* * * * *

It takes a voice with personality and modulations to make a fifteen-minute telephone conversation tolerable, and youth to make it possible. Ruth had both. For fifteen minutes she discussed with Carl the question of whether she should go to Marion Browne's dinner-dance at Delmonico's, as Phil wished, or go skeeing in the Westchester Hills, as Carl wished, the coming Saturday—the first Saturday in February, 1913. Carl won.

* * * * *

They arrived at a station in the Bedford Hills, bearing long, carved-prowed Norwegian skees, which seemed to hypnotize the other passengers. To Carl's joy (for he associated that suit with the Palisades and their discovery of each other), Ruth was in her blue corduroy, with high-lace boots and a gray sweater jacket of silky wool. Carl displayed a tweed Norfolk jacket, a great sweater, and mittens unabashed. He had a mysterious pack which, he informed the excited Ruth, contained Roland's sword and the magic rug of Bagdad. Together they were apple-cheeked, chattering children of outdoors.

For all the horizon's weight of dark clouds, clear sunshine lay on clear snow as they left the train and trotted along the road, carrying their skees beyond the outskirts of the town. Country sleigh-bells chinkled down a hill; children shouted and made snow houses; elders stamped their feet and clucked, "Fine day!" New York was far off and ridiculously unimportant. Carl and Ruth reached an open sloping field, where the snow that partly covered a large rock was melting at its lacy, crystaled edges, staining the black rock to a shiny wetness that was infinitely cheerful in its tiny reflection of the blue sky at the zenith. On a tree whose bleak bark the sun had warmed, vagrant sparrows in hand-me-down feathers discussed rumors of the establishment of a bread-crumb line and the better day that was coming for all proletarian sparrows. A rounded drift of snow stood out against a red barn. The litter of corn-stalks and straw in a barn-yard was transformed from disordered muck to a tessellation of warm silver and old gold. Not the delicate red and browns and grays alone, but everywhere the light, as well, caressed the senses. A distant dog barked good-natured greeting to all the world. The thawing land stirred with a promise that spring might in time return to lovers.

"Oh, to-day is beautiful as—as—it's beautiful as frosting on a birthday-cake!" cried Ruth, as she slipped her feet into the straps of her skees, preparing for her first lesson. "These skees seem so dreadfully long and unmanageable, now I get them on. Like seven-foot table-knives, and my silly feet like orange seeds in the middle of the knives!"

The skees were unmanageable.

One climbed up on the other, and Ruth tried to lift her own weight. When she was sliding down a hillock they spread apart, eager to chase things lying in entirely different directions. Ruth came down between them, her pretty nose plowing the wet snow-crust. Carl, speeding beside her, his obedient skees exactly parallel, lifted her and brushed the snow from her furs and her nose. She was laughing.

Falling, getting up, learning at last the zest of coasting and of handling those gigantic skates on level stretches, she accompanied him from hill to hill, through fences, skirting thickets, till they reached a hollow at the heart of a farm where a brooklet led into deeper woods. The afternoon was passing; the swarthy clouds marched grimly from the east; but the low sun red-lettered the day. The country-bred Carl showed her how thin sheets of ice formed on the bank of the stream and jutted out like shelves in an elfin cupboard, delicate and curious-edged as Venetian glass; and how, through an opening in the ice, she could spy upon a secret world of clear water, not dead from winter, but alive with piratical black bugs over sand of exquisitely pale gray, like Lilliputian submarines in a fairy sea.

A rabbit hopped away among the trees beyond them, and Carl, following its trail, read to her the forest hieroglyphics—tracks of rabbit and chipmunk and crow, of field-mouse and house-cat, in the snow-paved city of night animals with its edifices of twiggy underbrush.

The setting sun was overclouded, now; the air sharp; the grove uneasily quiet. Branches, contracting in the returning cold, ticked like a solemn clock of the woodland; and about them slunk the homeless mysteries that, at twilight, revisit even the tiniest forest, to wail of the perished wilderness.

"I know there's Indians sneaking along in there," she whispered, "and wolves and outlaws; and maybe a Hudson Bay factor coming, in a red Mackinaw coat."

"And maybe a mounted policeman and a lost girl."

"Saying which," remarked Ruth, "the brave young man undid his pack and disclosed to the admiring eyes of the hungry lass—meaning me, especially the 'hungry'—the wonders of his pack, which she had been covertly eying amid all the perils of the afternoon."

Carl did not know it, but all his life he had been seeking a girl who would, without apologetic explanation, begin a story with herself and him for its characters. He instantly continued her tale:

"And from the pack the brave young hero, whose new Norfolk jacket she admired such a lot—as I said, from the pack he pulled two clammy, blue, hard-boiled eggs and a thermos bottle filled with tea into which I've probably forgotten to put any sugar."

"And then she stabbed him and went swiftly home!" Ruth concluded the narration.... "Don't be frivolous about food. Just one hard-boiled egg and you perish! None of these gentle 'convenient' shoe-box picnics for me. Of course I ought to pretend that I have a bird-like appetite, but as a matter of fact I could devour an English mutton-chop, four kidneys, and two hot sausages, and then some plum-pudding and a box of chocolates, assorted."

"If this were a story," said Carl, knocking the crusted snow from dead branches and dragging them toward the center of a small clearing, "the young hero from Joralemon would now remind the city gal that 'tis only among God's free hills that you can get an appetite, and then the author would say, 'Nothing had ever tasted so good as those trout, yanked from the brook and cooked to a turn on the sizzling coals. She looked at the stalwart young man, so skilfully frying the flapjacks, and contrasted him with the effeminate fops she had met on Fifth Avenue.'... But meanwhile, squaw, you'd better tear some good dry twigs off this bush for kindling."

Gathering twigs while Carl scrabbled among the roots for dry leaves, Ruth went on again with their story: "'Yes,' said the fair maid o' the wilds, obediently, bending her poor, patient back at the cruel behest of the stern man of granite.... May I put something into the story which will politely indicate how much the unfortunate lady appreciates this heavenly snow-place in contrast to the beastly city, even though she is so abominably treated?"

"Yes, but as I warned you, nothing about the effect of out-o'-doors on the appetite. All you've got to do is to watch a city broker eat fourteen pounds of steak, three pots of coffee, and four black cigars at a Broadway restaurant to realize that the effeminate city man occasionally gets up quite some appetite, too!"

"My dear," she wailed, "aside from the vulgarity of the thing—you know that no one ever admits to a real interest in food—I am so hungry that if there is any more mention of eating I shall go off in a corner and howl. You know how those adorable German Christmas stories always begin: 'Es war Weinachtsabend. Tiefer Schnee lag am Boden. Durch das Wald kam ein armes Maedchen das weinte bitterlich.' The reason why she weinted bitterlich was because her soul was hurt at being kept out of the secret of the beautiful, beautiful food that was hidden in the hero's pack. Now let's have no more imaginary menus. Let's discuss Nijinsky and the musical asses till you are ready——"

"All ready now!" he proclaimed, kneeling by the pyramid of leaves, twigs, and sticks he had been erecting. He lit a match and kindled a leaf. Fire ran through the mass and rosy light brightened the darkened snow. "By the way," he said, as with cold fingers he pulled at the straps of his pack, "I'm beginning to be afraid that we'll be a lot later getting home than we expected."

"Well, I suppose I'll go to sleep on the train, and wake up at every station and wail and make you uncomfortable, and Mason will be grieved and disapproving when I get home late, but just now I don't care. I don't! It's la belle aventure! Carl, do you realize that never in my twenty-four (almost twenty-five now!) never in all these years have I been out like this in the wilds, in the dark, not even with Phil? And yet I don't feel afraid—just terribly happy."

"You do trust me, don't you?"

"You know I do.... Yet when I realize that I really don't know you at all——!"

He had brought out, from the pack, granite-ware plates and cups, a stew-pan and a coffee-pot, a ruddied paper of meat and a can of peas, rolls, Johnny-cake, maple syrup, a screw-top bottle of cream, pasteboard boxes of salt and pepper and sugar. Lamb chops, coiled in the covered stew-pan, loudly broiled in their own fat, and to them the peas, heated in their can, were added when the coffee began to foam. He dragged a large log to the side of the fire, and Ruth, there sitting, gorged shamelessly. Carl himself did not eat reticently.

Light snow was falling now, driven by them on the rising wind. The fire, where hot coals had piled higher and higher, was a refuge in the midst of the darkness. Carl rolled up another log, for protection from the weather, and placed it at right angles to the first.

"You were saying, at Mrs. Needham's, that we ought to have an old farm-house," he remarked, while she snuggled before the fire, her back against a log, her round knees up under her chin, her arms clasping her legs. "Let's build one right here."

Instantly she was living it. In the angle between the logs she laid out an outline of twigs, exclaiming: "Here is my room, with low ceiling and exposed rafters and a big open fireplace. Not a single touch of pale pink or rosebuds!"

"Then here's my room, with a work-bench and a bed nine feet long that I can lose myself in."

"Then here outside my room," said Ruth, "I'm going to have a brick terrace, and all around it heliotrope growing in pots on the brick wall."

"I'm sorry, blessed, but you can't have a terrace. Don't you realize that every brick would have to be carted two hundred miles through this wilderness?"

"I don't care. If you appreciated me you'd carry them on your back, if necessary."

"Well, I'll think it over, but——Oh, look here, I'm going to have a porch made out of fresh saplings, outside of my room, and it 'll overlook the hills, and it 'll have outdoor cots with olive-gray army blankets over them, and when you wake up in the morning you'll see the hills in the first sunlight."

"Glorious! I'll give up my terrace. Though I do think I was w'eedled into it."

"Seriously, Ruth, wouldn't you like to have such a place, back in the wilderness?"

"Love it! I'd be perfectly happy there. At least for a while. I wouldn't care if I never saw another aigrette or a fat Rhine maiden singing in thirty sharps."

"Listen, how would this be for a site? (Let me stick some more wood there on your side of the fire.) Once when I was up in the high Sierras, in California, I found a wooded bluff—you looked a thousand feet straight down to a clear lake, green as mint-sauce pretty nearly, not a wrinkle on it. There wasn't a sound anywhere except when the leaves rustled. Then on the other side you looked way up to a peak covered with snow, and a big eagle sailing overhead—sailing and sailing, hour after hour. And you could smell the pine needles and sit there and look way off——Would you like it?"

"Oh, I can't tell you how much!"

