A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      Mother Mason (1924)
Author:     Bess Streeter Aldrich, 1881-1954
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Language:   English
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Title:      Mother Mason (1924)
Author:     Bess Streeter Aldrich, 1881-1954







CHAPTER I

MOTHER'S DASH FOR LIBERTY


Mother sat in front of her Circassian walnut dressing table, her f--,
no, PLUMP form enveloped in a lavender and green, chrysanthemum-
covered, stork-bordered kimono, and surveyed herself in the glass.

Mother was Mrs. Henry Y. Mason, and in Springtown, Nebraska, when
one says "Henry Y." it conveys, proportionately, the same
significance that it carries when the rest of the world says "John
D."

It was eleven o'clock at night, which is late for Springtown.
Mother had set her bread before climbing, rather pantingly, the
wide mahogany stairs.  There is something symbolical in that
statement, illustrative of Mother's life.  She had been promoted to
a mahogany stairway, but she had clung to her own bread making.

Three diamond rings just removed from Mother's plump hand lay on
the Cluny-edged cover of the dressing table.  These represented
epochs in the family life.  The modest little diamond stood for the
day that Henry left bookkeeping behind and became assistant
cashier.  The middle-sized diamond belonged to his cashier days.
The big, bold diamond was Henry Y. as president of the First
National Bank of Springtown.

Mother was tired and nervous to-night.  She felt irritable, old,
and grieved--all of which was utterly foreign to her usual sunny
disposition.

She took off the glasses that covered her blue eyes.  It was just
her luck, she thought crossly, that she couldn't even wear
eyeglasses.  They simply would not stay on her nose.  Deprecatingly
she wrinkled that fat, broad member.  Then she removed and laid on
the table a thick, grayish braid of silky hair that had formed her
very good-looking coiffure, and let down a limited, not to say
scant, amount of locks that were fastened on as Nature--then
evidently in parsimonious mood--had intended.

With apparent disgust she leaned forward under the lights that
glowed rosily from their Dresden holders and scanned the features
which looked back at her from the clear, oh, VERY clear, beveled
glass.  She might have seen that her skin was as fair and soft and
pink as a girl's, that her mouth and eyes showed deep-seated humor,
that her face radiated character.  But in her unusual mood of
introspection she could find nothing but flaws.  The eyes looked
weak and nearsighted without their glasses.  The chin--like a two-
part story, that chin gave every evidence of stopping, and then to
one's surprise went merrily on.  She leaned closer to the glass.

"Well," Mother said dryly, reaching for manicure scissors, "that is
THE LIMIT!"  Living with a houseful of young people as she did,
Mother's English had in no way been neglected.

Then, as though to let Fate do its worst, and looking cautiously
around--for she was very sensitive about it--Mother took from her
mouth a lower plate of artificial teeth.  Immediately, out of
obedience to nature's law that there shall be no vacuum, her soft
lower lip rushed in to fill the void.

"Pretty creature, am I not?" she grumbled.

Just at this point, we opine, every one will say, "Ah!  No doubt
the president of the First National Bank is showing symptoms of
being attracted elsewhere!"  Not so.  Mother had only to turn her
plump self around to see the long figure of that highly efficient
financier stretched out in its black-and-white-checked tennis-
flannel nightgown, sleeping the sleep of the model citizen and
father.

No, Mother had only reached one of those occasional signboards in
life that say "Fagged!  Relax!  Let up!  Nothing doing!"  She was
suffering from a slight attack of mental and spiritual ennui, which
is a polite way of saying that her digestion was getting sluggish.
She was fifty-two, not exactly senile, but certainly not as gay as,
say, TWENTY-two.

Just then the connoisseur of mortgages rolled over heavily like a
sleepy porpoise and muttered something that sounded like "Ain oo
cum bed?"

Fifty-two! she went on thinking, and she had never had a day to
herself to do just as she liked.  From that day, twenty-five years
ago, when the nurse laid the red and colicky Bob in her arms, her
time had belonged to others.  In memory she could see Henry's
white, drawn face as he knelt by her bed and said:

"Molly, you'll never, NEVER have to go through this again."

But she had!  Oh land, yes!  Bob was twenty-five, Katherine was
twenty-two, Marcia twenty-one, Eleanor sixteen, and Junior eleven--
all healthy, good-looking, fun-loving, and thoughtless.  She had
been a slave to them, of course.  She ought to know it by this
time, every one had told her so.

But it wasn't just the family.  There was the church--and the club--
and the Library Board.  Oh, she was hemmed in on all sides!
Always, every one thought, Mrs. Mason would do this and that and
the other thing.  Why did people think she could attend to so many
duties?  She was just an EASY MARK!  This week, for instance: this
was Monday night; to-morrow afternoon she was to lead the
missionary meeting; to-morrow night the Marstons were coming to
play Somerset.  They came every Tuesday night.  She and John
Marston would bid wildly against Sarah Marston's and Henry's slower
playing, and Henry and Sarah would probably win.  Henry's bidding
was like his banking--calm, studied, conservative.  Then she would
serve sandwiches and fruit salad and coffee.  Why did she rack her
brain to think of dainty new things to feed them every Tuesday
night, just to hear them say, "Lordy, Molly, your things melt in
the mouth!"

Wednesday, the Woman's Club was to meet with her, and besides
entertaining she had to get her paper into better shape to read.
It had been Mrs. Hayes's date, but she couldn't have them--or
didn't want them--and of course they had asked to come to Mrs.
Mason's.  Well, being an easy mark, SHE could put all the chairs
away afterward and pick up the ballots strewn around.

Wednesday night was the church supper.  Why had SHE baked the beans
and made the coffee for YEARS?  Thursday afternoon the Library
Board must meet, and Thursday night Junior's Sunday school class
was to have a party in the basement of the church.  She must go
whether she felt like it or not, and help with the refreshments and
play "Going to Jerusalem" until she was all out of breath and--oh,
WHY did she have to keep on doing so many things for others?  It
was as though she had no personality.  Never a day to herself to do
just as she liked!

Tired and cross, she brushed her hair spitefully.  Then her eyes
fell upon a motto-calendar, silver framed, on the dresser.  In gay
red letters it flaunted itself:


     . . . Know ye not
     Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?

                                         Byron, "Childe Harold."


Could message be more personal?  Underneath the calendar the
detested lower plate of teeth reposed in a little Japanese dish
which was their nightly bed.  She picked them up and held them
distastefully in her hand, so uncannily human, so blatantly
artificial.  And suddenly, born of rebellious mood and childish
desire, was brought forth a plan.

She rose from her chair and undressed.  Then she knelt by the side
of the bed and said her prayer, a little rambling, vague complaint:
"Oh, Lord; I'm so tired of the same things--and everybody expects
so much of me--and there are so many things to do--and it won't be
just a lie--if You know all about it--and why I did it--Amen."

And maybe, to the Good One who heard her, she seemed only a very
fat little girl with a thin little pigtail hanging down her back.

Mother rose stiffly from her knees, snapped out the lights, and lay
down beside the president of the First National Bank, who mumbled
drowsily, "Hut time ist?"

At the breakfast table, Mother casually announced, as though she
were accustomed to these gay little jaunts, that she was taking the
nine-twenty train for Capitol City.  It was like a hand grenade in
their midst.

"YOU, Mother?" . . . "Why" . . . "What for?" . . . "You can't!
It's Missionary Day!" came the shrapnel return.

"She's going to see Doctor Reeve about her plate."  Father had been
previously informed, it seemed.

"Her plate?" . . . "What plate?" . . . "Card plate?" . . .
"Haviland plate?" . . . "Home plate?"  Every one giggled.  The
Great American Family thoroughly appreciates its own wit.

"Sh!"  Marcia tapped her own pretty mouth.


     "The hours I've spent with Doctor Reeve
     Are but a china set to me--
     I count them over, every one apart,
     My crockery!  My crockery!"


They all laughed hilariously, all but Mother.  They were not cruel,
not even impertinent.  But they were intensely fun-loving, a trait
inherited from Mother herself.  Strangely enough, humor, Mother's
faithful partner for fifty-two years, had suddenly turned tail and
fled, leaving only its lifeless mask which she surveyed in tragic
dignity.  Very well, let them make fun of her if they so wished.

There was some discussion as to which one should take Mother to the
train.  She settled it herself; there was a reason why she chose to
walk.  On analysis, she would have discovered that this reason was
not to interrupt the new sensation of feeling sorry for herself.

She would have liked to make the trip to the station in mournful
solitude, but Henry must have been watching for her, for he grabbed
his hat and came running down the bank steps as she passed.

"Have you got plenty of blank checks?" he wanted to know.

All the way down Main Street Henry chatted sociably.  When the
train whistled in he said, "Well, Mother, we'll meet you to-night
on the five-fifty"--and kissed her.  In ordinary times a tender
kiss from any member of her family had the effect of melting Mother
into a substance resembling putty; but to-day she had no more
feeling for her tribe than the cement platform on which she stood.

As she settled herself in the car, Henry came to the window and
said something.  The train was starting and she couldn't hear.  So
he shouted it:  "You sure you got plenty of blank checks?"

"Yes, yes!"

She nodded irritably as though he had said something insulting.

At Capitol City Mother went immediately to the Delevan--rather
timidly, to be sure, for Father had always been with her when they
registered.

"Single rooms, three, four and five dollars," said the jaunty
clerk.

"Five dollars," said Mother boldly, as befitted the wife of Henry
Y. Mason.

There was a little time to shop before lunch, so she walked over to
Sterling's and bought one nightgown, one kimono, and one pair of
soft slippers.  After lunch she sent a telegram to Henry:


          Find lots to be done.  Home Friday night.


Well, she had cut loose, burned her bridges!  For three days she
would escape that long list of energy-killing things.  She would
think of no one but herself, do nothing but what she wished to do.

In the afternoon she sauntered past the movie theaters, reading the
billboards.  To the hurrying passer-by she was only a heavily-
built, motherly-looking person in a gray voile dress and small gray
and black hat.  In reality she was Freedom-from-Her-Mountain-
Height.

In the theater, as she took nibbles from a box of candy and
listened to the orchestra, if any thought of the missionary meeting
with its lesson on "Our Work Among the Burmese Women" came to her,
it was in pity for the feminine population of Burma who knew not
the rapture of complete liberty.

She laughed delightedly and wept frankly over the joys and sorrows
of the popular star, who whisked energetically through seven reels.

Out of the theater again, she loitered by the plate glass windows
of the big stores, went in and out as fancy dictated, and bought a
few things--always for herself.

When she returned to the Delevan there was a long-distance call for
her.  It was Henry:  "This you, Mother?  Say, I could just as well
come down on the night train and stay with you until you're all
through your work."

"Oh, no, no," she assured him.  "I'm perfectly all right.  I'm
FINE.  I wouldn't THINK of it."

"You got plenty of blank checks?"

"Yes, YES!"  Mother was smiling into the transmitter.  Her grouch
was as much a thing of the past as the battle of Gettysburg.

At dinner she ordered food for the first time in her life without
running her finger up and down the price column.  After resting a
while in complete comfort, she sallied forth again.  A famous tenor
was singing at the Auditorium.  His "Mother Machree" gave her a
momentary twinge of conscience-itis, but she quickly recovered.
Even the Mother Machree of the song may have had one wild fling
some time in her life.

There were two more whole days of complete emancipation.  Club
afternoon, when she should have read her paper on "Pottery--Ancient
and Modern," she was attending "The Vampire."  She had always
wondered just what that particular blood-sucking animal was like,
and she was finding out.

When she left the theater it was sprinkling, and by dinner time
there was a downpour.  But after dining she went through the storm
to a theater where a merry troupe demonstrated how one may
effectively kick and sing at the same time.  NOW, Mother thought,
as she watched the twinkling heels, the women were clearing up that
awful mess of church-supper dishes and wondering how it happened
they had fallen short of chicken and had three times as many
noodles as they needed.  Thank her stars, SHE had escaped it!

On Thursday she took a long street car ride, read comfortably in
her room, went to two movies, and attended an art exhibit.  The
Library Board was meeting at home, of course, and listening half
the afternoon to the Reverend Mr. Patterson tell how he started a
library at Beaver Junction forty years ago.  Then Junior's class
was cavorting through those never-ending games of "Tin-Tin-Come-In"
and "Beast-Bird-Fish-or-Fowl."  Well, thank fortune, some other
mother was getting a dose of assisting Miss Jenkins with her
irrepressibles.

Friday morning Mother went up to Doctor Reeve's office.  Friday
afternoon she went home.  On the train she reviewed her pleasurable
three days.  She had solved the problem.  Life need never again
become too strenuous.  How simple it all was.  The foolish part was
that she had never thought of the plan before.  She had only to
slip away in peace and solitude whenever a week piled up with
duties as the past one had.  Good sense told her that she would not
do it often, but it would always lie there before her--the way of
beatific escape.

The train was rumbling through the cut in the Bluffs now, where lay
the ghosts of many dead picnics, rounding the curve toward the
water tank, slowing at the familiar station.  There they were,
Henry and Marcia and Eleanor--assembled as if they were about to
greet the President of the United States.  Junior, hanging by one
arm and leg from a telephone pole, was waving his cap like a
friendly orang-outang.

They kissed her rapturously--the girls and Junior.  Henry's kiss,
while resembling less a combustion, was frankly tender.

"Your dental work hurt you, Mother?"

"Oh, not a great deal."  She was cheerfully brave.

They hung about her, all talking at once as they moved in a tight
little bunch toward the car.

"Kathie's got two girls home from the University for over Sunday,"
they were telling her.  "We had Tillie bake a cake and make
mayonnaise and dress chickens for dinner tonight, but Papa wouldn't
let her fry 'em--wants you to do it.  And, Mamma, you've got to
lead Missionary Meeting next Tuesday, Mrs. Fat Perkins said to tell
you.  They didn't have it last Tuesday."

