Part + 

III + 

Not So Much So + 

I + 

Mother Grace thought that it would be tactless to show her enthusiasm for what June was about to do. If she showed the happiness she felt, she thought it would reveal to June her disapproval of what her daughter had done before. + 

“As for those three boys, Hugh and Daniel and Kenneth⁠—they’re perfect dears. And the apartment is a lovely one. I don’t blame you for preferring it to a furnished room,” she had said. “Of course your friends think nothing of it and neither do their friends. But think of the world. Not your world, I suppose, but my world. If any of my friends ask ‘where’s June living now’ and I say, nonchalantly, ‘with three men over on Waverly Place’⁠—what do you suppose they’ll think? Not that I’m likely to answer them in any such way.” + 

She wrinkled her eyebrows considerably over the jail episode and June noticed the little pucker of worry with remorse. “I am a brute,” she thought, “to make her worry so.” And she continued to fret over the inconsequentiality of her life. “Am I going to continue frittering my time away?” + 

As for the youngest member of the family, he gloated over his sister’s recent confinement. He sat on the front steps and informed all the children in the neighborhood of it. “My sister’s been to jail,” he boasted. + 

“We mustn’t talk of June in front of Glubb,” Mother Grace told Adele in despair. “He only goes out and repeats it to the children and they take the news home to their families. They think I’m the most unnatural mother, not to take better care of my children.” + 

And then June came with a letter to show her mother, applying for admittance to the city hospital. Her mother hid her approval as carefully as she hid her disapproval and asked her if she was about to become patriotic. + 

“Not a bit of it,” said June indignantly. “I don’t believe in war and I really think that if women united and refused to bear children to fight wars or to take care of the wounded as long as there are wars we’d never have any more fighting. But I hate being Utopian and trying to escape from reality. And now that there is war and so much work to be done, I might as well try to do some of it instead of sitting around playing at writing book reviews and helping edit magazines that are on the verge of suppression. That’s the only kind of a job that I’m fit for.⁠ ⁠… And I’ve had enough of newspaper work. I’d be sacrificing principles to work on the capitalist press even if I could get a job on one of the New York papers which I can’t. And if I’m going to sacrifice the foolish little principles that I have in looking forward to an ideal state, I might as well sacrifice them by doing work that has to be done in a hospital.” + 

“I don’t know what in the world you are talking about when you say you are sacrificing principle to enter a hospital,” said Mother Grace. “But you always have to have some high-flown reason for what you do, I suppose.” + 

“I expect I don’t know what I mean, either,” June agreed amiably. “I just know that I don’t believe in war and that by entering a hospital I am doing my share in the war. + 

“At any rate, the prospectus of the training school calls for six pink uniforms (that’s what probationers wear and I look like hell in pink) and a dozen aprons. Will you stake me to the money to buy them? I’m broke.” + 

“By the way, Mother Grace,” said Adele, not long afterward. “Do you realize that I’m eighteen?” + 

“Goodness gracious, so you are. I guess it’s about time that you began to talk of living your own life and getting out in the world.” And they smiled to each other as they often did when they were making pleasant fun of June. + 

“I know what you’re thinking of,” said June. “You want to enter the hospital with me.” + 

“You’ve still got Glubb,” and Adele looked at her mother appealingly. “I’ve got to do something, some time. And they need nurses so badly now. Not to go abroad, but to stay at home and serve in the hospitals here. The Red Cross is full and they haven’t sent abroad anywhere near all the nurses they have in reserve. They just sit around doing nothing or parade Fifth Avenue while they wait to get across. And meantime the hospitals are terribly hard up for help.” + 

Mother Grace had long expected her youngest daughter to realize her eighteen years. Since the hospital the two girls wished to enter was within twenty minutes’ ride of home, it was easier to give up the last of her grown ups than she had thought possible. + 

It was decided that the two should begin training after Christmas and many afternoons were spent in making pink dresses and voluminous white aprons. + 

“I did not dream bed-making could be so hard,” Adele sighed at the end of the first day and stretched her lame body luxuriously. “If it weren’t for you being here, I’d want to cry and go straight home. How many times did you have to put the bottom sheet on your bed? I didn’t get mine right until the tenth time.” + 

“I did mine satisfactorily the seventh,” June laughed. “But then I’m two years older than you are, so I can’t help being smarter.” + 

Bed-making was a difficult job. First you whisked the mattress⁠—away from you lest you get a germ on your clean white apron⁠—and turned it and whisked some more. Then you whisked a carbolic solution over each side of the mattress and washed the remainder of the bed till there wasn’t a speck of dust on it. You did this to six beds before you returned to the beginning of the line to make the first one. + 

The sheets were folded in a certain way so that they could be unfolded and spread out on the bed in a certain way. There was no flapping open as you did at home with a sheet or tablecloth to spread it smoothly. That might disturb germs that were in the air and set them in circulation. + 

After the sheet was smoothed out on the bed, you tucked in one side, tucking with broad sweeps from the middle. Then you went around to the other side and the sheet was so wide that when you tucked it there, you tucked that side so that it fitted into the other, as an envelop flap fits inside of an envelope. At either end what was left over of the sheet on the underside of the mattress was inserted under the sheet on the upper side of the mattress, was folded to form a flap and pinned carefully and neatly with two straight pins to the mattress. There was a certain way of putting in the pins too. You see what a difficult job it was. + 

And you see also what June and Adele meant when they said they had to make the bed seven and ten times before the head nurse was satisfied. It was very discouraging to put the sheet on to the best of your ability and then have the head nurse come along and point out several wrinkles. Wrinkles, it would seem, were very irritating to sick people. + 

When you had been told to try again, off the sheet had to come. Not quickly. You didn’t just take out the pins and pull the sheet off and begin laboriously to put it on again. No, it had to be folded as it was taken off, and unfolded again to put it on. So many times that you could never forget how hospital linen was folded. + 

Making a bed, June decided, was much more difficult than writing a book review, and her satisfaction when her bed had been made for the seventh time and approved was much greater than she had enjoyed when seeing a book review in print with her name signed to it. + 

June and Adele worked in an empty ward. A wide door opened into another ward from which every now and then came the hot, sharp cry of a patient. It was good to be working there. There was even a strange satisfaction in hearing a patient cry because when the cries were stilled you knew that something useful had been done. + 

Miss Kelley was the probationers’ instructor. She was a little white-faced nurse with prim firm ways. Her eyes were large and intensely serious, the color of an ocean on a dull winter day. Her hair was mouse colored. She was sweetly firm and could be very forceful. June heard her voice from behind a screen, calming an hysterical patient. “Turn right over on your side now and let the nurse attend to you! The idea of your making all this trouble!” There was quiet immediately. + 

There was the same insistence in the touch of her hands. She was not strong but she could move the helpless bulk of a woman who weighed three times as much as she did. Strength seemed to pour from her fingertips into a patient. + 

When, after several days of bed-making, June gave her first morning toilet, she felt that it was an event and an accomplishment. Before you could give a morning toilet, you had to be given a tray with many bottles and sponges and toilet articles on it. Trays were fascinating with the little jars of salve and swabs and bandages and liquid green soap and mouthwash⁠—many more things. You had to go over your tray every morning to see that the other nurses did not steal things from it. + 

June’s first patient was an old Canadian woman, ninety-four years old. Granny objected to being washed saying that she had been bathed the day before and that at her time of life she did not see why she had to be pestered with soap and water the way she was. Argument was useless so she began to kick and fight, clawing at June with birdlike hands. + 

Another nurse said, “Can’t you see, Granny, that Miss Henreddy only wants to make you comfortable? She does it because she loves you.” + 

“Love be damned,” said Granny, loudly, stridently. Her defiance was glorious, June thought, and she laughed joyfully as she put her hands under the armpits of the old lady and tried to persuade her to lie down. In the scuffle the bedclothes had been heaped in the middle of the bed. Granny perched there, sitting on the end of her spine, her arms clasped about her bare and scrawny knees and blazed at June with eyes as dark as those of a baby. Her cap hung over one ear, displaying a large bald spot surrounded by a queer fringe of grey hair which was matted and awry, standing up like a field of ferns. She gave way to June at last and allowed herself to be bathed, crying to herself all the while like a whimpering monkey. The ghastly youthfulness of her false teeth in her yellow shrivelled face haunted June for the rest of the day. + 

“She has been crying for months,” another nurse told June, “to be allowed to wear a wig which was taken away from her when she entered the hospital. She says she wouldn’t feel half so badly with it. I wish they would let her have it.” + 

There were two women dying in the ward, a woman of fifty and a girl of twenty-two. Mary Adams was slowly fading from the whiteness of the ward around her into a grey shadow on the long slim bed. She had a grown son who came to visit her every evening when the wards were twilit and the evening toilets were completed. He brought huge bunches of flowers which the head nurse vaguely disapproved of. “They are too flary.” But the orchids suited her somber eyes and the mint and old-fashioned flowers made a strange rich scent around the bed, Every time June passed her, a little thrill ran up and down her spine. Mrs. Adams never spoke but lay there motionless, looking out of wide open grey eyes, looking at the death she saw so plainly with dull wonder. + 

Irene was the girl and she was pathetically young. Her finely shaped mouth was always contorted with pain and there was a fierce protesting light in her eyes. The lines that agony had drawn in the ivory of her skin were like those of passion. She might have been clutching a lover in a last embrace knowing that when he arose from the bed he would go out and close the door forever. + 

“There is the smell of death around her,” June thought, “and no one brings her flowers to deaden it.” + 

When Adele was working in a ward where there were six girls who were about to have their tonsils taken out, June was passed on to the fracture ward, number twenty-five. There were eleven old ladies there with fractures of the femur and hip bones. The most youthful of them were sixty and close on to seventy years. They approached the elderly stage when they were eighty and when they passed ninety-five, it was admitted that they were indeed old. + 

It seemed strange at first to call them by their Christian names but it was the custom of the hospital and June soon became used to it. + 

Ida, a young Jewish woman of sixty, was a trial to June. It seemed she had never known the meaning of the word bath and when she was washed on her arrival she howled so that a young intern rushed in thinking that she had been taken with labor pains. Her features were colossal, well carved and wrinkled like a crumpled linen handkerchief. She had become so used to contorting every feature to give vent to her emotions that now her face was as uncontrolled as that of a six year old child. + 

Every morning June had to bathe her from head to foot, rub her back with alcohol, powder her and comb her hair. And soon Ida was so accustomed to being waited on that although she was no longer helpless, she wailed loudly if any detail of her morning toilet was omitted. + 

“Schmeer! Mit alcohol!” she demanded, arching her back from the bed. She could not turn, owing to the splint which bound her on one side from her shoulder to her ankle. + 

Her sensuous joy was so great that all the while she was being groomed and curried, she grunted like an enormous pig. Before she had been in the ward a week, she demanded that each leg, each arm, be also rubbed with alcohol. + 

Occasionally, the ward maid, Catherine, “did” her morning toilet, and to avoid the boisterous argument which Ida always indulged in and to save the alcohol, she took to rubbing her arms and legs with a weak solution of thymol and water. Ida soon discovered the deception and seizing the bottle, she dashed it on the floor. After that she could no longer be deceived. Before she allowed herself to be rubbed, she smelled the contents of the bottle. + 

Although she was physically clean, thanks to June’s efforts, her habits remained filthy. On visiting days, she furtively accepted the food which her relatives brought her, and which was not supposed to be left at the bedside of the patient, and hid it under her mattress, her pillow, under her arms, and even between her splint and her body under the bandages. Then knowing that she had only a few hours before she would again be bathed, she applied herself assiduously to the food which was brought to her until every crumb was devoured. “Ei, ei, gevault, gevault, gevault,” she complained if anyone tried to take her food away from her. + 