"Have to go there some day."

"When you're president of the VanZile Company you must give me a Touricar to go in, and perhaps I shall let you go, too."

"Right! I'll be chauffeur and cook and everything." Quietly exultant at her sweet, unworded promise of liking, he hastily said, to cover that thrill, "Even a poor old low-brow mechanic like me does get a kind of poetic fervor out of a view like that."

"But you aren't a low-brow mechanic. You make me so dreadfully weary when you're mock-humble. As a matter of fact, you're a famous man and I'm a poor little street waif. For instance, the way you talk about socialism when you get interested and let yourself go. Really excited. I'd always thought that aviators and other sorts of heroes were such stolid dubs."

"Gee! it'd be natural enough if I did like to talk. Imagine the training in being with the English superintendent at the mine, that I was telling you about, and hearing Frazer lecture, and knowing Tony Bean with his South-American interests, and most of all, of course, knowing Forrest Haviland. If I had any pep in me——Course I'm terribly slangy, I suppose, but I couldn't help wading right in and wanting to talk to everybody about everything."

"Yes. Yes. Of course I'm abominably slangy, too. I wonder if every one isn't, except in books.... We've left our house a little unfinished, Carl."

"I'm afraid we'll have to, blessed. We'll have to be going. It's past seven, now; and we must be sure to catch the 8.09 and get back to town about nine."

"I can't tell you how sorry I am we must leave our house in the wilds."

"You really have enjoyed it?" He was cleaning the last of the dishes with snow, and packing them away. "Do you know," he said, cautiously, "I always used to feel that a girl—you say you aren't in society, but I mean a girl like you—I used to think it was impossible to play with such a girl unless a man was rich, which I excessively am not, with my little money tied up in the Touricar. Yet here we have an all-day party, and it costs less than three really good seats at the theater."

"I know. Phil is always saying that he is too poor to have a good time, and yet his grandmother left him fifteen thousand dollars capital in his own right, besides his allowance from his father and his salary from the law firm; and he infuriates me sometimes—aside from the tactlessness of the thing—by quite plainly suggesting that I'm so empty-headed that I won't enjoy going out with him unless he spends a lot of money and makes waiters and ushers obsequious. There are lots of my friends who think that way, both the girls and the men. They never seem to realize that if they were just human beings, as you and I have been to-day, and not hide-bound members of the dance-and-tea league, they could beat that beastly artificial old city.... Phil once told me that no man—mind you, no one at all—could possibly marry on less than fifteen thousand dollars a year. Simply proved it beyond a question."

"That lets me out."

"Phil said that no one could possibly live on the West Side—of course the fact that he and I are both living on the West Side doesn't count—and the cheapest good apartments near Fifth Avenue cost four thousand dollars a year. And then one can't possibly get along with less than two cars and four maids and a chauffeur. Can't be done!"

"He's right. Fawncy! Only three maids. Might as well be dead."

The pack was ready, now; he was swinging it to his back and preparing to stamp out the fire. But he dropped his burden and faced her in the low firelight. "Ruth, you won't make up your mind to marry Phil till you're sure, will you? You'll play with me awhile, won't you? Can't we explore a few more——"

She laughed nervously, trying to look at him. "As I said, Phil won't condescend to consider poor me till he has his fifteen thousand dollars a year, and that won't be for some time, I think, considering he is too well-bred to work hard."

"But seriously, you will——Oh, I don't know how to put it. You will let me be your playmate, even as much as Phil is, while we're still——"

"Carl, I've never played as much with any one as with you. You make most of the men I know seem very unenterprising. It frightens me. Perhaps I oughtn't to let you jump the fence so easily."

"You won't let Phil lock you up for a while?"

"No.... Mustn't we be going?"

"Thank you for letting the outlaw come to your party. The fire's out. Come."

With the quenching of the fire they were left in smothering darkness. "Where do we go?" she worried. "I feel completely lost. I can't make out a thing. I feel so lost and so blind, after looking at the fire."

Her voice betrayed that he was suddenly a stranger to her.

With hasty assurance he said: "Sit tight! See. We head for that tall oak, up the slope, then through the clearing, keeping to the right. You'll be able to see the oak as soon as you get the firelight out of your eyes. Remember I used to hunt every fall, as a kid, and come back through the dark. Don't worry."

"I can just make out the tree now."

"Right. Now for it."

"Let me carry my skees."

"No, you just watch your feet." His voice was pleasant, quiet, not too intimate. "Don't try to guide yourself by your eyes. Let your feet find the safe ground. Your eyes will fool you in the dark."

It was a hard pull, the way back. Encumbered with pack and two pairs of skees, which they dared not use in the darkness, he could not give her a helping hand. The snow was still falling, not very thick nor savagely wind-borne, yet stinging their eyes as they crossed open moors and the wind leaped at them. Once Ruth slipped, on a rock or a chunk of ice, and came down with an infuriating jolt. Before he could drop the skees she struggled up and said, dryly:

"Yes, it did hurt, and I know you're sorry, and there's nothing you can do."

Carl grinned and kept silence, though with one hand, as soon as he could get it free from the elusive skees, he lightly patted her shoulder.

She was almost staggering, so cold was she and so tired, and so heavy was the snow caked on her boots, when they came to a sharp rise, down which shone the radiance of an incandescent light.

"Road's right up there, blessed," he cried, cheerily.

"Oh, I can't——Yes, I will——"

He dropped the skees, put one arm about her shoulders and one about her knees, and almost before she had finished crying, "Oh no, please don't carry me!" he was half-way up the slope. He set her down safe by the road.

They caught the 8.09 train with two minutes to spare. Its warmth and the dingy softness of the plush seats seemed palatial.

Ruth rubbed her cold hands with a smile deprecating, intimate; and her shoulder drooped toward him. Her whole being seemed turned toward him. He cuddled her right hand within his, murmuring: "See, my hand's a house where yours can keep warm." Her fingers curled tight and rested there contentedly. Like a drowsy kitten she looked down at their two hands. "A little brown house!" she said.



CHAPTER XXXIV

While scientists seek germs that shall change the world, while war comes or winter takes earth captive, even while love visibly flowers, a power, mighty as any of these, lashes its human pack-train on the dusty road to futility. The Day's Work is the name of that power.

All these days of first love Carl had the office for lowering background. The warm trust of Ruth's hand on a Saturday did not make plans for the Touricar any the less pressing on a Monday. The tyranny of nine to five is stronger, more insistent, in every department of life, than the most officious oligarchy. Inspectors can be bribed, judges softened, and recruiting sergeants evaded, but only the grace of God will turn 3.30 into 5.30. And Mr. Ericson of the Touricar Company, a not vastly important employee of the mothering VanZile Corporation, was not entitled to go home at 3.30, as a really rational man would have done when the sun gold-misted the windows and suggested skating.

No longer was business essentially an adventure to Carl. Doubtless he would have given it up and have gone to Palm Beach to fly a hydro for Bagby, Jr., had there been no Ruth. Bagby wrote that he was coming North, to prepare for the spring's experiments; wouldn't Carl consider joining him?

Carl was now, between his salary and his investment in the Touricar Company, making about four thousand dollars a year, and saving nearly half of it, against the inevitable next change in his life, whatever that should be. He would probably climb to ten thousand dollars in five years. The Touricar was promising success. Several had been ordered at the Automobile Show; the Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia agents of the company reported interest. For no particular reason, apparently, Milwaukee had taken them up first; three Milwaukee people had ordered cars.... An artist was making posters with beautiful gipsies and a Touricar and tourists whose countenances showed lively appreciation of the efforts of the kind Touricar manufacturers to please and benefit them. But the head salesman of the company laughed at Carl when he suggested that the Touricar might not only bring them money, but really take people off to a larger freedom:

"I don't care a hang where they go with the thing as long as they pay for it. You can't be an idealist and make money. You make the money and then you can have all the ideals you want to, and give away some hospitals and libraries."

* * * * *

They walked and talked, Ruth and Carl. They threaded the Sunday-afternoon throng on upper Broadway, where on every clear Sunday all the apartment-dwellers (if they have remembered to have their trousers pressed or their gloves cleaned in preparation) promenade like stupid black-and-white peacocks past uninteresting apartment-houses and uninspiring upper Broadway shops, while two blocks away glorious Riverside Drive, with its panorama of Hudson and hills and billowing clouds, its trees and secret walks and the Soldiers and Sailors Monument, is nearly deserted. Together they scorned the glossy well-to-do merchant in his newly ironed top-hat, and were thus drawn together. It is written that loving the same cause makes honest friendship; but hating the same people makes alliances so delightful that one can sit up late nights, talking.

At the opening of the flying season Carl took her to the Hempstead Plains Aviation Field, and, hearing his explanations, she at last comprehended emotionally that he really was an aviator.

They tramped through Staten Island; they had tea at the Manhattan. Carl dined with Ruth and her father; once he took her brother, Mason, to lunch at the Aero Club.

Ruth was ill in March; not with a mysterious and romantic malady, but with grippe, which, she wrote Carl, made her hate the human race, New York, charity, and Shakespeare. She could not decide whether to go to Europe, or to die in a swoon and be buried under a mossy headstone.

He answered that he would go abroad for her; and every day she received tokens bearing New York post-marks, yet obviously coming from foreign parts: a souvenir card from the Piraeus, stating that Carl was "visiting cousin T. Demetrieff Philopopudopulos, and we are enjoying our drives so much. Dem. sends his love; wish you could be with us"; an absurd string of beads from Port Said and a box of Syrian sweets; a Hindu puzzle guaranteed to amuse victims of the grippe, and gold-fabric slippers of China; with long letters nonchalantly relating encounters with outlaws and wrecks and new varieties of disease.

He called on her before her nose had quite lost the grippe or her temper the badness.

Phil Dunleavy was there, lofty and cultured in evening clothes, apparently not eager to go. He stayed till ten minutes to ten, and, by his manner of cold surprise when Carl tried to influence the conversation, was able to keep it to the Kreisler violin recitals, the architecture of St. John the Divine's, and Whitney's polo, while Carl tried not to look sulky, and manoeuvered to get out the excellent things he was prepared to say on other topics; not unlike the small boy who wants to interrupt whist-players and tell them about his new skates. When Phil was gone Ruth sighed and said, belligerently:

"Poor Phil, he has to work so hard, and all the people at his office, even the firm, are just as common as they can be; common as the children at my beastly old settlement-house."

