"Are you going to stay for tea, Hen?" she asked, amid the stir and vocal noises of two hundred women.

But Hen said no; getting tea for the Cooney invalids was her portion.

"We'll just stop a minute and speak to V.V.," she added, as if that went without saying.

But this time Cally said no, somewhat hastily. And then she explained that she must go home to dress, as mamma was having some people to dinner to-night. Hen looked disappointed.

"Well, there's no chance of getting near him now, anyway. Look at that jam around the platform.... Stay just a minute or two, Cally."

The two cousins, the rich and the poor, and looking it, strolled among the Clubbers, Henrietta speaking to nearly everybody, and invariably asking how they had liked Dr. Vivian's speech, Pond and the Mayor ignored. She also introduced her cousin right and left, and enjoyed herself immensely.

Cally, having matters to think about, again remarked that she must go. She saw Hen glance hungrily over the dense lively crowd, densest around the platform, and promptly added: "But of course you mustn't think of coming with me."

Henrietta hesitated. "You wouldn't mind if I stayed on a minute? I would like just to say a word to V.V."

Cally assured her. "And thank you for bringing me, Hen. I—had no idea it would be so interesting."

The two girls parted. Hen plunged into the Clubbers to speak to Mr. V.V. Cally went out of the great doors, deep in thought. And having passed through these doors, the very first person she saw was Mr. V.V....

It was incredible, but it was true. How he had escaped the handshakers was a mystery for a detective. But there the man indubitably stood at the head of the Club steps, alone in the gathering twilight, bowing, speaking her name....

Had he been waiting for her, then? A certain air of prepared surprise in his greeting rather suggested the thought.

"Is your car waiting?" inquired the orator, courteously. "May I call it for you?"

Cally's heart had jumped a little at the sight of his tall figure, but she answered easily enough, as she moved toward the steps, that she was walking.

"Then won't you allow me to see you home?... It's getting rather dark. And I—the fact is, I wanted to speak to you."

And Cally said, far from what she had planned to say in thinking of this meeting:

"If you like.... Only you must promise not to scold me about the Works."

He gave her a look full of surprise, and touched with a curious sort of gratification; curious to her, that is, since she could not know how a well-known Labor Commissioner had taxed this man with "easiness."

"I promise," said he.

As they took the bottom step, he added, in a controlled sort of voice:

"Please tell me frankly—is it objectionable to you to—to have me walk with you?"

"Oh, no," said Cally.

Down forty feet of bricked walkway, through the swinging iron gates, out upon the public sidewalk, Carlisle walked silently beside the attacker of her father, the religious fellow whom Hugo Canning so disliked. About them in the pale dusk tall street-lights began to twinkle. Over them hung the impenetrable silence. It was but three blocks from the Woman's Club to the House of Heth. They had traversed half of one of them before Vivian gave voice:

"I merely wanted to say this."

And on that they walked ten steps without more speech.

"This," resumed Mr. V.V., and his voice was not easy. "You must have thought it strange the other day, when I told you the—the work I had taken up.... My articles, I mean.... I should know, if anybody does, that you—your family—have had much trouble to bear of late.... It seems that I should be the last person to do what will bring you more trouble—annoyance certainly, pain perhaps.... I felt that I wanted you to know, at least, that it took a—a strong necessity to make me go into the matter—at this time.... I wanted to tell you that—personally—I've been very sorry about it...."

She hesitated a moment, and then said:

"I don't doubt that.... I haven't doubted it since I stopped to think."

And if this was disloyalty to papa, Cally felt that she could not help it.... What, after all, did she know about it? Surely it was all a men's matter, a mere question of "reform," in which some thought one way and some another, and each side said hard things without meaning them exactly. Probably papa would be the last person to wish her to interfere....

"Thank you," he replied, it seemed with feeling in his voice. And walking on, looking straight before him, he added:

"There was one thing more ... Ah—pardon me."

The young doctor carried a cane, but used it principally for swinging and lunging. In view of his infirmity, Cally had begun by walking more slowly than was her custom. It had soon developed, however, that he was a rapid walker, and of absent-minded habit as well, particularly when talking. So, throughout the brief walk, her difficulty was to keep apace with him.

"What you said just now—my scolding you about the Works.... I realize that it must have seemed peculiar to you, and—and—weak—unmanly—my pursuing you so about a—a—purely business matter. Of course you must have felt that if I had criticisms to make, I should have taken them to your father—instead of inflicting them on you, all the time."

He paused; but the girl said nothing. She had, in fact, speculated considerably on this very point: how could she possibly have any responsibility for the way papa ran his business? It occurred to her to ask the man plainly whether he considered that she had; but she did not do so, perhaps fearing that he might reply in the affirmative....

"I once tried to explain it, in a way," he went on, hurriedly. "I said that I didn't know your father.... You naturally considered that merely a—a foolish sort of—claim—explaining nothing. I suppose you've forgotten all this, but—"

"No, I remember."

"Then let me say that—the other day, when I saw you—I had no idea of mentioning the Works to you, other than to explain my position—not an idea.... And then, when we talked—well, I did," he said with a kind of naked ingenuousness, as if no one could have been more surprised about it all than he.... "I can't explain it, so that it won't still seem peculiar to you.... It's only that I do feel somehow that—that knowing people makes a great difference—in certain respects...."

"I—think I can understand that."

"It's generous of you to be willing to try."

"No," said Cally, pulling her veil down at the chin, and quickening her steps as he strode on, "I'm only trying to be—reasonable about it."

They were passing people now and then in the twilight street, most of whom Cally spoke to; and once she thought how surprised Hugo would be, could he look over from Washington and see her walking amiably in this company. But then Hugo might have thought of these matters last year, when he said she wasn't the girl he had asked to marry him.

"Besides," said she, suddenly, "you don't mean to say anything—terribly bad about the Works in the articles—do you?"

"Yes, terribly," replied Mr. V.V., leaving her completely taken aback.

He added, formally, after a step or two: "I—ah—shouldn't feel honest if I left you in the slightest doubt—on that point."

But she could not believe now that his articles would be so terrible, no matter what he said, and her strange reply was:

"Then—suppose we don't talk about it."

He said: "I feel it's better so." And then they walked on rapidly in silence.

And somewhere in this silence, it came over Cally that the reason she could not distrust this man was because, in a very special way, she had learned to trust him; could not dislike him because the truth was that in her heart she liked him very much. And people must act as they felt. And then her thought suddenly advanced much further, as if mounting the last step in a watch-tower: and Cally saw that the question between herself and V. Vivian had always been, not what she might think of him, but what he thought of her....

The fruitful pause ran rather long. She considered complimenting Mr. V.V. upon his speech, expressing her surprise at his unlooked-for gentleness on the subject of the poor. How could one who spoke so kindly write terrible articles in the newspapers, attacking one's own father? Cally wondered, missing the perfectly obvious point of it all, namely: that when a man is a guest at a woman's club, his particular task is to look sharp to his tongue, ruling with a strong hand what besetting weakness he may have for grim speech, and abhorring ...

But the whole subject was difficult to the girl, and it was he who broke the silence, speaking his pedestrian's apology again. And this time, so swift and straight had they come, Cally replied, with quite a natural laugh:

"Never mind.... Here I am."

She halted before the white-stone steps of home, and glanced involuntarily toward the windows. Independent though she felt since day before yesterday, she would not have cared to have mamma glance out just then....

"I hadn't realized that we were here already!"

"Oh, it isn't far, as you see.... But it was good of you to bring me."

It was a parting speech; but Cally said it with no inflection of finality. So, at least, it seemed to be considered. V. Vivian stood drawing O's with his stick on the flagging belonging to Mr. Heth, of the Works. He took some pains to make them exactly round.

"I hope," said he, "that your—your annoyance over this matter won't interfere with your interest in the Settlement. I hope you still think of—of helping in the work."

"Oh!... I don't know," replied Cally, having thought but little about this since Hugo's reentrance into her life. "Mr. Pond, you see, convinced me pretty well of my uselessness—"

"It's only his manner!—he's always so mortally afraid that people aren't in earnest. I'm certain he could find—ah—suitable and congenial work, if you—you cared to give him another chance. And I'm certain you'd like him, when you knew him a little better."

"You like him?"

"I put him above any man I know, except only Mr. Dayne."

The tall electric light four doors below, which so irritated the Heths when they sat on their flowered balcony on summer nights, shone now full upon the old family enemy. It was observed that he wore, with his new blue suit, a quaint sprigged waistcoat which looked as if it also might have come down from his Uncle Armistead, along with the money he had given away. The old-fashioned vestment seemed to go well with the young man's face....

Cally stood upon the bottom step of the House, and drew her hand along the rail. It had occurred to her to tell him that she would probably go away to live; but now she only said, half-absently:

"I might think about it, and let you know later."

And then, as he accepted her tone as dismissal, and his hand started toward his hat, she spoke impulsively and hurriedly:

"Tell me, is it your feeling that this matter—the Works—makes it necessary for us to—to go on quarreling?"

The two stood looking at each other. And in each, in this moment, though in differing degree, the desire for harmoniousness was meeting the more intangible feeling that harmony between them seemed to involve surrender in another direction.

"How could it be?" said the man. "It's what I've been trying to say. But I naturally supposed that you—"

"I supposed so, too. It seems that I don't."

She looked down at her hand upon the rail, and said: "Don't misunderstand me. Of course I think that papa is doing what is right. Of course I am on his side. I think your sympathy with the poor makes you extreme. But ... you asked me the other day to try to see your point of view. Well, I think I do see it now. People," said Cally, with a young dignity that became her well, "sometimes agree to disagree. I feel—now when we've quarreled so much—that I'd like to be friends."

The tall young man looked hurriedly away, down the dusky street. In his mind were his articles, shooting about: his terrible articles, where surely nobody would find any gentleness to surprise them. They were the best thing he would ever do; precisely the thing he had always wanted to do. And yet—well he knew now that he had no joy in them....

