still staring at the marked dollar. For a reason he could not have put
into words just then, it began to seem almost vitally important to him
to own this coin if he could, and to prevent Charlie Loomis from getting
possession of it. The jibe, “He wants it for luck with the dames,”
rankled in Collinson’s mind: somehow it seemed to refer to his wife.

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Smithie,” he said. “I’ll bet two dollars
against that dollar of yours that I hold a higher hand next deal than
you do.”

“Here! Here!” Charlie remonstrated. “Shack rules! Ten-cent limit.”

“That’s only for the game,” Collinson said, turning upon his host with a
sudden sharpness. “This is an outside bet between Smithie and me. Will
you do it, Smithie? Where’s your sporting spirit?”

So liberal a proposal at once roused the spirit to which it appealed.
“Well, I might, if some o’ the others’ll come in too, and make it really
worth my while.”

“I’m in,” the host responded with prompt inconsistency; and others of
the party, it appeared, were desirous of owning the talisman. They
laughed and said it was “crazy stuff,” yet they all “came in,” and, for
the first time in the history of this “shack,” what Mr. Loomis called
“real money” was seen upon the table as a stake. It was won, and the
silver dollar with it, by the largest and oldest of the gamesters, a fat
man with a walrus moustache that inevitably made him known in this
circle as “Old Bill.” He smiled condescendingly, and would have put the
dollar in his pocket with the “real money,” but Mr. Loomis protested.

“Here! What you doin’?” he shouted, catching Old Bill by the arm. “Put
that dollar back on the table.”

“What for?”

“What _for_? Why, we’re goin’ to play for it again. Here’s two dollars
against it I beat you on the next hand.”

“No,” said Old Bill calmly. “It’s worth more than two dollars to me.
It’s worth five.”

“Well, five then,” his host returned. “I want that dollar!”

“So do I,” said Collinson. “I’ll put in five dollars if you do.”

“Anybody else in?” Old Bill inquired, dropping the coin on the table;
and all of the others again “came in.” Old Bill won again; but once more
Charlie Loomis prevented him from putting the silver dollar in his
pocket.

“Come on now!” Mr. Loomis exclaimed. “Anybody else but me in on this for
five dollars next time?”

“I am,” said Collinson, swallowing with a dry throat; and he set forth
all that remained to him of his twelve dollars. In return he received a
pair of deuces, and the jubilant Charlie won.

He was vainglorious in his triumph. “Didn’t that little luck piece just
keep on tryin’ to find the right man?” he cried, and read the
inscription loudly. “‘Luck hurry back to me!’ Righto! You’re home where
you belong, girlie! Now we’ll settle down to our reg’lar little game
again.”

“Oh, no,” said Old Bill. “You wouldn’t let me keep it. Put it out there
and play for it again.”

“I won’t. She’s mine now.”

“I want my luck piece back myself,” said Smithie. “Put it out and play
for it. You made Old Bill.”

“I won’t do it.”

“Yes, you will,” Collinson said, and he spoke without geniality. “You
put it out there.”

“Oh, yes, I will,” Mr. Loomis returned mockingly. “I will for ten
dollars.”

“Not I,” said Old Bill. “Five is foolish enough.” And Smithie agreed
with him. “Nor me!”

“All right, then. If you’re afraid of ten, I keep it. I thought the
ten’d scare you.”

“Put that dollar on the table,” Collinson said. “I’ll put ten against
it.”

There was a little commotion among these mild gamesters; and someone
said, “You’re crazy, Collie. What do you want to do that for?”

“I don’t care,” said Collinson. “That dollar’s already cost me enough,
and I’m going after it.”

“Well, you see, I want it, too,” Charlie Loomis retorted cheerfully; and
he appealed to the others. “I’m not askin’ him to put up ten against it,
am I?”

“Maybe not,” Old Bill assented. “But how long is this thing goin’ to
keep on? It’s already balled our game all up, and if we keep on foolin’
with these side bets, why, what’s the use?”

“My goodness!” the host exclaimed. “_I_’m not pushin’ this thing, am I?
_I_ don’t want to risk my good old luck piece, do I? It’s Collie that’s
crazy to go on, ain’t it?” He laughed. “He hasn’t showed his money yet,
though, I notice, and this ole shack is run on strickly cash principles.
I don’t believe he’s got ten dollars more on him!”

“Oh, yes, I have.”

“Let’s see it then.”

Collinson’s nostrils distended a little; but he said nothing, fumbled in
his pocket, and then tossed the one-hundred-dollar bill, rather
crumpled, upon the table.

“Great heavens!” shouted Old Bill. “Call the doctor: I’m all of a
swoon!”

“Look at what’s spilled over our nice clean table!” another said, in an
awed voice. “Did you claim he didn’t have _ten_ on him, Charlie?”

“Well, it’s nice to look at,” Smithie observed. “But I’m with Old Bill.
How long are you two goin’ to keep this thing goin’? If Collie wins the
luck piece, I suppose Charlie’ll bet him fifteen against it, and
then——”

“No, I won’t,” Charlie interrupted. “Ten’s the limit.”

“Goin’ to keep on bettin’ ten against it all night?”

“No,” said Charlie. “I tell you what I’ll do with you, Collinson; we
both of us seem kind o’ set on this luck piece, and you’re already out
some on it. I’ll give you a square chance at it and at catchin’ even.
It’s twenty minutes after nine. I’ll keep on these side bets with you
till ten o’clock, but when my clock hits ten, we’re through, and the one
that’s got it then keeps it, and no more foolin’. You want to do that,
or quit now? I’m game either way.”

“Go ahead and deal,” said Collinson. “Whichever one of us has it at ten
o’clock, it’s his, and we quit.”

But when the little clock on Charlie’s green-painted mantel shelf struck
ten, the luck piece was Charlie’s and with it an overwhelming lien on
the one-hundred-dollar bill. He put both in his pocket; “Remember this
ain’t my fault; it was you that insisted,” he said, and handed Collinson
four five-dollar bills as change.

Old Bill, platonically interested, discovered that his cigar was
sparkless, applied a match, and casually set forth his opinion. “Well, I
guess that was about as poor a way of spendin’ eighty dollars as I ever
saw, but it all goes to show there’s truth in the old motto that
anything at all can happen in any poker game! That was a mighty nice
hundred-dollar bill you had on you, Collie; but it’s like what Smithie
said: a piece o’ money goes hoppin’ around from one person to
another—_it_ don’t care!—and yours has gone and hopped to Charlie. The
question is, Who’s it goin’ to hop to next?” He paused to laugh, glanced
over the cards that had been dealt him, and concluded: “My guess is ’t
some good-lookin’ woman’ll prob’ly get a pretty fair chunk o’ that
hundred-dollar bill out o’ Charlie. Well, let’s settle down to the ole
army game.”

They settled down to it, and by twelve o’clock (the invariable closing
hour of these pastimes in the old shack) Collinson had lost four dollars
and thirty cents more. He was commiserated by his fellow gamesters as
they put on their coats and overcoats, preparing to leave the hot little
room. They shook their heads, laughed ruefully in sympathy, and told him
he oughtn’t to carry hundred-dollar bills upon his person when he went
out among friends. Old Bill made what is sometimes called an unfortunate
remark.

“Don’t worry about Collie,” he said jocosely. “That hundred-dollar bill
prob’ly belonged to some rich client of his.”

“What!” Collinson said, staring.

“Never mind, Collie; I wasn’t in earnest,” the joker explained. “Of
course I didn’t mean it.”

“Well, you oughtn’t to say it,” Collinson protested. “People say a thing
like that about a man in a joking way, but other people hear it
sometimes and don’t know he’s joking, and a story gets started.”

“My goodness, but you’re serious!” Old Bill exclaimed. “You look like
you had a misery in your chest, as the rubes say; and I don’t blame you!
Get on out in the fresh night air and you’ll feel better.”

He was mistaken, however; the night air failed to improve Collinson’s
spirits as he walked home alone through the dark and chilly streets.
There was indeed a misery in his chest, where stirred a sensation
vaguely nauseating; his hands were tremulous and his knees infirm as he
walked. In his mind was a confusion of pictures and sounds, echoes from
Charlie Loomis’s shack: he could not clear his mind’s eye of the
one-hundred-dollar bill; and its likeness, as it lay crumpled on the
green cloth under the drop-light, haunted and hurt him as a face in a
coffin haunts and hurts the new mourner. Bits of Smithie’s
discursiveness resounded in his mind’s ear, keeping him from thinking.
“In one person’s hands money’ll do good likely, and in another’s it’ll
do harm.”—“The dummy that said, ‘Money’s the root of all evil!’”

It seemed to Collinson then that money was the root of all evil and the
root of all good, the root and branch of all life, indeed. With money,
his wife would have been amiable, not needing gay bachelors to take her
to vaudevilles. Her need of money was the true foundation of the
jealousy that had sent him out morose and reckless to-night; of the
jealousy that had made it seem, when he gambled with Charlie Loomis for
the luck dollar, as though they really gambled for luck with her.

It still seemed to him that they had gambled for luck with her: Charlie
had wanted the talisman, as Smithie said, in order to believe in his
luck—his luck with women—and therefore actually be lucky with them;
and Charlie had won. But as Collinson plodded homeward in the chilly
midnight, his shoulders sagging and his head drooping, he began to
wonder how he could have risked money that belonged to another man. What
on earth had made him do what he had done? Was it the mood his wife had
set him in as he went out that evening? No; he had gone out feeling like
that often enough, and nothing had happened.

Something had brought this trouble on him, he thought; for it appeared
to Collinson that he had been an automaton, having nothing to do with
his own actions. He must bear the responsibility for them; but he had
not willed them. If the one-hundred-dollar bill had not happened to be
in his pocket—— That was it! And at the thought he mumbled desolately
to himself: “I’d been all right if it hadn’t been for that.” If the
one-hundred-dollar bill had not happened to be in his pocket, he’d have
been “all right.” The one-hundred-dollar bill had done this to him. And
Smithie’s romancing again came back to him: “In one person’s hands
money’ll do good, likely; in another’s it’ll do harm.” It was the money
that did harm or good, not the person; and the money in his hands had
done this harm to himself.

He had to deliver a hundred dollars at the office in the morning,
somehow, for he dared not take the risk of the client’s meeting the
debtor. There was a balance of seventeen dollars in his bank, and he
could pawn his watch for twenty-five, as he knew well enough, by
experience. That would leave fifty-eight dollars to be paid, and there
was only one way to get it. His wife would have to let him pawn her
ring. She’d _have_ to!

Without any difficulty he could guess what she would say and do when he
told her of his necessity: and he knew that never in her life would she
forego the advantage over him she would gain from it. He knew, too, what
stipulations she would make, and he had to face the fact that he was in
no position to reject them. The one-hundred-dollar bill had cost him the
last vestiges of mastery in his own house; and Charlie Loomis had really
won not only the bill and the luck, but the privilege of taking
Collinson’s wife to vaudevilles. But it all came back to the same
conclusion: the one-hundred-dollar bill had done it to him. “What kind
of a thing _is_ this life?” Collinson mumbled to himself, finding
matters wholly perplexing in a world made into tragedy at the caprice of
a little oblong slip of paper.

Then, as he went on his way to wake his wife and face her with the
soothing proposal to pawn her ring early the next morning, something
happened to Collinson. Of itself the thing that happened was nothing,
but he was aware of his folly as if it stood upon a mountain top against
the sun—and so he gathered knowledge of himself and a little of the
wisdom that is called better than happiness.

His way was now the same as upon the latter stretch of his walk home
from the office that evening. The smoke fog had cleared, and the air was
clean with a night wind that moved briskly from the west; in all the
long street there was only one window lighted, but it was sharply
outlined now, and fell as a bright rhomboid upon the pavement before
Collinson. When he came to it he paused at the hint of an inward impulse
he did not think to trace; and, frowning, he perceived that this was the
same shop window that had detained him on his homeward way, when he had
thought of buying a toy for the baby.

The toy was still there in the bright window; the gay little acrobatic
monkey that would climb up or down a red string as the string slacked or
straightened; but Collinson’s eye fixed itself upon the card marked with
the price: “35 cents.”

He stared and stared. “Thirty-five cents!” he said to himself.
“Thirty-five cents!”

Then suddenly he burst into loud and prolonged laughter.

The sound was startling in the quiet night, and roused the interest of a
meditative policeman who stood in the darkened doorway of the next shop.
He stepped out, not unfriendly.

“What _you_ havin’ such a good time over, this hour o’ the night?” he
inquired. “What’s all the joke?”

Collinson pointed to the window. “It’s that monkey on the string,” he
said. “Something about it struck me as mighty funny!”

So, with a better spirit, he turned away, still laughing, and went home
to face his wife.

                               JEANNETTE

THE nurses at the sanitarium were all fond of the gentlest patient in
the place, and they spoke of him as “Uncle Charlie,” though he was so
sweetly dignified that usually they addressed him as “Mr. Blake,” even
when it was necessary to humour his delusion. The delusion was peculiar
and of apparently interminable persistence; he had but the one during
his sixteen years of incarceration—yet it was a misfortune painful only
to himself (painful through the excessive embarrassment it cost him) and
was never for an instant of the slightest distress to any one else,
except as a stimulant of sympathy. For all that, it closed him in,
shutting out the moving world from him as completely as if he had been
walled up in concrete. Moreover, he had been walled up overnight—one
day he was a sane man, and the next he was in custody as a lunatic; yet
nothing had happened in this little interval, or during any preceding
interval in his life, to account for a seizure so instantaneous.

In 1904 no more commonplace young man could have been found in any of
the great towns of our Eastern and near-Eastern levels. “Well brought
up,” as we used to say, he had inherited the quiet manner, the good
health, and the moderate wealth of his parents; and not engaging in any
business or profession, he put forth the best that was in him when he
planned a lunch for a pretty “visiting girl,” or, again, when he bought
a pair of iron candle-snuffers for what he thought of as his
“collection.” This “collection,” consisting of cheerless utensils and
primitive furniture once used by woodsmen and farmers, and naturally
discarded by their descendants, gave him his principal occupation,
though he was sometimes called upon to lead a cotillion, being
favourably regarded in the waltz and two-step; but he had no
eccentricities, no habitual vices, and was never known to exhibit
anything in the nature of an imagination.

