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advantages would think she had heaven on earth.”

“I hate it, I tell you. Flora and Snow and all those girls, with nothing on their brains except fellows and fancy work, make me positively sick.”

“I notice Flora had enough brains to become engaged to a fine young fellow with prospects like Vincent Bankhead.”

“Every time I sit down at that circle I think I’m going to scream. I just can’t rake up enthusiasm over French knots. Something in me begins to suffocate and I can’t get out from under. I hate it.”

Regarding her daughter through the bluish aroma of bacon in the frying, her early-morning coiffure and wrapper not lenient with her, a bitterness pulled at the lips of Mrs. Becker.

“That settles it. I’m going to have a talk with your father this morning.”

“Oh, mamma, please don’t begin a scene!”

“Ben, are you ready for breakfast? Come down. What do you do up there so long? You’ve been one solid hour splashing around the bathroom, as if I didn’t have to get down on my hands and knees to wipe up the flood around the bathtub. Hurry! Your daughter has something to say to you.”

“Coming, Carrie. Don’t get excited.”

“Don’t get excited! I think your father would ram that down my throat if this house was tumbling around our heads.”

It was true that Mr. Becker’s imperturbability incased him like a kindly coating of tallow. His daily and peremptory call to breakfast brought him down only after the last satisfactory application of whisk, tooth, hand, shoe, bath, and hair brush, his invariable white-linen string tie adjusted to a nicety, his neat gray business suit buttoned over a gradual embonpoint.

“If I took as good care of myself as my husband does, I’d live to be a thousand.”

“Now, little woman, you got up on the wrong side of bed to-day.”

On this particular morning he descended genial, rubbing cold, soap-exuding hands together.

“Well, little woman! Good morning, daughter.”

“Ben, I’m at my row’s end with Lilly. Something has got to be done or I can’t stand it.”

He sat down, an immediate tiredness out in his face, adjusting his napkin by the patent fasteners to each coat lapel.

“Now, Carrie, have you and Lilly been quarreling again? Doesn’t it seem too bad, Lilly, that you and your mother cannot get on without these disturbances? Your mother may have her peculiarities, but she means well.”

A ready wave of red self-commiseration dashed itself across Mrs. Becker’s face.

“I can’t stand it, Ben. I don’t know what she wants. Maybe you can please her. I can’t. Everything I do is wrong. Everything.”

In her little blue-gingham morning dress, out of which her neck flowered white and ever beautiful of nape, Lilly crumbled up her biscuit, eyes miserably down, the red-hot pricklings which invariably accompanied these scenes flashing over her and a crowding in her throat as if she must tear it open for language to make them understand.

“Talk to your father, now! Tell him some of the things you hound me with.”

“Lilly, what seems to be the trouble?”

“I–I don’t know. Mamma gets so excited right away. I just happened to mention that–I don’t know what to do with myself.”

“Do with yourself! Help me in the house. I can give you enough to do with yourself. I don’t get lonesome.”

“Carrie, now, don’t holler.”

“That’s the way she is, papa. She gets excited and hollers at me because I can’t get interested in sewing clubs and housework.”

“It’s because you’ve got it too good that you’re not satisfied. That Flora Kemble, that never has a decent thing to wear, gets engaged to a–“

“Now, Carrie, that’s no way to talk.”

“Mamma always makes me feel uncomfortable because I’m not married yet.”

“Now do you believe what I go through with, Ben?”

“You haven’t any faith in me, but–somewhere–destiny, or whatever you want to call it, has a job waiting for me!”

“That’s too poetical for me to keep up with. Thank goodness I’m a plain woman who knows her place in life.”

“Exactly, mamma. It isn’t that I consider myself above Flora’s party to-morrow night. It’s not my place. I don’t belong there. I hate it, I tell you.”

“You hear that, Ben? That’s the thanks I get. You know the way I’ve tried to make this little home one a child could be proud of. Take the time that fine young Bryant fellow came to call. Why, that little parlor of ours was fit for a princess. His knuckles didn’t suit her! They cracked, she said. I’ve heard of lots of excuses for not taking to boys, but that beats all. Three girls out of the sewing club already married and Flora engaged to that well-to-do Bankhead boy, and mine holds herself above them all.”