"And to-night's paper said in the club notes that Mrs. Mason would
read her paper on dishes, or kettles, or something like that next
Wednesday."

"Oh, Muz!"  It was Junior jumping backward in front of them and
shouting.  "We didn't have our party--Miss Jenkins said you'd be
back to help next Thursday.  Ain't that dandy?"

"They put off the library meeting till you got home, too."

"Did they?"  A tidal wave of chuckles was forming somewhere in
Mother's stout interior.  "Did they by any possible chance have the
church supper?"

"No, they never," they were all answering.  "It was so rainy, and
they 'phoned around, and they said anyway you weren't here to do
the beans and coffee.  It's next Wednesday."

"Oh, I guess you didn't miss much, Molly."  Henry gave her
substantial arm a friendly squeeze and beamed down at her.  "The
Marstons are coming to-night."

The tidal wave rolled in--or up.  Mother was laughing hysterically.
Humor, her faithful partner for fifty-two years, had returned from
his mysterious vacation, and with the rest of the family had met
Mother at the station.

Mother sat in front of her Circassian walnut dressing table.  It
was eleven o'clock.  She had just come upstairs after setting the
bread.  She removed the heavy gray braid, laid it on the dresser
and let down her scant hair.  Then she took from her mouth the
detested thing--so luridly red, so ghastly white--and surveyed it
critically to see whether there remained a visible trace of the
minute defect that Doctor Reeve's assistant in four minutes had
ground down in his laboratory.

As she laid the plate in its Japanese dish, her eyes fell upon the
silver-framed calendar.  The old date was now ancient history.
Mother removed the card and slipped the new page into place.  In
black and gilt it grinned impishly at her:


Freedom is only in the Land of Dreams.

Schiller.


Mother got into her nightgown and knelt by the bed to say her
prayer.  It was neither vague and wandering, nor was it a
complaint.  It was a concise little expression of gratitude, direct
and sincere:  "Dear Lord:  I always felt that You must have a
humorous side and now I am sure of it.  The joke's on me.  And,
Lord, I'll be good and never be cross again about doing all the
little everyday things for the folks about me.  Amen."

Then she rose, snapped off the lights and lay down beside the
president of the First National Bank, who mumbled sleepily, "Hut
time ist?"



CHAPTER II

INTRODUCING THE FAMILY


Mother having been introduced, it would be well to get a glimpse of
the other members of the Mason household--a "close-up" of each, as
it were.

Mother herself, standing on that plateau of life where one looks
both hopefully forward and longingly back, felt that life had been
very gracious to her.  It had brought her health, happiness, and
Henry--and sometimes, in a spasm of loyal devotion, she decided
that the greatest of these was Henry.

For thirty-five years Henry Mason had given his time, his thought,
his every waking moment to building up the First National Bank of
Springtown.  He was not only a part of the bank, he WAS the bank.
He knew every man in the community, his financial rating, his
capabilities, his shortcomings, his life history.

The country banker is an entirely different species from your city
banker.  The city banker may hold his hand on the pulse of the
nation's financial ebb and flow, but your country banker lives
close to the hearts of the people.  He is the financial pastor of
his flock.  "Better slow up, Jim," he will say; "you're running
bigger grocery bills than a family of your size ought to have."
And sometimes Jim doesn't like it, says the old man better mind his
own business; but it is noticeable that he takes the advice to
heart.

The country banker is also lawyer, judge, physician.  In his little
back office, thick with smoke, spattered with gaudy calendars and
farm-sale bills, he advises his patrons when to sell hogs and when
to marry, when to buy bunches of yearlings and when to have their
appendixes removed.  He carries a burden of confidences that is far
from being merely financial, a burden of greater proportions than
the minister's.

Father was not a great church worker.  His voice was never raised
in the congregation; but not every one who saith Lord, Lord, shall
enter into the kingdom.  His religion was a very simple thing.  He
made no public demonstration of it, but he did a great many things
unto the "least of these."  He saw that more than one load of wood
and sack of potatoes found their way to tumble-down back doors.  He
sent lame Annie Bassert to business school.  When Lizzie Beadle
came into the bank and wanted a loan to take her old mother to the
sanitarium, Father refused the loan at the bank window because
there was no security; but he called Lizzie into the back office
and made out his personal check to her.  Business was business at
the grated window, but the back office was his own.

Once the influential members of the community wanted to send Father
to the legislature.  It pleased him immensely, but he would have
given his right hand rather than let on how gratified was his
pride.  He thought it all over and then, "Thank you, boys," he
said; "guess I'd better just stay here and saw wood."  He was a son
of the soil, was Henry Mason.  He had come from good old farmer
stock.  One of his earliest recollections was lying flat on the
bottom of a prairie schooner and watching the coarse wild grass
billow away from the big wooden wheels.

That very characteristic, love of the soil, was his greatest asset
as a country banker.  The members of the bank force had a joke
among themselves concerning this.  It was about farm sales.  That
is another phase of country banking of which your city banker lives
in dark and fathomless ignorance.  In the country communities of
the great Mid-West, the winter and early spring dispersion sales
draw vast crowds of buyers to the various farms.  To each sale goes
the farmer's banker to set up a miniature place in which to do
banking business for the day.  It is usually the cashier or an
assistant who is listed for the work, seldom the older president,
for the work is dirty, the whole day hard.

Father, however, reveled in the earth smells, the tramping stock,
the call of the auctioneer, the noon-day lunch in the farmyard.  On
the morning of a sale day he talked of nothing else.  He asked each
customer as soon as he stepped inside the bank if he intended
going.  He walked around restlessly, looking out of the big windows
at the sky, wondering what the weather would be.

D. T. Smith, the cashier, and Bob Mason, and the other two boys
would all wink at each other.  Bob might say, "Gee, I certainly
hate to go out in this wind."  Father always fell for it.  "Wind?
My golly, Son, that's just a little breeze."

"Don't feel like going yourself, do you, Father?"

And Father, trying not to answer too hastily that he'd just as soon
go if Bob didn't want to, could scarcely get away fast enough to
the locker, where he kept an old moth-eaten Galloway coat, an
equally dilapidated cap, and a pair of hip boots.  He would leave
for the sale as happy as a little boy going on a fishing trip, and
the minute the door closed the force would laugh and chuckle at the
joke before settling down to the cleaner indoor work of the day.

To Mother a farm sale was always a trial.  In addition to the mud-
spattered condition in which Father often returned, he always
bought something, some outlandish worn-out thing for which they had
no possible use.

"Nobody bid on it," Father would explain apologetically, as though
the statement vindicated him.

As some men collect Sir Joshua Reynolds and Corots, so Father
collected odds and ends from the farm sales.  Once he bought a
broken grindstone, and one time a sickly calf, and once a pair of
collapsible bedsprings that collapsed perfectly but failed to have
any other virtue.

"He's missed his calling," Marcia would say pertly before him.
"He's really by nature and inclination a junk dealer, you know."

"He can't help it, poor dear!" Katherine would add.  "Some men
can't resist gambling, but Father can't resist bidding on old
trash."

"I'm saving them for your wedding presents, Kathie," Father would
retort good-naturedly, which lately had the effect of bringing a
shell-pink ripple of color to Katherine's smooth cheek.

Katherine was the eldest Mason daughter, serious-eyed, lithe and
lovely--and just graduated from the State University.  In the bosom
of her family Katherine held the self-appointed office of Head
Critic.  With zeal and finesse she engaged in constant attempts to
manage the activities of the other Masons.  Their manners, their
grammar, their very opinions on art, literature, and music were
supervised by the eldest daughter and sister.  To be sure, results
were far from satisfactory to the ardent critic; the Masons,
individually and collectively being of a too independent
disposition to follow dictation, sheeplike.  At Katherine's
unceasing efforts to bring them all up to certain standards of
propriety, they merely shrugged their shoulders and went blithely
on their respective ways.  They loved her, but they did not obey
her.

Marcia, the second daughter, was only a year younger than Katherine
and had completed her Junior year at the University.  There is in
this world an occasional gay, care-free person who seems to be
wafted not only to the skies but through life itself on flowery
beds of ease.  Such a rara avis was Marcia.  While Katherine's
nature was of a sweet seriousness and given to earnest study,
Marcia's was neither of these.

If she was serious, she concealed it admirably.  Her studying was
usually a very hasty procedure, conducted on the way down a
corridor to her recitation room.  She had a flour-sieve mind,
warranted to hold a great deal of information for at least twenty
minutes.

"I always volunteer during the first part of the recitation while
the going's good," she brazenly told at home, "then my silence
isn't so conspicuous when the road gets rough."

Things seemed to come Marcia's way.

"I was born under a lucky star," she often told the family.  And
the family almost believed it.

In appearance she was undeniably lovely, and, as one of her aunts
said, "as likable as she was lookable."  No one could say she was
lazy about the house.  She simply made a wise and far-sighted
choice of household tasks.  Soon after she had enthusiastically
offered to shell the peas, it became apparent to the other girls
that the pea-shelling operation carried on under the breeze-swept
grape arbor was greatly preferable to doing the dishes in the hot
kitchen or making countless beds.

"Marcia certainly has the happy faculty of slipping through life
easily," Mother would sometimes say in exasperation to Father.

"Well, Mother, I don't know any one in the family that makes more
friends," Father would remind her.

Which brings us to Father and Mother Mason's attitude toward and
about their children.  For twenty-six years they had argued over
them, but always when they were alone.  Toward the children they
presented a solid front.  If Mother chose to reprove, Father either
assisted at the ceremony or kept silent.  And vice versa.  It is a
fine old policy.  It has been effective since the days of Abraham
and Sarah.

When they were alone, however, they argued it out.  And the strange
part is that neither one always took the same side.  If Mother
found fault with some characteristic of her offspring, Father
immediately made excuses for it.  If Father offered the complaint,
Mother flew to her child's defense like a mother bear.

In this instance Father was right about Marcia's friends.
Everybody liked her, the teachers and old people and children, and
Hod Beeson, who brought the coal, and Lizzie Beadle, the town
dressmaker.

When Marcia went away to school, it was as though a great deal of
the sunshine of the Mason home had gone with her.  When she
returned for vacations, everything and every one, from the piano to
Tillie, seemed to brighten at her coming.  After all, the old world
needs more of them--these people who turn to joyousness as the
tides run to meet the moon.

Each time Marcia came home she had new tales to tell.  And Father
and Mother, who came to reprove, remained to laugh.

"Say, folks," she would begin, "I had to write a thesis on some
form of lower animal life for old Prof. Briggs in zoölogy class,
and what I know about zoölogy you could put in a SPOON.  So I wrote
about a starfish--sort of from the fiction standpoint--and they
told me old Prof. Briggs laughed till he nearly cried over the joys
and sorrows of that little echinoderm--I GUESS it's an echinoderm.
I got a grade of excellent, and all I know about a starfish to this
DAY is that it has five points and WIGGLES."

"You can't go through life side-stepping that way, my girl," Father
sermonized after he had suppressed a chuckle.  "One of these days
you'll bump up against something mighty serious and wish you'd
applied yourself."

"Don't preach, Father!"  Marcia rubbed a pink and white cheek
against Father's graying hair.  "When that time comes I'll be like
Sentimental Tommy--I'll find a way."  And softhearted old Father
hoped it was true.

No one ever spoke of Eleanor, the sixteen-year-old daughter, as
being pretty.  By the side of Katherine's Madonnalike sweetness and
Marcia's loveliness, Eleanor was rather plain, but she was merry
hearted, and a merry heart maketh a cheerful countenance.

Instead of being the possessor of large, luminous eyes like the
other girls, she had smaller, twinkling ones, like Mother's.  Most
people laugh first with their mouths, but when anything pleased
Eleanor, which was about four hundred times a day, there came a
little crinkling at the corner of her lids so that her eyes seemed
to laugh before their mirth communicated itself to her generous
mouth.

Of the three girls she had always been the most hoydenish.  Many an
old lady in Springtown could testify to having been nearly
frightened out of her wits at the diabolical speed with which
Eleanor Mason rode a bicycle.  She could hold her own in baseball,
and she was the star guard of the high school basketball team.

Clothes she considered mere articles of apparel, worn from the
necessity of being decently covered.  It was sometimes recalled in
the family that once, to give Eleanor more pride in her clothes,
Mother had sent her to Lizzie Beadle, with two nice pieces of serge
and the instructions to plan both dresses herself.  On the way
Eleanor had encountered Junior and a crowd of neighborhood boys,
who wanted her to pitch for them.  She had rushed up to the house
of the Beadle lady, thrust the bundle in the door and called out,
"Make 'em just alike, Miss Beadle," and taken herself off to the
more glowing pleasures of the Mason cow pasture.

Boys she looked upon simply as the male of the species, somewhat to
be envied for having been endowed by the gods with stronger right
arms and an apparent aptitude for mathematics, denied to Eleanor
herself.

To be sure, there was a Land of Romance, but it was peopled with no
one she had really ever seen.  The Prince and the Sleeping Beauty
were there, and Laurie and Amy from the pages of Little Women, and
Babbie and the little minister.  If there occasionally walked some
one in the shadowy forest that seemed to belong to her, alone, he
was too far away and vague to take on any semblance of reality.

Junior was eleven.  The statement is significant.

There are a few peevish people in the world who believe that all
eleven-year-old boys ought to be hung.  Others, less irritable,
think that gently chloroforming them would seem more humane.  A
great many good-natured folks contend that incarceration for a
couple of years would prove the best way to dispose of them.

Just how Springtown was divided in regard to Junior and his crowd
of cronies depended largely upon the amiability of its citizens.
But practically every one looked upon that crowd as he looked upon
other pests: rust, sparrows, moth millers, and potato bugs.  As the
boys came out of school tearing wildly down the street with Apache
yells, more than one staid citizen had been seen to cross the road
hurriedly as one would get out of the way of fire engines, or
molten lava rolling down from Vesuvius.