It was in the autumn of the year just mentioned that he went for the
first time to Europe, accompanying his sister, Mrs. Gordon Troup, an
experienced traveller. She took him through the English cathedrals, then
across the Channel; and they arrived unfatigued at her usual hotel in
Paris after dark on a clear November evening—the fated young
gentleman’s last evening of sanity. Yet, as Mrs. Troup so often recalled
later, never in his life had her brother been more “absolutely normal”
than all that day: not even the Channel had disturbed him, for it was as
still as syrup in a pantry jug; he slept on the French train, and when
he awoke, played gently with Mrs. Troup’s three-year-old daughter
Jeannette who, with a nurse, completed the small party. His talk was not
such as to cause anxiety, being in the main concerned with a tailor who
had pleased him in London, and a haberdasher he made sure would please
him in Paris.

They dined in the salon of their apartment; and at about nine o’clock,
as they finished their coffee, flavoured with a little burnt cognac,
Mrs. Troup suggested the theatre—a pantomime or ballet for preference,
since her brother’s unfamiliarity with the French language rapidly
spoken might give him a dull evening at a comedy. So, taking their
leisure, they went to the Marigny, where they saw part of a potpourri
called a “revue,” which Mrs. Troup declared to be at once too feeble and
too bold to detain them as spectators; and they left the Marigny for the
Folies Bergères, where she had once seen a fine pantomime; but here they
found another “revue,” and fared no better. The “revue” at the Folies
Bergères was even feebler, she observed to her brother, and much bolder
than that at the Marigny: the feebleness was in the wit, the boldness in
the anatomical exposures, which were somewhat discomfiting—“even for
Paris!” she said.

She remembered afterward that he made no response to her remark but
remained silent, frowning at the stage, where some figurantes just then
appeared to be dressed in ball gowns, until they turned, when they
appeared to be dressed almost not at all. “Mercy!” said Mrs. Troup; and
presently, as the costume designer’s ideas became less and less
reassuring, she asked her brother if he would mind taking her back to
the hotel: so much dullness and so much brazenness together fatigued
her, she explained.

He assented briefly, though with some emphasis; and they left during the
entr’acte, making their way through the outer room where a “Hungarian”
band played stormily for a painted and dangerous-looking procession
slowly circling like torpid skaters in a rink. The _bang-whang_ of the
music struck full in the face like an impulsive blow from a fist; so did
the savage rouging of the promenaders; and young Mr. Blake seemed to be
startled: he paused for a moment, looking confused. But Mrs. Troup
pressed his arm. “Let’s get out to the air,” she said. “Did you ever see
anything like it?”

He replied that he never did, went on quickly; they stepped into a cab
at the door; and on the way to the hotel Mrs. Troup expressed contrition
as a courier. “I shouldn’t have given you this for your first impression
of Paris,” she said. “We ought to have waited until morning and then
gone to the Sainte Chapelle. I’ll try to make up for to-night by taking
you there the first thing to-morrow.”

He murmured something to the effect that he would be glad to see
whatever she chose to show him, and afterward she could not remember
that they had any further conversation until they reached their
apartment in the hotel. There she again expressed her regret, not with
particular emphasis, of course, but rather lightly; for to her mind, at
least, the evening’s experience was the slightest of episodes; and her
brother told her not to “bother,” but to “forget it.” He spoke casually,
even negligently, but she was able to recall that as he went into his
own room and closed the door, his forehead still showed the same frown,
perhaps of disapproval, that she had observed in the theatre.

The outer door of the apartment, giving entrance to their little
hallway, opened upon a main corridor of the hotel; she locked this door
and took the key with her into her bedchamber, having some vague idea
that her jewels were thus made safer; and this precaution of hers later
made it certain that her brother had not gone out again, but without
doubt passed the night in his own room—in his own room and asleep, so
far as might be guessed.

Her little girl’s nurse woke her the next morning; and the woman’s voice
and expression showed such distress, even to eyes just drowsily opening,
that Mrs. Troup jumped up at once. “Is something wrong with Jeannette?”

“No, ma’am. It is Mr. Blake.”

“Is he ill?”

“I think so. That is, I don’t know, ma’am. A _valet-de-chambre_ went
into his room half an hour ago, and Mr. Blake hid himself under the
bed.”

“What?”

“Perhaps you’d better come and see, ma’am. The _valet-de-chambre_ is
very frightened of him.”

But it was poor young Mr. Blake who was afraid of the
_valet-de-chambre_, and of everybody else, for that matter, as Mrs.
Troup discovered. He declined to come out from under the bed so long as
she and the nurse and the valet were present, and in response to his
sister’s entreaties, he earnestly insisted that she should leave the
room at once and take the servants with her.

“But what’s the matter, Charlie dear?” she asked, greatly disturbed.
“_Why_ are you under the bed?”

In his voice, as he replied, a pathetic indignation was audible:
“Because I haven’t got any clothes on!”

At this her relief was manifest, and she began to laugh. “Good
heavens——”

“But no, madame!” the valet explained. “He has his clothes on. He is
dressed all entirely. If you will stoop and look——”

She did as he suggested, and saw that her brother was fully dressed and
making gestures as eloquently plaintive as the limited space permitted.
“Can’t you take these people away?” he cried pettishly. “Do you think
it’s nice to stand around looking at a person that’s got nothing on?”

He said the same thing an hour later to the doctor Mrs. Troup summoned,
though by that time he had left his shelter under the bed and had locked
himself in a wardrobe. And thus, out of a clear sky and with no
premonitory vagaries, began his delusion—his long, long delusion, which
knew no variation in the sixteen years it possessed him. From first to
last he was generally regarded as a “strange case;” yet his state of
mind may easily be realized by anybody who dreams; for in dreams,
everybody has undergone, however briefly, experiences similar to those
in which Mr. Blake fancied himself so continuously involved.

He was taken from the hotel to a private asylum near Paris, where he
remained until the following year, when Mrs. Troup had him quietly
brought home to a suburban sanitarium convenient for her to visit at
intervals; and here he remained, his condition changing neither for the
better nor for the worse. He was violent only once or twice in the whole
period, and, though he was sometimes a little peevish, he was the most
tractable patient in the institution, so long as his delusion was
discreetly humoured; yet it is probable that the complete records of
kleptomania would not disclose a more expert thief.

This was not a new form of his disease, but a natural by-product and
outgrowth of it, which within a year or two had developed to the point
of fine legerdemain; and at the end of ten years Doctor Cowrie, the
chief at the sanitarium, declared that his patient, Uncle Charlie Blake,
could “steal the trousers off a man’s legs without the man’s knowing
it.” The alienist may have exaggerated; but it is certain that “Uncle
Charlie” could steal the most carefully fastened and safety-pinned apron
from a nurse, without the nurse’s being aware of it. Indeed, attendants,
nurses and servants who wore aprons learned to remove them before
entering his room; for the most watchful could seldom prevent what
seemed a miraculous exchange, and “Uncle Charlie” would be wearing the
apron that had seemed, but a moment before, to be secure upon the
intruder. It may be said that he spent most of his time purloining and
collecting aprons; for quantities of them were frequently discovered
hidden in his room, and taken away, though he always wore several, by
permission. Nor were other garments safe from him: it was found that he
could not be allowed to take his outdoor exercise except in those
portions of the grounds remotest from the laundry yard; and even then as
he was remarkably deft in concealing himself behind trees and among
shrubberies, he was sometimes able to strip a whole length of
clothesline, to don many of the damp garments, and to hide the others,
before being detected.

He read nothing, had no diversions, and was immersed in the sole
preoccupation of devising means to obtain garments, which, immediately
after he put them on, were dissolved into nothingness so far as his
consciousness was concerned. Mrs. Troup could not always resist the
impulse to argue with him as if he were a rational man; and she made
efforts to interest him in “books and the outside world,” kindly efforts
that only irritated him. “How can I read books and newspapers?” he
inquired peevishly from under the bed, where he always remained when he
received her. “Don’t you know any better than to talk about intellectual
pursuits to a man that hasn’t got a stitch of clothes to his name? Try
it yourself if you want to know how it feels. Find yourself totally
undressed, with all sorts of people likely to drop in on you at any
minute, and then sit down and read a newspaper! Please use your _reason_
a little, Frances!”

Mrs. Troup sighed, and rose to depart—but found that her fur cloak had
disappeared under the bed.

In fact, though Mrs. Troup failed to comprehend this, he had explained
his condition to her quite perfectly: it was merely an excessive
protraction of the nervous anxiety experienced by a rational person
whose entire wardrobe is missing. No sensitive gentleman, under such
circumstances, has attention to spare from his effort to clothe himself;
and all information not bearing upon that effort will fail of important
effect upon his mind. You may bring him the news that the Brooklyn
Bridge has fallen with a great splash, but the gravity of the event will
be lost upon him until he has obtained trousers.

Thus, year after year, while Uncle Charlie Blake became more and more
dextrous at stealing aprons, history paced on outside the high iron
fence inclosing the grounds of the sanitarium, and all the time he was
so concerned with his embarrassment, and with his plans and campaigns to
relieve it, that there was no room left in his mind for the plans and
campaigns of Joffre and Hindenburg and Haig and Foch. Armistice Day, as
celebrated by Uncle Charlie, was the day when, owing to some cheerful
preoccupation on the part of doctors and attendants, he stole nine
aprons, three overcoats, a waistcoat and seventeen pillow-slips.

Rip Van Winkle beat Uncle Charlie by four years. The likeness between
the two experiences is pathetically striking, and the difference between
them more apparent than actual; for though Rip Van Winkle’s body lay
upon the hill like a stone, the while his slumber was vaguely decorated
with thousands of dreams, and although Uncle Charlie Blake had the full
use of his body, and was all the time lost in one particular and
definite dream, still if Rip Van Winkle could wake, so could Uncle
Charlie. At least, this was the view of the younger alienist, Doctor
Morphy, who succeeded Doctor Cowrie in 1919.

In the course of some long and sympathetic talks with his patient,
Doctor Morphy slightly emphasized a suggestion that of late tin had come
to be considered the most desirable clothing material: the stiffness and
glitter of tin, as well as the sound of it, enabled a person to be
pretty sure he had something over him, so long as he wore one of the new
tin suits, the Doctor explained. Then he took an engraving of _Don
Quixote_ in armour to a tinsmith, had him make a suit of armour in tin,
and left it in Uncle Charlie’s corridor to be stolen.

The awakening, or cure, began there; for the patient accepted the tin
armour as substance, even when it was upon him, the first apparel he had
believed to be tangible and opaque enough for modesty since the night
his sister had taken him to the Folies Bergères in 1904. The patient’s
satisfaction when he had put on this _Don Quixote_ armour was instant,
but so profound that at first he could express it only in long sighs,
like those of a swimmer who has attained the land with difficulty and
lies upon the bank flaccid with both his struggle and his relief. That
morning, for the first time, he made no dive under his bed at the sound
of a knock upon the door, and when he went out for his exercise, he
broke his long habit of darting from the shelter of one tree to another.
He was even so confident as to walk up to a woman nurse and remark that
it was a pleasant day.

Thence onward, the measures to be taken for his restoration to society
were obvious. The tin greaves pinched him at the joints when he moved,
and Doctor Morphy pointed out that silver cloth, with rows of tiny bells
sewed upon it here and there, would glitter and sound even better than
tin. Then, when the patient had worn a suit of this silver cloth,
instead of tin, for a few weeks, the bells were gradually removed, a row
at a time, until finally they were all gone, and Uncle Charlie was
convinced by only the glitter that he went apparelled. After that, the
silver was secretly tarnished, yet the patient remained satisfied. Next
a woollen suit of vivid green and red plaid was substituted; and others
followed, each milder than its predecessor, until at last Uncle Charlie
grew accustomed to the daily thought that he was clothed, and, relieved
of his long anxiety, began to play solitaire in his room. His delusion
had been gradually worn away, but not to make room for another;
moreover, as it lost actuality to him, he began to forget it. His
intelligence cleared, in fact, until upon Thanksgiving Day, 1920, when
Mrs. Troup came to take him away, he was in everything—except a body
forty-six years old—the same young man who had arrived in Paris on a
November evening in 1904. His information, his point of view and his
convictions were those of a commonplace, well-brought-up, conventional
young American of that period; he had merely to bridge the gap.

Doctor Morphy advised Mrs. Troup that the bridging must be done with as
little strain as possible upon the convalescent’s mind—a mind never too
hardily robust—and therefore the devoted lady took her brother to a
mountain health resort, where for a month they lived in a detached
cottage, walked footpaths in the woods, went to bed at nine, and made no
acquaintances. Mrs. Troup dispensed with newspapers for the time (her
charge did not appear to be aware of their absence) but she had brought
such books as she thought might be useful; and every day she talked to
him, as instructively as she could, of the terrific culminations history
had seen during the latter part of his incarceration.

Of Bolshevism he appeared unable to make anything at all, though Mrs.
Troup’s explanations struck out a single spark from his memory. “Oh,
yes,” he said, “I remember a rather talky chap—he was one of the guests
at that queer place where I used to live, you know—well, he used to
make speeches the whole day long. He said the doctors got all the money
and it was _our_ money. If it wasn’t for us, the doctors wouldn’t have a
cent, he said; and since we produced all the wealth, we ought to
organize, and lock the doctors up in the cellar, and get the money
ourselves. I remember some of the other guests seemed to think there was
a good deal in the talky chap’s speeches, and I suppose it must be
something of this sort that’s happened in Russia. It’s very confusing,
though.”

And when her lessons, as mild as she could make them, had proceeded
somewhat further, he passed his hand over his brow, professing himself
more confused than ever.

“I declare!” he said. “No sensible person could make head or tail of it,
if I may use such an expression. I never dreamed anything could actually
come of all these eccentricities—women’s rights, socialism, blue
Sundays, prohibition and what not. I’ve heard of such people—heard
jokes about ’em—but never in my life _met_ a person that went in
seriously for any of ’em, except that speechifying chap I told you
about. How on earth did it all _happen_?”

Upon this she was able to enlighten him but feebly, and he rubbed his
forehead again.

“It’s no use,” he told her. “There’s no _reason_ behind these things:
the only thing to do is to realize that the world’s gone crazy. We used
to think that civilization was something made of parts working together
as they do in an engine; but from what you tell me, it must have been
trying to split itself up, all the time. The nations split up and began
to fight one another; and as soon as they’d all got so crippled and in
debt that they couldn’t fight any more, the other splits began.
Everybody had to be on the side of the women or on the side of the men,
and the women won. Now everybody has to be either a capitalist or a
labourer, it seems, no matter what _else_ he is; and even if he doesn’t
know which he is, he’ll have to fight, because somebody’s sure to hit
him. And besides _that_, the people have gone and split themselves into
those that drink and the others that won’t let ’em. How many _more_
splits are there going to be, with the people on each side just bound to
run the world their way? There are plenty of other _kinds_ of splits
that could be made, and I suppose we might as well expect ’em; for
instance, we can have all the married people on one side in a
‘class-conscious class,’ as you were explaining, and all the unmarried
ones on the other. Or all the parents on one side and all the children
on the other.” He paused, and laughed, adding: “However, I don’t suppose
it’s gone quite so far as children versus parents yet, has it?”