Usually her relatives, who came in tribes and draped themselves around the bed to ei-gevault with her over the miseries of the world, brought her prunes. They came in quart jars, twice a week, and after drinking all the juice out of the bottle, Ida munched the prunes all night, eating them as continually and with as unalloyed delight as a debutante would salted almonds. + 

There were times in the sweet dusk of evening when she had been “schmeered” with alcohol to her heart’s content that she showed a gentler side. Her ei-gevaults gave way to a melancholy chanting, a chanting that was also joyous. One time when she was softly and exultantly wailing, June asked another Jewish woman in the ward what she was singing about. The reply was that she was “talking to God.” + 

There was another in the ward who was almost as much trouble as “Ei-gevault.” The nurse called her “Oh-a, Oh-a” because she cried continually. She was the one Irishwoman there who did not bear her pains stoically. Approaching death had loosened the bolts she had placed on her consciousness. Although she was seventy, she had a beautiful body, as white and firm as that of a young girl. She paid for her delicacy however, for every inch of her was alive to sensation and responded to the pain in her broken hip. She seemed burned by an inward fever and was always calling for water. + 

“I’m scaldin’, Nellie, and achin’. Bring me some water in the tin cup, in the little tin cup by the pump!” Glasses did not satisfy her thirst, so June bought a tin cup for her. “It tastes so good and cold,” said Oh-a, Oh-a. + 

June’s special pet was Sarah Lauthier, a tiny little lady of ninety-six. June was Margaret to her and anyone who made a noise was Willie. On one occasion, five nurses and a doctor were strapping a delirious, screaming patient into the bed next to her and consciousness of the tumult gradually sifted into her mind. “Willie!” she piped up. “Don’t make so much noise. The neighbors will think we keep a disorderly house.” + 

June loved Willie, her cubby great-grand-child of ten. He came twice a week with bottles of orange juice and sat by her bedside. When he had been at her side for an hour, she realized that he was there, and chirped at him happily. He always stayed for two hours, holding her hand, and never seemed oppressed by the sickness around him. + 

For a time June almost succumbed to the temptation to break one of the most stringent of the hospital rules. Sarah was continually beckoning to her and whispering slyly in her ear, “You know what I want,” or “Wouldn’t a wee drop of gin taste good.” And then June discovered that little Willie was bringing her something that strongly resembled a Bronx cocktail, judging by the smell of it. After that she was careful that Granny’s orange juice was not confused with the orange juice of other patients and that she got every drop of it. + 

Every morning when June arrived on the ward, she found the little old woman, lying naked. It was evident that she could not endure being wet and tore off her sheets and nightgown so that the warm air could dry her. Her withered, crooked body was like that of Rodin’s ancient courtesan. + 

At times her years dropped from her and she coquetted with June adorably. She had the sweetest grin and the wickedest wink. And there was a tiny dimple still left in one cheek when she laughed her silent laugh. + 

One evening June found her trying to sew with her large brass cross at the end of a rosary. “What are you trying to do, Granny?” She was swearing softly to herself now and then. + 

“Can’t you see I’m trying to make a buttonhole, you damn fool? The needle won’t go through. How can I keep warm without a buttonhole in my gowns?” + 

And then Lora McAlister was carried into the ward and all its sordid ugliness was lightened and relieved. Lora was twenty-eight, a widow, with auburn hair and brown eyes. The floor man, an ex-patient, found much to do in the neighborhood and wandered around singing under his breath. June caught a few lines of a tuneless ballad once⁠—“He placed his hand upon her knee. She said, ‘my man, you’re mighty free’⁠—” and then he caught sight of her and the song died away in his throat. The doctors haunted the ward and other patients were deluged with attentions. The three men who were with Lora when the automobile accident occurred which resulted in her broken hip obtained special permission to call at the hospital to see her every afternoon, and the ward was beautiful with flowers and plants. + 

In spite of her injuries which were severe, she threw off her lethargy and powdered and primped and sewed ribbons on her night dress and sang until the ward was aglow and the up-patients in the corridor stopped their chattering to listen. The sixty and seventy year old women became conscious of their sex and were more willing to have their faces washed. They gave June quarters to buy them sweet-smelling talcums and relatives appeared with dainty night dresses for them. + 

June had been in the hospital six months when she was transferred to the male medical ward. She was glad to leave her old ladies for Sarah Lauthier was about to die. She did not want to see her dead. So she got permission to perform Granny’s morning toilet for the last time and after gathering up her flung-out wet clothes around the bed, fastening the old lady securely in a dry unbleached muslin night gown, tucking her in tightly, and leaving a little kiss on the tiny dimple in her cheek, she rushed breathlessly to the male building at the other end of the grounds. + 

Ward fifty-four was a strange, wild place. June and Miss Andrews, a capable young Irish girl who was two months June’s senior in training, were alone in the ward from seven o’clock in the morning until seven in the evening, save for the visits of the doctors and interns and the much to be dreaded superintendent of nurses. The head nurse of the ward was busy most of the day in the ward above and when she came, she came to help not to criticize. It was the superintendent who stood sternly at the end of the room and let her eye travel down the long ward for some disorder or carelessness. It was hard not to be careless at this time too, for an influenza epidemic had broken out over the city and every day eight to ten victims were carried in or walked in staggeringly, only to fall unconscious as soon as their clothes were taken from them. + 

According to the superintendent every ward in the hospital should be in order by ten o’clock; but to get the work underway, June and Miss Andrews did without their breakfasts in the nurses’ dining-room and arrived on the ward at six-thirty. + 

However, Red Reynolds who used to keep a saloon on Coney Island and was at present the kitchen-man, prepared an excellent breakfast of toast, soft boiled eggs and coffee. While June ate, Miss Andrews worked and kept a lookout for head nurses (it being against the rule to eat on the ward) and June did the same for her. + 

The up-patients were already at work when the girls arrived, sweeping, polishing brass, getting the linen in order and helping other more miserable up-patients into their wheelchairs. The latter were trundled out into the solarium where they sat all day and chewed tobacco and gossiped of wine, women and war and occasionally of God. Sometimes you could hear the cracked voice of an old sailor trying to sing a barroom song or the booming voice of the old German who was almost ossified, singing a hymn. + 

June’s first task was to pour out the medicine for a hundred patients, a task demanding concentration and a steady hand. When she first started pouring, she continued pouring in her dreams every night, until she was able to associate every patient with the medicine which he took. For instance, whenever she saw Sullivan, her brain immediately flashed: + 

Arom. Spt. Am. Dr. 1 + 

Donov. Sol. M. 10 + 

Pot. Iod. Gr. 15 + 

Stokes M. Dr. 1 + 

There were almost as many medicines for each patient, and the entire dose was handed out in one glass regardless of chemical combinations. The convalescent patients greeted June hilariously as she came bringing them what they called their cocktails and bracers. + 

It took two hours to pour and chart the medicines. All the while June stood at the glass medicine cabinet in the center of the ward, Philip, a handsome elderly man in the bed opposite to her, leisurely selected and picked (with apparently great discrimination) a large bouquet of flowers from the air, each one of which he sniffed with enjoyment before adding it to the bunch in his hand. This he presented to June with a courteous, grave smile, when she brought him his medicine, and she thanked him with equal gravity and ceremony and arranged them in an imaginary vase on her medicine tray. One time she noticed him pulling with a great deal of effort at what must have been a goldenrod, it was so hard to separate it from its stalk. + 

“If you try to break it, instead of tearing at it,” said the man in the next bed kindly, “maybe you’ll get it off.” + 

There was another patient, a laundryman, with a red haggard face and burning eyes, who took off his bedclothes, one by one and fed them into an ironing machine. Even his nightshirt was sacrificed in the stress of his delusion, and wearily, again and again, June clothed him, and bound him down in the bed with restraining sheets which he loosened in fifteen minutes with his restless, strong, sick fingers. + 

Adele sat and sniffed into a handkerchief at the open window while June, crouched on the bed in the corner where she couldn’t see how tantalizing the spring evening was, was trying vainly to memorize the symptoms of atropine poisoning. + 

“It seems to me that all the heart medicines have the same poisoning symptoms,” she complained. “Now, mercury is easy to remember. If your patients salivate, then you know they’ve got the first symptom. Then their gums begin to swell and turn purple and then their teeth fall out. When I first went on ward seventy-two, I had just learned those symptoms, so I went around to all the patients who were taking mercury in one form or another and looked at their mouths. And would you believe it, every one of them complained of wanting to spit all the time! Those interns had forgotten all about prescribing mercury and had left it on the medicine chart and the damn-fool nurse who was in the ward before me kept right on giving the medicine. I kicked to the head nurse⁠—or rather I reported the matter respectfully, for she’s an old devil⁠—and she told me to go right on giving the medicine till the doctor came on the ward again. ‘Doctor’s orders must be obeyed.’ And the doctor might not be on the ward again for a week!” + 

The ward was like a ship, she concluded, where the doctor was captain, the superintendent first mate, the head nurse, second mate and the nurses just ordinary seamen. They had to obey orders, nothing else. And if they used their brains, and deduced that a patient was about to die of strychnine poisoning unless the dose was stopped, they had to go on giving the dose until word came from higher-up to stop it. Discipline was a great thing. For any woman holding an executive position who was about to have a nervous prostration, a course of training in a hospital would surely cure her. If it didn’t kill her. June felt that she would like to scream every now and then and throw medicine bottles at the head nurses. But she felt too the relief of being told what to do and knowing that she had to do it. + 

Suddenly she looked up from the book she was vainly trying to concentrate her mind upon and noticed Adele with her handkerchief. “What is the matter? Have you got a cold or are you crying?” + 

Adele admitted that she was crying and continued sniffing. June’s sympathy made it worse. + 

“Oh, I like hospital work and I wouldn’t stop it for anything,” she wept, “but every now and then you see something that actually breaks your heart and you don’t see how you can stand it any longer. You know Mary⁠—the one I told you about with consumption and who had just had a baby a month ago? Well, she’s dead.” + 

June knew that it wasn’t at the death itself that her sister was crying, for they had talked of it and expected it every day for the past week. It sounded callous but there was a sort of excitement in seeing how long you could keep a person who was lingering with a fatal disease alive. + 

“She died at quarter to seven,” Adele went on. “And you know when a patient dies at ten minutes of seven the day nurses leave the work to the night nurses. Doctor Gleason was passing through the ward and signed the death certificate then and there, the time of death marked at the top of it and the day nurses had to ‘do up’ the dead body. Miss Smith⁠—she’s a month ahead of me⁠—had to attend to it seeing as the head nurse was off duty, and she and another girl went behind the screen and you could hear everything they said through the ward and out in the corridor. They swore⁠—they said, ‘damn it, why couldn’t she have waited till after seven. I’ve got a date tonight.’ And the other girl said, ‘Oh, hell, of course she had to wet the bed again before she died.’ And you could hear them slap her as they turned her over to get the sheet out from under her. The worst of it all was, the husband of the girl was standing out in the hall all the time and he was just a young boy. He was crying terribly. And I have been, too, ever since.” + 

Nursing was like newspaper work in that it was impossible to suffer long over the tragedies which took place every day. You were too close to them to have perspective. They happened too continuously. They weighed on you⁠—gave you a still and subdued feeling but the very fact that you were continually busy left you no time to brood. + 

There was brightness on the ward, the brightness of the spring sunlight, the cleanliness and the convalescent patients. Some patients could not help shedding a jovial atmosphere about them. There was the old sailor who called himself Captain Kidd, for instance. He had toppled into the river and when rescued had emptied no one knew how many bottles of whiskey to avoid bad effects, he told the doctor. But nevertheless he had been brought into the hospital with influenza. Now he was convalescing and his red bandana handkerchief which he twined around his head made the one spot of color in the white ward. Every time the head nurse entered the ward she made him take it off. But it was on again as soon as her back was turned and June received grateful little nods and winks every time she was reprimanded for not having discipline among her patients. Red handkerchiefs were untidy, it seemed. + 