There were a dozen or more boys in the crowd, but the ringleaders
were Runt Perkins, Shorty Marston, and Junior Mason, and the only
similarity between charity and Junior was that the greatest of
these was Junior.

At home, by the united efforts of the other members of the Mason
family, he was kept subdued into something resembling civilized
man.  Mother ruled him with a firm hand but an understanding heart.
The girls made strenuous efforts to assist in his upbringing, but
their gratuitous services were not kindly looked upon by the young
man, who believed it constituted mere butting-in.

Katherine it was who took upon herself the complete charge of his
speech.  Not an insignificant "have went" nor an infinitesimal "I
seen" ever escaped the keen ears of his eldest sister, who
immediately corrected him.  Mother sometimes thought Katherine a
little severe when, in the interest of proper speaking, she would
stop him in the midst of an exciting account of a home-run.  There
were times, thought Mother, when the spirit of the thing was so
much more important than the flesh in which it was clothed.

For arithmetic Junior showed such an aptitude that Father was wont
to say encouragingly, "You'll be working in the bank one of these
days, Son."  At which "Son" would glow with a legitimate pride that
quickly faded before the sight of a certain dull red book entitled
Working Lessons in English Grammar.  Katherine labored patiently
many an evening to assist in bringing Junior and the contents of
this particular volume somewhere within hailing distance of each
other.  Painstakingly she would go over the ground with him in
preparation for his lessons, to be met with a situation something
like this:

"Now we're ready.  Read the first sentence, Junior."

And Junior would earnestly and enthusiastically sing-song:  "'He
TOOK his COAT down FROM the NAIL withOUT a word of WARNing.'"

"What's the subject, Junior?  Now think!"

"Coat," Junior would answer promptly.  Then, seeing Katherine's
grieved look, he would change quickly to "Nail."  And when the look
deepened to disgust he would grow wild and begin guessing
frantically:  "Warning?  Took?  From?"

Of the three girls Eleanor was his best friend.  Rather boyish
herself, she was still not so far removed from the glamour of ball
games in the back pasture, the trapping of gophers, and circuses in
the barn, but that the two held many things in common.

It was Marcia who was his arch enemy.  Not that she committed any
serious offenses.  It was her attitude that exasperated him.  She
had a trick of perpetrating a lazy little smile on his every act, a
smile that was of a surpassing superiority.  And she had a way of
always jumping at the conclusion that he was dirty.  "Go WASH your
HANDS!" was her sisterly greeting whenever he approached.  She used
it as consistently toward him as she used "How do you do?" to other
people.  Junior would jump into a heated argument over his perfect
cleanliness, a discussion that consumed more time than an entire
bath would have taken.

With catalogue-like completeness this finishes the list of the
Mason family members who were still at home, for Bob and his young
wife, Mabel, and the new baby girl who had recently arrived, lived
two blocks away.  Like a supplement to the register, however, there
still remains Tillie who was as much a part of the household as
Father or the kitchen sink.

Tillie Horn--her church letter and bank book said Matilda Horn--had
lived in the Mason household for eighteen years.  Accordingly to
present-day standards her position there was hard to define.
Guest?  No.  Mother silently put a check on the kitchen clock shelf
every Saturday morning, and Tillie as surreptitiously removed it
sometime during the day.  It was one of Tillie's forty odd
characteristics that she disliked to speak of her wages.  Several
times in the eighteen years, as the H. C. of L. thrust itself with
nightmare ferocity on an unwary world, the amount on the check had
been voluntarily raised by Mother, to which Tillie had made
grateful and appreciative response, "Wha'd you do that silly thing
for?"

Domestic servant?  The day the new doctor's wife returned Mother's
call, she asked affably, "Do you find your servant satisfactory?"
As smooth as lubricating oil, Mother answered, "I have none.  My
old friend Miss Horn lives with us and helps me."  Then she called
pleasantly, "Come in, Tillie, and meet Mrs. Cummings."  Which of
course was not at all according to Hoyle.  But then Mother did not
do things by footrules and yardsticks.  She did them by friendly
instinct.  And when you stop to think about it, that is a fairly
good definition of a lady and a Christian.

No, Tillie was not a servant.  For those eighteen years she had
alternately worked like a Trojan or "slicked up" and gone
comfortably to Mite Societies and Missionary Meetings with Mother.

The two had known each other years before in the more or less
pleasant intimacy of a cross-roads schoolhouse, where Tillie's
education had abruptly ceased.  Mother had gone away to school,
taught, been married, and was in the midst of the triple-ringed
circus act of trying to raise three babies at once when Tillie
dropped in one day between trains to call upon her.  That call had
lasted eighteen years, broken only by two intervals.

In appearance Tillie was all that any enterprising movie director
could desire.  She was tall, angular, homely.  Her long neck,
rising from the habitually worn, dull gray kitchen dress, was
slightly crooked, like a Hubbard squash's.  Hair, to Tillie, meant
nothing by way of being a woman's crowning glory.  It was merely,
as the dictionary so ably states, small horny, fibrous tubes with
bulbous roots, growing out of the skins of mammals; and it was
meant to be combed down as flat as possible and held in place with
countless wire hairpins.  Her eyes were small and nondescript in
color, her mouth and nose large, and her teeth of a glaring china-
white falseness.  Altogether, it was a lucky thing for Tillie that
while man looketh on the outward appearance the Lord looketh on the
heart.  For Tillie's heart was as good as gold, and was buried
under just about the same proportion of crusty exterior as the
yellow metal under the earth.

Tillie's sense of humor, or lack of it, was not an understandable
thing to the fun-loving Masons.  The ancient author who copyrighted
most of the wise sayings of the world once stated that there was a
time to weep and a time to laugh.  Tillie seemed never to know when
that time was.  Over things that the whole family shouted about,
she maintained a dignified and critical silence.  On the other
hand, she would occasionally break out into a high, weird, hen-like
cackle over the most trivial thing imaginable.  If the Masons
laughed then, it was not at the trifling joke but because Tillie
herself was so odd.

"My stars!  Listen to Tillie!" one of the girls would say.  "I'll
bet a nickel she's just found out it's Thursday morning instead of
Friday."

"Or picked up the egg beater instead of the potato masher," another
would guess.

No, in spite of the long association with a family whose chief
delight in life was the foolish little fun extracted by the way,
Tillie's sense of humor was almost negligible.  And it is easier
for the keeper of five cinnamon bears to control his charges
without chains and a prodding pole, than it is for any member of a
household that contains five hilarious young people to exist
comfortably with them, minus a highly developed sense of humor.

A buffer being any contrivance that serves to deaden the concussion
caused by the impact of two bodies, it became apparent, when the
children were growing up, that such an apparatus was needed between
them and Tillie.  And with that clear perception with which some
people see their duty, Mother very early discovered that she,
herself, must be that device.  During all these years she had stood
between her noisy, merry brood and this old friend, whose ideas of
life were invoiced in terms of sweeping and scrubbing.

With that capacity for sinking herself in another's personality,
Mother could clearly see both sides of a situation, and as for the
diplomatic handling of it, she was an able ambassador to the Court
of the Kitchen.  So she had tactfully handled each affaire
d'honneur from the days when Bob's kites littered up the back
porch, through the period of the girls messing around with dough,
down to Junior's high jinks.  Firmly had she made a stand for
Tillie's right to have certain hours in the day to herself, and
stanchly had she defended the children's legitimate desires for
picnic lunches and other childish necessities.  Yes, Mother
certainly deadened the concussion caused by the impact of two
bodies.

The two intervals in which Tillie had not worked for the Masons
were occasions when she had become vaguely dissatisfied and gone
away to live permanently with her own relatives.  The first time,
after being gone two months, she wrote Mother and asked if she
might come back, that she couldn't abide her sister's husband and
would die happy if she could only put him in her mop stick and
scrub the kitchen floor with him.

The other time she had gone to a cousin's, returning in three weeks
with the information that her cousin's daughters both had beaus,
and they made her sick with what she chose to call their "lally-
gagging" around.  Aversion to the display of sentiment being
another of Tillie's characteristics, no one was surprised.

If she ever had a romance of her own, no one knew of it.  It was
often recalled in the family that Hod Beeson, erstwhile a drayman
by profession and a widower by Providence, had once come to the
back door on a Sunday night, dressed in his best.  To the
unsuspecting Tillie who opened the door this smiling Lochinvar had
ventured jauntily, "It's a nice evening, Miss Horn."  But, unlike
Ellen of Netherby Hall, Tillie had snapped out, "Maybe so.  I ain't
noticed it," and peremptorily shut the door.

With this intimate view of the Mason family whose members form the
cast of characters--the stage the comfortable, commodious home of a
middle-west country banker--the little plays are ready.  And let
only those of you who can sense the fun and tragedy in the everyday
ups-and-down of the ordinary American family, the kind of folks
that live next door to you and me--read on.



CHAPTER III

KATHERINE ENTERTAINS


In the week that followed Mother's return from Capitol City, she
slipped back into the old routine with doubled energy, attending
cheerfully all the meetings which she so gullibly believed she had
missed in her dash for liberty.  But through it all one great event
stood out with arc light brilliancy: that on Sunday the family was
to entertain company.

Entertaining company in itself was nothing unusual, the Sundays in
which it occurred probably outnumbering those in which the family
ate alone.  But on this coming June Sunday it was the guest-to-be,
himself, who was out of the ordinary.

Specifically, he was to be Katherine's company, but the family had
been cautioned by Mother that they were by no manner of means to
refer to him as Katherine's individual acquisition.

The coming guest, Keith Baldridge, was assistant professor of
history in Katherine's Alma Mater.  He was thirty-two and
unmarried.  No, he was not Katherine's fiancé--Katherine's manner
dared any one to suggest it.  As a matter of fact, their friendship
was at that very delicate stage where the least breath might
shrivel the emerging chrysalis, or blow it into a gorgeous-winged
creature of Love.

In the meantime, it was going to be an awful strain on the family
to have him come.  Mother was already feeling the effects of
Katherine's attempts to make over the entire family in the four
days intervening before his arrival.

"How long's Bald Head goin' to stay?" Junior wanted to know at the
supper table in the middle of the week.

"There he goes, Mamma," Katherine said plaintively.  "Can't you
keep him from saying those horrid things?"

"My son," Father addressed him from the head of the table, "have
you ever heard of the children in the Bible who were eaten by bears
when they said, 'Go up, thou bald head'?"  Junior grinned
appreciatively, realizing he was not being very violently reproved.

"If you could just know, Mamma, how different the Baldridge home is
from ours!"  Katherine was in the kitchen now, assisting Mother and
Tillie.  "Our family is so talkative and noisy, and laughs over
every little silly thing, and there is so much CONFUSION.  Why, at
their dinners--beside Professor Baldridge there's just his father
and an aunt, both SO aristocratic--at their dinners it's so quiet
and the conversation is so ENLIGHTENING--about Rodin, and--and
Wagner--and, oh, maybe Milton's 'Il Penseroso'--you know what I
mean--so much more REFINED."

At that word, Mother had an unholy desire to recall to the
polished, critical girl before her the days when she used to hang,
head downward, from the apple tree, her abbreviated skirts
obediently following the direction of her head.  But she forbore.
Mothers are like that.

"And I wish you could SEE their house.  It's not as big as ours,
and really no nicer, but, oh! the ATMOSPHERE!  The hangings are
gray or mauve or dark purple--and they keep the shades down so much
lower than ours--so it's peaceful, you know, like twilight all the
time."

"My stars!  Ain't that a gloomy way to live, and unhealthy, too, I
must say."  It was Tillie speaking acridly with the familiarity
which comes from having braided a little girl's hair and officiated
at the coming out party of her first tooth.

"And pictures!" Katherine went on, ignoring Tillie's disgusted
remark.  "Why, folks, in one room there's just ONE, a dull dim, old
wood scene, and so ARTISTIC.  You can imagine how Papa's bank
calendar in our dining room just makes me SICK.  And they have a
Japanese servant.  You never hear him coming, but suddenly he's
right there at your elbow, so quiet and--"

"My good land!  How spooky!"

"Oh, Tillie, NO!  It's the most exquisite service you ever saw--to
have him gliding in and out and anticipating your every wish."

"Well, Kathie, I'll wait table for you, and glad to, but I ain't
goin' to do no slippin' around like that heathen, as if I was at a
spiritual séance, I can promise you that."

"Thank you, Tillie, and, Tillie, when you pass things to him,
please don't say anything to him, he's so used to that unobtrusive
kind of being waited on--and he's so quiet and reserved himself."

"Well, if I had a glum man like that, I'd mop the floor with him."
Tillie was always going to mop the floor with some one.

At that, Katherine left the kitchen with dignity, which gave Tillie
a chance to say, "Ain't she the beatenest!  I declare, she riles me
so this week!"  To which Mother replied, "Don't be too hard on her,
Tillie.  It's exasperating, I know; but she's nervous.  Sakes
alive!  Don't I remember to this day just how I felt sitting around
in a new lavender lawn dress thinking Henry might come.  He had a
pair of spotted ponies, and went driving furiously past our farm
for three different evenings before he had the courage to stop."
And Mother laughed at the recollection.

It was a characteristic of Mother's--this being able to project
herself into another's personality.  In the days that followed she
seemed to live a Jekyll-Hyde existence.  She was her own
exasperated self because of Katherine's constant haranguing about
the way things ought to be, and she was Katherine, sensitive,
easily affected, standing quiveringly in the wings of the stage at
the Great Play--waiting for her cue.