"It's tremendously generous of you," he said, mechanically.

Cally's eyes wavered from his face, and she answered: "No, I'm not generous."

Her struggle was to keep life fixed and constant, and all about her she found life fluent and changing. Or perhaps life was constant, and the fluency was in her. Or perhaps the difficulty was all in this man, about whom she had never been able to take any position that he did not shortly oust her from it. Considering her resolution only last night, she too had thought, when she began, that she was carrying generosity to the point of downright disloyalty to papa. By what strangeness of his expression did he make her feel that even this was not generous enough, that more was required of the daughter of the Works than merely withdrawing from all responsibility?...

V. Vivian regarded the lovely Hun. As a prophet you might glory, but as a man you must face the music....

"But I must tell you," he began, with visible effort, "that you—you will feel very differently, when you've seen—"

However, she interrupted him, raising her eyes with a little smile, sweet and somewhat sad.

"I'll look after my part of it," said she; and there was her pledge of amity held out, gloved in white. "Do you think you can be my friend?"

The light showed another change in the young man's face. He took the hand, and said with sudden strange feeling:

"Let my life prove it."

So Cally turned away thinking that she had found that rarest thing among men, a friend of women.

And Mr. V.V. walked off blindly up the lamplit street, his heart a singing and a pain.



XXVII

Of one of the Triumphs of Cally's Life, and the Tete-a-tete following, which vaguely depresses her; of the Little Work-Girl who brought the Note that Sunday, oddly remet at Gentlemen's Furnishings.

Canning was absent more than two weeks. His attorney's business had brought entanglements before and behind; he was by no means a free man even now. Not all the powers of government could have detained him, we may be sure, had he considered such detention hurtful to the dearest matter in the world. But Canning, in the peculiar circumstances, had concluded that a period of meditation was well, that absence made the heart grow fonder; and, if human calculations are worth anything at all, his conclusions were amply justified. Through the days of their separation his chosen had constantly felt upon her the weight of that vast intangible pressure which pins each mortal of us, except the strong, to his own predestined groove. Chiefly mamma, but many other things, too, had been pressing Cally steadily from thoughts of useful deeds, of which she knew so little, toward thoughts of Mrs. Hugo Canning, of which she knew so much. For sixteen days, time and circumstance had played straight into her lover's hands....

Hugo paused to be welcomed, on his way from the train, Olympian of mien, and beautifully dressed, he looked indeed exactly the sort of man who would shortly have use for the contents of the little velvet box, at this moment reposing snugly in his waistcoat pocket. Still, he had turned up the collar of his big travelling-coat, and a slight hoarseness indicated that the throat trouble which had sent him south last year had returned with the first frost.

"I can draw on it for another six months' furlough," said he, meeting Cally's eyes with gay meaning, "just as soon as I have need for such a thing."

He had come this time as the open gallant, Lochinvar in all men's sight. If his lady desired ceremonies all in order, in sooth she should have them. For the first week of his absence, he had strategically allowed himself to be lost in silence. And then the postman and expressman had suddenly begun to bring reminders of him, letters, bon-bons, books even, flowers every day, and every day a different sort. Cally greeted him wearing out-of-season violets from his own florist. And by telegraph to the faithful Willie Kerr, the gifted wooer had arranged a little dinner for his first evening, to give his official courtship a background which in other days it had sometimes lacked....

"To my mind it's a bore," said he, as they parted. "Please expect to give me a little time of my own afterwards."

The occasion was no bore to Carlisle. She recognized it as one of the triumphs of her life. The material dinner could of course be no better than the New Arlington could make it; but then the New Arlington was a hotel which supercilious tourists always mentioned with pleased surprise in their letters home; that is, if they had any homes and ever thought of writing to them. And Cousin Willie Kerr, having got "off" at three-thirty with carte blanche for the arrangements, that night proved that the world of Epicurus had lost an artist when he had turned his talents to commerce. But of course Carlisle's triumph lay not in glowing candle-shades or masses of red and pink roses, not in delicate viands or vintages, however costly. She read her brilliance in the eyes and bearing of Hugo Canning's guests.

They sat down twelve at table. Beside Carlisle's own little coterie, there were present Mr. and Mrs. Allison Payne, who, before they had retired to the country to bring up their children, had been conspicuous in that little old-school set which included Mrs. Berkeley Page: simple-mannered, agreeable people these were, who were always very pleasant when you met them, but whom you never really seemed to know any better. And Mrs. Payne, who was Hugo's first cousin, had kissed Carlisle when they met in the tiring-room, and hoped very prettily that they were going to be friends. Still more open was the gratulation of the somewhat less exclusive. Papa had been detained by business, and J. Forsythe Avery, having been asked at the last moment to fill his place, had broken up another dinner-table to be seen at Canning's. Unquestionably he must have recognized a doughty rival, but Carlisle, who sat next him, easily saw how high she had shot up in his pink imagination. As for dear Mats Allen, her late funeral note had quite vanished in loving rapture, with just that undercurrent of honest envy so dear to the heart of woman.

"He's simply mad about you, Cally! The way he looked and looked at you!... And he never even listened to poor little me, chatting away beside him, and frightened out of my wits all the time, he's so lordly."

This was when dinner was over, and the guests were strolling from the little dining-room for coffee in the winter garden. Cally smiled. She had observed that most of her best friend's time had gone, not to chatting to Hugo, but to lavishing her delicious ignorance and working her telling optic system on J. Forsythe Avery, who was so evidently now to be released for general circulation....

Mats seized the moment to inquire, simply, whether she or Evey was to be maid of honor; and Cally then laughed merrily.

"Perhaps we shall have it done by a justice of the peace.... Mats, you're the greatest little romancer I ever saw. How you got it into your pretty noddle that Mr. Canning has the faintest interest in me I can't imagine...."

Willie Kerr, too, paid his tribute, having momentarily withdrawn himself from mamma, whose loyal escort he was once more. Willie was a shade balder than last year, when he had played his great part in Cally's life and then sunk below her horizon; a shade more rotund; a shade rosier in the face. But he was as genial as ever, being well lined now with a menu to his own taste and an exceptionally good champagne.

"Knew he'd come back, Carlisle," said Willie, standing before a florid oil-painting he had lured her into a parlor to look at. "Said to Eva Payne in September—no, August, one Sunday it was—'Canning'll be back soon as she gets home,' s'I. 'Don't know what happened, that trouble in the spring. Don't want to know—none of my business. But mark my words, Eva Payne,' s'I, 'Hugo Canning'll be back.' Fact," said Willie, grinning cordially. "Funny how I knew. And don't forget, Carlisle, m'dear, 'twas your Uncle Cosmo did it all! Hey? Remember that tea in my apartments? Always keep a spare room ready for Uncle Cosmo, and, by gad, I'll come and spend my summers with you."

And later, Eva Payne, the once far unattainable, asked Mrs. Heth and her daughter for luncheon on Friday—"with a few of our friends." Mamma received the invitation like an accolade. Truly that ten thousand dollars might well have remained in bank, subject to personal check....

The little dinner, with its air of everything being all settled, was a huge success; a bit too huge to Hugo's way of thinking. It was eleven o'clock before he really had a word with Carlisle.

"It began to look like a house-party," said he....

They were alone now in the drawing-room at home, a room whose dim beautiful lights made it look always at its best at night. Mamma had just gone up. Cally stood in front of a small plaque-mirror; she had taken off her wraps, and was now fluffing up her fine ash-gold hair where the scarf over her head had pressed it down. The pose, with upraised arms, was an alluring one; she was lithe, with a charming figure. And she still looked very young, as fresh as a rose, as new as spring and first love.

"Cally," said Canning, behind her—"I've fallen in love with your little name, you see, and I'm always going to call you by it after this—Cally, did I ever mention to you that you're the prettiest girl I ever saw. Only pretty is not the word...."

Cally laughed at her reflection in the glass.

"You could never have fallen in love with me—or my name—unless you'd thought so.... Could you?"

"I've never asked myself. But I could fall in love with everything else about you, too, because I've gone and done it."

"I wonder ... Anyhow none of the other things matter much, do they? I can't imagine your falling in love with a hideosity, no matter how worth loving she might be."

"Under the circumstances, why bother to try?"

"It's no bother, and it's intensely interesting...."

Canning advanced a step. Carlisle's gaze moved a little and encountered his in the glass. In his eyes lay his whole opinion of one half the human world....

"Don't look at me in that proprietary way...."

Canning laughed softly. He was fully prepared for coquetry.

"Proprietary! It's the last way, my dear, I should venture to look at you."

She had allowed him to linger, certainly with no blindness as to what he desired to say to her. She had stood there with no ignorance that the moment was favorable. But now something seemed to have gone amiss, and she turned suddenly, frustrating whatever loverly intention he may have had.

Carlisle sat down in a circular brocaded chair, in which gold back and gold arms were one; a sufficiently decorative background for her shining decollete. Hugo, standing and fingering his white tie, looked down at her with no loss of confidence in his handsome eyes.

"You've changed somehow," said he. "I haven't quite placed it yet. Still, I can feel it there."

"I'm older, my friend, years older than when you used to know me. And then I'm suffering from a serious bereavement, too. I've lost my good opinion of myself."

"Perhaps I can be of some help in restoring it to you."

"That is the question.... Besides ageing immensely, I'm also getting frightfully modern, you see...."

And pursuing this latter thought a little, she presently replied to him:

"Oh, no—sociology, not politics.... I've been thinking for some time of inspecting the Works, to see if it needed repairs. How horrid of you to laugh! Don't you think a woman should take some interest in how the money is made that she lives on?..."

She said this smiling, in the lightest way imaginable. Small wonder if Hugo didn't guess that she had thought twenty times in two weeks of actually doing this thing she spoke of. Still less if it never occurred to him that he here confronted again the footprint of the condemned revivalist fellow, lately become his beloved's sworn friend....

"Have you asked your father that question yet?"

"I thought I'd better get the advice of a prominent lawyer first. Tell me what you think?"

