Part + 

I + 

Adolescent + 

I + 

Every few months Mother Grace and the children’s father had a house party and that meant the horse-chestnut tree in the back garden would have an outcropping of nickels and dimes. They grew in the branches and were hidden among the leaves and twigs around the trunk. The boys could climb for them, but June had to burrow around the roots of the tree. She was only four then⁠ ⁠… + 

There was a convenient ledge all around underneath the kitchen table where the children ate supper and they hid their crusts there. Sometimes they were able to slip away unsuspected from the supper table and sometimes Mary Milady, the “girl,” went around and scooped up the crusts and made them eat them before they went out to play “run, sheepy, run.” The disadvantage of that was that the crusts got mixed up and one had to eat them indiscriminately. June being a finicky child much preferred to eat her own⁠ ⁠… + 

Sadie Spielberger, whose mother kept a grocery store at the end of the block, used to lure June into the little corn field at the back of the house and while the two of them hid among the sweet smelling cornstalks, told June things which were very interesting but which June felt that she ought not to know. There was an agreeable excitement in listening to Sadie, excitement akin to that stomach-aching thrill when one was going to the circus. + 

But Sadie died from eating an Easter egg which had served as a parlor ornament for ten years. It was made of sugar and by squinting through one end, June could see a cow and a milkmaid and green trees. Sadie’s death, June felt, was the result of delving too deeply into life’s secrets⁠ ⁠… + 

There was a brook running through the vacant lot across the street, and June and her sister Adele used to sit on the stones and try to turn hairs from a horse’s tail into water-snakes, holding the long hairs patiently in the water, waiting for the heads to grow on them as you were told they did. Concentration made Adele dizzy and she fell in the water and went home howling. June was whipped for it because, as Mother Grace argued, June was two years older and should have known better. That was one of the disadvantages of playing with one’s sister. + 

June was slapped for many things. For going to the icebox and dipping her fingers into the condensed milk can. Two fingers could scoop up a lot⁠ ⁠… + 

At the end of the summer the weeds in the lot grew so high that June could tunnel her way through them, making large green-roofed caves here and there. One of the boys let her share his cave with him and some afternoons when the others weren’t around, he took her in his arms and kissed her, pressing himself up against her. He was one of the big boys, fourteen, and when June was allowed to play with a boy of his age who was captain of the “run, sheepy, run” team which always won, she felt that she should be glad that he wanted to hug her. But there was wickedness in it. It was exciting. + 

June was eight then, and at school, during recess, the girls joined hands and formed a circle and sang: + 

“Water, water wine-flower, + 

Growing up so high. + 

We are all young ladies + 

And we are sure to die. + 

All excepting Ju-une, + 

She is the fairest flower. + 

Fie for shame, fie for shame, + 

Turn around and tell your beau’s name.” + 

It wasn’t always June of course who was the “fairest flower.” Sometimes whole days passed before she was called upon to be one. It gave her a secret thrill to name the captain of the “run, sheepy, run” team. His name was Harvey. Then the girls joined hands again and sang: + 

“Harvey⁠—Harvey’s a nice young man, + 

Comes to the door with his hat in his hand. + 

Takes off his gloves and shows her the ring, + 

Tomorrow, tomorrow the wedding will begin. + 

“Harvey’s sick and ready to die, + 

That will make poor Ju-une cry, + 

Oh June, Oh June, don’t you cry, + 

He’ll be better by and by.” + 

Not long after this was a great upheaval. The Henreddy family moved to the city where there were no vacant lots and brooks and houses with wide lawns around them. Instead there was a long tenement which stretched the entire length of a block. There were stores downstairs and above there were five-room flats and back of each flat there was a porch as big as a room. Each porch had a gate to it, and when June went outside the gate, there was a long passageway down which she could walk, staring in at the other porches⁠—some of them with geraniums, and nasturtiums in boxes nailed to the railing, and swings hanging in the middle of the porches⁠ ⁠… + 

For lunch there was always potato soup and for supper there were bananas, bread and butter and jelly and tea. June didn’t like tea and she didn’t like jelly. And she didn’t like being sent after the bananas. “Get dead ripe ones,” her mother always said. “They ought to be only ten cents a dozen.” And Mother Grace told her if she couldn’t get them for ten cents in one place to go on to the next⁠ ⁠… + 

There was housework to do. Wiping dishes and sometimes washing. Wiping up the floor, and worst of all, dusting. After June and Adele read the story of Polly Pepper from the Sunday School library, there was more fascination in housework. June even polished the faucets of the kitchen sink. + 

Once there was a terrible scene. Mother Grace picked up dishes one by one and slammed them on the floor. Mr. Henreddy got behind her and tried to hold her and kept saying, “Grace, now Grace dear.” + 

June and Adele were making valentines⁠—the next day they were going to get up early and distribute them to the other children around the porches⁠—and they sat with gaudy bits of paper in their hands and whimpered as the smashing continued. Dan hustled them into the bedroom and made them go down on their knees and pray. Dave wouldn’t pray. He just sat with white lips and pretended to go on reading. + 

Afterwards when it was over and Mother Grace was weak and shaking on the bed, Mr. Henreddy sent out for ice cream for the children, but June refused to eat hers. It was too terrible an evening to think of eating ice cream. She sat and wept. Wept for her mother, and for her father because he was so pathetic in his efforts to comfort them. And because ice cream, generally considered a treat, made the tragedy more poignant. + 

The next day Mother Grace made a terse remark about losing her nerve and no more was said about it. June had a hideous feeling of shame and bitterness in her heart, but she did not blame her mother for a minute. Mother Grace was brave as a general rule. She had a sweet habit of “dressing up” in the afternoon. Not that she wasn’t neat and tidy in her pleasant house dresses in the morning. But on cleaning days when the floors had to be scrubbed or after a hard morning in the common laundry in the basement of the tenement, Mother Grace was exceptionally dainty. + 

June loved to watch and help; to prepare the hot bath with just a drop of cologne, for Mother Grace couldn’t afford bath salts; to lay out the towels and the treasured silk kimono with storks and flowers embroidered on it. And afterwards to keep Adele quietly amused on the back porch while Mother Grace napped for fifteen minutes. She seldom allowed herself more for there was always sewing and mending to do in the afternoon. + 

It was a special treat to be allowed to help at the dressing, to brush out the long twist of hair. + 

“Oh dear, oh dear, won’t it ever get all grey,” she often said. It was beautifully white around her face and she was proud of it, for she was only thirty. “I’ve heard say that you could have your hair whitened, but I doubt it. There⁠—that’s enough for the brushing of it. Just see if I get all the little hairs tucked-in in back, dear. The hand-glass, please. If it won’t curl, it’s got to stay tucked. Women who let their hair straggle on the back of their necks, add ten years to their age⁠—” this denunciation of the careless woman coming through several hairpins which Mother Grace kept in readiness in her mouth to tuck some more. + 

It was fun to powder her round neck and dimpled shoulder blades and still more fun to watch her with the pinkish, smelly powder for her face and the little dabs of rouge for cheeks and the lobes of her ears. + 

There was a deep sigh of pleasure for her improved appearance and always the emphatic statement that she felt a hundred times better already. + 

The toilet was completed when violet perfume was applied delicately to eyebrows and behind the ears, and as a reward for services rendered, to the flat bosom of June’s frock. + 

This afternoon’s toilet always brought back the smiley corners to Mother Grace’s lips and eyes. + 

But in times of unusual stress, when the rent had to be paid and there was no money to pay it, or when Mr. Henreddy had been hypercritical about the breakfast set before him and had stamped around and made the atmosphere blue, there was relief to be found in what Mother Grace termed “dissipation.” + 

June was sent down the street to spend fifteen cents on a bottle of ginger ale and the sewing that afternoon would be accompanied by sips of ginger ale highball. + 

“Will you have just a taste of ‘oh-be-joyful’ in your ginger ale?” Mother would say gayly, and June would have a thimbleful added, not because she liked the taste, but because she liked to feel grown-up and companionable. And the warm feeling produced was very pleasant, too. + 

Whenever Mother Grace referred to whiskey as “oh-be-joyful” she’d sigh, “dear old Uncle Charlie,” and there would follow stories about him and his whaling vessel and his iceboat on the Hudson and when Mother was a little girl. To which little June listened with absorbed attention⁠—so absorbed, indeed, that she could not darn more than two holes in the afternoon. + 

One of the little girls whom June played with was called “Cathern” and was a most intimate friend. She had ten dolls “up in the closet” and that phrase typified everything delightful to June. Once she wistfully asked Mother Grace if she didn’t have a doll “up in the closet” for her. “Damn that stingy Hall woman,” said her mother, and then scolded June for letting Mrs. Hall know that she wanted a doll by looking wistfully at Catherine’s. + 

But she took two towels nevertheless and in some miraculous way with cotton and clothespins and crayons and scraps, made dolls of fascinating character and expression. And for mouths there were buttonholed slits, very conveniently opened for “nippy bottles” which you could buy at the store for two cents. “Cathern” had nothing like them. + 

There were other things that Mother Grace did. When she noticed that “Cathern” and her sister “Gwadys” often had tea-parties in the afternoon (exclusive tea-parties to which no one was invited) she scrubbed the sooty back porch and put out a carpet and table and chairs and there suddenly appeared a surprise party of oatmeal cookies and cocoa molasses candy. And this was an exceptional party, for she invited not only Cathern and Gwadys (with intent to heap coals of fire perhaps) but six others beside. + 

And when Dave and Dan joined the choir and went away for a week’s vacation in a camp there was an evening treat for the girls every night. Sometimes it was ice cream and sometimes it was moving pictures and when it was ice cream, Mother Grace divided the pitcherful (it was now ten cents worth) into three equal parts, but somehow she could never finish hers. + 

“A little goes a long way,” she assured them, and then there was an extra portion to divide. + 

Mary was one of the porch children and the eldest of nine. She was a Catholic, and she told June of the mysteries of her religion and her saints one evening after the supper dishes were done, and before the smaller children had to be put to bed. The gleaming stars glimpsed through the network of porches, the soft warm night, and the dusky odorous alley made her disclosures all the more impressive. She also gave June the story of a saint to read, with the result that thereafter June prayed to Pelagia, her birthday saint, every time a whipping threatened. It didn’t avert the punishment, but her faith remained unshaken. Were the saints ever saved from the cauldrons of boiling oil by their prayers? + 

One hot night, when the hurdy-gurdies were playing in the street, and the call of the “hot tamale” man and the voices of the passersby kept the night alive, Adele stuck her elbow in June’s ribs. + 