Because of this trait, Mother had known, to her finger tips, the
griefs and joys of each member of her family--how Father felt the
year bank deposits dropped forty-five per cent, how Junior felt
when he made the grammar Nine.  Some call it sympathy.  Others call
it discernment.  In reality, it is the concentrated essence of all
the mother wisdom of the ages.

Mother was worried, too.  She had never seen Keith Baldridge, and
numerous questions of doubt filled her mind.  What manner of man
was this that lived in a house of perpetual twilight?

The family managed to live through Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
The word SUNDAY seemed to have a portentous meaning, as though it
were the day set apart for a cyclone, or something dreadful was to
happen to the sun.

Professor Baldridge was coming in his car sometime in the morning.
He had to leave in the afternoon, as he was to go around by Miles
City to get his aunt, who was visiting there, and take her home.
In truth, that had been his excuse for coming at all.

It came--SUNDAY.  To the Mason family it was "Der Tag."  It proved
to be a still, hot morning, full of humidity and the buzzing and
bumbling of insects.

At the breakfast table Katherine gave the last of her multitudinous
directions.  "Mamma, I wish you'd MUZZLE Junior.  Make him promise
not to OPEN his head."

"My child"--Mother's tone signified that it was making its last
patient stand--"Junior shall be the pink of propriety, I assure
you; but not for the President of the United States would I
frighten one of my children into silence."

Simultaneously, Marcia and Eleanor hooted.  "Imagine anybody being
able to frighten Junior into silence!" was their combined
exclamation.

After breakfast, Katherine, like General Pershing, reviewed her
troops, the house and the grounds.  From vestibule to back porch,
through the big reception hall, library, living-room, sun-parlor,
everything was immaculate.  There was not a flicker of dust in the
house.  There was not a stick or dead leaf on the lawn.

Marcia, Eleanor, and Junior all trooped off to Sunday school and
Father followed later to church, but Mother and Tillie stood by the
guns, preparing ammunition in the form of salad and chicken.
Katherine, who by this time was in such a palpitating state of
heart that she could not assist intelligently at anything, went
upstairs to dress.

When she had finished--she decided on white after having had on a
pink and a pale green--she sat down on her cedar chest, with eyes
glued on the driveway.  For some time she sat there, starting up at
the sound of every car.  Then she saw some one turning in at the
front walk.  He was short and slightly stooped.  He carried a cane,
but seemed to hobble along without using it.  He wore store clothes
too large for him and a black, wide-brimmed felt hat over his white
hair.  IT WAS GRANDPA, Grandpa Warner, who lived with another
daughter on his old home farm, and had evidently come to surprise
Mother's family.

Katherine started up with a cry.  Not that!  Oh, not Grandpa TO-
DAY!  It was too cruel!  Why, Grandpa monopolized conversation with
his reminiscences, and at the table he did unspeakable things with
his knife.

The good fairy which is called Memory reminded Katherine of the
days when she had slipped her hand into Grandpa's and gone skipping
along with him through dewy, honey-sweet clover to drive the cows
down to the lower pasture; days when she had snuggled down by him
in the old homemade sleigh and been whirled through an elfland of
snow-covered trees and ice-locked rivulets; days that seemed then
to embody to her all the happiness that time could hold.  But she
turned coldly away from the wistful fairy, and looked bitterly out
upon a day that was unconditionally spoiled.

Carrying herself reluctantly downstairs, she perfunctorily greeted
the old man.  Mother, the happy moisture in her eyes, was making a
great fuss over him.  Temporarily she had forgotten that such a
personage as Keith Baldridge existed.

Back in a few moments to her room, Katherine continued her watchful
waiting.

A car turned in at the driveway, a long, low, gray car and Keith
Baldridge, in ulster and auto cap, stepped out.  At the sight of
the figure that was almost never out of her mind, she dropped on
her knees by the cedar chest and covered her face with her hands,
as though the vision blinded her.  And those who think her only
ridiculously sentimental do not understand how the heart of a girl
goes timidly down the Great White Road to meet its mate.

As for Mother, when Keith Baldridge grasped her hand, her own heart
dropped from something like ninety beats to its normal seventy-two.
He was big and athletic-looking, and under well-modeled brows shone
gray-blue eyes that were unmistakably frank and kind.  With that
God-given intuition of Mother's she knew that he was CLEAN--clean
in mind and soul and body.  And quite suddenly she wanted him for
her girl, wanted him as ardently as Katherine herself.  Well, SHE
would do everything in her power to make his stay pleasant and to
follow out Katherine's desires.

So she hurried to the kitchen to see that everything was just as
she knew Katherine wanted it.  She saw that the crushed fruit was
chilled, that the salad was crisp, that the fried chicken was
piping hot.  The long table looked lovely, she admitted.  Just
before she called them in, Mother pulled the shades down part way,
so that the room seemed "peaceful--you know, like twilight."

They all came trooping in, Father continuing what he had evidently
begun on the porch, a cheerful monologue on the income tax law.
Bob and Mabel, who had arrived with the new baby in the reed cab
that Father had given them, held a prolonged discussion as to where
the cab and its wonderful contents could most safely stand during
dinner.

With that old-fashioned notion that "men-folks like to talk
together," Mother placed Keith Baldridge and Bob and Grandpa up at
the end of the table by Father.

As they were being seated, Father said in that sprightly way which
always came to him when a royal repast confronted him, "What's the
matter with the curtains?"  Then walking over to the windows with
the highly original remark, "Let's have more light on the subject,"
he snapped the shades up to the limit.  The June sun laughed
fiendishly at Mother as it flashed across the cut glass and china
and the huge low bowl of golden nasturtiums.  Mother felt like
shaking Father, but of course she couldn't get up and jerk the
shades down again, like Xanthippe or Mrs. Caudle.

Tillie, with an exaggerated tiptoeing around the table, began
passing the plates as Father served them.  Previously, there had
been a little tilt between Mother and Katherine over the coffee,
the latter wanting it served at the close of the meal, "like real
people," but Mother had won with, "Father would just ask for it,
Kathie, so what's the use?"  And now Tillie was saying hospitably,
"Will you have coffee, Mr. Bald--Bald--?"  At which Junior snorted
in his glass of water, and received the look of a lieutenant-
colonel from Mother.

There was a little interval of silence as the dinner started, then
Grandpa looked down the table toward Katherine and said in his old,
cracked voice, "Well, Tattern!"  It was her childish nickname, put
away on the shelf with her dolls and dishes.  It sounded
particularly silly to-day.  "What you goin' to do with yourself now
you've graduated?"

"I'm going to teach in the Miles City High School, Grandfather."
She had never said Grandfather before; he'd always been "Grandpa"
to her, but the exigencies of the occasion seemed to call for the
more dignified term.

"What you goin' to teach?"

"History," she said briefly, and flushed to the roots of her hair.
Marcia and Eleanor exchanged knowing grins.

"Then git married, I s'pose, and hev no more use fer your history?
That makes me think of somethin' that happened back in Illynois.
It was a pretty big thing fer anybody from our neck of the woods to
go to college, but Abner Hoskins went, and when he was 'most
through he got drowned.  At the funeral Old Lady Stearns walked
round the casket and looked down at the corpse 'n' shook her head
'n' said:  'My!  My!  What a lot o' good larnin' gone to waste.'"

Every one laughed.  Katherine's own contribution to the general
fund was of a sickly, artificial variety.

"You came here from Illinois at an early date, I suppose, Mr.
Warner?" Keith Baldridge asked.

It was like a match to dynamite--no, like a match to a straw stack,
a damp straw stack that would burn all afternoon.  Grandpa looked
as pleased as a little boy.

"YES, sir--it was 1865.  I fought with the old Illynois boys first,
'n' then I loaded up and come, with teams of course.  That was a
great trip, that was.  Yes, SIR!  I mind, fer instance, how we
crossed a crick with a steep bank, and the wagon tipped over, 'n'
our flour--there was eight sacks--spilled in the water.  Well, sir,
would you believe them sacks of flour wasn't harmed, we got 'em out
so quick?  The water 'n' flour made a thin paste on the outside 'n'
the rest wasn't hurt.  I rec'lect the youngsters runnin' barelegged
down the crick after Ma's good goosefeather pillows that was
floating away."

Two scarlet spots burned on Katherine's cheeks.  She raised
miserable eyes that had been fixed steadily upon her plate to see
Keith Baldridge looking at Grandpa in amazement.  What was he
thinking?  Comparing Grandpa with his own father, dignified and
scholarly?

On and on went Grandpa.  "Yes, sir--the year I'm tellin' you about
now was the year the grasshoppers come, 1874."

Marcia kicked Katherine under the table.  "Same old flock has
arrived," she whispered.

"They come in the fall, you know, 'n' et the corn, 'n' then the gol-
durn things had the gall to stay all winter 'n' hatch in the
spring.  Why, there wasn't nothin' raised that summer but broom-
corn 'n' sorghum-cane.  You'd be surprised to know they left them
two things."  There was a great deal more information about the
grasshoppers, and then:  "Yes, sir, me'n Ma had the first sod house
in Cass County.  'N' poor!  Why, Job's turkey belonged in
Rockefeller's flock by the side o' us.  I had one coat, 'n' Ma one
dress, fer I don't know how long, 'n' Molly over there"--he pointed
with his knife to Mother, who smiled placidly back--"Molly had a
little dress made outen flour sacks.  The brand of flour had been
called 'Hellas,' like some foreign country--Eyetalian or somethin'.
Ma got the words all outen the dress but the first four letters of
the brand, 'n' there it was right across Molly's back 'H-E-L-L,'
'n' Ma had to make some kind o' knittin' trimmin' to cover it up."

Every one laughed hilariously, Mother most of all.  Junior shouted
as though he were in a grandstand.  Katherine gave a very good
imitation of a lady laughing while taking a tablespoonful of castor
oil.

"Well, Grandpa!"  It was Father, when he could speak again.  "She's
had several dresses of later years that cost like that, but I never
saw the word actually printed out on them."

Oh, it was awful!  What would he think?  He was laughing--but of
course he would laugh!  He was the personification of courtesy and
tact.  Talk about Wagner--"Il Penseroso"--Rodin!  To Katherine's
sensitive mind there stood behind Keith Baldridge's chair a
ghostly, sarcastically-smiling group of college professors,
ministers, lawyers, men in purple knickers and white wigs and
plumed hats--gentlemen--aristocrats--patricians.

Behind her own chair stood sweaty farmers with scythes, white-
floured millers, woodsmen with axes over their shoulders, rough old
sea-captains--common folks--PLEBEIANS.

Her heart was an icicle within her.  All the old longing for Keith
Baldridge, all the desire to be near him, died out.  With a
sickening feeling that she was living in a nightmare, she only
wanted the day to be over, so that he would go home, so that she
could go to the cool dimness of her own room and be alone.

The dinner was over.  Father, with the same nonchalance that he
would have displayed had he been dining the Cabinet members, walked
coolly into the library, and with the automobile section of the
paper over his face prepared to take his Sunday nap.

Katherine, unceremoniously leaving Mr. Baldridge to the rest of the
family, slipped out to the kitchen to wipe dishes for Mother and
Tillie.

"Why, Kathie, you go right back!" Mother insisted.

"Let me be," she said irritably.  "I know what I want to do."

Mother, giving her eldest daughter a swift look, had a savage
desire to take her across her knee and spank her, even as in days
of yore.

The work done, Katherine walked slowly up the back stairs, bathed
and powdered her flushed face, and with a feeling that life held
nothing worth while went down to join the family.  As she stopped
in the vestibule and surveyed the scene it seemed to her that it
could not have been worse.

The porch seemed as crowded with people as a street fair.  Father
had finished his nap, and was yawning behind his paper.  Eleanor's
entire crowd of high school girls had stopped for her to take the
Sunday afternoon walk which took place whether the thermometer
stood at zero or 102° in the shade.  They were all sitting along on
top of the stone railing like a row of magpies.

Bob was wheeling the baby up and down, Mabel watching him, hawk-
eyed, as though she suspected him of harboring intentions of
tipping the cab over.  Mother, red faced from the dinner work, was
calling cheerily to a neighbor woman, "You've lots of grit to get
out in this hot sun."  Marcia, in the living-room, had just
finished "The Mill on the Cliff" record, and was starting "The
Sextette from Lucia," the fanfare of the trumpets literally tearing
the air.

Grandpa, for Keith Baldridge's benefit, was dilating on the never-
ending subject of grasshoppers.  As he paused, Tillie, in her best
black silk, came around the corner of the porch and sat down near
the guest with "Be you any relation to the Baldridges down in East
Suffolk, Connecticut?"  (Oh, WHAT would he think of Tillie, who had
waited on him, doing that?)  Junior, on the other side of Mr.
Baldridge, was making frantic attempts to show him a disgusting eel
in an old fish globe that was half full of slimy green water.  Even
the Maltese cat was croqueting herself in and out through Professor
Baldridge's legs.  To Katherine's hypersensitive state of mind the
confusion was as though all Chinatown had broken out.

With a feeling of numb indifference, she stepped out on the porch.
Keith Baldridge rose nimbly to his feet.  "Now, good people," he
said pleasantly, apparently unabashed, "I'm going to take Miss
Katherine away for a while in the car.  You'll all be here, will
you, when I get back?"

Katherine went down the steps with him, no joy in her heart--
nothing but a sense of playing her part callously in a scene that
would soon end.

It was outrageously hot in the car.  "How about going where it's
cooler.  Is there some woodsy place around here?" he wanted to
know.

So Katherine obediently directed him to Springtown's prettiest
picnic spot and, almost without conversation, they made a run for
its beatific shade.  As they walked over to the bank of the river,
the man said, "I'm certainly elated over the find I made to-day."

"Find?" Katherine questioned politely.

