Part + 

III + 

Jimmy + 

I + 

I + 

Jane Carver opened the screened door that led from the living-room of her father-in-law’s house at Gull Rocks, Seaconsit, to the verandah that commanded a view of the sea. She closed it quietly behind her and walked quickly over to the wooden steps that led down to the grassy terrace. + 

Fifteen years of matrimony had not impaired the lightness of Jane’s step. Her fine straight hair was still untouched with grey, her waist was still slender, and her eyes were still bright. They gleamed, now, with a spark of irritation. Had Mrs. Ward and Isabel been present they would have recognized, immediately, the storm signal. “Tantrum” would have been their verdict. + 

Jane stood still, for a moment, by a porch pillar and looked up at the vast assuaging reaches of blue sky beyond the green festoons and orange flowers of the trumpet vine. The sky was delightfully impersonal, thought Jane. Its very impersonality was vaguely comforting. With an acute sense of peril, momentarily escaped, Jane drew in a great breath of the warm sea-scented air. She was feeling better, already, just because of the sky and the sunshine and the soft sea-breeze and the tender waving tendrils of the trumpet vine. + 

If she had stayed in that living-room another minute, Jane knew she would have been rude to her mother-in-law. And Jane had never been that. Not really. Not once in fifteen years. But if she had listened once more to Mrs. Carver’s gentle expression of the pious hope, already reiterated three times since luncheon, that the good weather that they were now enjoying did not mean that it was going to rain during Stephen’s vacation, Jane knew her record would have been broken. + 

It was terrible, thought Jane, it was really terrible, what it did to her to listen to Stephen’s family talk about Stephen. And incomprehensible. For Jane loved Stephen. They were very happy together. Yet, somehow, when his mother⁠— + 

Oh, well, there was no use going into it. She had been knitting quietly by the living-room fire when Aunt Marie had observed that it was a pleasant afternoon for the race and Uncle Stephen had remarked that there was not much wind and Mrs. Carver had opened her mouth to reply. The pious hope had cast its shadow before. Jane had known what was coming. She had sprung to her feet and made good her escape. + 

It all seemed rather silly, now, as she looked back on it. Jane opened her knitting-bag and sat down on the top step in the sunshine. + 

A sunshot August haze hung over the familiar view of lawn and beach and bay. The Seaconsit harbour was filled with flitting sails. The Saturday afternoon race would begin in half an hour. Her father-in-law’s launch was riding at anchor, ready to follow the contestants around the course, and Jane could see her father-in-law, dapper in blue coat and white flannels, standing at the end of the pier, binoculars in hand. He was watching Alden and Silly, rounding the first flag in their catboat, already manoeuvring for position, half an hour ahead of the starting gun. + 

Mrs. Carver was watching them, too, Jane knew, from a living-room window, but without binoculars. On racing afternoons the binoculars became the passionate personal property of Mr. Carver. No one else would have thought of touching them. + 

Jane picked up her worsted and began to knit. She was making a blue sweater for her fourteen-year-old daughter, copying the shoulder pattern from the printed directions on the Mothers’ Page of The Woman’s Home Magazine. She spread the periodical on the porch floor beside her and bent placidly over her work. The sweater would be becoming to Cicily. When this one was finished, she would knit another for Jenny and a third for little Steve, much as he disliked being dressed to match his sisters. All three children were very blond. Like the Carvers, thought Jane, with a little sigh. When she looked up she could see her son’s yellow head bent over his pad and paintbox on the beach at the foot of the lawn and the stiff white contour of his trained nurse’s figure, stretched in the shadow of a rock at his side. Her daughters were nowhere to be seen. They were out in their Aunt Silly’s kennels, perhaps, playing with the cocker-spaniel puppy that she had given them. + 

It was very peaceful, alone on the verandah. And very quiet. Jane could hear the faint eternal ripple of the little lapping waves on the beach beyond the lawn, the insistent put-put of an unseen motorboat in the harbour and the mechanical tap of a woodpecker in the oak tree near the garden. The click of her own knitting-needles was the only other sound that broke the sunny silence. + 

It was pleasant to be alone. At Gull Rocks, Jane perversely reflected, one seldom was. The Carvers, as a family, were animated by the clan spirit. They did things, if at all, in concert. They even did nothing in concert. They abhorred solitude as nature does a vacuum. + 

Jane’s fingers were busy and her eyes were occupied, but her mind was not concerned with the work in hand. Quite mechanically she purled and plained and tossed the blue wool over her amber needles. She was thinking wise, thirty-six-year-old thoughts about the relative-in-law complex. “The relative-in-law complex” was the phrase that Jane herself had coined to account for the obvious injustice of her thoughts about Carvers. She was privately rather proud of it. The Freudian vocabulary was not yet a commonplace in the Western hemisphere, but Jane knew all about complexes and was vaguely comforted to feel herself in the grip of one that was undoubtedly authentic. There was nothing you could do about a complex. There it was⁠—like the shape of your nose. You had no moral responsibility for it and it innocently explained all the baser emotional reactions, of which, alone with your conscience, you were somehow subtly ashamed. + 

Jane was decidedly relieved to feel able to evade all moral responsibility for the emotions aroused in her breast by the constant society of Carvers. For, from any point of view but that of the enlightened Freudian, she could not but feel that they were distinctly unworthy. Even ridiculous. For years she had struggled against them. But emotions were strangely invincible. Ephemeral, however. That was a comfort. It was only when visiting at Gull Rocks, Seaconsit, that Jane fell a prey to the baser variety of which she was subtly ashamed. Safe at home with Stephen, in her little Colonial cottage in the suburbs of Chicago, Jane could always look back on the complications presented by life at Gull Rocks with a tolerant smile. Seen from that secure perspective, the congenital peculiarities of Carvers seemed always harmless, at times picturesque, and often pathetic. For ten months of the year they figured in her life as mere alien phenomena at which she marvelled detachedly, with easy amusement. In July and August they reared their sinister heads as dragons in her path. + 

Jane had spent July and August at Gull Rocks, Seaconsit, every summer but two since the birth of her first baby. The year that Steve was born, Stephen had gone East alone with their two little daughters. And the year after that Stephen had incredibly taken a three months’ vacation from the bank to make the grand tour of Europe, leaving the three children at home in the Colonial cottage in Mrs. Ward’s care. Twelve Julys and twelve Augusts at Gull Rocks, Seaconsit! When Jane put it like that, she really felt that she had joined the Holy Fellowship of Martyrs. Stephen didn’t know what it was like⁠—how could he, being born a Carver?⁠—marooned alone with the children at Gull Rocks summer after summer, while he held down his job at the bank at home and only came on to join them for a three weeks’ holiday. Stephen wanted his children brought up with some idea of the New England tradition. That was only natural, of course, still⁠— + 

However, Stephen was coming, that very afternoon, on the six o’clock train, for the three weeks’ holiday. Jane was very glad of that. Stephen’s coming would make everything much better. Gull Rocks was almost fun, when Stephen was there. They would swim with the children and Stephen would teach little Steve to sail and⁠— + 

Jane heard the screened door open behind her and the brisk, decided step of Aunt Marie crossing the piazza. She did not raise her head from her knitting. + 

“I’ve come out to keep you company,” said Aunt Marie pleasantly. + 

Jane made no comment. She was counting stitches again, softly, under her breath. She heard the Nantucket hammock at the corner of the verandah creak faintly under her aunt’s substantial weight. + 

“Have you read the August Atlantic?” asked Aunt Marie presently. + 

Jane shook her head in silence. She could hear the pages of the magazine flutter faintly in her aunt’s deliberate fingers. + 

“There’s a very good article in it,” continued Aunt Marie, in her pleasant practical New England voice, “by Cassandra Frothingham Perkins, on ‘The Decline of Culture.’ ” + 

“Twenty-three, twenty-four,” whispered Jane defensively. Then “Has it declined?” she asked. The innocence in her tone was not entirely ingenuous. + 

“Well, hasn’t it?” returned Aunt Marie very practically, as before. Then, after a pause, “You know who Cassandra Frothingham Perkins is, don’t you?” + 

“One of the Concord Perkinses,” said Jane, as glibly as a child responding with “1492” or “1066” to the question of a history teacher. She had not spent twelve summers at Gull Rocks, Seaconsit, in vain. + 

“She’s the daughter,” said Aunt Marie, “of Samuel Wendell Perkins, who wrote the Perkins biography of Emerson and Literary Rambles in Old Concord. The Atlantic publishes a lot of her stuff.” + 

“I’ve read it,” said Jane briefly. Who cared, she thought perversely, if culture had declined? But the question was purely rhetorical. For obviously Cassandra Frothingham Perkins did. And Aunt Marie Carver. All the Carvers, in fact. Nevertheless, the decline of culture was not a burning issue with Jane. + 

She bent her head again over the knitting directions in The Woman’s Home Magazine and her eye caught a flamboyant headline on the opposite page. “How Can We Keep Our Charm?” by Viola Vivasour. And below in explanatory vein, “Fifteen minutes a day devoted to Miss Vivasour’s simple formula of face creams solves woman’s eternal problem.” But Aunt Marie was again speaking. + 

“Cassandra’s made a little schedule,” she said. “She claims that fifteen minutes a day, spent reading the best books⁠—and she adds a little list of one hundred⁠—” + 

How much less important, thought Jane wickedly, the decline of culture than that of charm! Not, however, in the Carvers’ circle. There the significance of a five-foot bookshelf would always rise above that of a good cosmetic. The society of her relatives-in-law made Jane feel wantonly frivolous. She would just as soon read one article, she thought, or follow one recipe, as the other. Both equally absurd. Prepared for different publics⁠—that was all. + 

Jane heard the screened door open once more behind her and the heavy, slightly hesitant step of her mother-in-law crossing the piazza. She did not turn her head. Her hands still busy with her knitting, she gazed steadily out over the close-clipped lawn, pierced here and there with outcrops of granite rock, stretching smooth and green and freshly watered, three hundred feet before her, to where the coarser growth of beach grass, rooted in sandy soil, met the yellow fine of beach that fringed the blue expanse of sea. Jane loved the beach grass. It continued to exist in a state of nature, rooted in primeval sand, defeating the best efforts of the impeccable Portuguese gardener to impose on it an alien culture. There it was. The Carvers could do nothing about it. Jane wondered if her Aunt Marie had ever reflected that her Western niece-in-law was rather like the beach grass. + 

Mrs. Carver’s footsteps paused at her side. + 

“Dexter doesn’t think he can get me any lobster today, Jane.” Mrs. Carver’s voice was grave and just a trifle anxious. “Do you think Stephen would prefer bluefish or mackerel?” + 

“I don’t know,” said Jane. + 

“He’s so fond of sea food,” said Mrs. Carver. + 

Jane felt again that absurd surge of irritation. Stephen would never know what fish he was eating. Why fuss about it? + 

“I wanted to give him an old-fashioned shore dinner.” + 

The wistful note in the worried voice suddenly touched Jane’s heart. She looked up and met her mother-in-law’s anxious gaze. The fat, elderly face was creased in lines of vivid disappointment. Old age was pathetic, thought Jane, secure in the citadel of her thirty-six summers. Mothers were pathetic. + 

“I think he’d love mackerel,” she said warmly. + 

Mrs. Carver’s face brightened. + 

“I shall keep on trying for the lobster,” she said solemnly, “until the last minute.” + 

Suddenly Jane loved her mother-in-law. She loved her for the solemnity. It was touching and disarming. Why didn’t she always say the things that Mrs. Carver liked to hear? It was so easy to say them. She really must reform. + 

“Is that little Steve on the beach?” said Mrs. Carver. + 

“Yes,” said Jane. + 

“Don’t you think the sun is too hot for him?” asked Mrs. Carver. + 

“No,” said Jane. + 

“The glare’s very bright on those rocks,” said Mrs. Carver, “and Miss Parrot never seems to notice⁠—” + 

“The doctor said the sun was good for him,” said Jane tartly. Her moment of reform was short-lived. + 

“We can’t be too careful,” said Mrs. Carver. + 

They couldn’t be, of course. Why was she so perverse? Poor little Steve, pulled down, still, from his scarlet fever in June, still watched by his nurse, still worrying them all with that heart that wasn’t quite right yet, but would be, so the doctor said, by next spring! + 

“I think he ought to come into the shade,” said Mrs. Carver. + 

Jane rose abruptly and picked up the megaphone behind the hammock. + 

“Yoo-hoo!” she called. “Miss Parrot!” The white cap turned promptly in response to her call. “Bring Steve up, please!” + 

She sank on the steps again and picked up her knitting. She could see Miss Parrot’s slender starched figure rise from behind her rock. It assumed a slightly admonitory angle. Steve’s yellow head was raised from the sands in obvious protest. + 

“She doesn’t know how to manage children,” said Mrs. Carver. + 

Steve, pad and paintbox in hand, was wading through the beach grass, now, beside his nurse. His thin little voice could be heard, raised in inarticulate argument. Miss Parrot walked steadily on. Steve, reaching the smooth green turf of the lawn, paused to scratch a mosquito bite on his brown little knee. + 

“Why doesn’t she wait for him?” said Mrs. Carver. + 

“Oh, he’s all right,” said Jane. “He loves Miss Parrot.” + 

Mrs. Carver watched her grandson’s approach in silence. + 

“I don’t want to come up, Mumsy!” he cried. “I was painting the harbour.” + 

“Don’t run, dear,” said Mrs. Carver. + 

“You can finish your painting tomorrow,” said Jane. + 

“The light will be different, Mumsy!” His tanned little nine-year-old countenance was eager with protest. + 

“Mrs. Carver thinks the sun is too hot on the beach, Miss Parrot,” said Jane. + 

The trained nurse turned her pretty, pleasant face upon them with a tolerant smile. + 

“All righty!” she said. “Come on, Stevey, we’ll paint in the garden.” + 

“I don’t want to,” said Steve. He glared crossly at his grandmother. + 

Miss Parrot smiled again, throwing a glance of frank, professional understanding at the adults on the verandah. + 

“Oh, yes, you do,” she said easily. “If Grandma wants you to, Grandma’s the doctor!” + 

She disappeared around the corner of the house. Steve trailed aggrievedly after her. When he was irritated, reflected Jane, his little nine-year-old figure took on exactly the angle of that of her preposterous father-in-law. Mrs. Carver’s lips were slightly compressed. Jane knew what was coming. + 

“I don’t like that woman’s tone,” said Mrs. Carver. + 

“She’s a very good heart nurse,” said Jane. + 

“She has no proper deference,” said Mrs. Carver. + 

Jane’s lips, in their turn, were slightly compressed at the familiar phrase. Proper deference! That commodity that the Carvers sought in vain, throughout the world, looking for it, Jane thought, with the most pathetic optimism, in the most unlikely places. In the manners of Irish housemaids, on the lips of trained nurses, and in the emotional reactions of modern grandchildren. They never lost their simple faith that they ought to find it. That it was somehow owing to them. Was it, thought Jane curiously, because they were all over sixty? Or because they were Carvers? Stephen was a Carver, yet proper deference meant nothing in his life. + 

“Here comes Alden!” said Mrs. Carver suddenly. “Marie, are you ready?” + 

The figure of Mr. Carver had indeed deserted the pier and advanced to the beach grass. He was waving peremptorily. Aunt Marie rose from the Nantucket hammock a trifle hastily. + 

“I’ll get my sneakers,” she said, and vanished into the house. + 

“Now, where is your Uncle Stephen?” said Mrs. Carver. Jane, you’ll need your hat.” She was hurriedly swathing her own with a purple face veil. + 

“Didn’t you hear the horn?” called Mr. Carver. “I blew it twice.” + 

“We didn’t, dear,” said Mrs. Carver. “The wind’s offshore.” + 

“Jane, not much time,” said Mr. Carver. He took out his watch as he spoke. “It’s twenty minutes to three. Where are your rubber shoes?” + 

“I’ll get them,” said Jane. “They’re in my room.” + 

“Gall your Uncle Stephen,” said Mrs. Carver. “He’s working in the study.” + 

“I can’t see why you can’t all be ready at the proper time,” Jane heard her father-in-law observe as she crossed the porch. “I only keep up the launch for the pleasure of the family.” The screened door banged behind her. She crossed the living-room with an air of extreme deliberation. What a ridiculous old man Mr. Carver was! Domestic dictator! Why didn’t they all revolt? Why hadn’t they all revolted, years ago, long before she came into the family? + 

Jane paused before the living-room chimneypiece to kick, vindictively, a smouldering log back into the ashes and place the screen before the dying fire. Always this fuss about nothing, every Wednesday and Saturday afternoon, at twenty minutes to three! That launch! The Whim! Ironic name! It ought to be called The Duty, The Responsibility, The Obligation. Or perhaps, like a British dreadnought, The Invincible. It was invincible, when manned by Mr. Carver. Those Wednesday and Saturday races! That sacred necessity of following them, twice every week, out of the harbour and into the bay, around the three buoys and home. Watching those ridiculous catboats with Alden and Silly at the helm of one, appraising the wind, discussing the course, commending the seamanship. No one cared to go⁠—except Mr. Carver. Take today when Mrs. Carver wanted to telephone for lobsters and Aunt Marie to read the Atlantic and Uncle Stephen to work in the study and she just to be let alone for a quiet afternoon, to finish Cicily’s sweater and think of Stephen’s arrival. No one ever cared to go, really⁠—except the children. And they couldn’t because they made Mrs. Carver nervous, climbing around the boat, and Mr. Carver irritated, ever since little Steve had dropped the compass and broken the glass and spilled the alcohol all over the varnished table in the cabin. + 

“I only keep up the launch,” thought Jane in resentful retrospect, as she crossed the hall, “for the pleasure of the family.” What bunk! It was really Mrs. Carver’s fault, of course. She should have taken him in hand just as soon as she married him. Her weakness was his strength. She’d made him what he was today and the rising generations had to suffer for her folly. Stephen might have been like that if he had married a woman like his own mother. There was lots of “Carver” in Stephen. Jane knew she had been good for him. All the Wards had been good for him. Her father in one way, and her mother, and even Isabel, in quite another. The West had been good for him. Jane paused at the living-room door. + 

“Uncle Stephen?” she said. + 

The elderly professor was seated at his brother’s mahogany secretary, bent over a little pile of manuscript. He did not hear her. + 

“Uncle Stephen!” said Jane again. + 

Her uncle raised his shiny bald head abruptly. His big blue eyes looked mildly up at her over his gold-rimmed spectacles. His face was very fat and round and pink and his head was very spherical and almost hairless. In spite of his white moustache, Jane always thought he looked just like a good-natured baby. Uncle Stephen was always good-natured and Jane was very fond of him. He didn’t seem at all like a Carver. Was that perhaps because of Aunt Marie, the indomitable daughter of “the great Nielson,” with whom he had been united in matrimony for more than forty years? Aunt Marie seemed so much more like a Carver than Uncle Stephen himself. There was a subtle warning in that thought, reflected Jane. In patiently eradicating, throughout a long lifetime, the more disagreeable traits of a husband, did a wife herself acquire them? + 

But Uncle Stephen’s pleasant pink old face had assumed a guilty expression. + 

“Good Lord, Janie!” he said regretfully. “Is it twenty minutes to three?” + 

“You bet it is,” said Jane briefly. And her eyes met those of her uncle in a twinkle of understanding. Jane never discussed Carvers with Carvers, but she knew just how Uncle Stephen felt about The Whim. Fumbling a little in his haste, he began to put away his manuscripts in a shabby brown briefcase. + 

“I wanted to finish these notes,” he said helplessly, “but⁠—” + 

“What are you doing?” asked Jane. The activities of Uncle Stephen at Gull Rocks were always refreshing. Jane thought scholarship a trifle amusing. Impersonal, however, and assuaging, like the blue sky. Uncle Stephen’s conversation could always be counted on to rise above the domestic plane. + 

“A monograph,” he said meekly, “on the Letters of William Wycherley, for the Modern Language Society. His correspondence with Alexander Pope.” + 

“I thought Wycherley wrote plays,” said Jane vaguely. In spite of the early exhortations of Miss Thomas, the details of a Bryn Mawr education were fast fading from her memory. + 

“He did, my dear,” said Uncle Stephen. “Good plays and bad poems and very bad letters.” + 

“Then why write monographs on them?” asked Jane. + 

“They are interesting,” said Uncle Stephen, rising from his chair, “because they stimulated Pope to reply.” + 

“Then why not write on Pope’s answers?” + 

“That has been done, my dear.” + 

Jane felt that the mysteries of scholarship were beyond her. + 

“Pope was very fond of him,” said Uncle Stephen, as they turned toward the door. “He said ‘the love of some things rewards itself, as of Virtue and of Mr. Wycherley.’ ” + 

As she mounted the stairs in search of her rubber shoes, Jane wished that she were a scholar. Scholarship would be a resource at Gull Rocks. She wished that she were capable of generating a passionate interest in the thoughts of Alexander Pope on Virtue and Mr. Wycherley. She wished that she were capable of generating a passionate interest in almost anything that would serve to pass the time. On the landing she met Miss Parrot. + 

“Mrs. Carver,” said the trained nurse. Her voice was pleasant but a trifle cool. + 

“Yes,” said Jane. + 

“I wanted to speak to you again about Steve’s diet,” said Miss Parrot. “His grandmother will keep on giving him too much sugar. He had three tablespoons on his raspberries at luncheon. I can’t convince her it won’t build him up⁠—” + 

“I’ll speak to her,” said Jane. She turned to mount the stairs. + 

“And Mrs. Carver⁠—” + 

“Yes,” said Jane, pausing again on the third step above the landing. + 

“I’ll have to speak to you again about my supper tray. The desserts⁠—last night the cook sent me up only three prunes. I thought you’d like to know.” + 

“Oh, I love to know!” thought Jane. But⁠—“I’m sorry, Miss Parrot,” she said. “I’ll see about it.” + 

“And Mrs. Carver⁠—Madam Carver spoke to me again about using the back stairs. I’m not a servant, Mrs. Carver.” + 

“You’re a guest, Miss Parrot,” said Jane, “as I am myself. You’ll have to use whatever stairs Madam Carver asks you to.” + 

Miss Parrot’s pretty lips were firmly compressed. Jane looked at her in silence. She was a very good heart nurse. Jane fell a prey to inner panic. + 

“Please be patient, Miss Parrot,” she said weakly. “It won’t be for long now.” + 

“I shall use the front stairs,” said Miss Parrot firmly. And turned to descend them. + 

Jane mounted to her room in silence. At thirty-six life was terrible, she thought, as she pulled on her rubber shoes. It had no dignity. It wasn’t at all what you expected, when you were young. Youth wasn’t dignified, of course, but it was simple, it was joyous, it was expectant. In youth life seemed⁠—important. The things you thought about were important, no matter how inadequately you thought about them. But later you found yourself involved in a labyrinth of trifles. Worrying, ridiculous trifles. Things that didn’t matter, yet had to be coped with. And you’d lost that sustaining sense that, at any moment, something different might be going to happen. At thirty-six you found yourself a buffer state between the older generation and the younger. You had to keep your son’s trained nurse and you had to keep the peace with your mother-in-law. Did Miss Parrot think she liked to live with Mrs. Carver? Did Mrs. Carver think she liked to live with Miss Parrot? If she could live with both of them, Jane thought, they might at least succeed in living with each other for two brief months⁠— + 

“Jane!” It was the voice of her mother-in-law, raised in anxious protest from the terrace below her window. “What are you doing, dear? The launch is waiting!” + 

Jane snatched up a hat and ran from her room. She dashed down the stairs. Oh, well! Stephen was coming that evening. They would go home in three weeks. Miss Parrot was a good heart nurse. She took all the responsibility. And Steve was much better. Gull Rocks had done a lot for him. The sun and the sea air. Her mother-in-law was pathetic. She couldn’t really help Mr. Carver. And Stephen was coming. + 

Jane banged the screened door and overtook Mrs. Carver on the path to the pier. She slipped her hand through her plump arm. + 

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was talking to Miss Parrot.” + 

“What about?” asked Mrs. Carver. + 

“She was telling me she didn’t like prunes,” said Jane, laughing. + 

“Did she think that you cared?” inquired Mrs. Carver with acerbity. + 

“Yes. But she was wrong!” Jane dropped her mother-in-law’s arm and stooped to pluck a handful of sweet fern from among the beach grass. The grey-green petals, wrenched from the fibrous stem, exhaled a pungent perfume. Jane buried her nose in them. They were very sweet and warm from the sun. She ran lightly ahead of her mother-in-law out onto the pier. + 

Mr. Carver was standing on the float, his watch in his hand. He looked severely at her from under his straw hat-brim. + 

“Quickly, now,” said Mr. Carver. + 

Jane sprang from the float to the boat. Aunt Marie was seated in a canvas deck chair. Her ankles looked thick and her small, wide feet very flat and stubby in her white sneakers. She had brought the August Atlantic with her. Jane knew she wouldn’t be allowed to read it. Uncle Stephen was sitting on the little varnished bench along the rail. He looked more like a baby than ever, thought Jane, in his round canvas boating hat. A semicircle of pink scalp showed under its floppy brim in the rear. Mr. Carver was carefully handing his wife up over the little landing-ladder. Her feet fumbled on the rubber treads and she clung a trifle nervously to his blue serge sleeve. + 

“We may be in time yet,” said Mr. Carver quite happily. Then, with severity, “The starting gun is late.” His tone implied that starting guns were not what they used to be. In the days when he was president of the Seaconsit Yacht Club⁠— + 

Jane, perched on the rail, her rubber-shod feet upon the varnished bench, suddenly realized that she was laughing aloud. Carvers were pathetic. They were all over sixty. They didn’t know how funny they were. Jane felt distinctly sorry for them. To a discerning daughter-in-law they didn’t really matter. + 

One white-clad sailor was pulling up the ladder. Another was standing by to push off the launch. Mr. Carver had taken his seat at the wheel. His shrivelled little New England face, with its grey Vandyke beard, was turned sideways and upward, estimating the weather. + 

“Not much wind,” he said. + 

The whir of the gasoline engine increased in volume, then quieted suddenly to a steady purr. The water widened between the launch and the pier. Jane turned to watch the catboats, veering and tacking now, around the first buoy. Suddenly she heard the gun. Mr. Carver rose from his seat, still holding the wheel, to observe the start. Alden and Silly were well in the rear. That was too bad, thought Jane. She had long ago decided that, all things considered, it was preferable to listen to Alden talking all evening of how he had won a race than of how he had lost one. + 

II + 

“If the wind hadn’t dropped at the second buoy,” said Alden, “we should have come in third.” + 

“You made a mistake,” said Mr. Carver, “splitting tacks on the second leg.” + 

“We only missed that puff by four seconds,” said Silly. + 

“But you missed it,” said Mr. Carver. + 

“That was a matter of luck,” said Alden. + 

“Exactly,” said Mr. Carver. “I’m talking of the science of seamanship.” + 

Jane, busy again with her knitting before the living-room fire, was not bothering to listen. It was just the same sort of talk she had heard at Gull Rocks every Wednesday and Saturday evening of July and August for the last twelve years. Sometimes she listened. Sometimes she even joined in the argument. But tonight she was watching Stephen over her amber knitting-needles in silence. + 

Stephen, settled in a chintz-covered armchair, with his daughter Cicily on a stool at his feet, was following the conversation of the assembled Carvers with interest. He was sailing the race over again with Alden and Silly. Jane knew he knew every rock in the harbour, every trick of the summer breeze that blew over the blue waters of the bay. In spite of the animation of his face, he seemed tired and very much in need of his holiday. Surrounded by the tanned yachtsmen he looked strangely white. The flesh under his eyes was just a little puffy and there was a new drawn line that Jane had never seen before around one corner of his mouth. Stephen had been very busy working over that bank merger. It had been a hot summer in the West. + 

Stephen didn’t have much fun, thought Jane. With a sudden pang she realized that he looked his forty-four years. His curly, blond hair had receded over his temples and was streaked with grey above the ears. The temples were rather shiny and the hair was growing perilously thin⁠—considering Uncle Stephen and the forces of heredity⁠—in a small circular area at the top of his head. His grey sack suit was just a little wrinkled after a hot afternoon in a New England train. Yes⁠—Stephen looked just like what he was⁠—the forty-four-year-old first vice-president of the Midland Loan and Trust Company, badly in need of his summer vacation. + 

Men drew the short straw in the lottery of life, reflected Jane, as she looked at him. Men like Stephen, at least. Miss Thomas had claimed it was a man-made world. If so, men had certainly made it with a curious disregard of their own comfort and convenience. How terrible to have to be the first vice-president of a bank and work eight hours a day for forty years at a mahogany desk in the executive offices of the Midland Loan and Trust Company and never have more than a three weeks’ holiday! Why did men do it? When the world was so wide and so full of a number of things and they didn’t really have to marry to⁠—to enjoy themselves. + 

Wives didn’t appreciate husbands. Ridiculous for her to carry on so about just having to live in idleness with the Carvers⁠—who were, after all, quite harmless⁠—at Gull Rocks⁠—which was, after all, very pretty⁠—for two brief months every summer, while Stephen⁠— + 

“It wasn’t luck,” said Mr. Carver, “that you had to concede the right of way to the Uncateena. If you hadn’t been on the port tack, she would have had to give you room around the mark.” + 

“We shouldn’t have been on the port tack,” said Alden stubbornly, “if the wind hadn’t shifted.” + 

“I think the winds are so uncertain this time of year,” put in Mrs. Carver pacifically. + 

It was really pretty terrible to have to listen to them, thought Jane. Day in and day out. Perhaps it was worse than being the first vice-president of a bank. Men never had to listen to what bored them. Or did they? A sudden recollection of Stephen’s patient face across the candlelight at her father’s dinner-table rose in Jane’s mind. Stephen, listening to her mother and Isabel. Robin, listening to her mother and Isabel. Her father, listening to her mother and Isabel. The patient “Oh, all right, Lizzie!” that had terminated, since her earliest memory, so many of the Wards’ domestic discussions. + 