“Your mother isn’t all wrong, Lilly.”

“I’ve run my legs off for the white organdie so Katy Stutz could make it up for Flora’s engagement party to-morrow night. Does she appreciate it? Oh yes, long face is the kind of appreciation I get.”

“I’d rather stay home, mamma, and practice my singing or read–anything–“

“You’ll sing _there_. Mrs. Kemble has it all fixed for Flora to call on you just before the refreshments. If you begin to pout about this party, Lilly, I–“

“Oh,” cried Lilly, turning her face away to hide the embitterment of lip and still crumbling up her biscuit, “don’t worry. I’m going if–if it kills me.”

Suddenly Mrs. Becker’s face quivered ominously, the impending storm-cloud bursting.

“I wish I was dead. What do I get out of it? Struggle and sacrifice, and all for an ungrateful daughter that isn’t happy in her home.”

“It isn’t that. Just let me be–myself!”

“Then what is yourself? For God’s sake tell us what? Anything to end this state of affairs.”

“I’m suffocating here. Let me make something out of myself.”

“Listen to her, Ben. Make something. Her stories come back from the editors. Her teacher keeps telling me her voice isn’t ready yet. Miss Lee says her piano technique is lazy–“

“Then let me travel–college–anything.”

“She thinks we’re millionaires, Ben.”

“Lilly, Lilly! What is the young generation coming to?”

“I wish I was dead. Dead,” cried Mrs. Becker, beating at the table until the dishes shivered. Danger lights sprang out in little green signals around about the flanges of her nose. She was mounting to hysteria.

“Lilly, aren’t you ashamed to torture your mother like this?” cried Mr. Becker, his voice shot through with what for him amounted to a pistol report. “Comfort your mother. Apologize at once!”

“Mamma, I’m sorry! I am, dear.”

“You would think we were plotting against her.”

“Now, now, Carrie, Lilly doesn’t mean all she says.”

“But she eats my life out.”

“She wants to please us. Don’t you, Lilly?”

“Y-yes, papa–“

“Now let us see if things can’t run smoother in our little home, eh, Lilly? We’ll all try and do each his part, eh, Lilly?”

“Y-yes, papa.”

“It’s late,” cried Mrs. Becker, suddenly, on the single gong of half after seven, and, ever quick and kaleidoscopic of mood: “Katy Stutz will be here any minute. That’s her now. Run upstairs, Lilly, and take the top off the sewing machine and lay out the white organdie. Quick, Lilly. I want you to have it without fail for to-morrow night.”

CHAPTER IX

It was at this controversial gathering of young people at the home of Flora Kemble that Lilly met, for the first time, Albert Penny.

The Kemble home lent itself gracefully to occasions of this kind, the parlor and reception hall opening into one, and the impending refreshments in the dining room shut off with folding doors. There was more of ostentation in the Kemble home. More festooning of fringed scarfs, gilt chairs, and a glass curio cabinet crammed with knickknacks.

“Dutch as sauerkraut,” was Mrs. Becker’s indictment; and Flora Kemble came under the gaucherie of the impeachment, too.

She had attained tall and exceedingly supine proportions, wore pinks and blues and an invariable necklace of pink paste pearls to fine advantage, and a fuzz of yellow bangs that fell down over her eyes, only to be repeatedly flung back again.

Again MRS. BECKER (who could be caustic): “She makes me so nervous, with her hair down over her eyes like a poodle dog, that I could scream.”

Nevertheless, at eighteen Flora’s neat spiritous air lay calm as a wimple over her keenly motivated little self. The same apparently guileless exterior that had concealed her struggle along a road lit with midnight oil toward her graduation, enveloped the campaign of strategy and minutiae that had resulted victoriously in her engagement to Vincent Bankhead, assistant credit man to his father.

Albert Penny at this time was second-assistant buyer for Slocum-Hines, and, at the instance of his friend Vincent, somewhat reluctantly present.

“Al, what are you doing to-night?”