Even the superintendent of the nurses, who had trained in that same hospital long ago and had been there ever since, felt the influence of spring. Her yellowish-grey hair usually was pulled straight back behind her ears, but now it fluffed out a little like the wings of birds. Instead of the high stiff collar which she wore all winter, there was a low stiff one, but it was softened by a white and slightly withered throat. Every other afternoon she lectured the first year girls on anatomy and June noticed that the bones which she handled delicately, as though they were flowers, were the same color as her hair. + 

There was an insistent somnolence in her voice which must have come from years of association with the sick. It murmured on, those spring afternoons like the bees in the park outside. On Thursdays there were band concerts for the old peoples’ home next door and then the lecture had to be cut short. It wasn’t only that Miss Daly couldn’t compete with the noise. But the band was made up of twelve year old boys from the Catholic school nearby and every now and then came a series of bars that rasped on her nerves like the tearing of silk. She could not concentrate on what was before her. And since the lecture had been cut short there was a half hour of freedom for June and Adele to sit in the park and watch the old people smoke and mumble to themselves. + 

“Every one of those old ladies smokes her pipe and the county allows her tobacco,” June grumbled. “Gee, how I’d like to have a cigarette now.⁠ ⁠… What is it that you miss at these Thursday afternoon band concerts, Adele?” + 

“Lots of things.” + 

“No, I mean one thing specially. It’s the smell of cigarettes. I can’t think of those park concerts and Mr. Armand without remembering that odor of damp grass and people’s clothes and cigarettes.” + 

It was very restful there under the trees. The sparrows hopped up to the little old women who had saved crusts for them in their apron pockets. An occasional pigeon strutted up and down and a large black cat slunk under the benches with her yellow eyes on the birds. The trees were flecked with the pale green of new leaves. + 

June noticed one shrivelled little woman standing apart from the others talking to a man who was also in the uniform of the county. “Sex instinct at this late stage of the game,” she was about to say jeeringly, for the little woman was laughing coquettishly. But the smile was wiped off her lips as she recognized the bent figure as an ex-patient of hers. + 

“See that little old thing,” she told Adele, almost tenderly. “I saw her last night. You know the shortcut I take when I’m in a hurry⁠—around the back of the chapel and laundry and the two old peoples’ homes. There the two of them were last night, gripping each others’ hands, trying to tear themselves away. Seven o’clock is their bed time you see. Husband and wife being taken care of by the county, poor dears, and separated. He kissed her so nicely, and she said, ‘remember John, don’t kick the covers off tonight. You’ve got to be careful of your cold.’ Think of them having to sneak around behind a laundry house to kiss each other!” + 

What she did not say was that now and then a vague longing came to trouble her⁠—she felt a restless need of someone who would clutch at her and not want to let her go. + 

II + 

“How many times have you fallen in love?” June asked her sister suddenly. The two of them were walking slowly from the wards to the nurses’ home. It was eight o’clock and very dark and still in the big park which surrounded the hospital. They came to one of the old ladies’ benches and sat down. It was a dim spot. June felt that she could phrase the tumult within her in the properly ridiculous phrases and not betray herself. Walking a little further they would have to enter the glaring hall of the nurses’ home and Adele’s sharp eyes could see that her face was flushed and her hands unsteady. + 

“Just three times,” Adele told her. “You know, I told you about that boy when I was thirteen and then when I was fourteen and then again just a year ago.” + 

“I’ve heard you hint about that last ‘affair,’ ” June commented. “But if you’re perfectly frank with me, I’ll be perfectly frank with you. I want your advice.” + 

“Not my advice. You probably just want to get something off your chest.” + 

“Well, leave it that way, then. Anyway, did you always fall in love at first sight?” + 

“Of course.” + 

“It seems so impossible to do a thing like that when you think of it coldly and soberly, but I’ve gone and done it.” + 

“Oh, June! Who!” And Adele squeezed her sister’s arm. + 

June disregarded her question and went on. “It seems so unreasonable. If you grew up with a person or had known him for a long time and suddenly began to realize that you wanted to kiss his eyelids, there might be some sense in it. There’d be something in back of an insane desire like that. But to see a man for the first time and want to⁠—I’m actually ashamed of myself.” + 

“Yes, I can see how foolish it seems. You wouldn’t be a bit surprised if you had fallen in love with Hugh Brace or Daniel or Kenneth. Just casually fallen in love while you were living there all summer with them.” + 

“Sure,” June agreed. “And then in a case like that I shouldn’t have had the slightest hesitation about kissing them. But wouldn’t they have been surprised,” she chortled, “if I announced suddenly, ‘oh, by the way, when I woke up this morning I discovered that I was in love with you. It must have been growing on me.’ ” + 

“I don’t believe that it does just grow on you,” Adele said stoutly. “I think it always comes suddenly. As soon as you see the man, you know right away. Why, when I saw King walking down the street with Ann (fortunately it was a girl I knew) I realized immediately I was in love. Of course it’s hopeless but it’s nice being in love anyway.⁠ ⁠… All three of them had amber eyes,” she ended incoherently. + 

“It seems ridiculous, but I can’t laugh about it. Do you know what it was that made me fall in love right away, Adele? It was this man’s broken nose. It looked just exactly like Amenemhat’s. You know how his is broken, sort of hacked off so that it looks as though it were pushed to one side. I told him right away that he looked like Amenemhat III, and he said, ‘who in hell is he?’ and then he apologized and asked me if I would have my eggs scrambled or poached.” + 

“You don’t mean to say that you’ve fallen in love with a patient! Was he delirious?” + 

“No, of course not a patient. He was a kitchen man in ward seventy-two and now he’s an orderly.” + 

As long as June’s was what Adele would term a hopeless passion, she could not feel shocked. But as the weeks passed and she noticed the look of suppressed excitement in her sister’s eyes, she felt that she had to take it more seriously. Especially when she learned more about Dick Wemys. + 

He was not an ordinary orderly although you could hardly use that adjective in connection with any of the orderlies of the Central Hospital. A good many of them were formerly professional men, doctors and lawyers, college graduates who had never fitted themselves for any work and drank steadily until they found themselves in the city hospital either with some illness or with delirium tremens. If, after they had recovered, they were offered some position in the hospital, they usually took it. The pay was good, and so was the food. Their quarters were almost as comfortable as those of the nurses. Moreover, they were out of the way of temptation. It was generally understood that once a month they would disappear with their pay envelopes, but they usually returned two days later, yellow about the eyes and anxious to be taken back. And since intelligent orderlies were scarce, they were allowed to return to work without comment. + 

June was glad to assure her sister that Dick Wemys had not been brought into the hospital with delirium tremens. He had been working as a cameraman with a moving picture outfit in Caracas and had worked his passage on a freighter back to New York in order to save money. + 

“I always flattered myself that I was hard-boiled enough to take care of myself,” he told June, “but the trick those dirty Mexican sailors pulled on me was the simplest ever. Dropped into a saloon with them on Furman Street and didn’t know a thing until I came to in the hospital here a week afterward. An overdose of knockout drops, and they took all my money. As if that wasn’t enough, they chucked me under an archway at the foot of Montague Street and left me to freeze to death. Unfortunately I didn’t have but a few glasses of liquor in me so I got pneumonia. + 

“This job isn’t so bad and I want to save enough to get out to the harvest fields. That’s the life for you. I usually get out there every summer and wander from state to state with the harvest, ending up in Canada. Lumber camps are all right, too. Then you can winter in Seattle or down in Frisco. Either loaf or find a newspaper job. I was woman’s editor of a Frisco paper several winters ago.” + 

The strange wooing began immediately, of course. Dick Wemys was that sort of a man. He wouldn’t have remained in the hospital if it hadn’t been for June. It was another adventure for him, but he would not have enjoyed it if he had not had June to enjoy it with. And the fact that it was another adventure for her, too, made it easier. Adventurous souls were rare, he argued. People liked to regard something that just happened to them, and which took an hour or so to happen, as an adventure. Real adventurers were those that could enjoy a long drawn out adventure, one that entailed hard work and days of depression as well as those uplifted moments that come so seldom and are remembered ever after. + 

You have to get outside yourself June agreed⁠—stand afar off and watch yourself running up and down the ward with glasses of eggnog, tying patients in bed, undressing filthy longshoremen, watch yourself being scolded at by head nurses and superintendents or nurses who always insisted upon your doing the most unnecessary things at the most critical moments when it seemed absolutely essential to do something else. Dick had to share all this with June now. + 

There was the incident of the dirty feet, not so indelicate as it sounds. Dr. Weiss, that tiddy-nosed old flitterbottom as June called him, was examining a patient with rheumatism in his ankles. He was the sort of doctor who always insisted that the head nurse accompany him on his rounds. No ordinary blue and white striped nurse would do. And he not only needed a white gowned nurse, he needed an orderly to wheel around a dressing tray. He just had to have it. It added to his importance. + 

The man with rheumatism in his ankles had been a sailor all his life, used to scuffing about the docks barefooted, and the feet in their uniform brownness, thick and calloused on the soles, stubbled as to toe nails, did not correspond in whiteness with his thighs. There was tar on them too, but as June protested, if she stopped to scrape the tar from the feet of the sailors who came into ward seventy-two they would have to do without not only their medicines but their eggnogs. + 

Dr. Weiss came to the old sailor and the head nurse drew the immaculate bed linen from his feet. The movement was delicate. You could almost see the little finger of her hand upturned. She handled the sheets as Miss Daly had handled the bones in the anatomy class. The whiteness of the sheets and the smallness of her hands accentuated the grotesqueness of the huge widespread toes which were exposed. + 

The doctor turned away in disgust. “Did he just enter the hospital this morning?” He looked at the patient’s chart. “No, he has been here a week. I shall examine him another time.” + 

“Miss Henreddy!” It was the prim voice of the head nurse. “I shall examine the feet of every patient in the ward at eight o’clock tomorrow morning.” + 

Behind her back, Dick and June exchanged glances. + 

It was a day during the influenza epidemic when patients were brought in one after another on stretchers, and died very often before they could be put to bed and had to be carried away again. + 

“Believe me, those sailors won’t thank you for getting the callouses off their feet,” Dick laughed afterward. But nevertheless at six that evening when there was no danger of an inspection from head nurses, he and June informed the ward of what was before it. + 

“I’m taking charge of this,” Dick said briskly. And the patients who liked June and helped her whenever they could, offered their cooperation. In a minute, the two huge bath tubs at the end of the ward were full of warm water and liquid green soap, and all those patients who were able to walk or be assisted, tottered to the end of the ward and sat in a circle around the edge of the tubs. The job was taken hilariously and finished in an hour. + 

There was danger in it of course. Not two days before, one of the patients had taken advantage of the nurse’s absence to try to get out of bed to reach the lavatory and had dropped dead. Weakness of the heart was common in the influenza wards. But Dick claimed that the patients were so fond of June that they would risk dropping dead to save her trouble and that their mentally agreeable state would prevent any such disaster happening. + 

Mr. Liscinderella was another hard customer. He was brought in on a busy morning, raving fiercely and demanding liquor. June and Dick wrestled with him, strapping him into bed but their combined strength was hardly enough. He broke away from them again and again. Dick snarled at him viciously and June used the conciliatory tones proper to a nurse. Perhaps the two treatments neutralized each other. At any rate, it was a full hour before he was properly restrained. Several times June approached him with a hypodermic full of morphine which the doctor had ordered. But each time he leaped under the touch of her hand and either broke the needle or separated it from its glass cylinder. + 

“I know it doesn’t hurt him,” June said. “The first time I ever gave a hypo I know my hand trembled so that I must have bungled the job. After that I gave myself one with sterile water and as you don’t mind pain inflicted by yourself, my hand didn’t tremble at all and I couldn’t even feel the needle going in. All you have to do is keep a supply of fresh, sharp needles. Seeing as we have to buy our own, some of the nurses are stingy about it and use the same ones over and over.” + 