“Tell me a story so’s I kin get to sleep,” she demanded. + 

“Won’t!” June replied. “I’m thinkin’.” + 

“All right for you. I’ll tell Mother how you went swimmin’ again with the boys after she told you not to.” + 

“All right, then, I’ll make an old witch’s face at you and scare you.” + 

“I’ll tell Mother on you for that too. Are y’gonna tell me a story?” she asked threateningly. + 

A whipping had lost its novelties and much of its terror for June. She was about to pull her sister’s hair when she thought of St. Pelagia and a new game they hadn’t played. Adele snuggled her hot face against her shoulder and breathed on her neck while June narrated the trials and struggles of the early saints. + 

“So you see,” she mumbled in conclusion, “if you ever expect to get to heaven, we’ve got to begin trying that stuff now. They all slept on the floor and hard boards and the stone floors of prison cells and ate nothing but bread and water. I don’t know what you’re going to do, but I’m going to sleep on the floor tonight.” + 

“You ain’t gonna be the only martyr. Me too.” + 

For weeks after that their bedroom at night was transformed into a bare cell, and to their glowing imaginations, visions of St. Pelagia and the Virgin with her little Christ child hovered around. And every night the smell of beer and whiskey came up in waves from the saloon below, and the Drunken Lady who lived in the flat above fell into bed and snorted and groaned with the heat all night. + 

And then they moved away from the tenement and for a time life lost its poignancy. + 

II + 

Life was becoming very difficult for June. There was nothing to do but read and go to school and help with the housework. Reading, in itself, might have been a pleasure, save for the fact that it was always interrupted to help prepare meals, to set tables, to make beds. Reading, moreover, seemed to make life even more of a problem. + 

For instance, there was the question of her soul and where she was before she was born and what would be come of her afterward. In reading Martin Eden, she came across references to Herbert Spencer, and she borrowed First Principles from the library and was unhappy that she could not understand it. In reading Edgar Allan Poe, she found references to metempsychosis which was easier to understand and believe, after consulting works of reference. The word led to research in ancient religion. She bumped into Kant and Spinoza afterwards and found them insurmountable. Coming across Darwin, she was slightly encouraged at finding him relatively understandable, and Darwin led her to Huxley and Huxley to Fabre. + 

She was learning a good deal, she reflected, not in the curriculum at the high school where she had to translate twenty lines each of French, Latin and Greek, write a theme, and read ten pages of dull history a day. + 

She was studying continually, but in her reading, she had not found any references to adolescence, nor anything to explain why life was so unreasonably difficult and why she was so unhappy. + 

In a sudden reaction from Zoroastrianism June became interested in the Episcopal church which her mother had attended as a child and her grandmother before her. But enjoyment of the elaborate services was at best a mournful one, nor did the pleasurable conviction of sin come to her until she fell in love. This happened when she was fifteen. + 

She was terribly sensitive about this new passion which gripped her and left her hot and cold and on the verge of tears, morning, noon and night. She was afraid that her brothers would get possession of the diary which she kept and read about it, and quote some passage to enrage her. + 

They had done so often enough before⁠—quoted little things, bits of religious ecstasy, scraps about her friends. And she used to become frightfully angry and chase them around the house with the bread knife until they were afraid and told Mother Grace that she was a wild cat. June never would have touched them with it, but she used to pummel them with her fists and bite them and pull their hair till they lost their tempers and fought back. + 

For a while it had seemed that no hiding-place was safe. If she put the diary under her mattress and locked the door of her bedroom, they would climb on the shed above the kitchen and in at the window, or they would pry open the door of the bedroom with a knife. Then they would read it, with their heads together over the fire, and giggle and learn passages of it by heart, to recite later. As furious as June became, however, she never ceased keeping it, because she was lonesome and the little red book was her only comfort. Finally a place was found for it underneath the carpet of the back stairs and then she felt safe. + 

This was an emotion more sacred than God and the little Jesus. It must be concealed from everyone, even from herself; only when she was alone, out under the trees in the park with her face pressed to the grass and her body clutching the warm throbbing earth or when she was in her room at night with all the lights out⁠—only then, could she let the hurrying thoughts and desires swarm through her mind, leaving her body aching and trembling. + 

She had had attachments before, but in retrospect they seemed dully insipid. There was none of the early companionship which she had enjoyed with her mother. Mother Grace no longer called her a comfort. Instead she wondered what had “gotten into” her three eldest children. Relatives were strangers who were familiar with June and could take liberties with her and her emotions. She would have loved her brothers⁠—but they were ashamed of being fond of their sister, and would suffer no expression of love from her. They were cold and aloof to each other, except when drawn together in times of storm; the poverty-stricken tenement on the South Side, and the time Mother Grace became hysterical and broke everything in sight⁠—these colossal things made them run together and clutch each other. They had each other and everything else in the world was terrible and mysterious. For brief hours they showed their love and were not ashamed. + 

June had loved Georgie Spielberger because when Mary Milady punished her for getting wet in a storm, he sympathized with her and consoled her. She had loved Adam Sunquist although he had protruding teeth, because he had said that she could go in swimming with the crowd if she wished, even if they did go in naked. June was six and he was eight, and although his freckles and his teeth prevented him from being just the one she would have chosen for her lover, she was grateful for his attentions. Feminine delicacy interfered on this occasion, so they took a “hitch” on the back of the mail-carrier’s wagon and rode up the mountain to get apricots. But June ate so many of them that she became ill and from that time on hated the apricots and the boy who led her to them. + 

Then there was a fair-haired boy who sat two seats behind her in Miss Davis’ room at school. In a fit of boredom on a hot day, she sent him a shy little note⁠—“I love you.” The reply was not at all gallant. Pursued, he fled. His note read, “Well, I hate you. You think that you’re the smartest in the room.” June replied, “I hate you, too.” That was all. But at the close of school when they had sung “Now the day is over,” and Miss Davis asked all those who had not whispered during the day to rise, and June rose and he rose, a tragedy occurred. The little telltale across the aisle raised her hand and said, “Miss Davis, June and Roy have been passing notes.” And they had to stay in after school, both of them. The teacher was very anxious to hear what the notes contained, but June would not tell, nor he. She stood at the teacher’s desk and wept and the boy stood sullen and obstinate. They would not tell her although she kept them for two hours. + 

In spite of the fact that the boy carried June’s books home from school and told her that he did not mean what he said in his note, she hated him forever after. + 

When she was twelve, she loved Jim Pickering because he also paid attention to her when no one else did. Jim was a man; he was eighteen and worked on a ten-twenty-thirty cent stage as a hypnotist and wrote poetry. All the girls on the block were crazy about him. His attentions appealed to June’s sense of vanity. Mr. Henreddy, in one of his recurrent moods of superiority, would not let his daughter play with the girls of the neighborhood nor join in their good times⁠—Mother Grace assisting him in carrying out his idea of exclusiveness⁠—and June envied them and tried to get even with them by inciting their jealousy. Every evening she sat on the front porch and listened to Jim’s poetry. Then one day Mother Grace accused her, laughing lightly, of having a “case” on him which shamed and disgusted June so that she fled whenever he was around. + 

But she had never before been troubled by thoughts of a man’s arms and lips. Her mind had never seemed to be connected with her body and it was strange and wonderful that a thought, a glance, could make a little shiver of delight run through her. + 

The day June fell in love, Mother Grace was in the hospital. June had just received word from Mr. Henreddy that she had a little brother and that he hoped she was glad. She was glad, but not in the way he thought. Tension was relieved; a subject was no longer avoided in the house; Mother Grace would no longer look out of haunted eyes, and now she could wear some sensible clothes again instead of loose, unheard-of garments. And she wouldn’t walk around the house any more at night like a silent, dusky ghost. + 

The baby⁠—June couldn’t realize. She hadn’t seen him yet. And she had other things to think of. Something had just happened to her and she was not yet sure what it was. From all the novels she had read, she suspected that she had fallen in love. She had fallen in love at first sight even. It was a remarkable thing, a joyous thing, and in a peculiar way, she was happy. She was happy but she wanted to cry. And she was sure that she didn’t want to cry because of this new feeling, but because “Miserere” was being played on a hurdy-gurdy down the street. She always wanted to cry when she heard it. + 

It had happened at two o’clock in the afternoon. June was sitting on the porch crocheting some wash rags for the family. + 

Half an hour before, she had found a four leaf clover⁠—the first that she had ever seen. She was thrilled in a curious way by it. With the sweet superstition of adolescence, she felt that something was going to happen to her, and that something was not connected in any way with the new baby. + 

The afternoon sun was filtering through the trees and the pavements were hot. There were some lilac bushes in the next yard and the fresh sweet smell swirled around her like a host of silent bees. She was stung with beauty. + 

Suddenly she heard steps on the porch next door. She glanced up casually to find a pair of keen blue eyes looking at her. The house had been empty for a long while, and June knew that someone had moved in from down the street. This was the first she had seen of the new family. She had heard a baby crying, heard a woman’s voice sighing once in a while, “Oh Gawd” or “Oh that brat,” from the room which faced the Henreddy dining-room and opened on an air shaft and she heard a violin whining and exulting now and then, late in the afternoon. + 

This man who caused such a shudder to shoot through her was Mr. Armand, as she found out afterward, who played in the symphony orchestra. Neighbors on the other side of the street knew him and his family because they had lived there for fifteen years. His wife had sung as a soloist before he married her, they said. He had fallen in love with her three summers before. She didn’t ever sing anymore. All she did was wheel the baby up and down the street and sew some tiny garments which were far too small for the child which she held in her arms. Mother Grace had seen her and said succinctly, “Another coming? Oh Lord, three small children in two adjoining houses!” + 

The man stood there for a long moment, fumbling for a key and piercing June with his sharp eyes. His hair was cropped short and brushed straight off his forehead which was high on each side of his temples. His nose was long and sharp and his chin was square with a deep dimple in it and he kept it in the air as though he were laughing contemptuously at the whole world. He was well groomed and he held his shoulders haughtily, and June noticed afterward that he swaggered as he walked. + 

She liked the interested look in his eyes; there was something personal about it that made her feel grown up. She felt her face flushing but she couldn’t turn away till he found the key and entered the house. Then she looked at her hands which were trembling in her lap and which had turned cold although she felt hot all over. + 

June got up quickly and went into the house for her hat, throwing her crocheting on the dining-room table. + 

“Where you going?” Adele asked. She was dusting the books on the open shelves and she looked worn and tired. “Let me come too, please, June,” and although her sister didn’t answer her, she flung the duster behind the door and came with her, hatless and with a smudge on her cheek. + 