“Oh, about the same old thing! Take a stroll and turn in, I guess. Why?”

“There is a little gathering up at the Kembles’ this evening. Thought maybe you’d like to meet the girl. Nothing formal, just a few of the girls and boys over to celebrate.”

“I’m not much on that kind of thing, Bankhead. Guess you’d better count me out.”

“Come along. Want to show you the kind of little peach I’ve picked.”

“Ask me out some night to a quiet little supper, Bankhead. I feel a cold coming on.”

“Quiet little supper, nothing. That’s your trouble now, too much quiet. Nice people, her folks. It’ll do you good.”

And so it came that when the folding doors between the Kemble dining room and parlor were thrown open, Lilly Becker, still flushed from a self-accompanied rendition of “Angels’ Serenade” and an encore, “Jocelyn,” and Albert Penny, in a neat business suit and plaid four-in-hand, found themselves side by side, napkin and dish of ice cream on each of their laps, gay little bubbles of conversation, that were constantly exploding into laughter, floating up from off the gathering.

There is a photograph somewhere in an album of Lilly much as she must have looked that night. Her white organdie frock out charmingly around her, a fluted ruffle at the low neck forming fitting calyx for the fine upward flow of her high white chest into firm, smooth throat; the enormous puff sleeves of the period ending above the elbow where her arm was roundest; the ardent, rather upward thrust of face as if the stars were fragrant; the little lilt to the eyebrows; the straight gray eyes; the complexion smooth as double cream, flowing in cleanest jointure into the shining brown hair, worn in an age of Psyche or Pompadour, so swiftly and shiningly drawn back that it might have been painted there.

That was the Lilly Becker upon whom Albert Penny cast the first second glance he had ever spared her sex.

“Miss Becker, we certainly did enjoy your solo.”

She was still warmed from the effort, the tingling nervousness of the moment not yet died down, and she was eager and grateful.

“Oh, Mr. Penny, did you really? I was so afraid I flatted there at the end.”

“I had to laugh the way they broke in with clapping before you were finished. I knew you weren’t done.”

“Oh, then you’re musical, too?”

“No, but I could see there was one more page you hadn’t turned.”

“Oh!”

“My! but you can go high! Like a regular opera singer.”

“Oh, if I thought you meant that! It’s my ambition to sing–real big opera, you know.”

“It certainly was a pretty song, not so much the song as the way you sang it. I could understand every word.”

“If only my parents could hear you say that. You see, they don’t approve. They think it’s all right for a girl to have a parlor voice, but it must stop right there, otherwise it becomes a liability instead of an asset.”

At this little conceit of speech he turned delighted eyes upon her.

“Why, you’re a regular little business woman!” he cried.

“Yes,” she sighed out at him through a smile, “I took the commercial course at High.”

Inhibitions induce callosities, and Albert Penny’s inhibitions, incased within the shell of himself, were as catalogic as Homer’s list of ships. First, like Tithonus, he had no youth. Persiflage, which he secretly envied in others, on his own lips went off like damp fireworks. He loved order and his mind easily took in statistics. He had invented a wire kind of dish for utilizing the left-over blobs of soap. He never received so much as a street-car transfer without reading its entire face contents. In seven years he had not availed himself of the annual two weeks’ vacation offered him by his firm, and, conspire as he would against it, Sunday continued to represent to him a hebdomadal vacuity of morning paper, afternoon nap and walk, unsatisfactory cold supper, and early to bed. His very capacity for monotony seemed to engender it. He could sit in Forest Park the whole of a Sunday afternoon, poring over a chance railroad time-table picked up on the bench; paring his straight, clean finger nails with a penknife; observing the carriages go by; or sit beside the lake, watching the skiffs glide about at twenty-five cents the hour; and finally, hat brim down over his eyes, doze until twilight seeped damply into his consciousness.

This same unsensitiveness to routine had enhanced his value with Slocum-Hines from delivery boy at fifteen to second-assistant buyer at twenty-five, an amenability, however, that threatened to pauperize him of any capacity for play. Under the well-meant banterings of friends he became conscious of it, but to cast it off was to cast off the thing he was. He tried to learn to recreate, and took Saturday-evening street-car rides to Forest Park Highlands and joined a bowling club. He paid ten dollars in advance for a course of six dancing lessons, too, and only took four of them.