Perhaps people were all bored most of the time after they were thirty-six, thought Jane. Perhaps being bored was just a part of growing up and growing old. The excitement went out of things. Life no longer had a surprise up its sleeve. But still, after you were thirty-six, you went on living for another thirty-six years or so. Living and thinking about annoying trifles. + 

Why had Stephen, at twenty-two, wanted to be a banker? Why had Stephen, at twenty-nine, wanted, so desperately, to marry her? Why did he want, now, after fifteen years, to go on working at that mahogany desk, to protect the interests of the Midland Loan and Trust Company and support his wife and three children? Why did he want to waste the pathetic brevity of his three weeks’ holiday at Gull Rocks every summer, when the world was full of beautiful, bewildering places that he would never see and life might be full of strange exotic experiences that he would never know? What kept men faithful, throughout a long lifetime, to the banks and the wives they had embraced in early manhood? The sense of duty? The force of habit? The hands of their children, perhaps. + 

Jane looked at her fourteen-year-old daughter. Her young tanned face alight with enthusiasm, Cicily was sailing the race over, too, but rather with her father in a phantom catboat than with her aunt and uncle in the prosaic vessel now riding at its moorings beyond the pier. Cicily adored Stephen. And Stephen adored Cicily. In his eyes she could do no wrong. She could not even sit up too late. Jane knew she should have been in bed an hour ago. The other children had gone upstairs at eight. + 

“Cicily,” she said, “it’s ten o’clock.” + 

“But tonight’s Saturday,” said Stephen quickly. It was a family joke. Whatever night it was was always his excuse for letting Cicily sit up ten minutes longer. + 

“Yes, tonight’s Saturday, Mumsy!” echoed the child. “And it’s Daddy’s first evening.” + 

Jane smiled indulgently. It was very difficult not to smile indulgently at Cicily and Stephen. + 

“You heard your mother,” said Mr. Carver with severity. + 

The child rose reluctantly from her stool. She looked reproachfully at Jane, with Stephen’s eyes and Stephen’s smile. “Why stir up Grandfather?” her glance said, plainer than words. She looked a trifle mutinous and very pretty, with her cheeks flushed in the firelight and her crisply curly fair hair a little loosened from the bow at her neck. + 

“Good night,” said Stephen, as she kissed his bald spot. + 

“Good night,” said Jane, as her lips met her daughter’s smooth cheek. As she stooped for the caress, the child’s fair hair streamed over her mother’s shoulder. + 

“Melisande!” laughed Stephen. + 

“I want to put it up,” said Cicily. “I’m fourteen and a half.” + 

“Picnic tomorrow!” said Stephen, as his daughter turned toward the door. Her face lit up as she threw him a smile over her smocked shoulder. “That child’s growing up,” said Stephen, as she vanished into the hall. + 

III + 

Jane sat at her dressing-table, brushing the long straight strands of her brown hair, looking critically at her reflection in the glass as she did so. For more than a year, now, Jane had been endeavouring to think of herself as “middle-aged.” On the momentous occasion of her thirty-fifth birthday she had said firmly to Stephen, “Middle-age is from thirty-five to fifty.” But curiously enough, in spite of that stoical statement, Jane had continued, incorrigibly, to think of herself as “young.” In this soft light, thought Jane dispassionately, in her new pink dressing-gown, she really did not look old. And she was prettier at thirty-six than she had been at twenty. No, not that, exactly. The freshness was gone. But prettier for thirty-six than she had been for twenty. At twenty everyone was pretty, and most girls had been, after all, much prettier than she. But at thirty-six⁠—Jane smiled engagingly at her reflection⁠—she held her own with her contemporaries. + 

At thirty-six the trick was not so much to look pretty as to look young. Beauty helped, of course, but not as much as youth. And she was still slim and agile and not grey and⁠—but what difference did it make, anyway? It didn’t make any difference at all, thought Jane solemnly, unless, like Flora, you were still unmarried, or, like Muriel, though married, you went on collecting infatuated young men. + 

What use had Jane, in the Colonial cottage in the Chicago suburb, for youth or beauty or any other intriguing quality? Looking young didn’t help you to preside over the third-grade mothers’ meeting in the Lakewood Progressive School. Looking beautiful didn’t help you to keep your cook through a suburban winter. There was Stephen, of course. But wasn’t it Stephen’s most endearing quality⁠—or was it his most irritating?⁠—that for ten years or more Stephen had never really thought about how she looked at all? To Stephen Jane looked like Jane. That was enough for him. + 

The attitude was endearing, of course, when you looked a fright. When you were having a baby, or trying to get thin after nursing one, or hadn’t been able to afford a new evening gown, or suddenly realized that you looked a freak in the one you had afforded. In crises of that nature it was always very comforting to reflect that Stephen would never notice. But in other crises⁠—when the baby was a year old and you weighed a hundred and thirty pounds again and you had bought a snappy little hat that⁠—or even when you were sitting in front of your dressing-table in a soft light and a new pink dressing-gown, waiting for Stephen to stop gossiping with his mother and come up to join you⁠—it was irritating to reflect that, no matter what you did, to Stephen you would always look exactly as you always had. That you would look like Jane. + 

Jane put down her hairbrush with a sigh of resignation and selected a new pink hair-ribbon from her dressing-table drawer. She tied it carefully in a bow above her pompadour and, picking up a hand glass, turned to admire the effect in the mirror. She wished her hair were curly. Suddenly the frivolity of that immemorial wish and the sight of the flat satin hair-ribbon and the long strands of straight hair made Jane think of André. Of André and of being fourteen. Of Flora’s red-gold tresses and Muriel’s seven dark finger curls. Of André’s resolute young face and the shy, unspoken admiration in his eloquent young eyes. Funny that just the sight of a hair-ribbon should make her feel his presence so vividly. Should so recall that funny little warm, happy feeling, deep down inside, that was so integral a part of being fourteen and loving André and never feeling quite sure of how he felt about her in return. + 

André. André was a bridegroom now. Four months a bridegroom. Jane wished she had written to him, as she almost had, that day last spring when she had found his picture in the May copy of Town and Country in Muriel’s living-room. But it had seemed absurd to break a silence of fifteen years’ duration just because she had seen a snapshot, from the camera of the Associated Press, of André, with averted head and raised silk hat, resplendent in bridal finery, hastening through the classic portico of the Madeleine with a vision in floating tulle on his arm. A vision reported to be, in the legend beneath the snapshot. Mademoiselle Cyprienne Pyramel-Gramont, daughter of the Comte et Comtesse Jean Pyramel-Gramont. “Noted Sculptor Weds” had been the caption. + 

André was a noted sculptor. One of France’s most distinguished sons. Eight years ago, on the occasion of her memorable trip abroad with Stephen, Jane had come suddenly on his Adam in the corridors of the Tate Gallery. Stephen had called her attention to it. He had noticed it because it was double-starred in Baedeker. “This can’t be your Duroy,” he had said. + 

Later his Eve had met Jane’s eye with an enigmatic smile over her yet untasted apple, in the entrance of the Luxembourg. An Eve still innocent, but subtly provocative. Jane had regarded her with wistful interest. What had André said in the postscript of his long explanatory letter⁠—Jane had never forgotten⁠—“There is something of you in all my nymphs and Eves and saints and Madonnas?” And what was Stephen saying at the moment? “Golly, she smiles like you, Jane! He never got over you!” + 

“Well, why should he?” she had retorted lightly. But her mind was still busy with the postscript. “Something you brought into my life. Romance, I guess. Nothing more tangible.” + 

She had brought romance into André’s life, as they walked up the Lake Shore Drive together, with their schoolbooks under their arms. He was achieving its fulfilment, now with this French Cyprienne, in exotic settings that Jane could not even imagine. André was thirty-eight. Yet André was a bridegroom, while she, Jane, was a settled suburban housewife and the middle-aged mother of a fourteen-year-old daughter and an eleven-year-old daughter and a nine-year-old son. Jane felt devoutly grateful that the Atlantic rolled between them. That André would never see her again. That he would think of her, always, as she looked in a hair-ribbon, while Cyprienne had babies and grew old and came to look only like Cyprienne. But Cyprienne wouldn’t grow so very old, thought Jane almost resentfully, while André lived to see her. Cyprienne, under the floating tulle, hadn’t looked a day over eighteen. Four years older than Cicily, perhaps, and bewitchingly pretty. Sixteen-year-old André, a middle-aged Frenchman with a child bride! + 

Jane shivered as she thought of it. Men should marry when they were young. André should have married when he loved her. But if he had he would never have become one of France’s most distinguished sons. Chicago would have stifled him. André might have been a banker by this time, thought Jane, if he had taken her on at nineteen. And he had had the sense to foresee it. His abrupt departure from her life had been much in the romantic tradition established by Romeo in the balcony window. His alternatives had been the same. “I must be gone and live, or stay and die!” + 

But she had married young. And Stephen had been young when she married him. They had had together those ridiculous, unthinking, heartbreaking years of almost adolescent domesticity, with two babies in the sand pile and another in the perambulator and a contagious disease sign often on the front door and a didy always on the clothesline! They’d had all that. But had they really had romance? Romance, such as she’d known with André? Stephen had had it, perhaps, in the first years of their marriage. But⁠—had she? Hadn’t she always been rather afraid of romance, all those young years when it might have been hers for the taking? Did a woman ever really value romance until she felt it slipping away from her? Wasn’t that the surest sign of all of being middle-aged? You might be still slim and agile and not grey, but when you felt that wistful, almost desperate impulse to live your life to the full before it was over, didn’t it really mean that it was over, that youth, at any rate, was over, that it was too late to recapture the glamour that you saw only in retrospect⁠— + 

But this was ridiculous, thought Jane. Life wasn’t over at thirty-six. She loved Stephen and Stephen loved her. He had never looked at another woman. Anything they wanted was theirs for the taking. Their personal relationship was only what they made it. She must say to Stephen, “Look at me, Stephen! Really look at me! You haven’t for ten years!” And he would laugh⁠—of course he always laughed at her⁠— + 

That was Stephen’s step on the stair. + 

Jane looked quickly about the bedroom. Yes, it was very neat. Mrs. Carver was an excellent housekeeper and Jane herself was always tidy. Her underclothes were meticulously folded on a chair by the dressing-table and the linen sheets of the twin four-poster mahogany beds were turned smoothly down over the rose-coloured comforters. Stephen’s clean blue pajamas were folded on his pillow. + 

As he opened the door, Jane rose from her mirror to meet him. He stood a moment on the threshold, smiling contentedly around the lamplit room. Dear old Stephen⁠—even in the soft light he still looked white and jaded. Jane walked slowly over to him. + 

“Glad to be here?” she smiled up into his eyes. + 

“You bet!” said Stephen fervently. + 

“I’m glad you’ve come,” said Jane. + 

Stephen closed the door. + 

“How’s it been?” said Stephen. “Family been bothering you?” + 

“Oh, no,” said Jane. + 

Stephen slipped off his grey sack coat and hung it carefully over the back of a chair. + 

“It’s a pretty good old place,” said Stephen. He walked over to the window in his shirtsleeves and peered out into the darkness beyond the screen. + 

“Smell that sea-breeze,” said Stephen. He snuffed the briny air luxuriously for a moment in silence. + 

“Put out the lamp,” said Stephen. “The moon’s just rising over the bay.” + 

Smiling a little, Jane pushed the button and walked blindly over to him in the darkness. She slipped her arm though his. The brown film of screen had grown suddenly transparent. The lawn and beach and harbour were flooded with silver light. The waning moon swung low in the eastern sky. Jane gazed in silence as small objects on the lawn slowly took form and substance in the unearthly radiance. The outcrops of granite rock cast clear-cut shadows on the greyish grass. The weather beaten outline of a clump of stunted cedars at the foot of the pier stood out in black silhouette against the silver waters of the harbour. The slender mast of the catboat rocked uneasily at its moorings. A lighthouse winked, deliberately, far out in the bay. One white flash and two red. Jane could hear the little harbour waves, quite distinctly, as they rippled on the shingle. Then the faint moaning of the bell-buoy that marked the hidden reef beyond the point. Jane pressed her cheek gently against Stephen’s arm. + 

“I’m very glad you’ve come,” she said. + 

Stephen turned his head abruptly. Her voice seemed to rouse him from revery. + 

“I guess it was time,” he said cheerfully. “Mother seems a bit on edge.” + 

Jane dropped his arm. She moved away from him in the square of moonlight that fell through the casement. + 

“What about?” she asked. + 

“Oh⁠—nothing much,” said Stephen still cheerfully. Then, after a moment, “Don’t you think, Jane, you could persuade Miss Parrot to use the back stairs?” + 

Jane moved in silence back to her dressing-table. She switched on the light abruptly and sat down on her chair. + 

“I’ve said all I could,” said Jane. “You know how Miss Parrot is. She’s an awfully good heart nurse. I don’t want to rock the boat.” + 

Stephen untied his necktie and removed his collar in silence. He walked slowly across the room to place them on top of his chest of drawers. Jane watched him in her mirror. Suddenly she caught the gleam of irritation in her own eyes. She gazed steadily at her reflection until it faded into a twinkle of amusement. + 

“Stephen,” she said resolutely, wheeling round in her chair, “don’t talk about Miss Parrot.” + 

“All right,” said Stephen, “I won’t.” He was unbuttoning his waistcoat a trifle absentmindedly. “How’s the weather been? Good sailing breeze, all month?” As he spoke he turned to smile at her. Jane regarded him steadily. Poor old Stephen⁠—he looked very tired. As for herself, from the nature of his smile Jane knew what she looked like. There was absolutely nothing to be done about it. She looked like Jane. + 

IV + 

“I’d go, if I were you,” said Silly. + 

“It’s only for a week, of course,” said Jane. + 

“The children will be all right with Miss Parrot,” said Silly. + 

“Oh, yes,” said Jane. “It’s just moving them back West.” + 

“Stephen can do that,” said Silly. + 

They were lying side by side in the shadow of a rock on the sands of Pine Island. Two weeks of Stephen’s precious holiday had already passed. The litter of a picnic luncheon defiled the beach at their feet. A few yards away little Steve, in his scarlet bathing-suit, was digging a canal in the wet brown sand where the waves were breaking. Cicily and Jenny were tossing a baseball back and forth, a little farther down the beach. Stephen and Alden, leaning back against a boulder, were enjoying their after-luncheon cigarettes and discussing the hilarities of the twenty-fifth reunion of the Class of ’88, which Alden had superintended at Cambridge the preceding June. + 

“And on Sunday,” said Alden, with a reminiscent chuckle, “we had an excursion by steamer to Gloucester. Some excursion! More liquid in the bar than in the bay!” + 

“I’d go,” repeated Silly. “I’d do whatever I wanted to, whenever I could.” + 

On Silly’s lips the simple statement took on a wistful significance. Jane’s absent eyes had been fixed on her unconscious children. She turned, now, to contemplate her sister-in-law. Silly’s long angular frame was carelessly clothed in a weather-beaten brown tweed skirt and sun-streaked tan sweater. A dilapidated brown felt hat of Alden’s was pulled well down over her forehead to protect her eyes from the glare. Her clean white sport shirt was buttoned mannishly about her neck, and a diamond horseshoe pin, which had been Mr. Carver’s generous gesture on the occasion of her forty-fifth birthday, was negligently thrust through her orange tie. It twinkled, inappropriately, in the brilliant sunshine. She lay flat on her back on the beach, gazing up at the silver clouds that floated in the stainless August sky. A queer weather-beaten figure curiously akin to the rocks and the sands and the clumps of stunted pine trees that gave the island its name. A pathetic figure and, strangely enough, it seemed to Jane, a beautiful one at the moment. The rough outline of tweed and worsted could not conceal the Diana-like grace of Silly’s lank body, nor mar the delicacy of her slender ankles nor the strength of her slim wrists nor the angular beauty of her long, lean hands. Jane peeped under the turned-down hat-brim. Silly might boast the body of a goddess, but her face was uncompromisingly that of a forty-six-year-old New England spinster. Plain, tanned, and austere, it was set in its familiar lines of controlled resignation. + 

When had Silly ever done what she wanted to, thought Jane? Never since Jane had known her. For the last fifteen years, as all the Carvers knew quite well, Silly had wanted to do only one thing. To break away from the family and the place at Gull Rocks and the house on Beacon Street and buy a little stone-strewn farm at Topsfield, Massachusetts, and keep cocker-spaniel kennels there with Susan Frothingham. Susan was now forty-eight. For the last fifteen years, she had wanted to break away from the Frothinghams on Arlington Street and live with Silly on a Topsfield hilltop. Jane saw no charms in Susan. A fat, uninteresting New England old maid, if there ever was one. Still⁠—if Silly liked her and she liked Silly⁠—it was dreadful what life did to single women. What families did to single women. Well-to-do families, throwing destitute middle-aged daughters an occasional diamond horseshoe, but denying them the right to independence. The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. + 

“If you want to go to New York to see Agnes,” pursued Silly, still gazing at the silver cloud, “I think you ought to go.” + 

“Your mother won’t like to have Stephen take the children back West alone,” said Jane. + 

“I’m tired of seeing the men in this family considered!” said Silly with sudden violence. “I’d like to see one of the women get her innings for a change.” + 

“Oh, I never consider Stephen much,” said Jane honestly. “And I get plenty of innings.” + 

“Well, this is an outing,” smiled Silly. “How long since you’ve seen Agnes?” + 

“Oh, mercy!” said Jane. “Ever so long! Seven years. Not since she married. The last time I saw her was when she came West for her father’s funeral.” + 

“I think you ought to go,” repeated Silly. “Mother won’t care as long as you’re going to meet Flora.” + 

That was probably true, thought Jane. The bond between Mrs. Carver and her brother was a very close one. Flora and Mr. Furness were on the water now, returning from a summer in England. Whatever Mrs. Carver might think of the folly of a headstrong daughter-in-law who deserted her husband and children to spend a week in New York for the purpose of seeing an old Bryn Mawr classmate, she would consider it a very suitable attention for Stephen’s wife to meet his uncle and cousin on the dock at Hoboken, bearing appropriate greetings from the Boston connection. + 

Not that Jane cared particularly about meeting Flora. She had seen her in Chicago at Easter and would see her again there in two weeks at the very latest. But the Furnesses’ arrival did make a plausible pretext for a trip to New York, and Jane did care, terribly, about being with Agnes again for a few days and seeing her five-year-old daughter and meeting the gentleman whom Jane had always privately characterized as “that dreadful husband.” + 

In Jane’s opinion, Agnes had ruined her life by marrying Jimmy Trent. She never understood how it could have happened. Levelheaded Agnes, at the great age of thirty-one, with a reputation really established as a writer of short stories, with one good novel published and a better one half-finished, had succumbed to the incomprehensible charm of a ne’er-do-well journalist, hanging about the outskirts of the newspaper world of New York, three years younger than Agnes and perfectly incapable of holding down a lucrative job for more than two months at a time. When Jane considered Agnes as she had been in college, the marriage was really incredible. Agnes, on a Bryn Mawr window-seat, the level head triumphantly crowned with a wreath of potted ivy, saying seriously, “I’m not at all romantic. I just want to accomplish.” + 

One moment of romance had ruined for Agnes ten years of accomplishment. The baby had come at once, of course, and the second novel had never been finished. After a year or two of living in boardinghouses and trying to subsist on Jimmy’s nonexistent income, Agnes had abandoned her writing and had taken a job in the advertising department of Macy’s. It was a good job, she had written Jane very cheerfully, at the time. She liked advertising. On the whole, she liked it better than writing. They had taken a nice little flat in Greenwich Village and little Agnes was established in a play school at the age of three and Jimmy did a little writing, now and then, mainly musical criticism, and worked with his fiddle, which amused him awfully, and took her to hear a lot of good music, of which he was very fond. + 

Jane’s lip curled as she remembered that letter. She had had another last week. It was this second letter that had determined her to go to New York. + 

“I wish I could see you,” Agnes had written. “Jimmy may go West for a few months. He’s had a temporary position offered him on the Chicago Daily News. I hope he takes it, I’d like him to see Chicago. Of course I have to stick at Macy’s.” + 

Jane read between the lines just what Agnes really wanted. She wanted Jane to meet Jimmy and like Jimmy and make things pleasant for him in Chicago, so that he would hold down this new job and make life a little easier for them all, financially speaking, when he returned to the Greenwich Village flat. Jane didn’t relish the task. She knew perfectly well what she would think of Jimmy and what Stephen would think of Jimmy and what her mother and Isabel and even her father would think of Jimmy, when he showed up in the West. But Agnes was Agnes. And Agnes’s husband was Agnes’s husband. Jane would do what she could for him. But she would like to go to New York and look over the field. + 

“Stephen!” called Silly suddenly. “Don’t you think Jane ought to go to New York?” + 

“Sure I do,” said Stephen amicably. “I’m going to make her go. Of course, I’ve never seen the fatal charm in Agnes⁠—” + 

“But you’re a perfect husband!” cried Jane, sitting up in the sunshine. “It’s time we set sail for home. Come on, girls!” + 

Cicily and Jenny turned at her call. Jenny threw the baseball, with unerring aim, straight into the group around the picnic basket. It landed with a plop, right in the centre of her father’s waistcoat. Cicily and Jenny and little Steve all burst into laughter as he collapsed in mock agony under the force of the blow. Jenny came running up in hilarious apology. An Alice in Wonderland child, with straight fair hair strained back from a round comb on her forehead, and a plain practical little face that was her Aunt Silly’s all over again. She had none of Cicily’s blonde beauty. + 

“Come help us pack up,” said Jane. “We must leave a clean beach.” She was picking up eggshells as she spoke. Silly’s support had strengthened her determination. She would go to New York. Suddenly she realized that she was humming aloud. The refrain of an old Bryn Mawr song, “Once there dwelt captiously a stern papa!” Good gracious! She hadn’t thought of it for nearly twenty years! It would be fun to see Agnes again. + 

II + 

I + 

Nevertheless, seven days later, as Jane stood on the platform of the Bay State Limited in the Boston South Station, waving goodbye to Stephen and the children and Miss Parrot, she felt her eyes fill suddenly with tears. She was always absurd over partings. That very morning, on the front porch at Gull Rocks, when she was saying goodbye to Mr. and Mrs. Carver and Uncle Stephen and Aunt Marie, she had felt a sudden surge of emotion. They were all over sixty. She wouldn’t see them for another ten months. They had been awfully good to her. The congenital peculiarities of Carvers already seemed harmless. Jane had embraced her relatives-in-law with ardour. + 

And now, at the sight of the little smiling, waving group on the dingy platform, Jane had an almost irresistible impulse to jump off the New York train and return to the West with her family at half-after two that afternoon. + 

“Mumsy!” shouted Cicily, hanging on Stephen’s arm. “Can I order the meals ’til you get home?” + 

“Don’t you let her!” cried Jenny, tripping over the cocker-spaniel puppy’s leash in her excitement. “She’d forget and we’d starve!” + 

“Now, don’t worry about anything, Mrs. Carver,” called Miss Parrot, almost losing her balance as little Steve tugged at her hand. He was on his knees on the platform, peering under the train. + 

“I want to see the air brakes!” he cried. + 

“Have a whirl with Agnes,” smiled Stephen. “Don’t let that husband cramp your style!” + 

“I won’t,” said Jane. “But I know I’ll hate him.” + 

The train jerked into motion. Jane pushed by the porter to the step of the car. + 

“Kiss me again, Stephen!” she cried. Stephen jumped to the step beside her. She raised her lips to his. Suddenly he realized that she was crying. + 

“Goodbye, goose!” he said tenderly. As the train gathered speed, he swung back on the platform. + 

“Don’t worry!” called Miss Parrot again, dragging little Steve to his feet. The children were all waving wildly. Stephen threw a last kiss. + 

The porter led Jane firmly back into the vestibule and closed the train doors. She couldn’t see the family any longer. She hoped Miss Parrot would hold little Steve’s hand until they were out of the train-shed. It would be just like him to run out on the tracks. But she would, of course. She was very responsible. + 

Jane made her way slowly back through the narrow Pullman corridor to her seat in the parlour car. She was really off. She had not been in New York since she came home from Europe, eight years before. It would be fun to see Agnes again. The children would be perfectly safe with Miss Parrot. And she would be home in a week. + 

II + 

The heat of the September day still pervaded the city streets as Jane descended from the top of the Fifth Avenue bus and turned, a trifle uncertainly, under the arch, to walk south and west across Washington Square. Jane had had very little experience in looking after herself and she always felt a trifle uncertain when wandering alone in strange places. Earlier that very afternoon, in emerging from the Bay State Limited, she had found the congested turmoil of the Grand Central Station a little overwhelming. It had seemed quite an adventure to choose a black porter and follow him as he threaded his way through the crowded concourse and out past the swinging doors through the traffic of Forty-Second Street to the lobby of the Belmont Hotel. + 

Jane had felt just a little queer, as she stood alone at the desk, her luggage at her feet, signing the register and asking for a single room and bath for the night. It was perfectly ridiculous⁠—she was thirty-six years old⁠—but Jane really couldn’t remember ever having spent a night alone at a hotel before. She was very glad that Flora and Mr. Furness would join her at noon next day and greatly relieved to discover that a letter from Agnes was waiting for her, confirming her invitation to dinner and containing explicit directions as to how to reach the Greenwich Village flat. + 

“Come at six,” Agnes had written. “I get out of Macy’s at five-thirty and I’ll be there before you.” + 

She was perhaps a trifle early, reflected Jane, as she paused in the path to reassure herself as to just which direction was west. She had allowed too much time for the bus ride through the afternoon traffic. She had been glad to get out of her hotel bedroom. Once her bag was unpacked, there was nothing to do there but stare through the dingy lace curtain, which had seemed at once curiously starched and soiled, at the taxis and streetcars that congested Forty-Second Street and the crowds of suburbanites who were pouring into the entrance of the Grand Central Station. She had watched the station clock for fifteen minutes and when the hands pointed to five she had left the room. + 

Washington Square, thought Jane, gazing curiously about her, wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. It didn’t look like the cradle from which a city’s aristocracy had sprung. There was a nice old row of redbrick houses at the north end, but many of them seemed rather gone to seed and dilapidated, and the grass in the Square was worn down to hard-caked mud and the elm trees were leafless, and the shirt-sleeved men and shawled women on the benches and the dirty little dark-eyed children who were playing marbles and hopscotch on the path were the kind that you would only see “west of Clark Street” at home. + 

Jane left the Square at the southwest corner and, referring once more to the written directions that Agnes had given her, plunged into the congestion of the city streets. This was a funny place to choose to live in, thought Jane, as she pushed through a group of pale-faced little girls, skipping rope on the sidewalk. It was a funny place to choose in which to bring up a child. A group of shabby young men, hanging about the entrance of a corner saloon, commented favourably on her appearance as she approached them. Jane held her chin high and passed on in disdain. The green baize door swung open to admit an elderly hobo and Jane caught a whiff, across the stale heat of the pavement, of the acrid damp odour of beer. She thought the disreputable bar looked rather cool and dark and inviting from the glare of the city street. She could quite understand why the group of shabby young men liked to linger there. + 

At the next corner she stood amazed and delighted at the sight that met her eye. A curving vista of narrow street, flanked by tall redbrick houses trellised with iron fire escapes. The fire escapes were festooned with varicoloured washing and all the windows were wide open and the windowsills were hung with bedding. From nearly every window a dark-haired woman and a couple of children were hanging out, leaning on the bedding and gazing down at the street beneath them. The street itself was crowded with push carts and fruit stands. Great piles of golden oranges and yellow bananas were displayed for sale. Clothing hung fluttering from improvised frame scaffolds. A fish vendor was crying his wares at her elbow. The front steps of all the houses were crowded with people laughing and talking together and shouting to the purchasers that clustered about the open-air booths. The dingy store on the corner had a sign in its dirty window, “Ice⁠—kindling⁠—coal and charcoal.” A little olive-faced girl came out of it balancing an old peach basket on her head. It contained a melting lump of ice. She skipped gaily down the street and vanished into a basement entrance. The store on the opposite corner had a foreign sign in the doorway. “Ravioli. Qui si vende Pasta Caruso. Speciahtà in Pasta Fresca.” Jane was suddenly enchanted with Greenwich Village. Still⁠—it was a funny place to choose in which to bring up a child. + 

Presently she came to Agnes’s corner. Charlton Street was quite broad and paved with cobblestones. A car-track ran down the centre of the street. The houses on both sides were built of red brick, with white frame doorways. Nice white-panelled front doors with fanlights above them and brass knobs and knockers, some brightly polished. The windows were all square-paned and many of the houses had green window-boxes. The plants in them were drab and shrivelled, however, in the city heat. Jane did not see a single flower. + 

Agnes’s house was in the centre of the block. It looked just like all the others. There was a sign in the downstairs front window, “Furnished Room. Gents Preferred.” Jane mounted the front steps and regarded the empty hole, where a doorbell had once hung, for a moment in perplexity. Then she pushed open the front door. She found herself in a small white-panelled vestibule, carpeted with yellow linoleum. Three mailboxes met her eye and on the middle one a card, “Mr. and Mrs. James Trent.” She pushed the electric bell beneath the mailbox and, after a minute or two in which absolutely nothing happened, she opened the inner door. The odour of cooking cabbage instantly assailed her nostrils. The entrance to the first apartment was on her left hand. A white-panelled door, soiled with countless fingerprints. A straight, steep staircase, with uncarpeted wooden treads, led to the upper floors. Jane slowly ascended the stairs into comparative darkness. The odour of cooking cabbage grew fainter. At the front end of the upper corridor was a second white-panelled door. Jane knocked at it tentatively. She heard, immediately, the sound of masculine footsteps and the airy notes of a masculine whistle, a fragment of “La Donna e mobile” from Rigoletto. The door was suddenly opened by a young man. He stood smiling at her on the threshold. A rather charming young man, with tousled dark hair and an open collar, who looked, Jane thought from the dusk of the corridor, with his quizzical eyebrows and his pointed ears and his ironical smile, exactly like a faun. + 