“I hate that house,” she said. “And I hate Mrs. Cummins.” Mrs. Cummins was temporary housekeeper during their mother’s absence. “And I hate to dust and wash dishes. I hate the new baby too. It only means that we’ll be tied down all afternoon so that we can’t run away together for picnics as we used to. We’ll always have him whimpering around. Do you remember how all day long the Weiss girls had to take care of their baby brother? + 

“And mother’ll be more cranky and particular about things and there’ll be more work around the house with a kid. Oh, damn!” She bit her lips to keep from crying. + 

“Well,” she said at last with a resignation which seemed very sweet to June⁠—“well, there’s one comfort. You and I’ll get noble, just like Beulah, wheeling a carriage up and down the street and walking the floor with him and taking care of him while he’s sick. Do you mind awfully having this baby come?” + 

“No!” June snapped at her, more from the intensity of emotion than from actual ill-temper. “That’s just one little worry.” + 

“What’s the matter then?” + 

“Everything.” And June began to run wildly through the short grass till she was completely out of breath and Adele gasped as she caught up. + 

Arriving at the lake front, they clambered out on the breakwater which jutted like a pointed finger in the deadly calm water. Far out, on the very end, they sat among the rocks and listened to the water sobbing softly around the rotten wood. In a tiny patch of dirt which had settled there, a dandelion was growing, smiling up at the sky lonesomely. Its gay color stabbed the air. Every once in a while, a little wave leaped and sparkled with another splash of color which greeted the flower. A breeze sprang up as the sun settled on the skyline, and stirred the wisps of hair around their hot faces. It was like a caress and June thought of Mr. Armand’s long fingers. + 

“Why don’t you say something?” Adele burst in on her thoughts. “You haven’t spoken to me for days, and you’ve got that silent look I don’t like. What are you thinking about?” + 

“I was thinking of the hate we have inside of us,” June lied. “You hate everything and so do I. I hate the springtime. It’s so restless and uncomfortable. You never want to do what you ought to be doing. You can’t sit still and read and if you have to dust a room or wash dishes you have an awful ache in your heart. I tell you I hate it.” + 

But really June didn’t hate it. She loved to be bitten by fierce emotion. This steady restlessness had suddenly become a torment but she would not have given it up now that she knew what it was. + 

They sat there for a long time, Adele pulling out a tattered copy of Jane Eyre from the blouse of her dress and devouring it with an absorbed expression on her lean little face. + 

June stretched out on the rocks and let the wind kiss her lips and listened to the gurgling of the water around. + 

It was twilight when they reached home. + 

June discovered before the week was over that Mr. Armand, during the spring and summer months, led band concerts in the park a block away from her home. All through the summer the year before, she used to lie in bed and thrill at the little wisps of melody that floated in on the fragrant night. Often she begged her mother to let her go. There was little enough melody in their regular and placid lives. Her existence for the last six years had been so calm and restrained that now some little thing like a strain of music, the glance of a man’s eye as he passed and the scent of a summer night aroused her strangely. There were no adventures to make her realize that life was joyful. When Adele and June were younger and their parents had been engrossed in making ends meet, there had been opportunities to run away and mingle with the crowds of children in playgrounds and play in the dirty streets with strange little girls and tell them wild, imaginative tales. Even the boys that June used to play with who now came to the house were distant and different. It was a humdrum life of lonesomeness and she was fifteen. + 

Adele and June made up their minds that while Mother was in the hospital and Mr. Henreddy was working nights they would take advantage of the freedom and go to the concert. Adele was by nature more cautious and conscientious than June but she longed so to get away from the house that she was easily persuaded to do what she considered a wicked and thrilling thing. + 

“Suppose the boys tell?” she whispered. + 

“I know they won’t.” June was very confident of that. “I’ve got something on both of them, and they don’t dare. You didn’t know and you mustn’t tell, but Dan broke a window on the next block and got arrested for it. He made me promise not to tell, but I will if he starts snitching on us. And Dave is fighting⁠—real prize fights⁠—in the back room of the Emery Street saloon. Mother doesn’t know that either. One day he broke a thumb. I promised I wouldn’t tell her, so they won’t dare tell anything that we do.” + 

It had showered that afternoon, and all the park was cool and moist. People were hurrying to the concert to get seats. A slight breeze stirred the women’s clothes and wafted faint perfumes to June as the children passed them. Every now and then a little toad hopped across the path. + 

“Everything smells so good!” and Adele sniffed ecstatically. + 

They arrived at the concert ground early and found seats in the second row of the benches where they faced the bandmaster and could watch his every movement. They waited and waited. There was a continual babble of voices, but Adele and June were silent. + 

Then Mr. Armand strode through the crowd, and there was a ripple of applause as he came which swelled and swelled. He was tall and lithe. June noticed again with a thrill the aggressive way he carried his shoulders. + 

Adele nudged her sister as he passed. “He lives next door to us now,” she whispered. “I’ve seen him pass a couple of times. He knows father because he always speaks to him.” + 

June kicked her under the bench to make her keep quiet. She was irritated that Adele should break the sensuous stillness that enveloped her and she was angry and jealous that her sister should have seen him more often than she. And it was then too, that he passed her seat, which was on the outside by the aisle, and his hand brushed hers. The contact made her catch her breath and an agreeable quiver came to her heart. + 

For the rest of the evening June gazed at him with an intensity which he must have felt, she reasoned, because every now and then he’d look her way and smile. And all the while the spell grew and grew. + 

A week later, Mother Grace came home from the hospital with a tiny atom in her arms which she put in a clothes basket on the floor. The family bulldog smelled at it for an instant and woofed joyously. The tip of his tongue stood out as though he would like to give it a mighty and slobbery kiss that would engulf it. But he looked at Mother and slunk away. + 

Mother seemed tired. She showed no pride in her new possession. All day long she sat at the window with her brows puckered. Although Mr. Henreddy wanted her to go to bed, she stubbornly refused. + 

A feeling of awe swept over June every time she looked at her mother. Once in a great while when she managed to play with any of the children in the neighborhood, she had caught fragments of conversation which recalled Sadie Spielberger and her revelations. Also, in the tenement on Twenty-second Street, Mrs. Cleary had had a baby and June remembered how she had hidden her head under the covers and strangled the sobs in her throat as sounds came down the airshaft. + 

June wanted to question Mother Grace about it, but it took more courage than she possessed. It was only when the library grew dusky and the baby, whom father called “Glubb” was being nursed preparatory for bed that she could ask her⁠—“Mother Grace, did it hurt?” and clutch her hand. + 

“Who’s been saying things to you, or what have you been reading?” Her tone was brusque. “It was nothing much. Wore me out somewhat. Have you got the dishes washed?” + 

The children had never known what it was to have Mother sick before, so her irritability, added to increased household duties made their lives seem dark. Adele and June used to cry in bed at night. June’s only relief during that long hard summer were the moments when her blood ran fire at Mr. Armand’s glance. + 

She saw him three times a day regularly. At ten in the morning he left the house; at three in the afternoon he returned; at quarter of eight in the evening he left again for the concert. + 

All day she thought of him, and she found herself unconsciously imitating his walk, and when she caught herself at it, she felt a hot wave spread over her. Mother Grace used to say he swaggered and June would agree indifferently, although she became acutely self-conscious at the sound of his name. And because the neighbors talked about him behind his back, Mother Grace called him worthless too and said that he went around with other women. June didn’t blame him when she knew his wife. + 

She was a tall woman⁠—though he was taller⁠—and her hair was shot with grey. The baby was two years old, and once when June and Adele were walking and wheeling Glubb and she passed, she turned to June and said, “Gawd, these brats make me tired.” + 

In June’s heart she agreed with her, because she was hot and tired and unhappy. But she condemned her for saying what she did because she was his wife. She condemned her big floppy hat too, and her clothes were what Mother Grace called “in bad taste.” + 

On some golden afternoons June saw Mr. Armand oftener. In the afternoon when he returned, sometimes he took the baby to the park with him and sauntered down the steps and past with his pugnacious chin in the air; and June would look at him defiantly, angry with him for the feelings he evoked, yet loving him all the while. + 

On the days that he did not send her that sympathetic and exciting glance, she was miserable and sad and when she was alone at night, wallowed in melancholy. + 

Being at the Tennysonian age, the lines kept coming to her, increasing her mood⁠— + 

“Dear as remembered kisses after death + 

Or sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned + 

On lips that are for others⁠— + 

Deep as love, deep as first love, + 

And wild with all regret⁠ ⁠…” + 

One violet evening his baby was ill. From June’s dusky seat on the porch she could see him pacing up and down the path in front of the house. Every now and then when the baby began to moan, he bent his head and a soft murmur reached her. + 

It was only occasionally that he played the violin at home and because of this, she had a queer feeling that what he played was for her. Sometimes for a breathless hour or so, she could hear wild, quivering notes that ate her heart out. + 

He must have seen the worship in her eyes, but she did not mind. She wanted him to know, though she concealed from everyone else how she adored him. She never imagined herself speaking to him, holding a casual, conventional conversation before the house about the babies, the weather or the last concert. But adventures crowded into her mind; his baby toddling out into the street, an automobile swiftly upon it, and June rushing out to save it just in time, but at the cost of her own life. Of course this didn’t happen while Mr. Armand was away. It happened when he could only rush forward, too late to save his child⁠—that June had already done⁠—but in time to hold her in his arms while she died. + 

There was also the adventure of his wife disappearing with another man and the baby falling ill and June being called in to nurse it back to health and thereby gaining Mr. Armand’s love. + 

When she realized her thoughts, the absurdity of them rushed over her so that she blushed with shame. Such situations were crude and melodramatic. + 

The summer faded away; autumn came and with it long walks, sweet-smelling days in the park with Glubb. There were fires from faded leaves on every street and the delicate spirals of smoke were a melancholy incense. The sweet clover in the fields down by the lake where June walked made the air heavy. The soft waves whispered at the breakwater all the day long. + 

But with the late autumn, school came again and band concerts ceased and she no longer saw Mr. Armand. The sky was muddy, there was no brightness in it. Music had fled with all the little breezes that aroused the soft emotions in her heart. + 

Long hours of study, the constant struggle in the family, housework and the baby occupied her time and her imagination. There was no more romance. + 

III + 

It was a gloomy Sunday. The Henreddy family had just finished dinner and Sunday dinner was a dark spot in the uniformly grey week. Mr. Henreddy must hate his children, June often thought. As long as she could remember, the only time they ever sat at the table with him was on Sunday at the midday meal. Even when the boys had started to work nights as telegraphers, getting up at ten when he also arose, he would not eat breakfast with them but insisted that Mother Grace serve his meals separately. He wished, twenty meals a week, to eat with Mother Grace alone. If he wanted to read in the parlor, he sent his sons and daughters into the dining-room, although they were no longer prattling children. It didn’t matter if the dining-room fire was out and the room cold and draughty. They had to allow him “to read in peace.” + 