There had never been a woman, a perfume, or a regret in his life. In the period of ten years since his migration from the paternal farm ten miles outside of Sparta, Missouri, he had worked for one firm, boarded with one landlady, and eaten about three thousand quick lunches in the Old Rock Bakery at Lucas Avenue and Broadway. To further account for the state of existing hiatus in Mr. Penny’s scheme of things would be tautology.

A short femur line gave him an entirely false appearance of stockiness. On the contrary, he stood a full five feet ten, was thewed with fine compactness and solid with clean living and clean with solid living. Even the fiber of his remarkably fine hair was strong. It was the brilliant honey color of full-moon shine, lay off his brow, but not down, lending him a look of distinction to which he was hardly entitled.

He regarded Lilly with a furtiveness prompted solely by a desire not to appear audacious. Her softly rising throat just recovering its normal beat reminded him of the sweet agitation of pigeons in the park. He was close enough to be conscious of an amazing impulse on his part to reach over and touch the soft white flesh above the cove of her elbow. A little blue thread of a vein showed there, maddeningly. A sense of inner pounding suffocated him. He felt as if he had suddenly stepped into a bath of charged waters, little explosions all over the surface of him. Then a numbness so that, when he placed his tongue to the roof of his mouth, it was insensate, and, somewhat frightened, he pinched the back of his hand, relieved by the stab of pain.

“Do you dance, Mr. Penny?”

“Me? I–No, I guess I’m what you would call temperance when it comes to frolics.”

A little clearing had been made in the parlor, a music box pricking out the “Blue Danube.” From the dining room they sat regarding the three or four couples, Lilly marking time with the toe of her white-kid slipper. The elixir of the dance could rush to her head like wine, but she was not sought after as a partner, due to her reserve against a too locked embrace and a curious tendency to lead.

“To me, dancing is poetry as written by the feet.”

He relieved her of her napkin and ice-cream dish, eager for suitable reply to this syrupy observation.

“Speaking of feet, have you seen the show at Forest Park Highlands this week?”

“No.”

“Well, really remarkable. There is an armless fellow there who eats and juggles, even writes, with his toes.”

“Indeed!”

“Sometime if you would honor me by–by accompanying–I–er–Becker, did I understand the name to be? I wonder if by any chance you are related to Ben Becker.”

She turned upon him with the immemorial sense of a point about to be scored, her eyes full of relish.

“Why, I think I’m slightly related, Mr. Penny. He happens to be my father.”

He whacked his thigh.

“You don’t tell me! Why, I’ve bought rope and twine from your father for three years! A mighty fine gentleman, there. Well, well, this is a small world, after all.”

She noticed his large, protuberant Adam’s apple throbbing with the accelerando of pleasure, and a thaw set in between them. He let his arm drape over the back of her chair, a stolen sense of her nearness dizzying him. He was like a man with a suddenly developed new sense, which he could not tickle enough.

“Well, well!” he said. “Well, well, well!” And she sighed out again through her smile that he could fall so short of what he looked to be.

“I used to say, when I was a little girl, Mr. Penny, that I wished my father were in a more romantic business than rope and twine. I wanted him to be a florist or a wood carver or a music publisher or some of the perfectly silly things that girls get into their heads.”

“I always say of myself that I must have been born with a wooden spoon in my mouth. Took to hardware from the very start. Left my stepfather’s farm and general store at fifteen and made a bee line for the hardware business before I hardly knew what hardware meant. I suppose I’ll die with my nose to one of those very grindstones we carry in stock and be buried with one of those same wooden spoons in my mouth. Although I always say, no burial for mine. Burn me up–cremate me when I’m finished here.”

“Papa is that way, too, about his business, I mean. Tied up in twine, I tell him.”

“Just ask your father if he knows Albert Penny, Miss Becker. Queer how things happen. This very day I turned over a memorandum to the head of my department, advising a certain buy in hemp rope, Becker and Co. in the back of my head all the time.”