Mrs. Troup looked thoughtful. “I suppose it always _has_ been ‘children
versus parents’ at least, in a sense,” she said. “I’ve been thinking
lately, though, that since all revolts are more apt to take place
against feeble governments than against strong ones, if the children
_are_ in revolt, it must be because the parents are showing greater
laxity than they used to.”

Mr. Blake went to his afternoon nap, shaking his head, but in silence.
Naturally he was confused by what he heard from her, and once or twice
he was confused by some things he saw, though in their seclusion he saw
little. One mistake he made, however, amazed his sister.

From their pleasant veranda a rounded green slope descended slowly to
the level lawn surrounding the Georgian upheavings of an endless hotel;
and at a porte cochère of this hotel a dozen young women, come from a
ride on the hills, were getting down from their saddles. Mr. Blake, upon
the veranda of the cottage a hundred yards distant, observed them
thoughtfully.

“It may be only the difference in fashions,” he remarked; “but people’s
figures look very queer to me. The actual shapes seem to have changed as
much as the clothes. You’re used to them, I suppose, and so they don’t
surprise you, but down there at that porte cochère, for instance, the
figures all look odd and—well, sort of bunchy. To me, every single one
of those boys seems to be either knock-kneed or bow-legged.”

“‘Boys!’” Mrs. Troup cried.

He stared at her. “What are they?”

“Good gracious! Don’t you see? They’re women!”

He still stared at her, while his incredulous expression slowly changed
to one of troubled perplexity. But he said nothing at all, and after a
moment more, turned away and went to his room, where he remained until
dinner-time. When he appeared at the table, he made no reference to his
mistake, but reverted to the topic of which they had been speaking that
afternoon before his attention wandered to the horsewomen at the porte
cochère.

“Prohibition must have altered a great many people’s lives quite
violently,” he said. “I suppose it was quite a shock for people who’d
always had wine or Scotch at dinner—giving it up so suddenly.”

“I suppose so—I don’t know——” A little colour showed below Mrs.
Troup’s eyes. “Of course, quite a number of people had supplies on hand
when the day came.”

“But most of that must be gone by this time.”

“Quite a good deal of it is gone, yes; you don’t see wine very often any
more. People who have any left are getting very piggish about it, I
believe.”

“It must be odd,” he said contemplatively, “the whole country’s being
absolutely sober and dry, like this.”

“Well——” she began; then, after a pause, went on: “It isn’t like
that—exactly. You see——”

“Oh, of course there would be a few moonshine stills and low dives,” he
interrupted. “But people of our circle——”

“Aren’t exactly ‘dry,’ Charles.”

“But if they have no wine or——”

“It’s my impression,” said Mrs. Troup, “that certain queer kinds of
whisky and gin——”

“But we were speaking of ‘our circle’—the kind of people _we_——”

“Yes, I know,” she said. “They carry these liquids about with them in
the most exquisite flasks. Jeannette has one—a boy friend gave it to
her—and it must have been made by a silversmith who is a real artist.
It must have been fearfully expensive.”

Mr. Blake’s open mouth remained distended for a moment. “Your
Jeannette!” he exclaimed. “Why, she’s only——”

“Oh, she’s nineteen,” his sister informed him soothingly.

“But was it exactly nice for her to receive such a gift from a young
man?”

“Oh, he’s one of the nicest boys we know,” Mrs. Troup explained. “They
swim together every day.”

“‘Swim together’?” her brother inquired feebly.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Troup. “His aunt has a tank.”

“‘His aunt has a tank,’” the convalescent repeated in a low voice, as if
he wished to get the sentence by heart. “‘His aunt has a tank.’”

Mrs. Troup coughed placatively. “It may be a little difficult for you to
understand,” she said. “Of course, even I feel obliged to have something
in the house at home—a certain amount of whisky. I don’t approve of
such things, naturally, but Jeannette feels it’s necessary on account of
the young men and the other girls. She doesn’t like whisky and never
touches it herself.”

Jeannette’s uncle uttered a sigh of relief. “I should think not! I was
afraid, from what you told me of her flask——”

“Oh, in that,” said Mrs. Troup, “she keeps gin.”

“Gin?” he said in a whisper. “Gin?”

“She’s rather fond of gin,” Mrs. Troup informed him. “She makes it
herself from a recipe; it’s quite simple I believe.”

“And she _carries_ this flask——”

“Oh, not all the time!” Mrs. Troup protested, laughing. “Only to dances
and girls’ lunches.” And, observing her brother’s expression, she added:
“Of course, she never takes too _much_; you mustn’t get a wrong idea of
Jeannette. She and all the girls of her set don’t believe in _that_, at
all—I’m positive none of them has ever been intoxicated. They have the
very highest principles.”

“They have?”

“Yes; you see, Jeannette has read Wells and Shaw since she was twelve.
When we go home and you meet Jeannette, you must try to understand that
she belongs to a different generation, Charles. You see, Jeannette has
had so _many_ influences that didn’t affect your own youth at all. For
instance, she always insisted on going to the movies even when she was a
little girl, and I rather enjoy them myself, when I’m tired; and then
there’s the new stage—and the new novel—you know, we have everything
on the stage and in books that we used to think could only be in books
and on the stage in France, because here the police——”

“But in France,” he interrupted, “—in France they didn’t let the _jeune
fille_ read the books or go to the theatre.”

“No,” she agreed. “But of course over here we’ve had feminism——”

“What’s that?”

“I don’t know exactly, but I think it’s something to do with the
emancipation of women.” She paused, then added thoughtfully: “Of course,
Jeannette smokes.”

“What!”

“Oh, that’s nothing at all,” she said hastily. “They’ve had to permit it
in nearly all the restaurants.”

He rose, leaning heavily upon his chair, as if for support, and looking
rather more pallid than usual. In fact, his brow was damp from the
exertion its interior workings had undergone in the effort to comprehend
his sister’s conversation. “I think, if you don’t mind,” he murmured,
“I’ll go directly to bed and rest.”

“Do,” she said sympathetically. “We’ll talk some more about Jeannette
to-morrow. She’s the most lovably pretty thing in the world, and you’ll
be cra——” She changed the phrase hastily. “You’ll be delighted to have
such a niece.”

But, as it happened, when she began to speak of Jeannette the next day,
he gently protested, asking her to choose another topic. “I’m sure I
couldn’t understand,” he said, “and the effort rather upsets me. It
would be better to wait and let me form my own impressions when I see
her.”

His sister assented without debate; and nothing more was said about
Jeannette until a week later when they were on the train, and half the
way home. A telegram was handed to Mrs. Troup by the porter, and after
reading it, she glanced rather apprehensively toward her brother, who,
in the opposite seat, was so deeply attentive to a book that he had not
noticed the delivery of the telegram; in fact, he did not observe it,
still in her hand, when he looked up vaguely, after a time, to speak a
thought suggested by his reading.

“So many of these books about the war and the after-effects of the war
say that there is to be a ‘new world.’ All the young people have made up
their minds that the old world was a failure and they’re going to have
something different. I don’t know just what they mean by this ‘new
world’ the writers talk so much about, because they never go into the
details of the great change. It’s clear, though, that the young people
intend the new world to be much more spiritual than the old one. Well,
I’m anxious to see it, and, of course, it’s a great advantage to me,
because I stayed so long at that queer place—where the doctors were—it
will be easier to start in with a new world than it would be, maybe, to
get used to the changes in the old one. I’m mighty anxious to see these
new young people who——”

His sister interrupted him. “You’ll see some of them soon enough, it
appears. I really think Jeannette shouldn’t have done this.” And she
handed him the telegram to read.

    =Thought I better let you know in case you prefer taking
    Uncle Charles to hotel for first night at home as am throwing
    toddle about forty couples at house sausage breakfast at four am
    to finish the show and blackamaloo band might disturb Uncle
    Charles=.

Uncle Charles was somewhat disturbed, in fact, by the telegram itself.
“‘Am throwing toddle’——” he murmured.

“She means she’s giving a dance,” his sister explained, frowning. “It’s
really not very considerate of her, our first evening at home; but
Jeannette is just made of impulses. She’s given I don’t know how many
dances since I went away with you, and she might have let this one drop.
I’m afraid it may be very upsetting for you, Charles.”

“You could send her a telegram from the next station,” he suggested.
“You could ask her to telephone her friends and postpone the——”

“Not Jeannette!” Mrs. Troup laughed. “I could wire, but she wouldn’t pay
any attention. _I_ have no influence with her.”

“You haven’t?”

“No.” And upon this Mrs. Troup became graver. “I don’t think her father
would have had any either, if he had lived; he was so easy-going and
used to sing so loudly after dinner. Jeannette always seemed to think he
was just a joke, even when she was a child. The truth is, she’s like a
great many of her friends: they seem to lack the quality of respect.
When we were young, Charles, we had that, at least; our parents taught
us to have that quality.”

“But haven’t you taught Jeannette to have it?”

“Indeed I have,” Mrs. Troup sighed. “I’ve told her every day for years
that she hadn’t any. I noticed it first when she was thirteen years old.
It seemed to break out on her, as it were, that year.”

“How did it happen?”

“Why, we were staying at a summer hotel, a rather gay place, and I’m
afraid I left her too much to her governess—I was feeling pretty blue
that summer and I wanted distraction. I liked tangoing——”

“‘Tangoing’?” he said inquiringly. “Was it a game?”

“No; a dance. They called it ‘the tango’; I don’t know why. And there
was ‘turkey-trotting,’ too——”

“‘Turkey-trotting’?” he said huskily.

“Well, that,” she explained, “was really the _machiche_ that tourists
used to see in Paris at the _Bal Bullier_. In fact, you saw it yourself,
Charles. A couple danced the _machiche_ that night at the Folies
Ber——” She checked herself hastily, bit her lip, and then, recovering,
she said: “I got quite fond of all those dances after we imported them.”

“You mean you got used to looking at them?” he asked slowly. “You went
to see them at places where they were allowed?”

At this she laughed. “No, of course not! I danced them myself.”

“_What!_”

“Why, of course!”

“No one——” He faltered. “No one ever _saw_ you do it?”

“Why, of course. It’s a little difficult to explain this to you,
Charles, but all those dances that used to seem so shocking to us when
we went to look on at them in foreign places—well, it turned out that
they were _perfectly_ all right and proper when you dance them yourself.
Of course I danced them, and enjoyed them very much; and besides, it’s a
wholesome exercise and good for the health. _Everybody_ danced them.
People who’d given up dancing for years—the oldest _kind_ of
people—danced them. It began the greatest revival of dancing the
world’s ever seen, Charles, and the——”

He interrupted her. “Go a little slower, please,” he said, and applied a
handkerchief to his forehead. “About your seeming to lose your authority
with Jeannette——”

“Yes; I was trying to tell you. She used to sit up watching us dancing
in the hotel ballroom that summer, and I just _couldn’t_ make her go to
bed! That was the first time she deliberately disobeyed me, but it was a
radical change in her; and I’ve never since then seemed to have any
weight with her—none at all; she’s just done exactly what she pleased.
I’ve often thought perhaps that governess had a bad influence on her.”

He wiped his forehead again, and inquired: “You say she’s given dances
while you’ve been away with me?”

“Oh, she asks plenty of married people, of course.”

“And it wouldn’t be any use to telegraph her to postpone this one?”

“No. She’d just go ahead, and when we got home, she’d be rather annoyed
with me for thinking a dance _could_ be postponed at the last minute. We
must make the best of it.”

“I suppose so.”

“We won’t reach the house till almost nine, and you can go straight to
bed, Charles. I’m afraid the music may disturb you; that’s all. Dance
music is rather loudish, nowadays.”

“I was thinking,” he said slowly, “—I was thinking maybe I’d dress and
look on for a while; I do want to see these new young people. It might
be a good thing for me to begin to get accustomed——”

“So it might,” she agreed, brightening. “I was only bothered on your
account, and if you take it that way, it will be all right.” She
laughed. “The truth is, I enjoy Jeannette’s dances myself. I like to
enter into things with her and be more like a sisterly companion than a
mother in the old-fashioned strict sense. That’s the modern spirit,
Charles; to be a hail-fellow of your children—more a wise comrade than
a parent. So, if you feel that you would be interested in looking on,
and won’t be disturbed—well, that’s just too lovely! And you’ll adore
Jeannette!”

He was sure of that, he said; and added that as he was Jeannette’s uncle
he supposed it would be proper to kiss her when she met them at the
station.

“Oh, she won’t be at the station,” said his sister. “In fact, I’ll be
surprised if she remembers to send the car for us.”

But as it happened, Mrs. Troup was surprised: Jeannette sent the car,
and they were comfortably taken homeward through a city that presented
nothing familiar to Charles Blake, though he had spent his youth in it.
The first thing he found recognizable was the exterior of his sister’s
big house, for she had lived in it ever since her marriage; but indoors
she had remodelled it, and he was as lost as he had been under the great
flares of light down-town. Mrs. Troup led him up to his room and left
him there. “Jeannette’s dressing, they tell me,” she said. “Hurry and
dress, yourself, so as to see her a minute before she gets too busy
dancing. It’s late.”

In spite of her instruction, he was too nervous to dress quickly, and
several times decided to get into bed instead of proceeding with his
toilet; but an ardent curiosity prevailed over his timidity, and he
continued to prepare himself for a state appearance, until a strange
event upset him.

There were a few thin squeaks and low blats of warning—small noises
incomprehensible to him, and seemingly distant—when suddenly burst
forth the most outrageous uproar he had ever heard, and he thought it
just outside his door. When it happened, he was standing with his right
foot elevated to penetrate the orifice of that leg of his trousers, but
the shock of sound overturned him; his foot became entangled, and he
fell upon the floor.

Lying there, helpless, he heard a voice sweet as silver bells, even when
it screamed, as it had to scream now to make itself heard. “No, _no_! I
don’t want ‘The Maiden’s Dream’! _Stop it; dam it!_” And the outrage
became silence, murmurously broken by only the silvery voice which was
itself now indistinguishable, except as ineffable sound; he could not
make out the words.

Fingers tapped on his door. “Do hurry, Charles dear,” Mrs. Troup said.
“Jeannette’s arguing with the musicians, but she might have a moment or
two to see you now. People are just beginning to come.”

“With whom?” he asked hoarsely, not attempting to move.