Sunday noon, however, he insisted on a family meal. No engagement was important enough to keep anyone away. It was a solemn institution in the family life. + 

None spoke; all ate in gloomy silence. They could hear each other swallow and the strain to eat quietly was so great that by the time the dessert was brought on, appetites had fled. + 

June used to sit and look at her father eating in this curious, abject way and feel sorry for him. Did he feel as shy and embarrassed and miserable as they did? She was sure of it, and her self-consciousness and resultant anger relaxed and she gulped less. At moments like these she felt a curious sympathy for him. She suddenly realized that she and her father looked very much alike⁠—their eyes and the shape of their mouths. The same blood ran in their veins and probably the same feelings in their hearts. + 

All father wanted was mother, and here was a group of children sitting around the table, restrained and uncomfortable. Where did they all come from? They were his. Well, he had performed a family duty by dining with them on Sunday⁠ ⁠… His meals for a week hence would be with mother⁠ ⁠… Damn it! He always wanted to be alone with her, and here were five children come between them⁠ ⁠… + 

These, it seemed to June, must have been his thoughts. + 

Adele and June found it an unpleasant duty after dinner to wash the dishes. They could not sing while they worked as they usually did, because Mr. Henreddy would send Mother Grace out to silence them. + 

While Adele cleared the table, June piled the dishes in neat stacks in the kitchen. And sometimes they forgot to maintain their enforced silence and as soon as the doors were closed between the two rooms, they burst into soft song. + 

One hymn was June’s favorite: + 

“In that cou-untry⁠— + 

To which I jour-er-ny + 

My Redeemer, my Redeemer + 

Is its King. + 

There is no sorrow + 

Nor any si-ighing + 

Nor any tears there, + 

Nor any cry-y-ing. + 

I’m a pilgrim, + 

I’m a stra-anger, + 

I can tarry, I can tarry + 

But an hour.” + 

“Huh,” Adele said. “Feeling religious?” + 

“Is that a nice way to talk?” + 

“Just because you went to church this morning, you get holy!” + 

“Jesus, Lover of my soul, + 

Let me to Thy bosom fly⁠—” + 

“Hypercrite! Singing songs like that when you’re in love with a married man.” It seemed Adele had been reading her sister’s diary. + 

“You’re a liar,” June told her trembling. + 

“ ‘He who calleth his brother or sister a fool or a liar is in danger of hell fire.’ ” It was her turn. + 

“Now don’t you get holy. Besides you’re quoting wrong.” + 

“I’m not trying to be holy. You’re the one. You’re always pretending to mother that you’ve got religion. You’re always spouting the Bible to the boys and me. I don’t pretend to be religious the way you do.” All this with a self-righteous air, in spite of which June felt that she was right. + 

After that fervent summer, fall had come drearily. Lessons were dull and unprofitable, and although for a time the Virgil class was made interesting by a boy in the next row whose Irish eyes were blue-lidded and strangely appealing, that charm faded soon. For he came to school one day with his hair cut too short and the visible scalp offset the appeal of his eyelids. + 

There were no teachers offering opportunities for distant worship and, at first, no girl in the class sufficiently attractive to write notes to. + 

Then a new boy appeared in the choir of the little church and offered a sufficient reason for being baptized and confirmed, taking communion and attending church regularly. + 

It was a fragile and ephemeral attachment, hardly enduring till Monday morning. But part of its charm lay in its contrast to the fervid emotions of the summer, and the boy’s ascetic and rather tubercular face gave to the music a sad charm. + 

June read the Bible with interest, but exaltation was obtained only through the sermons of Wesley and the little books of Jonathan Edwards and Thomas á Kempis. The Church of England prayer book had a quaintness and beauty about it. Diligent translation of a Greek New Testament, attractively dog-eared and ancient (one hundred and fifty years old) and picked up in a secondhand bookshop for ten cents, served, if not to increase her religious zeal, to gain for her a high mark in Greek for the term. + 

Then came Henrietta, June’s first intimate friend. Her sincere and wholesomely cheerful piety gave a vigor to religion which it had lacked before, and also provided reasons for scrubbing the bathroom, say, Wednesday instead of putting it off till Thursday; reasons for not slapping Adele; reasons for looking for happiness in life instead of rebelling against it. + 

Though it is true Henrietta’s attitude toward life was self-conscious and she dramatized her sins and her virtues, her emotions were far more healthy than those of June. Her mother and two older sisters shared her religious convictions. They went to church together, sang hymns together, visited hospitals, and strove to outdo each other in self-sacrifice to help needy neighbors and friends. + 

On the other hand, June’s family, although really no more self-centered than Henrietta’s, was entirely worldly. + 

On three occasions, to June’s remembrance and to her mother’s despair, Mr. Henreddy had brought home friends who needed help⁠—once a broken-down newspaper man, then an actor and his wife, and finally one poor wreck who had just served a few years in the penitentiary (for being a “promoter” June gathered) and kept them for visits of weeks at a time. + 

Mother Grace, in spite of occasional bitter asides to June that charity began at home and that she was tired of skimping and saving and going without things⁠—always kept her delightful air of pleased hostess. + 

Mr. Henreddy and Mother Grace had no Christ-like attitude about such things. One came across an old friend, or a friend of an old friend in distress, and it was a matter of course to help him out. + 

June had little consciousness either of these guests of her parents’ magnanimity. They ate their meals with Mr. Henreddy and Mother Grace and were away all day just as Mr. Henreddy was. They were looking for “openings.” + 

So naturally June’s religion took a morbid and secretive tinge. Because of it she was scoffed at by her brothers and Adele. Mother Grace had no sympathy with churchgoing, regarding it as an easy way of avoiding the elaborate preparation of the formal Sunday meal, and rather a disagreeable pose on the part of June. Of course it was a pose. June would admit it. But didn’t everyone have poses, and why was one more objectionable than another? + 

There was another aspect of her religion which June caught a glimpse of once after long and consecutive thought on the subject. She had been reading of early Christian saints and took note of the fact that most of them indulged in trances. Not that she put it that way. It was hours of meditation, fasting, prayer and vigil, on which emphasis was laid, not only in the lives of the saints, but in the exhortations of á Kempis, and Wesley. And it occurred to June that some English poet had tried to induce the same ecstasy, according to some essay she had read, by sitting on a hilltop and trying either to think of nothing or to concentrate on a bluebell (she could not remember which). But she did remember that the poet quoted Indian philosophers as inspiration to his endeavor. Further reading discovered to her sages sitting on the banks of streams, grass growing from their toes, baked and wedged and stiffened into a perpetual pose, by the sun, the wind and the rain. + 

(With no early knowledge of Indian philosophers, had not June and Adele tried to outdo each other in seeing who could pray the longest, and had not stubbornness and cramp given way to a drowsy pleasure and feeling of blessedness⁠—which was dispelled when they awoke hours later still and cold?) + 

It was after long ruminations to the above effect that June, startled, had a sudden thought, as she lay in bed one night. + 

“It’s all because we are too small to know how to be happy. Some people take whiskey to be happy⁠—father usually has the smell of it about him, and then there are Mother Grace’s highballs when she’s feeling low. It’s because they want to escape from reality. Religion, or whiskey, or dope⁠ ⁠… + 

“I suppose I’m always worrying about my unhappiness because I’m introspective.” (It was a new word to June and she liked it.) “To be happy you’ve got to be retrospective and quit worrying about your relation to things. + 

“Somehow, I believe that Fabre is happy.” With this sudden leap from the general to the specific, she fell asleep. + 

And then, with the coming of Henrietta, she forgot about her conclusions, and religion became more of a pose than ever. + 

That Sunday afternoon, by the time the dishes were washed and dried and put away, and Adele had brushed out the dining-room to equalize her share of the work with that of June who had the pots and pans to wash and dry, June was looking forward with pleasurable anticipation to her Sunday religious letter to Henrietta which the two girls had pledged themselves to write. + 

She had forgotten about Adele and her accusations and smooth sounding phrases were rolling in the mind when Adele burst out. + 

“I don’t care, I want some fudge! Mother Grace always makes the Sunday desserts for father, regardless of what we like, so I don’t see why we can’t make fudge.” + 

“If we ask her, she’ll just say no. She can’t say yes in front of father. He’d just begin to talk about pampering.” + 

June finished the last pan and stood considering. Fudge was extremely desirable that stormy afternoon. + 

“There’s two doors in between the kitchen and the library, so I don’t see how she can smell it,” she declared. “Let’s make it anyway!” + 

With great daring, they started to make the candy, extravagantly using two cups of sugar. This was one of the periods of skimp and save in the Henreddy household. After it had boiled for a few minutes, and the smell began to permeate the house and fill the girls with apprehension, Mother Grace came out, clad in the loose, yet tidy negligee which she affected around the house, and asked them coldly what they were doing. She seemed, on Sundays and the mornings Mr. Henreddy was home, infected by his formal attitude towards his offspring; or perhaps she was afraid of incurring his wrath against her and them, by her usual show of affection. (For instance, if she drew Dan’s bath for him in the morning, she was accused of spoiling her son, and Dan, in turn, was accused of being spoiled and selfish). + 

“Making fudge,” June answered her, rather brazenly, considering her usual Sunday piety. “We didn’t like the dessert we had for dinner anyway, and we wanted something sweet.” + 

Mother Grace surveyed them with the stony look of displeasure in her eyes which the girls detested. “You can stop making that candy right now and go upstairs to your room.” And with that she sailed away, leaving a faint odor of lavender and violets behind her. + 

Adele and June looked at each other blankly. Whenever things went smoothly in the house they were inclined to quarrel. But whenever Mother Grace leagued herself against them on the side of Mr. Henreddy they immediately were drawn together. + 

As soon as she left the room, they took as much of the soft candy as they could carry on a plate and went upstairs. + 

The grate fire was burning downstairs, and it was warm and cozy there. The bedroom was cold and there was nothing to read but the Bible. The soft candy would have been good and comforting if Mother Grace had allowed them to finish it. June’s writing materials were in the room, however, and her diary in which she had continued to write all winter. + 

Curling up in her bathrobe by the window, she began her letter to Henrietta. Adele took the Bible and the plate of fudge and crouched against the pillows on the bed. + 

