A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      Mother Mason (1924)
Author:     Bess Streeter Aldrich, 1881-1954
eBook No.:  0500531h.html
Edition:    1
Language:   English
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Date first posted:          June 2005
Date most recently updated: June 2005

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MOTHER MASON

by

Bess Streeter Aldrich, 1881-1954

1924

CHAPTER

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 ch