"What do you mean by 'common'?" bristled Carl.

"Not of our class."

"What do you mean by 'our class'?"

And the battle was set.

Ruth refused to withdraw "common." Carl recalled Abraham Lincoln and Golden-Rule Jones and Walt Whitman on the subject of the Common People, though as to what these sages had said he was vague. Ruth burst out:

"Oh, you can talk all you like about theories, but just the same, in real life most people are common as dirt. And just about as admissible to Society. It's all very fine to be good to servants, but you would be the first to complain if I invited the cook up here."

"Give her and her children education for three generations——"

She was perfectly unreasonable, and right in most of the things she said. He was perfectly unreasonable, and right in all of the things he said. Their argument was absurdly hot, and hurt them pathetically. It was difficult, at first, for Carl to admit that he was at odds with his playmate. Surely this was a sham dissension, of which they would soon tire, which they would smilingly give up. Then, he was trying not to be too contentious, but was irritated into retorting. After fifteen minutes they were staring at each other as at intruding strangers, he remembering the fact that she was a result of city life; she the fact that he wasn't a product of city life.

And a fact which neither of them realized, save subconsciously, was in the background: Carl himself had come in a few years from Oscar Ericson's back yard to Ruth Winslow's library—he had made the step naturally, as only an American could, but it was a step.

She was loftily polite. "I'm afraid you can't quite understand what the niceties of life mean to people like Phil. I'm sorry he won't give them up to the first truck-driver he meets, but I'm afraid he won't, and occasionally it's necessary to face facts! Niceties of the kind he has gr——"

"Nice!"

"Really——" Her heavy eyebrows arched in a frown.

"If you're going to get 'nice' on me, of course you'll have to be condescending, and that's one thing I won't permit."

"I'm afraid you'll find that one has to permit a great many things. Sometimes, apparently, I must permit great rudeness."

"Have I been rude? Have——"

"Yes. Very."

He could endure no more. "Good night!" he growled, and was gone.

He was frightened to find himself out of the house; the door closed between them; no going back without ringing the bell. He couldn't go back. He walked a block, slow, incredulous. He stood hesitant before the nearest corner drug-store, shivering in the March wind, wondering if he dared go into the store and telephone her. He was willing to concede anything. He planned apt phrases to use. Surely everything would be made right if he could only speak to her. He pictured himself crossing the drug-store floor, entering the telephone-booth, putting five cents in the slot. He stared at the red-and-green globes in the druggist's window; inspected a display of soaps, and recollected the fact that for a week now he had failed to take home any shaving-soap and had had to use ordinary hand-soap. "Golly! I must go in and get a shaving-stick. No, darn it! I haven't got enough money with me. I must try to remember to get some to-morrow." He rebuked himself for thinking of soap when love lay dying. "But I must remember to get that soap, just the same!" So grotesque is man, the slave and angel, for while he was sick with the desire to go back to the one comrade, he sharply wondered if he was not merely acting all this agony. He went into the store. But he did not telephone to Ruth. There was no sufficiently convincing reason for calling her up. He bought a silly ice-cream soda, and talked to the man behind the counter as he drank it. All the while a tragic Ruth stood before him, blaming him for he knew not what.

He reluctantly went on, regretting every step that took him from her. But as he reached the next corner his shoulders snapped back into defiant straightness, he thrust his hands into the side pockets of his top-coat, and strode away, feeling that he had shaken off a burden of "niceness." He had, willy-nilly, recovered his freedom. He could go anywhere, now; mingle with any sort of people; be common and comfortable. He didn't have to take dancing lessons or fear the results of losing his job, or of being robbed of his interests in the Touricar. He glanced interestedly at a pretty girl; recklessly went into a cigar-store and bought a fifteen-cent cigar. He was free again.

As he marched on, however, his defiance began to ooze away. He went over every word Ruth or he had said, and when he reached his room he sat deep in an arm-chair, like a hurt animal crouching, his coat still on, his felt hat over his eyes, his tie a trifle disarranged, his legs straight out before him, his hands in his trousers pockets, while he disconsolately contemplated a photograph of Forrest Haviland in full-dress uniform that stood on the low bureau among tangled ties, stray cigarettes, a bronze aviation medal, cuff-buttons, and a haberdasher's round package of new collars. His gaze was steady and gloomy. He was dramatizing himself as hero in a melodrama. He did not know how the play would end.

But his dramatization of himself did not indicate that he was not in earnest.

Forrest's portrait suggested to him, as it had before, that he had no picture of Ruth, that he wanted one. Next time he saw her he would ask her.... Then he remembered.

He took out his new cigar, turned it over and over gloweringly, and chewed it without lighting it, the right corner of his mouth vicious in appearance. But his tone was plaintive as he mourned, "How did it all start, anyway?"

He drew off his top-coat and shoes, and put on his shabby though once expensive slippers. Slowly. He lay on his bed. He certainly did not intend to go to sleep—but he awoke at 2 A.M., dressed, the light burning, his windows closed, feeling sweaty and hot and dirty and dry-mouthed—a victim of all the woes since tall Troy burned. He shucked off his clothes as you shuck an ear of corn.

When he awoke in the morning he lay as usual, greeting a shining new day, till he realized that it was not a shining day; it was an ominous day; everything was wrong. That something had happened—really had—was a fact that sternly patrolled his room. His chief reaction was not repentance nor dramatic interest, but a vexed longing to unwish the whole affair. "Hang it!" he groaned.

Already he was eager to make peace. He sympathized with Ruth. "Poor kid! it was rotten to row with her, her completely all in with the grippe."

At three in the afternoon he telephoned to her house. "Miss Ruth," he was informed, "was asleep; she was not very well."

Would the maid please ask Miss Ruth to call Mr. Ericson when she woke?

Certainly the maid would.

But by bedtime Ruth had not telephoned. Self-respect would not let him call again, for days, and Ruth never called him.

He went about alternately resentful at her stubbornness and seeing himself as a lout cast out of heaven. Then he saw her at a distance, on the platform of the subway station at Seventy-second Street. She was with Phil Dunleavy. She looked well, she was talking gaily, oblivious of old sorrows, certainly not in need of Carl Ericson.

That was the end, he knew. He watched them take a train; stood there alone, due at a meeting of the Aeronautical Society, but suddenly not wishing to go, not wishing to go anywhere nor do anything, friendless, bored, driftwood in the city.

So easily had the Hawk swooped down into her life, coming by chance, but glad to remain. So easily had he been driven away.

* * * * *

For three days he planned in a headachy way to make an end of his job and join Bagby, Jr., in his hydroaeroplane experiments. He pictured the crowd that would worship him. He told himself stories unhappy and long about the renewed companionship of Ruth and Phil. He was sure that he, the stranger, had been a fool to imagine that he could ever displace Phil. On the third afternoon, suddenly, apparently without cause, he bolted from the office, and at a public telephone-booth he called Ruth. It was she who answered the telephone.

"May I come up to-night?" he said, urgently.

"Yes," she said. That was all.

When he saw her, she hesitated, smiled shamefacedly, and confessed that she had wanted to telephone to him.

Together, like a stage chorus, they contested:

"I was grouchy——"

"I was beastly——"

"I'm honestly sorry——"

"'ll you forgive——"

"What was it all about?"

"Really, I do—not—know!"

"I agree with lots of the things you——"

"No, I agree with you, but just at the time—you know."

Her lively, defensive eyes were tender. He put his arm lightly about her shoulders—lightly, but his finger-tips were sensitive to every thread of her thin bodice that seemed tissue as warmly living as the smooth shoulder beneath. She pressed her eyes against his coat, her coiled dark hair beneath his chin. A longing to cry like a boy, and to care for her like a man, made him reverent. The fear of Phil vanished. Intensely conscious though he was of her hair and its individual scent, he did not kiss it. She was sacred.

She sprang from him, and at the piano hammered out a rattling waltz. It changed to gentler music, and under the shaded piano-lamp they were silent, happy. He merely touched her hand, when he went, but he sang his way home, wanting to nod to every policeman.

"I've found her again; it isn't merely play, now!" he kept repeating. "And I've learned something. I don't really know what it is, but it's as though I'd learned a new language. Gee! I'm happy!"



CHAPTER XXXV

On an April Saturday morning Carl rose with a feeling of spring. He wanted to be off in the Connecticut hills, among the silvery-gray worm-fences, with larks rising on the breeze and pools a-ripple and yellow crocus-blossoms afire by the road, where towns white and sleepy woke to find the elms misted with young green. Would there be any crocuses out as yet? That was the only question worth solving in the world, save the riddle of Ruth's heart. The staid brownstone houses of the New York streets displayed few crocuses and fewer larks, yet over them to-day was the bloom of romance. Carl walked down to the automobile district past Central Park, sniffing wistfully at the damp grass, pale green amid old gray; marveling how a bare patch of brown earth, without a single blade of grass, could smell so stirringly of coming spring. A girl on Broadway was selling wild violets, white and purple, and in front of wretched old houses down a side-street, in the negro district, a darky in a tan derby and a scarlet tie was caroling:

"Mandy, in de spring De mocking-birds do sing, An' de flowers am so sweet along de ol' bayou——"

Above the darky's head, elevated trains roared on the Fifty-third Street trestle, and up Broadway streaked a stripped motor-car, all steel chassis and grease-mottled board seat and lurid odor of gasoline. But sparrows splashed in the pools of sunshine; in a lull the darky's voice came again, chanting passionately, "In de spring, spring, spring!" and Carl clamored: "I've got to get out to-day. Terrible glad it's a half-holiday. Wonder if I dare telephone to Ruth?"

At a quarter to three they were rollicking down the "smart side" of Fifth Avenue. One could see that they were playmates, by her dancing steps and his absorption in her. He bent a little toward her, quick to laugh with her.

Ruth was in a frock of flowered taffeta. "I won't wait till Easter to show off my spring clothes. It isn't done any more," she said. "It's as stupid as Bobby's not daring to wear a straw hat one single day after September fifteenth. Is an aviator brave enough to wear his after the fifteenth?... Think! I didn't know you then—last September. I can't understand it."

"But I knew you, blessed, because I was sure spring was coming again, and that distinctly implied Ruth."