“We went to the amusement park Friday after school,” the letter began, “and Adele and I went on every ride. We each had fifty cents and it was with regret that I saw the money go. It seemed a shameless waste, but then I realized that there was more for God’s children and it will come to them when they need it. ‘Be careful for nothing.’ ‘Take no thought for the morrow.’ So I just spent it with the others and enjoyed myself very much. Today Dan gave me fifty cents to go downtown with. I shall go to the library and the secondhand bookstore, some day next week after school. + 

“Yesterday afternoon I rode home on the lake boat from downtown and afterwards had to take the baby to the park. Glubb was sweet and good and the sky was dark, deep blue, all flecked with purplish clouds. The trees were rustling and the sun flickered on my book. I was happy, but not in the right way. I did not have the spiritual happiness that I crave, only a wicked thrilly feeling at my heart⁠ ⁠… + 

“But I couldn’t give way to my sinful thoughts because Glubb yelled for candy, soda, sandwich, and to see the animals and my thoughts were taken away from myself. It’s a good thing. Such a foolish unhappiness and such foolish pining. I forgot all about ‘Bog’s silent messengers, the winged thoughts of love,’ and just wanted to think of my troubles. How weak I am! My pride forbids me to write this and to put it down on paper makes me blush, but all the old love comes back to me. It is a lust of the flesh and I know that unless I forsake all sin, I will not gain the kingdom of heaven.” + 

(June had confessed her summer passion to her friend and was the recipient of similar confidences.) + 

“Adele and I have been following an exciting serial in the movies and father usually lets us go on Sunday afternoon, but not any other time during the week. My ideas have changed about Sunday. I have learned that it is rather hypocritical to be so strict on the Sabbath and not on every other day. Every day belongs to God and every day we are to serve him, doing his pleasure. And as ‘every good thing is prepared for them that love God’ and my moving pictures are a good thing, if you stop to think of the educational advantages of them, therefore I can see no wrong in going to the show and pleasing Adele (for she cannot go alone) and incidentally myself. + 

“This afternoon it took two hours to do the dishes and now that they’re done I suppose I’ll have to take the baby for a long walk in the park. How I love the park in winter! So solitary and awful in the truest meaning of the word. God is there. Of course He is everywhere, but under the trees and looking over the wide expanse of lake, He communicates himself to me and fills me with a deep quiet peace. I need those hours alone in the afternoon with Glubb, and I feel as though the troubles of life are lifted until I return to the house and it comes back to me. + 

“Maybe if I stayed out more and kept away from the books I am reading this restlessness would pass. Last night I sat up late over Dostoevsky and today my soul is like lead. During the last few weeks I’ve read all of Ibsen but he doesn’t make me sad. His plays are less depressing and the unhappiness that comes afterward is nothing more than a pleasant melancholy. + 

“I am sitting in my bedroom in my comfortable chair by the window. The wind is cold and seeps in through the glass so that I have to wrap my bathrobe about me while I write. I should be reading my Bible because it is Sunday afternoon, but I don’t want to. I’d rather write. I’m still in Acts. I never went over it so thoroughly before and now I find much more in it. Isn’t it queer how the same verse will strike you at different times? ‘We must through much tribulation enter into the kingdom of God.’ How true that is! Only after a hard, bitter struggle with sin and only after we have overcome it, do we experience blessed joy and peace. The tears come to my eyes when I think how often I have gone through the bitter struggles and then succumbed to some small sin while peace was in sight. And after I fell, how far away it fled. Poor weak creatures we are, yet God is our Father and God is love, ever-present, ready to enfold us and comfort us and hold us up.” + 

June paused here having reached a climax of righteousness and looked at Adele apprehensively. She didn’t care to have her sister read over her shoulder or jump suddenly and snatch what she had been writing as she sometimes did. Gripping the paper tightly, June went on. + 

“I have so much work to do to overcome my sins. I am working always⁠—always on guard, praying without ceasing to overcome all physical sensations and be purely spiritual. + 

“It is wrong to think so much about human love. All those feeling and craving that come to us are sexual desires. We are prone to have them at this age, I suppose. But I think that they are impure. It is sensual and God is spiritual. We must harden ourselves to these feelings, for God is love and God is all, so the only love is of God and is spiritual without taint of earthliness. I am afraid I have never really experienced this love or I would never desire the sensual love or the thrill that comes with the meeting of lips. + 

“I know it seems foolish to try to be so Christ-like⁠—but God says we can⁠—why else His command, ‘Be ye therefore perfect.’ + 

“Oh, it surely is a continual strife and my spirit is weary.” + 

Finger cramp at this point put a check to the enthusiasm of self-expression, and June paused to survey a line of roofs whose dirty covering of snow was being replaced by a blue-white layer of fresh flakes, sifting slowly from a soft sky which hung low over the houses. + 

As she watched the scene, a desolate one and lifeless, as it seems the backs of houses always are on Sunday afternoons⁠—lifeless save for the animation of the falling snow, June reflected how dingy is the backyard aspect of things. Dimly, for she wasn’t able to reason about all her feelings as she had tried to do in figuring out the need for religion, she felt that her attitude in the letter to Henrietta was a backyard and dingy attitude, strangely lacking in beauty. + 

She could not have put it in words, but she realized that the conviction of sin which is so vital a part of religious feeling was ignoble, and that it was wicked to spend an hour on one’s knees in contemplation and repentance of one moment’s ecstasies which had to the girl’s budding womanhood the aesthetic value of a symphony or a beautiful poem. + 

What June could have put in words and what she did think was that it was really better for the soul to bask in the sun on a warm spring day, or walk in a snowy park when the twilight made deep blue shadows behind the trees, or to read beautiful poetry than to go to church. + 

And when she thought of poetry she thought of Swinburne’s Tristram which she had been reading and which was hidden back of the bookcase for safe keeping. + 

With the thought she picked up her diary and defiantly wrote: + 

“I should like to lie on the grass in the woods with a lover all night just like Tristram and Iseult. And I expect Adele feels the same way, so if she snoops for my diary and reads this, I don’t care. And I know she was in love all last summer, just as I was, otherwise why did she suddenly stop writing a diary after keeping one for two years, and then start again in the fall, unless she was afraid I’d find out about it?” + 

This protest against suppressions, suppressions which led only to an increase in her desire for beauty and excitement, satisfied her far more than her previous attempt at self-expression. + 

And so content both with the plate of fudge which she and Adele had consumed and with the temporary solution of her problems, she jumped up briskly. + 

“Come on, Adele,” she said, “I’m sick and tired of religion. I promise not to lecture you anymore, nor make you go to Wednesday night prayer-meetings. I’m going to the movies down the street and we’ve got to climb out the window over the shed. I begged the money from Dave. Mother’d have a fit rather than let us go. Glubb is so cranky today she’ll want us to take care of him when he wakes up from his nap. Wanna come?” + 

Adele hesitated a moment. Then she came over and hugged June tightly. “I’m glad you’re through with it. If you really meant it, it would have been all right, but you were playing a game and it made me so mad, we could only fight. Come on, let’s go. What do we care if we get a scolding when we get back?” + 

IV + 

After the loneliness which preceded her early love affair, and love affair June still thought it, and after her strife with things religious, she attained a state of happy melancholy. Life was unexciting, it is true. Henrietta passed out of it to attend business college, and so far, June’s friendships had not been serious enough for her to go out of her way either to make new ones or continue old ones which had been interrupted. There was a feeling of dependence, more household duties on account of Mother Grace’s ill health, the distaste for which was a large extent mitigated by the intensity they imparted to everyday pleasures. + 

There were the early morning hours which gradually became pleasant through their very hardship. Glubb, that little imp with the dimple in one cheek, and a devil in his eye, felt that since he was always put to bed just when the clatter of the supper dishes reminded him of how much fun it was to play with the pans and potatoes and apples (it was easier to bite the potatoes which were pleasantly gritty⁠—his teeth slid on the apples) and took his revenge by awakening before the birds. And in winter this was very early. For a while he would lie there, content to make earthquake changes in the mountains and valleys of his bedclothes. Toes were fascinating if he could extricate them from the jungle and there were mouth noises to make at the flicker of the street lamp on the ceiling and the corner brass knob on his crib. Steadfast gaze at the knob reminded him that here was another noise, and in making his way down the crib in pursuit of his object, there was always the discovery, new every morning it would seem from the surprised way he stopped, of a singsong creaking of the spring. For a moment there were a few little songs to make by jumping up and down, songs interspersed with delicious chuckles and crowings⁠—it was easy to chuckle but it was harder to crow. You had to stop, throw back your chin, clench your fists, draw in a deep breath and hold it back in your throat to gurgle with. Quite a strain on the chest, but a great accomplishment. The creaking of the spring was only temporarily satisfying, however. With a last dash to attain his original object, Glubb reached the loose post with the brass knob. + 

Here was real bliss, to be enjoyed only for a moment. So instead of beginning softly and leading up to a climax of banging, as he could do in the daytime when put in his crib for safekeeping, Glubb put aside artistic finish and threw into his work all the energy he could. + 

As always happened, the girl in the bed sighed, stirred, turned over, and before she could put her warm feet out into the cold, there was time for another loud rattle of the bedpost. It was a lovely clamor. + 

As always, the girl lifted him up, in spite of protesting legs kept in the sitting posture, flattened him out, tucking firmly the while to keep him in that position, and to forestall the usual whimper, gave him a rubber thing to play with. Rubber toys offended his aesthetic taste in daylight hours, but they were comforting to feel and chew on when the gloom of dawn hid their ugliness. + 

Well, he could get even with the girl in the bed at any time by lifting his voice in a howl, and the crib was warm. He might as well be good a little longer, especially since it was chilly downstairs and June fussed over him before she gave him the bottle of warm milk. + 

He remembered it was time for the outside noises to begin and began summoning them with peeps in different degrees of loudness. He could imitate the birds but not the noise of the milk wagon. That rattle over the cobbles of the alley, the clink of footsteps, punctuated by a metallic sound of depositing bottles, gradually coming nearer, and humanly interspersed with calls of the milkman to his horse⁠—these noises were hailed with delight by Glubb. The answering peep of birds outside was as nothing, and after so intense a joy, it was too insufferably dull to remain an instant longer in bed. When there were possibilities in life for such noise and stir, how impossible to remain tucked in! + 

Glubb never could understand why his loudest clatter during the day among pantry pans made so little racket in the scheme of things. It was seldom rewarded even by a reprimand from his mother. He had yet to learn the value of contrast. + 

With the noise of the milkman dying out, the diminuendo not nearly so enjoyable as the crescendo, protests began. + 

There was a first quavering cry. Glubb knew how pathetic it was, knew its sufficiency. There was a more determined hopping out of bed from the other side of the room and June was awake. + 