“Come in,” he said pleasantly. + 

“I⁠—I’m looking for Mrs. James Trent,” said Jane. + 

“Come in,” the young man repeated. Jane stepped, a little hesitantly, over the threshold. “You must be Jane.” His smile deepened into a grin of appreciation. “You don’t look at all as I thought you would. Come in and sit down. Agnes will be home any minute.” Then, as she continued to stare at him in perplexity, “I’m Jimmy.” + 

Jane’s eyes widened with astonishment. This boy, Jimmy⁠—Agnes’s husband? He did not look a day over twenty-five. Jane knew he was thirty-four, however. + 

“Oh⁠—how do you do?” she said. “Yes⁠—I’m Jane.” + 

Agnes’s living-room was pleasantly old-fashioned. The ceiling was high and was decorated with a rococo design in plaster that looked, Jane thought, like the top of a wedding cake. A charming Victorian mantel of white marble dominated one end of the room. It was adorned with a bas-relief of cupids holding horns of plenty in their chubby arms. The cupids were dusty and the hearth was discoloured and the fireplace was filled with sheets of musical manuscript, torn in twain. Two tall chintz-hung windows looked over Charlton Street and a battered davenport sofa was placed beneath them. The sofa was strewn with other sheets of music, and a violin lay on a pile of disordered cushions in one corner. The top of the mantelpiece was piled with books, and a high white bookcase, filled with heterogeneous volumes, occupied one end of the room. A small gate-legged table, covered with a clean linen cloth, stood near the hearth, with an armchair on one side of it and a child’s Shaker rocker on the other. Through the half-open folding-doors across from the fireplace Jane caught a glimpse of a little room that was evidently a nursery. The floor was strewn with toys and a white iron crib stood near the window. + 

“Sit down,” said Jimmy, throwing an armful of music from the sofa to the floor. “Hot as hell, isn’t it?” + 

“I’m afraid I’m very early,” said Jane, sitting down in the armchair. + 

“No. Agnes is late,” said Jimmy. He was standing before the Victorian mantel, still regarding her with an appreciative grin. “You look as cool as a cucumber in that blue silk. Maybe I ought to put on my coat.” + 

“Oh, no,” said Jane politely. She hadn’t noticed his shirtsleeves until that moment. + 

“Well, anyway, a necktie,” persisted Jimmy engagingly, fingering his open collar. + 

“You look very nice and Byronic as you are,” smiled Jane. + 

“I know I do,” said Jimmy rather surprisingly. “I get away with a lot of that Byron stuff. But just the same I think I owe that French frock a cravat.” He walked across the room as he spoke and, opening a door, disappeared into the inner recesses of the apartment. + 

Jane, left to herself, began to inspect the room once more without rising from her chair. Her eyes wandered to the high bookcase. She recognized some old Bryn Mawr books that had adorned, for two years, the walls of her Pembroke study. The two small blue volumes of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. The green Globe editions of Wordsworth and Shakespeare. The Buxton Forman Keats and Shelley. The Mermaid Series of Elizabethan dramatists. And the long dark red line of Matthew Arnold and Pater. + 

The sound of running water from the interior of the apartment distracted her attention. Jimmy was a great surprise. She had never thought that he would be like that. She glanced at the sheets of music on the sofa. The one on top of the pile was half-filled with pencilled notations. He must have been writing music. Evidently he was a composer on the side. Agnes had never mentioned that. + 

The door to the inner rooms opened suddenly and Jimmy reappeared, freshly washed and brushed, his collar rebut-toned, and a soft blue necktie bringing out the colour in his smiling eyes. He picked up his coat from the back of the sofa and put it on with a sigh. + 

“What men do for women!” he murmured as he adjusted his collar. + 

“What women do for men!” laughed Jane. “This dress is French, but it’s fearfully hot.” + 

“I bet you didn’t put it on for me!” grinned Jimmy. Jane’s blush acknowledged the home thrust. “You just wanted to show Agnes how well you’d withstood the assaults of time.” + 

Jane had thought Agnes might think the dress was pretty. Not that Agnes ever noticed clothes, of course. + 

“You must have been an infant prodigy,” went on Jimmy. He was sitting on the sofa now, his elbows on his knees, his eyes fixed flatteringly on her face. + 

“Why?” asked Jane unguardedly. + 

“To have been Agnes’s classmate,” said Jimmy promptly. + 

Jane frowned. She didn’t like that. She didn’t like it at all. That was no way for Agnes’s husband to speak of Agnes. + 

“I wish she’d come home,” she said with severity. + 

“Do you?” smiled Jimmy. “Well, she will soon. She stops at the Play School every evening to bring home the child. It began again last week, thank God! Another day of vacation and I should have committed infanticide.” + 

Jane did not reply to this sally. She continued to look, very seriously, at Jimmy. But he rattled on, ignoring her silence. + 

“A Play School is a wonderful invention. It takes children off their parents’ hands for nine hours a day. I call it immoral⁠—but very convenient. So much immorality is merely convenience, isn’t it? We resort to it, faute de mieux. Saloons and play schools and brothels⁠—they’re all cheap compromises, forced on us by civilization. In an ideal Utopia I suppose we’d all drink and love and bring up our children at home. Do it and like it⁠—though that seems rather a contradiction in terms. Progressive education is really only one of many symptoms of decadence. It’s a sign of the fall of the empire.” He paused abruptly and looked charmingly over at Jane, as if waiting for her applause. Jane felt an inexplicable impulse not to applaud him. + 

“That’s all very clever,” she said quickly. “But of course it isn’t true.” + 

Jimmy burst into amiable laughter. + 

“So you are a pricker of bubbles, are you, Jane?” he asked amusedly. “You certainly don’t look it. Are you a defender of the truth and no lover of dialectic for dialectic’s sake? Do beautiful rainbow-coloured bubbles, all made up of watery ideas and soapy vocabulary, floating airily, without foundation, in the void, mean nothing in your life?” + 

“Very little,” said Jane severely. “I’m a very practical person.” + 

“I seem to be a creature of one idea this afternoon,” said Jimmy lightly, “but I can only repeat⁠—you don’t look it! The picture you present, as you sit in that armchair, Jane, is far from practical⁠—” + 

As he spoke, Jane heard with relief the sound of a latchkey in the outer door. + 

“That’s Agnes!” she cried, springing to her feet. + 

“It must be,” said Jimmy, rising reluctantly to his. + 

The door opened quickly, and Agnes, hand in hand with her five-year-old daughter, stood beaming on the threshold. Just the same old Agnes, with her funny freckled face and her clever cheerful smile! No⁠—somehow a slightly plumper, rather more solid Agnes, with a certain maturity of gesture and authority of eye! Jane clasped her in her arms. It was not until the embrace was over that she noticed how grey Agnes’s hair had grown. It showed quite plainly under her broad hat-brim. Jane sank on her knees before the child. She looked a little pale and peaked, Jane thought, but she was Agnes all o’er again⁠—the little Agnes that Jane had known in the first grades of Miss Milgrim’s School! How preposterous⁠—how ridiculous⁠—to see that little Agnes once more in the flesh! How absurdly touching! Jane clasped the child gently in her arms. + 

“Agnes!” she cried. “She’s precious! She’s just like you!” + 

“Unfortunately,” remarked Agnes with mock criticism. “When she might have favoured her fascinating father! Whatever you may say against Jimmy, Jane, you have to admit he has looks. In six years of matrimony they’ve never palled on me.” + 

“Don’t talk like that, Agnes,” remonstrated Jimmy promptly. “You make me feel superficial. I’ve much more than looks. I’ve all the social graces. I’ve been exhibiting them for Jane’s benefit for the last twenty minutes and I leave it to her if my face is my fortune! I’ve many more important assets.” + 

“How about it, Jane?” said Agnes, smiling. “Did he make the grade?” Behind the smile Jane detected a gleam of real concern in Agnes’s glance. She suddenly recalled that winter afternoon, sixteen years ago, when she had first displayed Stephen to Agnes in Mr. Ward’s library on Pine Street. Handsome young Stephen, flushed from the winter cold! She remembered her own dismay at the unspoken verdict of “cotillion partner” in Agnes’s honest eyes. + 

“Y-yes,” she said slowly, with a twinkle, rising to her feet, still holding the child’s hand in hers. “I think he did⁠—for a first impression.” + 

“If anything,” said Jimmy engagingly, “I improve on acquaintance. I’m an acquired taste, like ripe olives. I feel that’s been said before. Let’s say I’m a bad habit, like nicotine or alcohol. Once you take me up, you’ll find it hard to get on without me.” + 

“Don’t be ridiculous!” said Agnes. She threw a glance at Jane to see how she was taking his banter. + 

“I was just warning her,” said Jimmy. + 

“Jane never needs much warning,” said Agnes. + 

“Now, that’s just the sort of thing she’s always said of you,” sighed Jimmy plaintively. “It gave me such a false impression. I’ve never been attracted by the type of woman who doesn’t need to be warned against a handsome man⁠—” + 

“Agnes,” interrupted Jane, “is he always like this?” + 

“Always,” said Agnes, with great good cheer. She looked distinctly relieved by Jane’s frivolous question. She knew now that Jane was taking Jimmy in the right spirit. “Sometimes he’s worse.” She placed her hand affectionately on Jimmy’s shoulder. “How did the music go today, old top?” + 

“Oh⁠—rotten!” said Jimmy lightly. “My rondo’s a flop.” + 

“He’s writing a concerto for the violin,” explained Agnes, with a glance at the music on the sofa. + 

“Really?” cried Jane, honestly impressed. Then, turning to Jimmy, “Aren’t you excited about it?” + 

He met her shining eyes with an ironical smile. + 

“Well,” he said calmly, “I’ve lost my first fine careless rapture. I’ve been writing it for ten years.” + 

“Some of it’s very good,” said Agnes. + 

“And some of it isn’t,” pursued Jimmy cheerfully. + 

“I want him to finish it,” said Agnes. + 

“And I’m eager to please,” said Jimmy. “So I sit here, day after day, pouring my full heart in profuse strains of unpremeditated art, while Agnes supports me in the style to which I was never accustomed before she laid me on the lap of luxury. I don’t get much done, however.” + 

His voice sounded a little discouraged, Jane thought, in spite of his levity. Agnes changed the subject abruptly. + 

“We’re dining out at a restaurant,” she said. “I won’t cook dinner in hot weather.” + 

“She’s a swell cook, you know,” said Jimmy to Jane. + 

“I’ve known it for twenty years,” said Jane to Jimmy. + 

“Come with me while I clean the child,” said Agnes. She opened the door through which Jimmy had vanished in quest of his necktie. It led into a narrow dark corridor. Agnes pushed open another door and Jane found herself in a bedroom. A very dark bedroom, with one corner window opening on a dingy airshaft. + 

“No electricity,” said Agnes. “It’s a curse.” She struck a match and lit a flaring gas-jet beside a maple bureau. The bureau and two iron beds completely filled the room. One bed was neatly made and covered with a cotton counterpane. The other was in complete disorder. + 

“Jimmy never gets up until after I’ve gone in the morning,” said Agnes apologetically, “so he never gets his bed made until I come home at night.” As she spoke she picked up a pair of pajamas from the floor and hung them on a peg behind the door. A couple of discarded neckties were strewn on top of the bureau. Agnes added them to a long row of other neckties that hung from the brass gas-bracket. Then she tossed off her hat, without even a glance at the mirror, and opening a bureau drawer, took out a clean blue romper for the child. Jane suddenly realized that Agnes looked tired. Her hair was really very grey. + 

“I’ll make the bed,” said Jane. + 

“Oh⁠—do you want to?” asked Agnes. Jane nodded. “Well, it would save time.” She vanished into the bathroom with her daughter. + 

Jane walked very soberly over to the bed and pulled off the sheets and turned the mattress. She heard once more the sound of running water. This bedroom was not fit to live in, thought Jane. A black hole of Calcutta. How could Agnes put up with it? How could Agnes put up with a husband who didn’t get out of bed in the morning until after she had gone down to her office to earn his living? Jane tucked the bottom sheet firmly under the mattress. She’d like to take Jimmy by the ear, she thought, and make him make his own bed, while Agnes sat in a rocking-chair and watched him do it. Jane was thoroughly shocked by Agnes’s revelation. Lots of wives, of course, lay serenely in bed every morning until long after the breadwinner had departed for his day’s work. But that seemed different, somehow. Why did it? If Jimmy had nothing in life to get up for, there was, of course, no real reason for his getting up. Still Jane smoothed the blankets and turned to pick up the counterpane from the windowsill. Wasn’t Jimmy acting just the way she had always wished that Stephen sometimes would? Stephen thought the world would come to an end if he did not catch the eight o’clock train every morning at the Lakewood Station. Jane had been mocking that delusion of Stephen’s for the last fifteen years. + 

Agnes reentered the room with a clean blue-rompered daughter at her side. Jane smoothed the counterpane over the pillow. Agnes walked over to the bureau and, still without glancing in the mirror, ran a comb casually through her low pompadour. Agnes did her hair just the way she always had since the day that she first put it up⁠—a big figure eight twisted halfway up her head in the back. She had always run a comb through it just like that, without a thought for a looking-glass. + 

“Come on,” said Agnes. + 

Jimmy rose from the sofa as they entered the living-room. + 

“Where are we going?” he asked. “Tony’s?” + 

“I thought so,” said Agnes. Then, turning to Jane, “Or do you hate Italian food?” + 

The night was so hot that Jane thought that she would hate food of any nationality. + 

“I love it,” she said falsely. + 

They all walked down the corridor and the uncarpeted stairs into the odour of cooking cabbage and out into the comparative freshness of the sultry street. + 

“Tony’s is just around the corner,” said Agnes. She slipped one arm through Jane’s and the other through Jimmy’s. Little Agnes skipped on ahead of them. She seemed to know the way to Tony’s quite as well as her parents did. Jane threw a glance past Agnes’s clever, contented face to Jimmy’s faun-like countenance. It was clever, too, but it wasn’t very contented, Jane thought. In the grey September twilight Jimmy looked older than he had in the softer light of the chintz-hung living-room. Suddenly he met her eyes and smiled. + 

“This is swell!” he said cheerfully. “But an embarrassment of riches! Taking two beautiful women out to dinner at Tony’s the same night!” And suddenly he began softly, ridiculously, to sing. + 

“How happy could I be with either, + 

Were t’other dear charmer away!” + 

A wrinkled old woman, pulling a little wagon full of kindling, turned to smile toothlessly up at him at the sound of his artless tenor. He grinned at her pleasantly and resumed his song. Jimmy might be irritating, thought Jane, and of course he was a worthless husband, but he had charm. + 

III + 

The waiter’s hand, which touched Jane’s accidentally as he placed her demitasse before her, felt damp and warmly clammy. His collar was wilted and great drops of perspiration beaded his swarthy brow. Throughout the meal Jane had seen him surreptitiously mopping it with the wrinkled napkin that hung over his arm. Tony’s was hot and very crowded. Vaguely conscious of having eaten too much garlic in the salad and too much cheese in the spaghetti and of having drunk rather more Chianti than was perhaps quite wise on such a warm evening, Jane was half-listening to Jimmy, who was conversing most intelligently on modern American music, and half-reflecting that little Agnes, who had eaten quite as much garlic and cheese as she had herself, should have been in bed hours ago and would certainly be sick when once she was. The child was half-asleep in her chair. + 

Agnes was arguing with Jimmy, also most intelligently, on modern American music and everyone else within hearing at the little candlelit tables seemed to be arguing also. Across the room four dark-eyed, oily-headed, hairy-wristed young men were certainly arguing very vociferously in Italian on some unknown subject, and, just beyond them, a middle-aged woman with short grey hair and a green smock was arguing in tense undertones with her adolescent escort as to whether or no he should order another apricot brandy, and at the round table in the middle of the room an uproarious group of young men and women were shouting their arguments on the relative merits of Matisse and Picasso, two painters, apparently, of whom, until that moment, Jane had never even heard. + 

In spite of the heat and the garlic and the cheese and the arguments, and, possibly, Jane thought, partly because of the Chianti, she had enjoyed the evening very much indeed. It was fun to be with Agnes again and fun, after two months at Gull Rocks, to be chattering carelessly with contemporaries whose intellectual slant on life was the same as her own. Moreover, Jane, in the course of the evening, had become comfortingly reassured about Jimmy. Why, she almost understood, already, why Agnes had married him. He was certainly amusing and seemed also to be intelligent, and he was very much sweeter with Agnes and his little daughter thar Jane had expected him to be after his cavalier references to them in his initial advances toward her. He did not seem at all like Agnes’s husband, of course. He did not seem like anyone’s husband. More like some young relative⁠—a brother or a cousin or even a nephew⁠—whose attitude toward his family was marked by humorous detachment, affectionate and appreciative, but distinctly irresponsible. + 

His attitude toward Jane had been marked by a mocking, but flattering, attention and a rapidly increasing sense of intimacy. There was something in his manner, not at all unpleasant, that seemed subtly to suggest that he was always remembering that Jane was a woman and never allowing her to forget that he was a man. Jane could not think of any other American husband who was just like him. Bert Lancaster, of course, was always woman-conscious, but in a slimy, satyrish sort of way that bore no resemblance to Jimmy’s cool recognition of a world in which you felt he thanked God that there were two sexes. There was a friendly matter-of-factness about Jimmy’s frank admiration that made Jane feel very sure that they would get on well together. She was glad that he was coming to Chicago. + 

He was coming, almost immediately, to take up a friend’s job as musical critic on the Daily News, while that friend spent the winter in Munich. He was bringing his fiddle and the unfinished concerto and he expected to get a great deal of work done in some boardinghouse bedroom, with no woman around to distract him. Agnes hoped that he would. She hoped to do some writing herself, in the evenings after little Agnes was in bed. Not the novel, of course⁠—she would never finish that now; but she had plots for a couple of short stories that she thought she could sell and⁠—Jane would laugh at her, she knew⁠—an idea for a play about newspaper life that had never been done before. + 

Jane did not laugh at her. She had no high hopes for Jimmy’s concerto, but she longed to see Agnes take up writing again. She thought that Jimmy would like Chicago. She would introduce him to all Agnes’s old friends and Stephen would put him up at the clubs⁠— + 

“He hadn’t better do that,” Jimmy had interrupted lightly. “At the only club I ever belonged to I was kicked out for nonpayment of dues. I shouldn’t advise a conservative banker to back me at another⁠—” + 

Jane had laughed at his nonsense, wondering, however, just how much Stephen would have laughed had he been present that evening. Jimmy did not seem just Stephen’s kind. Something told her that Jimmy would not take the importance of bank mergers very seriously, and that to Stephen a man without visible means of support, who had spent ten years of his life writing a concerto for the violin, would seem rather one of the broader jokes⁠—unless he seemed just an object of charity, in which case Stephen would be very kind and considerate and helpful, of course, but possibly not entirely understanding. + 

“Agnes,” said Jane suddenly, in the midst of the argument on modern American music, “you ought to put that child to bed.” + 

“I know I ought,” said Agnes, rising regretfully from her chair, “but it’s such fun to be with you again, Jane, and Jimmy’s always so pyrotechnic in the presence of a third person! When I get arguing with him, I never want to stop!” + 

“Not only,” said Jimmy mockingly, “in the presence of a third person. Night after night, Jane, while Agnes is arguing with me, the child falls asleep on the hearth rug.” He, too, was rising regretfully to his feet. He picked up his drowsy daughter. + 

“Can I get a taxi down here?” asked Jane. + 

“Jimmy’ll cruise out and find one,” said Agnes. + 

He left the restaurant with the child on his shoulder. Agnes sank back into her chair. Suddenly she leaned forward across the candlelight. + 

“If I could write a play, Jane,” she said earnestly, “a good bad play, such as managers have confidence in, it might run for a season. If it did, I’d make fifty thousand dollars.” + 

“Oh, Agnes!” said Jane reproachfully. “Don’t talk like that! You never used to. Why do you want to write a bad play⁠—just for a manager? Write a good one if it never gets on. I bet you could. You have lots of ideas⁠—you always had⁠—” + 

“Exactly,” said Agnes, briefly. “I’ve always had more ideas than cash.” Her face clouded a little under Jane’s incredulous stare, then lightened suddenly with conviction. “If you think there’s an idea in my head that I wouldn’t sacrifice for a dollar, you’re very much mistaken. Jane⁠—you have to have money to be happy. If I could make fifty thousand dollars, I’d put every cent of it in trust for little Agnes. It would clothe her and educate her and take care of her as long as she lived. I’d never have to worry about the future again. I wouldn’t feel anxious and driven any longer and I’d stop nagging Jimmy the way I have nagged him ever since Agnes was born, and if I stopped nagging him, we’d have time to talk together the way we used to⁠—to be together the way we used to⁠—Jimmy’s adorable when he isn’t nagged⁠—I adore him when I’m nagging him. But I just can’t help it. I’m growing cross and nervous and old before my time and⁠—” + 

“Taxi waiting!” said Jimmy, at Jane’s elbow. He looked a little curiously, Jane thought, at Agnes’s excited face. But he asked no questions. + 

Agnes rose from the table without speaking. Her hands were trembling a little as she picked up her daughter’s hat from the back of her chair. Jane followed her out onto the sidewalk in silence. She was almost trembling herself from the contagion of Agnes’s excitement. Or was it from the disconcerting glimpse she had had of Agnes’s private life through the rent that Agnes had torn in the curtain that hides the private lives of all married couples from the eyes of the world. She was acutely conscious of the intimacy of the moment that had just passed between them. And terribly sorry for Agnes. And for Jimmy. And terribly thankful in the dark of the uptown-bound taxi, for a husband like Stephen, who was a banker and caught the eight o’clock train every morning and didn’t write concertos and lie in bed and goad her into nagging him until⁠— + 

Jane was so preoccupied with thoughts of husbands and marriage, and what life did to girls who were once young and full of promise and sat on Bryn Mawr window-seats confidently assuming that the world was their oyster, that she almost forgot to feel queer as she passed through the lobby of the Belmont Hotel alone at midnight. But not quite. + 

IV + 

“I thought you’d be more enthusiastic,” said Flora. + 

“I am enthusiastic,” protested Jane. “It’s just that I’m not used to the idea yet⁠—” + 

They were sitting on the edge of Flora’s bed at the Belmont. The room was crowded with gaping trunks and strewn with the silk and satin confusion of Flora’s new winter wardrobe, fresh from the fingers of the Paris dressmakers. Flora, very chic and fair in a new sheath dress of black chiffon, was fastening on her slender wrist the first diamond wrist watch that Jane had ever seen. She was wearing the first slit skirt that Jane had ever seen, also. Jane could not keep her eyes off the unseemly exposure of Flora’s slender black legs. Flora had said they were wearing dresses like that in the streets of Paris. + 

“Be that as it may,” thought Jane, “in the streets of Chicago that skirt will look very queer.” + 

But Flora was only superficially preoccupied with slit skirts and wrist watches. She had been unfolding to Jane her plans for the winter. Jane wondered what her mother and Isabel would think of them. For those plans were very surprising. Flora, incredibly, was going to open a shop. A hat shop. And, of all places, in the old brownstone stable in the back yard on Rush Street. + 

“Lots of women are doing it in London,” said Flora. “I’ve got the duckiest French models and a very clever French vendeuse to help me. We’re going to make hats on the head, you know, just the way they do in Paris. I’m going to turn the coach-house into a showroom and make fitting-rooms out of the stalls. The workshop will be in the hayloft. Papa sold the Daimler last spring, and he thinks it would really be more convenient to use cabs this winter than buy a new one. I’m going to have a black-and-gold sign made to put over the door⁠—‘Chez Flora,’ in a facsimile of my own handwriting. And copy it for the tags inside the hats. That lid of yours is a fright, Jane. It looks almost like Silly’s. I bet you bought it in Boston. You must be my first customer.” + 

The hat did not look like Silly’s, thought Jane indignantly. Then, as she recovered from the passing insult, “Do you expect to make much money?” Jane had been thinking rather wistfully of money and of the difficulty of making it, since her dinner last night with Agnes. + 

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Flora easily. “I guess so. My expenses will be quite heavy. If I do I’ll give it away, of course.” + 

“To whom?” asked Jane. She was wondering already whether if she and Flora could get up a little trust fund for Agnes’s daughter, Agnes would consent to accept it. + 

“Oh⁠—to some charity. I haven’t thought which. My goodness, Jane, I don’t have to worry about that! The poor we have always with us. Mrs. Lester would be glad to grab it for her crippled children.” + 

“I see,” said Jane doubtfully. She was not at all sure that she did. She could not help feeling that Flora must have some very special reason for wanting to do anything so unusual and so unusually unpleasant as running a hat shop. Of course, if it were for charity⁠— + 

“I do think,” said Flora with conviction, “that a really chic hat shop is needed in Chicago. But the main thing is⁠—it will give me something to do.” + 

Across the brass hotel bedstead Jane looked at Flora. Her red-gold hair was just as shiny as ever, her figure was as slender and her eyes as brightly blue. She had never lost that look of the Dresden-china shepherdess. Was it just because Flora had never really done anything that she still seemed as delicate and fragile and fair as a precious piece of porcelain? Things had always been done to Flora. From the hour of her mother’s dreadful dishonoured death, her life had been swallowed up by her ageing father. He had carried her around an empty world, trying to fill its emptiness with her Dresden-china prettiness. She had summered in England and France and Germany and Switzerland. She had wintered in Italy and Egypt and India and Spain. She had opened and closed the brownstone house on Rush Street for innumerable brief Chicago seasons. But she had never settled down⁠—never really belonged anywhere, since the winter of Muriel’s marriage. There had been, of course, that incident in Cairo, eleven years ago, with that young Englishman with the unbelievably British name. Inigo Fellowes!⁠—that was it! Jane had had a letter from Flora⁠—such a happy letter⁠—confiding the secret of her engagement. And three weeks later a second letter, saying that Mr. Furness had been ill in Shepheard’s Hotel and that Flora had been very much worried about him, and that the engagement was broken and that Flora was going to take her father to the South of France for the spring. Jenny had been born two days after the arrival of the second letter. Jane had been too preoccupied to think much about it. She did not see Flora again for two years, and Flora had never mentioned Inigo’s name. And now Mr. Furness was seventy-nine years old and really too feeble to travel any longer. And Flora was thirty-seven and was going to open a hat shop in the brownstone stable in the back yard. + 

Jane thought she would much rather be as grey and as tired as Agnes and work in Macy’s advertising department and sleep in a black hole of Calcutta and nag a worthless husband and worry about a baby’s future than open a hat shop to give herself employment. + 

But she only answered: “Yes, of course it will, Flora. And I’d love to buy a hat. So will Isabel, I know. And Muriel and Rosalie.” She thought her encouragement sounded a trifle hollow, however, and changed the subject brightly. “Did you have fun this summer?” + 

“Yes,” said Flora absently. “We motored in Ireland. How was Gull Rocks? Pretty dull?” Then, without waiting for an answer, “Oh, Jane! Whom do you think I saw in London, just before I sailed?” + 

Jane couldn’t imagine. + 

“André Duroy!” cried Flora. “After all these years! In a picture gallery in New Bond Street. He recognized me. I should never have known him. He asked after you, Jane. I told him all about your children.” + 

Jane sat a moment in silence. + 

“What⁠—what was he like?” she ventured. + 

“Oh⁠—funny,” said Flora. “He’s gone frog. He had a little black beard and a wife who couldn’t speak English.” + 

“Nice-looking?” said Jane, after a pause. + 

“The beard or the wife?” questioned Flora. + 

“The wife,” said Jane. + 

“Oh, very pretty,” said Flora. “A mere child.” + 

Jane sat another moment in silence. She couldn’t think of any other question to ask and Flora evidently considered the subject finished. + 

“Let’s get some theatre tickets,” said Flora. “I’d like a gay evening.” + 

“So would I,” said Jane. She sprang up from the bed. “I’m here for a time and I mean to have it!” + 

Flora took down the telephone receiver and called the ticket broker. + 

“We’ll make Papa stand us to a magnificent dinner,” she said. + 

Jane did not answer. So André had gone frog and had a little black beard. It seemed only yesterday to Jane that she had noticed that André had begun to shave. And Cyprienne couldn’t speak English. She wondered if Flora had told him that Cicily was fourteen. Somehow she hoped that she hadn’t. + 

V + 

“Well⁠—I guess this is goodbye,” said Agnes. + 

“I hate to say it,” said Jane. + 

They were sitting on two high stools in a Broadway Huyler’s and had just finished a luncheon composed of a sandwich and a soda. Jane was going back to Chicago on the Twentieth Century Limited next day and that evening she and Flora and Mr. Furness were having a last whirl at the theatre. + 

Jane had had a gay week in New York. She had seen six plays in seven days and all the picture exhibitions up and down Fifth Avenue and had gone twice to the Metropolitan, and had bought a new dress at Hollander’s and a boxful of toys for the children at Schwartz’s, and had dined once again with Agnes and had had her and Jimmy to dine at the Belmont one evening before a symphony concert. + 

This, of course, was Agnes’s noon hour. She had to be back at Macy’s in ten minutes. Jane seized the soda check and slipped regretfully from her stool. + 

“It has certainly been great to see you,” she sighed. + 

“And you’ll take care of Jimmy in the corn belt,” said Agnes a little wistfully. + 

“Of course I will,” said Jane, pushing the check through the cashier’s cage. “I think he’s a darling. When will he show up?” + 

“Oh⁠—right away,” said Agnes. “He would have loved to go with you, Jane, but he has to pay his own expenses, so the Twentieth Century seemed foolish. He’ll loiter out on some milk train in a day or two and show up in Lakewood looking hungry for a square meal.” + 

“Well, he’ll get one!” Jane pocketed her change. + 

“And now, darling”⁠—Agnes looked steadily in Jane’s shining eyes⁠—“you are a darling, you know, Jane⁠—wish me luck on the play!” + 