"Of course it did. You've guessed my secret. I'm the Spirit of Spring. Last Wednesday, when I lost my marquise ring, I was the spirit of vitriol, but now——I'm a poet. I've thought it all out and decided that I shall be the American Sappho. At any moment I am quite likely to rush madly across the pavement and sit down on the curb and indite several stanzas on the back of a calling-card, while the crowd galumps around me in an awed ring.... I feel like kidnapping you and making you take me aeroplaning, but I'll compromise. You're to buy me a book and take me down to the Maison Epinay for tea, and read me poetry while I yearn over the window-boxes and try to look like Nicollette. Buy me a book with spring in it, and a princess, and a sky like this—cornflower blue with bunny-rabbit clouds."

At least a few in the Avenue's flower-garden of pretty debutantes in pairs and young university men with expensive leather-laced tan boots were echoing Ruth in gay, new clothes.

"I wonder who they all are; they look like an aristocracy, useless but made of the very best materials," said Carl.

"They're like maids of honor and young knights, disguised in modern costumes! They're charming!"

"Charmingly useless," insisted our revolutionary, but he did not sound earnest. It was too great a day for earnestness about anything less great than joy and life; a day for shameless luxuriating in the sun, and for wearing bright things. In shop windows with curtains of fluted silk were silver things and jade; satin gowns and shoe-buckles of rhinestones. The sleek motor-cars whisked by in an incessant line; the traffic policemen nodded familiarly to hansom-drivers; pools on the asphalt mirrored the delicate sky, and at every corner the breeze tasted of spring.

Carl bought for her Yeats's poems, tucked it under his arm, and they trotted off. In Madison Square they saw a gallant and courtly old man with military shoulders and pink cheeks, a debonair gray mustache, and a smile of unquenchable youth, greeting April with a narcissus in his buttonhole. He was feeding the sparrows with crumbs and smiled to see one of them fly off, carrying a long wisp of hay, bustling away to build for himself and his sparrow bride a bungalow in the foot-hills of the Metropolitan Tower.

"I love that old man!" exclaimed Ruth. "I do wish we could pick him up and take him with us. I dare you to go over and say, 'I prithee, sir, of thy good will come thou forthfaring with two vagabonds who do quest high and low the land of Nowhere.' Something like that. Go on, Carl, be brave. Pretend you're brave as an aviator. Perhaps he has a map of Arcadia. Go ask him."

"Afraid to. Besides, he might monopolize you."

"He'll go with us, without his knowing it, anyway. Isn't it strange how you know people, perfect strangers, from seeing them once, without even speaking to them? You know them the rest of your life and play games with them."

The Maison Epinay you must quest long, but great is your reward if you find it. Here is no weak remembrance of a lost Paris, but a French-Canadian's desire to express what he believes Paris must be; therefore a super-Paris, all in brown velvet and wicker tables, and at the back a long window edged with boxes red with geraniums, looking to a back-yard garden where rose-beds lead to a dancing-faun terminal in a shrine of ivy.

They sipped grenadine, heavy essence of a thousand berries. They had the place to themselves, save for Tony the waiter, with his smile of benison; and Carl read from Yeats.

He had heard of Yeats at Plato, but never had he known crying curlew and misty mere and the fluttering wings of Love till now.

His hand rested on her gloved hand.... Tony the waiter re-re-rearranged the serving-table.... When Ruth broke the spell with, "You aren't very reverent with perfectly clean gloves," they chattered like blackbirds at sunset.

Carl discovered that, being a New-Yorker, she knew part of it as intimately as though it were a village, and nothing about the rest. She had taught him Fifth Avenue; told him the history of the invasion by shops, the social differences between East and West; pointed out the pictures of friends in photographers' wall-cases. Now he taught her the various New Yorks he had discovered in lonely rambles. Together they explored Chelsea Village section, and the Oxford quadrangles of General Theological Seminary, where quiet meditation dwells in Tudor corridors; upper Greenwich Village, the home of Italian tables d'hote, clerks, social-workers, and radical magazines, of alley rookeries and the ancient Jewish burying-ground; lower Greenwich Village, where run-down American families with Italian lodgers live on streets named for kings, in wooden houses with gambrel roofs and colonial fanlights. From the same small-paned windows where frowsy Italian women stared down upon Ruth, Ruth's ancestors had leaned out to greet General George Washington.

On an open wharf near Tenth Street they were bespelled by April. The Woolworth Tower, to the south, was an immortal shaft of ivory and gold against an unwinking blue sky, challenging the castles and cathedrals of the Old World, and with its supreme art dignifying the commerce which built and uses it. The Hudson was lustrous with sun, and a sweet wind sang from unknown Jersey hills across the river. Moored to the wharf was a coal-barge, with a tiny dwelling-cabin at whose windows white curtains fluttered. Beside the cabin was a garden tended by the bargeman's comely white-browed wife; a dozen daisies and geraniums in two starch-boxes.

Forging down the river a scarred tramp steamer, whose rusty sides the sun turned to damask rose, bobbed in the slight swell, heading for open sea, with the British flag a-flicker and men chanting as they cleared deck.

"I wish we were going off with her—maybe to Singapore or Nagasaki," Carl said, slipping his arm through hers, as they balanced on the stringpiece of the wharf, sniffing like deer at the breeze, which for a moment seemed to bear, from distant burgeoning woods, a shadowy hint of burning leaves—the perfume of spring and autumn, the eternal wander-call.

"Yes!" Ruth mused; "and moonlight in Java, and the Himalayas on the horizon, and the Vale of Cashmir."

"But I'm glad we have this. Blessed, it's a day planned for lovers like us."

"Carl!"

"Yes. Lovers. Courting. In spring. Like all lovers."

"Really, Carl, even spring doesn't quite let me forget the convenances are home waiting."

"We're not lovers?"

"No, we——"

"Yet you enjoy to-day, don't you?"

"Yes, but——"

"And you'd rather be loafing on a dirty wharf, looking at a tramp steamer, than taking tea at the Plaza?"

"Yes, just now, perhaps——"

"And you're protesting because you feel it's proper to——"

"It——"

"And you really trust me so much that you're having difficulty in seeming alarmed?"

"Really——"

"And you'd rather play around with me than any of the Skull and Bones or Hasty Pudding men you know? Or foreign diplomats with spade beards?"

"At least they wouldn't——"

"Oh yes they would, if you'd let them, which you wouldn't.... So, to sum up, then, we are lovers and it's spring and you're glad of it, and as soon as you get used to it you'll be glad I'm so frank. Won't you?"

"I will not be bullied, Carl! You'll be having me married to you before I can scream for help, if I don't start at once."

"Probably."

"Indeed you will not! I haven't the slightest intention of letting you get away with being masterful."

"Yes, I know, blessed; these masterful people bore me, too. But aren't we modern enough so we can discuss frankly the question of whether I'd better propose to you, some day?"

"But, boy, what makes you suppose that I have any information on the subject? That I've ever thought of it?"

"I credit you with having a reasonable knowledge that there are such things as marriage."

"Yes, but——Oh, I'm very confused. You've bullied me into such a defensive position that my instinct is to deny everything. If you turned on me suddenly and accused me of wearing gloves I'd indignantly deny it."

"Meantime, not to change the subject, I'd better be planning and watching for a suitable day for proposing, don't you think? Consider it. Here's this young Ericson—some sort of a clerk, I believe—no, don't think he's a university man——You know; discuss it clearly. Think it might be better to propose to-day? I ask your advice as a woman."

"Oh, Carl dear, I think not to-day. I'm sorry, but I really don't think so."

"But some time, perhaps?"

"Some time, perhaps!" Then she fled from him and from the subject.

They talked, after that, only of the sailors that loafed on West Street, but in their voices was content.

They crossed the city, and on Brooklyn Bridge watched the suburbanites going home, crowding surface-car and elevated. From their perch on the giant spider's web of steel, they saw the Long Island Sound steamers below them, passing through a maelstrom of light on waves that trembled like quicksilver.

They found a small Italian restaurant, free of local-color hounds and what Carl called "hobohemians," and discovered fritto misto and Chianti and zabaglione—a pale-brown custard flavored like honey and served in tall, thin, curving glasses—while the fat proprietress, in a red shawl and a large brooch, came to ask them, "Everyt'ing all-aright, eh?" Carl insisted that Walter MacMonnies, the aviator, had once tried out a motor that was exactly like her, including the Italian accent. There was simple and complete bliss for them in the dingy pine-and-plaster room, adorned with fly-specked calendars and pictures of Victor Emmanuel and President McKinley, copies of the Bolletino Della Sera and large vinegar bottles.

The theater was their destination, but they first loitered up Broadway, shamelessly stopping to stare at shop windows, pretending to be Joe the shoe-clerk and Becky the cashier furnishing a Bronx flat. Whether it was anything but a game to Ruth will never be known; but to Carl there was a hidden high excitement in planning a flower-box for the fire-escape.

Apropos of nothing, she said, as they touched elbows with the sweethearting crowd: "You were right. I'm sorry I ever felt superior to what I called 'common people.' People! I love them all. It's——Come, we must hurry. I hate to miss that one perfect second when the orchestra is quiet and the lights wink at you and the curtain's going up."

During the second act of the play, when the heroine awoke to love, Carl's hand found hers.

And it must have been that night when, standing between the inner and outer doors of her house, Carl put his arms about her, kissed her hair, timidly kissed her sweet, cold cheek, and cried, "Bless you, dear." But, for some reason, he does not remember when he did first kiss her, though he had looked forward to that miracle for weeks. He does not understand the reason; but there is the fact. Her kisses were big things to him, yet possibly there were larger psychological changes which occulted everything else, at first. But it must have been on that night that he first kissed her. For certainly it was when he called on her a week later that he kissed her for the second time.

They had been animated but decorous, that evening a week later. He had tried to play an improvisation called "The Battle of San Juan Hill," with a knowledge of the piano limited to the fact that if you struck alternate keys at the same time, there appeared not to be a discord.

"I must go now," he said, slowly, as though the bald words had a higher significance. She tried to look at him, and could not. His arms circled her, with frightened happiness. She tilted back her head, and there was the ever-new surprise of blue irises under dark brows. Uplifted wonder her eyes spoke. His head drooped till he kissed her lips. The two bodies clamored for each other. But she unwound his arms, crying, "No, no, no!"