The transition from the languorous drowsiness of the bed, where she too under Glubb’s tutelage was beginning to enjoy the first sounds of the day, to the chill in a large house where the fires are low, was equally hard every winter morning. + 

Every morning when she peered at the alarm clock by the light of the street lamp⁠—no dawn yet⁠—it was four o’clock. Catching her clothes under one arm, Glubb under the other, she made her way down the stairs. And if by any chance she could see from the turning a tiny gleam of the grate fire, she felt an anticipatory warmth steal over her. She always banked it carefully the night before, but the draught was too strong. Most often she found only black coals which were still too hot to touch. + 

But once out of bed and her duties under way, it was an easy matter to start the blaze again⁠—to tip out the ashes, scoop them up, lay the crumpled balls of paper, then wood, cinders and soft coal. That done, a match applied and the blower adjusted, the cheerful roar began immediately. It was another noise that Glubb enjoyed. + 

To heat his milk and leave him ensconced in warm dryness, while she made coffee and found some breakfast for herself⁠—these things took but little time. She was left free to snuggle her own toes against the fire and over a history or Latin book to sip her coffee. June often thought that these early morning breakfasts with Glubb were the most tasty she had ever eaten. + 

Glubb was quite willing to play in the morning and leave her to her Virgil and Xenophon. And when it was time to call Adele for school and the boys, who had turned to working in the daytime, Glubb had fallen to sleep and her lessons were done. + 

The consciousness of virtue, the result of work well done, always carried her through the preparation for breakfast, a task which up to the arrival of Glubb had been despised and slightingly accomplished. + 

Now it was more carefully prepared and although perhaps Dave and Dan took no notice, June herself appreciated the improvement⁠—the smooth linen and a little pot of fern placed in the center of the table. On it, the boiled eggs, sliced oranges and toast made an attractive color scheme. + 

In retrospection, the school day beginning at nine and ending at two-thirty, passed quickly if the lessons were well prepared⁠—slowly if they were not. No period stood out, save the lunch period or two study periods when June could read and chew unobtrusively on a piece of candy which was not too scrunchy, yet lasted a long time. It occasionally surprised her when she realized how little she knew of her school fellows who sat together at lunch and giggled and gossiped, or passed notes during other periods. But books, usually romances, continued to absorb her and to play more vital a part in her life than the talk of the boys and girls around her. + 

Then duties began again at three when she arrived home an hour earlier than Adele, who was still in grammar school. Mother Grace was glad to be relieved of Glubb. Six hours of his alternating exuberance and complainings were a strain on her nerves and two hours were always needed for her recovery. So on clear days there were long walks in the park or an exploration of side and back streets; or if it were too cold and stormy a short brisk walk. Then with red noses and cold hands, in before the fire to make chocolate with melted marshmallows on top⁠—a treat which made Adele and June spend the afternoon in pleasant intercourse. All that remained of the day was supper which Adele helped prepare while June put Glubb to bed; and dishwashing⁠—Adele assisted even though she did make beds and run errands after school. Dishwashing was nice on winter nights because the hot water with the opalescent tints was so comfortable to cold hands. + 

Best of all were the long evenings curled up on the sofa while the hands of the clock neared twelve, reading Poe, or Stevenson or Rider Haggard, any author whose imagination carried her on strange adventures; and then the hurried going to bed, up the stairs through the library, peering down into the room she had just left where things haunted the corners and the fire glowed quietly; the cold bedroom with its immense windows, rattling in the winter wind; the bed with the sheets so icy that she could never stretch out but had to curl up in a warm ball. So passed each day of her last winter at home. + 

V + 

Thanks to the fact that one had to pay only ten dollars matriculation fee and twelve dollars a semester, June was able to spend the next two years at the state university. + 

One of the boys she went with there told her one time after he had read some of the short stories she had written for her English class, “what you need is perspective, my dear.” And when June looked back on those two years in after life, it was always with what she thought of as perspective. + 

Of her studies, she remembered very little. She flunked in a course in biology because she skipped most of the classes and when her examination papers were set in front of her, the only thing she could remember was the definition of the word “sport.” + 

She took a bird course because it consisted of two trips a week through the fields and woods about the little town and because a boy she liked was taking it with her. + 

The thing which impressed her most in the course in American literature was the professor’s futile attempts to implant in the minds of his students the love for the poetic phrase. She could still hear that class of sixty, yelling in every pitch: + 

“The desert and the illimitable air.” + 

“Do you get the beauty and swing of that? Say it again!” + 

“The desert and the illimitable air.” + 

The most valuable bit of information she received in rhetoric 3a was the fact that if you pressed the length of your forefinger to your upper lip every time a sneeze threatened, the spasm would be averted. + 

June often had the occasion to do this in after years, and since it was always efficacious she sometimes wondered why people who were plagued with hay fever had never heard of it. + 

The Latin professor was always quoting a line which he said came from one of Dickens’ novels. June didn’t know which one for she hadn’t read them all. “When found, make a note of it!” Fifteen or twenty times a day, this remark would be the signal for notebooks and pencils. She liked the Latin class because her seat was next to the window which looked out over the south campus to the forest where the pines were blue black. Every now and then a meadowlark threw her into a trance out of which it was hard to awaken. + 

What stood out most clearly in her university life were the jobs she held in order to earn board and room and pocket-money. + 

At the home of one professor where June washed dishes for her lunch and supper, it was necessary to say grace before eating. The three children said it, the old grandmother said it, the professor said it, his wife said it, and June had to say it too. Its simplicity made it very hard to say. + 

“Be present at our table, Lord. + 

Be here and every where, Adored. + 

Bless Thou this food and grant that we + 

May feast in Paradise with Thee.” + 

There was the job of the four babies, all under five years of age, and when one of them went to sleep, another would awaken it by crying. (Their sex was hard to determine.) And when June went into another room looking for a dry diaper for this one, still another would take the opportunity to fall off the couch. At one time, all of them were howling together and then June had to gather them up in her arms which were long enough to go around, fortunately, and finding an upholstered rocking-chair big enough to swallow them all, sang them to sleep. It was smothering work. + 

Occasionally she had to scrub floors and beat rugs, and once she had to wash baby clothes and all the skin peeled off her knuckles. She swore over such work, but having accepted the job she could not turn it down when she found out what it was. + 

Working for the Y.W.C.A. was difficult. For a while June set the tables and changed the linen for one hundred and fifty students and in return received her board. For several months she washed dishes after the one hundred and fifty (with two girls to help her dry them) and realized how simple a thing it was to wash dishes for a family of six. + 

After that she moved her belongings into the home of a bootlegger to assist his wife in the care of the children and in return received board and room. June didn’t know she was working for a bootlegger and probably wouldn’t have minded. What forced her to leave was the evident amorous intention of her employer. + 

Then there was Mrs. Wittle who was expecting her second baby in July. She was “three months gone” as she explained to June. And every afternoon at four when June came in from her last class, Mrs. Wittle gave her some flannels or diapers to hem and told her how it felt to be a prospective mother. + 

“It’s so long since I had Edwin,” she told the girl, “that I’ve forgotten all about it and I’m absolutely terrified. And haven’t you always heard it was dangerous to have a baby at my age? I’m thirty-eight, you know.” + 

“Mother was forty when she had her last baby,” June comforted her, “and it didn’t bother her a bit. She told me it was nothing at all and women made entirely too much fuss about such things.” + 

“Some women have an easier time than others,” Mrs. Wittle said gloomily. + 

June found her in tears one afternoon over a book of Upton Sinclair’s. “Just listen to this, June,” she almost wailed, and between the snuffles read an elaborately detailed scene of the birth of a child. + 

“Now isn’t that horrible? I had forgotten it was as bad as all that. Oh, oh, oh!” + 

“I think it’s disgusting⁠—I mean for a man to write stuff like that. It would be different if it were a woman. I suppose he hung over his wife’s bed while she was having a baby, carefully observing in order to make copy of it.” + 

“He might have gone to a hospital,” Mrs. Wittle suggested, in the writer’s defense. + 

“But they don’t let young authors in the maternity wards of hospitals to watch the birth of children.” + 

“It is a rather disgusting idea, isn’t it,” Mrs. Wittle agreed, “a man watching his wife with scientific interest while she was in such agony. It’s humiliating enough to have to lie still and holler while you’re performing such an important piece of work.” + 

“It does take away some of the dignity of motherhood, I should think. When a woman has to lie still and protest at the top of her voice, it makes her seem such a passive instrument instead of an active one⁠—a child-bearer.” + 

“I’ve been thinking of it all afternoon,” and Mrs. Wittle almost began to weep again, “and I think it’s outrageous that women should have to suffer so. Here they’ve been bringing children into the world for thousands of years, and they’re doing it in the same prehistoric way⁠—a little chloroform maybe, but a lot of good that does! If it was men who had to bear children, you can bet doctors and scientists would find an easier way of doing it.” + 

“Yes, and they glorify it and put a halo around motherhood, I suppose, so that we’ll keep on doing it,” June put in, becoming ardently feminist. “It would be much better if it could be regulated. First the woman should have a baby, then the man. The discomfort would be more evenly divided that way.” + 

That night at supper the subject was rehashed, somewhat to June’s embarrassment, for Mrs. Wittle insisted on reading aloud the most gruesome bits of the story and commenting on them, every minute remembering more of her early agony. The cause of it sat very still in his chair, lest attention be called to him and he be sent out of the room. It was the custom of the Wittles to speak freely before Edwin, Mr. Wittle being something of a modern educationist, but occasionally in the midst of a most interesting discussion, Edwin found himself suddenly sent on an errand. + 

The next afternoon Mrs. Wittle remembered that in her distress she had forgotten to tell June about the rape which had occurred earlier in the book, and unable to convey all the excitement, turned to reading it aloud. + 

“For my part,” Mrs. Wittle said as she put the book down, “I don’t see why it didn’t happen long before. It seems to me the physical side of marriage is the most important one and how these two people lived together so long!⁠—why it’s contrary to human nature.” + 

“My instructor said that the American race were as a rule so reticent about sex that they laid too much stress on the frankness of French literature. That applies not only to the people who read, but to the people who write. When they are frank, they go to such extremes,” June said. + 

Not yet having read enough of Dr. Wittle’s library (he was professor of psychology) June could not give expression to her ideas as to suppressions. But Mrs. Wittle was not interested in generalities. She preferred debating whether or not rape was possible; cited cases in the newspapers, the opinions of her friends; told of things that had happened in her town when she was a girl; things that she had heard had happened in other towns. + 