"The point would early arise as to how you would know, on visiting the Works, whether or not it needed repairs. You've inspected many factories, of course?"

"That's true!—I know nothing in the world about it. Of course not!"

She spoke with a sort of eagerness; but went on presently in another tone: "Do you know, I really don't know anything ...? I've never thought of it specially before, but all at once I'm constantly being impressed with my ignorance...."

And Hugo, with all his accomplishment and skill, could not thenceforward bring the conversation back where it belonged. Only the time and the place were his to-night, it seemed....

"I," said the girl, "belong to the useless classes. I don't pay my way. I'm a social deadbeat. So Mr. Pond told me the other night. You must meet Mr. Pond, Hugo, the Director of the Settlement you gave all that money to last year. He can be as horrid as anybody on earth, but is really nice in a rude interesting way. He's packed full of quarrelsome ideas. You know, he doesn't believe in giving money to the poor under any circumstances. Harmful temporizing, he calls it ..." A rather wide sweep here gave Mr. Pond's views on poor relief in detail ... "Are you listening, Hugo? This information is being given for your benefit. And oh, he wants me to learn millinery from Mme. Smythe (Jennie T. Smith, nee) and help him start a class in hat-trimming, to train girls for shop assistants. Or perhaps I'll learn cooking instead...."

"He seems to have aired his views to you pretty thoroughly," said Canning, dryly.

He rose to go, a little later, rather amused by the skill with which he had been held off. He admired the piquancy of spirit with which she took advantage of the altered positions. For him tameness was the great disillusionizer; his undefined ideal was a woman who must be won anew every day. Still, he had been rubbed a little the wrong way by the new-woman catch-phrases she had picked up somewhere, by the faintly argumentative note in her conversation....

"Plans for to-morrow!... By the way," said Cally, glancing away to conceal a smile as she rose, "how long shall you be in town?"

"Just as long, Miss Heth, as my business here makes necessary."

"What can I say to that?... If I say I hope you won't be with us long, it sounds quite rude. And if I say I hope it will be very, very long ..."

But he would not follow that lead now. His instinct, her expression warned him; and he was fully resolved that when he spoke again, it would be to land this "wild sweet thing" fluttering safe in his net. However, his laugh was not quite natural.

"I may," said he, "get a telegram calling me off, at almost any minute. Let every one be kind to the stranger within the gates. May I nominate myself for luncheon?"

He was unanimously elected. This time, at parting, he did not touch his former betrothed's hand. His bow was accompanied by a slightly ironic smile; it seemed to say: "Since you prefer it this way, my dear ... But really—what's the use?"

Cally, snapping out the lights, felt vaguely depressed.

* * * * *

Next day, half an hour after luncheon, Hugo said to the greatest admirer he had on earth:

"Where did Carlisle get the notion that she wanted to go in for Settlement work?"

Mrs. Heth's reply, delivered with a beam, was masterly in its way.

"Why, my dear Hugo! Don't you know the sorry little makeshifts women go to, waiting for love to come to them?"

Hugo's comment intimated that he had fancied it was something of the sort. He then went out, to his future mother-in-law's regret; she often wondered how it was that she and Hugo had so few good talks.

Her two young people, as the good lady loved to call them once more, had separated almost from the table, but soon to re-meet. Carlisle, having spent "the morning" shopping,—that is from twelve o'clock to one-fifteen,—had departed to finish her commissions. Canning had a regretted engagement with Allison Payne, downtown, to advise Mr. Payne touching some of his investments. But he was to pick Carlisle up at Morland's establishment at four o'clock, with the car he had hired by the week; and the remainder of the afternoon would belong to him alone. He was to have the evening, too, at the House, following a large dinner-party of the elders arranged by Mrs. Heth before she knew the date of his return. And these two occasions, the lover resolved, should suffice his need....

Cally had her hour in the shops, enjoying herself considerably. Her purchases this afternoon were partly utilitarian, it was true, concerned with Mrs. Heth's annual box to her poor Thompson kin in Prince William County. But she took more than one little flyer on her own account. Nothing more had Cally said to her father as to giving him back the fifteen hundred dollars, dividend on her stock. Consequently she bristled with money nowadays, and had been splurging largely on highly desirable little "extras." And mamma, usually quite strict in her accounts, thought of trousseaux, and only smiled at these extravagances.

Cally moved in her destined orbit. From shop to shop, she pleasurably pursued the material. Nevertheless, she cogitated problems as she bought; chiefly with reference to Hugo, and the two or three hours' tete-a-tete that waited just ahead.... At just what point should the needs of discipline be regarded as satisfied? That was the question, as she had remarked last night.

At Baird & Himmel's these knotty reflections were interrupted for a space. In this spreading mart Cally chanced to fall in with an acquaintance.

Baird & Himmel's was the great popular department store of the town, just now rapidly flowing over its whole block, and building all around the usual drug-store which declined to sell. Here rich and poor rubbed elbows with something like that human equality so lauded by Mr. V.V. and others. And here Cally had pushed her way to Gentlemen's Furnishings, her purpose being to buy two shirts for James Thompson, Jr., neck size 13, and not to cost over one dollar each, as mamma had duly noted on the memorandum.

It was ten minutes to four o'clock, as a glance at her watch now showed. Cally swung a little on her circular seat, and encountered the full stare of a girl of the lower orders, seated next her. Her own glance, which had been casual, suddenly became intent: the girl's face, an unusual one in its way, touched a chord somewhere. In a second Cally remembered the little factory hand who had brought her the note from Dr. Vivian, that fateful Sunday afternoon in May ...

The little creature bobbed her head at her, with the beginnings of an eager smile, which did not change her wide fixed stare.

"Good evenin', ma'am—Miss Heth."

"Good afternoon ..."

No more talk there had been about the Works at home, other than as to papa's plan to have Mr. and Mrs. O'Neill to dinner, to talk over matters in a friendly way. But if Cally had desired a sign of how much this subject had been on her mind since her talk with Vivian she could have found it in the mingling sensations that rose in her now. For this little apparition at her elbow—so she had learned incidentally through Hen Cooney, who knew everything—was the connecting link in the whole argument. Here, on the next seat, sat that "strong necessity" which had impelled Vivian to attack Mr. Heth in the papers.

"I remember you," said Carlisle, slowly. "I understood from Miss Cooney that you had been very sick. You don't look sick—especially."

"I been away, ma'am. On a Trip," explained the pale operative with a kind of eagerness. "Dr. Vivian he sent me off to Atlantic City, in New Jersey, and then to a hotel in the Adriondacts. I conv'lessed, ma'am, y'know?"

"I see. Now you are going back to the Works, I suppose?"

It was not a question easy to answer with delicacy, to answer and avoid all risk of hurting a lady's feelings. How explain that the Works were expressly prohibited by doctor's orders, though you yourself knew that you ought to go back? How tell of special lessons at a Writing Desk every night, such as prepared people to be Authors, when anybody could see by looking at you that you were only a work-girl, and you yourself felt that it was all wrong someway?...

Kern spoke timidly, though her wide eyes did not falter.

"Well—not just to-reckly, ma'am. The plan was, till I got my strength back, that I might lay off a little and go—go to School."

"I see."

The tone was cool, and the girl added with a little gasp:

"And then go back to bunchin' again,—yes, ma'am. It's—it's my trade...."

Many feelings moved in Cally, and it might be that the best of them were not uppermost. Perhaps the glittering material possessed her blood, even more than of habit. Perhaps it was only her instinct warning her to take her stand now with her father, where was safety and her ordered course. Or at least it was hardly a pure impulse of generosity that made her open the plump little gold bag at her side, and produce a bill with a yellow back.

"I'm very sorry you've been ill," she said, in her pretty modulated voice. "As you probably feel that you got your illness in the Works, I should like you to take this. Please consider it as coming from my father—and buy yourself something—"

All the blood in the little creature's body seemed to rush headlong to her face. She shrank away as from something more painful than a blow. But all that she said was:

"Oh!... Ma'am!"

It was Miss Heth's turn to show a red flag in her cheek.

"You don't want it?"

"I—why ma'am,—I couldn't ..."

"As you like, of course."

She dropped the spurned gift back into her bag, with studied leisureliness, and rose at once, though she had made no purchase. Standing, she made a slight inclination of her prettily-set head. And then Miss Heth was walking away through the crowded aisle with a somewhat proud bearing and a very silken swish.

And Kern Garland swung round on her seat at Gentlemen's Furnishings, staring wide-eyed after her, her finger at her lip ...

No fairy coming-true here, indeed, of that gorgeous fever-dream in which Miss Heth with lovely courtesy informed Miss Garland that she had been a lady all the time. But consider the Dream-Maker's difficulties with such far-flown fancies as this: difficulties the more perplexing in a world where men's opinions differ, and some do say that she in the finest skirt is not always the finest lady ...

Yet times change, and we with them. It is a beautiful thing to believe in fairies. In the valley, men have met angels. Kern sat staring at Miss Heth's retreating back: and lo, a miracle. When the lovely lady had gone perhaps ten steps down the aisle, her pace seemed to slacken all at once, and she suddenly glanced back over her shoulder. And then—oh, wonder of wonders!—Miss Heth stopped, turned around, and came swishing straight back to the seat beside Kern Garland.

"That was silly of me," said the pretty voice. "You were quite right not to take it if you didn't want it ..."

Kern desired to cry. But that would be very ridiculous, in a store, and doubtless annoying to Others. So the little girl began to wink hard, while staring fixedly at a given point. You could often pass it off that way, and nobody a whit the wiser.

"I've happened to have the Works on my mind a little of late," added Carlisle, almost as if in apology. "But I—I'm really glad to see you again."

She perceived the signs of agitation in the little work-girl, and attributing it all to the twenty-dollar bill, saw that she must pave the way to a conversation. And conversation, now that the ice was broken, she eagerly desired, fascinated by the thought that this girl knew at first-hand everything about the Works.

"Let me see—your name is Corinne, isn't it?"