“‘With whom’ what? I don’t understand,” his sister inquired, shouting
through the closed door.

“You said she’s arguing. With whom?”

“With the musicians.”

“With whom?”

“The musicians. They began to play ‘The Maiden’s Dream,’ but she doesn’t
like it: she wants something livelier.”

“Livelier?”

“I must run,” Mrs. Troup shouted. “Do hurry, Charles.”

In spite of this departing urgency, Charles remained inert for some
time, his cheek upon a rug, his upper eye contemplating the baseboard of
the wall, and his right foot shackled in his trousers. Meanwhile, voices
began to rise without in an increasing strident babble, until finally
they roused him. He rose, completed his toilet and stepped outside his
door.

He found himself upon a gallery which looked down upon a broad hall
floored in wood now darkly lustrous with wax. He had a confused
impression of strewn and drifting great tropical flowers in haphazard
clusters and flaring again, in their unfamiliar colours, from the
reflecting darkness of the polished floor; such dresses as he had never
seen; and flesh-tints, too, of ivory and rose so emphasized and in such
profusion as likewise he had never seen. And from these clusters and
from the short-coated men among them, the shouting voices rose to him in
such uproarious garbling chorus that though he had heard choruses not
very different, long ago, it increased his timidity; and a little
longing floated into his emotion—a homesickness for the old asylum,
where everything had been so orderly and reasonable.

Suddenly he jumped: his hands were clutched upon the railing of the
gallery, and they remained there; but his feet leaped inches into the
air with the shock; for the crash that so startled him came from
directly beneath the part of the gallery where he stood. In his
nervousness, he seemed about to vault over the railing, but as his feet
descended, he recognized the sound: it was of a nature similar to that
which had overcome him in his room, and was produced by those whom his
sister had defined as “the musicians:” they had just launched the dance
music. The clusters of tropical flowers were agitated, broke up. The
short black coats seized upon them, and they seized upon the short black
coats; something indescribable began.

The dance music did not throb—the nervous gentleman in the gallery
remembered dance music that throbbed, dance music that tinkled merrily,
dance music that swam, dance music that sang, and sometimes sang sadly
and perhaps too sweetly of romantic love—but this was incredible: it
beat upon his brain with bludgeons and blackjacks, rose in hideous
upheavals of sound, fell into chaos, squawked in convulsions, seemed
about to die, so that eighty pairs of shoes and slippers were heard in
husky whispers against the waxed floor; then this music leaped to life
again more ferociously than ever.

The thumping and howling of it brought to the gallery listener a dim
recollection: once, in his boyhood, he had been taken through a
slaughter-house; and this was what came back to him now. Pigs have
imaginations, and as they are forced, crowding against one another,
through the chute, their feet pounding the thunderous floor, the
terrible steams they smell warn them of the murderers’ wet knives ahead:
the pigs scream horror with their utmost lungs; and the dumfounded
gentleman recalled these mortal squealings now, though there was more to
this music. There should be added, among other noises, all the agony
three poisoned cats can feel in their entrails, the belabourings of
hollow-log tomtoms by Aruwimi witch-doctors, and incessant cries of
passion from the depths of negroes ecstasized with toddy.

A plump hand touched Mr. Blake’s shoulder, and lifting his pale glance
from below he found that his sister had ascended the gallery stairs to
speak to him.

“What are they doing down there?” he shouted.

“Toddling.”

“You mean _dancing_?”

“Yes; toddling. It’s dancing—great fun, too!”

He was still incredulous, and turned to look again. To his perturbed
mind everybody seemed bent upon the imitation of an old coloured woman
he had once seen swaying on the banks of a creek, at a baptism. She
jiggled the upper portions of her, he remembered, as if she were at once
afflicted and uplifted by her emotions; and at the same time she
shuffled slowly about, her very wide-apart feet keeping well to the
ground. All of these couples appeared to have studied some such ancient
religious and coloured person anxiously; but this was not all that
interested the returned Mr. Blake. Partners in the performance below him
clung to each other with a devotion he had never seen except once or
twice, and then under chance circumstances which had cost him a hurried
apology. Some, indeed, had set their cheeks together for better harmony;
moreover, the performers, who in this exhibition of comedy abandoned
forever all hope of ever being taken seriously by any spectator, were by
no means all of the youthfulness with which any such recklessness of
dignity had heretofore been associated in Mr. Blake’s mind: heads white
as clouds moved here and there among the toddlers; so did dyed heads,
and so did portly figures.

“I came up to point Jeannette out to you,” Mrs. Troup explained,
shouting in her brother’s ear. “I wanted you to see her dancing: she
looks so beautiful. There she is! See! _Doesn’t_ she look pretty?”

His eyes aimed along her extended forefinger and found Jeannette.

Jeannette did “look pretty” indeed, even when she toddled—there could
be no test more cruel. She was a glowing, dark-eyed, dark-haired,
exquisite young thing shimmering with innocent happiness. One of her
childish shoulders bore a jewelled string; the other nothing. Most of
her back and a part of each of her sides were untrammelled; and her
skirt came several inches below the knee, unless she sat. Nothing her
uncle had ever seen had been so pretty as Jeannette.

To her four grandparents, Jeannette would have been merely unbelievable.
Her eight great-grandparents, pioneers and imaginative, might have
believed her and her clothes possible, but they would have believed with
horror. In fact, to find ancestors who would not be shocked at
Jeannette, one would have to go back to the Restoration of Charles
Stuart. At that time she had five hundred and twelve
great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents, and probably some of
them were familiar with the court. They would have misunderstood
Jeannette, and they would not have been shocked.

“I just wanted you to see her,” Mrs. Troup shouted. “I must run back to
my partner and finish this. Come down when this number is over and meet
some people.”

He did not attempt to reply, but stared at her blankly. As she turned
away, more of her was seen than when she stood beside him; and a
sculptor would have been interested. “Don’t forget to come down,” she
called back, as she descended the stairway.

But he did not appear at the end of the dance; nor could she find him in
the gallery or in his room; so, a little anxious, she sent a maid to
look for him; and presently the maid came back and said that she had
found him standing alone in the dining-room, but that when she told him
Mrs. Troup was looking for him, he said nothing; he had walked away in
the direction of the kitchen.

“How strange!” Mrs. Troup murmured; but as her troubled eyes happened to
glance downward, both of her hands rose in a gesture of alarm. “Jennie,
where’s your _apron_?” she cried.

“It’s on me, ma’am,” said Jennie; then she discovered that it wasn’t.
“Why, how in the world——”

But Mrs. Troup was already fluttering to the kitchen. She found trouble
there between the caterer’s people and her own: the caterer’s _chef_ was
accusing Mrs. Troup’s cook of having stolen a valuable apron.

Uncle Charles was discovered in the coal cellar. He had upon him both of
the missing aprons, several others, a fur overcoat belonging to one of
the guests, and most of the coal.

                           THE SPRING CONCERT

THE town was only about eighty years old, but it loved to think of
itself as a “good old place,” and it habitually spoke of the residence
of its principal citizen as “that old-fashioned Ricketts property.”

This was an under-statement: the Ricketts place was more than merely
old-fashioned. So rapidly do fashions change in houses, nowadays, in
small towns as well as in big, and so quickly does life become history,
that the “Ricketts property” at fifty years of age was an actual
archæological relic. Contemplating the place you contemplated a
prevalent way of life already abandoned, and learned a bit of Midland
history. The Ricketts place was a left-over from that period when every
Midland townsman was his own farmer, according to his means; and if he
was able, kept his cow and chickens, and raised corn and pigs at home.

The barn was a farm barn, with a barnyard about it; here were the empty
pig-pens and the chicken house, the latter still inhabited. In summer,
sweet corn was still grown in the acre lot adjoining the barnyard; and,
between that lot and the driveway from the barn, there was a kitchen
garden, there was an asparagus bed, and there was a strawberry patch
fringed with currant-bushes. Behind the house were out-buildings: the
storeroom, the washhouse, the smoke-house. Here was the long
grape-arbour, and here stood the two pumps: one of iron, for the
cistern; the other a wooden flute that sang higher and higher to an
incredible pitch before it fetched the water.

The house was a large, pensive-looking, honest old brick thing, with a
“front porch” all across it; and the most casual passer-by must have
guessed that there was a great deal of clean oilcloth on the hall
floors, and that cool mattings were laid, in summer, in all the
rooms—mattings pleasant to the bare feet of children. It was a house
that “smelled good”: aromas at once sweet and spicy were wont to swim
down the mild breezes of Pawpaw Street, whereon the Ricketts place
fronted.

In the latter part of April the perfume of apple-blossoms was adrift on
those breezes, too; for all the west side of the big yard was an apple
orchard, and trees stood so close to the house that a branch of blossoms
could be gathered from one of the “sitting-room” windows—and on a warm
end-of-April day, when that orchard was full abloom, there sat reading a
book, beneath the carnival clouds of blossom, an apple-blossom of a
girl.

So she was informed by Mr. Lucius Brutus Allen. Mr. Allen came walking
up Pawpaw Street from Main Street, about five o’clock in the afternoon;
a broad, responsible figure with a broad, irresponsible face, and a
good, solid, reddish-haired head behind the face. He was warm, it
appeared; inclined to refresh his legs with a pause of leisure, his nose
with the smell of the orchard, his eyes with the sight of its occupant.
He halted, rested his stout forearms upon the top of the picket fence,
and in his own way made the lady acquainted with his idea of her
appearance.

“A generous soil makes a generous people, Miss Mary,” he observed; and
she looked up gravely from her book at the sound of his tremulous tenor
voice. “You see, most of this country in the Ohio and Mississippi
valleys is fertile. We don’t have to scratch the rocks for our crops, so
we have time to pronounce our _r_’s. We’ve even got the leisure to drawl
a little. A Yankee, now, he’s too pinched for time, between his hard
rocks and his hard winters, to pronounce his _r_’s; so he calls his
mother ‘motha’, and hurries on. But he’s conscientious, Miss Mary; he
knows he’s neglected something, and so, to make up for it, he calls his
sister ‘Mariar.’ Down South it’s too hot for a fellow to trouble about
the whole blame alphabet, so he says, ‘Lessee, which lettuhs goin’ to be
the easies’ to leave out?’ he says. ‘Well, the _r_’s, I reckon,’ he
says. ‘An’ _g_,’ he says. ‘I’ll leave _r_ out most the time, an’ _g_
whenevuh I get the chance—an’ sometimes _d_ an’ _t_. That’ll be a heap
easiuh,’ he says, ‘when I’m claimin’ my little boy is the smahtis’ chile
in the worl’.”

Mr. Allen paused genially, then concluded: “You see, Miss Mary, I’ve
just been leading up logically to the question: Which is you and which
is the rest of the apple-blossoms?”

Miss Ricketts made no vocal reply, but there was a slight concentration
of the fine space between her eyebrows; decidedly no symptom of
pleasure, though she might properly have enjoyed the loiterer’s little
extravagance, which was far from being inaccurate as extravagances go.
Mr. Allen was forced to remind himself that “nobody loves a fat man,”
though he decided not to set his thoughts before the lady.

A smile of some ruefulness became just visible upon the ample surface of
his face, then withdrew to the interior, and was transmuted into a
quality of his odd and pleasant voice, which was distinctly rueful, as
he said:

“It’s the weather, Miss Mary. You mustn’t mind what anybody says along
during the first warm days in spring. People are liable to say anything
at all.”

“Yes,” Miss Ricketts returned, not mollified. “I’ve just noticed.” She
gave him one dark glance, wholly unfavourable, as she spoke, and then
looked down at her book again, allowing him no possible doubt that she
wished to proceed with her reading.

“I’m a hard man to discourage,” said Mr. Allen. “The band’s going to
play in the Square to-night. It’s been practising ‘Annie Laurie’ and
‘Tenting To-night’ all winter, up in the storeroom over Tom Leggett’s
wall-paper and book emporium, and of course the boys are anxious to give
their first concert. What I wanted to say was this: If I came by for you
after supper, would you care to go?”

“No,” said Miss Ricketts quietly, not looking up.

Before continuing and concluding the conversation, Lucius Brutus Allen
paused to contemplate the top of her pink-and-white hat, which was
significantly presented to his view as she bent over her book; and the
pause was a wistful one on his part. “Seeing as that’s the case,” he
said, finally, “I may be a hard man to discourage, and I _was_ on my way
home, but I believe I’ll just turn right square around and go on back to
the National House bar—and get me a drink of lemonade. I want to show
people I’m as desperate as anybody, when I’m crossed.”

Immediately, with an air of resolution, Mr. Allen set off upon the path
by which he had come. He debouched upon Main Street, at the foot of
Pawpaw, crossed the Square to the dismal brick pile much too plainly
labelled, “National House, Will Wheen Propr,” and passed between two
swinging green doors on the ground floor. “George,” he said to the
bartender, “I’m not happy. Have you any lemons?”

The bartender rubbed the back of his neck, stooped, and poked and peered
variously beneath the long bar. “Seems like I _did_ have some, Lu,” he
said thoughtfully. “I remember seein’ them lemons last Mon——”

“No,” Mr. Allen interrupted, sighing. “I’ve been through this before
with you, George. I’ll take buttermilk.”

“Oh, got plenty _buttermilk_!” the bartender said, brightening; and
supplied his customer from a large, bedewed white pitcher. “Buttermilk
goes good this weather, don’t it, Lu?”

“It do,” said Lucius gravely.

Glass in hand, he went to a small round table where sat the only other
present patron of the bar—a young man well-favoured, but obviously in a
state morbid if not moribund. He did not look up at Mr. Allen’s
approach; continuing to sit motionless with his far-away gaze marooned
upon a stratum of amber light in his glass on the table before him.

He was a picturesque young man, and, with his rumpled black hair, so
thick and wavy about his brooding white face, the picture he most
resembled was that of a provincial young lawyer stricken with the
stage-disease and bound to play _Hamlet_. This was no more than a
resemblance, however; his intentions were different, as he roused
himself to make clear presently, though without altering his attitude,
or even the direction of his glance.

“What do you mean?” he inquired huskily, a moment after Mr. Allen had
seated himself at the table. “What do you mean, slamming a glass of
buttermilk down on my table, Lucius Brutus Allen?”

Mr. Allen put on a pair of eye-glasses, and thoughtfully examined the
morose gentleman’s countenance before replying, “I would consume this
flagon of buttermilk in congenial melancholy, Joseph Pitney Perley.”

Mr. Perley, still motionless, demanded: “Can’t you see what I’m doing?”

“What are you doing, Joe?”

“Drinking!”

“Professionally?” Mr. Allen inquired. “Or only for the afternoon?”