"Yes--your grandfather.  He's a wonderful man.  He's promised to
come to my home next week and stay several days with me.  He's just
what I've been looking for, an intelligent man who has lived
through the early history of the state and whose memory is so keen
that he can recall hundreds of anecdotes.  I am working on a
history of the state, and my plan is to have it contain stories of
vividness and color, little dramatic events which are so often
omitted from the state's dull archives.  From the moment he began
to talk I realized what a gold mine I had struck.  I could scarcely
refrain from having a pad and pencil in my hand all the time I was
listening to him.  Why, he's a GREAT character--one of the typical
pathfinders--sturdy, honorable, and lovable.  You must be very
proud of him."

"I--am," said Katherine feebly.

"Take, for instance, my chapter on the early political life of the
state.  Do you know he told me that one election day, when it came
time for the polls to close, every one in the locality had voted
but himself.  He was miles away, hauling merchandise home from the
river.  A man got on a horse, rode over into the next county to
meet him, then they exchanged places, your grandfather hurrying
home on horseback while they held open the polls for him.  It so
happened that when the votes were counted, there had been a tie
and, of course, his vote had decided the issue.  Now, isn't that
rich?"

Miss Mason acknowledged that it was.

"I'm a little cracked on the subject of these old pioneers," he
went on.  "To me they were the bravest, the most wonderful people
in the world.  Look at it!"  He threw out his arm to the scene
beyond the river.  Before them, like a checkerboard, stretched the
rolling farmland of the great Mid-West: brown squares of newly
plowed ground; vivid green squares of corn; dull green squares
where alfalfa was growing!  Snuggled in the cozy nests of orchards
were fine homes and huge barns.  The spires of three country
churches pointed their guiding fingers to the blue sky.

"Think of it!  To have changed an immense area of Indian-inhabited
wild land into this!  Visualize to yourself, in place of what you
see, a far-reaching stretch of prairie land on every side of us,
with only the wild grass rippling over it.  Now imagine this: you
and I are standing here alone in the midst of it, with nothing but
a prairie schooner containing a few meager necessities by our side.
We're here to stay.  From this same prairie we must build our home
with our own hands, wrest our food, adequately clothe ourselves.
It is to be a battle.  We must conquer or be conquered.  Would you
have courage to do it?"  He turned to her with his fine, frank
smile.  And into Katherine Mason's heart came the swift, bitter-
sweet knowledge that she could make sod houses and delve in the
earth for food and kill wild animals for clothing--with Keith
Baldridge.

"And this," he went on again, indicating the landscape, "this is
our heritage from the pioneers.  From sod houses to such beautiful
homes as yours!  I can't tell you how much I've enjoyed being in
your family to-day.  It's the typical happy American family.  When
I think of my own gloomy boyhood, I could fight some one--a
lonesome, motherless little tad studying manners and 'Thanatopsis'
under a tutor.  Yours is the kind of home I've always wanted.  It's
the kind of home I mean to have when--if--I marry--all sunshine--
and laughter--and little children--"

He turned to her suddenly and caught her hands.  "It was to talk
about that home that I brought you out here.  With my whole heart--
I love you--Katherine--"

It was late afternoon when the long gray car turned into the Mason
driveway and stopped at the side lawn.  In fact, it was so much
later than Keith Baldridge had planned to leave that he only took
time to run up to the porch to say good-by to them all.  If he
expected the Masons to sit calmly on the porch when he should drive
away, he did not yet know the Masons.  One and all, excepting
Grandpa, who stayed in his rocker, they followed him down the
steps, flocking across the green sloping lawn to where his car
stood.  The cat, seeing the entire family trooping in one
direction, came bounding across the yard, tail in air, and rubbed
herself coquettishly against the departing guest's trousers.  She
may have been of a curious disposition, that cat; but she was the
soul of hospitality.

Tillie came running from the back of the house with a shoebox tied
with a string.  "It's some chicken sandwiches and cake," she
explained.  "Come again.  I'll fry chicken for you any day."

Keith Baldridge beamed at her, and shook her rough hand vigorously.
"I'm mighty glad to hear you say that, for you're going to have a
chance to do that very thing next Sunday."

They all shook hands with him a second time.  He got into the car
and pressed the button that gave life to the monster.  The wheels
seemed quivering to turn.  Just then Grandpa rose from his chair on
the porch and excitedly waved his cane.  "Say!" he called.  He came
hobbling over the grass, the late summer sun touching his scraggly
gray hair.  "Wait a minute, Mr. Baldridge!"

They all turned to watch him apprehensively, he seemed so hurried
and anxious.  He was close to the family group now.  "Say!  Mr.
Baldridge!  I jes' happened to think of somethin' else about them
darned grasshoppers!"

They all shouted with laughter--all but Katherine, for she was not
there.  She had slipped into the front door and up to her room.
There she dropped on her knees by the side of her bed and made a
fervent little prayer to the God of Families.  And her prayer was
this: that some day--if she lived humbly for the rest of her life--
she might be purged from the sin of having been, even in thought,
disloyal to Her Own.

Then, hearing the family back on the porch, she rose from her knees
and went into the hall.  There she leaned over the banisters and
called:  "Mother!  Come up here.  I want you."



CHAPTER IV

TILLIE CUTS LOOSE


After Keith Baldridge's visit, the days slipped into that type of
hot summer known to the Mid-West as "cracking good corn weather."
As one after another of the torrid days passed Tillie began giving
evidence of that same ingrowing restlessness that had characterized
those other periods prior to her decision to leave the Masons and
make her home with relatives.

"One of these days I'm goin' to cut loose," she would hint with
deep mystery.

Mother smiled, but seldom encouraged her.  On one of those other
occasions, years before, Mother had agreed with Tillie and
encouraged her to try a change for awhile.  At which Tillie had
suddenly broken out into a wild and distressed sniveling.  "I can
see right through you," she had cried into her gingham apron.
"You're sick of me livin' here."

"You certainly have to handle Tillie with gloves," Mother had said
wearily to Father then, and she had said it many times since.

"By cricky!  They'd be boxing-gloves if I had it to do," Father
would return.  Men are like that.  If only they had the management
of the hired help, you understand, all they would need to do would
be to go into the kitchen and rant around and settle things once
for all.  It follows that things certainly would be settled.

This summer, Tillie seemed to Mother's keen eyes to be changing.
From an almost fierce loyalty--in spite of frequent arguments--
Tillie seemed to have acquired a frank disdain for many of Mother's
ideas.  She began going away several evenings in the week with no
comment as to her destination, hitherto an unheard-of thing.
Mother said nothing, but felt that something unusual must be
possessing Tillie's mind.  She obtained an inkling of what it was
when Bob and Mabel, coming in for the evening, asked what Tillie
was doing so much over at the Perkinses'.

She was sure of the reason later on a rainy afternoon, when she
went into Tillie's room to close the windows.  On Tillie's dresser
lay an accumulation of reading material of the latest cult in which
Mrs. Perkins had become interested.

Mrs. Perkins had lived in Springtown all her married life, but she
had never taken root.  She had always been poised for flight, as it
were, although a quarter of a century had gone by and two of the
four children (who had miraculously brought themselves up) were
married.  She still maintained an air of fluttering condescension
toward the town.  Periodically she told her fellow citizens that
the family would be moving to Capitol City soon now, and she
confided to strangers that she was not really of Springtown, that
she was but temporarily quartered there, and that her real life was
lived in the outside world, to which she flew when the narrow
limits of the town seemed choking her.  As an opiate to soothe her
in the winter of her discontent, she delved into the study of
various creeds.  And as one cannot thoroughly detect the origin of
cults and cobwebs at the same time, Mrs. Perkins's house contained
as many of the one as the other.

With characteristic forbearance Mother maintained the friendliest
of attitudes toward her, but admitted to a teasing family that she
was "a little odd."

"Odd!  Your grandmother!" the girls would say.  "She's got bats in
her belfry."

And now Tillie was apparently absorbed in the study of one of this
peculiar woman's peculiar cults.  Mother sighed as she went
downstairs.  It was difficult for her to understand how any one
could need an addition to or an amplification of her own simple
creed:  "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do--"

Tillie spoke about it herself in a few days.  She and Mother were
canning blackberries in a steaming hot kitchen that was full of the
sickish-sweet odor of the fruit.

With characteristic shortness Tillie blurted out, "Molly, I might's
well tell you first as last--I've decided to go away for good."

Mother, of course, was partially prepared for the news, but she did
not say so.  She only asked calmly, "What are your plans, Tillie?"

"Well--I ain't sure yet, but I'm goin' to do something for myself.
I got some money, and there's things a-plenty that women can do
these days.  It's the age of woman.  She's come into her own."

Mother could scarcely suppress a smile.  Tillie's voice had that
formal, stilted sound of quoting.

"I've lived here for eighteen years, Molly," she went on, "and in
the next eighteen I'm goin' to do somethin' more broadenin'.  You
know yourself the town's little, and everybody here is livin'
little cramped lives.  I'm goin' to get out where things are bigger
and"--she paused and then took the unfamiliar, icy plunge--"where I
can stretch my soul."

The saying was so distinctly Perkinesque that Mother had to turn
abruptly to the sink to hide the unholy mirth on her face.

"Take yourself, for instance, Molly," the rasping, monotonous voice
went on.  "Mis' Perkins--she's certainly the broadest-minded woman
I ever knew--she was talkin' about you to me, and she says just to
look at Mis' Mason; you was bright and smart, and yet you'd just
let yourself be tied down to the family all these years and never
hardly traveled, like she had, to broaden out--and that you'd made
a big mistake to let the children take all your time--and she says
the very fact that you LIKE Springtown showed that it had kept you
too narrow to know different."

Two bright pink spots, neither of heat nor blackberry juice, burned
on Mother's cheeks.

"Well, my studyin' these things with her--and I honestly wish you'd
study them, too, Molly, you ain't rightly understood what this
bein' cramped down means to you--it's made me decide to break away
and get out.  As I said, I got some money and I ain't called on to
be nobody's under dog."

Mother silently clamped on a refractory jar cover.  Not until she
felt herself well enough in hand to speak calmly, did she ask
quietly, "Where will you go, Tillie?"

"I'm plannin' first to go to Capitol City to get me some new
clothes--Mis' Perkins has good ideas on that, too--then I'm goin'
up to Big Moon Lake with her.  We're goin' to live at the Inn a
week or two and meet some ladies there that Mis' Perkins has been
correspondin' with.  She's never met them, but they've all been
studyin' this new thought, it's called cosmic philosophy, and
course that makes us all friends to start with.  After that, I'll
decide just what I am goin' to do; I may go on to Chicago.  But one
thing's certain, Molly, Mis' Perkins has been the means of me
seein' Springtown like it really is--and the narrow way we all live
here."

Mother's part of the work was over.  She slipped silently out of
the kitchen, climbed the wide, curving stairway, and went into her
room.  Then she turned the lock and sat down in a low rocking-chair
by the window.  She was resentfully, flamingly angry, as good, high-
minded people sometimes become angry.  She was deeply, quiveringly
hurt, as sensible, sunshiny people, who do not go about looking for
slights, are sometimes hurt.

If Mrs. Perkins had said it directly to her, she would have made
light of it and put it aside.  If Tillie, by some miraculous mental
exertion, had thought it up herself, Mother could even have laughed
at it.  But to undermine Tillie's regard for her in that subtle
way, turn her old friend and helper from her, after all these years
of working side by side!

"Keep calm, now," Mother said mentally.  "Look at this thing
fairly.  Mrs. Perkins has traveled about a great deal.  Maybe there
is some truth in what she says."  That same calm hold upon her
other self, who was both impulsive and tempery, had seen Mother
safely through many a trial.

Was she narrow?

It is a very big question, that deciding who is narrow and who
broad-minded.  Broad-mindedness knows no financial standing nor
rank of station.  Bigotry is limited neither to rural communities
nor cities.  There are narrow-minded poor people and broad-minded
millionairies, just as there are liberal-minded country
storekeepers and smug, provincial-minded Congressmen.

In retrospect, Mother began looking back over the years of her
married life.  How she had endeavored to keep her mind fresh and
open!  Even in the days when they had lived across town in the
first tiny cottage that seemed full of tumbling babies, she had
never allowed a day to pass without a few hurriedly snatched
moments of good reading.  Though clothes were mended and turned and
made over, yet there were always good books and magazines on the
table.

Sudden, hot tears rushed to her eyes at the recollection of the
children piling into bed, and the thought of herself, tired to the
depths with the work and confusion, wandering with them through all
the dear old childhood tales.

With that alacrity with which the mind leaps from one memory to
another, she thought of the set of travel books for which she had
paid the sum of forty-five dollars in the days when that sum was a
huge one.  Whimsically she remembered the shabby old gray coat and
velvet toque she had worn a winter longer than they seemed even
passably decent, because of the books.  She wondered if in Mrs.
Perkins's long trips, born of discontent and unwillingness to keep
a home sweet and lovely, there had been half the satisfaction that
she herself had obtained from those precious volumes.

Travel?  No, Mother had not traveled.  A few short trips limited to
the mid-west states themselves, and the one long journey she and
Father had taken to the western coast completed the meager list.
Washington!  New York!  Boston!  It was with a distinct shock that
she realized she had never seen them.  It seemed almost
unbelievable, for New York's famous sky line, the interesting old
places in Boston, her country's capital, all seemed as pleasantly
familiar to her as the streets of Springtown.

Mother had that peculiar God-given gift of imagination so keen that
the printed word became to her a vivid, living reality.  It was as
though, while her body stayed at home and cared for the children,
her spirit had climbed far mountain peaks and sailed into strange
harbors.