She hated to have June leave her to prepare supper. + 

For a month breakfasts were embarrassing meals to June. At that time investigations were being made in the city into the activities of midwives and every morning the most lurid of the newspapers was delivered at the Wittle door. + 

After the editorial page had been torn out for Dr. Wittle, the rest of the paper was Mrs. Wittle’s in which to scavenge for news of salacious interest. + 

The most interesting bits were read aloud and were greeted with noncommittal grunts by Dr. Wittle who had his sheets propped up before him. + 

“What different ways are there for performing abortions? Have you ever heard, June? I must ask Mrs. Bigley when she comes over this afternoon.” + 

“Oh, here’s a sad case. Young girl, eighteen, consulted Dr. S⁠⸺ and told him that⁠—” + 

It wasn’t only from Mrs. Wittle that June was beginning to learn of sexual problems. Dr. Wittle’s library was an extensive one and contained not only some valuable works on psychology and education which June availed herself of, but also books on sexual pathology by Havelock Ellis, Forel, Krafft-Ebing, Brill and Freud. For the most part, she was repelled by what she read. She preferred her early glamorous idea of life and blotted out of her mind, as much as she could, the glimpse into the abnormal which her reading had given her. + 

Even though June didn’t remember what she learned in classes, she would always remember the instructors. There was one group especially which afforded her a great deal of delight. And once she and her roommate were invited to tea by Mr. Lord, their instructor in rhetoric that semester. + 

He was a very blonde, enthusiastic young man who tried to hide his enthusiasm by a drawl, rendered more effective by a Harvard accent (he had graduated from a western college). In the heat of discussion he almost lost his drawl and recovered it with a gasp, and as this was often, his discourses were punctuated with abrupt intakings of breath. He was one of a little group of English instructors who professed themselves modern and unfettered. It was rumored about the campus that indeed some of them were living together, perhaps Miss Hubbard and Mr. Lord, or maybe Miss Hubbard and Mr. Fenton. Nobody knew. Although there were other women in the group, everybody suspected Miss Hubbard because she read Oscar Wilde’s poetry aloud to her classes. An ephemeral flavor of sex hovered around her, and young men were drawn to her classes and held there. + 

What clinched the matter was the report that she had read those verses of Swinburne in which the lines occur + 

“Curled snakes that are fed from my breast + 

Bite hard lest remembrance come after + 

And press with new lips where you pressed.” + 

It was decided then once and for all that she was living with someone⁠—not exactly immoral, but unmoral, it is true. Lots of literary people were like that and it was understood she was writing a book. + 

So her angularity of form and feature was endowed with a decadent grace in the eyes of her students and the gasping blondness of Mr. Lord and the stentorian triteness of Mr. Fenton were disregarded in the awe they aroused as possible inspirers of passion. + 

There were a few other young men and women in the same group⁠—all instructors and all taking postgraduate courses, but these three stood out by their enthusiasm for things literary. + 

It was rumored about the campus that at a picnic given by this group, some students came upon them engaged in theatricals. Mr. Lord was said to have been clothed only in his B.V.D.’s and a tiger skin (Miss Hubbard had one on her library floor) and was declaiming George Bernard Shaw while his blond shock of hair waved over his face. This report served only to turn the students of English to Shaw. + 

Mr. Fenton had an apartment in one of the large new apartment houses which had been built overlooking the campus and in which the more wealthy students had furnished flats. + 

When the girls arrived, the tea-party was in full progress. Mr. Lord and Miss Hubbard were sitting side by side on a couch and leading the conversation. + 

“But how can one really know without a trial marriage?” Miss Hubbard was saying languidly, while her bright sharp eyes sparkled around the group. And perhaps there was no answer because of the general rustle, attendant on the arrival of June and her roommate Regina. Then when Miss Hubbard assured June that there was plenty of room on the couch and Mr. Fenton had placed another chair for Regina, Mr. Lord brought back the conversation to where it was when the girls entered. + 

“How can one really know,” repeated Miss Hubbard, full of the italics of earnestness. + 

“Know what?” Regina startled them all by asking. + 

But such a question could never be answered directly and Miss Hubbard went on, “The only true mating is a complete harmony of the spiritual, mental and physical⁠—and preferably in that order, my dear.” + 

“But surely that’s the usual order. We usually get acquainted with a man before we marry him,” Regina put in matter-of-factly. + 

“Not at all,” boomed Mr. Fenton. “Too many young things are attracted by mere physical passion.” A slight stir passed over the room. “They know little or nothing of their mate’s intellectual or spiritual life and care even less. In fact,” he went on in his best classroom manner, “it is by the sublimation of passion, or rather, the directing of it into higher channels that we arrive at the basis of an understanding.” + 

The ladies nodded in agreement. Somehow it was more fitting for a man to speak of passion than a woman. + 

“But how long should a trial marriage last before one can really know?” spoke up Miss Smythe, English 2b, sitting on the edge of her chair and twitching with interest. + 

This question, couched in her own italics, was a little too direct for Miss Hubbard, who went on, “I don’t know that I wouldn’t advise a rather full experience for women before marriage. How else can we get into direct contact with the intricate nature of man?” + 

Another little stir, this time masculine. Mr. Lord hawed rather loudly, settling himself more firmly between June and Miss Hubbard, and as the haw was understood to be the preface to a speech, everyone kept silent. + 

“And when you speak of full experience, I presume you are thinking of a single standard for men and women⁠—” + 

“Yes, yes! That women should be allowed the freedom from condemnation that man enjoys, since in having freedom, it is generally understood that they will exercise it with the moderation natural to their sensibilities.” + 

“But isn’t that presupposing”⁠—June unconsciously fell into the didactic tone of the others. “But isn’t that presupposing that the mental and spiritual can only be reached through the physical?” + 

“Or do you mean Platonic trial marriages?” Regina contributed. + 

“You have to take into consideration the nature of the man and woman involved,” Miss Hubbard said gently, as from a height. + 

“Then too,” Miss Smythe reminded them, “one must remember the emotional wave line of women which stands in contradistinction to the steady even flow of that of man. After all, one cannot ignore the physiological basis of existence. According to recent tests made by Dr. Peraugh,” then remembering that the explanation of the tests was couched in language perhaps not fit for the ears of undergraduates and mixed company, she paused. + 

“You mean those published in Eros?” Mr. Fenton helped her out. + 

“Quite so,” Miss Hubbard agreed. “And do you remember those in an earlier issue which proved that woman’s brain is fully equal to a man’s and quite as capable of grappling with problems of state. There can be no doubt therefore that Pompadour and du Barry swayed the rulers of France, not through physical charm, but through their mental and spiritual qualities.” + 

“But I can’t see that their physical qualities weren’t the basis,” June protested. “If du Barry hadn’t been beautiful she would have always been a milliner’s apprentice. As it was, she attracted men, and they were the ones who educated her till she passed out of their hands and became Louis XV’s mistress.” + 

“You are getting down to specific cases, my dear,” Miss Hubbard reminded her, but before she could raise the conversation to generalities again, Regina had pitched in. + 

“I liked du Barry,” she assured them. “She was so beautifully frank. When she discovered in her footman an old lover of hers, she honestly confessed in her memoirs to falling a victim to his charms and being faithless to the king and didn’t try to excuse herself. All she did was to admit she was a flighty creature and dismiss him from her service for fear she’d fall again.” + 

“You must remember that French literature,” said Mr. Lord, succeeding where Miss Hubbard had failed, “is not restricted in the sense that English literature is. This freedom is apt to lead us to lay undue emphasis on that frankness and our reticence.” + 

“But then there is always the implication,” Miss Smythe hastened to say, “of character in our sublimest moments. You must remember those lines of Henley⁠— + 

“ ‘Some starlit garden grey with dew + 

Some chamber flushed with wine and fire + 

What matters so that I and you + 

Are worthy of our desire.’ ” + 

“Ah! ‘Worthy’! That is the point,” said Miss Hubbard softly. “And those other lines⁠— + 

“Some moment that will magnify the universal soul, + 

And quicken and control.” + 

The usual pause that separates a quotation from the rest of the conversation fell and the guests began to deposit their empty cups and saucers on the center table and to brush the crumbs from their knees. And in the pause Regina jumped up. + 

“Lordy, an editorial conference at five, and we’re late,” she reminded June. + 

“You must come again,” Mr. Fenton assured them. + 

“Yes, it has been very interesting,” was all the girls could say and as they went out they could hear Miss Hubbard italicizing⁠—“ ‘Youth shows but half. See all. Be not afraid,’ ” and Mr. Lord’s “Quite so!” + 

“Do you suppose they hang over their teacups and worry about sex every afternoon?” June asked Regina as they were getting into bed that night to read history for an hour before going to sleep. + 

“I wonder why they don’t live a full life as Miss Hubbard called it. Then they wouldn’t spend so much time gabbling about it.” + 

“I don’t believe for one minute that she’s living with anybody, Regina. You know the rumors that go around the campus. This is the way it looks to me. Mr. Lord, probably, is urging her to take the fatal step and she feels she is in danger of doing it. That gives her a feeling of superiority over the other old maid instructors and she speaks with authority. But if she had taken it, she wouldn’t talk so much about it, or if she did talk, what she’d say would have made more sense. + 

“Do you know, I’d like to write a theme for Mr. Lord only it would get me in a mess⁠—” + 

“What sort of theme? Your brain is entirely too active, June.” Regina settled back, glad to postpone the history reading for a time. + 

“On those things they were talking about this afternoon.” June pondered deeply. “Well in the first place, you know by all sorts of ways whether you like a man physically or not. You can tell without living with him first, I should think. And you can tell whether a man keeps himself clean and what sort of table manners he has, so you get an idea of what breakfast with him would be like in the morning. That’s the physical side of it. + 

“On the other side, the mental and spiritual, all the men we know and talk to try to impress us with their mentality and they put their best mental clothes on for us just as a male bird displays all its beauty of coloring for the sake of the female. Not that they want to marry us. They just want our admiration, the same as we like theirs.” + 

“That disposes of trial marriages, in a superficial way,” Regina agreed. + 

“Unless a trial marriage lasted for several years,” June went on very seriously, “it wouldn’t do any good. For any shorter time, a man would feel that he’s on his good behavior and just show off all the time⁠—put his best foot first. Of course on a desert island the time could be shorter, but not in our present civilization when a man is away all day working and sometimes the woman, too. + 

“Then if you lived with one man for a year or so and got tired of him, physically and mentally⁠—and found he hadn’t any depths to discover, then I should think you’d lack the courage to change and take another mate for fear you’d tire again. + 