“I don’t want to be talked to!”

“I do,” said Lucius. “Talk to me.”

Here the bartender permitted himself the intervention of a giggle, and
wiped his dry bar industriously—his favourite gesture. “You ain’t goin’
to git much talk out o’ _Joe_, Lu!” he said. “All he’s said sence he
come in here was jest, ‘Gimme same, George.’ _I_ tell him he ain’t goin’
to be in no condition to ’tend the band concert ’s evening if he keeps
on another couple hours or so. Me, I don’t mind seein’ a man drink some,
but I like to see him git a little fun out of it!”

“Have you considered the band concert, Joe?” Mr. Allen inquired. “Do you
realize what strange euphonies you’ll miss unless you keep sober until
seven-thirty?”

The sombre Perley relaxed his gaze, and uttered a fierce monosyllable of
denunciation. “Sober!” he added, afterward. “I’m sober. That’s my
trouble. I’ve been trying to get tight for three hours!”

“I’ll say this fer you,” the bartender volunteered—“you been tryin’
_good_, too!”

“Ever experiment any?” Lucius suggested. “Why don’t you go over to Doc
Willis’s Painless Dental Parlours? He’s got a tank of gas there, and all
you do is put a rubber thing over your nose and breathe. Without any
trouble at all you’ll be completely out of business in forty-five
seconds.”

“Yeh,” said the bartender. “But it don’t last more’n about four
minutes.”

“No; that’s true,” Lucius admitted. “But maybe Joe could hire Doc to tap
him behind the ear with one of those little lead mallets when he sees
him coming out of the gas. Joe’d feel just about the same to-morrow as
he will if he stays here running up a bill with you. Fact is, I believe
he’d feel better.”

“I tell you,” said Mr. Perley, with emphasis, “I’m drinking!” And for
further emphasis he rattled his glass. “Give me the same, George,” he
said.

George held a bottle to the light. He meditated, rubbing the back of his
head; then spoke: “Tell you what I’ll do. The wife’s waitin’ supper fer
me now; I want to git back up-town early fer the trade before the
concert, because I look fer quite a rush——”

“Yes,” interrupted Mr. Allen musingly. “Our community is going to see a
night of wine and music, George.”

“I’ll jest open a fresh bottle fer you, Joe,” the bartender continued;
“and when I git back I’ll charge you with how many drinks you take out
of it. I’m goin’ on home to supper. You want any more buttermilk, Lu?”

“Bring the pitcher,” said Mr. Allen. “I will sup upon it.”

“All right.” And George brought to the table the pitcher of buttermilk,
a dim saucer of crackers and cheese, a brown bottle, ice-water, and
fresh glasses. After that he doffed his apron, put on his hat, but no
coat, and went to the door, where he turned to say: “If anybody else
comes in here before I git back——”

“And calls for liquor,” Mr. Allen took up the sentence, as George paused
in thought, “we shall be glad to——”

“Tell ’em,” said George, “they don’t git it!” He departed.

Mr. Allen helped himself to buttermilk, ate a cracker, leaned back in
his chair, and began to hum “Annie Laurie.”

“Stop that!” said Perley sharply.

“Certainly,” said Lucius. “I’ll whistle instead.”

“If you do,” the troubled young man warned him, apparently in good
faith, “I’ll kill you!”

“What can I do to entertain you, Joe?”

“You might clear out,” his friend suggested darkly. “God knows I haven’t
asked for your society!”

“No,” said Lucius. “Our fairest gifts do oft arrive without petition.
What an unusual thought! Have you noticed——”

But the other burst out suddenly in a tragic fury: “Shut up! What’s the
matter with you? Can’t you see I want to be alone?”

Mr. Allen remained placid. “What difference do I make?” he asked. “I
thought you said you were ‘drinking’? If you’re really in earnest about
it you don’t care who’s here or anywhere else.”

“Don’t you see I’m in _misery_?” cried Perley.

“The ayes have it.”

“Well, then, why in Heaven’s name can’t you——”

“I’ll tell you,” said Lucius. “I’m in misery, too. Terrible!”

“Well, what the devil do _I_ care for that?”

“Haven’t I got a right to sit here?” Lucius inquired mildly. “Haven’t I
got a right to sit here and drink, and cuss inside my innards, and take
on the way you’re doing? Mary Ricketts just told me that she wouldn’t go
to the band concert with me.”

“Oh, do dry up!”

“Well, you’re responsible for Mary’s treatment of me, aren’t you?” said
Lucius. “I thought probably there’d be trouble when I saw you headed
this way this afternoon.”

“You do beat any ordinary lunatic!” the distressed young man protested.
“I ‘headed this way’ this afternoon because I got one of my spells. You
know well enough how it is with me, and how it was with my father before
me—every so often the spell come on me, and I’ve _got_ to drink. What
in the Lord’s name has that to do with Mary Ricketts? I don’t suppose
I’ve even seen her for a month. Never did see anything of her, to speak
of, in my life.”

Mr. Allen replenished his glass from the pitcher of buttermilk before
replying, and appeared to muse sorrowfully. “Well, maybe I was
mistaken,” he said. “But I——” He broke off a line of thought; then
sighed and inquired: “When this ‘spell’ comes on you, Joe, you feel that
you’ve ‘_got_’ to go on until——”

“You know I do! I don’t want to talk about it.”

“But suppose,” said Lucius, “suppose something took your mind off of
it.”

“Nothing could. Nothing on earth!”

“But just suppose something did turn up—right in the start of a spell,
say—something you found you’d rather do. You know, Joe, I believe if it
did and you found something else was _really_ pleasanter, it might be
you’d never start in again. You’d understand it wasn’t the fun you think
it is, maybe.”

“Fun!” Joe cried. “I don’t _want_ to drink!”

And at that his stocky companion burst into outright laughter. “I know
you think so, Joe,” he said apologetically, when his hilarity was
sufficiently diminished. “Of course you believe it. I’m not denying
that.”

“By George!” the unfortunate young man explained. “You _do_ make me
sick! I suppose if I had smallpox you’d say you weren’t denying I
believed I had it! You sit there and drink your buttermilk, and laugh at
me like a ninny because you can’t understand! No man on earth can
understand, unless he has the thirst come on him the way mine does on
me! And yet you tell me I only ‘believe’ I have it!”

“Yes, I ought to explain,” said Mr. Allen soothingly. “It did sound
unfeeling. One of the reasons you drink, Joe, is because this is a small
town;—you have an active mind, a lot of the time there’s nothing much
to do, and you get bored.”

“I told you nobody could understand such a thirst as mine—nobody except
the man that’s got one like it!”

“This hankering is something inside you, isn’t it, Joe?”

“What of that?”

“It comes on you about every so often?”

“Yes.”

“If there weren’t any liquor in the world, you’d have the thirst for it
just the same, would you?”

“Just the same,” Perley answered. “And go crazy from it.”

“Whereas,” Mr. Allen returned, “since liquor’s obtainable you prefer to
go crazy from the imbibing of it instead of from the hanker for it. You
find that more ossedalious, and nobody can blame you. But suppose
alcohol had never been discovered, would you have the hanker?”

“No, because I wouldn’t have inherited it from my father. You know as
well as I do, how it runs in my family.”

“So I do, Joe; so I do!” Mr. Allen sighed reminiscently. “Both your
father and your Uncle Sam went that way. I remember them very well, and
how they enjoyed it. That’s different from you, Joe.”

“Different!” Joe laughed bitterly. “Do you suppose I get any ‘enjoyment’
out of it? Three days I’ll drink now; then I’ll be in hell—and I’ve got
to go on. I’ve _got_ to!”

“Funny about its being hereditary,” said Lucius, musing aloud. “I expect
you rather looked forward to that, Joe?”

His companion stared at him fiercely. “What do you mean by that?” he
demanded.

“You always thought it was _going_ to be hereditary, didn’t you, Joe?
From almost when you were a boy?”

“Yes, I did. What of it?”

“And maybe—” Lucius suggested, with the utmost mildness—“just
possibly, say about the time you began to use liquor a little at first,
you decided that this hereditary thing was inevitable, and the idea made
you melancholy about yourself, of course; but after all, you felt that
the hereditary thing made a pretty fair excuse to yourself, didn’t you?”

“See here,” Joe said angrily, “I’m not in any mood to stand——”

“Pshaw!” Lucius interrupted. “I was only going on to say that it’s more
and more curious to me about this hereditary notion. I’m thirty-five,
and you’re only twenty-six. I remember well when your father began to
drink especially. I was seventeen years old, and you were about eight.
You see you were already born then, and so I can’t understand about the
thirst being heredi——”

“Damn it all!” Joe Perley shouted; and he struck the table with his
fist. “I told you I don’t want to talk, didn’t I? Didn’t you hear me say
I was _drinking_!”

The amiable man across the table produced two cigars from his coat
pocket. “We’ll change the subject,” he said. “Smoke, Joe?”

“No, thank you.”

“We’ll change the subject,” Lucius repeated. “I gather that this one is
painful to you. You don’t mind my staying here if we talk about
something else?”

“No—not much.”

“I mentioned that I asked Mary Ricketts to go with me to the band
concert to-night, didn’t I?” Mr. Allen inquired, as he lit his cigar. “I
was telling you about that, wasn’t I, Joe?”

“You said something about it,” Mr. Perley replied with evident ennui.

“You know, Joe,” said Lucius, his tone becoming confidential, “I walk
past the old Ricketts property every afternoon on my way home. It’s
quite considerable out of my way, but I always do. Fact is,” he chuckled
ruefully, “I can’t help it.”

“I suppose you want me to ask you why,” said his gloomy companion, with
sincere indifference.

“Yes, Joe, will you?”

“All right. Why can’t you help it?”

“Well, there’s something about that old place so kind of pleasant and
healthy and reliable. This is a funny world: there’s a lot of things a
fellow’s got to be afraid of in it, and the older he gets the more he
sees to scare him. I think what I like best about that old Ricketts
property is the kind of _safe_ look it has. It looks as if anybody that
belonged in there was safe from ’most any kind of disaster—bankruptcy,
lunacy, ‘social ambition,’ money ambition, evil thoughts, or turning
into a darn fool of any kind. You don’t happen to walk by there much, do
you, Joe?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Well, sir, you ought to!” said Lucius genially. “The orchard’s in
bloom, and you ought to see it. The Ricketts orchard is the show of this
county. The good old judge has surely looked after those old apple-trees
of his; they’re every one just solid blossom. Yes, sir, every last one!
Why, it made me feel like a dryad!”

“Like a who?”

“You mean that I’m thirty-five”—so Mr. Allen thought fit to interpret
this question—“and that I’m getting a little fat, some baldish and a
whole lot reddish. So I am; but I’ll tell you something, young Joseph:
romance is a thing inside a person, just the same as your thirst. It
doesn’t matter what his outside is like. My trousers always bag at the
knees, even when they’re new, but my knees themselves are pure Grecian.
It’s the skinny seamstress of forty that dreams the most of marquises in
silver armour; and darky boys in school forget the lesson in reveries
about themselves—they think of themselves on horseback as generals with
white faces and straight blond hair. And everybody knows that the best
poets are almost always outrageously ordinary to look at. This is
springtime, Joseph; and the wren lays an egg no bigger than a fairy’s.
The little birds——”

“By George!” Mr. Perley exclaimed, in real astonishment. “See here!” he
said. “Had you been drinking, yourself, before you came in? If not, it’s
the first time I knew a person could get a talking jag on buttermilk.”

“No,” said Lucius, correcting him. “It’s on apple-blossoms. She was
sitting under ’em pretending to read a book, but I suppose she was
thinking about you, Joe.”

“Who was?”

“Mary,” Mr. Allen replied quietly. “Mary Ricketts.”

“You say she was thinking about _me_?”

“Probably she was, Joe. She was sitting there, and the little birds——”

“I know you’re a good lawyer,” Joe interrupted, shaking his head in
gloomy wonder, “but everybody in town thinks you’re a nut, except when
you’re on a law case, and I guess they’re about right. You certainly
talk like one!”

Mr. Allen nodded. “A reputation like that is mighty helpful sometimes.”

“Well, if you like it you’re free to refer all inquirers to me,” said
Joe heartily. “You’re trying to tell me Mary Ricketts was ‘thinking’
about me, and I don’t suppose I’ve seen her as much as five times this
year; and I haven’t known her—not to speak of—since we were children.
I don’t suppose I’ve had twenty minutes’ talk with her, all told, since
I got back from college. The only girl I ever see anything of at all is
Molly Baker, and that’s only because she happens to live next door. I
don’t see even Molly to speak to more than once or twice a month. I
don’t have anything to do with _any_ of the girls. I keep _away_ from
’em, because a man with the curse I’ve got hanging over me——”

“Thought you didn’t want to talk about that, Joe.”

“I don’t,” the young man said angrily. “But I want to know what you mean
by this nonsense about Mary Ricketts and me.”

“I don’t know if I ought to tell you—exactly.” Here Lucius frowned as
with a pressure of conscience. “I’m not sure I ought to. Do you insist
on it, Joe?”

“Not if you’ve got to talk any more about ‘the little birds!’” Joe
returned with sour promptness. “But if you can leave them out and talk
in a regular way, I’d like to hear you.”

“Have you ever noticed,” Mr. Allen began, “that Mary Ricketts is a
beautiful girl?”

“She’s not,” said Joe. “She’s not anything like ‘beautiful.’ Everybody
in town knows and always has known that Mary Ricketts is an ordinarily
good-looking girl. You can call her pretty if you want to stretch it a
little, but that’s all.”

“That all, you think?”

“Certainly!”

“You ought to see her in the orchard, Joe!”

“Well, I’m not very likely to.”

“Well, just why not, now?”

“Well, why should I?”

“You mean you’ve never given much thought to her?”

“Certainly I haven’t,” said Joe. “Why should I?”

“Isn’t it strange now!” Mr. Allen shook his head wistfully. “I mentioned
that I asked her to go to the band concert with me, didn’t I, Joe?”

“You did.”

“And did I tell you that she refused?”

“Lord, yes!”