“You know I do,” said Jane. “I hope it’s bad enough to run forever.” + 

“It won’t be my fault if it isn’t,” said Agnes. She put one arm around Jane’s waist. Jane looked tenderly at her funny freckled face. + 

“Agnes,” said Jane. “You’re the most gallant person I ever knew.” + 

Agnes smiled in defensive mockery. + 

“No,” said Agnes. “You’ve forgotten. Dido was that.” + 

“Dido?” questioned Jane. Then she remembered. The memory of Agnes’s little front porch, “west of Clark Street,” rose before her. The Aeneid and André and the Thomas Concert. + 

“No,” she said earnestly, “you beat Dido. I’m going to see that the Eroica Symphony is played at your funeral pyre.” + 

“Jimmy might whistle it,” suggested Agnes. Her lips met Jane’s cheek. + 

“Duty calls!” she said. “Goodbye, old speed!” Jane watched her solid, slightly shabby figure disappear in the Broadway traffic. To Jane it looked very heroic. She was conscious, curiously enough, of a slight sense of envy. Agnes’s life, at least, was still an adventure. She was fighting odds and overcoming difficulties. She was struggling with life and love. Goodness! Jane jumped⁠—that taxi had almost exterminated her! If it had, thought Jane, as she pushed her way through the hurrying crowd of Broadway pedestrians, Agnes would have rated that best of epitaphs⁠—“I have lived and accomplished the task that Destiny gave me, and now I shall pass beneath the earth no common shade.” + 

VI + 

Jane sat beside Flora in their compartment on the Twentieth Century, watching Flora and Mr. Furness play cribbage. She was thinking how much Mr. Furness looked like her mother-in-law and how much he looked a venerable codfish and how much more feeble he had grown during his summer months abroad. His hands trembled terribly when he dealt the cards and fumbled as he fixed the little pegs in the holes in the cribbage board. The train had just passed Spuyten Duyvil and the Hudson stretched glittering, a river of steel, in the hazy September sunshine outside the window. + 

It was warm in the compartment, in spite of the whirring electric fan, and Jane was not particularly interested in cribbage. She thought she would go back to the observation car and read a magazine. She said as much and Flora looked up patiently from the cribbage board. Flora was not particularly interested in cribbage either, but Mr. Furness loved it. Jane could remember him playing it with Flora’s mother in the green-and-gold parlour of the Rush Street house. She could remember just how the rings had looked on Flora’s mother’s lovely listless hands as she moved the cribbage pegs. One of those rings, a sapphire between two diamonds, was on Flora’s hand that minute. And Flora’s hand was just as lovely and just as listless. Mr. Furness should have taken up solitaire early in life, thought Jane brutally. + 

She walked through the plush and varnished comfort of the Twentieth Century thinking idly that Flora’s life was terrible. Nothing ever happened in it. She wondered in how many trains, bound for what exotic destinations, Flora had played cribbage with Mr. Furness. Of course, on the Twentieth Century Limited, just passing through Spuyten Duyvil, you would not expect anything very surprising to happen in any case, but on those trains de luxe, en route, for Calcutta and Luxor and Moscow, had not Flora ever felt⁠—Jane passed from the narrow corridor to the observation compartment and saw Jimmy Trent, stretched comfortably in an armchair, scanning the columns of the Evening World. + 

He saw her instantly and cast aside the paper. + 

“I was wondering when you would show up,” he said casually. Then, rising to his feet, “I saw you get aboard and took an upper on the same section. I was just about to page the train for you.” + 

Jane stared at him in astonishment. She could not believe her eyes. + 

“Did⁠—did Agnes know you were coming?” she asked stupidly. + 

“Oh, yes,” said Jimmy. “I had lunch with her. I only decided to come this morning.” + 

“Oh!” said Jane. Then after a tiny pause, “I thought⁠—” + 

“I’ve no doubt,” said Jimmy cheerfully, “that you shared all those thrifty thoughts of Agnes’s about that milk train. But I say anything that’s worth doing at all is worth doing well. And I haven’t been out of New York City for six years.” + 

“Oh!” said Jane again. + 

Jimmy continued to contemplate her with a sunny smile. + 

“I took this train,” he said presently, “because I thought we’d have fun on it together. Don’t you think it’s time we began? We’ve lost almost an hour already.” + 

“What⁠—what do you want to do?” asked Jane, again rather stupidly. She felt totally unequal to coping with Jimmy. + 

“I want to talk to you,” said Jimmy disarmingly. “There’s nothing in all the world as much fun as talk. When you’re talking, that is, with the right person.” + 

Jane, still staring up at him, felt her features harden defensively. + 

Jimmy burst into gentle laughter. + 

“Jane,” he said, “you look like a startled faun! You needn’t. Would it have been more discreet of me to use the plural? Should I have said ‘the right people’? I don’t like that phrase. It has an unfortunate social significance.” + 

Jane began to feel a little foolish. She laughed in spite of herself. Her laughter seemed to cheer Jimmy immensely. + 

“Curious, isn’t it,” he went on airily, “that ‘talking with the right people’ means something so very different from ‘talking with the right person’? You are an awfully right person, Jane. No doubt you’re of the right people, too, but don’t let’s dwell on that aspect of your many charms. Do you want to stand here in the train aisle all afternoon?” + 

Having once laughed, Jane found it perfectly impossible to recapture her critical attitude. + 

“Where shall we go?” she asked. + 

“How about the back platform?” said Jimmy promptly. “Or will the dust spoil that pretty dress?” + 

“Mercy, no,” said Jane. “Nothing could spoil it.” + 

The back platform was rather sunny and quite deserted. Jimmy opened one of the little folding chairs and brushed off the green carpet-cloth seat and placed it in the shade for Jane. He opened another for himself and sat down beside her. Jane looked out over the sparkling river. + 

“Isn’t the Hudson beautiful?” she said. + 

“Don’t let’s talk about the Hudson,” said Jimmy. + 

Jane couldn’t keep from smiling as she met his twinkling eyes. + 

“What shall we talk about?” she said. + 

“I’ll give you your choice of two subjects,” said Jimmy promptly. “You or me!” + 

“In that case I think I’ll choose you,” said Jane. + 

“All right,” said Jimmy. “Shall I begin or do you, too, find the topic stimulating?” + 

“I think I’d like to hear what you have to say for it,” said Jane. + 

“It’s my favourite theme,” smiled Jimmy. “I’ll begin at the beginning. I was born in East St. Louis and I was raised in a tent.” + 

“A tent!” cried Jane. Vague visions of circuses rose in her mind. + 

“Not the kind you’re thinking of,” said Jimmy. “A revivalist’s tent. I’m the proverbial minister’s son. My father was a Methodist preacher.” + 

Jane looked up at him with wide eyes of astonishment. + 

“My mother,” went on Jimmy brightly, “was a brewer’s daughter. Not the kind of a brewer who draws dividends from the company, but the kind who brews beer. My grandfather⁠—so I’m told⁠—used to hang over the vats in person and in shirtsleeves and my mother used to bring him his lunch at the noon hour in a tin pail. My father was an itinerant revivalist. When my mother met him, he was running a camp meeting in town, crusading against the Demon Rum. She met him in a soft-drink parlour and promptly got religion and signed the pledge. After that my grandfather had to eat a cold lunch and carry his own pail when he went to work in the morning. Mother wouldn’t have anything more to do with the brewery. Father told her it was the Devil’s kitchen. That made quite a little trouble in the family, of course. My grandfather kicked my father out of the house a couple of times, but Mother was hell-bent to marry him, and so, of course, presently she ran off and did. That’s how I came to be raised in a tent.” + 

“I don’t believe a word of it,” said Jane. “You’re making it all up.” + 

“It’s Gawd’s truth,” said Jimmy, “and you don’t know the half of it! I’m just the kind of a young man that H. G. Wells writes novels about. I ought to get in touch with him. He’d pay me for the story of my life. I’d make him one of those wistful, thwarted, lower-middle-class heroes⁠—” + 

“I know you’re lying,” said Jane cheerfully, “but go on with the story.” + 

“You see,” said Jimmy triumphantly, “it holds you! It would be worth good money to H. G. Wells. Well, I was raised in a tent, and before I was six I knew all about handing out tracts and passing the plate. All about hellfire, too. I believed in a God who was an irascible old gentleman with belligerent grey whiskers and in a bright red Devil with a tail and a pitchfork. I thought Father was God’s ablest lieutenant on earth and Mother was His most trusted handmaiden. Mother loved music and she learned to play the melodeon at the camp meetings. By the time I was ten, I was equally expert with the drum and the fiddle and the tambourine. We wandered up and down the Mississippi Valley with our tent, keeping up a guerilla warfare with the Devil, and, until I was fifteen, I really thought the chances were about a hundred to one that I’d burn through eternity for my sins.” There was a note of real emotion in his voice. + 

“Is this actually true?” asked Jane. + 

“You bet it is,” said Jimmy. “But at fifteen I met a girl. I met her on the mourner’s bench, singing ‘Hallelujah’ with the rest of the saved. She fell off it pretty soon and I kept on seeing her. She was a bad egg, but she taught me more than you can learn at a camp meeting. + 

“By the time we moved on to the next town, I’d lost all real interest in fighting the Devil. I took a pot shot at him now and then, but most of the time I declared a neutrality. I didn’t state my views to Father, of course, but he noticed a certain lassitude in my technique with the tracts and the plate. He began to row with me a good deal and ask me questions about what I was doing when I wasn’t in the tent. I’d skip a prayer meeting whenever I could and hang around the soda fountains and cigar stores. I used to long to steal money from the offering and run off to a burlesque show, but I never had the nerve to do it. Long after I’d lost my faith in the Irascible Old Gentleman, I used to feel a bolt would fall on me if I did a thing like that. + 

“When I was seventeen, I had my first real drink at a real bar, and when I came home Father smelled the whiskey on my breath. First he prayed over me and then he beat me. I snatched the cane away from him and broke it over my knee, and that night he prayed for me by name, in public, at the camp meeting. That finished religion for me. Mother tried to patch things up between us, but it was no use. After six months of family warfare she gave up. I travelled around with them after that in the position of Resident Atheist. I never went to any more prayer meetings, but I was useful putting up and taking down the tent and doing odd jobs backstage. Every now and then I’d consent to drop in and play a violin solo while they were collecting the offering. + 

“I was just nineteen when my father died of pneumonia, caught preaching in the rain. And my mother and I went back to East St. Louis. Jane⁠—your eyes are as big as saucers.” + 

“Why wouldn’t they be?” cried Jane breathlessly. “It’s perfectly thrilling.” + 

“It wasn’t very thrilling while it was going on,” said Jimmy. “My grandfather was dead, but my grandmother took us in and my mother got me a job with my rich uncle. He lived across the river in St. Louis and he was a fashionable druggist. I worked in his shop for two years, making sodas and mixing prescriptions. At first I liked it. I had money of my own for the first time in my life and I didn’t have to hear any preaching. I went to night school at a settlement and I read all the books I could lay my hands on and pretty soon I turned socialist. That got my uncle’s goat right away. He was making a pretty good thing off the drug business and the established order was all right with him. He talked of Karl Marx just the way my father had of the Devil, and I was too young to have the sense to keep my face shut. I’d air my views and he’d call me an anarchist and I’d say there were worse things than anarchy. I used to like to get him on the run. Pretty soon he really got to believe I had a bomb up my sleeve, and he was afraid to let me mix prescriptions any longer for fear I’d add a little strychnine to the cough-mixture of a plutocratic customer. So he told Mother he guessed I wasn’t suited to the drug business. + 

“Mother thought I’d better learn to run an elevator, but I didn’t fancy a life in a cage and presently I got a job with my fiddle in a theatre orchestra. That nearly finished Mother, of course. She thought the stage was the Devil’s recruiting office. I lost the job pretty soon and got another through a man I knew at the settlement as a cub reporter on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. That didn’t last long either, but it made Mother’s last days happy to think I was through with the stage. She died when I was twenty-two and left me three thousand dollars saved from Father’s life insurance. The day after the funeral I took the train to New York and signed up with a vaudeville circuit as a ragtime accompanist for a blackface comedian. I guess I lost forty jobs in the next six years on newspapers and in orchestra pits. But I learned a lot about music and more about slinging the English language. I was just twenty-eight when I met Agnes. I thought she was a card. She was the only woman I’d ever met who was as good as my mother and as clever as I was. She took a fancy to reform me, though I told her at the time I’d been immunized to salvation from early childhood. After that, of course, it was all over but the shouting.” + 

“It is like a novel,” said Jane breathlessly. “It’s just like a novel.” + 

“But how does it end?” asked Jimmy, a trifle gloomily. + 

“It ended when you married Agnes,” said Jane promptly. + 

“It isn’t a fairy story,” said Jimmy gently. “H. G. Wells’s novels never end at the altar.” + 

Jane did not reply to that. She was watching the ruddy September sun sinking into the western haze behind Storm King. She was conscious of Jimmy’s eyes, fixed thoughtfully on her face. They sat a long time in silence. Jane could see the dim outline of the Catskills, pale lavender against an orange sky, before he spoke again. + 

“And your novel, Jane?” he asked gently. “Who wrote that?” + 

“Louisa M. Alcott,” said Jane promptly. “There’s nothing modern and morbid in my story.” + 

“Now it’s my turn to be disbelieving,” said Jimmy. + 

“Do I look morbid?” said Jane, turning to smile serenely into his admiring eyes. + 

“You look modern,” said Jimmy. “And you look very, very thoughtful. All people who think sooner or later go through hell.” + 

“Then my hell must be ahead of me,” said Jane steadfastly. + 

“You haven’t even experienced a purgatory?” smiled Jimmy. “Something you got in and got out of?” + 

“Not even a purgatory,” said Jane. “I’m a very naive person. I’ve never experienced much of anything.” + 

“Perhaps that will be your hell,” said Jimmy. + 

The door behind them opened suddenly and Flora stood on the platform. + 

“Oh, here you are, Jane!” she cried. “Papa wants to dine early. He’s pretty tired.” Then she recognized Jimmy. She had met him, of course, at that dinner at the Belmont. She looked very much astonished. + 

“Why⁠—Mr. Trent⁠—” she said uncertainly. + 

“Jimmy decided to come West on the Century,” said Jane, rising from her chair. + 

“How nice!” said Flora, in her best Dresden shepherdess manner. Then to Jimmy with a smile, “You’ll dine with us, of course?” + 

“I’d love to,” said Jimmy. + 

They all walked together into the observation car. Flora looked distinctly cheered at the thought of a little male companionship other than Mr. Furness’s. Jane was thinking of Jimmy’s story. How fairy-like and fantastic it was compared to her own! By what different roads they had travelled to reach that intimate moment of companionship on the back platform of the Twentieth Century Limited. Having met at last, it seemed very strange to Jane that they could speak the same language. But yet they did. Jimmy, holding open a heavy train door to let her pass in front of him, smiled down into her eyes. She thanked him with an answering smile. Jane felt as if she had known Jimmy for years. + 

VII + 

The Twentieth Century was pulling slowly into the La Salle Street Station. Jane stood in the vestibule, knee-deep in luggage, looking eagerly for Stephen beyond the little crowd of porters that lined the greasy platform. Jimmy was at her elbow, but Flora and Mr. Furness were still sitting in the compartment. Mr. Furness found crowds very tiring. + 

The train came slowly to a standstill. Jane tumbled down the steps, stumbling over suitcases. She looked quickly down the long vista of the train-shed. The platform was crowded, now, with red caps galvanized into action and with travellers trying to sort out their bags from the heaps of luggage piled at each car entrance. No Stephen was to be seen. Jimmy was watching her with his ironical smile. + 

“He’s forgotten you,” he said presently. “He isn’t here.” + 

“He always meets me,” said Jane. “In fifteen years of matrimony he’s met me every time I’ve come home.” + 

“What an idyll!” smiled Jimmy. It didn’t seem impertinent because of the smile. + 

Suddenly Jane saw Stephen. She saw his grey Fedora hat towering over the heads of the crowd. + 

“Oh⁠—Stephen!” she called, her voice lost in the uproar of the train-shed. He saw her waving arm, however. In a moment he was at her side. Jane cast herself into his arms. She knew Jimmy was watching them. She pressed her cheek against the rough tweed of Stephen’s coat lapel, then turned her face to his. She felt a trifle histrionic, under Jimmy’s ironical eye. Stephen kissed her cheek, very tranquilly. + 

“Hello, Jane!” he said cheerfully. “Your train’s an hour late. You can get a dollar back from the railroad.” + 

Jane wished his greeting had been a bit more idyllic. Jimmy was grinning now, quite frankly. + 

“Stephen,” said Jane, “this is Jimmy⁠—Jimmy Trent. He’s been giving me a whirl all the way from New York.” + 

Stephen looked over at Jimmy. He seemed a little surprised, Jane thought, at what he saw. Or perhaps it was at what she had said. She remembered her last words on Jimmy in the Boston South Station, eight days before, “I know I’ll hate him.” Jimmy had stepped forward and extended his hand. + 

“How do you do, sir,” he said simply. + 

His ultimate monosyllable struck Jane’s ear. She glanced from Jimmy to Stephen. Jimmy looked very casual and debonair. Stephen looked⁠—well, Stephen looked just like what he was, the forty-four-year-old first vice-president of the Midland Loan and Trust Company. Jane felt again that curious little pang of pity. Stephen had once looked quite as casual and as debonair as Jimmy. He was only ten years older than Jimmy that minute. Yet Jimmy had called him “sir.” And the worst of it was that it had sounded quite suitable. + 

Flora and Mr. Furness had descended from the train. They were greeting Stephen, now, very warmly. They all trooped down the platform together and into the station, and over to the ticket window to collect their dollars. Jimmy pocketed his and turned to Jane with a smile. + 

“Could you have lunch with me?” he said. “Meet me somewhere at one and show me the town.” + 

“Oh, I couldn’t,” said Jane. “I have to go out to the country and have lunch with the children.” + 

“Have dinner with the children,” smiled Jimmy persuasively. “I’m a dollar in pocket and I’d like to give you a time.” + 

“I couldn’t,” said Jane firmly. “But I’d like you to have lunch with Stephen. Stephen!” she called. He turned from the ticket window. “Don’t you want to lunch with Jimmy at the University Club? I’d like him to meet people.” + 

Once more, Stephen looked just a little surprised. + 

“I’d be glad to,” he said, “if he can come early. I’ve a date to meet Bill Belmont there at noon. He’s on from New York to put through that Morgan deal. If Jimmy doesn’t mind talking of bond issues⁠—” + 

“I’m not awfully helpful on bond issues,” said Jimmy self-deprecatingly. “And I’m afraid I couldn’t get off at noon. I’ll be busy with the boys at the News. Thanks ever so much, though.” + 

They all turned away from the ticket window to the taxi entrance. Jane was solemnly reflecting that Jimmy was outrageous. She felt very thankful that Stephen had not heard him invite her to lunch. Suddenly she heard his voice at her ear. + 

“And when am I going to see you?” said Jimmy. + 

Jane hadn’t forgiven him. + 

“You must come out to Lakewood sometime,” she said vaguely. “For a night or a weekend.” + 

“Oh, I’ll come out to Lakewood,” said Jimmy. + 

“When you’re settled,” pursued Jane politely, “let me know where I can reach you. Give me a ring when you find a good boardinghouse.” + 

“Oh, I’ll give you a ring,” said Jimmy. + 

By this time Stephen had hailed a taxi. + 

“I won’t go with you to the other station,” he said. “I’ve got to run into the Federal Building.” Jane stepped into the cab. “Your mail’s on your desk, dear. Don’t pay the painter’s bill till I talk to you about it.” + 

Jane nodded very brightly. She was once again conscious of Jimmy’s ironical eye. This time she wouldn’t stoop to be histrionic. She waved her hand casually as the taxi started. Jimmy and Stephen, standing bareheaded on the curbstone, both smiled and waved cheerfully in reply. Their waves and their smiles were very different, however, reflected Jane, as the taxi turned into the traffic at the station entrance. + 

III + 

I + 

“They say it wasn’t a stroke,” said Isabel, “but of course it was.” + 

“Mrs. Lester told me it was acute indigestion,” said Mrs. Ward. + 

“And Rosalie told me it was brain fatigue,” said Isabel. + 

“I don’t know what Bert Lancaster’s ever done to fatigue his brain,” said Mrs. Ward. + 

Jane laughed, in spite of her concern for Muriel. They were all sitting around the first October fire in Jane’s little Lakewood living-room. Her mother and Isabel had motored out from town to take tea with her and they were all discussing, of course, Bert Lancaster’s sudden seizure at the Commercial Club banquet the night before. + 

“It must have been awful,” said Isabel, “falling over like that, right into his own champagne glass, in the middle of a speech.” + 

“They say he was forbidden champagne,” said Mrs. Ward. “Dr. Bancroft’s wife told me that the doctor had warned him last winter that he must give up alcohol.” + 

“Have some more tea, Isabel,” said Jane. + 

“I oughtn’t to, but I will,” said Isabel. At forty-one Isabel was valiantly struggling against increasing pounds. “No sugar, Jane.” She opened her purse and taking out a small bottle dropped three tablets of saccharine into her cup. + 

“Of course he’s pretty young for a stroke,” said Mrs. Ward. + 

“He’s fifty-five,” said Isabel. “He was fifty-five the third of August.” + 

“It’s frightful for Muriel,” said Jane. + 

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Mrs. Ward. “Perhaps it’s providential. Of course if he’s disabled⁠—” + 

“If he lives, he will be,” said Isabel. “Sooner or later. If you have one stroke, you always have another.” + 

“Well, he may not live,” said Mrs. Ward. “He can’t have any constitution to rely on after the life he’s led.” + 

“What do you think Muriel would do, Jane?” asked Isabel. “Do you think she’d really marry Cyril Fortune?” + 

“I don’t know,” said Jane. + 

“She was off at the Scandals with him when it happened,” said Mrs. Ward. “They paged her at the theatre.” + 

“You mark my words,” said Isabel, taking a piece of toast and scraping the buttered cinnamon off it, “whenever Bert Lancaster dies, Muriel will marry the man of the moment the day after the funeral. Not that I think she’s really in love with Cyril. I never thought she was in love with Sam or Binky or Roger or any of them.” + 

“Not even with Sam?” said Mrs. Ward. + 

“Not really,” said Isabel with conviction. “Rosalie always said she wasn’t. I think Muriel is really just in love with herself. It keeps up her self-confidence to have a young man sighing gustily around the home. But just the same, if Bert Lancaster dies tonight, I bet she marries Cyril Fortune before Christmas.” + 

“Nonsense!” said Mrs. Ward. “Muriel would do everything decently. She’d stay in mourning for at least a year. She’d have to show the proper respect for her son’s sake.” + 

“They’ve sent for young Albert,” said Isabel, “to come home from Saint Paul’s.” + 

“Well, I hope Muriel behaves herself while he’s here,” said Mrs. Ward severely. “He’s fifteen and he’s old enough to notice.” + 

“That’s just exactly,” said Isabel dreamily, “what you used to say of Flora.” + 

“Well, she was old enough to notice,” said Mrs. Ward, “but I doubt if she ever did. Lily Furness had a curious magnetism. Somehow she always made you believe the best of her.” + 

“Flora simply adored her,” said Jane suddenly. “I adored her, myself.” + 

“Just the same,” said Mrs. Ward, “she had no principle.” + 

“You don’t know,” said Jane. “Perhaps she went through hell. You can’t help it if you’re not in love with your husband.” + 

“Every wife with principle,” said Mrs. Ward firmly, “is in love with her husband.” + 

“Mamma!” cried Isabel. “Don’t be ridiculous! How many wives are? But what I say is, even if you’re not, you don’t have to take a lover⁠—” + 

“No,” said Jane, “of course you don’t. But I can see how you might.” + 

“Don’t talk like that!” said Mrs. Ward sharply. “I don’t know where you girls get your ideas! When I was your age I wouldn’t even have said those words⁠—‘take a lover’! And you two sit there talking as if it were actually done!” + 

“But it is done, Mamma,” said Isabel. “Not very often, of course, but sometimes. Lily Furness did it, even in your day. And you know, in your black heart, that you’re wondering whether Muriel hasn’t gone and done it in ours.” + 

“I am not!” said Mrs. Ward indignantly. “I shouldn’t think of making such an accusation against Muriel. All I say is, she isn’t very discreet. She gets herself talked about. There’s been a lot of gossip about Muriel. And everyone knows that where there’s so much smoke, there’s bound to be some fire.” + 

“Well, what do you think you’re saying now?” said Isabel. “What are, or aren’t you, accusing Muriel of this minute?” + 

Mrs. Ward looked slightly bewildered. + 

“I don’t like the way young people speak out nowadays,” she said. “And I don’t like your attitude toward wrongdoing. You and Jane are both perfectly willing to condone whatever Muriel has done. At least, in my day, we all made Lily Furness feel she was a guilty woman. We took the marriage vows seriously.” + 

“I take the marriage vows seriously. Mamma,” said Jane gently. “But I can understand the people who break them. At least,” she added doubtfully, “I think I can. I think I can understand just how it might happen.” + 

“Anyone could understand how it might happen in Muriel’s case,” said Isabel. “Bert’s a perfect old rip. There’s a certain poetic justice in the thought of him, standing in Mr. Furness’s shoes⁠—” + 

Mrs. Ward rose with dignity from her chair. + 

“Come, Isabel,” she said, “I’m going home. I’m not going to listen to you girls any longer. I only hope you don’t talk like this before Robin and Stephen. It’s a woman’s duty to keep up her husband’s standards.” + 

Jane and Isabel burst into laughter. + 

“Robin and Stephen!” exclaimed Isabel. “Imagine either of them on the loose!” + 

“They keep up our standards,” said Jane, as she kissed her mother. Mrs. Ward still looked a trifle bewildered. + 

“Put on your heavy coat,” said Jane, as they all turned toward the door. “Don’t let her catch cold, Isabel.” + 

“I won’t,” said Isabel. “Mind that rug, Mamma. The floor is slippery.” + 

“You girls think I’m just an old lady,” said Mrs. Ward, as Jane opened the front door. “I wish you’d both remember that I took care of myself for about forty-five years before you thought you were old enough to give me advice.” She climbed, a little clumsily, into the waiting motor. + 

“Give my love to Papa,” said Jane. “And Isabel⁠—when you telephone Rosalie, ask if there’s anything I can do for Muriel.” + 

“I will,” said Isabel. “There probably will be. Muriel never does anything for herself.” + 

The car crunched slowly around the gravel driveway. Jane watched it to the entrance. Curious, she thought, the gap between the points of view of different generations. The facts of life were always the same, but people thought about them so differently. New thoughts, reflected Jane, about the same old actions. Was it progress or merely change? Sex was a loaded pistol, thought Jane, thrust into the hand of humanity. Her mother’s generation had carried it carefully, fearful of a sudden explosion. Her generation, and Isabel’s, waved it nonchalantly about, but, after all, with all their carelessness, they didn’t fire it off any oftener than their parents had. What if the next generation should take to shooting? Shooting straight regardless of their target. As Jane entered the front hall, the telephone was ringing. + 

She stood still, suddenly, on the doormat. That might be Jimmy, she thought instantly, and despised herself for the thought. Jane hated to think that she had been back in the Lakewood house for three weeks and that, in all that time, the telephone had never rung without awakening in her unwilling brain the thought that it might be Jimmy. For Jimmy had never telephoned. He had vanished completely out of her life that morning in the La Salle Street Station. At first she had been only relieved to find that the voice, whosever it was, trickling over the wire, was not his. Jane had been firmly determined to discipline Jimmy for that outrageous refusal to lunch with Stephen on the day of his arrival. But, as the days passed and she did not hear from him, her relief had been subtly tempered first with curiosity then with concern, and, at last, with indignation. Jimmy ought to have telephoned. It was rude of him not to. She had really felt, after those intimate hours on the back platform of the Twentieth Century, that she meant something to Jimmy, that he really liked her, that he was depending on her for support and diversion during his visit to Chicago. And then⁠—he had not telephoned. By not telephoning he had made Jane feel rather a fool. For Jimmy had meant something to her, she had really liked him. Of course he was irritating and she had known he was not to be counted on, but still⁠—she had thought that she had read an honest admiration in his ironic eyes, she had felt that he was a very amusing person, she had even wondered just what she had better do in case Jimmy’s honest admiration became a trifle embarrassing. She had solemnly assured herself, on her arrival at Lakewood, that if she were firm and pleasantly disciplinary she could, of course, handle Jimmy, who was a dear and Agnes’s husband, but not very wise, perhaps, and obviously in the frame of mind in which he could easily be led astray by the flutter of a petticoat. And then⁠—he had not telephoned. + 

“Mrs. Carver,” Miss Parrot’s pleasant voice called down the stairs, “Mr. Carver wants you on the wire.” + 

Jane walked to the telephone in the pantry. + 

“Yes, dear?” she said. + 

“I can’t get out for dinner this evening,” said Stephen. “Muriel wants me to come up and talk business with her. It seems Bert was just advising her about some investments when he was stricken. She’s got some bonds he wanted her to sell immediately.” + 

“Of course go, dear,” said Jane quickly. Stephen would be very helpful to Muriel. Everyone turned to Stephen when in trouble. And Muriel had no one to advise her except Freddy Waters, her volatile brother-in-law. Unless you counted Cyril Fortune, who was a young landscape gardener recently rumoured to have lost twenty thousand dollars in a flyer in oil. He wouldn’t be much to lean on in a financial crisis. + 

“I’ll be out on the ten-ten,” said Stephen. “Don’t be lonely.” + 

“I won’t,” said Jane. “I’ve got letters to write. Give my love to Muriel.” + 

As Jane turned from the telephone she heard the whirr of a motor. That would be the children coming home from school. The car called for them at the playground every afternoon at five. Jane was always afraid to let them walk home alone through the traffic. The country lane on which her house had been built, fourteen years before, had long since become a suburban highroad. As she entered the hall again, they burst in at the front door. The cocker-spaniel puppy tumbled down the stairs to meet them. + 