Because of Barrie and Kipling and scores of others she had been
intimately, sensitively in touch with the places and peoples of the
world.  She had stood on wind-swept, heather-grown Scottish moors,
and broken bread in the little gray homes of the Thrums weavers.
She had watched, fascinated, the slow-moving, red-lacquered bullock
carts, veiled and curtained, creep over the yellow-brown sands of
India.  She had walked under brilliant stars down long, long trails
in clear, cold, silent places, and she had strolled through groves
of feathery flowering loong-yen trees of China.  She had sensed to
the finger tips the beauty of the witching, seductive moon-filled
nights of Hawaii, and with strained eyes and chilling heart she had
watched for the return of the fishing fleet on the wild-wind banks
of Labrador.

Yes, the warp of Mother's life had been restricted to keeping the
home for Henry and the children.  But the woof of the texture had
been fashioned from the wind clouds and star drifts of the heavens.

As she had touched her life with all the lives of these peoples of
the earth, for the time being sunk her own personality in theirs,
she had come to the conviction that, fundamentally, there was
nothing in life that could not be found in this little inland town.

Narrow?  She looked out of her windows over the pleasant maple-
edged, elm-bordered streets, where the warm afternoon sun cast
little quivering glints of gold.  In that bungalow over there she
had assisted when a child was born.  In the big house across the
street she had helped manage the wedding supper for a glowing
bride.  Down in that old-fashioned wing-and-ell she had closed the
eyes of an old man in his last long sleep.  Narrow?  Was birth
narrow?  Or marriage?  Or death?

For a long time she sat rocking, thinking of the twenty-six years
spent in the tiny town which, after all, was a cross-section of
life.  And if she made a little prayer:  "O, Lord, keep me clean of
heart--clear of mind--sweet of soul--gentle of speech" it was
because she had tested the Source of her strength many times
before.

She rose, bathed, dressed in fresh linens, as though to leave in
the laundry basket all the disturbing thoughts of the past hour.
She combed her graying hair carefully, put on a beautifully
laundered blue house dress and little ruffled apron, and then,
calm, placid, serene, came out of her room.  And there was about
her a little of the spirit of the Man who, long ago, came out of a
Garden.

In the evening, Tillie, with the literature that was guaranteed to
give such breadth of mind, left the house for Mrs. Perkins's.

The entire Mason family was congregated in the library, Bob and
Mabel having come in with the baby.  There was the usual diversity
of occupations with the usual resultant confusion.  Mother, who was
deftly inclosing a large space of air in the knee of Junior's
stocking, looked up to say quite casually:

"Folks, Tillie is going to leave us."

"Leave!  What for?  Why?"  The chorus was in perfect unison, as
though the family had been drilled.

"She wants," said Mother soberly, but with her eyes twinkling, "to
stretch her soul."

Every one surveyed her in blank astonishment.

"Stretch her soul!" Eleanor repeated, "what in the WORLD is that?"

"I don't know," Mother said demurely; "but she wants to do it."

"Oh, I know," Katherine volunteered, "it's some of that slush Mrs.
Fat Perkins has been telling her.  We might be in the wrong sphere,
you know, and be mentally confined and never know it.  It's only by
getting out into--er--cosmic spaces or something like that--that we
find out whether we've really been contented or not."

"Imagine Tillie rattling around in a cosmic space," Marcia
contributed.

"What's a cosmetic space?" Junior wanted to know, which was the
signal for a lusty shout from every one.

"She told me," Mother explained, "that she's cramped here in
Springtown, and she wants to get out and do something for herself."

Father looked over the top of his paper.  Father was one of those
men who have apartment-house brains, the party that lives on the
lower floor being able to read and digest all the international
news while the one on the upper floor constantly sticks his head
out of the window and hears all the household gossip.

"Well," he said cheerfully, "as one of our presidents said, 'Every
nation is entitled to self-determination.'  And if nations, why not
Tillie?"

"Sure!" Bob put in.  "Tillie is just up to date, looking for her
place in the sun."

Marcia chuckled.  "Believe ME, she'd make a bigger hit if it was in
the DARK 'o the MOON."

The young folks all laughed.

"Children!  Children!" Mother admonished them.  Then she sighed.
Never could she stay the inrolling tide of comments when the Masons
with unity attacked a subject.

One week later Tillie left.  Her last words were the suggestion
that Mother hire the Dority girl to help her, and added, by way of
reference, "Though land knows, she don't know beans when the bag's
open."

Mother missed Tillie as the late summer days passed.  The girls
made elaborate promises to take her place so that Mother would not
feel the lack of help.  But any one who has raised three pretty,
popular daughters will know that the sum of the combined tasks done
by them was not equal to the faithful service of Tillie, who was
neither pretty nor popular.

At the end of the second week the Masons were at the supper table
when they heard some one coming up the front steps, and through the
wide front hall.  In the dining room doorway stood Tillie, the
Prodigal.  She had on a new navy blue suit of the latest cut.  A
chic little hat with scarlet cockade, that would have becomingly
adorned the head of a movie star, was slipping about rakishly on
Tillie's flat hair.

"Here I be," she said bluntly, sourly.

There was a chorus of welcoming voices that brought a dull red to
the wanderer's high-boned cheeks.  Mother rose from her chair, and
with outstretched hands went swiftly toward her.

"Good land, Molly!"--Tillie seemed genuinely distressed--"I hope
you ain't goin' to kiss me."

Mother laughed girlishly.  "No, I wouldn't dare, Tillie; but you
can rest assured I FEEL like it."

"Did you hire that silly little Dority girl?" was Tillie's next
question.

"No," said Mother, "we didn't even try to get her.  The girls have
helped me."  Somewhere the god of Tact gave Mother credit for the
reservation of the words "a little."  "I HOPE you're going to
stay?"

"I be," she answered curtly.

They could get no more out of her until she was through supper.
Then she pushed back her chair and said, "Now, I'm agoin' to tell
you somethin'.  I could keep it to myself I s'pose, and I'll
prob'ly wish I had--but I ain't goin' to, for I want to get it off
my chest.  Only I don't want one o' you to ever throw it up to me
again as long as I live.  I went to Capitol City, and I got me some
new clothes, and I ain't begrudgin' the money, for I felt tonier
than I ever did in my life before.  I had my face manicured, too."

Several of the Masons simultaneously dropped their napkins and
dived under the table for them.

"That was a powerful fussy job, and it's the first and last time
I'll ever let anybody hit me in the face with a fly-slapper.  I
wouldn't a-cared if I'd looked any different when they got through
with me; but it's the Lord's truth, girls, I didn't look one mite
changed, and that face-manicurin' business is all a hold-up."

"Well, of course, Tillie, it IS a SKIN game," Marcia put in, which
gave every one a chance to let off some laughter.  Tillie did not
crack a smile.

"Then I met Mis' Perkins at Big Moon Lake, and I don't mind sayin'
I felt about as good as any one with my new clothes.  The first
morning after we got there we was sittin' on a seat by a big tree,
and some eight or nine ladies and girls came along and stopped near
us.  They were nice-dressed, nice-lookin' women, and we guessed
right away that they was the ladies from the philosophy school, and
so we talked to the one nearest us.  She said she was expectin' us.
The others had started on ahead by that time, and she told us to
come along as they was out sight-seein', goin' to look at the
rapids and climb one of the hills.  So we walked along with her and
all this time she and Mis' Perkins talked, but lots deeper and
queerer than anything I'd read yet, and I got kinda sick of so much
of it at a stretch.  But Mis' Perkins seemed to be just in her
element.

"We walked around lookin' at the places of interest and about noon
got back to the Inn lawn.  Then one of the ladies who had been
pointin' out all the places to us come to Mis' Perkins and me and
pulled us aside and said she hadn't noticed us joinin' the crowd in
the rear in the mornin' until we got part way up the hill.  Then
she said she hadn't wanted to embarrass us when she did see us, so
she waited till we got back to tell us that these ladies was all
from the sanitarium near by, and though they was harmless they
wasn't any of 'em right in their minds.  I can't see nothin' very
funny about it myself, but I know all of you well enough to know
it's the kind of thing you laugh your heads off over.  So, laugh!"
she said shortly, crabbedly.

Tillie's supposition was entirely correct.  The Mason family
laughed until it wept.

When they were in shape to hear her again, she finished with:  "I
made up my mind right then and there, if I couldn't tell crazy
folks from the students of the philosophy I was studyin', I'd come
back to Springtown, where we know Grandma McCabe and Silly Johnson
are the only loony ones in town, unless," she added acridly, "you
count Mis' Perkins, too."

The next morning, Tillie in her stiffly starched gingham dress
stopped by the kitchen clock shelf.

"What's these?"  She picked up some oblong slips of paper and
glared at Mother.

"Oh," Mother responded timidly, "those are your checks."  Then she
added naïvely, "They've sort of accumulated up there, haven't
they?"

"What have I got checks for?"

"Why, I put one up there every Saturday you were gone."

"You thought I'd come back?"

"I KNEW it."  Mother was growing braver.  "Don't you suppose I know
that you need me just as much as I need you?  I'm in hopes you'll
make your home here with us the rest of your life, and when the
children are all gone, and you and I are two decrepit old ladies,
you can wait on me part of the time and I can wait on you the other
part.  In the meantime, I can pay your regular salary to your body--
can't I?--while your soul takes a little vacation."

For the second time in the eighteen years Tillie surprisingly threw
her gingham apron over her head and burst into a loud and
distressed sniveling.  "Molly Mason," she wailed, "you're the very
best woman that ever walked on the top of the Lord's green earth."

Tender-hearted Mother, who had been hunting for a handkerchief and
couldn't locate one, wiped her eyes on a tennis-flannel kettle
holder.  "Oh, no, Tillie," she said tremulously, "not that--just
ordinarily decent."

Suddenly Tillie pulled the apron off her head, raised her distorted
face and broke forth into a high, weird, henlike cackle.  "Oh, my
land-a-Goshen!" she chortled, "stretchin' my soul!  AIN'T I A FOOL?"

"I'm certainly glad Tillie's back," Mother said complacently to
Father that night in their room.

Father finished a yawn.  Then he dropped a large heavy shoe that
made a large heavy thud.  He, too, was glad Tillie was back, for
Mother's sake.  As for himself, he had fared quite comfortably
while Tillie was gone.

"Well, how about her soul?" he asked.  "Has it been stretched?"

"Yes," Mother answered, smilingly emphatic, "it has.  It has been
stretched enough to let in a faint glimmering of genuine humor."

"By golly!  She needed some," Father returned.  Then he yawned and
dropped the other shoe.



CHAPTER V

THE THEATRICAL SENSATION


Just a few weeks later, when the golden-rod was spreading its
yellow lace to trim the edges of the cornfield, and the blue of the
gentians was vying for brilliancy with the scarlet of the sumac,
Katherine left for her first year of teaching in Miles City, Marcia
for her senior year at college, and Eleanor and Junior returned to
their studies in the home school.

Father and Mother held the sensible view that each of the girls
should take up some practical training, so Marcia had chosen a
course in primary teaching.

"How'd you happen to choose primary?" Katherine had asked her.

"Oh, primary hours are shortest of all, and who wants to stay in a
schoolroom any longer than he has to?" had been Marcia's cheerful
reply.  And when you come to think about it--who does?

Not until the Thanksgiving vacation did the entire family get
together again.  There were a great many experiences related in
those few days.  Katherine's report was one of intense seriousness
over the young history students who sat in her classes.  Marcia's
account of her work was not of such a solemnity.

"In October we taught those little Comanches about squirrels and
Columbus and other adventurous gentlemen," she announced blithely
to the family, and added with bland unconcern:  "Primary teachers
are awful liars.  Imagine this!  The whole month has been rainy,
and we've had to smile our mail-order smiles and make those
youngsters sing 'Pit-a-pat, see the LOVELY raindrops,' just because
it was supposed to have mutual relation to the disgusting
elements."

Eleanor, in the meantime, had been deep in one of those sticky,
quagmire attachments for a teacher into which a high school girl
often slips.  It was a barnaclelike adherence that continued after
Thanksgiving.  The teacher's name was Buckwalter--Miss Genevieve
Buckwalter, and her mind contained a great many convolutions that
had been made by romantic experiences.  Her life, so far, had been
divided, like all Gaul, into three parts, which centered
respectively about the following characters:

1.  The man she had wanted to marry.

2.  The man who had wanted to marry her.

3.  The man she was going to marry.

Miss Buckwalter taught the English Literature class.  And because
she was capable of making an extra credit, Eleanor Mason, sixteen
and a junior, was scheduled to take English Literature with the
seniors.  From this class Miss Buckwalter organized the Shakespeare
Club, and so cleverly did she manipulate matters that when the
members signed the constitution--which document was nearly as long
and serious looking at the Constitution of the U. S.--it was
discovered that there were just fourteen members, evenly divided as
to sex.

"That will give them more interest in the club," said Miss
Buckwalter.  Which deduction showed amazing wisdom.

The Shakespeare Club met every other Friday night in Miss
Buckwalter's pretty suite of rooms.  And, to make the club more
attractive to the young people, she served refreshments.  On the
way home after the first meeting, tall, lanky Frank Marston said,
gosh, he wished she'd speed up a little on the eats, that the part
of his wafer that didn't stick in his teeth flew down the front of
his coat.  But, take it all in all, the club flourished like the
cedars of Lebanon.

Thereafter, Eleanor Mason's language was not the language of her
forbears.  From morning until night she dropped sayings of the
immortal bard.  She answered every innocent question with a
flippant Stratford-on-Avon answer.  The family accepted it as they
had the measles, an epidemic that, heaven willing, would be over
some day.

After school hours, immediately following the banging of the front
door, they would hear, "'Oh, Jupiter, how weary are my spirits!'"

To Father's grumbling about Old Man Smith not tending the furnace
to suit him, Eleanor said:


       "Fret till your proud heart break.
     Go, show your slaves how choleric you are,
       And make your bondsmen tremble."


A piece of gossip from Junior brought forth "'Peace!  Fool!  Where
learned you that'?"