He was enfolded by a sensation that they had instantly changed from friendly strangers to intimate lovers, as she said: "I don't understand it, Carl. I've never let a man kiss me like that. Oh, I suppose I've flirted, like most girls, and been kissed sketchily at silly dances. But this——Oh, Carl, Carl dear, don't ever kiss me again till—oh, not till I know. Why, I'm scarcely acquainted with you! I do know how dear you are, but it appals me when I think of how little background you have for me. Dear, I don't want to be sordid and spoil this moment, but I do know that when you're gone I'll be a coward and remember that there are families and things, and want to wait till I know how they like you, at the very least. Good night, and I——"

"Good night, dear blessed. I know."



CHAPTER XXXVI

There were, as Ruth had remarked, families.

When Carl was formally invited to dine at the Winslows', on a night late in April, his only anxiety was as to the condition of his dinner-coat. He arrived in a state of easy briskness, planning apt and sensible remarks about the business situation for Mason and Mr. Winslow. As the maid opened the door Carl was wondering if he would be able to touch Ruth's hand under the table. He had an anticipatory fondness for all of the small friendly family group which was about to receive him.

And he was cast into a den of strangers, most of them comprised in the one electric person of Aunt Emma Truegate Winslow.

Aunt Emma Truegate Winslow was the general-commanding in whatsoever group she was placed by Providence (with which she had strong influence). At a White House reception she would pleasantly but firmly have sent the President about his business, and have taken his place in the receiving line. Just now she sat in a pre-historic S chair, near the center of the drawing-room, pumping out of Phil Dunleavy most of the facts about his chiefs' private lives.

Aunt Emma had the soul of a six-foot dowager duchess, and should have had an eagle nose and a white pompadour. Actually, she was of medium height, with a not unduly maternal bosom, a broad, commonplace face, hair the color of faded grass, a blunt nose with slightly enlarged pores, and thin lips that seemed to be a straight line when seen from in front, but, seen in profile, puffed out like a fish's. She had a habit of nodding intelligently even when she was not listening, and another habit of rubbing her left knuckles with the fingers of her right hand. Not imposing in appearance was Aunt Emma Truegate Winslow, but she was born to discipline a court.

An impeccable widow was she, speaking with a broad A, and dressed exquisitely in a black satin evening gown.

By such simple-hearted traits as being always right about unimportant matters and idealistically wrong about important matters, politely intruding into everything, being earnest about the morality of the poor and auction bridge and the chaperonage of nice girls, possessing a working knowledge of Wagner and Rodin, wearing fifteen-dollar corsets, and believing on her bended knees that the Truegates and Winslows were the noblest families in the Social Register, Aunt Emma Truegate Winslow had persuaded the whole world, including even her near-English butler, that she was a superior woman. Family tradition said that she had only to raise a finger to get into really smart society. Upon the death of Ruth's mother, Aunt Emma had taken it as one of her duties, along with symphony concerts and committees, to rear Ruth properly. She had been neglecting this duty so far as to permit the invasion of a barbarian named Ericson only because she had been in California with her young son, Arthur. Just now, while her house was being opened, she was staying at the Winslows', with Arthur and a peculiarly beastly Japanese spaniel named Taka-San.

She was introduced at Carl, she glanced him over, and passed him on to Olive Dunleavy, all in forty-five seconds. When Carl had recovered from a sensation of being a kitten drowned in a sack, he said agreeable things to Olive, and observed the situation in the drawing-room.

Phil was marked out for Aunt Emma's favors; Mr. Winslow sat in a corner, apparently crushed, with restorative conversation administered by Ruth; Mason Winslow was haltingly attentive to a plain, well-dressed, amiable girl named Florence Crewden, who had prematurely gray hair, the week-end habit, and a weakness for baby talk. Ruth's medical-student brother, Bobby Winslow, was not there. The more he saw of Bobby's kind Aunt Emma, the more Carl could find it in his heart to excuse Bobby for having escaped the family dinner.

Carl had an uncomfortable moment when Aunt Emma and Mr. Winslow asked him questions about the development of the Touricar. But before he could determine whether he was being deliberately inspected by the family the ordeal was over.

As they went in to dinner, Mr. Winslow taking in Aunt Emma like a small boy accompanying the school principal, Ruth had the chance to whisper: "My Hawk, be good. Please believe I'm not responsible. It's all Aunt Emma's doing, this dreadfully stately family dinner. Don't let her bully you. I'm frightened to death and——Yes, Phil, I'm coming."

The warning did not seem justified in view of the attractive table—candles, cut glass, a mound of flowers on a beveled mirror, silvery linen, and grape-fruit with champagne. Carl was at one side of Aunt Emma, but she seemed more interested in Mr. Winslow, at the end of the table; and on his other side Carl had a safe companion in Olive Dunleavy. Across from him were Florence Crewden, Phil, and Ruth—Ruth shimmering in a gown of yellow satin, which broke the curves of her fine, flushed shoulders only by a narrow band.

The conversation played with people. Florence Crewden told, to applause and laughter, of an exploratory visit to the College of the City of New York, and her discovery of a strange race, young Jews mostly, who went to college to study, and had no sense of the nobility of "making" fraternities.

"Such outsiders!" she said. "Can't you imagine the sort of a party they'd have—they'd all stand around and discuss psychology and dissecting puppies and Greek roots! Phil, I think it would be a lovely punishment for you to have to join them—to work in a laboratory all day and wear a celluloid collar."

"Oh, I know their sort; 'greasy grinds' we used to call them; there were plenty of them in Yale," condescended Phil.

"Maybe they wear celluloid collars—if they do—because they're poor," protested Ruth.

"My dear child," sniffed Aunt Emma, "with collars only twenty-five cents apiece? Don't be silly!"

Mr. Winslow declared, with portly timidity, "Why, Em, my collars don't cost me but fifteen——"

"Mason dear, let's not discuss it at dinner.... Tell me, all of you, the scandal I've missed by going to California. Which reminds me; did I tell you I saw that miserable Amy Baslin, you remember, that married the porter or the superintendent or something in her father's factory? I saw her and her husband at Pasadena, and they seemed to be happy. Of course Amy would put the best face she could on it, but they must have been miserably unhappy—such a sad affair, and she could have married quite decently."

"What do you mean by 'decently'?" Ruth demanded.

Carl was startled. He had once asked Ruth the same question about the same phrase.

Aunt Emma revolved like a gun-turret getting Ruth's range, and remarked, calmly: "My dear child, you know quite well what I mean. Don't, I beg of you, bring any socialistic problems to dinner till you have really learned something about them.... Now I want to hear all the nice scandals I have missed."

There were not many she had missed; but she kept the conversation sternly to discussions of people whose names Carl had never heard. Again he was obviously an Outsider. Still ignoring Carl, Aunt Emma demanded of Ruth and Phil, sitting together opposite her:

"Tell me about the good times you children have been having, Ruthie. I am so glad that Phil and you finally went to the William Truegates'. And your letter about the Beaux Arts festival was charming, Ruthie. I quite envied you and Phil."

The dragon continued talking to Ruth, while Carl listened, in the interstices of his chatter to Olive:

"I hope you haven't been giving all your time and beauty-sleep doing too much of that settlement work, Ruthie—and Heaven only knows what germs you will get there—of course I should be the first to praise any work for the poor, ungrateful and shiftless though they are—what with my committees and the Truegate Temperance Home for Young Working Girls—it's all very well to be sympathetic with them, but when it comes to a settlement-house, and Heaven knows I have given them all the counsel and suggestions I could, though some of the professional settlement workers are as pert as they can be, and I really do believe some of them think they are trying to end poverty entirely, just as though the Lord would have sent poverty into the world if He didn't have a very good reason for it—you will remember the Bible says, 'The poor you always have with you,' and as Florence Barclay says in her novels, which may seem a little sentimental, but they are of such a good moral effect, you can't supersede the Scriptures even in the most charming social circles. To say nothing of the blessings of poverty, I'm sure they're much happier than we are, with our onerous duties, I'm sure that if any of these ragamuffin anarchists and socialists and anti-militarists want to take over my committees they are welcome, if they'll take over the miserable headaches and worried hours they give me, trying to do something for the poor, they won't even be clean but even in model tenements they will put coal in the bath-tubs. And so I do hope you haven't just been wearing yourself to a bone working for ungrateful dirty little children, Ruthie."

"No, auntie dear, I've been quite as discreet as any Winslow should be. You see, I'm selfish, too. Aren't I, Carl?"

"Oh, very."

Aunt Emma seemed to remember, then, that some sort of a man, whose species she didn't quite know, sat next to her. She glanced at Carl, again gave him up as an error in social judgment, and went on:

"No, Ruthie, not selfish so much as thoughtless about the duties of a family like ours—and I was always the first to say that the Winslows are as fine a stock as the Truegates. And I am going to see that you go out more the rest of this year, Ruthie. I want you and Phil to plan right now to attend the Charity League dances next season. You must learn to concentrate your attention——"

"Auntie dear, please leave my wickedness till the next time we——"

"My dear child, now that I have the chance to get all of us together—I'm sure Mr. Ericson will pardon the rest of us our little family discussions—I want to take you and Master Phil to task together. You are both of you negligent of social duties—duties they are, Ruthie, for man was not born to serve alone—though Phil is far better than you, with your queer habits, and Heaven only knows where you got them, neither your father nor your dear sainted mother was slack or selfish——"

"Dear auntie, let's admit that I'm a black sheep with a little black muzzle and a habit of butting all sorts of ash-cans; and let Phil go on his social way rejoicing."

Ruth was jaunty, but her voice was strained, and she bit her lip with staccato nervousness when she was not speaking. Carl ventured to face the dragon.

"Mrs. Winslow, I'm sure Ruth has been better than you think; she has been learning all these fiendishly complicated new dances. You know a poor business man like myself finds them——"

"Yes," said Aunt Emma, "I am sure she will always remember that she is a Winslow, and must carry on the family traditions, but sometimes I am afraid she gets under bad influences, because of her good nature." She said it loudly. She looked Carl in the eye.

The whole table stopped talking. Carl felt like a tramp who has kicked a chained bulldog and discovers that the chain is broken.

He wanted to be good; not make a scene. He noticed with intense indignation that Phil was grinning. He planned to get Phil off in a corner, not necessarily a dark corner, and beat him. He wanted to telegraph Ruth; dared not. He realized, in a quarter-second, that he must have been discussed by the Family, and did not like it.