“Mumsy!” called Jenny. “Oh, there you are! I’ve made the basketball team and I need some gym shoes!” + 

“I’m going to take my rabbits to school for the Animal Fair!” cried little Steve. + 

“Can I ask Jack and Belle to come out on Saturday?” said Cicily. Jack and Belle were Isabel’s seventeen- and thirteen-year-old son and daughter. No weekend was complete without them. + 

“When can we get the gym shoes?” said Jenny. + 

“I need a cage for the rabbits,” said little Steve. + 

“I’ve got to have the gym shoes by Monday, Mumsy,” said Jenny. + 

“Do you think I could make a cage out of a peach crate?” said little Steve. + 

“Hush!” said Jane. “Pick up your coat, Jenny, and hang it in the closet. Steve⁠—your books don’t belong on the floor. + 

“Yes, Cicily, you can telephone Aunt Isabel tonight and ask them.” + 

“Mumsy, where can I find a peach crate?” + 

“Be quiet!” said Jane. “Now go upstairs, all of you, and wash! If you get your homework done before supper, I’ll read King Arthur stories to you tonight. Daddy’s not coming home.” + 

The children clattered up the staircase. Jane walked into the living-room with a sigh. They were terribly noisy. They never seemed to behave like other people’s children. She sat down at her desk and began to look over the afternoon mail. An invitation to dine in town with Muriel before an evening musical⁠—that would be off, now, of course. A bill from the plumber for repairing the faucets in the maid’s bathroom. A note from the chairman of the Miscellaneous Committee of the Chicago Chatter Club asking her to write a funny paper on “The Hand that Rocks the Cradle” for the December meeting. A note from the chairman of the Literary Committee of the Lakewood Woman’s Club, asking her to write a serious paper on “Oriental Art” for the Spring Festival. A bill from the Russian Peasant Industries for smocking Cicily’s and Jenny’s new winter frocks. A notice from the Lakewood Village Council, announcing that Cleanup Week began on Monday next. A note from Steve’s teacher, suggesting that she see that he spend more time on his arithmetic. An advertisement of a Rummage Sale for the benefit of Saint George’s Church. A bill from the Lakewood Gas and Coke Company for the new laundry stove. A notice that her report would be due as chairman of the Playground Committee at the annual meeting of the Village Improvement Society next Wednesday night. + 

Jane pushed the mail into a pigeonhole. She felt she could not bear to cope with it. She felt she could not bear to cope with the winter that lay before her. Which was, of course, ridiculous. Jane knew that it would be just like all other winters⁠—fun enough, when you came to live it. But always in October, reestablished in Lakewood after the break of the Eastern summer, Jane wondered why she and Stephen chose to live just the way they did. Lakewood was good for the children, of course. No longer country, not much more rural than the Pine Street of her childhood, but better than Isabel’s town apartment, nicer, even, than Muriel’s smart city residence overlooking the lake. + 

Still⁠—suburban life was pretty awful. Narrow, confining, in spite of the physical asset of its wider horizons. Jane rose from her desk and walked to a western window. The sun was setting over the Skokie Valley. An October sunset, red and cold, behind her copper oak woods, beyond the tanned haystacks in the distant meadows. A western sunset, violent and vivid, glorifying the flat swamps with golden light, setting the tranquil clouds in the wide, unbroken sky aflame with rosy fire. The Skokie always looked like that, on autumn evenings. It was lovely, too, on winter nights, a snowy plane beneath the sparkling stars. In the spring, when the Skokie overflowed its banks and the swamps were wet and the moonlight paled the pink blossoms of the apple tree at the foot of the garden, it was perhaps most lovely of all. Jane was lucky to live there⁠—lucky to have that picture to look out on, always, outside her window. Still⁠— + 

Jane watched the burnished sun sink slowly beneath the flat horizon, the low clouds lose their colour and turn darkly purple, the high clouds flame with pink and pure translucent gold. Then they, too, faded into wisps of grey. The western sky was lemon-coloured now. A crescent moon was tangled in the oak boughs. + 

Jane turned back to her desk and stood looking at the illuminated quotation from Stevenson that hung over it in a silver frame⁠—the work of Jenny’s hand in the sixth grade of the Lakewood Progressive School, a gift of last Christmas. + 

“To make this earth, our hermitage, + 

A cheerful and a changeful page, + 

God’s bright and intricate device + 

Of days and seasons doth suffice.” + 

“What a damn lie!” thought Jane, and turned at the sound of a step in the doorway. Jimmy Trent, his hat in his hand, his fiddle-case under his arm, stood smiling at her on the threshold. The children had left the front door open, of course. He had come in quietly⁠— + 

“Hello!” said Jimmy. “How’s every little thing?” + 

“Jimmy!” said Jane. “Come in! Sit down. I’m awfully glad to see you!” + 

“That’s quite as it should be,” said Jimmy. “May I stay to dinner?” + 

“Of course,” said Jane. Then, before she could stop herself, “Why didn’t you telephone?” + 

“Why didn’t you telephone me?” said Jimmy, tossing his hat on a table and placing the fiddle-case beside it. “You could have, you know, at the Daily News.” + 

Jane thought her reason for not telephoning Jimmy might sound a little foolish. If you said you thought a man should telephone you first, it really seemed as if you took the fact that he had not telephoned quite seriously. + 

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Jane; “I’ve been busy.” + 

“So have I,” said Jimmy. “Awfully busy. It’s the first time in six years that I’ve cut loose from a woman’s apron strings in a big city. I like Chicago.” + 

“Do you like your job?” said Jane severely. Jimmy looked white, she thought, and just a little tired. + 

“My job?” said Jimmy. “Oh, yes. I like my job. It isn’t very arduous.” + 

“I hope you’re working at it,” said Jane. + 

“Now, Jane,” said Jimmy sweetly, “lay off salvation. I get enough of that at home.” He strolled over to the hearthrug and took his stand upon it, his back toward the smouldering fire. He was still smiling. “I met Stephen at noon today. I met him, I regret to tell you, Jane, in the University Club bar. Everyone was talking about this Lancaster’s stroke. Stephen said he was going up to see Mrs. Lancaster this evening. So I thought I’d come out with my fiddle and offer you a little entertainment. I want to play you Debussy’s ‘La Fille aux Cheveux de Laine.’ ” + 

“How nice of you,” said Jane a little uncertainly. + 

“Like Debussy?” asked Jimmy. + 

“Yes,” said Jane. + 

“Me, too,” said Jimmy. + 

There was a moment of silence. Jane suddenly realized how dark the room had grown. She turned on a lamp and gat down in her chair by the fireside. + 

“This is nice,” said Jimmy. “This is very nice.” He was looking interestedly around the chintz-hung living-room. The panelled walls, the books, the Steinway, the few good pieces of mahogany furniture all seemed to meet with his approval. “It’s just like you, Jane. Modern, but not morbid.” He sank into Stephen’s armchair across the hearthrug and picked up the October Question Mark from the table at his elbow. The Question Mark was the monthly magazine of the Lakewood Progressive School. Jimmy idly scanned a photograph of the football squad for a moment in silence and dropped the Question Mark back upon the table. His eye fell upon the copy of the King Arthur stories. “Not at all morbid,” he repeated. His eyes were twinkling as they met Jane’s. + 

“I must go up and dress for dinner,” said Jane, rising suddenly. “Here’s the newspaper if you’d like to read it until I come down.” + 

“Are you glad I came?” The question arrested her abruptly in the doorway. Curiously enough, Jane was not quite sure. But⁠— + 

“Very glad,” said Jane evenly. She mounted the staircase rather slowly. She wasn’t quite sure about the gladness. Nevertheless, she was inexplicably determined to look her best that evening. She would put on that red Poiret tea-gown she had so foolishly bought at a bargain sale last June. She had often regretted that folly. What use had Jane at Lakewood or Gull Rocks for a red Poiret tea-gown? + 

“Miss Parrot,” said Jane, pausing in the playroom doorway, “I want Steve to wear his blue suit this evening. And tell Cicily and Jenny, please, to put on their new yellow smocks.” On entering her bedroom she rang for the waitress. + 

“Sarah,” she said, “Mr. Carver will not be home for dinner, but Mr. Trent will stay. We’ll have cocktails. And some of the good sauterne at table. And creme de menthe, please, after the coffee. Be sure and see that the ice is cracked fine. You can pound it in a towel. It ought to be almost pulverized.” + 

Jane walked slowly to her closet and took out the red tea-gown. Jimmy was something different at Lakewood. Still, she wasn’t quite sure about the gladness. She wished that Agnes were downstairs with him. When Jane realized how much she wished that, she felt better about the gladness. She was even willing to admit to herself how very glad she was. + 

II + 

“Let’s play parcheesi,” said little Steve. + 

“I have to telephone Aunt Isabel,” said Cicily. + 

“I haven’t done my practising,” said Jenny. + 

They were all sitting around the living-room fire. Jane was presiding over the little silver coffee service on the table at her knee. Sarah was passing the creme de menthe. The little cut-glass goblets, filled with vivid green liquid, looked very festive and frivolous, on the small silver tray. Jimmy grasped his with a sigh of satisfaction. Miss Parrot took hers with the deprecatory gesture of every trained nurse accepting an alcoholic beverage. Jane sipped hers with the comforting realization that the ice was perfectly pulverized. + 

“Do you like parcheesi?” said little Steve to Jimmy. + 

“I love it,” said Jimmy, “but I hurt my finger yesterday and I’m afraid I couldn’t throw the dice.” + 

“Anyway,” said Jenny, “I have to practise.” + 

“Not tonight,” said Jimmy cheerfully. “Day before yesterday I hurt my ear and sudden noises pain it dreadfully.” + 

Jenny and Cicily and Miss Parrot all laughed uproariously at his nonsense. + 

“Well,” said Cicily, “I do have to telephone Aunt Isabel.” + 

“That’s a fine idea,” said Jimmy approvingly. “And Miss Parrot looks to me like a perfect parcheesi fan. I think it would be very nice, Cicily, if Steve got the board all ready in another room so that, when you had finished telephoning your aunt, you and she and Jenny and Steve could all play parcheesi together, while your mother sat here in the firelight and told me what to do for my finger and my ear.” + 

Miss Parrot, having finished her creme de menthe, rose with a smile. She was obviously quite captivated by Jimmy. + 

“Come up to the playroom, children,” she said. “I’ll play parcheesi with you.” + 

“And don’t I have to practise?” asked Jenny jubilantly. + 

“Not if Mr. Trent’s ear is hurting him,” smiled Jane. + 

Jenny threw Jimmy a grateful smile. Steve dragged Miss Parrot from the room. Cicily followed with Jenny. + 

“I can’t believe,” said Jimmy, as he lit a cigarette, “that those great children are yours.” + 

“They are,” said Jane briefly. + 

“Cicily’s a perfect heartbreaker,” said Jimmy. + 

“I’m afraid she will be,” said Jane. + 

“Why ‘afraid’?” asked Jimmy. + 

“I don’t think breaking hearts is a very rewarding occupation,” said Jane. + 

“Oh⁠—someone else can always mend them,” said Jimmy lightly. He twinkled across at her, through a blue streak of cigarette smoke. “You know that, don’t you, Jane?” + 

“I’ve never broken any hearts,” said Jane, smiling. “So really I don’t.” + 

“Well⁠—experience is the best teacher,” said Jimmy affably. + 

Sarah reentered the room to remove the coffee tray. She picked up the cups and the little cut-glass goblets with the silent efficiency of the perfect servant and retired noiselessly into the hall. + 

“It moves on greased wheels, doesn’t it, Jane?” said Jimmy. + 

“What does?” asked Jane. + 

“Your life,” said Jimmy. + 

“Yes,” said Jane. “But I grease them.” + 

“I suppose you do,” said Jimmy. “But you don’t mind it, do you?” + 

“I get awfully sick of it,” said Jane honestly. + 

Jimmy watched her for a moment in silence behind the cigarette smoke. + 

“Sick of what?” he said presently. + 

“Sick,” said Jane earnestly, “of greasing wheels. Sick of running the house and bossing the servants and dressing the children. Sick of seeing that everything looks pretty and everything goes right. Sick of seeing that the living-room is dusted before ten every morning and that dinner is served on the stroke of seven every night. Sometimes I wonder what’s the use of it all. Sometimes I wish that Stephen and I could just tear up our roots and buy a couple of knapsacks and put the children in a covered wagon and start out to see the world. Just wander, you know, for a year or two. Wander everywhere, before we’re too old to do it. Not bother about anything. Not care. Not do anything we didn’t really want to. I suppose you think I’m crazy!” She broke off abruptly. + 

“Crazy?” said Jimmy. “I think you’re just right. There’s a lot of the nomad in me, you know. I guess the tent got into my blood. If I’d been born a gypsy instead of a Methodist minister’s son, I’d never have broken home ties. Golly!”⁠—he waved his cigarette with enthusiasm⁠—“I’d like to go round the world. Round and round it in circles. Round it in every latitude. Let’s do it, Jane! Let’s surprise Stephen tonight! You leave a note on the pincushion and I’ll send a wire to Agnes. ‘Gone⁠—to points unknown!’ We’ll set out for the Golden Gate⁠—I guess we can buy those knapsacks in the Northwestern Station⁠—and sail for the South Sea Islands and drift over to Siam and Burma and India and on up to China⁠—and by that time Stephen and Agnes will have divorced us and I’ll make you an honest woman, Jane, in a little Chinese shrine with the temple bells ringing overhead, and we’ll wander on, through Tibet and Afghanistan and Persia to Asia Minor, or maybe up to Russia, and then down through the civilized countries, which won’t be so nice, but where the food will be much better, to Africa, Jane! To the Dark Continent. And maybe when we get there we’ll stay⁠—stay in the village of some cannibal king who never even heard of a musical critic or a suburban housewife, where concertos for the violin are unknown and living-rooms are never dusted! How about it, Jane?” He paused out of breath and looked engagingly over at her. + 

“It sounds very alluring,” said Jane, “but a little uncomfortable.” + 

“Comfort!” scoffed Jimmy. “You don’t really care about comfort!” + 

“Yes, I do!” cried Jane. “When I haven’t got it! And so do you. I don’t know you so awfully well, Jimmy, but I know you well enough to know that. You care so much about comfort that you won’t get up in the morning and make your own bed for Agnes! You won’t ride on a milk train instead of the Twentieth Century! I don’t think you’d be so good in a jungle. When I go to a jungle, I think I’ll take Stephen. He’d be very capable there.” + 

“I’m sure,” said Jimmy cheerfully, “he’d have sanitary plumbing installed in a fortnight. Nevertheless, something tells me that Stephen is no gypsy. If you ever see the Dark Continent with Stephen, you’ll see it in the discreet light shed on it by Thomas Cook and Sons! But as for me, with or without Agnes, I’m going to see the world before I die.” + 

“Mumsy”⁠—it was little Steve on the threshold⁠—“we want to kiss you good night.” + 

“Come in,” said Jane. “Come in, all of you.” The three children were lingering in the doorway. + 

“How’d the game come out, Steve?” asked Jimmy affably. + 

“Miss Parrot won,” said Steve gloomily. “She always does.” + 

“I’m going to send you a set of loaded dice,” said Jimmy benevolently. “Come in, kids, and sit down.” He rose as he spoke. “I want to sing to you.” He had picked up his fiddle-case and was removing the violin. Jane looked up in surprise. Jimmy was a strange mixture of contradictions. The children settled themselves delightedly on the floor near the fire. Jimmy tucked his violin under his chin and tuned it airily as he sauntered across the room. + 

“It’s an old English ballad,” he said, “and a particular favorite of mine. It appeals to your mother, too, who is really a gypsy at heart. Did you know that, children? There she sits by those polished brass andirons looking very pretty in a French tea-gown, but at heart she’s dancing barefoot by a bonfire in a tattered red shawl⁠—dancing in the dark of the moon to the tinkle of a tambourine. When she married your father, children, she jumped over a broomstick. But later he took up with the bond business. That’s the way most of us get married. Did you know that, Cicily? But later we nearly all of us take up with something else and after that we only use broomsticks to sweep with.” + 

The children were staring at him in wide-eyed fascination. They were still staring when he began softly to sing: + 

“There were three gypsies a-come to my door, + 

And downstairs ran my lady, O! + 

One sang high and the other sang low, + 

And the other sang bonny, bonny Biscay, O! + 

“Then she pulled off her silk-finished gown + 

And put on hose of leather, O! + 

The ragged, ragged rags about our door⁠— + 

She’s gone with the raggle-taggle gypsies, O!” + 

Jimmy paused to smile mockingly at Jane, drawing his bow with a flourish across the strings of his violin. + 

“It was late last night when my lord came home, + 

Inquiring for his lady, O! + 

The servants said, on every hand, + 

She’s gone with the raggle-taggle gypsies, O! + 

“Come saddle me my milk-white steed + 

And go and fetch my pony, O! + 

That I may ride and fetch my bride, + 

Who is gone with the raggle-taggle gypsies, O! + 

“Then he rode high, and he rode low, + 

He rode through wood and copses too, + 

Until he came to an open field + 

And there he spied his lady, O! + 

“What makes you leave your house and land + 

What makes you leave your money, O? + 

What makes you leave your new-wedded lord, + 

To go with the raggle-taggle gypsies, O?” + 

Again Jimmy paused to smile mockingly at Jane and again his bow swept over a string and a note of triumph quivered in the air. + 

“Oh, what care I for my house and land. + 

And what care I for my money, O? + 

What care I for my new-wedded lord, + 

I’m off with the raggle-taggle gypsies, O!” + 

His bow ran wildly, jubilantly over the high strings, then dropped to a sombre note of accusation. + 

“Last night you slept on a goose-feather bed, + 

With the sheet turned down so bravely, O! + 

But tonight you sleep in a cold open field, + 

Along with the raggle-taggle gypsies, O!” + 

Again the bow fluttered over the strings. The recreant lady’s laughter seemed tinkling in the room. + 

“Oh, what care I for a goose-feather bed, + 

With the sheet turned down so bravely, O! + 

For tonight I shall sleep in a cold open field, + 

Along with the raggle-taggle gypsies, O!” + 

He dropped his bow abruptly. In the sudden silence Steve’s voice rang out shrill with interest. + 

“And did she?” + 

“That lady did,” said Jimmy gravely. “She had the courage of her convictions.” + 

“And she never went back?” pursued Steve eagerly. + 

“Oh⁠—that I can’t tell you,” said Jimmy gaily. “The song doesn’t say. I shouldn’t be surprised if she did, though. Lots of ladies do.” + 

“Children⁠—you must go to bed,” said Jane. “It’s very late.” + 

“I must go back to town,” said Jimmy. He was putting the violin away in its case. + 

“Must you?” said Jane. “It’s very early.” + 

“I think I must,” said Jimmy. + 

“But we haven’t had any Debussy,” said Jane. + 

“We’ll have him next time,” smiled Jimmy. + 

“We’ll have Stephen next time, too,” said Jane. + 

“That will be delightful,” said Jimmy. The words might have seemed sarcastic if he had not been smiling so pleasantly. Suddenly, hat in hand, he crossed the room. He held out his hand to Jane. “You must make Stephen like me,” he said disarmingly. + 

“He will,” said Jane. Looking up into Jimmy’s charming faun-like face, Jane, at the moment, could not imagine anyone not liking him. + 

“I hope he will, Jane,” said Jimmy. “For I like you.” + 

“Stephen always likes people who like me,” said Jane loyally. + 

“Then that’s just as it should be,” said Jimmy. “When may I come again?” + 

“How about Tuesday?” said Jane. “Come out to dinner. Take the five-fifty with Stephen.” + 

“I will,” said Jimmy. “Good night, kids! Now, all together, before I go! Do you like me? The answer is ‘yes’!” + 

In the resulting clamour, Jimmy made his escape. He threw Jane one last smile from the threshold. As she heard the front door close behind him, Jane walked over to little Steve. For no reason whatever, she kissed him, very warmly. + 

“What are you smiling at, Mumsy?” said Jenny. + 

“Nothing,” said Jane. She ran her hand caressingly over Cicily’s fair crinkly hair. She kissed Jenny’s little freckled nose and pushed her toward the door. + 

“Go to bed, now, all of you,” said Jane. Left to herself, she picked up a book from the table and sat down in her chair to read it. She did not open it, however, but sat softly smiling, her eyes upon the fire. Stephen found her, sitting just like that, when he came home an hour later by the ten-ten. + 

“Bert’s better,” he said from the doorway, “And Muriel’s in fine shape. She’s taking everything very calmly. Young Albert gets home tomorrow!” + 

Jane realized that she had not once thought of Muriel since she had left the telephone after talking with Stephen five hours before. She felt suddenly conscious-stricken. She jumped up to help Stephen off with his coat. + 

“I’m glad,” she said. “Did you fix everything up for her?” Even now, Jane felt she wasn’t really thinking of Muriel. She did not give Stephen time to answer her question. “Jimmy Trent was here for dinner,” she said. + 

“Jimmy Trent?” + 

“Yes. He came out unexpectedly. He brought his fiddle and sang to the children.” + 

“Can he sing?” Stephen was walking across the room to lock the glass doors that opened on the terrace. + 

“Yes, Quite nicely. He’s very amusing. Stephen⁠—” + 

Jane hesitated. + 

“Yes,” said Stephen, fumbling with a door-latch. + 

Jane did not answer. She had had it on the tip of her tongue to say “Stephen, I think he’s falling for me,” Then she remembered. She remembered the three weeks in which Jimmy had not telephoned. He was probably just getting a rise out of her that evening. Well⁠—anyway, even so, he did not know that he had got it. That was a comfort. Of course he was not falling for her. He was Agnes’s husband and, obviously, a very volatile young man. + 

“Yes?” said Stephen again, turning from the window. + 

“Oh⁠—nothing,” said Jane. Stephen turned out the lights. + 

“If Bert lives,” said Jane, “we ought to ask young Albert out here for the weekend. It would relieve Muriel, and Cicily would love to have him. Jack and Belle are coming.” + 

“All right,” said Stephen. Jane preceded him up the staircase. The spell invoked by Jimmy was already evaporating. She was glad that she had not said anything silly to Stephen. She was really a very silly woman, thought Jane, as she slipped out of the Poiret tea-gown. Jimmy did not mean anything by all that nonsense. It was just his line. + 

III + 

It happened just seven weeks later. It happened Thanksgiving afternoon, out beneath the apple tree beyond the little clump of evergreens at the foot of the garden. Jane was very much surprised when it did. + 

The seven weeks had been full of incident. She had been seeing Jimmy quite often, of course. He had come out perhaps once a week to dinner. She had lunched with him in town one day and gone with him to a concert that he had had to review for his paper. That was the only time, really, that they had been alone. He usually brought his fiddle when he came out to Lakewood and they had had lots of Debussy and a few more ballads. The children adored him, of course, and he had, somewhat to Jane’s surprise, made rather a hit with Stephen. Jimmy had made rather a hit with everyone, in fact. With her mother and Isabel and Flora and Muriel, who had had him to dinner just as soon as Bert was pronounced out of immediate danger, and declared him charming⁠—much too good, indeed, for Agnes. Mr. Ward had raised the only dissenting voice. And all he had said was, after Jimmy had spent an unusually scintillating evening at the Wards’ dinner-table, that Agnes deserved a better fate. Jane knew that her father would think almost any fate unworthy of Agnes. He had admired her since her first days at Miss Milgrim’s School. When pressed by his indignant daughters for further and more flattering comment, even Mr. Ward had admitted that Jimmy was very clever. He fitted delightfully in Jane’s most intimate circle. That was why she had asked him out for Thanksgiving luncheon with the family. + 

Thanksgiving luncheon had been like all Thanksgiving luncheons⁠—not very brilliant. There had been too much turkey and too many children to make for clever conversation around the groaning board. Mr. Ward had sat on Jane’s right hand and Jimmy on her left. On either side of Stephen sat Mrs. Ward and Isabel. Robin and Miss Parrot and the five children filled up the centre of the table. They had eaten for nearly two hours and then had sunk in recumbent attitudes around the chintz-hung living-room. Suddenly, early in the afternoon, Jack Bridges had sprung to his feet and asked Cicily, rather sheepishly, to go for a walk. She had deserted the younger children immediately and, whistling to the cocker-spaniel puppy, had started off with him across the terrace. Jane had watched Jack help her, with adolescent gallantry, to climb over the stile that led to the open meadows. She had smiled, a trifle wistfully, over Cicily’s budding coquetry. Cicily could have cleared that stile at a bound. While she was smiling, Jimmy had roused himself from lethargy. He too had been watching the children. + 

“ ‘The younger generation is knocking at the door,’ Jane,” he had smiled. “But they have the right idea. Come out and walk five miles with me before sunset.” + 

She had gone for her hat and coat without a moment’s hesitation. Everyone was staying on for supper. The children were playing jackstraws, and Stephen was talking politics with Mr. Ward and Robin, and her mother and Isabel were discussing Bert Lancaster’s paralysis, with an occasional digression on Flora’s hat shop. She was not needed in the living-room and she would love a long walk. + 

They went out the terrace door and down the garden path and out into the fields in the opposite direction from the one which the children had taken. The November day was very cold and clear. The oak trees were already bare. The winter fields were brown. A high northwest wind was blowing across the Skokie Valley. It was difficult to talk in the teeth of the gale, and they had covered nearly two miles over the uneven stubble before they said much of anything. Then they paused in the shelter of a haystack. + 

“We must go back,” said Jane, trying to tuck her windblown pompadour under her felt hat-brim. + 

“Must we?” said Jimmy. “This walk was just what I wanted.” + 

“I’m all out of breath,” said Jane. “That last cornfield was rough going for an old lady.” She drew in a great gasp of the bracing autumn air. + 

“Was it?” said Jimmy. “You don’t look much older than Cicily this minute. Your cheeks are red and your eyes are bright and your mussy hair is pretty. That’s the true test of age for a woman. She’s young as long as she looks beguiling with mussy hair!” + 

“I look like a wild Indian,” said Jane, still struggling with the pompadour. “You ought to look at Cicily when the wind gets romping with her head of excelsior.” + 

“That’s Jack Bridges’ privilege,” said Jimmy. “I’m no cradle-snatcher.” + 

Jane left the haystack and started to walk back across the cornfield. It was easier to talk, now, with the wind at their backs. Nevertheless, they did not say anything for several minutes. Jane was hoping that Jack would bring Cicily home before dark. Jimmy broke the silence. + 

“Whose privilege was it, Jane, to look at you when you were Cicily’s age?” he asked. + 

Jane started at the question. But she did not answer. + 

“I bet someone did,” said Jimmy. “Who was he, Jane?” + 

“Oh,” said Jane vaguely, “he⁠—he was⁠—just a boy.” + 

“A broth of a boy?” questioned Jimmy. “Did you get much of a kick out of it?” + 

“Yes, I did,” said Jane simply. + 

Jimmy looked very much amused at her candour. + 

“We all do at that age,” he said cheerfully. “I’ll never forget the girl who fell off the mourners’ bench.” + 

Jane felt very indignant at the tacit comparison. + 

“Oh!” she said quickly. “He wasn’t like that!” + 

“How do you know what she was like?” smiled Jimmy. + 

“I know she wasn’t like André,” said Jane. The name had slipped out unconsciously. + 

“Do you mean that André never taught you anything you couldn’t learn at a camp meeting?” queried Jimmy. “Oh, Jane!” + 

“I mean that André wasn’t like anyone⁠—anyone else I’ve ever met,” said Jane. + 

“My God!” said Jimmy, addressing the empty November sky. “She never got over him! I hope,” he continued severely, “that you confessed him to Stephen.” + 

“Oh, I confessed him to Stephen,” said Jane. + 

Again Jimmy looked very much amused at her candour. + 

“Good girl!” he said approvingly. “You must always confess them to Stephen.” + 

Jane thought that her mother would think that Jimmy was taking the marriage vows lightly. She almost thought so herself. + 

“There haven’t been any others,” she said severely. + 

“Do you expect me to believe that?” said Jimmy. + 

“Not really any others,” said Jane. + 

“While there’s life there’s hope,” said Jimmy. + 

“I don’t want any others,” said Jane indignantly. + 

“Oh, Jane!” said Jimmy. + 

“I don’t,” protested Jane. “I think clandestine love affairs would be horribly inconvenient.” + 

“There are higher things than convenience,” said Jimmy sublimely. + 

Jane ignored his comment. + 

“And I think,” she went on, “they’d be dreadfully smirching and soiling. And too terrible to look back on when they were over. They would be over, you know. You get over loving anyone⁠—” + 

“Oh!” said Jimmy. “You’ve discovered that, have you?” + 

“No, I haven’t!” said Jane quickly. “I⁠—I’ve just⁠—observed it.” + 

Jimmy chuckled quietly to himself. They walked nearly half a mile in silence. As they entered the garden, he resumed the conversation. + 

“You do get over loving anyone, Jane,” he said gently. “But you don’t always regret that love in retrospect.” + 

Jane thought that sounded very sweet and understanding. + 

“Perhaps not,” she said. By this time they had reached the apple tree. + 

Jimmy paused for a moment beside the clump of evergreens. Jane looked up at him with a smile. They had had a nice walk. + 

“Jane,” said Jimmy suddenly, “are you really as innocent as you seem?” + 

Jane’s eyes widened in astonishment. Jimmy’s eyes were very bright. His breath was coming quickly and a funny excited little smile twisted the corners of his mouth. + 

“You’re like a child, Jane,” said Jimmy. “An inexperienced child!” + 

Jane still stared at him. + 

“Jane,” said Jimmy suddenly, “I’m going to kiss you.” And he caught her suddenly in his arms and turned her face to his. + 