Kern's eyes, wider than ever, shot back to the lady's face. A new wonder here!—Miss Heth said it just like in the Dream: Co-rinne.

"Yes, ma'am," said Co-rinne, with a little gulp and a sniff.

"And what are you doing at the Men's Furnishing counter, Corinne?" said Carlisle, pleasantly but quite at random. "Buying a present for Mr. V.V., I suppose?"

"Yes, ma'am."

Having taken Carlisle completely aback, she hesitated and then added timidly:

"Only a fulldress-shirt protector—for his birthday, y' know?... All his sick give him little presents now'n then, ma'am, find out his sizes and all. You know how he is, spending all his money on them, and never thinking about himself, and giving away the clo'es off his back."

"Yes, I know.... Find out his sizes?"

"Yes, ma'am. Like, say, 'Why, Mr.—why, Dr. Vivian, what small feet you got, sir, for a gempman!' And he'll say, like, 'I don't call six and a half C so small!' Yes, ma'am—just as innocent."

A block and a half away, Hugo Canning's car whirled to a standstill, and Hugo sat gazing at the select door of Morland's. In Baird & Himmel's vast commonwealth, Kern Garland sat beside Miss Carlisle Heth at Gentlemen's Furnishings, and could not look at the lady's lovely clothes since her eyes could not bear to leave the yet lovelier face. Kern had not confided the secret of the protector without a turning of her heart, but now at least the thrill in her rose above that.... She and Mr. V.V.'s beautiful lady, side by side.... It was nearly as good as the velvet settee in the Dream—only for the founting, and the boy with the pink lamp on his head, and Mr. V.V....

An extremely full-busted Saleslady, with snapping black eyes, deposited a lean bundle and a ten-cent piece before the work-girl, oddly murmured something that sounded like 'Look who's ear,' and then said proudly to Carlisle:

"What did you wish 'm?"

"Nothing just now, thank you."

The Saleslady gave her a glance of intense disapproval, pushed down her generous waist-line, arrogantly patted a coal-black transformation, and wheeled with open indignation.

"That's nice," said Carlisle, to the factory-girl. "Then the presents come as a surprise to him."

"Surprise—no, ma'am. He don't never know. Take the tags off 'n 'em, and slip 'em in his drawer, and he'll put 'em on and never notice nor suspicion, shirts and such. It's like he thought raiment was brought him by the crows,—like in the Bible, ma'am, y' know?"

There was a brief silence. Carlisle's sheltered life had not too often touched the simple annals of the poor. She seemed to get a picture....

The little work-girl's face was not coarse, strangely enough, or even common-looking; it was pleasing in an odd, elfin way. Her white dress and black jacket were in good taste for her station, without vulgarity. Such details Carlisle's feminine eye soon gathered in. The touch she missed was that that cheap dress was an exact copy of one she herself had worn one Sunday afternoon in May, as near as Kern Garland could remember it.

"How long were you at the Works?" said the lady suddenly.

"At the Works? More'n three years, ma'am."

There was another silence amid the bustle of the people's emporium.

"Tell me," said Carlisle, with some effort, "do you—did you—looking at it from a worker's point of view—find it such a very bad place to work?"

"Oh, no, ma'am!" said Kern. "Bad—oh, no! It's—it's fine!"

Carlisle's gaze became wider than the little girl's own. "But—Mr. V.V. says it's a terrible place...."

"It's only the beautiful way he talks," said Kern, eagerly. "I mean, he's so, so sorry for the poor.... But lor, ma'am, we know how rich is rich, and poor poor, and so it must always be this side o' the pearly gates—"

She stopped short; and then added shyly, with a kind of anxiousness in her wide dark gaze: "An expression, ma'am—for Heaven. I—I just learned it."

The lady's look was absent. "Oh!... Where did you learn that?"

"Off Sadie Whirtle, ma'am—a friend of mine." The girl hesitated, and then said: "That's her now."

And she pointed a small finger at the enormous snapping Saleslady, who stood glowering and patting her transformation at another customer ten feet away.

But Carlisle did not follow the finger, and so missed the sight of Miss Whirtle. Her rising relief had been penetrated by a doubt, not a new one ... Would her friend Vivian have committed himself to the articles for only a foolish sentimentalism which the poor themselves repudiated?...

"But tell me frankly, Corinne, for I want to know," said she—"I know working must be hard in any case—but do the girls at the Works consider it a—a reasonably nice place?"

Kern knew nothing of the articles, of any situation: and at that Co-rinne, her heart ran to water within her. She would have said anything for that.

"Oh, ma'am, all say it's the nicest place to work in town. Yes, ma'am ... And some of 'em has rich fathers and needn't work at all anywhere, but they just go on and work at the Works, yes, ma'am, because they druther ..."

That, by a little, drew the long-bow too hard. Cally saw that the small three-years' buncher, through politeness or otherwise, was speaking without reference to the truth. And hard upon that she had another thought, striking down the impulse to cross-examine further. What an undignified, what a cowardly way, to try to find things out! What a baby she was, to be sure!... V. Vivian knew about the Works, though it was certainly no affair of his. This frail girl, who did look rather sick now that you stopped and looked at her, knew all about it. Only she, her father's daughter, knew nothing, wrapped in her layers of pretty pink wool ...

The lady came abruptly to her feet.

"I'm glad to hear it," said she ... "But I 'm afraid I must go on now. Some one is waiting for me outside."

"Oh!—yes, ma'am!"

Kern had risen with her, though she had not learned that from the Netiquette. Much it would have amazed her to know that the heavenly visitor was regarding her with a flickering conviction of inferiority....

"Good-bye, then. I hope you'll soon get your strength back again.... And I'm very glad I saw you."

And then there was her hand held out; not lady to lady, of course, but still her lady's hand. Poor Kern, with her exaltation and her pangs, felt ready to go down on one knee to take it.

"Oh, ma'am!" she stammered. "I'm the glad one ..."

Miss Heth smiled—oh, so sweet, almost like in the Dream—and then it was all over, and she was walking away, with the loveliest rustle ever was. And Kern stood lost in the thronging aisle, staring at the point where she had disappeared and giving little pinches to her thin arm—just to make certain-sure, y' know ...

This till the voice of Miss Whirtle spoke in her ear:

"Say, Kurrin, I like that! Whyn't you ask me to shake hands with your swell dame friend?"

And Miss Heth, out in the crowded street, was heading toward Morland's with an adventurous resolution in her mind.

It had needed but a touch to make up her mind here, whether she realized it or not; and this touch the girl Corinne had given her. Now, too, impulse met convenient opportunity. For two weeks she had been thinking that if she did ever happen to go to the Works, she would make a point of going in some offhand, incidental sort of way, thus proving to herself and the public that she had not the slightest responsibility for whatever might be going on there. (How could she possibly have, no matter what Mr. V.V. thought, with his exaggerated sympathies for the poor?) Now here was Hugo waiting, perfectly fitted, to her need. What could be more natural and incidental than this? She would simply be showing her father's factory to her friend, Mr. Canning....

And perhaps Cally had an even deeper feeling of Mr. Canning's admirable suitability in this connection. Somewhere just above the line of consciousness, did there not lie the subtle thought that, if what she saw at the Works should have power to work dangerously on her own sympathies, Hugo, with his strong worldly sense, his material perfection, his whole splendid embodiment of the victorious-class ideal, would be just the corrective she needed to keep her safe and sane?...

* * * * *

When she was seated in the car beside him, and he was tucking the robe around her, Cally inquired with a deceptive air of indifference:

"You don't care particularly where we go, do you, Hugo?"

"The point seems of no importance whatever, now that I've got you."

"Then," said she, smiling, "I shall take you first to the Heth Cheroot Works."

Canning's face, which had been buoyant from the moment his eyes discovered her in the crowd, betrayed surprise and strong disapproval. That, surely, would give his afternoon a slant different from his plannings....

"I bar the Works. I feel all ways but sociological to-day. Let's go to the country."

"Afterwards," said she, with the same lightness, clear proof of the casual nature of the proposed excursion. "We'll simply pop in for a minute or two, to see what it looks like—"

"But you can't tell what it looks like, even—"

"Well, at least I'll have seen it. Do give me my way about this. You'll enjoy it ..."

And leaning forward on that, she said to his hired driver: "Take us to Seventeenth and Canal Streets."

The shadow of disapprobation did not lift from Hugo's face.

"I had no idea," he said, boredly and somewhat stiffly, "that you took your new-thought so seriously."

Cally laughed brightly. "But then you never think women are serious, Hugo."

It was on the tip of her tongue to add: "Until it's too late." But she held that back, as being too pointedly reminiscent.



XXVIII

A Little Visit to the Birthplace of the Family; how Cally thinks Socialism and almost faints, and Hugo's Afternoon of Romance ends Short in the Middle.

The car came to a standstill, and Cally was reminded of another afternoon, long ago, when she and Hen Cooney had encountered Mr. V.V. upon this humming corner. This time, she knew which way to look.

"There it is.... Confess, Hugo, you're surprised that it's so small!"

But Hugo helped no new-thoughter to belittle honest business.

"Unlike some I could mention, I've seen factories before," quoth he. "I've seen a million dollar business done in a smaller plant than that."

Actually Cally found the Works bigger than she had expected; reaction from the childish marble palace idea had swung her mind's eye too far. But gazing at the weather-worn old pile, spilling dirtily over the broken sidewalk, she was once more struck and depressed by something almost sinister about it, something vaguely foreboding. To her imagination it was a little as if the ramshackle old pile leered at her: "Wash your hands of me if you will, young lady. I mean you harm some day...."

But then, of course, she wasn't washing her hands of it; her hands had never been in it at all.

"You'll get intensely interested and want to stay hours!" said she, with the loud roar of traffic in her ears. "Remember I only came for a peep—just to see what a Works is like inside."

Hugo, guiding her over the littered sidewalk to the shabby little door marked "Office," swore that she could not make her peep too brief for him.