“Well, that was it,” said Mr. Allen gently. “She just said, ‘No!’ She
didn’t say ‘No, thank you.’ No, sir, nothing like that; just plain ‘No!’
‘Well,’ I thought to myself, ‘now why is that? Naturally, she’d _want_
to go to the concert, wouldn’t she? Why, of course she would; it’s the
first public event that’s happened since the lecture on “Liquid Air” at
Masonic Hall, along back in February. Certainly she’d want to go. Well,
then, what’s the matter? It must be simply she doesn’t want to go with
_you_, Lucius Brutus Allen!’ That’s what I said to myself, Joe. ‘You’re
practically a fat old man from _her_ point of view,’ I said to myself.
‘She wants to go, but you aren’t the fellow she wants to go _with_.
Well, who is it? Evidently,’ I reasoned, ‘evidently he hasn’t turned up,
because she’s just the least bit snappish the way she tells me she isn’t
pining for _my_ escort.’ Well, sir, I began to cast around in my mind to
think who on earth it could be. ‘It isn’t Henry Wheen,’ I thought,
‘because she discouraged Henry so hard, more than a year ago, that Henry
went and married that waitress here at his father’s hotel. And it isn’t
Bax Lewis,’ I thought, ‘because she showed Bax _he_ didn’t stand any
chance from the first. And it isn’t Charlie McGregor or Cal Veedis,’ I
thought, ‘because she just _wouldn’t_ have anything to do with either of
them, though they both tried to make her till the judge pretty near had
to tell ’em right out that they’d better stay away. Well, it isn’t Doc
Willis, and it isn’t Carlos Bollingbroke Thompson, nor Whit Connor,’ I
thought, ‘because they’re _old_ bachelors like me—and that just about
finishes the list.’ Well, sir, there’s where I had to scratch my head.
‘It must be somebody,’ I thought, ‘somebody that hasn’t been coming
around the Ricketts property at all, so far, because she’s never gone
any place she could help with those that _have_ been coming around
there.’ Then I thought of you, Joe. ‘By George!’ I thought. ‘By George,
it might be Joe Perley! He’s the only young man in town not married,
engaged, or feeble-minded, that hasn’t ever showed any interest in Miss
Mary. There’s no two ways about it: likely as not it’s liable to be Joe
Perley!’”

“I never heard anything crazier in my life!” Joe said. “I don’t suppose
Mary Ricketts has given me two thoughts in the last five years.”

Mr. Allen tilted back in his chair, his feet upon a rung of the table.
He placed his cigar at the left extremity of his mouth, gazed at the
ceiling, and waved his right hand in a take-it-or-leave-it gesture.

“Well, _why_ would she?” Joe demanded. “There’s nothing about _me_
that——”

“No,” said his friend. “Nothing except she doesn’t know you very well.”

At that Joe Perley laughed. “You are the funniest old Lucius!” he said.
“Just because I’ve never been around there and the rest have, you say
that proves——”

Mr. Allen waved his hand again. “I only say there’s _somebody_ could get
her to go to that concert with him. Absolutely! Why absolutely? It’s
springtime; she’s twenty-three. Of course, if it _is_ you, she isn’t
very liable to hear the music except along with her family—not when
you’ve got such pressing engagements _here_, of course! I’m thinking of
going up there again pretty soon myself, to see if maybe Judge and Mrs.
Ricketts aren’t going to walk up-town for the concert, and maybe I can
sort of push myself in among the family so that I can walk anyway in the
same _group_ with Mary! It’s going to be moonlight, and as balmy as a
night in a piece of poetry! By George! you can smell apple-blossoms from
one end of the town to the other, Joe!”

“How you hate talking!” Mr. Perley remarked discouragingly.

“I hear the band is going to try ‘Schubert’s Serenade,’” Lucius
continued. “The boys aren’t so bad as we make out, after all; the truth
is, they play almighty well. I expect you’ll be able to hear some of it
from in here, Joe; but take _me_ now—I want to be out in the moonlight
in that apple-blossom smell when they play ‘Schubert’s Serenade!’ I want
to be somewhere where I can see the moonshine shadow of Mary Ricketts’s
hat fall across her cheek, so I can spend my time guessing whether she’s
listening to the music with her eyes shut or open. It’s a pink-and-white
hat, and she’s wearing a pink-and-white dress, too, to-day, Joe. She was
sitting under those apple-blossoms, and the little bir——”

Sudden, loud and strong expressions suffered him not to continue for
several moments.

“Certainly, Joe,” Mr. Allen then resumed. “I will not mention them
again. I was only leading to the remark that nightingales serenading
through the almond-groves of Sicily probably have nothing particular on
our enterprising little city during a night in apple-blossom time. My
great trouble, Joe, is never getting _used_ to its being springtime.
Every year when it comes around again it hits me just the same
way—maybe a little more so each year that I grow older. And this has
been the first plumb genuine spring day we’ve had. At the present hour
this first true blue spring day is hushing itself down into the first
spring evening, and in a little while there’ll be another miracle: the
first scented and silvered spring night. All over town the old folks are
coming out from their suppers to sit on their front porches, and the
children are beginning to play hi-spy in and out among the trees. Pretty
soon they’ll all, old and young, be strolling up-town to hear the band
play on the courthouse steps. I expect some of the young couples already
_have_ started; they like to walk slowly and not say much, on the way to
the spring concert, you know.”

Mr. Allen drank another glass of buttermilk, smiled, then murmured with
repletion and the pathos of a concluding bit of enthusiasm. “Oh, Lordy,
Lordy!” he said, “What it is to be twenty or twenty-five in springtime!”

“Not for me,” Mr. Perley rejoined, shaking his head.

“No, I suppose not. It does seem pretty rough,” said Lucius,
sympathetically, “to think of you sitting here in this reeky hole, when
pretty nearly every other young fellow in town will be strolling through
the apple-blossom smell in the moonlight with a girl on his arm, and the
band playing, and all. Old soak Beeslum’ll probably be in here to join
you after while, though; and four or five farm hands, and some of the
regular Saturday-night town drunks, and maybe two or three Swedes. Oh, I
expect you’ll have _company_ enough, Joe!”

“I guess so. Anyhow, I haven’t much choice! This thing’s got me, and
I’ve got to go through with it, Lucius.”

“I see. Yes, sir, it’s too bad! Too bad!” And Lucius looked
sympathetically down, then cheerfully up again, as the swinging-doors
parted to admit the entrance of the returned bartender. “Hello, George!”

“Back a’ready,” said George self-approvingly. “Ham, fried potatoes,
coffee, and griddle-cakes, all tucked inside o’ me, too! Didn’t miss any
customers, did I?”

“No.”

George came to the table. “Lemme look how many drinks you owe me fer
sence I went out, Joe,” he said. “I had the place where she come to in
the neck of the bottle marked with my thumb.” He lifted the bottle,
regarded it thoughtfully at first, then with some surprise. He set it
down upon the table without comment, began to whistle “Little Annie
Rooney,” went behind the bar, doffed his hat, resumed his apron, and
continued to whistle.

Mr. Allen rose, dusting some crumbs of cracker from his attire. “I guess
I must have won the buttermilk record, George,” he said, as he placed a
silver dollar upon the bar. “If buttermilk were intoxicating there
wouldn’t be a sober creature on the face of the earth. Trouble with your
other stuff, George, it _tastes_ so rotten!”

“I take buttermilk sometimes myself, Lu,” said George as he made change.
“I guess there ain’t nobody seen me carryin’ much hard liquor sence my
second child was born. That was the time they had to jug me, and—whoo,
_gosh!_ you’d ought to seen what I went through when I got home that
night! She’s little and she was sick-abed, too, but that didn’t git in
_her_ way none! No, sir!”

“Good night,” said Lucius cheerily. “I’m going to stroll along Pawpaw
Street before the band starts. Moon’ll be ’way up in a little while now,
and on such a night as this is going to be did Jessica, the Jew’s
daughter—— _You_ know what I mean, George.”

“Yep,” said George blankly. “I gotcha, Lu.”

“I’m going,” said Lucius, “to go and push in with some folks to listen
to the band with. Good night, Joe.”

Joe Perley did not turn his head, but sat staring fixedly at the table,
his attitude being much the same as that in which Lucius had discovered
him.

“Good night, Joe,” the departing gentleman paused to repeat.

“What?”

“Nothing,” said Lucius. “I only said ‘good night.’”

“All right,” said Joe absently. “Good night.”

Mr. Allen took a musical departure. “Oh, as I strolled out one summer
evening,” he sang, “for to meet Miss Nellie Green, all the birds and the
flow’rs was singing sweetly, wherev-urr they was to be seen!”

Thus, singing heartily, he passed between the swinging-doors and out to
the street. Here he continued his euphonic mood, but moderated his
expression of it to an inconspicuous humming. Dusk had fallen, a dusk as
scented and as alive with spring as he had claimed it would be; and a
fair shaft of the rising moon already struck upon the white cupola of
the courthouse.

. . . Mary Ricketts was leaning upon the front gate of the Ricketts
place when he came there.

“Good evening, Miss Mary,” he said. “Are the Judge and your mother at
home?”

“They’re right there on the front porch, Mr. Allen,” she said cordially.
“Won’t you come in?”

“In a minute,” he responded. “It does me good to hear you answer when I
ask for your parents, Miss Mary.”

“How is that?”

“Why,” he said, “you always sound so friendly when I ask for _them_!”

She laughed, and explained her laughter by saying, “It’s funny you don’t
always ask for them!”

“Just so,” he agreed. “I’ve been thinking about that. Are you all going
up to the Square pretty soon, to hear the concert?”

“Father and mother are, I think,” she said. “I’m not.”

“Just ‘waiting at the gate’?”

“Not _for_ any one!”

Lucius took off his hat and fanned himself, a conciliatory gesture. “I
tell you I feel mighty sorry for one young man in this town to-night,”
he said.

“Who’s that, Mr. Allen?”

“Well——” he hesitated. “I don’t know if I ought to tell _you_ about
it.”

“Why not me?” she asked, not curiously.

“Well—it’s that young Joe Perley.”

Miss Ricketts was mildly amused; Lucius’s tone was serious, and if she
had any interest whatever in Mr. Perley it was of a quality most casual
and remote. “Why should you either tell me or not tell me anything about
him?” she asked.

“You know he’s such a good-looking young fellow,” said Lucius. “And he’s
going to make a fine lawyer, too; I’ve had him with me in a couple of
cases, and I’ve an idea he might have something like a real career,
if——” He paused.

“Yes?” she said idly. “If what? And why is it you feel so sorry for him,
and why did you hesitate to tell _me_? What’s it all about, Mr. Allen?”

“I suppose I’d better explain, now I’ve gone this far,” he said, a
little embarrassed. “I was talking with Joe to-day, and—well, the fact
is we got to talking about you.”

“You did?” Her tone betokened an indifference unmistakably genuine.
“Well?”

Lucius laughed with increased embarrassment. “Well—the fact is we
talked about you a long while.”

“Indeed?” she said coldly, but there was a slight interest now
perceptible under the coldness; for Miss Mary Ricketts was not unhuman.
“Was there a verdict?”

“It—it wasn’t so much what he said, exactly—no, not so much that,”
Lucius circumlocuted. “It was more the—the length of time we were
talking about you. That was the thing that struck _me_ about it, because
I didn’t know—that is, I’d never heard—I——”

“What _are_ you trying to say, Mr. Allen?”

“Well, I mean,” said Lucius, “I mean I hadn’t known that he came around
here at all.”

“He doesn’t.”

“That’s why I was so surprised.”

“Surprised at what?” she said impatiently.

“Why,” said Lucius, “surprised at the length of time that we were
talking about you!”

“What nonsense!” she cried. “_What_ nonsense! I don’t suppose he’s said
two words to me or I to him in two years!”

“Yes,” Lucius assented. “That’s what makes it all the more remarkable! I
supposed the only girl he ever thought _anything_ about was Molly Baker,
but he told me the only reason he ever goes there is just because she
lives next door to him.”

“Not very polite to Molly!” said Miss Ricketts, and she laughed with
some indulgence for this ungallantry.

“Still, Molly’s a determined girl,” Lucius suggested; “and she
might——”

“She might what?”

“Nothing,” said Lucius. “I was only remembering I’d always heard she was
such a—such a _grasping_ sort of girl.”

“Had you?”

“Yes, hadn’t you?”

She was thoughtful for a moment. “Oh, I don’t know.”

“So it seemed to me—well——” He laughed hesitatingly. “Well, it
certainly was curious, the length of time we were talking about you
to-day!” And he paused again as if awaiting her comment; but she offered
none. “Well,” he said, finally, “I expect I better go join the old folks
on the porch where I belong.”

He was heartily received and made welcome in that sedate retreat, where,
as he said, he belonged; but throughout the greetings and the subsequent
conversation he kept a corner of his eye upon the dim white figure in
the shadow of the maple trees down by the gate.

Presently another figure, a dark one, graceful and young, came slowly
along the sidewalk—slowly, and rather hesitatingly. This figure paused,
took a few steps onward again; then definitely halted near the gate.

“Who is that young man out there, talking to Mary?” asked Mary’s mother.
“Can you make out, father?”

“It’s that young Joe Perley.”

“I’ve heard he drinks a good deal sometimes,” said Mrs. Ricketts
thoughtfully. “His mother says he tries not to, but that it comes over
him, and that he’s afraid he’ll turn out like his father.”

Mr. Allen laughed cheerfully. “Anybody at Joe’s age can turn out any way
he wants to,” he said. “Mrs. Perley needn’t worry about Joe any more. I
just sat with him an hour down at the National House, and there was an
open whisky bottle on the table before us, and he never once touched it
all the time I was talking with him.”

“Well, I’m glad of that,” said Mrs. Ricketts. “That ought to show he has
plenty of will-power, anyhow.”

“Plenty,” said Lucius.

Then Mary’s young voice called from the spaces of night. “I’m going to
walk up-town to the concert with Mr. Perley, mother. You’d better wear
your shawl if _you_ come.”

And there was the click of the gate as she passed out.

“We might as well be going along then, I suppose,” said Mrs. Ricketts,
rising. “You’ll come with us old folks, Lucius?”

As the three old folks sauntered along the moon-speckled sidewalk the
two slim young figures in advance were faintly revealed to them,
likewise sauntering. And Lucius was right: you could smell
apple-blossoms from one end of the town to the other.

“I hope our boys will win the band tournament at the county fair next
summer,” said Mrs. Ricketts. “Don’t you think there’s a pretty good
chance of it, Lucius?”

For a moment he appeared not to have heard her, and she gently repeated
her question:

“Don’t you think there’s a pretty good chance of it?”

“Yes, more than a chance,” he dreamily replied. “It only takes a hint in
springtime. They’ll do practically anything you tell ’em to. It’s mostly
the apple-blossoms and the little birds.”