“Such a course would just lead to promiscuity, I should think, even though it deserves a more dignified name than promiscuity.” + 

“Promiscuity wouldn’t be so bad,” Regina said thoughtfully. “There’s Madame du Barry. Think of the education you’d get by living with one man after another. That is, if you have a receptive mind and pick out intelligent men.” + 

“But couldn’t you get it without the physical side entering in?” June protested, a little shocked. + 

“No,” Regina decided. “You’d get just the smattering of an education. If you want to make an intensive study, you’d have to live with the man who knew all you wanted to know. You see with women of brains, an intelligent man uses his mental charms rather than physical to captivate her.” + 

“Yes, and when the personal equation enters in, you learn much more than when you’re studying by yourself. I was slumping in history till you joined the class in January. Then I felt I had to go you one better, so I’ve been studying like mad ever since.” + 

“I want a thorough knowledge of biology,” Regina went on dreamily. + 

“But who would want to live with a man like Professor Hawkins”⁠—June interrupted her practically. + 

Regina made a wry face. “That’s the trouble. You’ve got to have a mental and physical combination and I suppose it’s rare. No, I couldn’t ever live with Professor Hawkins.” + 

“Even if we were immoral⁠—” + 

“No, unmoral,” Regina corrected. + 

“Either way. As long as you’re independent about it, you don’t care whether people call you the one or the other. Anyway, even if we were immoral we couldn’t⁠—we wouldn’t have any opportunity⁠—we probably wouldn’t even be asked if we did have the opportunity of knowing them⁠—to live with the men we wanted to; Anatole France, for instance, or Fritz Kreisler, or H. G. Wells. But think what we’d learn if we could!” + 

The girls sighed. + 

And there were the other conversations that would always be remembered. One morning Regina cut a class to interview Mrs. Rose Pastor Stokes who was lecturing at the university on socialism. The girls took turns getting stories for the school paper and the well known radical had fallen to Regina, much to her delight. She was still blazing with enthusiasm that afternoon at tea, and her eyes had red lights in them. Tomorrow she would talk with equal fire of Benvenuto Cellini but today radicalism, as expressed by Mrs. Stokes, flowed through her veins. + 

“What a wonder she is! Didn’t you think she was stunning, June? Tall and distinguished and just as poised!” (Poised was one of Regina’s favorite words at the time.) + 

“And she was so lovely to me. She said she had red hair the color of mine and that I reminded her of herself when she was a girl. That was a real compliment, I think. She told me how she worked in a factory on the East Side of New York when she was a girl and how she struggled for an education in the university settlement there. And this New York millionaire came along and married her. There’s romance for you. It’ll make a ripping story for tomorrow morning’s paper. I’ll write it after tea.” + 

Socialism as a creed did not appeal to Regina. Perhaps it was because on the only occasions she had attended the Socialist local in the town, two of her instructors had been there, and held positions as executives in the branch. This was sufficient evidence that socialists were not persecuted, as she had imagined, and that free speech was not merely a phrase in the constitution. She could learn all she wanted on the subject from her economics professor, who was a well-read and nonpartisan teacher. “I am an instructor,” he once told them, “not a politician.” So Regina, partly as a result of American indifference to politics and partly through a Nietzschean conviction that the mob wasn’t worth assisting, learned just enough about socialism to pass her term examinations in political economy, and no more. + 

“I told Mrs. Stokes why I wasn’t interested in Socialism and she laughed at me and said I was very young.” Regina dimpled ruefully. “So I told her I would like to hear about her activities in the birth control movement, since they didn’t teach that in Economics 1b and didn’t have a society in the town.” + 

“You’re not going to say anything about that in the Mirror,” Regina’s fiancé Ray broke in. “We’d be suppressed and probably we’d be canned.” + 

“There you are⁠—there’s your free speech,” pointed out Jim, who had his astute moments. + 

“Here is part of the feminist movement which people don’t know about except when they pick up their papers and find out Mrs. Stokes has gone to jail for a month for distributing pamphlets on the subject. What wouldn’t tenement mothers give to have one of those pamphlets. But they haven’t any chance to learn until the newspapers agitate for it and the legislature changes the laws. It’s up to the press.” + 

“You’re editor, Jim. If Regina or I wrote an article on the history of the birth control movement, would you print it?” June asked. + 

“Nope.” + 

“Of course not. You haven’t the guts. But this is what would happen. The article would be printed and you and the person who wrote it would be called up before the dean and expelled. The rest of the staff would stand back of you, print a farewell edition of the paper, shouting for liberty and free speech, and they also would get kicked out. An uproar in a university of five thousand students wouldn’t go unnoticed and just because Regina’s father was President of the Board of Trade and Jim’s father owns railroads, the big papers would make a stir. And in all the fuss, people would hear about birth control⁠—it would be advertised, so to speak, and mothers would cry for it. And demand is always followed by supply⁠—so there you are.” + 

“I love the way we sit around and talk about what we could do,” Regina sniffed. “Get a couple of people like Mrs. Stokes on the staff and something would be done.” + 

“Bah! placed in the same situation we are, she’d do just what we do⁠—nothing! Besides,” Jim suddenly remembered, “I thought we decided last week we were Nietzscheans.” + 

“That’s one way of getting away from responsibilities,” Regina protested, still under the influence of Mrs. Stokes. + 

“I’ll stick to Nietzsche,” June decided consistently. “Why give up several years of good fun and education and incur the wrath of the worthy Mr. Henreddy by fighting for a mob of stupid, dirty people. They haven’t gumption enough to lift up their voices and complain. I’ll fight for myself and for what I want and that will keep me busy, I guess. I’m not in danger of having babies yet a while, so why worry? And I want another sandwich!” + 

There were three poets who visited the university that year, and caused much discussion⁠—John Masefield, Edgar Lee Masters and Vachel Lindsay. + 

Before the first arrived June cut all her classes, spent the day in the library, gloating over The Everlasting Mercy, The Widow in the Bye Street, The Daffodil Fields and Dauber. Regina, Ray and Jim followed her example and there were energetic discussions of Masefield, Masters and Lindsay. + 

“It’s a good thing we read Masefield’s stuff before he got here,” Regina said over the inevitable cup of tea. “In that huge auditorium he was the hardest man to hear! But I think he’s a wonder.” + 

“I think he was bashful, he sounded so muffled; but I’d much rather have a poet act that way. Lindsay was too flamboyant. As a matter of fact,” June continued, “Masefield acted as though he were shy and unwilling. He probably needed the money. Books of poetry are never best sellers.” + 

“I was all prepared not to like him,” Ray confessed. “I have a prejudice against English writers coming over to America to be hailed as geniuses. We pay too little attention to our own product to know whether it’s any good or not. We take English writers for granted. But Masefield’s all right and I think his poetry’s great stuff.” + 

It was an opinion that was echoed by the several thousand students who went to hear him. And when it was rumored that Masefield had actually been a sailor, and had acted as assistant bartender in a New York saloon, there was a run on the library for his books. He was a man who had “lived,” it was decided. + 

Whether free verse was really poetry was a much debated question for a time. Vachel Lindsay had declaimed verse of the open road, immaculately dressed in an evening suit. + 

“The incongruity of his dress and the roughness of his poetry sets me against him,” Regina insisted. “Let him wander around the Middle West dressed in corduroys and recite in the wheat fields if he wants to. The farmers and field hands probably looked on him as a lunatic, that is, unless he composed and chanted as he worked, pitching hay, for instance. He’d be like sailors with their chanteys in that case and in establishing a precedent all sorts of songs of the fields would crop up.” + 

“I understand that’s what he did do,” June put in. “He worked in the fields, living the life of the people, and writing a poetry of the people. His songs are like the negro melodies in the south⁠—they have real beauty⁠—or like the cowboy songs which have never been well done. + 

“What I object to about the man is his misplaced enthusiasm in appearing before two or three thousand students who have little appreciation of art or beauty. If he’d blackened his face to recite ‘General Booth Enters Heaven’ they might have enjoyed his recitation as they would a minstrel show. As it was, his way of reciting was unprecedented and therefore ridiculous and they didn’t catch at all the lilting music of it. I didn’t myself until I read it the next day and got away from the spirit of the crowd in judging it.” + 

Then came Edgar Lee Masters, not in person, but in the shape of a small green volume from which Mr. Lord read short “vitriolic” epitaphs. The adjective was Mr. Lord’s. + 

Immediately rhetoric instructors were deluged with themes in free verse, and a free verse column appeared in the Mirror. + 

“It’s a marvelous piece of work,” Jim decreed. “Anybody who has lived in a small Middle Western town would know that. It’s real poetry because it has a languorous, sad rhythm in it, a desolate undercurrent note that you feel in an ugly little town on a summer afternoon.” + 

“You’re inspired,” June laughed. “I distrust it as poetry because everyone is so enthusiastic and is trying so hard to imitate it. They think it’s easy. I’m something of a snob, I suppose, but I think true poetry is like true music, not to be appreciated by the multitude. Look at Germany. It produces Wagner, and people only accept him under protest and are bored to death if they have to sit through a Wagnerian opera. Most German music is sickly sentimental stuff⁠—waltzes played by fat beery men on huge horns. That’s what makes the multitude thrill. + 

“And look at us. We produce an Edgar Allan Poe⁠—a great poet⁠—and he dies of starvation. The crowd has never raved about him. But look at the furor about Masters. It’s a vulgar enthusiasm in which I refuse to join.” + 

Then, just as the free verse mood was beginning to dissolve, Scott Nearing, another socialist lecturer arrived, and wild political articles and dissertations on free speech filled the columns of the Mirror and there was something else to talk of at tea. + 

“That’s American democracy for you,” sniffed Regina, “a man is kicked out of one state university for expressing himself too freely, and is allowed to lecture at another. Why won’t the people in authority be consistent? That’s another reason why I can’t believe in socialism⁠—capitalists are never consistently oppressive.” + 

And so the teatime debates went on⁠—whether capitalists did more harm than good, whether state control had ever been successful, the possibility of a brotherhood of man⁠—and usually concluded each day with a realization that all discussion was futile. + 

“No use talking, I’m going into the railroad business when I’ve finished my course and no socialistic ideas will keep me from becoming the president of a railroad.” + 

“And I’m going to write novels that are best sellers just to make a living,” Ray decided, “and all my desire to devote myself to art and perfection won’t keep me from doing it.” + 

“I’d like to get a job on a big daily paper and my fun in going out after stories or running a woman’s page will keep me from worrying because the press is governed by its advertisers.” + 

“Me too,” Regina agreed, then⁠—“I’m afraid we’re awfully lacking in ideals.” + 