She had considered the possibility of encountering her father here; had seen the difficulties of attributing this foray to Hugo's insatiable interest in commerce, with Hugo standing right there. However, in the very unpretentious offices inside—desolate places of common wood partitions, bare floors, and strange, tall stools and desks—she was assured by an anaemic youth with a red Adam's apple that her father had left for the bank an hour earlier, which was according to his usual habit. She inquired for Chas Cooney, who kept books from one of those lofty stools, but Chas was reported sick in bed, as Cally then remembered that Hen had told her, some days since. Accordingly the visitors fell into the hands of Mr. MacQueen, whom Carlisle, in the years, had seen occasionally entering or leaving papa's study o' nights.

MacQueen was black, bullet-headed, and dour. He had held socialistic views in his fiery youth, but had changed his mind like the rest of us when he found himself rising in the world. In these days he received a percentage on the Works profits, and cursed the impudence of Labor. As to visitors, his politics were that all such had better be at their several homes, and he indicated these opinions, with no particular subtlety, to Miss Heth and Mr. Canning. He even cited them a special reason against visiting to-day: new machines being installed, and the shop upset in consequence. However, he did not feel free to refuse the request out-right, and when Canning grew a little sharp,—for he did the talking, generously enough,—the sour vizier yielded, though with no affectation of a good grace.

"Well, as ye like then.... This way."

And he opened a door with a briskness which indicated that Carlisle's expressed wish "just to look around" should be carried out in the most literal manner.

The opening of this door brought a surprise. Things were so unceremonious in the business district, it seemed, that you stepped from the superintendent's office right into the middle of everything, so to speak. You were inspecting your father's business a minute before you knew it....

Cally, of course, had had not the faintest idea what to expect at the Works. She had prepared herself to view horrors with calm and detachment, if such proved to be the iron law of business. But, gazing confusedly at the dim, novel spectacle that so suddenly confronted her, she saw nothing of the kind. Her heart, which had been beating a little faster than usual, rose at once.

Technically speaking, which was the way Mr. MacQueen spoke, this was the receiving-and stemming-room. It was as big as a barn, the full size of the building, except for the end cut off to make the offices. Negroes worked here; negro men, mostly wearing red undershirts. They sat in long rows, with quick fingers stripping the stems from the not unfragrant leaves. These were stemmers, it was learned. Piles of the brown tobacco stood beside each stemmer, bales of it were stacked, ceiling-high, at the farther end of the room, awaiting their attentions. The negroes eyed the visitors respectfully. They were heard to laugh and joke over their labors. If they knew of anything homicidal in their lot, certainly they bore it with a fine humorous courage.

Down the aisle between the black rows, Cally picked her way after Hugo and Mr. MacQueen. Considering that all this was her father's, she felt abashingly out of place, most intrusive; when she caught a dusky face turned upon her she hastily looked another way. Still, she felt within her an increasing sense of cheerfulness. Washington Street sensibilities were offended, naturally. The busy colored stemmers were scarcely inviting to the eye; the odor of the tobacco soon grew a little overpowering; there were dirt and dust and an excess of steam-heat—"Tobacco likes to be warm," said MacQueen. And yet the dainty visitor's chief impression, somehow, was of system and usefulness and order, of efficient and on the whole well-managed enterprise.

"If there's anything the matter here," thought she, "men will have to quarrel and decide about it ... Just as I said."

The inspecting party went upward, and these heartening impressions were strengthened. On the second floor was another stemming-room, long and hot like the other; only here the stemming was done by machines—"for the fancy goods"—and the machines were operated by negro women. They were middle-aged women, many of them, industrious and quite placid-looking. Perhaps a quarter of the whole length of the room was prosaically filled with piled tobacco stored ready for the two floors of stemmers. The inspection here was brief, and to tell the truth, rather tame, like an anti-climax. Not a trace or a vestige of homicide was descried, not a blood-spot high or low....

Cally had been observing Hugo, who looked so resplendent against this workaday background, and felt herself at a disadvantage with him. He had not wanted to come at all, but now that they were here, he exhibited a far more intelligent interest in what he saw than she did or could. Oddly enough, he appeared to know a good deal about the making of cigars, and his pointed comments gradually elicited a new tone from MacQueen, who was by now talking to him almost as to an equal. Several times Cally detected his eyes upon her, not bored but openly quizzical.

"Learning exactly how a cheroot factory ought to be run?" he asked, sotto voce, as they left the second floor.

"Oh, exactly!... For one thing, I'd recommend a ventilator or two, shouldn't you?"

She felt just a little foolish. She also felt out of her element, incidental, irresponsible, and genuinely relieved. Still, through this jumble of feelings she had not forgotten that they were yet to see that part of the Works which she had specially come to peep at....

Progress upward was by means of a most primitive elevator, nothing but an open platform of bare boards, which Mr. MacQueen worked with one hand, and which interestingly pushed up the floor above as one ascended. As they rose by this quaint device, Carlisle said:

"Is this next the bunching-room, Mr. MacQueen?"

"It is, Miss."

"Bunching-room!" echoed Hugo, with satiric admiration. "You are an expert...."

The lift-shaft ran in one corner of the long building. Debarking on the third floor, the visitors had to step around a tall, shining machine, not to mention two workmen who had evidently just landed it. Several other machines stood loosely grouped here, all obviously new and not yet in place.

Hugo, pointing with his stick, observed: "Clearing in new floor-space, I see."

MacQueen nodded. "Knocked out a cloak-room. Our fight here's for space. Profits get smaller all the time...."

"H'm.... You figured the strain, I suppose. Your floor looks weak."

"Oh, it'll stand it," said the man, shortly. "This way."

Carlisle wondered if the weak floor was what her friend Vivian had meant when he said, in his extreme way, that the Works might fall down some day. She recalled that she had thought the building looked rather ricketty, that day last year. But these thoughts hardly entered her mind before the sight of her eyes knocked them out. The visitors squeezed around the new machines, and, doing so, stepped full into the bunching-room. And the girl saw in one glance that this was the strangest, the most interesting room she had ever seen in her life.

Her first confused sense was only of an astonishing mass of dirty white womanhood. The thick hot room seemed swarming with women, alive and teeming with women, women tumbling all over each other wherever the eye turned. Tall clacking machines ran closely around the walls of the room, down the middle stood a double row of tables; and at each machine, and at every possible place at the tables, sat a woman crowded upon a woman, and another and another.

Dirt, noise, heat, and smell: women, women, women. Conglomeration of human and inhuman such as the eyes of the refined seldom look upon.... Was this, indeed, the pleasantest place to work in town?...

"Bunchin' and wrappin'," said MacQueen. "Filler's fed in from that basin on top. She slips in the binder—machine rolls 'em together.... Ye can see here."

They halted by one of the bunching-machines, and saw the parts dexterously brought together into the crude semblance of the product, saw the embryo cigars thrust into wooden forms which would shape them yet further for their uses in a world asmoke....

"Jove! Watch how her hands fly!" said Hugo, with manlike interest for processes, things done. "Look, Carlisle."

Carlisle looked dutifully. It was in the order of things that she should bring Hugo to the Works, and that, being here, he should take charge of her. But, unconsciously, she soon turned her back to the busy machine, impelled by the mounting interest she felt to see bunching, not in detail, but in the large.

Downstairs the workers had been negroes; here they were white women, a different matter. But Cally had a closer association than that, in the girl she had just been talking to, Corinne, who had worked three years in this room. It wasn't so easy to preserve the valuable detached point of view, when you actually knew one of the people....

"Three cents a hundred," said MacQueen's rugged voice.

There was a fine brown dust in the air of the teeming room, and the sickening smell of new tobacco. Not a window in the place was open, and the strong steam heat seemed almost overwhelming. The women had now been at it for near nine hours. Damp, streaked faces, for the most part pale and somewhat heavy, turned incessantly toward the large wall-clock at one end of the room. Eyes looked sidewise upon the elegant visitors, but then the flying fingers were off again, for time is strictly money with piecework ... How could they stand being so crowded, and couldn't they have any air?

"Oh, five thousand a day—plenty of them."

"Five thousand!—how do they do it?"

"We had a girl do sixty-five hundred. She's quit ... Here's one down here ain't bad."

The trio moved down the line of machines, past soiled, busy backs. Close on their left was the double row of tables, where the hurrying "wrappers" sat like sardines. Cally now saw that these were not women at all, but young girls, like Corinne; girls mostly younger than she herself, some very much younger. Only they seemed to be girls with a difference, girls who had somehow lost their girlhood. The rather nauseating atmosphere which enveloped them, the way they were huddled together yet never ceased to drive on their tasks, the slatternly uncorseted figures, stolid faces and furtive glances; by something indefinable in their situation, these girls seemed to have been degraded and dehumanized, to have lost something more precious than virtue.

Yet some of them were quite pretty, beneath dust and fatigue; one, with a quantity of crinkly auburn hair, was very pretty, indeed. The girl Corinne, after three years here, was both pretty and possessed of a certain delicacy; a delicacy which forbade her to tell Mr. Heth's daughter what she really thought about the Works. For that must have been it....

"This 'un can keep three wrappers pretty busy when she's feelin' good. Can't yer, Miller?... Ye'll see the wrappers there, in a minute."

This 'un, or Miller, was a tall, gaunt, sallow girl, who handled her machine with the touch of a master, eliminating every superfluous move and filling a form of a dozen rough cheroots quickly enough to take a visitor's breath away. No doubt it was very instructive to see how fast cheroots could be made. However, the stirring interest of the daughter of the Works was not for mechanical skill.

Cally stood with a daintily scented handkerchief at her nostrils, painfully drinking in the origins of the Heth fortune. The safeguarding sense of irresponsibility ebbed, do what she might. Well she knew that this place could not be so bad as it seemed to her; for then her father would not have let it be so. For her to seem to disapprove of papa's business methods was mere silly impertinence, on top of the disloyalty of it. But none of the sane precepts she had had two weeks to think out seemed to make any answer to the disturbing sensations she felt rising, like a sickness, within her....