                               WILLAMILLA

MASTER LAURENCE COY, aged nine, came down the shady sidewalk one summer
afternoon, in a magnificence that escaped observation. To the careless
eye he was only a little boy pretending to be a drummer; for although he
had no drum and his clenched fingers held nothing, it was plain that he
drummed. But to be merely a drummer was far below the scope of his
intentions; he chose to employ his imagination on the grand scale, and
to his own way of thinking, he was a full drum-corps, marching between
lines of tumultuous spectators. And as he came gloriously down the
shouting lane of citizenry he pranced now and then; whereupon, without
interrupting his drumming, he said sharply: “Whoa there, Jenny! Git up
there, Gray!” This drum-corps was mounted.

He vocalized the bass drums and the snare drums in a staccato chant,
using his deepest voice for the bass, and tones pitched higher, and in
truth somewhat painfully nasal, for the snare; meanwhile he swung his
right arm ponderously on the booms, then resumed the rapid employment of
both imaginary sticks for the rattle of the tenor drums. Thus he
projected and sketched, all at the same time, every detail of this great
affair.

“_Boom!_” he said. “_Boom! Boomety, boomety, boom!_” Then he added:

                      “Boom! Boom!
                      Boom bought a rat trap,
                      Bigger than a bat trap,
                      Bigger than a _cat_ trap!
                      Boom! Boom!
                      Boomety, boomety, boom!”

So splendid was the effect upon himself of all this pomp and realism,
that the sidewalk no longer contented him. Vociferating for the moment
as a bugle, the drum-corps swung to the right and debouched to the
middle of the street, where such a martial body was more in place, and
thenceforth marched, resounding. “_Boom! Boom! Boomety, boomety, boom!_”
There followed repetitions of the chant concerning the celebrated trap
purchased by Mr. Boom.

A little girl leaned upon a gate that gave admission to a pleasant yard,
shaded by a vast old walnut tree, and from this point she watched the
approach of the procession. She was a homely little girl, as people say;
but a student of small affairs would have guessed that she had been
neatly dressed earlier in the day; and even now it could be seen that
the submergence of her right stocking into its own folds was not due to
any lack of proper equipment, for equipment was visible. She stood
behind the gate, eagerly looking forth, and by a coincidence not unusual
in that neighbourhood, a beautiful little girl was at the gate of the
next yard, some eighty or a hundred feet beyond; but this second little
girl’s unspotted attire had suffered no disarrangements, and her face
was clean; even her hands were miraculously clean.

When the sonorous Laurence came nearer, the homely little girl almost
disappeared behind her gate; her arms rested upon the top of it, and
only her hair, forehead and eyes could be seen above her arms. The eyes,
however, had become exceedingly sharp, and they shone with an elfin
mirth that grew even brighter as the drum-corps drew closer.

“_Boom!_” said Laurence. “_Boomety, boomety, boom!_” And again he gave
an account of Mr. Boom’s purchase; but he condescended to offer no sign
betokening a consciousness of the two spectators at their gates. He went
by the first of these in high military order, executing a manœuvre as he
went—again briefly becoming a trumpeter, swinging to the right, then to
the left, and so forward once more, as he resumed the drums. “_Boom!
Boom! Boomety, boomety, boom!_

                      “Boom! Boom!
                      Boom bought a rat trap,
                      Bigger than a bat trap——”

But here he was profoundly annoyed by the conduct of the homely little
girl. She darted out of her gate, ran to the middle of the street and
pranced behind him in outrageous mockery. In a thin and straining voice,
altogether inappropriate for the representation of a drum-corps, she
piped:

                      “Boom bought a rat trap,
                      Bigger than a bat trap,
                      Bigger than a _cat_ trap!
                      Boom!”

Laurence turned upon her. “For heavenses’ sakes!” he said. “My
good-_nuss_, Daisy Mears, haven’t you got _any_ sense? For heavenses’
sakes, pull up your ole stockin’s!”

“I won’t,” Miss Mears returned with instant resentment. “I guess you
can’t order _me_ around, Mister Laurence Coy! I doe’ know who ever
’pointed you to be _my_ boss! Besides, only one of ’em’s fell down.”

“Well, pull _it_ up, then,” he said crossly. “Or else don’t come hangin’
around me!”

“Oh, you don’t say so!” she retorted. “Thank you ever so kinely an’
p’litely for your complimunts just the same, but I pull up my stockin’s
whenever _I_ want to, not when every person I happen to meet in the
street goes an’ takes an’ tells me to!”

“Well, you better!” said Laurence, at a venture, for he was not
absolutely certain of her meaning. “Anyway, you needn’t hang around _me_
unless——”

He stopped, for Daisy Mears had begun, not to hang around him indeed,
but to dance around him, and indecorously at that! She levelled her
small, grimy right forefinger at him, appearing to whet it with her left
forefinger, which was equally begrimed, and at the same time she
capered, squealing triumphantly: “Ya-ay, Laurunce! Showin’ off! Showin’
off ’cause Elsie Threamer’s lookin’ at you! Showin’ off for Elsie!
Showin’ off for Elsie!”

“I am not!” Laurence made loud denial, but he coloured and glanced
wretchedly at the other little girl, who had remained at her own gate.
Her lovely, shadowy eyes appeared to be unaware of the dispute in the
street; and, crooning almost soundlessly to herself, she had that
perfect detachment from environment and events so often observed in
Beauties.

“I am _not_!” Laurence repeated. “If I was goin’ to show off before
anybody, I wouldn’t show off before Elsie!” And on the spur of the
moment, to prove what he said, he made a startling misrepresentation of
his sentiments. “I hate her!” he shouted.

But his tormentress was accustomed to deal with wild allegations of this
sort, and to discount them. “Ya-ay, Laur-runce!” she cried. “Showin’ off
for Elsie! Yes, you were! Showin’ off for Elsie! Show-win’ off for
Ell-_see_!” And circling round him in a witch dance, she repeated the
taunt till it nauseated him, his denials became agonized and his
assertions that he hated Elsie, uproarious. Thus within the space of
five minutes a pompous drum-corps passed from a state of discipline to
one of demoralization.

“Children! Children!” a woman’s voice called from an open window. “Get
out of the street, children. Look out for the automobiles!”

Thereupon the witch dance stopped, and the taunting likewise; Daisy
returned to the sidewalk with a thoughtful air; and Master Coy followed
her, looking rather morbid, but saying nothing. They leaned against the
hedge near where the indifferent and dreamy Elsie stood at her gate; and
for some time none of the three spoke: they had one of those apparently
inexplicable silences that come upon children. It was Laurence who broke
it, with a muttering.

“Anyways, I wasn’t,” he said, seemingly to himself.

“You was, too,” Daisy said quietly.

“Well, how you goin’ to prove it?” Laurence inquired, speaking louder.
“If it’s so, then you got to prove it. You either got to prove it or
else you got to take it back.”

“I don’t either haf to!”

“You do too haf to!”

“All right, then,” said Daisy. “I’ll prove it by Elsie. He was, wasn’t
he, Elsie?”

“What?” Elsie inquired vaguely.

“Wasn’t Laurence showin’ off out in the street? He _was_ showin’ off,
wasn’t he?”

“I was not!”

“You was, too! Wasn’t he, Elsie?”

“I doe’ know,” Elsie said, paying no attention to them; for she was
observing a little group that had made its appearance at the next
corner, a few moments earlier, and now came slowly along the sidewalk in
the mottled shade of the maple trees. “Oh, look!” she cried. “Just look
at that _darling_ little coloured baby!”

Her companions turned to look where she pointed, and Daisy instantly
became as ecstasized as Elsie. “Oh, _look_ at the precious, darling,
little _thing_!” she shouted.

As for Laurence, what he saw roused little enthusiasm within his bosom;
on the contrary, he immediately felt a slight but distinct antipathy;
and he wondered as, upon occasion he had wondered before, why in the
world little girls of his own age, and even younger girls, as well as
older girls and grown-up women, so often fell into a gesticular and
vocal commotion at the sight of a baby. However, he took some interest
in the dog accompanying this one.

The baby sat in a small and rickety wooden wagon which appeared to be of
home manufacture, since it was merely a brown box on small wheels or
disks of solid wood. A long handle projected behind as a propelling
device, but the course of the vehicle was continually a little devious,
on account of a most visible eccentricity of the front wheels. The
infant was comfortable among cushions, however, and over its head a
little, ancient, fringed red parasol had been ingeniously erected,
probably as much for style as for shade. Moreover, this note of fashion
was again touched in the baby’s ribboned cap, and in the embroidered
scarf that served as a coverlet, and, though plainly a relic, still
exhibited a lively colour.

An unevenly ponderous old coloured woman pushed the wagon; but her
complexion was incomparably darker than the occupant’s, which was an
extremely light tan, so that no one would have guessed them to be as
nearly related as they really were. And although this deeply coloured
woman’s weight was such a burden to her that she advanced at a slow,
varying gait, more a sag-and-shuffle than a walk, she was of an
exuberantly gracious aspect. In fact, her expression was so benevolent
that it was more than striking; it was surprising. Her eyes, rolling and
curiously streaked, were visibly moist with kindness; her mouth was
murmurous in loving phrases addressed sometimes to life generally,
sometimes to the baby, and sometimes to the dog accompanying the
cortège.

This dog was one of those dogs who feel themselves out of place in the
street, and show that they do by the guardedness of their expressions.
Their relief when they reach an alley is evident; then they relax at
once; the look of strain vanishes from their eyes, and their nerves
permit them once more to sit when they massage their ears. They seem
intended to be white, but the intention appears to have become early
enfeebled, leaving them the colour of a pale oyster;—and they do not
wear collars, these dogs. A collar upon one of them would alter his
status disturbingly, and he would understand that, and feel confused and
troubled. In a word, even when these dogs are seen in an aristocratic
environment, for some straying moment, they are dogs instantly
recognizable as belonging to coloured persons.

This one was valued highly by his owners; at least that was implied by
what the benevolent old woman said to him as they moved slowly along the
sidewalk toward the three children at Elsie Threamer’s gate.

“Hossifer,” she said, addressing the dog, “Hossifer, I b’lieve my soul
you the fines’ dog in a worl’! I feel the lovin’es’ to you I ever feel
any dog. You wuff fo’, fi’ hunnud dolluhs, Hossifer. You wuff fousan’
dolluhs; yes, you is! You a lovin’ dog, Hossifer!” Then she spoke to the
baby, but affection and happiness almost overcame her coherence.
“Dah-li-dah-li-dah-li-deedums!” she said. “Oh, but you the lovin’,
lovin’, lovin’ baby, honey! You is my swee’, swee’, li’l dee-dee-do! Oh,
oh, oh, bless Lawd, ain’ it a fine day! Fine day fer my honey lovin’
baby! Fine day f’um lovin’ heaven! Oh, oh, oh, I’m a-happy! Swee’ lovin’
livin’, lem me sing! _Oh_, lem me _sing_!”

She sang, and so loudly that she astonished the children; whereupon,
observing their open mouths and earnestly staring eyes, she halted near
them and laughed.

“Why all you look at me so funny?” she inquired hilariously. “Li’l whi’
boy, what fer you open you’ mouf at me, honey?”

“I didn’t,” Laurence said.

“Yes’m, indeed you did, honey,” she gaily insisted. “You all free did.
Open you’ moufs and look so funny at me—make me laugh an’ holler!” And
with unconventional vivacity she whooped and cackled strangely.

Finding her thus so vociferously amiable, Daisy felt encouraged to
approach the wagon; and bending down over it, she poked the mulatto baby
repeatedly in an affectionate manner. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “I do think
this is the darlingest baby!”

“Ain’ it!” the coloured woman cried. “Ain’ it! Yes’m, you say what’s
_so_! Ain’ it!”

“Does it belong to you?” Daisy inquired.

“Yes’m, indeed do! I’m baby’ grammaw. Baby my li’l lovin’ gran’chile.”

It was plain that all three children thought the statement remarkable;
they repeatedly looked from the light tan grandchild to the dark brown
grandmother and back again, while Daisy, in particular, had an air of
doubt. “Are you _sure_?” she asked. “Are you _sure_ you’re its gran’ma?”

“Yes’m indeed!”

“Honest?”

“Yes’m indeed!”

“Well——” Daisy began, and was about to mention the grounds of her
doubt; but tact prevailed with her, and she asked a question instead.

“What’s its name?”

“Name Willamilla.”

“What?”

“Name Willamilla.”

“Willamilla?” said Daisy. “I never heard it before, but it’s a right
pretty name.”

“Yes’m indeed!” the coloured woman agreed enthusiastically. “Willamilla
lovin’, happy, _gran’_ name!”

“What’s the dog’s name?” Laurence asked.

“Hossifer.”

Laurence frowned importantly. “Is he full-blooded?” he inquired.

“Is he who?”

“I guess he isn’t very full-blooded,” Laurence said. “Will he bite?”

“Hossifer?” she said. “Hossifer, he a mighty lovin’ dog! Bite? He ain’
bite nobody. Hossifer, he a lovin’-hearted dog.”

Elsie had come out of her gate, and she bent over the wagon with Daisy.
“Oh, my!” she said wistfully. “I do wish we could have this baby to play
with.”

“Couldn’t we?” Daisy asked of the baby’s grandmother. “Would you be
willing to sell it to us?”

“No’m,” the coloured woman replied, though she manifested no surprise at
the question. “No’m; my son-’law, he wouldn’ lem me sell no Willamilla.”

“Well, would you give it to us, then?”

“No’m. Can’ give Willamilla ’way.”

“Oh, my!” Daisy exclaimed. “I do wish we could have this baby to play
with awhile, anyway.”

The woman appeared to consider this, and her processes of considering it
interested the children. Her streaked eyes were unusually large and
protuberant; she closed them, letting the cumbrous lids roll slowly down
over them, and she swayed alarmingly as she did this, almost losing her
balance, but she recovered herself, opened her eyes widely, and said:

“How long you want play with Willamilla, honey?”

“Oh!” Daisy cried. “Will you let us? Oh, all afternoon!”

“Listen me,” said Willamilla’s grandmother. “I got errand I love to go
on. Wagon push ri’ heavy, too. I leave Willamilla with you lovin’ li’l
whi’ chillun, an’ come back free o’clock.”

“Oh, lovely!” Daisy and Elsie both shouted.

“Free o’clock,” said the coloured woman.

“That’ll give us _lots_ o’ time,” said Elsie. “Maybe almost an hour!”

The woman took a parcel from the wagon; it was wrapped in an old
newspaper, and its shape was the shape of a bottle, though not that of
an infant’s milk-bottle. Also, the cork was not quite secure, and the
dampened paper about the neck of this bottle gave forth a faint odour of
sweet spirits of niter mingled with the spicy fragrance of a decoction
from juniper, but naturally neither the odour nor the shape of the
parcel meant anything to the children. It meant a great, great deal to
Willamilla’s grandma, however; and her lovingness visibly increased as
she took the parcel in her arms.