When Tillie came in to say that she believed on her soul when she
lifted that wash water she had strained her back, Eleanor told her
jauntily that the quality of mercy was not strained, that it
droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the earth beneath.

Tillie was disgruntled.  "Can't that girl talk sense lately?" she
wanted to know.

"Never mind her, Tillie," Father said.  "She's only with us in the
flesh--her spirit is living with the great international poet who
cornered the market."

"Well, couldn't he a-wrote so white folks could have a chance to
understand him?" Tillie retorted acridly.

Aside from these poetic flights, Eleanor was apparently unchanged.
Mother watched her covertly to ascertain whether the boy question
had presented itself.  But, gay and carefree, after every club
meeting Eleanor would bring in the half-dozen young people who
lived nearest, and together they would eat large quantities of
sandwiches in the Mason kitchen.  But, "Better a lot of eating in
the kitchen than a little sweethearting on the porch," was Mother's
motto.

Then came great expectations.  The club was to give a play in the
spring.  Miss Buckwalter evolved the idea that it would make a
great hit, be good training for the students, and bring in a mint
of money for the school library.  Thereupon she chose "Romeo and
Juliet."  And because of Eleanor Mason's keen intelligence, and the
fact that her father was president of the school board and would
appreciate the honor, Miss Buckwalter selected her for Juliet.  She
might have spared herself any pains on account of the latter
reason, for a duck's back was not more impervious to water than
Father to the fact that he had been highly honored.

Mother was disgusted.  "I'm provoked through and through," she told
Father.  For twenty-six years Father had been her exhaust pipe.
"'Romeo and Juliet!'  How PERFECTLY silly!  I talked to Miss
Jenkins--she's so sensible--she didn't approve either, said she
suggested 'Merchant of Venice,' or 'As You Like It,' as lesser
evils; but a road company gave the 'Merchant' here not long ago,
and Miss Buckwalter said she couldn't fix a good forest of Arden
when the trees were cut bare.  She claims she will cut the play a
great deal--but think of that balcony scene!"  Mother threw up her
hands despairingly.  "Well, I'll not interfere; but you mark my
word, Henry, Eleanor will get foolish notions in her head.  Why,
Father, she's only SIXTEEN."

"Well, haven't I heard somewhere that the original Miss Capulet was
fourteen?"

Seeing that Mother was too much perturbed to answer him, Father
said cheerfully, "Oh, I wouldn't worry, Mother.  Eleanor's the most
sensible girl we've got, and the teacher will be there with
them."  Father was one of those old-fashioned souls who think,
optimistically, that the teacher, like the king, can do no wrong.
But Mother, having taught school herself, well knew that teachers
were of the earth earthy.

Comes now Andrew Christensen.  Andy had arrived with his parents at
Ellis Island from a small country noted for dairy products, some
fifteen years before.  And now, at nineteen, to prove that he was a
genuine American, he dressed in the most faddish clothes and
specialized in slang.  In fact he was so much a man of the world
that, so far as girls were concerned, he seldom deigned to waste
his fragrance on the desert air of Springtown, preferring, at ball
games, to flaunt various out-of-town girls before his classmates.
Mornings before school and on Saturdays he worked in Thompson's
combined grocery and meat market.  He was big and blond and good-
looking.  And he was Romeo.

Rehearsals began.  To Miss Buckwalter's disappointment, Eleanor
Mason was not getting as much out of her part as she had
anticipated.  Words?  Eleanor could reel them all off at the first
rehearsal.  But when she said, "Wherefore art thou Romeo?  What's
Montague?  Is it nor hand nor foot?  What's in a name?" she might
as well, for all the heart she put in it, have said, "Do you like
onions?  Or prunes?  Can you stand the sight of carrots?"

So, with much coaching on Miss Buckwalter's part and much faithful
endeavor on Eleanor's, the practice went on.  And then--quite
suddenly--Eleanor needed no more coaching.  They were on the drafty
stage of the old opera house, Eleanor standing on a dry-goods box
in lieu of a balcony.  Andy reached up and took her hand for the
first time.  A little shiver, as delicious as it was strange, went
through her.

"'Wouldst thou withdraw thy vow?'" said Andy.  "'For what purpose,
love?'"

And Eleanor, her honest little heart beating suffocatingly, leaned
over the old box and answered softly:


     "My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
     My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
     The more I have, for both are infinite."


AND SHE MEANT IT.

After that rehearsal Mother noted a subtle change in Eleanor.  She
seemed very subdued.  She slipped up to her room a great deal to
read.  She became fussy about her clothes.  She seemed (and Mother
knew this to be the most genuine symptom) to have lost her sense of
humor.

When Bob dropped in on his way home and wanted to know how Romiet
and Julio were coming on, there was no merry crinkle around
Eleanor's eyelids, only a very dignified answer from her.

Junior and the crowd of boys with whom she had occasionally been
wont to hobnob were as the dust beneath her feet.  The Saturday
before the play, they came into the house and entreated her long
and noisily to come to the pasture and help them make up a nine.
But their supplication was met with such withering scorn that when
they left Junior stuck his head back in the door to deliver this
cutting farewell:  "All right for you, Lady Juliet De Snub Nose!
You can put this in your pipe and smoke it--this is the last time
us boys'll ever ask YOU to do a DARN THING!"

As for Eleanor, she was living in the rarefied atmosphere which the
new thing in her life had created.  She walked daily in the land of
Romance; but where she had hitherto only caught rare glimpses of a
faraway shadowy creature, now he had come closer to her through the
forest and, behold--it was Andy!

The night of the play, Springtown turned out as small towns always
do for home talent and packed the old barnlike opera house to the
doors.

The program opened with a piano solo by Marybelle Perkins.
Probably Paderewski or Josef Hofmann could have done as well, but
the Perkinses wouldn't have admitted it.  Then the high school
boys' Glee Club sang "Anchored," and when they ended with "Safe,
safe at last, the harbor passed," people were so relieved that the
boys were quite reasonably safe at last from their perilous musical
journey that they applauded vigorously.

There was a short farce and then--The Play.

There was a great deal of loud and boisterous enmity displayed
between the followers and retainers of the respective houses of
Capulet and Montague.  There was a scene, somewhat hilarious,
showing the ball given by Lord Capulet.  There was the balcony
scene, and the grand finale of the poison and the dark tombs.

Springtown liked it.  True, there were a few discrepancies.  One
might have been carried back to a long-gone generation on fleeter
wings of imagination had he not, through the foliage on the side of
the balcony, caught glimpses of "Mr. Tobias S. Thompson, Dealer in
Meats and Fancy Groceries."  One recognized the portly Mrs. John
Marston's old purple velvet coat on her lanky son Frank, and Lord
Montague displayed a startling combination of dress-suit coat and
sixteenth-century legs.  The tomb where lay the bones of the dead
Capulets looked like a cross between an automobile hood and a dog
kennel.  But, taken as a whole, it was a very creditable
performance.

Father and Mother Mason sat in the center aisle, sixth row.  Across
from them sat Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Christensen, Sr., with so many
little Christensens that it had taken nearly a day's wages to get
tickets and reserved seats.  Mr. Christensen was not yet far enough
removed from kings and things but that he glowed with pride because
Andy was playing opposite the banker's girl.

People whispered to each other that they never knew Eleanor Mason
was so pretty.  Lithe and lovely in her white costume, Juliet
leaned over the balcony.  In after years she was never to smell the
pungent odor of rose geranium without seeing Andy's face, pale, a
little tremulous, turned up to her.

Liquid-like, dulcet-toned, dripped Juliet's:


     Good night, good night.  Parting is such sweet sorrow,
     That I could say good night until the morrow.


The audience clapped and clapped.  Miss Buckwalter, in the wings,
was elated.  "Eleanor never did so well," she said to Miss Jenkins.
Only Mother, sixth row, center, moaned over and over in her heart,
"Oh, WHAT have they done to my little girl?"

The play was over.  The audience breathed a long sigh, rose, began
laughing and talking.  Mother felt a fierce intuitive resentment
against Andy.  She did not want him to go home alone with her girl.
So she used the only weapon of defense she knew, a sandwich.  With
a hasty mental calculation as to how many buns there would be left
for the next day after dividing four dozen into fourteen boys and
girls, she invited them all up to the house.

It was an incongruous sight--Romeo and Tybalt and the old nurse and
Friar Lawrence, en costume, perched on the kitchen sink and table
cabinet, devouring sandwiches.  As they were leaving the kitchen,
Mother made a casual survey of the trays, and discovered that the
answer to her problem in mathematics was "Not any."

The Capulets and the Montagues all flocked out into the big hall.
Andy hung back a moment to speak to Eleanor.

"Say, kid, I wanta see you in the morning when I bring the meat.  I
wanta ask you something when the mob ain't around."

There was only one thing it could mean, Eleanor told herself when
she was alone in her room.  It was a date for Sunday.  She had
never had a real "date," the boys just happened in at times.  In an
ecstasy of emotion she went to bed.  For a long time she lay
imagining what she would say to the girls when they came for her to
go walking Sunday afternoon.  She would answer carelessly, "I
can't, girls.  I'm sorry.  Andy's coming."

When she woke with a start the sun was shining in her windows.  All
about her were evidences of the Great Event--her costume, a
crumpled program, her roses in a jar in the hall.  She dressed
carefully in a softly frilled blue dress and sat down by the window
to wait.  She didn't want any breakfast.  Eating?  How commonplace!

There was a sound of the rattly cart that Andy drove.  She wished
Andy had a nicer job; he was intending to be a traveling man.  She
heard him go around the house and then, whistling cheerfully,
coming back.  She went to the window and raised it.

"'But soft!  What light through yonder window breaks?'" he called.
"'It is the east, and Juliet is the sun!'"

They both laughed.  How easy it was to laugh with Andy.

"Come on down!" he called.  "I want to ask you that."

On winged feet of hope, she sped down the front stairs.  Andy
perched on the stone railing of the big porch, his cap on the back
of his blond, curly head.

"Well, Juliet, we're some little actors--what?"

At Eleanor's answering smile, he said:  "Say, kiddo, I wanta ask
you to help me think of something for my girl's birthday.  It's
tomorrow and I'm going to see her.  She lives over at Greenwood,
and she's some swell dame, believe me.  There's nobody in this town
that's got a look-in with her.  I thought maybe you could think of
some nifty stunt."

Eleanor bent to her slipper for a moment, so that when she lifted
her head it was quite natural that she looked flushed.  Her heart
was pounding terribly.  She felt sick, but she forced a little
crooked smile.  There was sturdy pioneer blood in Eleanor, the
strain that meets crises clear-eyed and bravely.  So she said
sturdily, "Why, Andy, flowers or books are nice."

"Nix on the flowers.  You won't see little Andy loping up with a
bunch of posies.  And books--she likes sweller things than
reading."

"You wouldn't want to get anything as expensive as a kodak, would
you?"

"Sure thing, just the dope.  You're some kid.  I thought you'd know
something right-o.  Much obliged.  Well, so long, kiddo.  See you
at the algebra funeral Monday morning."

The little wings of hope were bruised and bleeding when she dragged
them back up the stairs.  She closed her door and threw herself
down on the floor by the window, a little crumpled heap.  So this
was the end!  Andy hadn't meant any of those things he had said.
He had sounded so honest and truthful.  The beautiful new thing in
her life was gone.  The hot gushing tears of youth came.  Sobs
shook her.

Ah, well!  At sixteen a broken dream is as cruel as a broken
reality, for there is no one to tell you which is reality and which
is dream.

As she sat battling with emotions that would not be laid low, she
turned in desperation to the long shelf of books near by.
Mechanically she reached for a fat little volume and turned the
leaves.  Here was one called "The Saddest Hour."  With a vague hope
that the eminently appropriate title would put her own painful
thoughts into words, she began:


     The saddest hour of anguish and of loss
     Is not that moment of supreme despair
     When we can find no least light anywhere--


Surely it couldn't be that life held sadder moments than this.  She
read hurriedly, avidly.  What, then, was the saddest hour?  It
seemed it was not when we sup on salt of tears, nor even when we
drink the gall of memories of days that have passed.  Here it was:


     But when with eyes that are no longer wet
     We look out on the great wide world of men,
       And, smiling, lean toward a bright to-morrow--
     To find that we are learning to forget--
       Ah! then we face the saddest hour of sorrow.


Then the saddest hour of all would never come to her, for of course
she would never, never forget.  For a long time she sat by the
window looking mournfully out on the bleak landscape.  There was
some solace in the thought of dying and being buried in her Juliet
costume, with a sprig of rose geranium in her hand.  Andy would
come and when he saw her, dead, in her little white Juliet dress,
he'd think how rosemary was for remembrance. . . .

Junior and Runt Perkins and several of the boys of that crowd were
coming up the back walk.  They came close and stopped under the
clothesline.  There were eight of them.  They were motioning to
her.  What did they want?  She put up her window.

"Oh, EL-ner, come on down and make up the nine.  Shorty Marston had
to go to Miles City with his mother.  Come on, please.  PLEASE do,
El-ner."  Different voices were taking up the refrain.

Eleanor leaned out.  The air was mild and damp as though somewhere
there had been a gentle rain.  There was a faint smell of mellow
loam everywhere.  Down behind the garage the hens were cackling
noisily.  The trunks of the maple trees were moist with sap.  There
was a faint tinge of green on the hill beyond the pasture.

"You can pitch, El-ner, er bat," Runt Perkins called enticingly,
"er any old thing."

"Well," she said suddenly, "wait till I change my dress and get a
bite to eat."

At noon Father came up the walk proudly carrying the new broom that
Mother had told him to get two weeks before.  At the back porch he
stopped and looked across the alley to the half block of pasture
land where in summer he kept his cow.  For a few moments he stood
watching, then a grin came slowly over his face and he turned and
went into the house.