Her sense was of something polluting at the spring of her life. Here was the soil that she was rooted in, and the soil was not clean. It might be business, it might be right; but no argument could make it agreeable to feel that the money she wore upon her back at this moment was made in this malodorous place, by these thickly crowded girls.... Was it in such thoughts that grew this sense of some personal relation of herself with her father's most unpleasant bunching-room? Was it for such reasons that V. Vivian had asked her that day at the Settlement why didn't she go to the Works some day?...

She heard Hugo's voice, with a note of admiration for visible efficiency: "How do they keep it up at this clip nine hours?"

"Got to do it, or others will."

"You expect each machine to produce so much, I suppose?"

And Cally, so close to her lordly lover that her arm brushed his, was seeing for the first time in her life what people meant when they threw bricks at papa on election night, or felt the strong necessity of attacking him in the papers. By processes that were less mental than emotional, even physical, she was driven further down a well-trod path and stood dimly confronting the outlines of a vast interrogation.... What particular human worth had she, Cally Heth, that the womanhood of these lower-class sisters should be sapped that she might wear silk next her skin, and be bred to appeal to the highly cultivated tastes of a Canning?...

If there are experiences which permanently extend the frontiers of thought, it was not in this girl's power to recognize one of them closing down on her now. But she did perceive, by the growing commotion within, that she had made a great mistake to come to this place....

"Now, here's wrapping," said MacQueen. "Hand work, you see."

But his employer's daughter, it appeared, had seen enough of cigar-making for one day. At that moment she touched Canning's well-tailored arm.

"Let's go.... It's—stifling here."

Hugo, just turning from the bunching-machine, regarded her faintly horrified face with some amusement. And Carlisle saw that he was amused.

"I was wondering," said he, "how long your sociology would survive this air...."

The peep was meant to end there, and should have done so. But unluckily, at just that juncture, there came a small diversion. The gaunt girl Miller, by whose machine the little party stood, took it into her head to keep at it no longer.

Though nobody had noticed it, this girl had been in trouble for the last five minutes. The presence of the visitors, or of the superintendent, had evidently made her nervous; she kept looking half-around out of the darting corners of her eyes. Three times, as the men watched and talked about her, she had raised a hand in the heat and brushed it hurriedly before her eyes. And then, just as the superintendent turned from her and all would have been well again, her overdrawn nerve gave out. The hands became suddenly limp on the machine they knew so well; they slid backward, at first slowly and then with the speed of a falling body; and poor Miller slipped quietly from her stool to the floor, her head actually brushing the lady's skirt as she fell.

Cally stifled a little cry. Hugo, obvious for once, said, "Why, she's fainted!"—in an incredulous voice. Considerably better in action were the experienced Works people. MacQueen sprang for a water-bucket with a celerity which strongly suggested practice. A stout, unstayed buncher filled a long-felt want by flinging open a window. One from a neighboring machine sat on the floor, Miller's head on her lap. Two others stood by....

Carlisle, holding to the silenced machine with a small gloved hand, gazed down as at a bit of stage-play.

They had formed a screen about the fallen girl, under MacQueen's directions, to cut her off from the general view. The superintendent's gaze swept critically about. However, the sudden confusion had drawn the attention of all that part of the room, and concealment proved a too optimistic hope. The moment happened to be ripe for one of those curious panics of the imagination to which crowded womanhood is psychologically subject. Knowledge that somebody was down ran round the room as if it had been shouted; and on the knowledge, fear stalked among the tired girls, and the thing itself was born of the dread of it.

So it was that Carlisle, gripping fast to poor Miller's machine, heard an odd noise behind her, and turned with a sickening dropping of the heart. Five yards away a girl gave a little moan and flopped forward upon her machine. She was a fine, strapping young creature, and it is certain that two minutes before nothing had been further from her mind than fainting. It did not stop there. Far up the room a "wrapper" rose in the dense air, took her head in both hands and fell backward into the arms of the operative next her. In the extreme corner of the great room a little stir indicated that another had gone down there. Work had almost ceased. Many eyes stared with sudden nervous apprehension into other eyes, as if to say: "Am I to be the next?..."

MacQueen's voice rang out—a fine voice it was, the kind that makes people sit down again in a fire-scared theatre:

"Take your seats, every one of you.... Nothing's going to happen. You're all right, I say. Go on with your work. Sit down. Get to work...."

"Air," said Cally Heth, in a small colorless voice.

Hugo wheeled sharply.

"Great heavens!—Carlisle!... Do you feel faint?"

He had her at the open window in a trice, clasping her arm tight, speaking masculine encouragement.... "Hold hard, my dear!... I should have watched you.... Now, breathe this.... Gulp it in, Cally...."

His beloved, indeed, like the work-sisters, had felt the brush of the black wing. For an instant nothing had seemed surer than that the daughter of the Works would be the fifth girl to faint in the bunching-room that day; she had seen the floor rise under her whirling vision....

But once at the window the dark minute passed speedily. The keen October air bore the gift of life. Blood trickled back into the dead white cheeks.

"I ... was just a little dizzy," said Cally, quite apologetically....

And, though the visitors departed then, almost immediately, all signs of the sudden little panic in the bunching-room were already rapidly disappearing. Work proceeded. The gaunt girl Miller, who had earned MacQueen's permanent dislike by starting all the trouble, was observed sitting again at her machine, hands and feet reaching out for the accustomed levers.

* * * * *

It made an amazing difference simply to be outdoors again. The last few minutes in the Works had been like a waxing nightmare. But the sunshine was bright and sane; the raw clean winds blew the horrors away. Carlisle, realizing that she had been swept along toward something like hysterics, struggled with some success to recapture poise and common sense.

But she could not now quite strike the manner of one who has merely paused for an irresponsible peep. Hugo was aware of a change in her, before they were fairly in the car again. He had occasion to reflect anew, not without irritation, what an unfortunate turn she had given to the afternoon of romance, over his own plainly expressed wishes....

Yet nothing could have exceeded his solicitousness. He seemed to feel that he had been neglectful upstairs, that she would not have felt faint if he had properly presided over her movements. Cally had to assure him half a dozen times in as many blocks that she felt quite herself again.

And, meantime, he conscientiously gave himself to relieving her mind of the effects of her own feminine foolishness. That queer and undoubtedly upsetting bit of "crowd psychology" they had seen—that, he pointed out, had come merely from the unusual heat, the control of the steam-pipes happening to be out of whack to-day. Such a thing didn't happen once in six months; so that surly fellow MacQueen had said. Of course, producing wealth was a hard business at best, let none deny it. Everybody would like to see factories run on the model theory, like health resorts, but the truth was that those ideas were mostly wind and water, and had never worked out yet. An owner must think of his profits first, unfeeling as that might seem; else he would have to shut up shop, and then where would those girls be for a living? They needn't work for her father unless they wanted to, of course....

"You should look into a cannery some day, for sights—by which I mean that you shouldn't do anything of the sort!... Oh, get us to some quieter street there, Frederick!... But it was my fault for agreeing to go with you. I knew, as you couldn't, that a going factory's no place for a girl delicately brought up. Those women don't mind. That is, as a rule ..."

Carlisle responded to this sensible treatment with what lightsomeness she could muster; but the odd truth was that she hardly listened to Hugo. Heaven knew that she needed the strong sane arguments, heaven knew that he could state them all unanswerably. And yet, just as she was aware that her woman's feelings about the bunching-room would have no weight with Hugo, so she was curiously aware that Hugo's arguments produced no effect at all upon her. If she had relied upon him as a demolishing club against Vivian, the over-sympathetic, it appeared that his strength was not equal to the peculiar demand. And all at once she seemed to have gotten to know her lover very well; there were no more surprises in him. She suddenly perceived a strange and hitherto unsuspected likeness between Hugo and mamma, in that you could not talk over things with either of them....

"Remember, Cally," he said, summing up, "this is the first factory you've ever seen in your life. You've nothing at all to judge by, in a business matter of this sort—"

Something in his tone flicked her briefly out of her resolve not to argue; but she spoke lightly enough.

"Yes, I judge by the way it made me feel. I judge everything that way."

"That's natural, of course," said he, with a slight smile, "but after all it's rather a woman's way of judging things than a sociologist's. Isn't it?"

"But I am a woman."

The car shook off the dust of the business district, mounted a long hill, bowled into streets fairer than Canal. Hugo's sense of a grievance deepened. Granted that she had nearly fainted, as a consequence of her own foolish perversity, it was surely now due to him that she should begin to be her sweet natural self again.

He had had quite enough of this irrational invasion of his afternoon; and so, having said just a word or two in reply to her last remark, he banished the matter from the conversation.

"Now," said he, "to fresh woods and pastures new, and a song of the open road!... Which way shall we go?"

Cally hesitated.

"I'm sorry, Hugo—but I think I should like to go home, if you don't mind."

"Home?"

"I really don't feel quite like a drive now. I'm very sorry—"

Canning gazed down at her in dismay.

"I knew you didn't feel quite yourself yet. You couldn't deceive me ... But don't let's go home! Why, this air is the very thing you need, Carlisle. It will set you up in no time."

But no, she seemed to think that was not what she needed, nor were her doubts removed by several further arguments from him.

Canning sat back in the care with an Early Christian expression. She had said, not five minutes ago, that she felt perfectly well; perfectly well she looked. Was it imaginable that she really took seriously the absurd little smatterings of new-womanism she had picked up, God knew where, while waiting for love to come?...

"Carlisle," he began, patiently, "I understand your feelings perfectly, of course, and natural enough they are to a girl brought up as you've been. At the same time, I'm not willing to leave you feeling disgusted with your father's methods of—"

"Disgusted with papa!" exclaimed Cally, quite indignantly. But she added, in a much more tempered tone: "Why, Hugo—how could you think such a thing?... I assure you I'm disgusted with nobody on earth but myself."

At that the annoyed young man gave a light laugh.