But even the morphine when it was finally administered failed to soothe the delirious man. In the middle of the afternoon he wrenched loose the sheet from around his shoulders and sat up in bed suddenly. + 

“Line up, everybody,” he called out. “My treat.” And one feeble longshoreman from the other side wandered vaguely into the middle of the ward with his nightshirt flapping around him and died upon being put back into bed. + 

It was only when an intern ordered whiskey three times a day for Liscinderella that he subsided and the ward again became quiet. + 

There was a sort of ghastly excitement and joy in the ward among the convalescing patients when the sicker ones were obstreperous. + 

“Gee, ain’t this a hell house,” June heard one of them remark complacently. “You’d think the old black bottle was being passed around.” For the legend that hospitals did away with superfluous patients by draughts from the black bottle was still current among the lowest of the lower classes. + 

They rather enjoyed believing it. + 

It was an exciting play that they were all taking part in. It was a battle in which one grim spirit passed by, casting a spell over some and shrieking through their mouths obscenities on life. + 

June and Dick were the only healthy young things in the entire ward. As long as some of the patients could help the nurse by washing their own faces and keeping their beds smoothed and the tables cleared by their sides, they felt that they partook of a little of her energetic health. They could watch the struggle going on in the long room with a grim humor. + 

On one occasion when the ward slept and June was off duty, a delirious patient who had been so quiet that it had not seemed necessary to fasten him in bed with restraining sheets, quietly got up, tied his blanket around his waist to hide his bare legs and sneaked down the stairs and away. + 

June came on the ward at seven to find the night nurse weeping hysterically. “You can’t turn your back to feed one patient his medicine without another getting into some devilment. Now I’ll be kicked out.” + 

Dick took part in the search. Patients had been known to have escaped to the roof, to the benches in the park around the hospital buildings. This one was not to be found on the grounds. It wasn’t until noon that he was discovered, minus the blanket, sitting on the curbing of a street that ran through two deserted lots, holding an imaginary fishing pole and pointing to what he thought was a trout in a large puddle before him. The short nightshirt was open down the back and disclosed a long curved spinal column and shoulder blades which, Dick said, seemed to flap as he flung his line. His toes were meditatively wriggling in the dirt of the gutter. + 

Dick was triumphant as he brought him in and June was triumphant that she kept him alive all that day. He continued to live too, and was the admiration of the other patients in the ward when they heard of his nocturnal wanderings. + 

It was these things which drew Dick and June closer together. They looked on the work with the same eyes and the same clearheaded enthusiasm. Other long winter afternoons when the ward was quiet and no patients were ill enough to demand continual attention, they shared a feeling of languorous tiredness. They seemed to have wandered through a nightmare hand in hand, to have passed through it into a half stupor. June felt the sensuousness of her mood even before Dick voiced it. + 

“Two lines of a poem have been running through my head these last few days,” he told her while they were making eggnogs in the kitchen: + 

“ ‘Here, where the world is quiet, + 

Here, where all trouble seems + 

Dead winds’ and spent waves’ riot + 

In doubtful dreams of dreams.’ + 

“After the strain we’ve been through this last month everything seems the shadow of a dream.” + 

And because they both were so tired, and it was the quietest time of the afternoon when no one was stirring in the ward, she leaned against him with her head on his shoulder and they rested that way a few moments. + 

“You tempt me,” he told her one time. (It was a month later.) “You are a most intoxicating temptation. And who was it that said that temptations were made to be succumbed to?” + 

Neither of them could remember, but they were sure that it was a poet. (A year later he thought he remembered and woke her up in the night to tell her that it was Oscar Wilde.) + 

But they weren’t thinking much in terms of poetry those early days. June was too desperately determined that he shouldn’t go away from her as he kept saying he would. He gave himself three months to stay in the hospital. June gave him three months in which to seduce her. + 

“I’ve got to have you,” she told him. “I love you. I do love you. It’s a fatal passion.” She smiled, but her lips were trembling. + 

“You should wait for some nice young man who will marry you and buy you a rubber plant and give you babies.” + 

“I don’t give a damn about marriage. And you only talk about nice young men and rubber plants because you really want me, even though you don’t want to marry me.” + 

“Better look out! You’ll persuade me yet,” he laughed at her. And then, “But you know you love babies. And if you had one I’d leave you.” + 

“I don’t want anyone but you,” June protested stubbornly. “When women are really in love they don’t want babies. They only want them when they aren’t satisfied with the man they have and feel the need of something else. Or if they are jealous. Then they could feel, I suppose, that they were bringing another edition of their lovers into the world⁠—an edition that wouldn’t stay out late nights and neglect them. + 

“But I should never be satisfied with a substitute. I’ll take what I can get out of you and if I can’t get enough of you I suppose I shall just have to break my heart over it. I wouldn’t compromise.⁠ ⁠… + 

“But it just seems as though a hunger were gnawing at me continually. And I know what it is like to be hungry too. One doesn’t forget days like those I spent down in jail in Washington. It’s a continual pain.” + 

“You ungrateful little wretch, you. After the wonderful breakfasts I’ve given you on the ward⁠—and which I’ve seen you eat.” + 

“Oh, I can eat your breakfasts all right. I eat with the same appetite. I can’t say that I’m unhappy during the day. I’m too excited to be unhappy, when I can see you a good part of the time. It’s at night that I suffer so. I sleep, of course I sleep. I’m exhausted when I go off the ward at night. But I dream of you all the time. I don’t need to be a psychoanalyst either, to know what the dreams mean. + 

“Last night I was dreaming of the docks⁠—it wasn’t the East Side docks. I know them pretty well. It was in Brooklyn and the surroundings were strange to me. It must have been down around Furman Street you’ve told me about. I was sitting on the edge of a pier with you. We were throwing daggers at each other and we were only a couple of yards apart so they always hit. We played leisurely as though it was a game. It was a hideous game. I kept trying not to start so as not to show that I was hit.” + 

“My poor darling,” the words were playful but his arms around her were tender and there was passion in the touch of his lips on her face and neck. + 

“I am becoming a common little slut,” June maintained. “I slink out at night without telling anyone where I am going and meet you on deserted streets, and we have so little time together that I catch myself scheming. Scheming to get you into back rooms of saloons⁠—desolate, out of the way saloons, where the bartenders are always sleepy and there are never any customers so that I can look at you and you make love to me. Can’t coordinate when you put you arm around me on the street⁠—my knees wobble and I step on your feet.” + 

“You do seem to be strangely clumsy,” he mused. “And to think I fell in love with you because you held your hands like Mrs. Vernon Castle!” + 

“Oh dearest, you can say nice things!” + 

“Yes, I want to become sentimental when you put your hand on my face. They are luring. I want to quote Laurence Hope.” + 

“You should, if you want to. I’d love it.” + 

“That’s my weakness⁠—sentiment. I could quote reams of poetry to you but I always stop myself in time.” + 

“No,” and she liked to argue with him. “You are an accomplished flirt. You merely suggest a sentiment. But you are hard. I fell in love with you because you are hard.” + 

“It was my broken nose”⁠—in mock disappointment. “It was because I looked like the chipped and degenerate statue of Amenemhat.” + 

“That’s true, but he was hard. He looks as though he were above the weakness of falling in love. He was probably skilful in his lovemaking and he victimized women. Women love to be victims.” But Dick maintained she was basing her knowledge on an O. Henry story. “Women don’t mind being beaten. They’ll endure anything as long as they can persuade the man that he has the upper hand and they know all the while that they get their own way in the end. It’s true that Mrs. O’Grady or whatever her name was, was the envy of Mrs. Sullivan. But that was because although Mr. O’Grady beat up his wife periodically, she was always the winner. Didn’t he take her to Coney Island and buy her presents? Whereas Mr. Sullivan didn’t beat his wife and didn’t take her out or buy her anything. That’s why she tried to make him beat her. + 

“I’ll have to give you Schopenhauer’s essay on women to read. That old bird had the right idea of gals.” + 

June read it, but she was unconvinced. She insisted that it was only another of Dick’s fascinations that he could persuade women (with authorities) that they were the base, wily, and subtle heart breakers that they would like to be. + 

“Infatuated woman,” he called her, and pretended to be pleased. + 

“I have never had a virgin,” he ruminated cruelly another time and looked at her out of the corner of his eye. + 

She did not flinch. “Nothing you can say will hurt me. Nothing will persuade me to give you up. You’re mine, I know it.” + 

He disregarded her. “They are probably stupid little things that weep and are unnaturally unemotional. Accomplished women of the world have a more decided appeal. + 

“And yet⁠—I’ve always thought someday it would be nice to find a complete virgin. Not that I think I’ll ever discover one.⁠ ⁠… A completely unsophisticated young girl who has never heard of Freud or birth control and has never talked sex. Someone who is full of inhibitions and suppressions. I’m sure that there aren’t any such unless you catch them very young. And God! Look where that train of thought leads. I find myself convicted of moron tendencies.” + 

June admitted that she was a demi-vierge. + 

“You could call me that at the age of six,” she said rashly. + 

“I don’t doubt it,” Dick told her. “But that, too, adds to the decadent flavor which is one of your chief charms.” + 

June felt as though they were talking in circles. + 

When she arrived on the ward one morning she found Dick flitting up and down between the beds of patients holding a sheet high above his head which waved out behind him as he sang blithely, “Goodbye, boys, I’m through.” He stopped his carolling as he saw her enter the door and tying the sheet around his waist and taking up a towel, came toward her in mock servility and asked her what she would have for breakfast. + 

There was a frightened look in her eyes and a sickened feeling at the pit of her stomach which did not lessen when he came close to her and said, “Poor child, I’m going to leave you.” + 

“No, you aren’t,” her voice was grim. “Come on out in the kitchen.” + 

And when he followed her into that retreat of theirs, she closed the door after them, disregarding the fact that the head nurse was liable to come on the ward at any minute. He thoughtfully put some bread and milk on the table near her so that if anyone did open the door suddenly it might appear as though she was breaking one of the minor rules of the hospital in eating on the ward. Then he took her in his arms. + 

“How can I leave you?” he said softly. “You seem to be a part of my heart now after these months⁠—just a little part,” he teased her. “But it’s hard to cut it away. And I’m going to.” + 

“You won’t.” + 

“But I’ve got to. What in hell would I do with a woman around?” + 

“I don’t care. I’m just going to tag around after you from now on. If you go away I’ll go too. I can’t live without you and I don’t intend to stay here and suffer. You can run away all you want to, but I’ll just run after you, all over, wherever you go.” + 

“Silly little thing. What would you do in a lumber camp or harvest field? You wouldn’t last a minute. You can only endure the work here because of your morbid interest in it.” + 

June ignored the last part of his speech. “Where are you going? To the wheat fields? Oh God, I couldn’t stand your going away.” And her eyelashes were wet with the tears she pressed back. + 

“My sweetheart! Do you suppose I could go as far away as that? No I shall have to get out of your clutches gradually.” + 

“Where are you going then?” + 

“Me and my old sidekick, who’s still down in Caracas, have an apartment together here in New York which we subrented when we went away. The tenants are getting out now and I’ve found a respectable job acting the part of a drunkard in a play which is going on in a couple of weeks, and I’ve saved enough money from the job here to live for as long as that. Hip hip! I can loaf for a while.” + 

All that day she fought hard to keep from showing the bitter sorrow that was in her heart. It had to turn out right, she kept telling herself. It would turn out all right. She had to have him. She kept her head bent to hide her red-rimmed eyes. But she found herself dropping tears in the glasses of medicines on her tray. + 