“I’m go’ take this nice loaf o’ bread to some po’ ole sick folks whut
live up the alley ovuh yonnuh,” she said. “Hossifer he go’ stay with
Willamilla an’ li’l wagon.” She moved away, but paused to speak to
Hossifer, who followed her. “Hossifer, you the lovin’est dog in a wide
worl’, but you go on back, honey!” She petted him, then waved him away.
“Go on back, Hossifer!” And Hossifer returned to the wagon, while she
crossed the street toward the mouth of an alley.

The children stared after her, being even more interested just then in
her peculiar progress than they were in their extraordinary new
plaything. When the coloured woman reached a point about half way across
the street, she found a difficulty in getting forward; her feet bore her
slowly sidewise for some paces; she seemed to wander and waver; then,
with an effort at concentration, she appeared to see a new path before
her, followed it, and passed from sight down the alley.

Behind her she left a strongly favourable impression. Never had Daisy
and Elsie met an adult more sympathetic to their wishes or one more
easily persuaded than this obliging woman, and they turned to the baby
with a pleasure in which there was mingled a slight surprise. They began
to shout endearing words at Willamilla immediately, however, and even
Master Coy looked upon the infant with a somewhat friendly eye, for he
was warmed toward it by a sense of temporary proprietorship, and also by
a feeling of congeniality, due to a supposition of his in regard to
Willamilla’s sex. But of course Laurence’s greater interest was in
Hossifer, though the latter’s manner was not encouraging. Hossifer’s
brow became furrowed with lines of suspicion; he withdrew to a distance
of a dozen yards or so, and made a gesture indicating that he was about
to sit down, but upon Laurence’s approaching him, he checked the
impulse, and moved farther away, muttering internally.

“Good doggie!” Laurence said. “_I_ won’t hurt you. Hyuh, Hossifer! Hyuh,
Hossifer!”

Hossifer’s mutterings became more audible, his brow more furrowed, and
his eyes more undecided. Thus by every means he sought to make plain
that he might adopt any course of action whatever, that he but awaited
the decisive impulse, would act as it impelled, and declined
responsibility for what he should happen to do on the spur of the
moment. Laurence made a second effort to gain his confidence, but after
failing conspicuously he thought best to return to Willamilla and the
ladies.

“My goodness!” he said. “What on earth you doin’ to that baby?”

Chattering in the busiest and most important way, they had taken
Willamilla from the wagon and had settled which one was to have the
“first turn.” This fell to Daisy, and holding Willamilla in her arms
rather laboriously—for Willamilla was fourteen months old and fat—she
began to walk up and down, crooning something she no doubt believed to
be a lullaby.

“It’s my turn,” Elsie said. “I’ve counted a hunderd.”

“No fair!” Daisy protested at once. “You counted too fast.” And she
continued to pace the sidewalk with Willamilla while Elsie walked beside
her, insisting upon a rightful claim.

“Here!” Laurence said, coming up to them. “Listen! You’re holdin’ him
all sprawled out and everything—you better put him back in the wagon. I
bet if you hold him that way much longer you’ll spoil somep’m in him.”

“_Him?_” Both of his fair friends shouted; and they stared at Laurence
with widening eyes. “Well, I declare!” Elsie said pettishly. “Haven’t
you even got sense enough to know it’s a girl, Laurence Coy?”

“It is not!”

“It is, too!” they both returned.

“Listen here!” said Laurence. “Look at his name! I guess that settles
it, don’t it?”

“It settles it he’s a girl,” Daisy cried. “I bet you don’t even know
what her name is.”

“Oh, I don’t?”

“Well, what is it, then?”

“Willie Miller.”

“What?”

“Willie Miller!” Laurence said. “That’s what his own gran’mother said
his name was. She said his name’s Willie Miller.”

Upon this the others shouted in derision; and with the greatest
vehemence they told him over and over that Willamilla’s name was
Willamilla, that Willamilla was a girl’s name, that Willamilla was
consequently a girl, that she was a girl anyhow, no matter what her name
was, but that her name actually was Willamilla, as her own grandmother
had informed them. Grandmothers, Daisy and Elsie explained pityingly,
are supposed to know the names of their own grandchildren.

Laurence resisted all this information as well as he was able, setting
forth his own convictions in the matter, and continuing his argument
while they continued theirs, but finally, in desperation, he proposed a
compromise.

“Go on an’ _call_ him Willamilla,” he said bitterly, “—if you got to!
_I_ doe’ care if you haven’t got any more sense’n to call him Willamilla
when his real name’s Willie Miller an’ his own gran’mother says so!
_I_’m goin’ to call him Willie Miller till I die; only for heavenses’
sake, hush up!”

The ladies declined to do as he suggested; whereupon he withdrew from
the dispute, and while they talked on, deriding as well as instructing
him, he leaned upon the gate and looked gloomily at the ground. However,
at intervals, he formed with his lips, though soundlessly, the stubborn
words, “His name’s Willie Miller!”

“Oh, I tell you what’d be lovely!” Daisy cried. “Maybe she knows how to
_walk_! Let’s put her down and see—and if she doesn’t know how already,
why, we can teach her!”

Elsie gladly fell in with her friend’s idea, and together they
endeavoured to place Willamilla upon her feet on the ground. In this
they were confronted with insuperable difficulties: Willamilla proved
unable to comprehend their intentions; and although Daisy knelt and
repeatedly placed the small feet in position, the experiment was wholly
unsuccessful. Nevertheless the experimenters, not at all discouraged,
continued it with delight, for they _played_ that Willamilla was
walking. They heaped praises upon her.

“My darling baby!” Daisy cried. “Doesn’t she walk _beautiful_?”

“The precious little love!” Elsie echoed. “She just walks _beautiful_!”

At this the gloomy person in the background permitted himself to sneer.
“That ain’t walkin’,” he said.

“It is, too! You doe’ know what you’re talkin’ about!” the chorus of two
retorted, not interrupting their procedure.

“He ain’t walkin’,” Laurence maintained.

“She is, too!” said Elsie.

“She’s walkin’ now,” said Daisy. “She’s walkin’ all the time.”

“No, he’s not,” Laurence said. “His feet are sort of curly, and they’re
_’way_ too wide apart. I bet there’s somep’m the matter with him.”

“There is not!” The two little girls looked round at him indignantly;
for this unwarranted intimation of some structural imperfection roused
them. “Shame on you!” Daisy said; and to Willamilla: “Show mamma how
beautiful she walks.”

“He can’t do it,” Laurence said obdurately. “I bet there _is_ somep’m
the matter with him.”

“There is _not_!”

“Yes, sir,” said Laurence, and he added, with conviction: “His legs
ain’t fixed on him right.”

“Shame on you, Laurence Coy!”

But Laurence persisted in his view.

“Listen!” he said, arguing. “Look at _my_ legs. Look at anybody’s legs
that can walk. Well, are they fixed on ’em the way _his_ are?”

“Yes, they are!” Daisy returned sharply. “Only hers are fixed on better
than yours!”

“They ain’t,” said Laurence. “Mine are fixed on like other people’s, and
his are—well, they’re terrable!”

“Oh, isn’t he tiresome?” Elsie said pettishly. “Do be quiet about your
ole legs!”

“Yes, _do_!” said Daisy; and then she jumped up, a new idea lighting her
eyes. “_I_ tell you what let’s do,” she cried. “Let’s put her back in
the wagon, an’ play we’re takin’ a walk on Sunday with our baby an’ all
the family.”

“How’ll we play it?” Elsie asked.

“Well, _I_’ll be the mamma and push the wagon,” Daisy said excitedly.
“Elsie, you be some lady that’s visitin’ us, an’ sort of walk along with
us, an’——”

“No,” Elsie interrupted. “_I_ want to be the mamma and push the wagon,
an’ _you_ be some lady that’s visitin’ _us_.”

Daisy looked a little annoyed, but she compromised. “Well, we’ll go a
long walk, and I’ll be the mamma the first block, an’ then the next
block you can be the mamma, and I’ll be the lady that’s visitin’ us, an’
then the next block it’ll be my turn again.”

“All right,” said Elsie. “What’ll we have Laurence be?”

“We’ll have him be the father.”

Laurence frowned; the idea was rather distasteful to him, and for some
reason a little embarrassing. “Listen!” he said. “What do I haf to do?”

“Oh, just walk along and kind of talk an’ everything.”

“Well——” he said uncertainly; then he brightened a little. “I’ll be
smokin’ cigars,” he said.

“All right, you can.” And having placed Willamilla in the wagon, Daisy
grasped the handle, pushing the vehicle before her. Laurence put a twig
in his mouth, puffing elaborately; Elsie walked beside Willamilla; and
so the procession moved—Hossifer, still in a mood of indecision,
following at a varying distance. And Daisy sang her lullaby as they
went.

This singing of hers had an unfavourable effect upon Laurence. For a few
minutes after they started he smoked his twig with a little satisfaction
and had a slight enjoyment in the thought that he was the head of a
family—but something within him kept objecting to the game; he found
that really he did not like it. He bore it better on the second and
fourth blocks, for Elsie was the mother then, but he felt a strong
repulsion when Daisy assumed that relation. He intensely disliked being
the father when she was the mother, and he was reluctant to have anybody
see him serving in that capacity. Daisy’s motherhood was aggressive; she
sang louder and louder, and even without the singing the procession
attracted a great deal of attention from pedestrians. Laurence felt that
Daisy’s music was in bad taste, especially as she had not yet pulled up
her stocking.

She made up the tune, as well as the words, of her lullaby; the tune
held beauty for no known ears except her own and these were the words:

                     “Oh, my da-ar-luh-un baby,
                     My-y lit-tull baby!
                     Go to sleep! Go to _slee_-heep!
                     Oh, my dear lit-_tull_ baby!
                     My baby, my dar-luh-un bay-bee,
                     My bay-bee, my bay-_hay_-bee!”

As she thus soothed the infant, who naturally slumbered not, with
Daisy’s shrill voice so near, some people on the opposite side of the
street looked across and laughed; and this caused a blush of
mortification to spread over the face of the father.

“Listen!” he remonstrated. “You don’t haf to make all that noise.”

She paid no attention but went on singing.

“Listen!” said Laurence nervously. “Anyways, you don’t haf to open your
mouth so wide when you sing, do you? It looks terrable!”

She opened it even wider and sang still louder:

          “My lit-tull baby, my da-ar-_luh_-un _bay_-bee!
          My _bay_-bee! My bay-_hay_-bee!”

“Oh, my!” Laurence said, and he retired to the rear; whereupon Hossifer
gave him a look and fell back a little farther. “Listen!” Laurence
called to Daisy. “You scared the dog!”

Daisy stopped singing and glanced back over her shoulder. “I did not!”
she said. “You scared her yourself.”

“_Who?_” Laurence advanced to the side of the wagon, staring
incredulously. “Who you talkin’ about?”

“She was walkin’ along nice only a little way behind us,” Daisy said,
“until you went near her.”

“I went near _who_?” Laurence asked, looking very much disturbed. “_Who_
was walkin’ along nice?”

“Hossifer was. You said _I_ scared her, and all the time she——”

“Listen!” said Laurence, breathing rapidly. “I won’t stand it. This dog
isn’t a girl!”

“Hossifer’s a girl’s name,” said Daisy placidly. “I bet you never heard
of a boy by that name in your life!”

“Well, what if I never?”

“Well,” said Daisy authoritatively, “that proves it. Hossifer’s a girl’s
name and you just the same as said so yourself. Elsie, didn’t he say
Hossifer isn’t a boy’s name, an’ doesn’t that prove Hossifer’s a girl?”

“Yes, it does,” Elsie returned with decision.

Laurence looked at them; then he shook his head. “Oh, _my_!” he said
morosely, for these two appeared set upon allowing him no colleagues or
associates whatever, and he felt himself at the end of his resources.

Daisy began to sing again at once.

“Oh, my dar-lun lit-_tull_ bay-hay-_bee_-hee!” she sang; and she may
have been too vehement for Willamilla, who had thus far remained
remarkably placid under her new circumstances; Willamilla began to cry.

She began in a mild way, with a whimper, inaudible on account of the
lullaby; then she slightly increased her protest, making use of a voice
like the tinnier tones of a light saxophone; and having employed this
mild mechanism for some time, without securing any relief from the
shrillness that bothered her, she came to the conclusion that she was
miserable. Now, she was of this disposition: once she arrived at such a
conclusion, she remained at it, and nothing could convey to her mind
that altered conditions had removed what annoyed her, until she became
so exhausted by the protraction of her own protests that she slept,
forgot and woke to a new life.

She marked the moment of her decision, this afternoon, by the utterance
of a wail that rose high over the singing; she lifted up her voice and
used the full power of lungs and throat to produce such a sound that
even the heart of the father was disquieted, while the mamma and the
visiting lady at once flung themselves on their knees beside the wagon.

“Whassa _matta_? Whassa _matta_?” Daisy and Elsie inquired some dozens
of times, and they called Willamilla a “peshus baby” even oftener, but
were unable to quiet her. Indeed, as they shouted their soothing
endearments, her tears reached a point almost torrential, and she beat
the coverlet with her small fat hands.

“He’s mad about somep’m, I guess,” the father observed, looking down
upon her. “Or else he’s got a spasm, maybe.”

“She hasn’t either,” Daisy said. “She’ll stop in a minute.”

“Well, it might not be spasms,” Laurence said. “But I bet whatever it
is, it happened from all that singin’.”

Daisy was not pleased with his remark. “I’ll thank you not to be so
kinely complimentary, Mister Laurence Coy!” she said, and she took up
Willamilla in her arms, and rather staggeringly began to walk to and fro
with her, singing:

           “Oh, my peshus litt-_tull_ bay-_hay_-bee-hee!”

Elsie walked beside her, singing too, while Willamilla beat upon the air
with desperate hands and feet, closed her effervescent eyes as tightly
as she could, opened her mouth till the orifice appeared as the most
part of her visage, and allowed the long-sustained and far-reaching
ululations therefrom to issue. Laurence began to find his position
intolerable.

“For heavenses’ sakes!” he said. “If this keeps up much longer, _I_’m
goin’ _home_. Everybody’s a-lookin’ at us all up an’ down the street!
Whyn’t you quit singin’ an’ give him a chance to get over whatever’s the
matter with him?”

“Well, why don’t you do somep’m to help stop her from cryin’, yourself?”
Elsie asked crossly.

“Well, I will,” he promised, much too rashly. “I’d stop him in a minute
if I had my way.”

“All right,” Daisy said unexpectedly, halting with Willamilla just in