"I'm evidently about fifty years before the war, as you say down here. I can't understand, to save me, how—"

"I know it, Hugo. You never understand how I feel about things, and always assume that I'll feel the way you want me to."

Carlisle spoke quietly, almost gently. Yet Canning's feeling was like that of a man who, in the dark, steps down from a piazza at a point where steps are not. The jolt drove some of the blood from his cheek. But his only reply was to poke his hired driver in the back with his stick and say, distantly: "Nine hundred and three Washington."

The hired car rolled swiftly, in sun and wind, toward the House of Heth. Cobblestones were left behind; the large wheels skimmed the fair asphaltum. Three city blocks they went with no music of human speech....

"But I didn't mean to seem rude," said Cally, in a perfectly natural manner, "and I am really very sorry to—to change the afternoon's plans. I don't feel quite well, and I think perhaps I ought to rest—just till dinner-time. You remember you are dining with us to-night."

The apology, the pacific, non-controversial tone, unbent the young man instantly. Small business for the thinking sex to harbor a grudge against an irrational woman's moment of pique. Moreover, whatever this woman's foibles, Hugo Canning chanced to find himself deep in love with her. He met her advance with only a slight trace of stiffness. By the time they arrived at the Heth house, mamma's two young people were chatting along almost as if nothing had happened....

However, back at home, Cally seemed unresponsive to Hugo's overture in the direction of his lingering awhile in the drawing-room. It became evident that the afternoon was ruined beyond repair. He paused but a moment, to see whether any telegrams or telephone calls had been sent up for him from the hotel.

It proved that there was nothing of the sort. The lover looked relieved. He wished his lady a refreshing rest, apropos of the evening. Beneath his feeling that he was an ill-used man, there had risen in Canning the practical thought that he had let this wild sweet thing get too sure of him....

"I shall see you then," said he, at the door, "at seven-thirty."

"Yes, indeed.... I'll be quite myself again then. Au revoir!"

She stood alone, in the dim and silent hall. The house was sweet with Hugo's flowers. Cally, standing, picked a red rose slowly to pieces. She could pursue her own thoughts now, and her struggle was against thinking ill of her father. If it was the extreme of sympathy with the poor to regard the Works as a homicidal place, then her present impulse was plainly toward such extremity. But she dared not allow that impulse its head, fearful of the far-reaching consequences that would thereby be entailed. Yet, even from the cheeriest view, it was clear that the Works were a pretty bad place—Hugo himself had tacitly admitted that by the arguments he employed,—and if that was so, what was to be said for papa? Possibly she and mamma did have some connection with the business, but it would be simply foolish to say that they were responsible for the overcrowding in the bunching-room. How could she be—how could she?—she, to whom her father had never spoken seriously in his life, who had never even seen the Works inside till to-day? No, it was papa's business. He was responsible; and it was a responsibility indeed....

It was quarter-past five. So, presently, the tall hall-clock said, on its honor as a reliable timepiece.... Only an hour since she and Hugo had met in front of Morland's....

Still the girl did not hurry up to her rest-chamber. She wandered pointlessly from empty hall to silent drawing room. There had descended upon her that sense of loneliness in the great world, to which in the spring and summer she had been no stranger. She felt listless and oddly tired. Presently, when she had thought about it a little, she was certain that she felt quite unwell; almost ill. The strong probability was that she had a bad sick headache coming on; small wonder, either, after nearly fainting with poor Miller and others at the Works....

Cally considered whether she did not owe it to her health to dine from a tray this evening, giving Hugo to-morrow morning instead. Even as she revolved this thought—with especial reference to explaining it to mamma—there came her humble admirer, Flora Johnson, col'd, saying that Mr. Canning begged to speak to her a minute at the telephone.

"Mr. Canning?"

Flora said yas'm, and flashed her dazzling teeth. Her mistress ascended the stairs in surprise, wondering what reason Hugo would assign for wanting to come back.

However, Hugo's intentions were the contrary. His unhappy request was to be excused from dinner this evening.

The young man's voice over the wire was at once regretful, annoyed, and (somewhat) apologetic. There was, it seemed, the devil to pay over certain entanglements of the rate-case matter. He had found Mr. Deming, of his law firm, waiting for him at the hotel. Mr. Deming had come for a conference which could not be postponed; he had to get back to Washington by the nine-thirty train. Would Carlisle make his excuses to Mrs. Heth, and know for herself how disappointed he was?

He spoke in loverly vein, and Cally was able to answer soothingly. She mentioned that she would probably withdraw from the dinner, too; so that even mamma's table would not be upset at all. He would be much missed, of course. The suggestion emerged, or perhaps it was merely in the air, that Hugo was to come in, if he could, in the later evening.

Cally was at the telephone some three minutes. Turning away, she did not go at once to rest, though now halfway to her room. If she was not going to dinner, there was more time, of course. Or possibly her head had taken a slight turn for the better. The girl leaned against the banisters in the quiet upper hall, full of depression. And then she said aloud, with a resolution that was perhaps not so sudden as it seemed:

"I'll go and see Hen Cooney!"



XXIX

One Hour, in which she apologizes twice for her Self, her Life and Works; and once she is beautifully forgiven, and once she never will be, this Side of the Last Trump.

The Cooneys' door was opened, after the delay usual with the poor, by Henrietta herself, this moment returned from the bookstore. Hen wore her hat, but not her coat, and it was to be observed that one hand held a hot-water bottle, imperfectly concealed behind her back.

"Hurrah!—Cally!" cried she. "We were talking of you at dinner to-day, wondering what had become of you. Come into the house, and don't mind a bit if this bottle leaks all over you. Such troubles!"

"How is Chas to-day? I just heard that he hadn't been at work for a week."

"Chas?... Chas is better—Cousin Martha's worse—father's just the same—Looloo's dancing the floor with a toothache." Hen recited this in the manner of a chant, and added, as she ushered her Washington Street cousin into the little parlor: "But for that, we're all doing nicely—thank you!"

"Gracious, Hen! I'd no idea you had such a hospital. Why, what's the matter with Uncle John?"

"Oh, just his lumbago. He's complaining, but out and about—fighting over the Seven Days around Richmond with an old comrade somewhere, I doubt not.... Sit down, my dear," added Hen, who had been looking at Cally just a little curiously, "and excuse me while I run upstairs. I forgot to explain that this bottle is for mother, who's down with a splitting headache. Back in a jiffy...."

Thus Miss Cooney, not knowing that for one moment, at least, her society had been preferred above that of a Canning. Such was the odd little development. Carlisle, having been more with Henrietta in the past five weeks than she had commonly been in a year, had discovered her as undoubtedly a person you could talk things over with—the only person in the world, perhaps, that you could talk this over with....

Possibly Hen, being a lynx-eyed Cooney, had somehow gathered that her lovely cousin had not dropped in merely to "inquire"; for when she returned to the parlor, having doubtless put her hot-water bottle where it would do the most good, she did not expend much time on reporting upon her invalids, or become involved in the minor doings of the day. Very soon she deflected, saying:

"But you don't look particularly fit yourself, Cally. What's wrong with the world?"

Cally, being still uncertain how far she cared to confide in Hen, met the direct question with a tentative lightness.

"Oh!... Well, I did just have a rather unpleasant experience, though I didn't know I showed it in my face!... We happened to look in at the Works for a few minutes—Mr. Canning and I—and I certainly didn't enjoy it much ..." And then, the inner pressure overcoming her natural bent toward reserve, she spoke with a little burst: "Oh, Hen, it was the most horrible place I ever saw in my life!"

The little confidence spoke straight to the heart, as a touch of genuine feeling always will. Quite unconsciously, Henrietta took her cousin's hand, saying, "You poor dear ..." And within a minute or two Cally was eagerly pouring out all that she had seen in the bunching-room, with at least a part of how it had made her feel.

Hen listened sympathetically, and spoke reassuringly. If her "arguments" followed close in the footsteps of Hugo,—for Hen was surprisingly well-informed in unexpected ways,—it must have been some quality in her, something or other in her underlying "attitude," that invested her words with a new horsepower of solace. And Saltman's best stenographer actually produced an argument that Hugo had altogether passed by. She thought it worth while to point out that these things were not a question of abstract morals at all, but only of changing points of view....

"When Uncle Thornton learned business," declared Hen, "there wasn't a labor law in the country—no law but supply and demand—pay your work-people as little as you could, and squeeze them all they'd stand for. Nobody ever thought of anything different. In those days the Works would have been a model plant—nine-hour day, high wages, no women working at night, no children...."

If Cally was not wholly heartened by words like these, she knew where the lack was. And perhaps Hen herself was conscious of something missing. For, having defended her uncle's Works at least as loyally as she honestly could, she gave the talk a more personal tone, skirting those phases of the matter so new-thoughty that they had never even occurred to Hugo Canning.

"Cally, are you going to speak to Uncle Thornton about it—about your going there, I mean?"

"No, no!" cried Cally, hastily. "How could I? Of course I—realize that that's the way business must be—as you say. What right have I, an ignorant little fool, to set up as papa's critic?"

"Not at all—of course," said Hen, giving her hand a little squeeze. "What I—"

"You surely can't think that I ought to go and reprove papa for the way he runs his business—do you, Hen?... That I—I'm responsible in any way!"

Hen noted her cousin's unexplained nervousness, and it may be she divined a little further. She answered no, not a bit of it. She said she meant to speak to him, not as a business expert, but only as his daughter. It was always a mistake to have secrets in a family, said Hen.

Good advice, undoubtedly. Only Hen didn't happen to know the most peculiar circumstances....

The two girls sat side by side on a sofa that sorely needed the ministrations of an upholsterer. Hen was sweet-faced, but habitually pale, usually a little worn. Her eyes and expression saved her from total eclipse in whatever company; otherwise she would have been annihilated now by the juxtaposition of her cousin. Cally's face was framed in an engaging little turn-down hat of gold-brown and yellow, about which was carelessly festooned a long and fine brown veil. Hen, gazing rather wistfully, thought that Cally grew lovelier every year.