Every one seemed to be waiting for him to speak. Awkwardly he said, wondering all the while if she meant what her tone said she meant, by "bad influences":

"Yes, but——Just going to say——I believe settlement work is a good influence——"

"Please don't discuss——" Ruth was groaning, when Aunt Emma sternly interrupted:

"It is good of you to take up the cudgels, Mr. Ericson, and please don't misjudge me—of course I realize that I am only a silly old woman and that my passion to see the Winslows keep to their fine standards is old-fashioned, but you see it is a hobby of mine that I've devoted years to, and you who haven't known the Winslows so very long——" Her manner was almost courteous.

"Yes, that's so," Carl mumbled, agreeably, just as she dropped the courtesy and went on:

"——you can't judge—in fact (this is nothing personal, you know) I don't suppose it's possible for Westerners to have any idea how precious family ideals are to Easterners. Of course we're probably silly about them, and it's splendid, your wheat-lands, and not caring who your grandfather was; but to make up for those things we do have to protect what we have gained through the generations."

Carl longed to stand up, to defy them all, to cry: "If you mean that you think Ruth has to be protected against me, have the decency to say so." Yet he kept his voice gentle:

"But why be narrowed to just a few families in one's interests? Now this settlement——"

"One isn't narrowed. There are plenty of good families for Ruth to consider when it comes time for my little girl to consider alliances at all!" Aunt Emma coldly stated.

"I will shut up!" he told himself. "I will shut up. I'll see this dinner through, and then never come near this house again." He tried to look casual, as though the conversation was safely finished. But Aunt Emma was waiting for him to go on. In the general stillness her corsets creaked with belligerent attention. He played with his fork in a "Well, if that's how you feel about it, perhaps it would be better not to discuss it any further, my dear madam," manner, growing every second more flushed, embarrassed, sick, angry; trying harder every second to look unconcerned.

Aunt Emma hawked a delicate and ladylike hawk in her patrician throat, prefatory to a new attack. Carl knew he would be tempted to retort brutally.

Then from the door of the dining-room whimpered the high voice of an excited child:

"Oh, mamma, oh, Cousin Ruthie, nurse says Hawk Ericson is here! I want to see him!"

Every one turned toward a boy of five or six, round as a baby chicken, in his fuzzy miniature pajamas, protectingly holding a cotton monkey under his arm, sturdy and shy and defiant.

"Why, Arthur!" "Why, my son!" "Oh, the darling baby!" from the table.

"Come here, Arthur, and let's hear your troubles before nurse nabs you, old son," said Phil, not at all condescendingly, rising from the table, holding out his arms.

"No, no! You just let me go! I want to see Hawk Ericson. Is that Hawk Ericson?" demanded the son of Aunt Emma, pointing at Carl.

"Yes, sweetheart," said Ruth, softly, proudly.

Running madly about the end of the table, Arthur jumped at Carl's lap.

Carl swung him up and inquired, "What is it, old man?"

"Are you Hawk Ericson?"

"At your commands, cap'n."

Aunt Emma rose and said, masterfully, "Come, little son, now you've seen Mr. Ericson it's up to beddie again, up—to—beddie."

"No, no; please no, mamma! I've never seen a' aviator before, not in all my life, and you promised me 'cross your heart, at Pasadena you did, I could see one."

Arthur's face showed signs of imminent badness.

"Well, you may stay for a while, then," said Aunt Emma, weakly, unconscious that her sway had departed from her, while the rest of the table grinned, except Carl, who was absorbed in Arthur's ecstasy.

"I'm going to be a' aviator, too; I think a' aviator is braver than anybody. I'd rather be a' aviator than a general or a policeman or anybody. I got a picture of you in my scrap-book—you got a funny hat like Cousin Bobby wears when he plays football in it. Shall I get you the picture in my scrap-book?... Honest, will you give me another?"

Aunt Emma made one more attempt to coax Arthur up to bed, but his Majesty refused, and she compromised by scolding his nurse and sending up for his dressing-gown, a small, blue dressing-gown on which yellow ducks and white bunny-rabbits paraded proudly.

"Like our blue bowl!" Carl remarked to Ruth.

Not till after coffee in the drawing-room would Arthur consent to go to bed. This real head of the Emma Winslow family was far too much absorbed in making Carl tell of his long races, and "Why does a flying-machine fly? What's a wind pressure? Why does the wind shove up? Why is the wings curved? Why does it want to catch the wind?" The others listened, including even Aunt Emma.

Carl went home early. Ruth had the opportunity to confide:

"Hawk dear, I can't tell you how ashamed I am of my family for enduring anybody so rude and opinionated as Aunt Emma. But—it's all right, now, isn't it?... No, no, don't kiss me, but—dear dreams, Hawk."

Phil's voice, from behind, shouted: "Oh, Ericson! Just a second."

Carl was not at all pleased. He remembered that Phil had listened with obvious amusement to his agonized attempt to turn Aunt Emma's attacks.

Said Phil, while Ruth disappeared: "Which way you going? Walk to the subway with you. You win, old man. I admire your nerve for facing Aunt Emma. What I wanted to say——I hope to thunder you don't think I was in any way responsible for Mrs. Winslow's linking me and Ruth that way and——Oh, you understand. I admire you like the devil for knowing what you want and going after it. I suppose you'll have to convince Ruth yet, but, by Jove! you've convinced me! Glad you had Arthur for ally. They don't make kiddies any better. God! if I could have a son like that——I turn off here. G-good luck, Ericson."

"Thanks a lot, Phil."

"Thanks. Good night, Carl."



CHAPTER XXXVII

Long Beach, on the first hot Sunday of May, when motorists come out from New York, half-ready to open asphalt hearts to sea and sky. Carl's first sight of it, save from an aeroplane, and he was mad-happy to find real shore so near the city.

Ruth and he were picnicking, vulgar and unashamed, among the dunes at the end of the long board-walk, like the beer-drinking, pickle-eating parties of fishermen and the family groups with red table-cloths, grape-basket lunches, and colored Sunday supplements. Ruth declared that she preferred them to the elegant loungers who were showing off new motor-coats on the board-walk. But Carl and she had withdrawn a bit from the crowds, and in the dunes had made a nest, with a book and a magazine and a box of chocolates and Carl's collapsible lunch-kit.

Not New York only, but all of Ruth's relatives were forgot. Aunt Emma Truegate Winslow was a myth of the dragon-haunted past. Here all was fresh color and free spaces looking to open sea. Behind the dunes, with their traceries of pale grass, reveled the sharp, unshadowed green of marshes, and an inland bay that was blue as bluing, a startling blue, bordered by the emerald marshes. To one side—afar, not troubling their peace—were the crimson roofs of fantastic houses, like chalets and California missions and villas of the Riviera, with gables and turrets of red tiles.

Before their feet was the cream-colored beach, marked by ridges of driftwood mixed with small glistening shells, long ranks of pale-yellow seaweed, and the delicate wrinkles in the sand that were the tracks of receding waves. The breakers left the beach wet and shining for a moment, like plates of raw-colored copper, making one cry out with its flashing beauty. Then, at last, the eyes lifted to unbroken bluewater—nothing between them and Europe save rolling waves and wave-crests like white plumes. The sea was of a diaphanous blue that shaded through a bold steel blue and a lucent blue enamel to a rich ultramarine which absorbed and healed the office-worn mind. The sails of tacking sloops were a-blossom; sea-gulls swooped; a tall surf-fisherman in red flannel shirt and shiny black hip-boots strode out into the water and cast with a long curve of his line; cumulus clouds, whose pure white was shaded with a delicious golden tone, were baronial above; and out on the sky-line the steamers raced by.

Round them was the warm intimacy of the dune sands; beyond was infinite space calling to them to be big and unafraid.

Talking, falling into silences touched with the mystery of sun and sea, they confessed youth's excited wonder about the world; Carl sitting cross-legged, rubbing his ankles, a springy figure in blue flannel and a daring tie; while Ruth, in deep-rose linen, her throat bright and bare, lay with her chin in her hands, a flush beneath the gentle brown of her cheeks, her white-clad ankles crossed under her skirt, slender against the gray sand, thoughtful of eye, lost in happiness.

"Some day," Carl was musing, "your children and mine will say, 'You certainly lived in the most marvelous age in the world.' Think of it. They talk about the romance of the Crusades and the Romans and all that, but think of the miracles we've seen already, and we're only kids. Aviation and the automobile and wireless and moving pictures and electric locomotives and electric cooking and the use of radium and the X-ray and the linotype and the submarine and the labor movement—the I. W. W. and syndicalism and all that—not that I know anything about the labor movement, but I suppose it's the most important of all. And Metchnikoff and Ehrlich. Oh yes, and a good share of the development of the electric light and telephone and the phonograph.... Golly! In just a few years!"

"Yes," Ruth added, "and Montessori's system of education—that's what I think is the most important.... See that sail-boat, Hawk! Like a lily. And the late-afternoon gold on those marshes. I think this salt breeze blows away all the bad Ruth.... Oh! Don't forget the attempts to cure cancer and consumption. So many big things starting right now, while we're sitting here."

"Lord! what an age! Romance—why, there's more romance in a wireless spark—think of it, little lonely wallowing steamer, at night, out in the dark, slamming out a radio like forty thousand tigers spitting—and a man getting it here on Long Island. More romance than in all the galleons that ever sailed the purple tropics, which they mostly ain't purple, but dirty green. Anything 's possible now. World cools off—a'right, we'll move on to some other planet. It gets me going. Don't have to believe in fairies to give the imagination a job, to-day. Glad I've been an aviator; gives me some place in it all, anyway."

"I'm glad, too, Hawk, terribly glad."

The sun was crimsoning; the wind grew chilly. The beach was scattered with camp-fires. Their own fire settled into compact live coals which, in the dusk of the dune-hollow, spread over the million bits of quartz a glow through which pirouetted the antic sand-fleas. Carl's cigarette had the fragrance that comes only from being impregnated with the smoke of an outdoor fire. The waves were lyric, and a group at the next fire crooned "Old Black Joe." The two lovers curled in their nest. Hand moved toward hand.

Ruth whispered: "It's sweet to be with all these people and their fires.... Will I really learn not to be supercilious?"

"Honey! You—supercilious? Democracy—— Oh, the dickens! let's not talk about theories any more, but just about Us!"

Her hand, tight-coiled as a snail-shell, was closed in his.