“Jimmy!” cried Jane in horror. “Jimmy!” His lips stopped her words. He kissed her long and ardently. Jane struggled in his arms. His cheek scratched her face. She pulled herself from his embrace and stood staring at him in the garden path. + 

“Oh, Jimmy!” she cried again. “How⁠—how could you?” + 

Suddenly she remembered the house at the end of the garden. She glanced quickly, fearfully, at the white clapboard façade. The clump of evergreens hid the living-room windows. But was that Miss Parrot’s white sleeve in the playroom bay above? Jane felt suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of humiliation. She had been kissed⁠—kissed like a pretty chambermaid in her own garden. She had glanced at her own front windows, fearful of a spying servant’s ironical eye. + 

“Jimmy,” she said, “I wouldn’t have believed it of you!” He was looking down at her, now, still breathing rather quickly. The excited little smile still twisted the corners of his mouth. He looked more like a faun than ever, thought Jane, with an unconscious shiver. “Will you please go back to Chicago, now, at once?” she said with dignity. “Will you please go back without coming into the house?” + 

Jimmy looked very much astonished. + 

“Why, Jane⁠—Jane⁠—” he faltered. “Do you really mind, so awfully?” + 

“I’m going in,” said Jane. “And I don’t want you to follow me.” She turned abruptly away from him and walked up the garden path to the terrace, trying to put her face in order. She opened the terrace door and entered the living-room. The family were all still lounging about the fire. + 

“Where’s Jimmy?” asked Isabel. + 

“He’s gone,” said Jane, turning her back on them to close the terrace door. “He wasn’t staying to supper. He had to get back to the News.” Lies, she thought contemptuously, lies, forced on her by Jimmy, forced on her by her own damnable lack of foresight! She ought to have known what was coming. She ought to have prevented it. She turned from the door and faced the family tranquilly. + 

“What’s up, Jane?” asked Robin. “You look like an avenging angel. Your cheeks are as red as fire.” + 

“It’s just the wind,” said Jane. More lies! “There’s a perfect tornado blowing.” She raised her hands to rearrange her pompadour. As she did so, she rubbed her fingers violently across her mouth. She could still feel Jimmy’s lips there. She could feel his kiss, still vibrating through her entire body. Suddenly she caught her father’s eye. Mr. Ward was sitting comfortably in Stephen’s armchair beside the smouldering fire. Behind a cloud of cigar smoke he was watching his younger daughter very intently. Jane managed to achieve a smile. No one else was paying any attention to her whatever. Jane sat down on the sofa beside Isabel and tried to listen to what she had to say about the cubistic designs that Flora was painting on the wall of the old coach-house. Isabel thought they were very comic. Mrs. Ward thought they were hardly respectable. Mr. Ward continued to watch them all from behind the cloud of cigar smoke. Jane tried to look as if she had forgotten that kiss. + 

IV + 

Mrs. Lester’s living-room was in festive array for a very gala occasion. The occasion was Mrs. Lester’s seventy-fifth birthday. When Jane entered the room with Stephen and the children, she could not see her hostess, at first, in the crowd of people who were laughing and talking around the hearth beneath the Murillo Madonna. Mr. and Mrs. Ward were there, and Flora and Mr. Furness, and Isabel and Robin, and Rosalie and Freddy Waters, of course. Edith and her husband had come on from Cleveland for the celebration and Muriel had invited Cyril Fortune. Bert Lancaster was not yet out of his bed. Rosalie’s daughter was in school in Paris and Edith’s son was in Oxford, but young Albert was there, home from Saint Paul’s for the Christmas vacation, so Isabel had brought Jack and Belle and Jane had brought Cicily and Jenny and little Steve. It was little Steve’s first dinner-party. The children were to eat at a separate table in a corner of the dining-room. + 

Mrs. Lester was sitting in her wheelchair on one corner of the hearthrug. Enormously fat and somewhat crippled with gout, she had not left her wheelchair for years. She still gave parties, however, great gay parties, and was pushed to the head of her dining-room table to preside over them with all her old-time gaiety. Her three dark-haired daughters and their attendant husbands had never ceased to flutter about her. They weren’t dark-haired any longer, of course. Edith was really white-headed, slim, worn, and distinguished at forty-three. Pretty Rosalie was growing grey, and even Muriel had one white Whistler lock, that she rather exploited, in the centre of her dark pompadour. Mrs. Lester herself, with her straight snow-white hair, her wrinkled, yellow face, and her great gaunt nose hooked over her ridiculous cascade of double chins, had come to look much more Jewish with advancing years. In spite of her invincible gaiety, her large dark eyes, with yellow whites, were shadowed with racial sadness. No eyes, thought Jane, were ever as beautiful as Jewish eyes. Mrs. Lester’s had always touched her profoundly. They were twinkling now, up at Mr. Ward, as she sat enthroned on the hearthrug. An enormous bowl of seventy-five American beauties nodded over her snowy head. Jane kissed her with real emotion. Then turned to Muriel. + 

“How is Bert tonight?” she asked. + 

“Oh⁠—Bert’s fine,” said Muriel easily. “He’s going to sit up next week. They’ve given him exercises for his arm. They think he’ll get some motion back.” + 

“I see,” said Isabel, at Muriel’s elbow, “you asked Cyril to fill his place.” + 

“Cyril’s always helpful,” grinned Muriel shamelessly. “He does what he can.” + 

“Who else is coming?” asked Isabel interestedly. “You’re still a man short.” + 

“Jimmy Trent,” said Muriel, smiling. “I asked him for our Jane.” + 

Jane glanced casually at her father, then turned, to smell an American beauty, rather elaborately. She had not expected this. She had not seen Jimmy since she had turned away from him, five weeks before, under the apple tree in the Lakewood garden. He had telephoned three times, but Jane had not gone to the telephone. He had not written, for which fact Jane was devoutly thankful. She felt somehow very unequal to answering that unwritten letter and still more unequal to the melodramatic gesture of sending it back unread. She had known, of course, that she would have to meet Jimmy sometime, but she had not anticipated that meeting at Mrs. Lester’s seventy-fifth birthday-party. She was wondering just how to handle it when Jimmy appeared at the living-room door. + 

Muriel moved quickly to meet him and Jane slipped quietly away from Mrs. Lester’s side before he came up to present his compliments. She began talking to Freddy Waters in a great burst of gaiety. In a moment the butler appeared at the dining-room door. He announced dinner and moved to push Mrs. Lester’s chair in to the table. Almost immediately Jane heard Jimmy’s voice at her elbow. + 

“I found your name in my envelope in the dressing-room, Jane,” he said, “and you can bet your life I was glad to see it there.” He offered his arm with a smile. His eyes, however, looked very serious. Freddy Waters had gone off in quest of Isabel. The dinner-party was passing into the dining-room, two by two. + 

Jane rested her fingertips on Jimmy’s black broadcloth sleeve. She felt there was nothing whatever to say to him. Jimmy looked anxiously down at her as they joined the little procession. Jane saw her father watching them as he offered his arm to Edith. Mr. Furness had gone in with Mrs. Lester. + 

“Can’t you forgive me, Jane?” asked Jimmy earnestly, as they entered the dining-room. + 

“I don’t know,” said Jane. “I still don’t understand at all how you could have done such a thing.” + 

“Don’t you, Jane?” said Jimmy wistfully. “Don’t you, really?” + 

“I don’t understand how you could have done it to me,” said Jane. + 

“I didn’t know,” said Jimmy, pulling out her chair for her as they reached the table⁠—“I didn’t know that you would take it quite so seriously.” + 

Jane seated herself in silence. + 

“I’ve taken it seriously myself,” said Jimmy, “since I did it.” + 

He sat down at her side. + 

“I’m very glad to hear it,” said Jane severely. + 

“And you’ll forgive me?” said Jimmy. + 

“I don’t know,” said Jane again. She turned to look into his contrite eyes. There was something irresistibly funny about a penitent faun. Jane could not help smiling. Jimmy drew a long breath at the sight of her smile. + 

“You have forgiven me!” he said triumphantly. + 

Jane saw her father looking at him from across the table. She wished that Jimmy had not spoken quite so loudly. Then despised herself for the wish. + 

“Don’t let’s talk about it any longer,” she said evenly. “It happened, and I wish it hadn’t. But it doesn’t do any good to go on harping on it.” + 

“I don’t want to harp on it!” cried Jimmy jubilantly. “I don’t want to harp on anything you don’t want to hear.” He was looking at her now, with just the same old look of friendly admiration. “Let’s talk about the weather.” + 

They did, with mock solemnity. Then they talked of other things. Of Jimmy’s reviews, which were making quite a sensation in the Daily News; of Agnes’s play, which-was already half-written; of Cicily, shaking her dandelion head at Jack at the foot of the children’s table; of Mrs. Lester, nodding her white one at Mr. Furness at the head of theirs; of the charms of fourteen and of the charms of seventy-five. Jane was quite sorry when Mrs. Lester turned the conversation at the beginning of the salad course and she had to begin to talk to Edith’s husband of the charms of living in Cleveland⁠—if there were any, which Jane very much doubted. + 

Later, when the men joined the women in the living-room, Jane was rather surprised to find herself talking to her father. He sat down beside her on the green brocade sofa with a sigh of satisfaction. + 

“I don’t see enough of you, kid,” he said cheerfully. “Nor enough of Stephen. What with all the grandchildren, I hardly spoke to either of you on Christmas Day. I’m going to put in the evening catching up on what you’ve been doing.” + 

“I haven’t been doing much,” said Jane. “Just Christmas shopping.” + 

“Many town parties?” asked Mr. Ward. + 

“None in the holidays,” said Jane. “I’m too busy with the children.” + 

“Much company in the country?” + 

“No one but the children’s friends.” + 

“Jimmy been out often?” + 

Jane looked straight into her father’s eyes. + 

“He hasn’t been out since that luncheon on Thanksgiving Day,” she said. + 

Mr. Ward settled back against the sofa cushions. + 

“What do you hear from Agnes, kid?” he asked. + 

V + 

Motoring out to Lakewood when the party was over, tucked in beside Stephen in the front seat of their little Overland, with the children asleep in the tonneau behind them, Jane felt very happy over the events of the evening. She would not have believed it possible that she could have arrived so easily at an understanding with Jimmy. He was obviously very sorry and she had made her attitude quite clear. Jimmy knew now that she was not to be kissed like a chambermaid, caught in an upper corridor. Jimmy knew now that she was not entertained by philandering. Jimmy knew now that she was not that sort of wife to Stephen and that the idea of flirting with Agnes’s husband was, to her, unthinkable. Jimmy knew all those things, though they had not referred to his mistake again after they left the table. Jane had hardly spoken to Jimmy all the latter part of the evening. Jane had talked to her father and Jimmy had hung devotedly over Muriel. He had entered into open competition with Cyril Fortune for her favour and by the end of the party the blond young landscape-gardener was quite sunk in depression. Stephen had talked with his cousin Flora about her new hat shop. He had given her some splendid ideas about cost accounting. Flora had told Jane she was very grateful. Flora was not much of a bookkeeper. + 

How wise she had been, thought Jane, how very wise, not to have said anything to Stephen about that kiss. Not that wisdom had really entered into her decision to keep silent. In fact, all those weeks, when she had been wondering whether or no to talk to Stephen about it, she had felt that the wiser course would be to make a clean breast of the whole affair. And yet she hadn’t. Partly, of course, because of what Stephen would think of Jimmy, but even more because of what Stephen would think of her. Jane thought very little of herself, as she reviewed the incident. Jimmy had been outrageous⁠—Jimmy had been insulting. Yet Jane could not quite bring herself to tell the story to Stephen in the role of the betrayed damsel. Jane knew that she had been growing very fond of Jimmy. Jane knew that she had liked his flattering attention. And Jane knew that, though she had not expected his kiss and certainly had resented it, yet, after she had had it, she had not been able to get it out of her mind, out, indeed, of the very fibre of her being. That was the kind of thing a wife could not tell a husband⁠—not a husband like Stephen, at least, who had never even glanced at another woman since the day he had married her. Stephen would never understand how she could have thought about that kiss, the way she had. And if she did not tell him that, she really would not be telling him anything. Half-truths had no place in conjugal confidence. Half-truths were cowardly, misleading. Half-truths were really lies. Whereas silence was⁠—merely silence. No⁠—it was not the kiss half as much as the way she had felt about it. + 

What was a kiss, after all? Lots of women were kissed. Some of them had told her about it. Muriel was often kissed, and thought nothing of it. It was the thinking something of it that really counted. Jane had been awfully troubled. + 

But now, she felt, she had been very wise not to tell Stephen. The incident was over. It was forgiven and⁠—well, if not yet forgotten, it soon would be. Jane hoped she was not going to spend the rest of her life remembering that Stephen’s wife had been kissed by Agnes’s husband and had liked it. Yes, liked it, in retrospect. Jimmy had learned his lesson. It would not happen again. + 

Jimmy had not even asked when he might come out to see her. When he had said good night, he had left her to interpret the expression of his wistful eyes in silence. It was Stephen who had said in parting, “How about dinner on Friday, Jimmy? It’s fish night. You ought to taste Jane’s receipt for planked whitefish!” Even then he had not responded with a questioning glance at her. She had slipped her arm through Stephen’s and said serenely, “Of course, Jimmy. Just a family party.” And he had accepted without undue rejoicing. No grateful, penitent glances. Nothing to shame her before Stephen’s innocence. + 

Jimmy knew, now. There would be no more mistakes in the future. Jane snuggled down against Stephen’s shoulder under the furry lap-robe. He took his eyes from the road a moment to smile down into her face. + 

“Nice party, wasn’t it?” said Stephen. + 

“I had a lovely time,” said Jane, smiling softly. She kept on smiling all the way to Lakewood. A sleepy, reassured, little smile. + 

IV + 

I + 

The April sunshine was slanting in Jane’s open bedroom window. The pale, profuse sunshine of early April, flickering through the bare boughs of the oak trees. The crocuses were blooming in the garden. The daffodils nodded their yellow heads in the bed beneath the evergreens. The apple tree was an emerald mist of tiny budding leaves. + 

Jane sat at the window, sewing a fresh lace collar in the neck of a new rose-coloured gown and talking to Miss Parrot. From her chair she could see Jenny, swooping luxuriously up and down in the swing beneath the apple tree, and hear Steve, concealed in the upper branches, clamouring vociferously for his turn. + 

“I really hate to leave him,” said Miss Parrot. “But he’ll be all right now, Mrs. Carver, if you just watch him a little. Don’t let him race around too much this summer. And of course no competitive sports.” + 

Jane nodded, over her sewing. She was awfully glad, of course, that little Steve’s heart was really so much better, but almost gladder, she thought with a smile, that she would no longer have to talk to Miss Parrot at table, three times a day, or listen to her unasked advice on little Steve’s care. Of course, she had been wonderful. She was a very good heart nurse. Still, it had been irritating, having her around under foot all winter, a tacit critic of Jane’s every action, an alien observer of her every thought. But it was over now. Little Steve had completely recovered. Dr. Bancroft had dismissed Miss Parrot. She was going in three days. + 

“You’ll see that he takes his tonic,” said Miss Parrot. + 

“Of course,” said Jane, with a hint of irritation in her voice. + 

“Well, I hope Sarah remembers it when you’re out,” said Miss Parrot, with a sigh of resignation. + 

Jane looked up from her sewing at Miss Parrot’s starched, immaculate figure. She met her pleasant, impersonal eye. She wished dispassionately that she could push Miss Parrot out of her bedroom by main force. Suddenly Sarah appeared in the doorway. + 

“Mr. Trent to see you, madam,” she said impassively. + 

Jane jumped to her feet. + 

“Mr. Trent? Downstairs?” Jane glanced at the little French clock on the mantelpiece. It pointed exactly to three. Jimmy had said he was taking the three-nineteen. He was an hour ahead of time. She thrust her sewing into Miss Parrot’s hand. “Miss Parrot,” she said hastily, “just baste this collar in for me, will you? As quickly as you can, please. I’m wearing it this afternoon. And, Sarah⁠—I want tea in the living-room at four. We won’t wait for Mr. Carver. Toast, please, and anchovy sandwiches, and some of that sponge cake we had at luncheon.” She was already slipping out of her morning gown. “Tell Mr. Trent I will be down immediately.” + 

Sarah turned from the door. Jane sat down hastily at her dressing-table and began to take down her hair. Miss Parrot had seated herself at the window and was picking up Jane’s thimble. Jane could catch her reflection in the slanting plane of the cheval glass, near the dressing-table. She was looking at Jane with a faint smile of cynical amusement. Her eye was no longer impersonal. Jane hated Miss Parrot, at the moment. She hated herself for that question she had never been able to answer⁠—had that been Miss Parrot’s white sleeve in the playroom bay window, that Thanksgiving afternoon when Jimmy. She pushed in the last hairpin and rose to her feet. + 

“Ready, Miss Parrot?” she said evenly. + 

“Yes,” said Miss Parrot, handing her the gown. She lingered a moment, to put away the thimble and close the sewing box. Again she looked Jane over with that not impersonal eye. “You look very pretty, Mrs. Carver,” she said. + 

Jane dabbed a little perfume on her cheeks and hurried from the room without answering. In the hall she stumbled over the children’s cocker spaniel. It yelped sharply, then wagged its tail and started after her down the stairs. At the foot of them Jane saw Belle, just starting up for Cicily’s room. She and Jack were coming out for the weekend. They must have been on the train with Jimmy. The child looked up at her with wide, round eyes of admiration. The eyes were so round and the admiration so apparent that Jane stopped and laughed down at her. Belle was really charming. She looked like an apple blossom. + 

“Hello, little Belle,” said Jane. + 

At the sound of her voice, Jimmy Trent came out of the living-room. He looked taller than he really was, beside the staring child. His eyes were very bright and blue and his necktie exactly matched them. He stood smiling up at her from the foot of the staircase. As Jane ran down the last steps, he took her hand and held it for a minute. Jane laughed up at him. + 

“You know little Belle Bridges,” she said, withdrawing her hand. + 

“Of course I do,” said Jimmy. “Hello, little Belle Bridges!” He too smiled down at the child. Jane stooped over and kissed little Belle’s cheek. It felt very smooth and cool, like the petal of an apple blossom. The little spaniel was jumping forgivingly about her feet. Jane picked it up and held it tenderly in her arms and kissed the top of its little black head and looked up at Jimmy over its long, floppy ears. Then they turned away from Belle toward the living-room door. + 

“I didn’t expect you till four,” said Jane, smiling up at Jimmy over the spaniel. + 

He paused to let her precede him through the living-room door. + 

“I couldn’t wait to play you my last cadenza,” said Jimmy. “Jane, that concerto is finished. I couldn’t wait an hour⁠—” + 

“Silly!” said Jane, looking over her shoulder at Jimmy, as they passed into the living-room. In a moment she heard little Belle, scrambling upstairs to Cicily’s bedroom. “But I can’t wait myself to hear it. Oh, Jimmy, I can’t believe⁠—truly I can’t believe⁠—that you’ve really done it.” + 

“You know who made me,” said Jimmy. His eyes searched hers for a moment, before he turned to pick up his fiddle-case from the table. “It’s really your concerto.” He tucked his violin under his chin and tuned it airily as he strolled across the room, just as he had done on that first Lakewood evening. He took his stand on the hearthrug, bow in hand, and looked down at her. “Your concerto, Jane,” he repeated. It seemed to Jane, at the moment, a very solemn dedication. She looked up at Jimmy very seriously as he raised his bow. She never took her eyes off his slender, swaying figure, until the last note had sounded. + 

“It’s beautiful, Jimmy,” she said then, solemnly, “it’s very beautiful.” + 

“You know why, don’t you?” said Jimmy, looking down at her from the hearthrug. + 

Just then Sarah came in with the tea. + 

II + 

“You wouldn’t think it was so funny,” said Isabel scathingly, “if you’d heard Muriel talking about it yesterday in Flora’s hat shop. She didn’t even stop when I came in.” + 

“I don’t think it’s funny,” said Jane loftily. “I think it’s ridiculous.” + 

“Muriel ought to be ashamed of herself,” said Mrs. Ward. + 

They were all sitting around the fire in Mr. Ward’s library, waiting for Minnie to bring in the tea-tray. + 

“She said it was as plain as a pikestaff,” said Isabel. “She said it right before me. She said that just as soon as she and Flora came in they saw you two sitting over at a corner table. She said that you had a quart of champagne, Jane, and that you said something and that Jimmy smiled and lifted his glass and looked at you and kissed the rim before he drank from it.” + 

“It was only a pint,” said Jane. “We were drinking to the success of his concerto. He finished it last week.” + 

“It was very unfortunate,” said Mrs. Ward, “that Muriel had to come in at just that moment.” + 

“It was very unfortunate,” said Isabel severely, “that Jane had to be there at all. If you want to lunch with him, Jane, why can’t you lunch at the Blackstone or the Casino as if you’d like to be seen, instead of sneaking off to a place like De Jonche’s where no one you know ever goes⁠—” + 

“We didn’t sneak,” said Jane hotly. “And we go to De Jonche’s because we both like snails. They have the best in town.” + 

“You go?” said Mrs. Ward. “Had you been there before?” + 

“Often,” said Jane briefly. + 

“When I was your age,” said Mrs. Ward, “it was as much as a young married woman’s reputation was worth to be caught lunching with a man who was not her husband⁠—” + 

“Oh, nonsense, Mamma!” interrupted Isabel. “Everyone lunches with men, nowadays. It all depends on how you do it. Of course, as for Jimmy’s kissing the rim of his champagne glass in a public restaurant⁠—” She stopped abruptly as Minnie came in with the tea-tray. Minnie loved family gossip, but she was never allowed to hear any. Minnie had been twenty-five years in Mrs. Ward’s service, and in all those years Mrs. Ward had never failed to change the conversation from the personal plane whenever she entered the room. + 

“I wonder where your father is?” she said now, in a note of hollow inquiry, as Minnie, wheezing slightly, placed the heavy silver tray on the tea-table. Minnie, at fifty-three, was rather plump and puffy. She had recently developed a chronic asthma. But she never allowed anyone else to wait on Mrs. Ward. + 

“Hello, Minnie!” said Jane. + 

Minnie smiled her acknowledgement of the greeting. + 

“How are the children, Mrs. Carver?” she asked. Then bending solicitously over Mrs. Ward. “Don’t you eat too much of that plum cake, Mrs. Ward. It’s too rich for your blood pressure.” Her cap slightly askew on her iron-grey hair, she made a triumphant exit. + 

“Does Minnie think plum cake sends up blood pressure?” smiled Jane. + 

“She’s really getting impossible,” said Isabel. + 

“Sometimes I think she takes more interest in my condition than you children do,” said Mrs. Ward. She poured out a cup of tea for Isabel. + 

“No sugar, Mamma,” said Isabel. Then, returning to the charge, “Well, Jane, I think you ought to cut it out.” + 

“Cut what out?” said Jane angrily. “Two lumps, Mamma.” + 

“Cut out those clubby little parties à deux, with a pint of champagne. When Muriel starts talking⁠—” + 

“She’s a good one to talk,” said Mrs. Ward. + 

“Set a thief to catch a thief!” laughed Isabel. + 

“Oh, Isabel, shut up!” said Jane, in a sudden, snappish return to the vernacular of her childhood. She had not said “shut up” to Isabel for more than twenty years. As the words left her lips, Mr. Ward entered the room. He came in just as he always did, and laid the evening paper on his desk and began to turn over the afternoon mail. + 

“Hello, kid!” he said tranquilly. “Why must Isabel shut up?” + 

“Because she’s an ass!” said Jane, still rather snappishly. Mr. Ward raised a quizzical eyebrow. + 

“So are we all of us,” he said pleasantly, “sometimes.” Then, running his paper-cutter through an envelope, “What’s Isabel been doing now?” + 

“Talking,” said Jane briefly. “And listening. And repeating silly gossip.” + 

Mr. Ward looked as if he thought Isabel had merely been running true to form. + 

“That all?” he said, with a smile. + 

“I’ve been telling Jane,” said Isabel, “that she’s getting herself talked about.” + 

“Oh!” said Mr. Ward. “Lizzie, could you make me a cup of weak tea?” He dropped his mail and sat down in his leather chair, lowering himself into it rather carefully, his hands on the arms. “It’s like summer out,” he said pleasantly. “Makes me think of the old days when I used to walk home from the office. The Furnesses’ lilacs are almost in bud.” + 

“They don’t bud any more, Papa,” said Jane. “The soot is killing them.” + 

“One does,” said Mr. Ward. “Thank you, Lizzie. The one by the old playhouse.” + 

“It’s terrible,” sighed Mrs. Ward, “what’s happening to the neighbourhood.” + 

Jane knew just what her mother thought about what was happening to the neighbourhood. She walked over to the window and stood staring across Pine Street at the new flat building that had gone up in the opposite yard the previous autumn. + 

“Boardinghouses,” said Mrs. Ward, “and dressmakers and apartments⁠—” Jane was no longer listening. She stood staring out of the window at the terra-cotta façade of the flat building, thinking furious thoughts about Isabel⁠—and Muriel⁠—and a world in which you could not phrase a funny little toast to a man’s concerto, without⁠—Presently she heard her father get up and go out of the room. Jane glanced at her watch. + 

“I must go,” she said. “I’m motoring out to Lakewood.” + 

“Are you picking up Stephen?” asked Mrs. Ward. + 

“No,” said Jane. “He prefers the train.” She kissed her mother’s cheek. “Goodbye, Isabel,” she added coldly. + 

“Now, Jane⁠—don’t be a dumbbell,” said Isabel cheerfully. “You think over what I said.” + 

Jane left the room without stooping to further discord. In the hall she met her father. He was standing there, outside the library door, exactly as if he were waiting for someone. He slipped his arm through hers and walked to the front door. Jane opened it. + 

“Goodbye, Papa,” she said. There was a note of finality in her tone. He followed her out onto the front steps, however. He stood a moment on the top one, gently detaining her by his restraining arm. + 

“Kid,” said Mr. Ward, “I know you’re a grown woman, but you seem just like a child to me.” + 

Jane smiled, a little nervously. She did not speak. + 

“But you’re a wise child, kid,” went on Mr. Ward, “and I wouldn’t presume to dictate on your conduct.” He too smiled just a little nervously. Jane still stood silent. “I’ll only trespass on the parental prerogatives so far as to urge you,” said Mr. Ward, “to avoid all appearance of evil. It’s a wicked world. + 

“Papa,” said Jane, “I haven’t been doing anything I shouldn’t.” + 

“I’m sure you haven’t,” said Mr. Ward quickly. + 

“It’s just Muriel’s nonsense. You know Muriel.” + 

“Yes, I know Muriel,” said Mr. Ward. “That’s why I urge you to avoid all appearance of evil.” He stood looking steadily at Jane. The nervousness had left his smile. His eyes looked worried, however. His eyes looked tired, Jane thought. His eyes looked old. They seemed a darker brown since his hair had turned so white. Jane kissed him, tenderly. + 

“I will, Papa,” she said. “Don’t worry.” Then she ran down the steps and jumped into the Overland. She glanced back to wave at her father. He was still standing on the top step, looking after her with that faintly troubled expression. Jane forgot him as she set the gears in motion. Her thoughts returned, angrily, to Isabel. That luncheon was perfectly harmless. Muriel, of course, was always malicious, but Isabel ought to have more sense. + 

III + 

Jane could not, however, keep her angry thoughts on Isabel. The April afternoon was very warm and fair. The elm trees were budding down the stretch of Pine Street. The bushes in the park around the Water Works Tower were already green. Jane saw the bench where she and André had sat to look at the pictures of Sarah Bernhardt. She remembered Muriel’s adolescent giggle. Muriel was an idiot, even then. + 

The lake stretched, softly blue beyond the Oak Street breakers. A gaunt skyscraper or two loomed up on the filled-in land to the southeast. A whole section of the city had been created there since Jane’s childhood. Created from garbage and tin cans and rags and old iron. Apartments were going up in the waste of empty land. Magnificent redbrick and grey-stone apartments, with liveried doormen and marble entrance halls and wrought-iron elevators, standing where once there had been only blue water. Blue water beyond the vacant lots where sweet clover and ragweed had bloomed. Jane felt like the first white child born west of the Alleghenies when she looked at them. She had seen Chicago change from a provincial town into the sixth largest city in the world. + 

She turned the car abruptly from the Drive at the Division Street corner. She was going to pick up Jimmy at his North State Street boardinghouse and motor him out to Lakewood for the weekend. They would have lovely weather. One more hot day like this, thought Jane, and perhaps the apple tree would burst into bloom. + 

Jimmy was standing on the curbstone, his suitcase at his feet. + 

“Am I late?” asked Jane anxiously, as she brought the car to a standstill. + 

“No⁠—I’m early,” said Jimmy. He opened the door of the motor and slipped into the seat beside her. “I thought maybe you’d come sooner than you said.” + 

“I was having tea with Mamma,” said Jane, “and talking to Isabel.” She set the gears in motion. + 

“What about?” asked Jimmy. + 

“Oh, nothing,” said Jane. “Nothing much.” Suddenly she decided to tell him. “Muriel told Isabel about seeing us at De Jonche’s yesterday,” she said, her eyes on the street before her. + 

“What was there to tell?” asked Jimmy innocently. + 

“Oh⁠—Muriel can always make a good story,” said Jane. There was a little pause. Jane knew Jimmy was looking at her profile. + 

“Well⁠—do you care?” asked Jimmy presently. + 

“Oh, no,” said Jane falsely. “No⁠—not at all. Only⁠—” + 

She stopped. + 

“Only what?” asked Jimmy gently. + 

“Only it seems too bad that people have to try to spoil lovely things. To⁠—to smirch them, you know, with ugly gossip and false interpretations.” Again Jane stopped. + 

“They can’t spoil them really, Jane,” said Jimmy very seriously. “No one could ever spoil what happens between you and me but just ourselves.” + 