"I'll tell you, Cally!" she said, suddenly. "Do you know what you ought to do? Talk to V.V. about all this!"

Cally repressed a little start; though the thought, to speak truth, was far from being a new one. But how could she possibly talk to V.V. without the ultimate disloyalty to papa?...

"No," she said, quietly, after a brief pause. "I could hardly do that."

"Why not? He's thought out all these things further than anybody I know. And he'll—"

"Hen, have you forgotten what he wrote in the paper about papa last year—what he's going to write next month. Don't you see my position?"

"I don't care what he writes in the papers!... When it comes to people, there's nobody so kind—and wise. And—"

"He's the one person," said Cally, resolutely, "I could not possibly talk to about it."

Henrietta, falling back on the thought she had set out with, laughed good-naturedly.

"Then, I suppose, you'll want to fly at once. He's due here at any minute, you know—in fact, he's half an hour late now—"

"Here!... Is he coming here this afternoon?"

This time her start was without concealment. Hen looked genuinely surprised.

"He's our doctor—I told you the other day ... But he doesn't bite, my dear! You look as if I'd said that a grizzly bear and three mad ogres were loping down the steps."

"I never think of him as a doctor somehow," said Cally, recovering, with a little laugh. "So I couldn't imagine—"

"Second largest practice in town—only I'll admit that his not charging any fees has something to do with it. In fact V.V.'s patients usually borrow anything that's loose, including his hats, suits, and shoes ... Cally, it's like a play, for I believe there he is now ..."

True enough, a firm but unequal footstep just then sounded on the Cooneys' wooden steps outside. But Hen sat still, a far-away look in her eyes.

"Did you hear what Pond said, Cally, the first time he saw V.V.?—'Who's that man with the face like a bishop that never grew up?'... Do you know, I never look at him without remembering mean things I've done and said, and wishing I hadn't ..."

She rose as the bell rang, started toward the door, hesitated, turned in the middle of the floor.

"I'd naturally ask him in here, Cally, while I went up to see if things are ready for him upstairs. Of course, if you'd rather not see him ..."

Cally had risen too. The two girls stood looking at each other.

"No," said Cally, "I'd like to see him. Only I can't speak to him about the Works. I cannot."

"No, no—of course not, dear, if you don't feel like it."

Hen went out to open the door. Greetings floated in....

Cally stood at the parlor window, staring out into the shabby street. Over the way was the flaring sign of an unpained dentist, making promises never to be redeemed, and two doors away the old stand of the artificial limb-maker. Cally looked full at a show-window full of shiny new legs; but she did not see the grisly spectacle, so it did not matter.

The unexpected encounter was deeply disturbing to her. There stirred in her the memory of another night when she had similarly met the slum doctor in this room, between engagements with Hugo Canning. That night he had asked her forgiveness for calling her a poor little thing, which she was, and she had charged him with wicked untruthfulness for calling the Works homicidal, which—she said it in her secret heart—they were.... How history repeats itself, how time brought changed angles! Strange, strange, that in the revolving months it had now come her turn to apologize to Mr. V.V. in the Cooney parlor. Only she could not make her apology, no matter how much she might want to....

"... Stop a minute," Hen was heard to say, "and pass the time of day ..."

Unintelligible murmuring, and then: "D'you know who it was that invented stopping and passing the time of day?" said the nearing voice of Mr. V.V., gayer than Cally Heth had ever heard it. "Take my word, 't was a woman."

"To make things pleasant for some man!—and we've been doing it ever since.... Cally Heth's here ..."

The two came in. Cally, turning, held out her hand to the Cooneys' physician, with a sufficiently natural air and greeting....

They had not met since the afternoon at the Woman's Club, a day which had brought a strange change in their relations. But then, each of their meetings seemed marked by some such realignment, and always to his advantage. Again and again she had put this man down, at first with all her strength; and each time when she turned and looked at him again, behold he had shot up higher than ever.

So Cally had just been thinking. But now that V. Vivian stood in the room, and she looked at him, she was suddenly reminded that he was her good friend nevertheless. And something like ease came back to her.

When Hen had disappeared to make the sick-room ready (or for whatever purpose she went), Cally said:

"I hope Chas isn't really going to be ill?"

"Oh, there's no trouble at all with him," replied the young man, "but to make him stay in bed. It's all come down to a touch of sore throat, a little sort of quinsy. We were rather afraid of diphtheria, the other night."

"My cousins are having more than their share, just now. So many, many invalids.... I hope you've been well, since I saw you last?"

"Oh, thank you!—I've the health of a letter-carrier. At least, I assume they're naturally healthy, though as a matter of fact I've had three or four postmen on my list ... I'm afraid I interrupted you and Henrietta?"

"Oh, no!—Or rather, I imagine she was only too glad to be interrupted.... I was telling her all my troubles, you see."

"Have you troubles? I'm sorry."

The man spoke in a light tone, such as is suitable for friendships. Yet he must have felt a throe then, remembering his articles: now so soon to go to the "Chronicle" office and the print that cried aloud. And the girl's case, had he but known it, was like his own, only more so. Beneath the cover of her casual talk, she was aware of thought coursing like a palpitating vein under a fine skin, threatening to break through at any minute....

"Oh, so many," said Cally.

They had remained standing, for to ask the doctor to sit down had not occurred to her. The girl glanced toward the window.

"And what do you suppose Hen's prescription was?... That I should take them all to you."

There was the briefest silence.

"But, of course, you didn't want to do that?"

She hesitated, and said: "Yes, I do want to ... But I can't."

That was the utmost that she meant to say. But then, as she glanced again at the lame alien whom time had so beautifully justified, more of her inner tide overflowed suddenly into speech.

"Do you know—I feel that I could tell you almost anything—things I wouldn't tell Hen, or anybody.... Oh, I could, I don't know why. You don't know for what a long time I've thought of you as my confidant, my friend.... Only, you see—these troubles aren't all my own...."

She stopped rather precipitately, turned away a little; stood twisting a glove between her fingers, and doing her best to show by her look that she had not said anything in particular....

The thoughts of these two were over hills and dales apart; and yet, by the nature of what was between them, they followed hard on the same trail. V.V. was far from possessing the Cooneys' detective gift. He saw only that this girl was troubled about something; and if his own thought never left the Heth Works, it was only because this was the point where his connection with her troubles cut him deep.

So in his ears chirped the voice of his now familiar: "Who appointed you a judge of people like this? Who knows better than you that they're doing the best they can? Tear up that stuff!..."

But aloud he said only: "I understand that, of course. And I'm grateful for the rest you say."

And Cally, five feet away from him, was learning that in some matters the business logic of it didn't help very much, that what counted was how you felt about them in your heart. If something terrible should happen at the Works now, if the building did fall down some day, collapsing with all those girls—did she think she could look again into this man's eyes and say: "Well, I had nothing to do with it?..."

But neither were her thoughts for publication; and she bridged the brief gap in the conversation with a not particularly successful smile, designed to show that of course nobody was taking all this very seriously.

"But why expect to do what we want? No one can," said she. "You don't mind my fidgeting about the room this way, do you? I seem a little out of humor to-day—not myself at all, as I was told just now...."

V.V. said that he did not mind.

"I wonder," she went on, "if you remember something you said in your speech the other day?—about being free.... It seemed strange to me then, that you should have happened to say just that, for I—I've come to realize that, in a kind of way, that's always been a wild dream of my own.... Don't you think—where there are so many things to think about, things and people—that it's pretty hard to be free?"

"Hard?... There's nothing else like it on earth for hardness."

V.V. stood grasping the back of an ancient walnut chair. It was seen that he belonged in this room, simple home of poverty; different from the girl, who was so obviously the rich exotic, the transient angel in the house.

He added: "But it's always seemed to me worth all the price of trying."

"Oh, it is—I'm sure. And yet.... It seems to me—I've thought," said Cally, somewhat less conversationally, "that life, for a woman, especially, is something like one of those little toy theatres—you've seen them?—where pasteboard actors slide along in little grooves when you pull their strings. They move along very nicely, and you—you might think they were going in that direction just because they wanted to. But they never get out of their grooves.... I know you'll think that a—a weak theory."

"No, I know it's a true theory."

Surely the girl could not have been thinking only of her father's business as she went on, more and more troubled in voice:

"So much seems to be all fixed and settled, before one's old enough to know anything about it—and then there's a great deal of pressure—and a great deal of restraint—in so many different ways.... Don't you think it's hard ever to get out of one's groove?"

"It's heroic."

She put back her trailing motor-veil, and said: "And for a woman especially?"

"It would take the strength of all the gods!... I mean, of course—as women are placed, to-day. Perhaps in some other day—perhaps to-morrow—"

He broke off suddenly; a change passed over his face.

"And yet," he added, in a voice gentle and full of feeling—"some of them are doing it to-day."

What his thought might be, she had no idea; but his personal implication was not to be mistaken. The man from the slums, who had mistakenly put his faith in her once before in the Cooneys' parlor, conceived that she was or might be one of these strong he spoke of; little suspecting her present unconquerable weakness.

Cally was startled into looking at him, a thing she had been rather avoiding; and looking, she looked instantly away. In Mr. V.V.'s eyes, that strange trusting look, which had not been frequently observable there of late, had saluted her like a banner of stars....

"Certainly I was not meant to be one of them," said she, rather faintly.

He must have meant only a general expression of confidence, she was sure of that; only to be kind and comforting. But to her, grappling with new hard problems, that strange gaze came like a torch lit in a cave at night. Much she had wondered how Vivian could possibly hold her responsible for what her father did, or left undone. And now in a flash it was all quite clear, and she saw that he had not been holding her responsible at all. No, this simple and good man, who let the crows bring his raiment, or not, as they preferred, had only reposed a trust in her—in Cally Heth. It was as if, that day at the Settlement, he had said to her, by his eyes: "I know you. Once you go to the Works, you won't rest till you've made things better...."