"Your hand is asleep in my hand's arms," he whispered. The ball of his thumb pressed her thumb, and he whispered once more: "See. Now our hands are kissing each other—we—we must watch them better.... Your thumb is like a fairy." Again his thumb, hardened with file and wrench and steering-wheel, touched hers. It was startlingly like a kiss of real lips.

Lightly she returned the finger-kiss, answering diffidently, "Our hands are mad—silly hands to think that Long Beach is a tropical jungle."

"You aren't angry at them?"

"N-no."

He cradled her head on his shoulder, his hand gripping her arm till she cried, "You hurt me." He kissed her cheek. She drew back as far as she could. Her hand, against his chest, held him away for a minute. Her defense suddenly collapsed, and she was relaxed and throbbing in his arms. He slipped his fingers under her chin, and turned up her face till he could kiss her lips. He had not known the kiss of man and woman could be so long, so stirring. Yet at first he was disappointed. This was, after all, but a touch—just such a touch as finger against finger. But her lips grew more intense against his, returning and taking the kiss; both of them giving and receiving at once.

Wondering at himself for it, Carl thought of other things. He was amazed that, while their lips were hot together, he worried as to what train Ruth ought to take, after dinner. Yet, with such thoughts conferring, he was in an ecstasy beyond sorrow; praying that to her, as to him, there was no pain but instead a rapture in the sting of her lips, as her teeth cut a little into them.... A kiss—thing that the polite novels sketch as a second's unbodied bliss—how human it was, with teeth and lips to consider; common as eating—and divine as martyrdom. His lips were saying to her things too vast and extravagant for a plain young man to venture upon in words:

"Lady, to you I chant my reverence and faith everlasting, in such unearthly music as the angels use when with lambent wings they salute the marching dawn." Such lyric tributes, and an emotion too subtle to fit into any words whatever, his lips were saying....

Then she was drawing back, rending the kiss, crying, "You're almost smothering me!"

With his arms easily about her, but with her weight against his shoulder, they and their love veiled from the basket-parties by the darkness, he said, quiveringly: "See, my arms are a little house for you, just as my hand was a little house for your hand, once. My arms are the walls, and your head and mine together are the roof."

"I love the little house."

"No. Say, 'I love you."'

"No."

"Say it."

"No."

"Please——"

"Oh, Hawk dear, I couldn't even if—just now, I do want to say it, but I want to be fair. I am terribly happy to be in the house of Hawk's arms. I'm not afraid in it, even out here on the dark dunes—which Aunt Emma wouldn't—somehow—approve! But I do want to be fair to you, and I'm afraid I'm not, when I let you love me this way. I don't want to hurt you. Ever. Perhaps it's egotistical of me, but I'm afraid you would be hurt if I let you kiss me and then afterward I decided I didn't love you at all."

"But can't you, some day——"

"Oh, I don't know, I don't know! I'm not sure I know what love is. I'm not sure it's love that makes me happy (as I really am) when you kiss me. Perhaps I'm just curious, and experimenting. I was quite conscious, when you kissed me then; quite conscious and curious; and once I caught myself wondering for half a second what train we'd take. I was ashamed of that, but I wasn't ashamed of taking mental notes and learning what these 'kisses,' that we mention so glibly, really are. Just experimenting, you see. And if you were too serious about our kiss, it wouldn't be at all fair to you."

"I'm glad you're frank, blessed, and I guess I understand pretty well how you feel, but, after all, I'm fairly simple about such things. Blessed, blessed, I don't really know a thing but 'I love you.'"

His arms were savage again; he kissed her, kissed her lips, kissed the hollow of her throat. Then he lifted her from the ground and would not set her down till she had kissed him back.

"You frightened me a lot, then," she said. "Did the child want to impress Ruth with his mighty strength? Well, she shall be impressed. Hawk, I do hope—I do hate myself for not knowing my mind. I will try not to experiment. I want you to be happy. I do want to be honest with you. If I'm honest, will you try not to be too impatient till I do know just what I want?... Oh, I'm sick of the modern lover! I talk and talk about love; it seems as though we'd lost the power to be simple, like the old ballads. Or weren't the ballad people really simple, either? You say you are; so I think you will have to run away with me.... But not till after dinner! Come."

The moon was rising. Swinging hands, they tramped toward the board-walk. The crunch of their feet in the sand was the rhythmic spell of a magician, which she broke when she sighed:

"Should I have let you kiss me, out here in the wilds? Will you respect me after it?"

"Princess, you're all the respect there is in the world."

"It seems so strange. We were absorbed in war and electricity and then——"

"Love is war and electricity, or else it's dull, and I don't think we two 'll ever get dull—if you do decide you can love me. We'll wander: cabin in the Rockies, with forty mountains for our garden fence, and an eagle for our suburban train."

"And South Sea islands silhouetted at sunset!... Look! That moon!... I always imagine it so clearly when I hear Hawaiian singers on the Victrola—and a Hawaiian beach, with fireflies in the jungle behind and a phosphorescent sea in front and native girls dancing in garlands."

"Yes! And Paris boulevards and a mysterious castle in the Austrian mountains, with a hidden treasure in dark, secret dungeons, and heavy iron armor; and then, bing! a brand-new prairie town in Saskatchewan or Dakota, with brand-new sunlight on the fresh pine shacks, and beyond the town the plains with brand-new grass rolling."

"But seriously, Hawk, would you want to go to all those places, if you were married? Would you, practically? You know, even rich globe-trotters go to the same sorts of places, mostly. And we wouldn't even be rich, would we?"

"No, just comfortable; maybe five thousand a year."

"Well, would you really want to keep on going, and take your wife? Or would you settle down like the rest, and spend money so you could keep in shape to make money to spend to keep in shape?"

"Seriously I would keep going—if I had the right girl to go with me. It would be mighty important which one, though, I guess—and by that I mean you. Once, when I quit flying, I thought that maybe I'd stop wandering and settle down, maybe even marry a Joralemon kind of a girl. But I was meant to hike for the hiking's sake.... Only, not alone any more. I need you.... We'd go and go. No limit.... And we wouldn't just go places, either; we'd be different things. We'd be Connecticut farmers one year, and run a mine in Mexico the next, and loaf in Paris the next, if we had the money."

"Sometimes you almost tempt me to like you."

"Like me now!"

"No, not now, but—— Here's the board-walk."

"Where's those steps? Oh yes. Gee! I hate to leave the water without having had a swim. Wish we'd had one. Dare you to go wading!"

"Oh, ought I to, do you think? Wading would be silly. And nice."

"Course you oughtn't. Come on. Don't you remember how the sand feels between your toes?"

The moon brooded upon the lulled waves, and quested among the ridges of driftwood for pearly shells. The pools left by the waves were enticing. Ruth retreated into the shelter of the board-walk and came shyly out, clutching her skirts, her feet and ankles silver in the light.

"The sand does feel good, but uh! it's getting colder and colder!" she wailed, as she cautiously advanced into the water. "I'll think up punishments for you. You've not only caused me to be cold, but you've made me abominably self-conscious."

"Don't be self-conscious, blessed. We are just children exploring." He splashed out, coat off, trousers rolled to the knee above his thin, muscular legs, galloping along the edge of the water like a large puppy, while she danced after him.

They were stilled to the persuasive beauty of the night. Music from the topaz jeweled hotels far down the beach wove itself into the peace on land and sea. A fish lying on shore was turned by the moon into ivory with carven scales. Before them, reaching to the ancient towers of England and France and the islands of the sea, was the whispering water. A tenderness that understood everything, made allowance for everything in her and in himself, folded its wings round him as he scanned her that stood like a slender statue of silver—dark hair moon-brightened, white arms holding her skirts, white legs round which the spent waves sparkled with unworldly fire. He waded over to her and timidly kissed the edge of her hair.

She rubbed her cheek against his. "Now we must run," she said. She quickly turned back to the shadow of the board-walk, to draw on her stockings and shoes, kneeling on the sand like the simple maid of the ballads which she had been envying.

They tramped along the board-walk, with heels clicking like castanets, conscious that the world was hushed in night's old enchantment.

As they had answered to companionship with the humble picnic-parties among the dunes, so now they found it amusing to dine among the semi-great and the semi-motorists at the Nassau. Ruth had a distinct pleasure when T. Wentler, horse-fancier, aviation enthusiast, president of the First State Bank of Sacramento, came up, reminded Carl of their acquaintanceship at the Oakland-Berkeley Aero Meet, and begged Ruth and Carl to join him, his wife, and Senator Leeford, for coffee.

As they waited for their train, quiet after laughter, Ruth remarked: "It was jolly to play with the Personages. You haven't seen much of the frivolous side of me. It's pretty important. You don't know how much soul satisfaction I get out of dancing all night and playing tennis with flanneled oafs and eating marrons glaces and chatting in a box at the opera till I spoil the entire evening for all the German music-lovers, and talking to all the nice doggies from the Tennis and Racquet Club whenever I get invited to Piping Rock or Meadow Brook or any other country club that has ancestors. I want you to take warning."

"Did you really miss Piping Rock much to-day?".

"No—but I might to-morrow, and I might get horribly bored in our cabin in the Rockies and hate the stony old peaks, and long for tea and scandal in a corner at the Ritz."

"Then we'd hike on to San Francisco; have tea at the St. Francis or the Fairmont or the Palace; then beat it for your Hawaii and fireflies in the bush."

"Perhaps, but suppose, just suppose we were married, and suppose the Touricar didn't go so awfully well, and we had to be poor, and couldn't go running away, but had to stick in one beastly city flat and economize! It's all very well to talk of working things out together, but think of not being able to have decent clothes, and going to the movies every night—ugh! When I see some of the girls who used to be so pretty and gay, and they went and married poor men—now they are so worn and tired and bedraggled and perambulatorious, and they worry about Biddies and furnaces and cabbages, and their hair is just scratched together, with the dubbest hats—I'd rather be an idle rich."

"If we got stuck like that, I'd sell out and we'd hike to the mountain cabin, anyway, say go up in the Santa Lucias, and keep wild bees."

"And probably get stung—in the many subtle senses of that word. And I'd have to cook and wash. That would be fun as fun, but to have to do it——"

"Ruth, honey, let's not worry about it now, anyhow. I don't believe there's much danger. And don't let's spoil this bully day."

"It has been sweet. I won't croak any more."

"There's the train coming."