That was just like Jimmy, thought Jane, smiling softly at the North State Street traffic. It was just like Jimmy to understand. He had perfectly phrased the thought she had been groping forever since her angry altercation with Isabel. As long as she and Jimmy kept their heads and⁠—well⁠—did not allow anything⁠—anything silly to happen, there was nothing in their friendship to be ashamed of. + 

And it would so soon be over. Jimmy’s job at the News would be ended in a fortnight. His friend was on the water now, coming back from Munich. They had had a lovely winter⁠—the loveliest winter, Jane thought, that she had ever known. Jimmy had written his reviews and had finished his concerto, and she⁠—she had never been so happy, really, with Stephen and the children, never so contented at Lakewood, never so sure and satisfied, in her secret heart, that Life was worth living, that it would always, somehow, be fun to live. + 

There had been, of course, Miss Parrot’s cynical smile and Sarah’s impassive silence and Muriel’s malicious twinkle and her father’s troubled eyes. And now there was Isabel’s uncalled-for interference. It was, as her father had just said, a wicked world. But she and Jimmy had never exchanged a word that she could be sorry for. Never said anything, really, that Stephen might not have heard. Stephen, himself, had never been troubled, Stephen liked Jimmy. Stephen knew she was to be implicitly trusted. + 

And now Jimmy was going⁠—going in two weeks⁠—back to New York to the Greenwich Village flat and the big and little Agneses. And Jane⁠—Jane would be left in Lakewood to⁠—to watch the spring come and buy the children’s thin clothes and clean the house and pack up for the Gull Rocks summer. Jane sighed a little as she thought of the months before her. Just like all other spring months, of course. But she would miss Jimmy dreadfully, and she would never see him again, of course, just as she had this last lovely winter. He would go back to New York and produce the concerto and become suddenly distinguished. Suddenly distinguished, really, a little bit because of her. Of course it was absurd of Jimmy to call it her concerto, but Jane knew that she had kept him working. Her encouragement and enthusiasm had spurred him on. Yes, both she and Jimmy would always be a little better for the winter’s friendship, which no one but themselves could ever spoil. No one but themselves could ever understand it, really⁠—a simple friendship that had meant so much to them, a joy of companionship⁠— + 

“A penny for your thoughts, Jane?” said Jimmy. + 

“I was just thinking of us,” said Jane, “and of all that’s happened this winter.” + 

“Have you really liked it?” asked Jimmy. + 

“Oh, yes,” breathed Jane. Then, after a moment, “It seems so funny, now, to think I didn’t think I would, when Agnes first wrote me you were coming. I thought you’d be terrible, Jimmy⁠—” + 

“I am terrible,” said Jimmy, with a smile. + 

“Oh, no, you’re not,” said Jane very wisely. + 

“You don’t know the half of it,” said Jimmy. + 

“Yes, I do,” said Jane. “I know pretty nearly the whole of it. I understand you perfectly.” + 

“Sure you do?” said Jimmy. + 

“I know you can do great things if you’re prodded by a little encouragement⁠—” + 

“Say rather if I’m prodded by ‘the endearing elegance of female friendship,’ ” said Jimmy, still with the smile. “It does more for a man than you know. There’s a little lyric of A. E. Housman’s, Jane⁠—I wonder if you remember it?⁠—it has always been a particular favourite of mine.” Still smiling into her appreciative eyes, he quoted lightly: + 

“Oh, when I was in love with you. + 

Then I was clean and brave, + 

And miles around the wonder grew + 

How well did I behave.” + 

“Well,” laughed Jane a little confusedly, “even so, what of it? As long as you do behave, you know.” + 

“There’s a second verse,” said Jimmy warningly. + 

“And now the fancy passes by, + 

And nothing will remain, + 

And miles around they’ll say that I + 

Am quite myself again.” + 

Jane felt unaccountably disappointed in the second verse. She summoned up a laugh, however. + 

“I call that cynical,” she said. “It won’t be that way with you. As soon as you get to New York, Jimmy, you must show that concerto to Damrosch. I know he’ll like it. And you must write something else. Something else immediately, while you’re still in the mood for it.” + 

“Perhaps I won’t be in the mood for it,” said Jimmy. “I don’t feel as if I’d be much in the mood for anything when I get back to New York.” + 

“You’ve been working awfully hard,” said Jane sympathetically. “I liked what you wrote last week about Mischa Elman. You’re right. No other living violinist has his combination of warmth and light⁠—of feeling, yet detachment⁠—” + 

They talked of Mischa Elman’s concert all the way to Lakewood. Stephen was waiting for dinner and reading a King Arthur story aloud to the children when they entered the living-room. He was glad to see Jimmy and glad, too, of the soft spring weather. + 

“We’ll have eighteen holes of golf tomorrow morning, Jimmy,” he said cheerfully. “Don’t dress, Jane. I’m as hungry as a bear.” + 

But Jane thought she would just slip into the red Poiret tea-gown. It would not take a minute. + 

IV + 

That evening Jimmy played parcheesi with the children. Jane sat at Steve’s elbow and advised him on his moves. Stephen lounged in his armchair and read the Evening Post. Stephen was no parcheesi fan. He was glad to be relieved of a duty that had devolved upon him every evening since Miss Parrot’s departure the week before. Jane thought the game was really quite amusing. They laughed a great deal over Steve’s success with the dice. He sent Jimmy’s foremost man home eight times in succession. It was half-past nine before the game was over. + 

When the children had gone upstairs, Stephen cast aside his paper with a yawn. + 

“I’m tired tonight,” he said. “This first hot weather takes it out of you. I’m going up to bed.” + 

Jane caught a glint of elation in Jimmy’s eye across Stephen’s unconscious figure. Jane did not like that glint. Of course, Jimmy just wanted to sit and gossip by the fire as they had so often gossiped, but he should not have allowed himself to look elated. Curiously, at that moment, Jane thought of her father. “Avoid all appearance of evil.” She thought also of Sarah, washing dishes in the pantry. + 

“I’m tired, too, Stephen,” she said evenly. “I’d like to turn in early myself.” + 

The glint of elation in Jimmy’s eyes turned quickly to a look of incredulity, then to one of mock consternation. + 

“See here,” he protested, “I’m not tired. I’m not tired at all. I was looking forward to a big evening.” + 

“Sorry,” smiled Jane. “You’re not going to get it.” She turned with Stephen toward the door. + 

“See here,” said Jimmy again, “are you just going off to bed and leave me standing here on the hearthrug? I don’t call it civil.” + 

“That’s just what we’re going to do,” smiled Jane. “Goodnight.” + 

“It’s a sell,” said Jimmy. “It’s not ten o’clock yet. What will I do with myself? I can’t go to sleep for hours. I’ll be reduced to writing a letter to Agnes!” + 

The mention of Agnes’s name instantly confirmed Jane’s plan to go up with Stephen. He had already started for the stairs. + 

“That’s a fine idea, Jimmy,” said Jane pleasantly. “There’s notepaper in the desk by the window. Give her my love and tell her I think the concerto is grand.” + 

Jimmy crossed the hearthrug and stood at her side for a moment in hesitant silence. He laid a restraining finger on her arm. + 

“Don’t go up, Jane,” he said persuasively. “I want to talk to you.” + 

“Can’t you talk to me tomorrow?” asked Jane, a trifle uncertainly. + 

“Good night, Jimmy,” called Stephen from the staircase. “Remember, eighteen holes tomorrow morning!” + 

Jane turned to glance up at him. He was standing on the landing, looking down on them a little wearily. Jane suddenly thought their figures had assumed a rather intimate pose. She started away from Jimmy and walked out into the hall. She threw him a glance over her shoulder, however. He was gazing after her so wistfully that she could not help twinkling back at him. + 

“No, I’m going up,” she said pleasantly. “Good night, Jimmy.” She followed Stephen up the darkened staircase and into the mellow lamplight of their little blue bedroom. Stephen, with a familiar gesture, was already hanging his grey sack coat over the back of a chair. He looked up at Jane as she entered. + 

“You look very pretty tonight in that red thing,” he said. + 

Jane glanced at herself in the cheval glass⁠—she did look pretty. Her eyes were still twinkling at the thought of deserted Jimmy and her lips were curved in a little involuntary smile. Stephen continued to look at her in silence. + 

“You’ll miss Jimmy,” said Stephen, “when he goes back East.” + 

Jane turned to stare at him. Stephen had never made any comment on Jimmy just like that, before. Could Stephen be really⁠—troubled? He went on speaking very evenly. + 

“But you’ll have more time,” he said. There was a little pause. “I’ve been thinking, Jane,” he continued⁠—what had Stephen been thinking? Jane thought breathlessly⁠—“I’ve been wondering if this wouldn’t be a good spring to see about getting Steve’s teeth straightened. If he wore braces at Gull Rocks this summer⁠—” + 

Jane turned from him in an absurd surge of irritation. Oh, yes⁠—she would have plenty of time, now, to straighten Steve’s teeth and plan for Gull Rocks and⁠—Stephen was unbuttoning his waistcoat. + 

“I think you’d better take him in to the dentist⁠—” he began. + 

“I’ll take him in, Stephen,” said Jane snappishly. “Of course I’ll take him in. Why do you act as if you had to nag me⁠—” + 

Her voice died down. Stephen had paused, in the act of untying his necktie, to look at her in amazement. Jane walked over to him and laid her hand on his arm. “I’ll take him in, dear,” she said. Her tone was a tacit apology. Stephen went on untying his necktie. Jane slipped out of the Poiret tea-gown. Jimmy, she supposed, was writing a letter to Agnes at the living-room desk downstairs. + 

V + 

Next morning Stephen had his eighteen holes of golf with Jimmy. The April day had dawned very bright and fair. The men came home from the links just a little late for luncheon with Jane and the children. It was nearly three before the meal was finished. While they were drinking their after-luncheon coffee, Mr. and Mrs. Ward turned up, rather unexpectedly. The day was so pleasant, Mrs. Ward remarked, that they had motored out to spend Sunday afternoon with the grandchildren. Mr. Ward had greeted Jimmy very affably, but Mrs. Ward looked distinctly affronted by his presence at Jane’s fireside. When Stephen produced a cocktail for the men at teatime, Jane saw her mother fasten a lynx eye on Jimmy, as he stood on the hearthrug, nonchalantly toying with his glass of amber liquid. Jane could not suppress a smile. She knew that her mother was determined that Jimmy should not kiss the rim of that glass unobserved. He made no attempt to do so, however. He had made no attempt, all day, to resume the conversation of which Jane had deprived him on the previous evening. Mr. and Mrs. Ward did not leave their grandchildren until after six o’clock. It was time to dress for dinner when they had gone. + 

Both men seemed silent, Jane thought, at table. Tired out, perhaps, by their morning of golf in the open air. Cicily rather monopolized the conversation. She was chattering of the educational plans of the rising generation. In particular of the educational plans of Jack Bridges, on whom the family interest was centring that spring. At seventeen Jack was about to take his final entrance examination for Harvard. He was a clever boy, snub-nosed and twinkle-eyed like his father, with a strong natural bent for the physical sciences. Robin and Isabel were very proud of him. Cicily, herself, wanted to go to Rosemary next year with her cousin Belle. Jane had tried in vain to interest her in Bryn Mawr. She tried again, a little half-heartedly, this evening at the table. + 

“Why should I go to college, Mumsy?” said Cicily. “And lock myself up on a campus for four years?” + 

Lock herself up on a campus, thought Jane. That was what college life meant to the rising generation. For her Bryn Mawr had spelled emancipation. Through Pembroke Arch she had achieved a world of unprecedented freedom. Under the Bryn Mawr maples she had escaped from family surveillance, from the “opinions” of her mother and Isabel, from ideas with which she could never agree, from standards to which she could never conform. To Agnes and herself the routine existence in a Bryn Mawr dormitory had seemed a life of liberty, positively bordering upon licence. To Cicily it seemed ridiculous servitude. + 

“I don’t want to go to college,” said Cicily. “I want to room with Belie at boarding-school and come out when I’m eighteen.” + 

“Don’t you want to know anything?” asked Stephen, rousing himself from his silence. The twinkle in his eyes robbed the question of all harshness. + 

“I don’t want to know anything I can learn at Bryn Mawr,” laid Cicily airily. + 

“That’s a very silly thing to say,” said Jane. + 

“Oh, I don’t know,” interposed Jimmy brightly. “What use is knowledge to a girl with hair like Cicily’s? Let her trust to instinct. I bet that takes her farther, Jane, than you’ll care to see her go.” + 

“A little knowledge might hold her back,” said Jane. + 

“I don’t want to be held back,” said Cicily promptly. “I want to do everything and go everywhere.” + 

“Nevertheless, you want to know what you’re doing and where you’re going,” said Jane severely. + 

“I don’t know that I do,” said Cicily. “I like surprises.” + 

“The child’s a hedonist, Jane,” said Jimmy. “Let her alone. You’ll never understand a hedonist. ‘Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.’ Pater said that first, but it’s very true. You’ll never read Pater, Cicily, if you don’t go to Bryn Mawr, and you probably wouldn’t like him if you did. He doesn’t speak the language of your generation. Nevertheless, he is your true prophet. I learned pages of Pater by heart, when I was at night school at the settlement. I thought he had the right idea. ‘A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.’ That was my credo, Cicily, when I was not so much older than you are. Go on burning, my dear, burn like your golden hair, and never bother about the consequences.” + 

Cicily was staring at him with wide, non-comprehending eyes. Jane knew she had not understood a word of the Pater. + 

“That’s very immoral doctrine,” she said. + 

“But didn’t you think it was swell,” said Jimmy, “when you first read it with Agnes at Bryn Mawr?” + 

“Yes, I did,” said Jane honestly. “But I was too young to know what it meant.” + 

“The trouble with education is,” said Jimmy cheerfully, “that we always read everything when we’re too young to know what it means. And the trouble with life is that we’re always too busy to reread it later. There’s more sense in books, Cicily, than you’d really believe. Though, of course, they don’t teach you anything vital that you can’t learn for yourself.” + 

Jane rose from the table. + 

“Go up and do your homework, Cicily,” she said cheerfully. “And don’t listen to Mr. Trent. You’ll never learn the past participle of moneo, unless you apply yourself to Harkness’s Latin Grammar.” + 

The children trooped upstairs to the playroom. Stephen picked up the Sunday paper. What with the golf all morning and the family all afternoon, he had not really assimilated the real estate columns. Jimmy wandered over to the glass doors that opened on the terrace. + 

“Come out in the garden, Maud,” he said lightly to Jane. “The moon is full tonight.” + 

Jane looked at Stephen a little hesitantly. + 

“You come, too, Stephen,” she said. + 

Stephen looked up over the margin of the Morning Tribune. + 

“Run along with Jimmy,” he said. Then, as his eyes returned to the real estate page, “I think this Michigan Avenue Extension Bridge is really going through. That lot of your father’s on Pine Street will be worth a fortune some day, Jane.” + 

Jane walked at Jimmy’s side across the shaded terrace and down into the moonlit garden. They strolled the length of it in silence. The night was fresh and just a little cool. The moon was high in the eastern sky. It seemed racing rapidly through the ragged rents in the tattered clouds. There was no wind in the garden, however. The moon-blanched daffodils were motionless in their bed beneath the evergreens. The boughs of the apple tree did not stir. Only the cloud-shadows raced, as the moon was racing, across the expanse of lawn. Jimmy sat down on a green bench beneath the apple tree. + 

“Sit down, Jane,” he said. “Are you cold?” + 

“No,” said Jane, sinking down on the bench beside him. “I think the air is lovely.” + 

“Better put on my coat,” said Jimmy. + 

“No⁠—I don’t need it,” said Jane. + 

Jimmy took it off, however, and wrapped it about her shoulders. He turned the collar up, very carefully, around her bare throat. Jane could smell the faint distinctive odour of the tweed as he did so. + 

“I want you to be comfortable,” said Jimmy. + 

“I am comfortable,” smiled Jane. + 

“I want you to be comfortable,” continued Jimmy, ignoring her comment, “because I’m going to talk to you for a long, long time. It will take a long, long time, even out here in the moonlight, to make you understand all that I have to say.” + 

Jane looked quickly up at him, disquieted by his words. Jimmy’s face was very calm. He seemed, at the moment, a very tranquil faun. In one instant, however, by one sentence, he shattered the tranquillity of the moment. + 

“What do you think,” he said, “is going to happen to you and me?” + 

Jane stared at him. + 

“To you⁠—and me?” she faltered. He looked steadily down at her. “Why, Jimmy”⁠—she was conscious of smiling nervously⁠—“what⁠—what could happen?” + 

He ignored her foolish question. + 

“I’m married to Agnes,” said Jimmy; “you’re married to Stephen. We’ve known each other just seven months and we’re in love with each other. What’s going to happen?” Jane, in her utter astonishment, half-rose from the bench. + 

“We⁠—we’re not in love with each other,” she protested hotly. + 

“Jane”⁠—said Jimmy sadly⁠—“don’t waste time in prevarication. The night is all too short as it is.” + 

“I’m not in love with you,” said Jane, sinking back on the bench. + 

“Oh, yes, you are,” said Jimmy. + 

“I love Stephen,” said Jane, staring straight into his eyes. + 

“Yes,” said Jimmy; “that makes it worse, for you’re not in love with him. There’s a great difference, you know, in those two states of mind, or rather of emotion. You’re in love with me and I’m in love with you. I haven’t been in love with Agnes for years. I don’t even love her, any more. She’s irritated me too often. I respect her⁠—she amuses me⁠—I’m grateful to her⁠—” + 

“Jimmy! Don’t talk like that!” cried Jane sharply. + 

“But you love Stephen,” went on Jimmy imperturbably. “Which complicates everything, for of course you’ll want to consider him.” + 

“Consider him!” cried Jane. “Of course I want to consider him!” + 

“Yes,” said Jimmy reasonably. “That’s what I said. That’s what makes it so difficult.” + 

“Makes what so difficult?” cried Jane. + 

“My persuading you to come away with me,” said Jimmy calmly. + 

“Have you lost your mind?” demanded Jane. + 

“For you are going to come away with me, in the end, Jane,” said Jimmy. “But I’ll have to do an awful lot of talking first.” + 

“I’m not in love with you,” said Jane again. Meeting Jimmy’s eyes, however, her glance fell before his gaze. + 

“No use in not facing it, Jane,” said Jimmy. + 

“I⁠—I didn’t even know you were in love with me,” said Jane. “You⁠—you’ve never made love to me except⁠—except just that once⁠—” + 

“I’ve been making love to you, Jane,” said Jimmy, “from the moment that you resented that kiss. Not before. I just kissed you for the fun of it, and you were quite right to resent it. But since then, Jane, I haven’t thrown a glance or said a word that wasn’t arrant lovemaking. Oh”⁠—he stopped her indignant protest⁠—“I know you never recognized it. You’re invincibly innocent. Any other woman would have known it at once, and would either have kicked me out or responded in kind. In either case I’d have tired of her in two months.” + 

“You’re asking me to respond in kind, now,” said Jane tremulously. “At least⁠—at least I suppose you are.” + 

“You bet I am,” said Jimmy. + 

“So that you can tire of me in two months?” asked Jane. + 

“So that I can marry you,” said Jimmy promptly. “I want you to come away with me, Jane, tonight, or tomorrow or next week Wednesday⁠—any time you say. I want you to face the music. I want you to meet your fate. I want you to live before you die. Did you know that you’d never lived, Jane? That’s why you’re so invincibly innocent. I want you to live, darling. I want to live with you.” His eager face was very close to hers. But still he had not so much as touched her hands. They were clasped very tightly together in her lap. + 

“Jimmy,” said Jane brokenly, “please stop.” + 

“Why?” said Jimmy eagerly. + 

“Because it’s no use,” said Jane. “I won’t deceive Stephen, or betray Agnes, or leave my children.” + 

“But you love me?” said Jimmy. + 

Jane’s troubled eyes fell before his ardent glance. + 

“You love me?” he repeated a little huskily. “Oh, Jane⁠—my darling⁠—say it!” His shaken accents tore at her heartstrings. + 

“Yes,” whispered Jane. “I⁠—I love you.” Her eyes were on the cloud-shadows racing across the lawn. She could hardly believe that she had uttered the sentence that rang in her ears. It had fluttered from her lips before she was aware. The words themselves gave actuality to the statement. Once said they were true. They trembled in the silent garden. Winged words, that could not be recalled. + 

“Jane!” breathed Jimmy. And still he did not touch her. Staring straight before her at the cloud-shadows, Jane was suddenly conscious of a dreadful, devastating wish that he would. + 

“Jane⁠—” said Jimmy falteringly. Suddenly he took her in his arms. + 

Jane felt herself lost in a maze of emotion. + 

“Jimmy,” said Jane, after a moment, “this is terrible⁠—this is perfectly terrible. I⁠—I can’t tell even you how I feel.” She slipped from his embrace. + 

“Even me?” smiled Jimmy. Until he repeated them, Jane had not realized the tender import of her words. He took her again in his arms. + 

“Jimmy⁠—don’t!” said Jane faintly. “I’m sinking, Jimmy, I’m sinking into a pit that a moment before was unthinkable! Stop kissing me, Jimmy! For God’s sake, stop kissing me! I want to think!” + 

“I don’t want you to think,” said Jimmy. “I just want you to feel.” + 

“But I⁠—I am thinking!” said Jane pitifully. + 

“Don’t do it!” said Jimmy. + 

But Jane steadfastly put away his arms. + 

“Jimmy,” she said desperately, “we must think. We must think of everyone. If I went away with you, we wouldn’t achieve happiness.” + 

“Of course we would,” said Jimmy. “We’ve only one life to live, Jane, and that life’s half over. Let’s make the most of it while it lasts.” + 

“But Stephen’s life,” said Jane, “and Agnes’s⁠—” + 

“Don’t think of them,” said Jimmy. “Think only of us. Are our lives nothing?” + 

“I can’t think only of us,” said Jane. + 

“You could if you came away with me,” said Jimmy. “You will come, won’t you, Jane?” + 

“No, Jimmy,” said Jane very sadly. + 

“Then I’ll carry you off, darling,” said Jimmy, “to some chimerical place. We’ll jump over a broomstick together in the dark of the moon to the tinkle of a tambourine! Let’s sail for the South Sea Islands, Jane, just as we planned that first evening. Let’s go to Siam and Burma and on into India⁠—” + 

“Oh, Jimmy,” sighed Jane, “you’re so ridiculous⁠—and so adorable.” + 

There was only one answer to that. + 

“You’re adorable,” said Jimmy, as he kissed her. “And ridiculous!” + 

“Jimmy,” said Jane, “am I dreaming? I must be dreaming⁠—though I never dreamed of you like this before.” + 

“Invincible innocent!” laughed Jimmy. “You’re going away with me! You’re going to leave this garden forever. You’ll never see that apple tree in bloom again⁠—” + 

“Never that apple tree?” said Jane. + 

“But you’ll see other trees in bloom,” smiled Jimmy, “in other gardens.” + 

“But not that one?” said Jane. “Not that one with Jenny’s swing hanging from its branches and Steve’s tree-house nailed to its trunk and the bare place beneath it where the grass never grew after we took up Cicily’s first sandpile?” + 

“Don’t think, darling!” said Jimmy quickly. + 

They sat a long time in silence. + 

“Cold, darling?” whispered Jimmy, as Jane stirred in his arms. + 

“No⁠—not cold,” murmured Jane. + 

“Thinking?” whispered Jimmy. + 

“No⁠—not thinking,” murmured Jane. “Not thinking any more at all.” + 

“Coming?” smiled Jimmy. + 

“I⁠—don’t know,” said Jane. “Don’t ask me that or I’ll begin thinking. Just hold me, Jimmy, hold me in your arms.” + 

VI + 

When Jane opened her eyes next morning, the cold light of the April dawn was breaking over the garden. She had come into the house with Jimmy some four hours before. They had turned out the lights in the living-room and crept silently up the stairs and exchanged one last kiss at the door of Jane’s bedroom. She had opened the door with elaborate precaution and moved quietly into her room. Precautions, however, were unnecessary. Stephen was sound asleep on the sleeping-porch. Jane had slipped out of her clothes and into her nightgown in the darkness and had stood, for a moment, in her bedroom window gazing out at the silvery garden. She had raised her bare arms in the moonlight, as if to fold to her heart a phantom lover. She had smiled at their milky whiteness. Then she had jumped into bed and covered herself up and waited, a little fearfully, for besieging thoughts. They had not come, however. Defeated by victorious feeling, perhaps they lay in ambush. Jane wondered and, while wondering and feeling, fell serenely asleep. + 

She was wakened at dawn by the chirping of birds in the oak trees on the terrace. She opened her eyes in her familiar blue bedroom. She did not remember, for a moment, what had happened in the garden. Then the thoughts pounced on her. They had been in ambush. Serried ranks of thoughts, battalions of thoughts, little valiant warrior thoughts that rose up singly from the ranks and stabbed her mind before she was aware of their coming. She recalled the events of the evening with horror and incredulity. It could not have happened. If it had, she must have been mad. She was Jane Carver⁠—Mrs. Stephen Carver⁠—Stephen Carver’s wife and the mother of his three children. She was Jane Ward⁠—little Jane Ward⁠—John Ward’s daughter⁠—who had been born on Pine Street and gone to Miss Milgrim’s School with Agnes and to Bryn Mawr with Agnes. Little Jane Ward, who had loved André and grown up and married Stephen. She had been Stephen Carver’s wife for nearly sixteen years. Yes, she must have been mad last night in the moonlit garden. Mad⁠—to let Jimmy speak, to let him hold her in his arms. Mad to sit with him there⁠—beneath the apple tree⁠—how many hours? Four⁠—five⁠—six hours she had sat with Jimmy beneath the apple tree, deceiving Stephen and betraying Agnes and planning to abandon her children. + 

Had it really happened? Was it a dream? Something should be done about dreams like that. You should not even dream that you were deceiving your husband or betraying your friend or planning to abandon your children. But it was not a dream. If it were a dream, she would be lying beside Stephen in her bed on the sleeping-porch. No⁠—it had happened. It had irrevocably happened. The long path into which she had turned at the moment that she had looked into Jimmy’s eyes on the threshold of the Greenwich Village flat had come to its perhaps inevitable ending. She loved Jimmy. She had, incredibly, told him so. The telling had changed everything. It had changed Jimmy. It had changed herself, most of all. It had changed everything, Jane saw clearly in the light of the April dawn, but the most essential facts of the situation. You did not deceive your husband⁠—you did not betray your friend⁠—you did not abandon your children. + 

Yet she had promised Jimmy only four short hours ago, on the bench beneath the apple tree, to do all those things. She had promised him, just before parting. Jane closed her eyes to shut out the awful clarity of the April dawn, to shut out the familiar walls of the bedroom, to shut out the serried ranks of thoughts that clustered about her bed. It was no use⁠—the thoughts were still there, crowding behind her eyelids. They would not be denied⁠—battering, besieging thoughts. No feeling left, curiously enough, or almost none, to combat them. Only an incredulous bruised memory of feeling⁠—feeling so briefly experienced, to be forever forsworn. + 

Of course she would forswear it. She had been mad in the garden. Moon-mad. Man-mad. She had been everything that was impossible and undefendable. She had not been Jane Carver or little Jane Ward. She had been some incredible changeling. But she was Jane Carver now, and Jane Ward, too. Little Jane Ward, who had been brought up on Pine Street by a Victorian family to try to be a good girl and mind her parents. Jane Carver, who had behind her the strength of fifteen incorruptible years of honest living as Stephen’s wife. Of course she would forswear the feeling. She would tell Jimmy that morning. + 

Jimmy. At the memory of Jimmy the serried ranks of thoughts fell back a little. A sudden wave of emotion reminded her that feeling was not so easily forsworn. Jimmy’s face in the moonlight⁠—his eyes⁠—his lips⁠—his arms about her body. Suddenly Jane heard Stephen stirring on the sleeping-porch. It was seven o’clock, then. The day had begun. This day in which thoughts must give birth to action. This day in which feeling must be forsworn. Stephen, struggling into his bathrobe, appeared on tiptoe at the door to the sleeping-porch. He looked a little sleepy, but very cheerful. + 

“Hello,” he said, “you awake? Why did you sleep in here?” + 

“I didn’t want to wake you up,” said Jane. She was amazed at the casual tone she managed to achieve. “I sat out very late with Jimmy in the garden.” + 

“I went up early,” said Stephen, “just as soon as I finished with the paper. Coming down to breakfast?” + 

“No,” said Jane. “Ask Sarah to bring up a tray.” + 

Jane felt she could not face a Lakewood family breakfast. Whatever life demanded of her on this dreadful day, it did not demand that she should sit behind her coffee tray, surrounded by her children, and pour out Jimmy’s coffee under Stephen’s unconscious eye. She would wait in her room until Stephen had gone to the train, until the children had left for school. Then she would go down and tell Jimmy that she had been mad in the garden. + 

Two hours later, Jane opened her bedroom door and walked down the staircase. No Jimmy in the hall. She entered the living-room and saw him standing by the terrace doors, gazing out at the apple tree. He wheeled quickly around at the sound of her step on the threshold. Jimmy looked tired. Jimmy looked worn. But Jimmy looked terribly happy. Jane smiled tremulously. + 

“Jimmy⁠—” she said, still standing in the doorway. + 

“Don’t say it!” cried Jimmy. “I know just how you feel. I know just how you’ve reacted. Don’t say it, Jane! Give yourself time to⁠—to get used to it.” + 

“I am used to it,” said Jane pitifully. “I’m terribly used to it. I’ve been thinking for hours.” + 

“I know what you’ve been thinking!” cried Jimmy. He walked quickly over to her and caught her hand in his. “It was inevitable, Jane, that you’d think those thoughts. Don’t⁠—don’t let them trouble you, Jane. I knew how it would be.” + 