Later in the day, Dick came into the linen room where she was hunting for sheets and while her hands were full took her face between his hands and kissed her and looked at her for a long time. “I know⁠—you are mine. It was meant that I should love you so it’s no use fighting.” He slipped a little card down the bosom of her dress. “I find I can get off now, before supper, so I’m leaving. That’s my address that I’m giving you. Let your conscience be your guide.” And he kissed her again, a hard kiss and went away humming. + 

The time came for a consultation with the family. Not that Mr. Henreddy was called in to give his opinion or that the two brothers that June had not seen for such a long time were written to and asked for advice. It was a woman’s affair, June thought. Even young Glubb, who was now called James because he went to school, was left out of it. It is true that Adele and June installed a modern educational system in the household for his benefit and insisted that at the age of four he should be told how the buttercup family grew, at six, how the fishes produced their young and at seven, how men and women cohabited. He had now finished the course of biology recommended for little ones by Margaret Sanger, but nevertheless he occasionally came to his mother and asked her what certain words meant. So it was considered that he was still too young to be included in this family secret. + 

That was what it became⁠—a secret, between Mother Grace and Adele and June. + 

It was easy enough to tell Adele about it. She was a serious and receptive young person and though not without a certain dry sense of humor, she was willing to take people and their intentions seriously. She might not approve of what one was about to do. But she would give it her most earnest consideration and the heartfelt hope that it would turn out for the best. + 

“You know⁠ ⁠… Dick⁠ ⁠… I’m going to live with him,” June announced rather jerkily that night after the weekly lecture on dietetics. The two had been comparing the notes they had taken and Adele had already concluded from the pages missing in June’s notebook that her attention in class had wavered often. + 

“June! You don’t really mean it, do you? I know you’ve always said you would live with a man rather than marry him, but I don’t know⁠—it’s kind of a shock.” + 

“Yes, I’m going to leave tomorrow morning. I didn’t know before or I would have told you. Dick just told me he was going this morning. So I’m going too. + 

“I’m not going to tell you or mother our address for fear you might have a conscience-stricken impulse suddenly to come and urge Dick to make an honest woman of me and all that sort of thing. As a matter of fact, he’s not seducing me, I’m seducing him. So there wouldn’t be much point to mother making objections to him.” + 

“He’ll probably say, ‘You’re perfectly right, Mrs. Henreddy,’ ” she continued her line of thought later. “ ‘I did all I could to persuade your daughter that the step she is about to take is a foolish one, but she’s willful and wayward and she’s too much for me. I’m taking the line of least resistance.’ ” + 

“But every time he pushed me away from him,” her thought was resentful, “he pulled me to him twice as close.” + 

That same evening, they heard Mother Grace was ill. The doctor didn’t know whether she had diphtheritic sore throat, or diphtheria or just plain sore throat. At any rate she had to stay in bed for a while and June got leave of absence from the hospital in order to take care of her. + 

“Suppose,” she kept thinking to herself, “Suppose he gets tired of waiting for me and goes out west. From the way I talked he must have thought that I would be there immediately the next day. Oh, what shall I do?” + 

She could not blame her mother for being ill. It was the first time she had indulged in the luxury of staying in bed since Glubb was born. She kept saying what a pleasure it was for her to have a “morning toilet” and “evening toilet” and alcohol rub and meals on a tray⁠—those things she had paid for in a hospital. “I think I just got sick because I had a couple of nurses in the family to take care of me,” she declared. + 

Meanwhile June made tea and toast and became sentimental over the eggnogs which Mother Grace drank, all unsuspicious of the emotions they evoked in her daughter. + 

It turned out to be an ordinary sore throat, but the doctor told her it was just as well that she had stayed in bed, considering that there were several cases of the disease in the neighborhood and when Mother Grace put on her black silk kimono with embroidered storks (it was a new one) and sat in the library, sewing, June broke the news to her. + 

“What?” asked her mother, looking up from her work with a very startled face. “What did you say?” + 

June repeated that she was about to begin to live with someone. + 

“Live with someone! What do you mean?” + 

“With a man of course. I’ve fallen in love⁠—terribly in love and he doesn’t want to marry me⁠—he’s not half crazy about me as I am about him, so I’m just going to live with him. You needn’t worry about me. I’m not at all worried. I can take care of myself. You know I’ve always told you that I didn’t think marriage was so important.⁠ ⁠…” + 

June tried to keep talking⁠—tried to fill up the gaps which Mother Grace left in what should have been a conversation. What could she say when her mother wouldn’t make any reply or pay any attention. “You don’t mind, do you? I really can’t help it. I’ve had a hell of a time for the last couple of months, knowing that I’d have to tell you this pretty soon.” + 

“When are you going to start doing this?” her mother asked in a rather faint voice. + 

“I’d made up my mind to leave the hospital the next day on that very night when the doctor telephoned to the hospital for me. So I had to put it off. Oh, why are you sick at such a time, mother, when it’s so hard for me?” + 

Mother Grace ignored the obvious selfishness of this appeal and saw beneath it. Again she tried to ask calmly when June wanted to go. + 

June blushed and paled and then blurted out, “As soon as possible. I’d like to go tonight. I’m sure he’s waiting for me. I should have been there with him a week ago and I haven’t written to him or anything to tell him why I’m not there⁠ ⁠… + 

“Can I go tonight?” + 

“What use is there for me to stop you when I’d only make you miserable? Oh, why ask me what to do? You know you’ll only do just what you think best for yourself and pay no attention to me anyway. It’s after five. Leave me alone to think. I can’t say anything that I know isn’t absolutely futile.” + 

III + 

“I’m here,” she told him as he met her at the door of the little apartment on Thirty-fifth Street. He held a half-finished cigarette and an open book in one hand and with the other he closed the door behind her. He greeted her coldly, and resumed his seat in the armchair by the open window. The standing lamp by the side of him lit up a sullenly indifferent face. + 

June took off her hat and gloves and put them on a table at one end of the room. Then she slipped down on the floor by Dick’s side and put her head against his knee. Her trembling excitement had given way to a languorous feeling of happiness but every now and then a sharp feeling of fear swept over her. She clasped his knees so that he could not get up and he picked up his book again. She did not even take the trouble to see if he turned the pages. She did not care if he continued reading. She was with him again. + 

Finally he flung the book to the floor. “I thought you said you’d be here a week ago!” + 

The tenseness of her body relaxed. So he did care that she was late! He had been waiting for her. + 

“The night you left, the doctor called the nurses’ home and told me my mother was ill⁠—that he thought it was diphtheria and I had to take care of her. It wasn’t diphtheria. After they had taken tests they discovered that. But she was very sick and I had to stay.” + 

“Why didn’t your sister do it?” + 

“Mother wanted me, so I had to stay with her. I knew I was going to hurt her enough when I told her I was going to live with someone.” + 

She spoke drowsily, hating to speak at all. Finally he drew her up in his arms and held her closely. She was no longer conscious of the overmastering desire that had been tormenting her all the week she was away from him. It was only when his arms relaxed and he looked at her moodily between kisses that she felt that bright flame searing her, leaping up in her again and again until it was almost anguish. + 

The lines about his mouth deepened. “Where are your things?” he asked her softly. + 

“I checked them at the subway newsstand until I knew.” + 

“I’ll get them for you tomorrow.” + 

“You do want me?” + 

“It hurts me to be away from you. I can’t fight against it. Besides⁠—what does it matter? A month or two months, and it will pass and then I’ll be free again.” + 

“I don’t care what happens in a month or two months. I’m here with you now. I adore you.” + 

Somewhere from down the street came the restless music of a piano organ. Nearby, a phonograph tinkled mechanically. It was still very early, and in a little yard outside the window there was a soft rustle in the stunted trees. Every now and then a cool breath of air filtered down between the skyscrapers. June shivered and clung closer to her lover. She felt very cold and there was a numbness creeping over her. Then he spoke again and she listened keeping her lips pressed against his throat where it showed above the turned-in collar of his shirt. + 

“Women⁠—all I ever thought before was that you take something that you need from them. It’s physically impossible for a woman to take a man. She always gives, gives herself up. And now I hate you⁠—I don’t want you because I feel everything going out of me to you. The thought of you eats into me continually.” + 

She had never seen him in this mood before. He was usually aloof, and rather mocking. He looked as though he were suffering. If he would only take her, push aside this barrier of sex that was between them he could grip hold of himself again. And then she could breathe easily once more and her heart wouldn’t ache so in her breast. To get the first pain over with! She bit his neck contemplatively. + 

He shook her so suddenly that she cried out, startled, and then noticed that it was very still and quiet. When he turned down the lamp there was only the painful thumping of her own heart. + 

Later in the evening, June sat cross-legged on the bed in a pair of pajamas which were far too big for her and ate with a great deal of enjoyment an anchovy toast sandwich and stuffed olives. She felt very young and childlike. The pain of the last week was far past and curiously unreal. + 

“You are a lovely host,” she said, leaning over and kissing Dick on the shoulder. He put down his glass of wine to smooth her cheek. “Listen to this, will you,” he said, without looking up from his book. “Isn’t this a darb of a line⁠— + 

“ ‘I know not ugliness. It is a mood which has forsaken me.’ ” + 

Her days were curiously divided. When Dick left the house in the morning, the rooms were coldly desolate. The bed with its tossed-back covers was like a corpse. She felt it lingeringly to see if there was any warmth left in it. If there had been she would curl up there and dream of the close warmth of his arms. But he always flung the covers from him so riotously. There they were in a heap on the floor. The pillows were discarded things that he had spurned. He got up each morning as though there was some new joyous adventure to begin. The sunlight that streamed into the room gave the lie to the hours she had spent in his arms. Those early hours after he had left were cruelly unreal. + 

She picked up the socks he had left on the floor and surveyed the holes and runners in them with rueful affection. They were past darning. Poor wrecks of stockings. He saved them all so that he could have a change every day, brooding over them as they came back from the laundry. + 

“Well, this pair will have to be discarded.” But there was never enough money in his pocket to pay for a new pair. June caught him washing two out one evening at the end of the week before the laundry was returned and snatched them from him. It was one more little thing she could do for him. Everything she did for him made her love him the more. + 

His ragged underwear which she had carefully patched still held the creases of the iron which they had had when they came from the laundry. He was as dainty as a girl, June reflected. It was one way of feeling respectably prosperous. + 

Collar, shirt, and socks with the thought of them were put aside for the laundry. She turned to a consideration of his suit. (Her thoughts were painfully simple now.) + 

Last night they had had a humorous evening patching one knee of the trousers. The suit, if you examined it carefully, would appear to be a greenish grey tweed. In fact the green tint was barely noticeable. But close examination disclosed the fact that not only were there green threads in what appeared to be a dark grey suit, but also brown. + 

June got her work basket, examined her various spools of darning cotton and she and Dick debated. Darning cotton didn’t come in single threads. If you were an experienced darner you separated it, using two threads at a time. This avoided clumsy thickness. If you were very young, as June was when she first started to darn, you used the four threads, which when threaded and knotted became eight. It was easier and quicker to cover a hole so. + 

Now the question was whether to use two grey, one green and one brown thread and make a wild stab at approximating the tweed, or darn the weak spot which was threatening to become a large hole, in solid grey. A tiny spot which wouldn’t show on completion was darned first with the mixed threads and proved to look peculiar. They decided on grey and when the spot had been reinforced, it was neat, but unmistakably a darn. The grey thread did not match the grey of the suit. Dick had the happy idea of tinting the patch, and used the cover of a dark green book, dipped in water. He had always noticed, he said, that it was easy to get the color off a book by chewing a corner or carrying it on a rainy day. The job was done with great thoroughness, but the results were not all that could be expected from the care which had been bestowed upon the work. It was decided that he would have to walk briskly, trusting to the rapid motion of his legs to hide the patch, and when sitting, he would have to keep one hand on his knee. + 

The darling, June thought, as she finished reviewing the incident and turned to making the bed. There was a gorgeous Indian blanket on it which he had picked up in Mexico, which if sold would more than pay for another suit. But treasures once acquired, he refused to part with. + 