CHAPTER XXXVIII

While the New York June grew hotter and hotter and stickier and stickier, while the crowds, crammed together in the subway in a jam as unlovely as a pile of tomato-cans on a public dump-heap, grew pale in the damp heat, Carl labored in his office, and almost every evening called on Ruth, who was waiting for the first of July, when she was to go to Cousin Patton Kerr's, in the Berkshires. Carl tried to bring her coolness. He ate only poached eggs on toast or soup and salad for dinner, that he might not be torpid. He gave her moss-roses with drops of water like dew on the stems. They sat out on the box-stoop—the unfriendly New York street adopting for a time the frank neighborliness of a village—and exclaimed over every breeze. They talked about the charm of forty degrees below zero. That is, sometimes. Their favorite topic was themselves.

She still insisted that she was not in love with him; hooted at the idea of being engaged. She might some day go off and get married to some one, but engaged? Never! She finally agreed that they were engaged to be engaged to be engaged. One night when they sought the windy housetop, she twined his arms about her and almost went to sleep, with her hair smooth beneath his chin. He sat motionless till his arms ached with the strain, till her shoulder seemed to stick into his like a bar of iron; glad that she trusted him enough to doze into warm slumber in the familiarity of his arms. Yet he dared not kiss her throat, as he had done at Long Beach.

As lovers do, Carl had thought intently of her warning that she did care for clothes, dancing, country clubs. Ruth would have been caressingly surprised had she known the thought and worried conscientiousness he gave to the problem of planning "parties" for her. Ideas were always popping up in the midst of his work, and never giving him rest till he had noted them down on memo.-papers. He carried about, on the backs of envelopes, such notes as these:

Join country clb take R dances there? Basket of fruit for R Invite Mason W lunch Orgnze Tcar tour NY to SF Newspaper men on tour probly Forbes Rem Walter's new altitude 16,954 R to Astor Roof Rem country c

He did get a card to the Peace Waters Country Club and take Ruth to a dance there. She seemed to know every other member, and danced eloquently. He took her to the Josiah Bagbys' for dinner; to the first-night of a summer musical comedy. But he was still the stranger in New York, and "parties" are not to be had by tipping waiters and buying tickets. Half of the half-dozen affairs which they attended were of her inspiration; he was invited to go yachting at Larchmont, motoring, swimming on Long Island, with friends of herself and her brothers.

One evening that strikes into Carl's memories of those days of the pays du tendre is the evening on which Phil Dunleavy insisted on celebrating a Yale baseball victory by taking them to dinner in the oak-room of the Ritz-Carlton, under whose alabaster lights, among the cosmopolites, they dined elaborately and smoked slim, imported cigarettes. The thin music of violins took them into the lonely gray groves of the Land of Wandering Tunes, till Phil began to talk, disclosing to them a devotion to beauty, a satirical sense of humor, and a final acceptance of Carl as his friend.

A hundred other "parties" Carl planned, while dining alone at inferior restaurants. A hundred times he took a ten-cent dessert instead of an exciting fifteen-cent strawberry shortcake, to save money for those parties. (Out of such sordid thoughts of nickel coins is built a love enduring, and even tolerable before breakfast coffee.)

Yet always to him their real life was in simple jaunts out of doors, arranged without considering other people. Her father seemed glad of that. He once said to Carl (giving him a cigar), "You children had better not let Aunt Emma know that you are enjoying yourselves as you want to! How is the automobile business going?"

* * * * *

It would be pleasant to relate that Carl was inspired by love to put so much of that celebrated American quality "punch" into his work that the Touricar was sweeping the market. Or to picture with quietly falling tears the pathos of his business failure at the time when he most needed money. As a matter of fact, the Touricar affairs were going as, in real life, most businesses go—just fairly well. A few cars were sold; there were prospects of other sales; the VanZile Corporation neither planned to drop the Touricar, nor elected our young hero vice-president of the corporation.

* * * * *

In June Gertrude Cowles and her mother left for Joralemon. Carl had, since Christmas, seen them about once a month. Gertie had at first represented an unhappy old friend to whom he had to be kind. Then, as she seemed never to be able to give up the desire to see him tied down, whether by her affection or by his work, Carl came to regard her as an irritating foe to the freedom which he prized the more because of the increasing bondage of the office. The last stage was pure indifference to her. Gertie was either a chance for simple sweetness which he failed to take, or she was a peril which he had escaped, according to one's view of her; but in any case he had missed—or escaped—her as a romantic hero escapes fire, flood, and plot. She meant nothing to him, never could again. Life had flowed past her as, except in novels with plots, most lives do flow past temporary and fortuitous points of interest.... Gertie was farther from him now than those dancing Hawaiian girls whom Ruth and he hoped some day to see. Yet by her reaching out for his liberty Gertie had first made him prize Ruth.

* * * * *

The 1st of July, 1913, Ruth left for the Patton Kerrs' country house in the Berkshires, near Pittsfield. Carl wrote to her every day. He told her, apropos of Touricars and roof-gardens and aviation records and Sunday motor-cycling with Bobby Winslow, that he loved her; he even made, at the end of his letters, the old-fashioned lines of crosses to represent kisses. Whenever he hinted how much he missed her, how much he wanted to feel her startle in his arms, he wondered what she would read out of it; wondered if she would put the letter under her pillow.

She answered every other day with friendly letters droll in their descriptions of the people she met. His call of love she did not answer—directly. But she admitted that she missed their playtimes; and once she wrote to him, late on a cold Berkshire night, with a black rain and wind like a baying bloodhound:

It is so still in my room & so wild outside that I am frightened. I have tried to make myself smart in a blue silk dressing gown & a tosh lace breakfast cap, & I will write neatly with a quill pen from the Mayfair, but just the same I am a lonely baby & I want you here to comfort me. Would you be too shocked to come? I would put a Navajo blanket on my bed & a papier mache Turkish dagger & head of Othello over my bed & pretend it was a cozy corner, that is of course if they still have papier mache ornaments, I suppose they still live in Harlem & Brooklyn. We would sit very quietly in two wicker chairs on either side of my fireplace & listen to the swollen brook in the ravine just below my window. But with no Hawk here the wind keeps wailing that Pan is dead & that there won't ever again be any sunshine on the valley. Dear, it really isn't safe to be writing like this, after reading it you will suppose that it's just you that I am lonely for, but of course I'd be glad for Phil or Puggy Crewden or your nice solemn Walter MacMonnies or any suitor who would make foolish noises & hide me from the wind's hunting. Now I will seal this up & NOT send it in the morning.

Your playmate Ruth

Here is one small kiss on the forehead but remember it is just because of the wind & rain.

Presumably she did mail the letter. At least, he received it.

He carried her letters in the side-pocket of his coat till the envelopes were worn at the edges and nearly covered with smudged pencil-notes about things he wanted to keep in mind and would, of course, have kept in mind without making notes. He kept finding new meanings in her letters. He wanted them to indicate that she loved him; and any ambiguous phrase signified successively that she loved, laughed at, loathed, and loved him. Once he got up from bed to take another look at a letter and see whether she had said, "I hope you had a dear good time at the Explorers' Club dinner," or "I hope you had a good time, dear."

Carl was entirely sincere in his worried investigation of her state of mind. He knew that both Ruth and he had the instability as well as the initiative of the vagabond. As quickly as they had claimed each other, so quickly could either of them break love's alliance, if bored. Carl himself, being anything but bored, was as faithfully devoted as the least enterprising of moral young men, He forgot Gertie, did not write to Istra Nash the artist, and when the VanZile office got a new telephone-girl, a tall, languorous brunette with shadowy eyes and fine cheeks, he did not even smile at her.

But—was Ruth so bound? She still refused to admit even that she could fall in love. He knew that Ruth and he were not romantic characters, but every-day people with a tendency to quarrel and demand and be slack. He knew that even if the rose dream came true, there would be drab spots in it. And now that she was away, with Lenox and polo to absorb her, could the gauche, ignorant Carl Ericson, that he privately knew himself to be, retain her interest?

Late in July he received an invitation to spend a week-end, Friday to Tuesday, with Ruth at the Patton Kerrs'.



CHAPTER XXXIX

The brief trip to the Berkshires was longer than any he had taken these nine months. He looked forward animatedly to the journey, remembering details of travel—such trivial touches as the oval brass wash-bowls of a Pullman sleeper, and how, when the water is running out, the inside of the bowl is covered with a whitish film of water, which swiftly peels off. He recalled the cracked white paint of a steamer's ventilator; the abruptly stopping zhhhhh of a fog-horn; the vast smoky roof of a Philadelphia train-shed, clamorous with the train-bells of a strange town, giving a sense of mystery to the traveler stepping from the car for a moment to stretch his legs; an ugly junction station platform, with resin oozing from the heavy planks in the spring sun; the polished binnacle of the S.S. Panama.

He expected keen joy in new fields and hills. Yet all the way north he was trying to hold the train back. In a few minutes, now, he would see Ruth. And at this hour he did not even know definitely that he liked her.

He could not visualize her. He could see the sleeve of her blue corduroy jacket; her eyes he could not see. She was a stranger. Had he idealized her? He was apologetic for his unflattering doubt, but of what sort was she?

The train was stopping at her station with rattling windows and a despairing grind of the wheels. Carl seized his overnight bag and suit-case with fictitious enthusiasm. He was in a panic. Emerging from the safe, impersonal train upon the platform, he saw her.

She was waving to him from a one-seated phaeton, come alone to meet him—and she was the adorable, the perfect comrade. He thought jubilantly as he strode along the platform: "She's wonderful. Love her? Should say I do!"

While they drove under the elms, past white cottages and the village green, while they were talking so lightly and properly that none of the New England gossips could be wounded in the sense of propriety, Carl was learning her anew. She was an outdoor girl now, in low-collared blouse and white linen skirt. He rejoiced in her modulating laugh; the contrast of blue eyes and dark brows under her Panama hat; her full dark hair, with a lock sun-drenched; her bare throat, boyishly brown, femininely smooth; the sweet, clean, fine-textured girl flesh of the hollow of one shoulder faintly to be seen in the shadow of her broad, drooping collar; one hand, with a curious ring of rose quartz and steel points, excitedly pounding a tattoo of greeting with the whip-handle; her spirited irreverences regarding the people they passed; chatter which showed the world transformed as through ruby glass—a Ruth radiant, understanding, his comrade. She was all that he had believed during her absence and doubted while he was coming to her. But he had no time to repent of his doubt, now, so busily was he exulting to himself, slipping a hand under her arm: "Love her? I—should—say—I—do!"