"Mother," he said, "for once in your life you were good and
mistaken about one of your offspring."

"Who's that?"  Mother withdrew her rumpled head from a coat closet.

"Eleanor.  All that Juliet stuff never fazed her.  I told you she
was the most sensible kid we had.  She's out there in the pasture
with Junior's bunch, and she's just made a home run.  She took it
like a sand-hill crane, her hair flying, and the boys cheering her
like little Comanches."

"Well, thank the Lord," said Mother devoutly.


Out in the old pasture lot, the Jilted One was looking out on the
great wide world of men, and smiling, and leaning toward a bright
tomorrow.



CHAPTER VI

PROVING MARCIA TO HAVE BEEN BORN LUCKY


It was only a few weeks after the Shakespeare thriller that
Katherine and Marcia came home for the spring vacation.  To Mother
the few days of their stay were very precious.  Life was never the
same with part of the family away.

Characteristically the two girls gave divergent reports of their
work.  After Katherine had given the family a comprehensive and
earnest dissertation on the work she had accomplished, Marcia
summed up her own strenuous mental labors with:

"We had a perfect orgy of cherry trees and hatchets and valentines
in February--and I wish you could have seen the training school in
March.  We simply fell over seed boxes and kites, and we fairly ATE
pussywillows.  This month we've painted millions of wild-looking
robins.  You'd die to see them--their beaks all run down and mix up
sociably with their wings.  It's a great life," she added blithely.

It was during this spring vacation that she began talking about
Capitol City.  "I'm just LIVING to teach there next year.  They
send some member of the board every spring to the training school
to choose the best teachers, and I MUST be one.  I don't want to go
to any little two-by-four burg.  Capitol City for ME!  I ask an
interest in your prayers."

So short was the brief week that the girls were gone again before
Mother could realize the distressing fact.  Part of Mother went
with them.  It is an acrobatic feat that only mothers can
understand, this ability to be with every child.

To do Marcia justice, she really applied herself that spring when
the stakes were worth working for.  On the last Friday morning in
April she had gone from the college to town on one of her numerous
unimportant errands, and was waiting by the downtown station for
the college car.  As it stopped, a sorority sister came down
the steps.  "He's in there," she whispered.  "Capitol City
superintendent--come for teachers."

"Where?"

"There--halfway down--right-hand side."

He looked just as Marcia would have expected him to look--heavy,
distinguished, gray-haired, with a Van Dyke beard.  She sat down
behind him and whispered to his broad back a foolish little jargon:


     "Eeny meeny miny mo,
     Please, kind sir, choose me to go."


Across the aisle from the great man sat Mrs. Hastings, the college
doctor's wife.  A strange young man was with her.  From occasional
glimpses of his good-looking profile, Marcia decided that he bore a
faint resemblance to Mrs. Hastings.  There was something about him
she liked, his square jaw and alert manner and a distinct air of
sophistication that none of the college boys had yet acquired.

The car stopped at the entrance to the campus and let out its load.
As Marcia was about to pass Mrs. Hastings and the strange man, the
former said, "Oh, Miss Mason, are you in a hurry?"  As there was
merely a small matter of an English Literature class due then, Miss
Mason assured Mrs. Hastings she was not at all in haste.

"Could you show my brother around a little?  My brother, Mr.
Wheeler, Miss Mason. . . .  I would go with him myself, but I told
Hannah if the baby needed me, to put a red cloth in the window, and
there it is!"  She pointed excitedly to her home across from the
campus.  She was breathless, and anxious to get away.

"Maybe the baby has only joined the Bolsheviki," her brother
suggested.

Marcia laughed.  She liked him, his keen brown eyes and the sudden
humorous lift to the mouth that she had thought so stern.

"You can see for yourself he's not married or he wouldn't be so
flippant over a serious matter," Mrs. Hastings called to Marcia.
"Show him the new amphitheater--and Science Hall"--she was already
halfway across the street--"and the new dormitory and the training
school."

"My sister," Mr. Wheeler said, "missed her calling.  She would have
made an excellent major general or park policeman."

Marcia laughed again.  She still liked him.  Mr. Wheeler looked
down at his appointed guardian.  She wore an immaculate white skirt
with an audaciously green silk sweater and cap.  The V-shaped neck
of her blouse set off the lovely contour of her face.  By way of
completing a very satisfactory picture there was a bunch of dewy-
sweet violets in her belt.

"Do you happen by any chance," Mr. Wheeler asked, "to be the Miss
Mason who is Keith Baldridge's fiancée?"

"No, indeed," Miss Mason said, more emphatically than was
necessary, for it wasn't at all disgraceful to be engaged to Keith
Baldridge.  "That's my sister Katherine.  I'm Marcia.  And you know
Keith?"

"Like David knew Jonathan."

They crossed the green sloping campus, sweet-smelling from its
recent mowing.  There was some conversation relative to their
mutual interest in Keith Baldridge, and then Marcia said glibly:

"You see before you the new Science Hall.  It is thirty-seven
stories high, a mile square and cost seventy million dollars.  The
roof of the new dormitory may be seen through the trees.  Out
beyond the Domestic Science building is the amphitheater and beyond
the amphitheater--lies Italy."

They had come to a little rustic bridge across a miniature creek.
Neither one made a move to walk on.  In fact, to be explicit, they
sat down on the low railing.

"As for the training school," Marcia continued, "I wouldn't
voluntarily take you there.  It's the place where you abandon hope
all ye who enter here."

"You teach there?"

"I do."  She looked at her wrist watch.  "And in fifty minutes I'm
to teach before the new superintendent of the Capitol City schools,
if I haven't died of fright.  He was on the car.  Did you see him--
a big husky Vandyker?"  Mr. Wheeler had noticed him.

"I want to make a professional hit with him," Marcia went on
confidentially.  "I've simply got to teach in Capitol City next
year.  I LOVE a city.  I want to walk in the crowds and eat at tea-
rooms.  I want to go to the theater and sit in a box."

Mr. Wheeler looked judicially, appraisingly, at her.  "I don't
believe," he said soberly, "it would injure the looks of the box."

They both laughed.  Marcia was enjoying herself immensely.  He was
like that for the whole hour they were together, keen, clever,
interesting.  In comparison with him all the home boys and college
boys of her numerous friendships faded quietly into a blurred
masculine background.  In the light of his clever repartee Marcia
reveled.  To his questioning she told him a great deal about
herself.  She described faculty members to the last comic detail.
Mr. Wheeler enjoyed it, apparently, so she made fun of the training
school for his benefit.  She spared no one.  She mocked the
artificial manners of the student teachers and imitated the head of
the department.  His hearty, virile laugh was ample payment for her
pains.

It lacked seven minutes of the hour.  Marcia slipped down from the
bridge rail with "I go, like the quarry slave at night scourged to
his dungeon."  Suddenly she clapped her hand to her throat in a
characteristic gesture.  "Oh, my GOODNESS!--I forgot--I have to get
a whole violet plant with the roots on for my class.  Oh, HELP me
look, will you?"

Mr. Wheeler sprang nimbly to his feet and together they searched
over that particular part of the campus.  Not a violet showed
itself above the close-cropped lawn, nothing but bold-faced
dandelions.

"Can't you--cut that part out!" he suggested.

"You don't know Miss Rarick," Marcia was genuinely distressed.  "If
you haven't everything your lesson plan calls for, she just looks
at you--and you shrink--and shrivel--"

The wrist watch said three minutes of the hour.  "I'll have to take
a dandelion root," she announced, "and pass it off for a violet.
They won't know the difference."  Already her unquenchable spirits
were rising.  She borrowed Mr. Wheeler's knife and hastily dug up a
dandelion.  "See!  I'll take two or three violet blossoms and
leaves"--she took them out of her belt--"attach them to the
dandelion root, and wrap my handkerchief around the center as
though it were muddy and damp--and there you are!"

"But, see here, they're nothing alike," he protested.

"Oh, we should worry!" said the blithe Miss Mason.  "Thank you for
helping me.  You can come along if you want to, and see me teach.
I'm frightened senseless, anyway, at the Vandyker, so one or two
more able-bodied men won't matter."

Mr. Wheeler said he would be delighted to see the dandelion
masquerading before the great man.  So they hurried up the gravel
driveway to the huge training-school building.  Marcia pointed out
the door where he was to go.  "I have to go in another way," she
explained; "the righteous from the wicked, you know."

The model primary room was an awe-inspiring place.  Eleven student
teachers, notebooks in hand, sat by the side walls.  Two critic
teachers, notebooks in hand, sat by the rear walls.  The head
supervisor, notebook in hand, walked through the room as though to
remind one of the day of judgment.  The Capitol City superintendent
was there, and two or three lesser lights.  Marcia and nine small
pupils held the center of the arena after the manner of the early
Christian martyrs.  Her heart was beating suffocatingly, but she
conducted a very creditable little reading class whose lesson was
based on a violet plant that was much less modest than it should
have been, owing to the fact that its pedal extremities, so to
speak, had been grafted from a member of a family noted for its
brazen forwardness.

Marcia was a model of the sweet young instructor.  Only once did
she throw a fleeting glance of rougishness at Mr. Wheeler, to see
his mouth lift at the corners in the characteristic way she had
liked.

The lesson was over.  Every one breathed more naturally.  The
student teachers and visitors rose to go to chapel exercises.
Marcia looked around for Mr. Wheeler, but she did not see him.  In
the doorway, she turned to look at the Capitol City superintendent,
in the hope that he was discussing her with Miss Rarick.  He was
not so engaged.  He was picking up from the floor a dandelion root
alias a violet.

The sight disturbed her somewhat, but she put the thought of it
aside and went on to chapel.  Near the Auditorium she came upon a
group of senior girls waiting for her.  Some days at chapel
exercises these girls sat on the front seat and acted virtuously.
Some days they sat on the back seat and acted villainously.  To-day
was apparently one of their pious days, for they filed decorously
down the center aisle to the front seat and sang the opening hymn,
"Holy, Holy, Holy," as lustily as though they were the original
vestal virgins.

The superintendent of the Capitol City schools, in all his dignity,
sat upon the platform with the faculty.  After the prayer and
announcements, President Wells arose and said, "We have with us to-
day the new superintendent of the largest school system in the
state."  Marcia looked at him, sitting there so calmly.  How nice
it would be, she thought, to be so undisturbed when you were about
to address an audience.  President Wells had ceased introducing
him, but he did not stir from his chair.  Instead, from the
semigloom of the back row there was stepping out a tall, clean-cut,
alert young man, with keen brown eyes and a strong chin.

All eyes were upon him.  Marcia's own, fascinated, alarmed, watched
him.  The color dropped away from her face, and then surged back
like a scarlet tide.  From the chaotic jumble of her mind one
naked, leering truth stood out.  HE was the superintendent of the
Capitol City schools.

Like a kaleidoscope, things she had said to him tumbled about in
her brain, forming a nightmare of combinations.  With dry lips she
whispered to the girl next to her, "Who's the big man--in gray?"

"Supe at Mapleville--only has eight teachers under him--acts like
he was Supe of New York City."

The man on the platform was speaking, easily, forcefully.
"Earnestness and sincerity form the keystone of the teaching
profession."  He said a great deal more than that.  He said it with
fire and enthusiasm.  He said he was there to choose teachers, high-
grade teachers who had been faithful in their work.  Carefulness,
attention to details, were things that would be considered.  But
over and above these was the great fundamental question:  What was
the spirit of the teacher?  What gifts of heart and soul as well as
of mind did she come bearing to her task?

Marcia felt stunned, sick.  She sat with miserable hot eyes fixed
upon her lap.  It was over at last.  Chapel was out.  President
Wells and other faculty members had surrounded the speaker.  Marcia
slipped away from the girls.  She attended two classes and got
through a noisy boarding-house dinner.  She wanted to go home.  She
wanted to see the family, especially Mother, comfortable and
comforting Mother.  Katherine would be home for the week-end.  She
had written to that effect and also that Keith was coming for
Sunday.

Marcia did not go to her afternoon classes and she hung a frank
"Busy--Keep Out" sign on her door.  Then she packed her bag and
slipped down to the afternoon train.

At home the family was all excitement over the unexpected arrival.
Mother bustled about with happy moisture in her eyes even while she
took in the fact that Marcia had something on her mind.  When they
had finished supper it came out, just as Mother knew it would.
They were still sitting about the table--all but Junior, whose
urgent business with Runt Perkins and Shorty Marston always found
him swallowing his last bites while on the way to the door.

Marcia told them all about it.  She spared herself not at all.  She
had made a fool of herself, she said, and they might as well know
it.  "The thing that makes me maddest," she informed them,
tearfully, "is that I stretched things just to hear him laugh.  I
made myself out lots worse than I am.  He was the sternest-looking
man you ever saw, and I LOVED to see the corners of his mouth pull
up.  It seemed to me he laughed an awful lot," she finished
forlornly.

Every one looked sympathetic.  Katherine's consolation was,
"Marcia, I just can't IMAGINE myself talking so glibly to a strange
man."

Marcia's contrition was complete.  "I can't either, Kathie.  I envy
you being so cool and sweet and courteous to everybody.  Only it
SEEMED as though I'd known him a thousand years," she added.

Eleanor's contribution was, "Myself, I think it was terribly
romantic."

Marcia's scorn was withering.  "Romantic?  TRAGIC, you mean."

Father began a dry, "Well, Marcia, I've always told you you'd run
up against--"  But as Marcia dabbed a moist roll of handkerchief
into her eyes, he finished lamely, "Never mind, honey, I think you
can have the third grade here."

Tillie was on the warpath.  "There's a law about false pretenses.
He ought to be sued.  If I was a man I'd trounce the middle of the
road with him."

Mother was furtively wiping away a tear or two herself.  "Marcia,
there's something abou