“I’ve had to beg or steal or sweat for most of the things I have and I’m not going to part with them now,” he justified himself. “A day will come when I’ll have fifty dollars in my pocket which won’t have to go for rent or food and which I won’t be tempted to use for poker and drink. It sounds impossible but the impossible has been known to have happened.” + 

The bed was made with as much care as those in the hospital and as the sheets for a double bed are never the size of those for a single bed in the hospital, it was a longer job to get the lower one pinned neatly (and so it would not tear) and pulled free of wrinkles. + 

It was a comfort to see her picture of Amenemhat III framed and hung on one side of the bed. He looked more like Dick than ever. (That was the way she put it now. It wasn’t that Dick looked more like Amenemhat. She loved her own absurdities.) + 

There were dishes to do, but when you had only two plates and two cups, queer bits of pottery from South Carolina, it was the work of a moment to wash them and put them away. One frying pan, one coffee pot, some silverware. It took a minute to mop the floor. + 

The bathroom still had a warm smell of shaving soap and talcum powder. An intimate, man’s smell. + 

June would have preferred to have worked so that the long day would come to an end sooner. But it was sweet to be his woman too. She liked to have him use the phrase. It was more possessive than the phrase “his wife.” “You’re my woman and you have to wait on me hand and foot. I don’t want you independent. I like to think of you sitting at home and thinking of me all day. While you’re mine, you’ve got to be all mine so you needn’t have any interest outside of me.” + 

It was delightfully humiliating to be talked to in such a way. It was humiliating but she invited it. As long as he crushed her in his arms meanwhile, he could say anything. “You are nothing but a damn little fool so don’t you dare tell me Conrad knows how to write a story. I tell you he doesn’t so you might as well shut up.” She wasn’t even allowed to look as though Conrad could write novels. She could only snuggle her face closer in Dick’s neck and say⁠—“You are the most wonderful lover in the world and I’ll never read Conrad again.” (She gathered from Schopenhauer that he expected her to lie to him.) + 

At any rate she could spend the day in her armchair intermittently mending and reading books which he recommended⁠—The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers and the three volumes which followed their adventures, Heine’s prose⁠—his poetry was not worth looking at⁠—and any Scandinavian literature, for all Scandinavian literature was great. + 

For the most part, though, she was content to curl up in the morris chair and dream. + 

You could dream over sewing if you had any material to sew on. June became a collector of remnants. Every week when she had paid the milk and butter bill and enough groceries had been purchased to last for the coming week, there were usually several dollars left over. Although they talked of everything else in the world, the subject of money was never touched on. Every week Dick brought in forty dollars (his salary was fifty, but the temptation of drawing ahead on it was one of those meant to be succumbed to as he himself would put it.) Fifteen of this had to go to pay the rent. The egg and milk bill was around four dollars and the groceries never were more than five. June washed her own clothes in order to keep down the laundry bill which was always more than two dollars. Thirty dollars covered all these bills. + 

Now for the remnant! Silk mull, voile for lingerie, lawn, batiste, nainsook, flowered crepe, cross-barred muslins, cotton Georgette⁠—all these may be found on the cotton remnant table. But you never went directly to that display of bargains. Across the aisle there are silk remnants⁠—crepe de chine, silk Georgette crepe, taffeta, satins and brocaded silks in all colors and designs. + 

Would she rather have a flame-colored nightgown or a black one of slinky silk, or perhaps palest of green? The material should be very thin. + 

The black would be the most interesting to experiment with. Pale green was too ethereal and the flame-colored one would be too passionate. Nightgowns should not be obviously emotional. Then too, with a black nightgown, experiments could be made with lampshades. Rose and orange for languorous evenings, yellow for cruel coldness. + 

June suddenly remembered a story of Billy’s. + 

“He was one peach,” referring to a lover of the night before. “He tied my lavender chemise around the electric light⁠—said it gave me a pensively chaste look. It made him a damn sight handsomer than I thought he was. Anyway, the fool thing caught fire at the most unpropitious moment! + 

“He sent me another one the next day⁠—a floozy kind, of course. Just the kind a man would buy. Pink satin with bows and lace around the top.” + 

June gave up the idea of colored lampshades and startling nighties and proceeded to the cotton counter. She found just what she wanted there⁠—enough sheer cotton Georgette crepe of very pale yellow to make her nightgown and after buying some black silk with which to stitch it her shopping was finished for the week. + 

She seldom had to go out. It was better to sit curled up in the big chair. There was no hurry about the sewing. She had a week in which to finish the new article of underwear and it would be a week before she could get new material to begin another. While June had been working she had observed the slogan, “a book a week.” Now it was, “an article of clothing once a week.” Her wardrobe became extensive. Little short white undershirts were cheap and not as repulsively sensible as the union suits for which you had to pay ninety cents. You could get the former in the ten cent store. You could get enough silk to make the most frivolous of chemises for one dollar and thirty-nine cents. Stockings were a dollar and a half and you could get along with one pair a month. + 

Silk and jersey for smocks was reasonably cheap and that year one embroidered them in wool. They were very gay. By December she had two, one woolen one and one of black silk. There was nothing she could do for the shabby lining of her coat. It just had to stay shabby. If she took it out, she reflected, the inner lining would have to come out too. She could make it look decent by facing the seams with silk and passing it off for a summer coat. But she needed something heavier those cold months. It was humiliating to expose her poverty in a restaurant when a waiter started to assist her in taking off her jacket. And still more uncomfortable to leave it on and bake. In order to divert her mind June ran out to the closet to look at the new velvet hat which her mother had given her. + 

June had called up a few weeks after she had joined Dick, just as she had done when she had been away from home working, and asked Mother Grace if she could come home for supper. Dick would not be home until twelve now that the snow had commenced. + 

“You bet, come along,” her mother had said brightly. “I’ve got a lot of housecleaning to do and you can help me.” + 

She kissed June affectionately at the door. “How are you getting on? That’s fine. I’ve a little wedding present for you.” + 

The wedding present proved to be six knives and forks and spoons which June received gratefully. She could discard the ten cent store things now. They were abominable to eat with. + 

“Dick will like these,” she said. “He fusses every morning at breakfast at the incongruity of our china which is very nice and the ‘silverware’ which is aluminum. I think the forks spoil the taste for him. He’s very fastidious.” + 

It was in casual references such as these that Mother Grace learned of the new member of her family as she called him. + 

“Dick is so careful of his appearance that I’ve become engrossed in my own. I spend hours every day manicuring and bathing and primping.” Or, + 

“Dick is very finicky about his breakfasts. The eggs must be fried so that there aren’t any little frills of crispness around them and the coffee must be French coffee and just come to a boil and the toast must be ready the last minute when he’s ready to sit down to the table. Not really too finicky you know, because he’s just as ready to get my breakfast for me and he does it perfectly. On Sunday mornings we have eggs Benedict with truffles on the top. I don’t know how to make Hollandaise sauce, so he makes the breakfast then. + 

“He doesn’t ever have to leave until around twelve, so every morning the breakfasts are lovely. + 

“Dick met Billy and Ivan and Hugh Brace and Ellen Winter and Chester. He seems to like them all well enough, and he’s willing for us all to go on parties together either after the theatre or when he has a night off, but he objects to my seeing any of them when he isn’t with me. I think he’s jealous.” + 

June was convinced that he was jealous a few months later. Billy and some friends of hers and Dick and June were having a late supper one night after the show, and June with her usual freedom of gesture, put her hand on the shoulder of the man next to her when she leaned over to talk to Billy. + 

Dick pushed back his chair roughly and stood up. When June turned to speak to him she was startled to see how pale he was. He seemed about to go without speaking to her, and then thought better of it. + 

“I’ll leave you here,” he sneered, “to embrace the gentleman on your right.” + 

In her surprise and anger, June did not answer him. The blow was unexpected and she felt suddenly ill. She wanted to run after him, to embrace him and tell him she was sorry for some fault she was unconscious of committing. She wanted to trample on her pride and yet she sat there, paralyzed in her chair. Then he was gone. Despair was raising in her throat to choke her. She hastily swallowed the glass of whiskey and water that was on the table before her and although it was but her second felt that she would stagger if she ventured to get up. + 

“Billy,” she said. “I feel awfully woozy. Can I come over to your place to stay tonight?” + 

“Sure, old thing. I’ll bring home a bottle of sherry and we’ll have one of those early morning sprees that I just dote on.” + 

People seemed ugly suddenly. There were remarks from the man on her right⁠—a sympathetic question⁠—she could not hear what he said. She repulsed him rudely. He turned and went on talking to his friends. What did she care for Sorolla or whoever it was they were talking about? + 

Billy moved to the vacant seat by her side and squeezed her limp hand. She felt limp all over. It was as though life had gone out of her. Wait! Dick had used that phrase. When was it? That night she went to him and he told her he hated her because she was taking his life from him. + 

“They’re brutes, all of them,” Billy whispered and then went on chirping to the others at the table. She could afford to be sympathetic. She was in love with one of them and basked in his presence whenever he would sit at the table with her. Why was it that women idolized men that scorned them? His name was Bryant and he was a thin, black-haired fellow who limped. He painted feverishly most of the time and only stopped now and then to drink. + 

June had known him when she had worked on the Flame. She had always liked him. There had been nights when they had talked for hours over a glass of wine. She had liked to hear him talk even when she didn’t know what he was talking about. It flattered her that he should take it for granted that she understood the difference between a Corot and a Manet. + 

Yes, there was a time when she liked to sit with people, evening after evening. She liked them. She liked their enthusiasm. She didn’t anymore. People were dull and stupid. + 

The other man at the table had a face like Puck. His mouth stretched from ear to ear when he smiled and his ears were pointed. He grinned as though life were obscene. He grinned at June now. + 

“I laugh that I may not weep,” he said. Then, “Rotten to be in love.” + 

There were three doors June could watch from where she sat. Each time she heard one open her heart gave a jump and each time she saw that the newcomer was not Dick, her heart sank lower. The café was “L” shaped and at either end of the “L” there were doors that kept opening and closing. Just around the corner from where she sat there was another door going out into the bar. He had passed through that. Although she had not listened, she had heard the swing door pushed aside as he had gone, and then swing back and forth. Was he in the bar now? + 

She forgot her pride and asked the Puck-faced man to see if he was in the bar. He grinned sympathetically and returned to report that he was not there. + 

“Why don’t you go home after him?” he asked her helpfully. + 

“If I’d run after him when he left it would have been all right. Damn my pride! I love him and nothing else matters. But now⁠—I don’t know whether he did go right home or uptown. I haven’t any key. We’ve only got one between us. We’ve lost the duplicate.” (That “we” hurt her as she said it. Maybe it would not be “we” anymore. The dear intimacy of the word!) + 

“I could go home and sit on the door step, but if he’s already there that would be useless. It’s a back apartment so I couldn’t make him hear me by tapping on a window. And the bell only communicates with the landlady. (It’s an old house made over into apartments, you know.)” + 

June’s mind kept running around and around in circles. She began to weep softly. “Don’t pay any attention,” she whispered. “It’s probably only the whiskey.” + 

“Take another. That’ll help. The thing to do is to get pie-eyed.” + 

June didn’t think emotion and whiskey would mix very well. “I feel sickish now. But I’m not angry now. Before I had everything in the world, and now⁠—now I don’t see any use in living.” + 

The three doors went on opening and shutting but Dick did not return. Every now and then the telephone bell rang and sent its jangle through her heart, but neither of the two waiters who knew her came to say, “Miss Henreddy, somebody wants you on the phone.” + 

Soon it was closing time and Billy was ready to go home. + 

“Come on, June. I’ve got the sherry and I’ll tuck you in bed and give you enough to make you forget there ever was a lover in the world.” + 