“You knew how it would be?” faltered Jane. + 

“I even knew you wouldn’t come down to breakfast. In point of fact, I didn’t come down to breakfast myself In spite of all the many things I’ve done, Jane, in and out of camp meetings, I can’t say that I ever planned to run off with the wife of a friend before. I didn’t seem to care much about meeting Stephen myself, this morning. I didn’t seem to care much about sharing his eggs and bacon.” + 

“You haven’t had any breakfast?” said Jane stupidly. Jimmy shock his head. “I’ll ring for a tray.” She moved to the bell by the chimneypiece. Jimmy followed her across the room. + 

“But, Jane⁠—” he said. + 

“Yes,” said Jane, her hand on the bell-rope. + 

“Those thoughts, you know, aren’t really⁠—really important. I mean⁠—they don’t change anything.” + 

“They change everything,” said Jane dully. “Sarah, a breakfast tray, here in the living-room, for Mr. Trent.” + 

“And one for Mrs. Carver,” said Jimmy, with an affable smile for the maid in the doorway. “I’m sure you haven’t eaten a bite this morning. I’m sure you just drained down a cup of black coffee.” + 

“That’s just what I did,” said Jane, smiling wanly at Jimmy’s omniscience. + 

“Two breakfast trays, Sarah,” grinned Jimmy in dismissal. Then, when the girl had gone; “Sit down here, darling, on the sofa, with a pillow at your back. Put your feet up. There! Comfortable, now?” + 

“Very,” said Jane with another wan smile. “Jimmy, you make it awfully hard for me to tell you.” + 

“Tell me what?” said Jimmy brightly. “That you take it all back? Don’t trouble to tell it, Jane. Just sit there and rest and wait for your breakfast. When you’ve eaten it, life will seem much rosier.” He stood looking down at her very cheerfully from the hearthrug. “I wish I could sit down on the floor, Jane, and take your hands and tell you I adore you, but I really think I hadn’t better do it until Sarah has come in with the breakfast trays.” + 

“You hadn’t better ever do it,” said Jane. + 

“Nonsense,” said Jimmy. “I’m going to do it innumerable mornings. In the South Sea Islands and Siam and Burma⁠—” + 

Jane couldn’t help laughing. + 

“Jimmy,” she said, “you’re perfectly incorrigible. But I mean it. I really mean it. I’m terribly sorry⁠—I know it’s rough on you⁠—but⁠—but I made a dreadful mistake last night in the garden.” + 

“And now you’ve discovered that you don’t love me,” smiled Jimmy. “Well, presently you’ll discover again that you do.” + 

“No, Jimmy.” Jane’s voice was shrill with conviction. + 

“Here’s Sarah,” murmured Jimmy, turning with nonchalance to fleck the ash of his cigarette in the empty grate. Sarah placed the breakfast trays on two small tables and retired noiselessly from the room. + 

“Now eat, Jane,” said Jimmy commandingly. “I’m going to let you have all that breakfast before I even kiss you.” + 

Jane thought the breakfast would choke her. But somehow, under the stimulus of Jimmy’s pleasant conversation, she found she had consumed the entire contents of the tray. Jimmy rang again for Sarah. When the trays were removed, he stepped quickly over to her and sank on his knees by the sofa. + 

“Darling!” said Jimmy, seizing her hands in his. + 

“Jimmy!” cried Jane in terror. “Don’t kiss me! Don’t you dare to kiss me! I’m not the woman I was last night in the garden.” Her earnestness held him in check. + 

“Darling,” said Jimmy, still clinging firmly to her hands, “I know it’s terribly hard for you. I know it’s much worse for you than it is for me. You’ll have to face Stephen, whom you love, and a scandal, which you’ll hate. You’ll have to leave your children for a time⁠—though, of course, you’ll see them afterwards. I love your children, Jane, and they like me. They’re great kids. But of course you’ll have to leave them. It’s a terrible sacrifice⁠—and what have I to offer you?” + 

“Oh, Jimmy,” said Jane pitifully, “don’t say that! It isn’t that!” + 

“I know it isn’t, but still I have to say it. I’m a total loss as a husband, Jane. I’m a rolling stone and I’ll never gather moss. We’ll wander about the world together and I’ll write a little music and look for pleasant little jobs that won’t keep me too long in any one place. You’ll be awfully uncomfortable, Jane, a great deal of the time. And maybe lonely⁠—” + 

“No, I wouldn’t be lonely,” said Jane. + 

“I’m not so sure,” said Jimmy. “I think there are lots of raggle-taggle gypsies that you wouldn’t find so very congenial on closer acquaintance. They’re rather sordid, you know, and just a little promiscuous, in close quarters.” + 

“I wouldn’t care,” said Jane eagerly; “I wouldn’t care, Jimmy, as long as I had you.” + 

“Well, then,” smiled Jimmy, drawing a long breath, “well, then⁠—if that’s the way you feel, just why am I not to dare to kiss you?” + 

“Because I’m not going away with you, Jimmy.” Jane drew her hands from his. “I’m not going to do it. This isn’t just the silly reaction of a foolish woman to a moment’s indiscretion. It’s something much more serious. I’m in love with you, Jimmy, but I love you, too. I love you, just as I love Stephen and the children. I love you as I love Agnes. And that’s one of the reasons why I won’t let you do this thing. Can’t I make you understand, Jimmy, what I mean? When you love people, you’ve got to be decent. You want to be decent. You want to be good. Just plain good⁠—the way you were taught to be when you were a little child. Love’s the greatest safeguard in life against evil. I won’t do anything, Jimmy, if I can possibly help it, that will keep me from looking anyone I love in the eye.” Her voice was trembling so that she could not keep it up a moment longer. She turned away from Jimmy to hide her tears. In a moment he had tucked a big clean handkerchief into her hand. She buried her face in the cool, smooth linen. Jimmy rose, a trifle unsteadily, to his feet. + 

“Jane,” he said, “Jane⁠—you almost shake me.” + 

Jane wept on in silence. + 

“See here,” said Jimmy presently; his voice had changed abruptly: “This won’t do, you know. For it really isn’t true⁠—it’s very sweet, but it’s silly⁠—it’s sentimental. It doesn’t do anybody any good for a man and woman who are in love with each other to go on sordidly living with people they don’t love. Stephen wouldn’t want you to live with him under those circumstances. Agnes wouldn’t want me to live with her. They’re both exceptionally decent people.” + 

“So we’re to profit by their decency?” said Jane coldly. “To be, ourselves, indecent?” + 

“Darling,” said Jimmy, “it isn’t indecent to live with the man you love.” + 

Jane rose abruptly from the sofa. + 

“You’re just confusing the issues, Jimmy,” she said sadly. “But you can’t change them. It isn’t right for married people, happily married people, to leave their homes and children for their own individual pleasure.” + 

“But we’re not happily married people,” said Jimmy. + 

“If we’re not,” said Jane steadfastly, “it’s only our own fault. Neither Stephen nor Agnes has ever sinned against us. They love us and they trust us. They trusted us, once for all, with their life happiness. I couldn’t feel decent, Jimmy, and betray that trust.” + 

“Jane,” said Jimmy, “I don’t understand you. With all your innocence you’ve always seemed so emancipated. Intellectually emancipated. You’ve always seemed to understand the complications of living. To sympathize with the people who were tangled up in them. You’ve always said⁠—” + 

“Oh, yes,” said Jane, “I’ve done a lot of talking. It made me feel very sophisticated to air my broad-minded views. I was very smug about my tolerance. I used to say to Isabel that I could understand how anybody could do anything. I used to laugh at Mamma for her Victorian views. I used to think it was very smart to say that every Lakewood housewife was potentially a light lady. I used to think I believed it. I did believe it theoretically, Jimmy. But now⁠—now when it comes to practice⁠—I see there’s a great difference.” + 

“But there isn’t any difference, Jane,” said Jimmy. “Not any essential difference. Just one of convention. You’re a woman before you’re a Lakewood housewife. ‘The Colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady are sisters under their skins!’ ” + 

“But they’re not, Jimmy! That’s just Kipling’s revolt against Victorian prudery. I suppose he felt very sophisticated when he first got off that line! The complications of living seem very complicated when you look at them from a distance. When you’re tangled up in them yourself, you know they’re very simple. If you’re really the Colonel’s lady, Jimmy, no matter how little you may want to do it, you know exactly what you ought to do.” She turned away from him and stood staring out through the terrace doors at the April garden. For a long time there was silence in the room. Then⁠— + 

“I⁠—I don’t believe⁠—you love me,” said Jimmy slowly. + 

Jane turned her white face from the April garden. + 

“Then you’re wrong, Jimmy,” she said gently. “You’re very wrong. It’s killing me to do this thing I’m doing. It’s killing me to be with you, here in this room. Will you please go away⁠—back to town, I mean⁠—and⁠—and don’t come back until you’ve accepted my decision.” + 

“I’ll never accept it,” said Jimmy grimly. + 

“Then don’t come back,” said Jane. + 

Without another word he left the room. Jane opened the terrace doors and walked out into the garden. She walked on beyond the clump of evergreens and sat down on the bench beneath the apple tree. She had been sobbing a long time before she realized that she still held Jimmy’s handkerchief in her hand. She buried her face in it until the sobs were stilled in a mute misery that Jane felt was going to last a lifetime. She sat more than an hour on that bench. When she returned to the house, Sarah told her that Mr. Trent had gone back to the city on the eleven-fifteen. + 

VII + 

Five days later, Jimmy returned to Lakewood. He turned up, early in the afternoon, and found Jane superintending the gardener, who was spading up the rose-bed in the garden. + 

She looked up from the roots of a Dorothy Perkins and saw him standing on the terrace. She was no longer surprised that she was so easily able to dissemble her emotion. Jane had had plenty of practice in the fine art of dissembling emotion during the last five days. + 

“I think you’d better order another load of black earth, Swanson,” she said casually and turned to walk over to the terrace. + 

Jimmy stood there, quite motionless, watching her approach through the sunny garden. His face was very serious and his smile was very grave. Jane ascended the terrace steps and held out her hand to him. He took it in silence and held it very tightly. + 

“You don’t know what it does to me,” said Jimmy, “to see you again.” + 

“Have you accepted my decision?” said Jane. + 

“No,” said Jimmy abruptly, “of course not. Did you think I would?” He drew her hand through his arm and led her over to the corner of the terrace that was sheltered by the oak trees. The oak trees were just bursting into pink and wine-red buds. They did not give much shelter, but from that terrace corner you could not see the rose-bed. + 

“I asked you not to come back until you had,” said Jane, withdrawing her hand from the crook of his arm and sitting down on the brick parapet of the terrace. + 

“Jane, you’re really invincible,” smiled Jimmy. “Invincibly determined as well as invincibly innocent! Do you really mean to tell me that you haven’t spent the last five days regretting that you sent me out of your life?” + 

“I don’t think that there’s anything to laugh at in this situation,” said Jane severely. + 

“Darling!” said Jimmy⁠—in a moment he was all penitence and contrition⁠—“I’m not laughing. You know I’m not laughing. I’m preserving the light touch⁠—something very different in situations of an emotional character. But I repeat my question⁠—haven’t you been awfully sorry?” + 

“Of course I’ve been sorry,” said Jane. “I’ve been in hell.” + 

Jimmy looked down at her very tenderly. + 

“I’ve been there with you, Jane,” he said soberly. “Don’t you think it’s time you let us both out?” + 

Jane shook her head. + 

“I guess we’re there to stay, Jimmy,” she said. “Do you know, as far as I’m concerned, I almost hope I will stay there. The one thing that I couldn’t bear would be the thought that I could ever get over you.” + 

“Why?” said Jimmy. + 

“To feel the way I feel about you, Jimmy,” said Jane, “and then to get over it, would be the most disillusioning of all human experiences. I’m going to keep faith, forever, with the feeling I have for you at this moment.” + 

Behind the tenderness in Jimmy’s eyes glittered the ghost of his twinkle. + 

“Well, that’s very sweet of you, darling,” he said. “But don’t you think that assurance, taken by itself, is just a little barren? It has a note of finality⁠—” + 

“It is final,” said Jane. “That’s all I have to say to you.” + 

“Well,” said Jimmy, drawing a long breath, “I’ve a great deal more than that to say to you. Listen, you ridiculous child⁠—if you think I’m going to let you ruin both our lives with a phrase⁠—” + 

“Jimmy,” said Jane, “I beg of you not to go into this again. I’ve had⁠—really I’ve had⁠—a terrible five days. But I haven’t changed my mind. I haven’t changed it one iota. I’m glad you’re going away. I hope I don’t see you again for years. It just kills me to see you. It kills me to live with your memory, but I wouldn’t forget you for anything in the world.” His eyes were very bright as he stood looking down at her. Jane turned her head to gaze out over the flat, sunny Skokie Valley. After a moment she spoke again. Her voice had changed abruptly. It had grown dull and lifeless. “When are you going?” she asked. + 

“That depends upon you,” said Jimmy. + 

“If it depends upon me,” said Jane, still not turning her head, “you can’t go too soon.” + 

“Jane,” said Jimmy, dropping quickly down beside her on the parapet. “You⁠—you really won’t come with me?” + 

“No,” said Jane. + 

“You don’t want to live?” + 

“I’ll live,” said Jane tonelessly, “for Stephen and the children. That sounds very melodramatic, I know, but it’s exactly what I’m going to do. There’s just one other thing I want to say to you, Jimmy. I thought of it after you’d gone the other day.” She turned her head to look into his eyes. “I’m never going to tell Stephen anything about this, and I hope you won’t tell Agnes. I couldn’t decide, at first, just what I ought to do about that. I couldn’t decide whether it was courage or cowardice that made me want not to tell. I couldn’t decide whether Stephen ought to know. You see”⁠—she smiled a little gravely⁠—“I really feel terribly about it, and I know, no matter how dreadful the telling was, I’d feel better after I’d told it. Confession is good for the soul. I wish I were a Catholic, Jimmy. I wish I were a good Catholic and could pour the whole story into the impersonal ear of a priest in the confessional. But I’m not a Catholic and Stephen isn’t a priest. So I think I’ll just have to live with a secret. I’ll just have to live with Stephen, knowing that I know, but he doesn’t, just what I did.” + 

Jimmy’s sad little smile was very tender. + 

“You didn’t do so awfully much, you know, Jane,” he said. + 

“But I felt everything,” said Jane soberly, “I think it’s not so much what you do that matters, as what you feel. What I felt is somehow what I can’t tell Stephen. I’ve never had a secret before, Jimmy. I’ve never had anything I couldn’t tell the world. I hope⁠—I hope you’ll feel that way about Agnes. For I really feel about Agnes just the way I do about Stephen.” + 

“I’m not going back to Agnes,” said Jimmy suddenly. + 

Jane stared at him in horror. + 

“You’re not⁠—going back⁠—to Agnes?” she faltered. + 

“Did you think I could?” said Jimmy harshly. + 

“Why not?” asked Jane. Her eyes searched his. Suddenly her mouth began to tremble. “Why not⁠—if I can⁠—stay with Stephen?” + 

“Oh⁠—my darling!” breathed Jimmy. + 

“You must go back to her, Jimmy,” said Jane. “Don’t you see⁠—if you don’t, I’ll have ruined her life just as if I’d gone away with you?” + 

“I can’t go back to her,” said Jimmy. He stood up suddenly and took a few steps across the terrace, then turned to look at her again. “No, Jane. If you won’t come with me, I’m going without you. I’m going to see the world before I die, I’m going West⁠—out to the coast⁠—to sail on the first boat I can catch for the Orient. I don’t know just how I’ll manage it, but I’ll work my way somehow.” + 

“But you’ll come back?” said Jane. She rose as she spoke and walked anxiously over to him. “You’ll have to come back, you know.” + 

“Oh⁠—I suppose one always comes back,” said Jimmy uncertainly. “I’ll probably die in East St. Louis.” + 

“But before you die,” urged Jane, attempting a shaky little smile, “before you die, you will come back to Agnes?” + 

“Well⁠—nothing’s impossible,” said Jimmy. He looked moodily down at her. “Except, apparently, one thing.” + 

“When are you leaving?” asked Jane. + 

“Tomorrow, perhaps. It’s Saturday, you know. I need my last paycheck.” + 

“Then this is goodbye?” They were strolling, now, side by side, back to the terrace doors. + 

“I guess it is, Jane. Considering how you feel.” + 

He opened the door for her and they crossed the living-room in silence. He picked up his hat from the hall table and stood looking down at her by the front door. + 

“Do you want me to kiss you goodbye?” said Jimmy. + 

Jane shook her head. Two great tears that were trembling on her lashes rolled down her cheeks. She ignored them proudly. + 

“Well⁠—I’m going to do it anyway!” said Jimmy. He caught her roughly in his arms. In the ecstasy of that embrace, Jane knew that she was crying wildly. Suddenly, he put her from him. Without a word of farewell, he had opened the door and was gone. Jane leaned helplessly against its panels, exhausted by emotion. Suddenly she turned and ran rapidly up the stairs to the window on the landing. But she was too late. The gravel road was empty. Jimmy had disappeared around the bushes at the entrance of the drive. + 

V + 

I + 

Jane stood staring at the map of Europe that Stephen had tacked up on the living-room wall. She was staring at the little irregular row of red-and-blue thumbtacks that marked the battle-line in eastern France. She was staring at the holes in the canvas where the thumbtacks had once been and where they might be again tomorrow, as the fortunes of men and war wavered over the battlefields. Over the battlefields where men were fighting and dying while Jane stared at the map. She had been staring at it just like that for five days. + 

For more than three months that map had hung on the living-room wall and Jane had thought nothing of it. She had not shared Stephen’s interest in the fluctuating battle-line. To Jane, preoccupied with desolate thoughts of Jimmy, the war had been merely an irrelevance. A quarrel of diplomats that was no concern of hers. The fantastic thought that German and French and English men were dying on those battlefields, dying by scores of thousands, had never really captured her imagination. It was another European war. Incredible, of course, in this civilized age, but no nearer to Jane, emotionally speaking, than the War of the Roses, the Napoleonic campaigns, the French defeat of 1870. Even the thought that André, at the age of thirty-nine, might be drawn into the conflict had failed to arouse her. Jane was preoccupied with desolate thoughts of Jimmy. + 

He had left Chicago without trying again to speak to her. He had disappeared into silence. Silence that had lasted for two months. Then she had had a picture postcard with a Chinese stamp upon it. A Chinese stamp and a picture of a little tower-like temple. Jimmy had written just four lines beneath it. “Here’s the Chinese shrine, Jane, where I’d have made you an honest woman. Today the temple bells are tinkling out of tune.” + 

That was all. And again there had been silence. A curious silence in which the vast echoes of war could rumble without arresting her attention, but which could always be shattered by the postman’s ring. Silence, in which Jane waited to hear again from Jimmy. Five days ago⁠—it was the ninth of November⁠—Jane had received his letter. At the sight of the New York stamp her heart had leapt up⁠—was it with thankfulness or a strange, instinctive revulsion? Jimmy had returned to Agnes. Jane had opened the letter. She could not understand it. It was dated in Berlin, on the tenth day of August. + 

“I’m going to war, Jane. I’ve joined the German army. I joined it under the influence of a beer and a blond. I wasn’t too drunk, though, to remember my old friends Karl Marx and Bach and Beethoven and Wagner, and just drunk enough to have let Martin Luther slip my mind. + 

“I’ve got a pull with a Prussian I roomed with when he was a cub reporter on the New York Staats-Zeitung. He’s an officer now, and he made me an aide because of my English. It was all awfully irregular, for the army here is highly organized. Nevertheless, he did it and I’m going to see action at once. If they set me to using my English, I’ll probably be shot at dawn by the British. Anyway, I’m writing the Kaiser that, before I am, we’ve got to take Paris, because I’ve never seen it. I’d like to enter it in style the first time. + 

“I’m sending this letter through the lines in a spy’s pocket. He’s going to ramble around through Switzerland and Italy to Washington and hopes to come back with a blueprint or two, just in case we follow England into the war. He’ll mail it in New York, if he ever gets there. + 

“And now, Jane, to be quite serious for a minute, do you know that I adore you? Do you know that I feel about you just as I did on the day that I left you? Do you know that I wish to God that I didn’t? Darling⁠—there’s nothing much to say. If you had come away with me, I certainly should not be going to war. This quarrel’s not of my making. If you had, we’d be safe in that cannibal village by this time, eating roasted missionary in an undusted living-room. But you wouldn’t, and you were wrong, but I couldn’t do anything about it. I can’t do anything about it now, not even about the way I feel⁠—so I’m going to war, because that, at least, will be something else again. I certainly don’t want to be killed. Why, I don’t know. If you won’t marry me, there is nothing new under the sun⁠—but there might be, under the sod, where proverbially there is neither marriage nor giving in marriage. + 

“I bet I live to sack Paris absentmindedly, because I will be thinking of you. Your + 

Jane stood staring at the map of Europe. Somewhere on that wavering battle-line, as she stood there, Jimmy was fighting in the quarrel that was not of his making, Jimmy was seeking “something else again,” under a rain of shot and shell. How like Jimmy, how terribly like Jimmy, to go to war on that casual quest! To go to a war that had become a crusade in the minds of all civilized people in an attitude of ironic detachment. To become⁠—of all things⁠—a Prussian officer at a moment when a Prussian officer represented to the minds of his countrymen a symbol of all evil. How like Jimmy to become a Prussian officer because of a beer and a blond and a few romantic thoughts on Karl Marx and Bach and Beethoven and Wagner! Jimmy⁠—in a Prussian helmet, looking like a caricature of the Grown Prince. No, not that⁠—for there would always be his quizzical eyebrows and his pointed ears and his ironical smile, exactly like a faun’s. A faun, mocking himself, in a Prussian helmet⁠—that would be how Jimmy would look, even in the heat of battle. That would be how Jimmy would look, if he lived to sack Paris. If he lived to sack Paris absentmindedly, because he would be thinking of her. + 

If he lived! The thought of Jimmy’s death was unthinkable. Jimmy’s death in a conflict about the issues of which he did not care a damn. A conflict into which he had been driven by her unkindness⁠—No, she would not think that. She would never think that. She had done what she had to do. She had never really regretted it. She would not regret it now. Jimmy had been driven into that conflict by his own restless spirit⁠—by his⁠— + 

The ring of the doorbell roused Jane from revery. Not the postman’s ring, though, at two o’clock in the afternoon. Jane returned to the map again. Sarah stood a moment on the threshold, unnoticed. + 

“Mrs. Carver,” she said. “Mrs. Carver, here’s a telegram.” + 

Jane turned from the map and stared at her in silence. No, she thought, dully, no, it would be a cable! She took the yellow envelope from Sarah’s hand. She opened it without misgiving. + 

“Jane, dear, this may be a shock to you. Have just received letter from Prussian officer in French prison camp that Jimmy had joined the German army and was killed on the Marne. Had had no word from him since he left Chicago. Jane, dear, this seems for me the end of everything. Could you come to me? + 

The yellow papers fluttered from Jane’s fingers. The chintz-hung living-room turned black before her eyes. She caught herself, however, before falling, on the back of Stephen’s armchair. She closed her eyes a moment and then dully opened them. The familiar living-room had returned. Suddenly she felt Sarah’s hand upon her elbow, she heard Sarah’s voice in her ear. + 

“Mrs. Carver⁠—here⁠—sit down a moment. I’ll get a glass of water.” + 

Jane shook her head. She stooped suddenly down and picked up the yellow papers. She read the message through once more. All feeling seemed dead. She felt only the need for practical action. + 

“I’m all right, Sarah,” she said smoothly. “I⁠—I must talk to Mr. Carver.” She walked to the telephone in the pantry and gave Stephen’s number. How strange, she thought, at such a moment to turn instinctively to Stephen! + 

“Mr. Carver,” she said to his secretary. “Mrs. Carver speaking.” + 

“Yes, dear,” Stephen’s familiar voice trickled over the wire. + 

“Stephen,” she said quickly, “Stephen, I’ve just had a wire from Agnes. Jimmy was killed on the Marne.” + 

“On the Marne!” cried Stephen, in stupefaction. + 

“Yes,” said Jane dully, “he’s dead. He’s been dead for two months.” Suddenly she heard her voice break into breathless sobbing. But still there was no feeling. “Agnes wants me. Will you get me a compartment on the five-thirty, this afternoon? I’ve just time to pack and catch it.” She was still sobbing. + 

“Of course,” said Stephen. “But Jane⁠—” + 

“I’ll motor in,” said Jane, “and pick you up at five o’clock at the office. Can you see me off?” + 

“Of course!” cried Stephen. “But Jane⁠—” + 

Jane hung up the receiver. She had never told Stephen, she reflected weakly, that Jimmy was in the German army. + 

“Sarah!” she called sharply. “Bring down my big black bag to my bedroom and order the motor for a quarter-past four.” + 

II + 

“He was killed instantly,” said Agnes. “He was shot in the trenches. He was shot through the head. This German saw it happen.” She handed Jane a creased and wrinkled paper. It was the letter of the Prussian officer, written in perfect English, in a fine German hand, on a sheet of plain block paper. Jane took it in silence. She was sitting beside Agnes on the battered davenport sofa of the Greenwich Village flat. Little Agnes was playing in the nursery beyond the half-open folding doors. It was Saturday afternoon and Agnes had just come home from Macy’s. She was still wearing her new black serge street coat. She had not even taken off her hat. The sheer black chiffon of the widow’s veil, thrown carelessly over it, shadowed her weary eyes. + 

“He saw him buried,” went on Agnes tonelessly, though Jane was reading the letter. It was as if she could not make herself stop talking about it. “He saw him buried next day. There can’t be any mistake.” + 

Jane went on reading the letter in silence. + 

“It was nice of the French to let him mail that letter, wasn’t it, Jane?” said Agnes. “Otherwise I might never have known what happened. I might never have known that he had gone to war.” + 

Jane, having finished the letter, sat turning it over in her hands. + 

“Jane,” said Agnes suddenly, “Why did he do it? Why did he go to war?” + 

Jane still sat staring at the finished letter. + 

“I suppose,” she said a little huskily, “I suppose he⁠—he was just caught up in the general excitement.” + 

“But that wasn’t like Jimmy,” said Agnes earnestly. “General excitements always left Jimmy cold. There was nothing that Jimmy despised more than the mob spirit. Why, Jimmy was a pacifist⁠—as much as he was anything⁠—” Her voice trailed off into silence. + 

Jane looked slowly up at her. Agnes’s sad, worn face was twitching and her throat was throbbing convulsively with the sobs she was trying to master. Jane took her hand in hers. + 

“Don’t⁠—don’t think about that, Agnes,” she said simply. “It won’t do any good. You’ll never know.” + 

“No,” said Agnes, “I’ll never know.” Then, after a pause, “Jane, you saw what he said about Jimmy’s concerto⁠—that he had it with him at the front.” + 

“Yes,” said Jane. + 

“It⁠—it must be lost,” said Agnes sadly. “They fought over that trench for days after Jimmy⁠—died. The dugouts must have been simply exterminated.” + 

“Yes,” said Jane. + 

“Jane,” said Agnes, “did you ever hear the end of it? Did he play it for you?” + 

“Yes,” said Jane. + 

“Was it good?” asked Agnes eagerly. “Was it really good?” + 

“I thought it was very beautiful,” said Jane. + 

Again they sat in silence. + 

“Jane,” said Agnes suddenly, “isn’t it dreadful to think there’s nothing left of Jimmy? With all his cleverness and all his talent he left nothing behind him. The world is just the same as if he had never lived.” + 

“He left you,” said Jane tremulously. “He left you and little Agnes.” + 

“Yes,” said Agnes, “of course he left little Agnes. And he left me. You’re right, Jane. He left me a very different woman than if he’d never loved me. You’re very clever, Jane, darling, to think of that. A man does live in the change he made in the life of a woman who loved him⁠—” + 

“Yes,” said Jane. + 

Again there was silence. Again it was Agnes who broke it. And this time with a gallant attempt at a cheerful smile. + 

“I haven’t thanked you, Jane, for all you did for Jimmy last winter. He simply loved Chicago. He was awfully happy there. He wrote me the gayest letters.” + 

“I’m glad he did,” said Jane. + 

“He was happy in his work and happy about the concerto. He seemed so young, Jane, and somehow carefree⁠—just the way he did when I first knew him. He wrote me very often⁠—and always such funny letters.” + 

“No one could be as funny as Jimmy,” said Jane. + 

“No,” said Agnes. “He was always funny when he was happy. Do you know, Jane, I’ve always understood why he didn’t come back to me? I understood it even at the time. The strongest thing in Jimmy’s life was his sense of adventure. I think those months in Chicago must have seemed rather adventurous, after the years with me and little Agnes in this flat. That seems absurd to you and me, of course, for to us Chicago is just the town we grew up in⁠—but to Jimmy I think it must have been rather a castle in Spain. He couldn’t come back to humble domesticity just after it. He had to wander. To look for other castles, you know, in other countries. But he would have come back, Jane⁠—” Her voice trailed off a trifle wistfully. + 

“Of course he would have!” said Jane warmly. + 

“The thing that kills me,” said Agnes soberly, “is that if he had, you know, our life might have been quite different. My play’s doing awfully well, Jane. They’re going to start a second company on the road. I’m going to take a chance, Jane, and resign from Macy’s to write another. I think⁠—I think that perhaps I can really make a lot of money. Enough to have changed everything for Jimmy⁠—” + 

“Agnes,” said Jane solemnly, “you’re perfectly wonderful.” + 

“No, I’m not,” said Agnes. “I’m just a worker.” + 

“You’re always right,” said Jane. + 

“But not wonderful,” smiled Agnes. “Jimmy was wonderful. And always wrong. Oh, Jane!” Agnes’s smile was very tremulous. “Wouldn’t you know that Jimmy would fight with the Germans and die a hero’s death on the wrong side of the Marne? Jimmy was on the wrong side of every Marne from the day he was born!” + 

“But always wonderful,” smiled Jane. “And always the hero.” + 

“To me,” said Agnes gently. + 

“To me, too,” said Jane. + 