Billy had a telephone and June decided she would stay awake listening for it to ring. But she didn’t. The combination of emotion and highballs made her fall asleep as soon as she lay down and she awoke brightly to find the sun streaming across the dusty studio. Billy on the other side of the room, lifted a face still expressionless with sleep surrounded by matted short hair, and called, “Moral support!” + 

“What’ll it be? Sherry or coffee this morning?” June asked. With the recognition of her surroundings came the return of the emotions of the night before. + 

“Coffee o’ course. Every time I get lit, I decide when I go to bed that I’ll begin again immediately in the morning to keep up the glorious feeling. And then the next morning comes along and everybody in the whole house has entered into a conspiracy against me. They’re all making coffee. Smell it? Good ole coffee. June, get up and make my moral support.” + 

June looked at her watch and found that it was almost eleven. “But I’ve got to run up and see Dick,” she protested when she came out of the bath. + 

“You little idiot,” Billy sat up in bed in indignation. “Let him come down here after you. He went off in a huff. He isn’t tired of you yet. You can tell that by the way he acts. How long have you been with him?” + 

“Since the first of September and now it’s December. But I was really with him all summer in the hospital. We spent all our days together.” June wanted to cry but she took a swallow of hot coffee instead. It tasted so good that she decided to take Billy’s advice. + 

Later in the afternoon when her resolution wavered, she realized it was too late. He would not be there if she went home, and there she could not get in if he was not. She could only hope that he would meet her in the café where she often joined him after the theatre. It was a forlorn hope to feed upon. Until then, she could only sit in Billy’s dim studio and read. Now that the hard winter sun had gone down and the lamps were being lit along the street, her surroundings seemed very tawdry. She hid her face against the cushions of the sofa where she was curled up and repeated his name over and over. “God, how I want him,” was the cry she kept making. + 

They had a pickup supper in the room and afterward while June cleared up Billy continued the pen and ink illustration which she was making for a magazine. + 

But although June sat around with the “old” crowd in the café that night as she had done before she entered the hospital, Dick didn’t appear on the scene. + 

She went to see him the next morning when she knew he would be home. + 

“Did you come for your things?” he asked her brutally. He was sitting by the window as he had been that first night she had come to him and although she sat on his knee and twined her arms around his neck he did not stop filing his fingernails. + 

“I’ve beastly manners, haven’t I?” he asked her grinning. “Well, you can kiss me if you want to.” + 

But he met her more than halfway in the kiss and they were swept away by it. She could feel him trembling as he picked her up and carried her into the next room. + 

“I do love you,” he told her later, “but I can get along without you too. Better run along now. I’m going out pretty soon.” + 

She hated him desperately while she packed her things. But she refused to hate herself. “I don’t care. I’d sacrifice everything in the world for him,” and then stopped her packing. “I don’t see why I should take my things,” she said aloud.⁠ ⁠… “I won’t.” She hurled her suitcase back in the closet. + 

“You’ve got to go,” he reminded her gently, but she knew he meant it. + 

“I’m going to sit and wait in that café,” she informed him stubbornly as she stood by the door, pulling on her gloves, “from the time it opens in the morning until it closes at night. So you’ll know where to find me.” + 

Tony, the waiter, was a good friend of hers. “What are you doing around here so early in the morning?” he asked her the next day. + 

“I’m going to sit in here from eleven in the morning until one at night for three days,” said June, pleasantly. “I have a special purpose.” + 

“It’s a good enough place to sit and you’ll have plenty of company. So far as I can see, that gang of artists or whatever they call themselves hang out around here all the time. Will you tell me when they work? I ask you now.” + 

June couldn’t tell him, but she was relieved to find out that the “crowd” made up of reporters and young writers and artists who were out of a job and never tried to get one, still clung to the old place. She had been there seldom in the last eighteen months, and in the last four, only after eleven o’clock at night with Dick. + 

At least she wouldn’t be conspicuous in keeping her vigil. And keep it she would. + 

Billy and Bryant dropped in several times that day and evening and Bryant, unwittingly, was the cause of further mischief. + 

He presented her with a volume of Zuleika Dobson to while away the time with, and placed her name and his inside the cover. He had a large library and had often given her books in the two years she had known him. + 

But Dick came in late that night and took a seat by her side. “How are you, child?” She was suddenly made lighthearted and gay by the affection in his voice. + 

But he reached over to look at the book which she was reading and noticed her name with “from Bryant” under it. He looked at her a moment with lifted eyebrows and then getting up casually, sauntered out. Fortunately, Billy and Ivan and several others whom June did not know were sitting with her, so she had to resist the temptation to scream. Pure rage choked her. But it did not keep her from loving Dick desperately. + 

Dick joined the table the next night again, and spoke to her cheerfully. He was trying to torment her, she thought. But rather endure this agony of his casual presence than watch the doors and listen for the telephone bell to ring. + 

Billy had told her she was a fool. So she was. A line of Scripture flashed through her mind, “We are all fools for Christ’s sake.” She laughed suddenly and Dick took hold of her hand which was hanging by her side. + 

“Let’s go home,” he was saying. + 

“What? For the night?” she asked bitterly, knowing nevertheless that she would go. + 

“Come and see,” and she got up with him and went out, too dazed with her recovered happiness to say goodbye to Billy. + 

“Look!” And he showed her a bouquet of deep red roses. “They are a little withered, see? I cleaned up the house and bought them for you yesterday and then I saw that book and just couldn’t bring you home. What did you do with it?” he asked suspiciously. + 

“I threw it in the nearest ash can when I went over to Billy’s that night,” June said, but she didn’t add that she had finished it after he had left. + 

Spring came and with it that tormenting song, “The Missouri Waltz.” Played on hand organs, on neighboring phonographs, hummed by the two little girls who lived upstairs and who played in the back garden under June’s window all day long. The strains of it colored that season for her. + 

There was not very much to write about her now. She felt no longer that life was complicated. She no longer wondered and worried about herself and what she was going to do with her life. In fact she scarcely thought at all. She never thought about the Flame or the Clarion. It was by chance that she noticed that the editors of the magazine had finally been brought to trial after many delays, and dismissed. She read the notice in the paper with indifference. She heard that Hugh and Kenneth had both married and she was not interested enough to call on them to meet their wives. + 

Billy wrote to her that Terry Wode was going to China and that Ivan was leaving for Monte Carlo and asking her if she would not like to attend their going-away parties. “What is the matter with you,” Billy underlined the words heavily. “Are you dead or something?” + 

June would admit that there was something the matter with her. But she did not take the trouble to answer the letter. She was in love. That was all there was to it. When you were in love you couldn’t be anything else. When Dick was with her, she felt alive and completely satisfied. When he was away from her, she went around in a dream, living only with the image of him which was constantly with her. + 

One can understand how authors leave their heroines in the arms of her lover on the last page of the last chapter. There is so little you can say⁠—that is, until the two have incorporated their dream into their daily life and woven the spell of it through everything. + 

June probably could have written about herself and her lover, day after day and page after page without ever realizing that she was repeating herself. + 

The trouble was, she did not take her love affair and Dick as something she could incorporate into her life. He was not hers and this love was not hers. She had just come upon it by chance and snatched it to her. She knew she would not have it very long. Dick’s rather mocking attitude of casualness constantly reminded her of that. None of his plans for the future included her. At present he was working in the publicity department of a moving picture company, but he planned to act in the same capacity in the fall for a circus which had offered him the work when it made its southern tour. + 

“I love you, June, I love you more than anything else in the world, today. But I can’t say how I’ll feel tomorrow. It was my very good fortune to have been chucked out of that Furman Street saloon and into the hospital where you were. I have never loved anyone before and I never shall again probably. It’s just as well. It’s a very wearing emotion. Won’t you be glad to be free of it?” + 

“I only wish that with every kiss I give you a little of my life would leave me. It would be a lovely way to die, providing I could arrange it with God that my death would coincide with the moment you stopped loving me.” + 

“You nasty little thing. And think what a nuisance it would be for me. How’d I raise enough money to pay for a funeral? + 

“Anyway, I intend to leave you long before I stop loving you. I’d rather do it abruptly and go through the agony of parting from you than have my passion die out slowly. Unfortunately, you can’t stop loving as suddenly as you begin. Besides I want to see you for the last time when all the glamour of my affection is still there. You probably have no idea how beautiful and mysterious you are to me. It’s a continual torment to live with you. + 

“You are not beautiful but you appeal so to the imagination that I think all the poems in the world were written about you. + 

“And while I’m living with you, I’m not just living with you alone. When I hold you in my arms at night, you’re not June. I’m kissing a little street girl from Montmartre whom I’m keeping with me for the night; or you’re an eastern woman capable of any viciousness and with a knowledge of all the secret sins. Or I like to imagine you as cold and chaste, passively yielding to me because I’m stronger than you. You’ve taken the place to me of all the women in all books whom I thought I could have loved.” + 

The summer passed and the winter came again. Dick and June continued to live as though every day would be their last together. It added a delight to their relationship that was often indistinguishable from the keenest pain. + 

June often rebelled against it and there were afternoons when she walked the streets, or took bus rides, watching the women shopping on Fifth Avenue, looking at the homes of all those people who accepted permanency as the undercurrent of their lives. Those women were buying things to take home to their husbands⁠—to their babies, probably. Why couldn’t she too have a home, a husband, and babies? A dull resentment smouldered in her breast. She envied and hated them for the peace they could have which was denied to her. + 

IV + 

And then June discovered that she was about to become a mother. + 

There were a few days of uncertainty⁠—“Could I have miscalculated?” and then she lay crying and sobbing on the bed. She was caught! + 

“Don’t get caught!” her mother had said. “Whatever you do, don’t get caught.” + 

Well⁠—she had. + 

Hideous phrases flashed through her mind. The first was supposed to be a humorous one and she had heard it many times in burlesque shows. People would always laugh at the tragedies that had happened to them in the past, it would seem. She lay there and gulped as she thought about it. + 

Where had she heard the second phrase? It must have been at Miss Prince’s home. To the girls up there, nothing was so bad as being knocked up. + 

“About to become⁠—” That was an idiotic phrase anyway. Just as though it happened instantaneously. One realized that one was about to become and then one became. It followed right after. But it didn’t. There was the long wait of nine months. Plenty of time to worry and fret. + 

In the first place, Dick would never consent to have one. He had impressed that on her mind many times. If she insisted on having it, he would leave her⁠—leave her as soon as it began to show. Then, how could she go ahead and have it? + 

She thought of Dis-audrey and the long story she had told in the saloon down on the waterfront. There were homes, it seems, where you could wait for babies to arrive. Of course⁠—there was Miss Prince’s home. Lots of babies were born there. But to go to Miss Prince and say, “I have fallen. I’m going to have a baby. Will you take me in?” and feign repentance. That was impossible. She wasn’t repentant. She was not sorry she had fallen. Only sorry that she was going to have a baby. Sorry because she had been caught. + 

But a home was the only way open to her if she was going to have one. She could not go to her mother. + 

“You were willing enough to live with the man. What are you crying about now?” + 

“Whatever disasters my actions lead me into, I’ll have to take the consequences. I’ll be the one who will suffer, so don’t worry about me.” She had made that remark herself to Mother Grace a few years before. And now should she go whimpering home and ask her mother to share the consequences of what she had insisted on doing? + 

She could not sacrifice her pride and go to a home to have a baby. She could sacrifice every vestige of pride⁠—throw it all into the flames to keep her love burning. Her love for a man. But not her love for the child that was beginning to form in her. + 

She could not go to her mother for either help or sympathy. She had to stand alone. The same pride kept her from doing that. + 

Why should she expect any help from Dick anyway? He hadn’t wanted to love her or live with her. She had started the whole thing. She had told him she loved his broken nose. That he looked like Amenemhat III. That she was going to live with him no matter how much he protested. That she would follow him all over the world so that he couldn’t get away from her. + 

God knows he hadn’t wanted to live with her. She had clung to him knowing that sooner or later the affair (as he himself called it) would have to come to an end. + 

She continued excusing him for the brutality she expected he would show her in the near future. + 

She loved him for his irresponsibility⁠—for the happy-go-lucky way he slid through life. The way he “got out from under.” So there was no use expecting him to accept responsibility now. + 

It was all her fault anyway. Day after day, those long summer afternoons, she had sat in the window and watched the two little girls from the floor above, playing in the yard. One was two years old and the other five. The elder held up her skirts and pointed her toe at the lilac bush and sang the Missouri Waltz falteringly. The littlest one toddled around and got the seat of her pants filthy and ate dirt from a tablespoon that her mother had given her to play with. She was cross-eyed and chuckled ecstatically when you spoke to her. And every now and then she’d sit perfectly still and lifting up her little round face to the sky, fall into a perfect trance of happiness. + 

They never cried, they never fretted their mother at all. They just were alive and chortling and gleeful. + 

It was all their fault. It was because of them that she had found herself stopping by the side of baby buggies in the grocery store and beaming at the occupants. + 

Damn this mother instinct anyway. + 

Maybe she just wanted what she couldn’t have. That was human nature. Dick had told her that she would want a husband and babies someday and she had denied it vehemently. + 

Her theory had been that women only wanted children when they weren’t satisfied with their lovers. That a perfect love precluded the idea of children. She had said that she wanted only him and that she would not be satisfied with a substitute no matter how little happiness came to her through her love for him. + 

No, she wanted only Dick, she decided, and what was at the bottom of her desire for a child was the desire to bind Dick to her. As if that was any way to do it! + 

It was not a baby that she wanted. She wanted more of Dick. And she would lose Dick altogether unless she went to a doctor immediately and said nothing at all to him about it. + 

The thought of Mrs. Wittle flashed into her mind with her breakfast talk of operations so many years ago. If the Chicago paper had not carried detailed accounts of the investigations then being carried on into illegal operations, June would not know so much about it now. Mrs. Wittle had certainly given her detailed information too. She almost screamed as she thought of it. She jerked her mind away from the subject. It was as bad to think of as the dentist’s grinding machine which always set her mentally on edge days before she made an appointment with him and days afterward. + 

“Why in the world don’t you have it, June?” Billy was saying. Billy was the only one June could talk to in her hour of trouble. + 

“Because I’d lose Dick if I did, and because we couldn’t support it if I didn’t lose him. (But I know I would.) And because Dick and I aren’t married. He’s never once suggested it. Oh, for lots of reasons. Anyway, don’t let’s talk about it. What I want to know is, can you lend me any money and do you know the name of any doctor I can go to?” + 

“June, you are a fool, in every way. First because you’re so damn virtuous; then because when you do lose your virtue you pick out such a man. The last man in the world to fall for so seriously. Men like that are made for light affairs. I’m surprised that it’s lasted as long as it has. + 

“And gee, I’d give anything in the world to have a baby, but I can’t. I’m not made that way. I’m the most incapable sort of a person.” + 

“It’s the height of selfishness to bring children into the world anyway unless they’re going to have a fair chance at happiness,” June said seriously. “What do you want anyway? Just some helpless thing to share your misfortunes. You manage to have a good enough time, but the kid wouldn’t. Kids are the most conventional thing in the world anyway. We don’t mind not having a husband, but they’d probably mind not having a father. Why, I remember when I was seven years old and we were living in an awful hole in one of the worst neighborhoods in Chicago⁠—and when I walked home from school with one of the girls who lived on a decent street over by the lake, I’d always walk by the saloon⁠—we lived above it⁠—and pretend that I didn’t live there. There was a nice apartment house down the street and I’d always go in there as though I lived there, and wait in the hallway until my friends passed by. And it made me mad that we were always moving around from one place to another so that we never had any friends. I thought it would be wonderful if we could live in one house all our lives the way most of the children of the neighborhood did. And I wanted to go to dancing school when I got older, and I wanted to go to the school dances and wear pretty clothes. Children aren’t born with a radical scorn for the bourgeois class and the bourgeois things of life.” + 

It was four months later. June lay on a single cot bed in the home of Dr. Jane Pringle, a six-room flat in a huge apartment house on the upper East Side. Pretty soon it would be all over with. It ought not to take but a few hours more the doctor had said. Just to lie there and endure. Three hours seemed an eternity, but the minutes sped by very fast. One pain every three minutes. How fast they came! It seemed that the moments of respite could be counted in seconds. The pain came in a huge wave and she lay there writhing and tortured under it. Just when she thought she could endure it no longer, the wave passed and she could gather up her strength to endure the next one. + 

The door of the little hall bedroom where June lay was closed. Just before nine o’clock she heard the doctor’s small boy stamp past on his way to school. It was because of him that Dr. Pringle accepted such patients as she. She had lost her husband when he was a baby and her practice brought in very little money. Occasionally she took the case of a friend or the friend of a friend she told June. + 

The small boy was gone and now her door was open to the silent flat. Dr. Pringle was gone too to make several morning calls. She would be home at noon to see how June was and to make lunch for her son. Until then, June had the flat to herself. She could lie there and groan. It helped a great deal to groan every now and then. After twelve she must keep very quiet for the small boy would be back then. + 

There was an old singsong clock ticking in the next room, the living-room. There was a parrot there, too, and every now and then he called in to June, “Stop that noise!” and sometimes, “Poor dear, poor dear!” It took June a long time to recognize the remarks flung in at her. + 

A fat old bull terrier waddled into the room occasionally to look at her sympathetically. Downstairs in a room on the airshaft someone was practicing “Mimi, tu piu,” on the piano, playing it over and over again. + 

“A nice set for the last act,” June thought wryly. “I’m being given a chance to dramatize my misery.” + 

In the next interval she noticed a thick book on the table by the side of her, the story of some doctor in China. She would read that, she thought, when she got through with the business on hand. For the last couple of nights she had dreamed that she was a nurse back in the hospital again. She would have to go back there, she thought, and the idea was not disagreeable to her. + 

Dick was going away at the end of the week. It did not matter. Nothing mattered. Twelve hours of work a day, and no time to think, no time to be unhappy. Adele was there, in her last year now. She would have to hold open the doors for her and let her pass through first. Little Adele! She even might be head nurse on whatever ward to which June was assigned and give June orders to do this and that. + 

Mother Grace had arranged it so that June could go back any time. The hospital authorities thought that she had gone west to help take care of a delicate aunt. Mother Grace and Adele and June had fixed up the story between them. Without saying anything about it, it was tacitly understood that June would return to her work someday. + 

No use making any fuss about Dick’s going away. No use trying to follow him wherever he went. Ridiculous idea! Where would she get the money? It had been hard enough to raise money for the doctor. Dick was out of work. That was why he was going away. She was too tired to fight for him, tired of being precariously poised on the edge of an abyss of unhappiness. She had fallen into that abyss now. No one had reached out a hand to keep her from falling. + 

She stopped thinking then because a deep unconsciousness had overtaken her. She was sleeping the complete and dreamless sleep of exhaustion. + 

It had been agreed between them that Dick would call for her the following night and take her home. For she had not been able to keep her ordeal a secret after all. She would have, had it not been for the fact that Dick casually announced his departure one morning, showing her a telegram from a firm offering to pay his expenses back to Caracas. That had been a week ago and he had planned to leave at once. It had been a concession for him when he offered to remain with her two weeks longer. + 

“Dearest little sweetheart,” he had comforted her and had held her close and rocked her back and forth in his arms as though she were a child. And the moment had been a very bitter one for June. He could be tender to her; and she wept at the thought of the child she could not have. + 

She no longer thought of the child. That was over and done with. Although it was amazing how weak she was, she felt curiously clear and lighthearted. Whatever happened to her, she could stand alone and face it now. + 

Eight o’clock came and she was dressed and ready for Dick. Dr. Pringle had gone to a moving picture show with her son and had left June alone in the flat. In the front room was a lounge and she lay there, tired with her effort at dressing, her heart beating with expectancy. Perhaps that was his step on the stair! But it passed the door and went quickly up another flight and upstairs she heard a door open and shut. + 

Every now and then a taxi slowed up in front of the house, and June rushed to the window to watch for Dick to step out. But strange people descended and entered the apartment house or one of the neighboring flat buildings; or other strange people came out of the house and entered the taxi. + 

She got tired of jumping up to go to the window to look out. Soon the clock struck nine. + 

The telephone always gave a preliminary buzz before it began to ring. She had become acquainted with it while she had been lying in the little hall bedroom. She listened for it now with straining ears. Twice when it rang, the rush of hope almost suffocated her, but it was only patients calling for Dr. Pringle. + 

When the clock struck ten, she gave up hope, and putting on the scarf and hat, she left the house and waited on the corner for a taxi. She would rather go home alone than have Dr. Pringle find out that Dick had not called for her. If anyone pitied her, she would find it very easy to begin pitying herself. She could keep from being miserable as long as she was not sorry for herself. + 

“I suppose I should pin this on the pincushion,” the note which she found read, “but unfortunately you haven’t any pincushion. Why didn’t you have a pincushion for me? I go away with a grievance against you. + 

“I received another telegram yesterday telling me that if I wanted the job I would have to start out immediately. And to tell the truth, I was glad to do so. I have entirely too much imagination anyway. By nine o’clock yesterday morning, I was suffering the torments of the damned⁠—losing my perspective completely. After all, you are only one of God knows how many millions of women who go through the same thing, and why I should so far forget myself as to suffer the commonplace emotion of a man who is about to become a father, I don’t see. It is entirely against my principles and you would not respect me if I did not live up to my principles. + 

“When I return, and I hope it won’t be for several years, I shall expect to see you comfortably married to a rich man. It will be one of your patients, I suppose, if you stick to your noble resolution and go back into the hospital. And be sure it is a rich one, for it is quite likely that I shall want to borrow money from you. + 

“Romantic adventures must come to an end or they would not be romantic adventures. + 

“If you dream of me every night as you threaten to do, you will probably haunt me as you say you would like to. In all likelihood you will anyway. Habit is a strong thing, and I shall awake in the night and miss you from my arms. + 

“In thinking it all over, this is as good a time as any to split up. I should probably detect subconscious resentments in your attitude toward me which would build up serious counter-resentments in me. + 

“We could not have continued living on nothing anyway. + 

“Before I left I committed a last little crime. I cashed a check on a bank where I had no account for the money you will find in the enclosed envelope. This is the case where you must not let your conscience be your guide. I have spent at least five times as much in the saloon where I cashed the check, and they are acquainted with me only through the theatre where I worked last summer. The money will take care of you for a couple of weeks until you return to the hospital. + 

“Child, don’t be unhappy. Who knows. Perhaps my heart, scarred with the shackles of a hopeless passion will creep back someday like a frightened convict to the scene of its serfdom. Bleeding, torn from contact with an unsympathetic world, it may ask, who knows, that it be permitted once more to take its place in that least anchoritic of cells which you have provided it. + 

“But don’t build up any hopes. It is best, in fact, that you forget me. + 

“Your ever devoted swain.” + 

The next morning a final note came⁠—the last she received from him. It was mailed from the boat. + 

“When you were here and I was there, + 

The world did not a feather care, + 

Now you are there and I am here, + 

The world is just as cavalier. + 

“Ah, I had thought the world would fly + 

Apart, if either you or I + 

Had left the other; yet it sticks + 

As though all hearts were made of bricks. + 

“Strange world, yet I had also thought + 

That when to each we were as naught, + 

It would have torn its poles apart, + 

To mold us in a single heart. + 

“It didn’t then, it doesn’t now; + 

The world in fact, I must allow + 

Is so impervious to us + 

You’d think it didn’t give a cuss.” + 

“These thoughts are very helpful, dearest one. Goodbye.” + 