At eleven o’clock the first guest rose to go, Lilly following immediate suit.

His state of eagerness rose redly to his ears.

“Will you permit me to escort you home, Miss Becker?”

“Why, yes, if it won’t upset Flora’s plans for me. I only live two blocks over on Page.”

“I wish you lived as far as Carondalet,” he said, choking over words too strange to be his.

They walked home through quiet streets that smelled sweetly and moistly.

He was scrupulously careful of her at crossings, his tingling fingers closing over the roundest part of her arm, the warmth of her shining through to the fabric of her eider-down-bordered cape, lending it a vibrant living quality that thrilled him.

“I certainly have enjoyed a perfect evening, Miss Becker.”

The magic of youth stole out of the citified night upon her.

“See!” she cried, her arm darting out of her cape, “that’s Taurus up there. I can always tell him. He’s green. See how he glitters to-night. Sometimes I feel sorry for Taurus. It’s as if his little emerald soul is bursting to twinkle itself out of the monotony of all the white ones. That’s what they were at the party to-night, all white. All of a color.”

“Except you.”

“Oh! Do you know the names of the stars, Mr. Penny?”

“I know the Dipper. It’s our trade-mark, you know. That’s how I happened to work out our nest of aluminum dippers. Wonder if you wouldn’t permit me to bring you out a set of those dippers, Miss Becker. All sizes fitted into one another. Just a little kitchen novelty you might enjoy.”

They were at her front steps now, the hall light flickering out over them.

“I just certainly have enjoyed this evening, Miss Becker.”

“Nice of you to put it that way, Mr. Penny,” she said, trying to appear unconscious of the unmistakable suns in his eyes.

“I–I’m not much of a fellow for this kind of thing, but I see I’ve been making a mistake. A fellow like myself ought to get about more. But most of the–er–er–ladies–young ladies–I have met, if you will pardon my saying it, haven’t been the sensible kind like yourself that a fellow could sit down and have a talk with.”

“I’m not very congenial, either, Mr. Penny, with the boys and girls I am thrown in with. Flora’s all right, and Vincent, but I’d rather stay at home with my music or a good book than waste my time with social life. I just ache sometimes for something better.”

“Well, well,” he said, “we certainly agree in a lot of ways. I thought I was the only home body.”

She was inside the door now, bare arm escaping the cape and out toward him.

“Good night, Miss Becker. I–I hope I may be permitted to bring over those dippers some evening.”

“Why–er–yes, thank you.”

“Good night.”

Turning out the hall light, Lilly felt her way carefully upstairs to save creaks.

“Lilly, that you?”

“Yes.”

“Tear your dress?”

“No.”

“Turn out the hall light?”

“Yes.”

“Tight? Wait. I’m getting up.”

“Never mind.”

But during the process of Lilly’s undressing, huddled on the bed edge, arms hugging herself, Mrs. Becker held midnight commune.

“Who was there?”

“Oh, the usual crowd.”

“Refreshments?”

“The usual.”

“Anybody admire your dress?”

“No.”

“Don’t tell me too much, Lilly. I might enjoy hearing it.”

“But, mamma, won’t it keep until to-morrow? I’m sleepy now, dear.”

“Who brought you home–Roy?”

“A Mr. Penny.”

“Who? I thought you said only the old crowd was there. It’s like pulling teeth to get a word out of you.”

“A friend of Vincent’s. Works at Slocum-Hines’s.”

“Seems to me I’ve heard your father mention that name. Penny–familiar. Is he nice?”

Lilly shuddered into a yawn. In the long drop of nightdress from shoulder to peeping toes, her hair cascading straight but full of electric fluff to her waist, she was as vibrant and as eupeptic as Diana, and as aloof from desire.

“Yes, he’s nice enough–“

“Penny–certainly–familiar name.”

“–if you like him.”

“What?”

“I say he’s nice enough if you like his kind.”

“Well, Miss Fastidious, I wish I knew who your kind is.”

“I wish I did too, mamma.”

Suddenly Mrs. Becker leaned to the door, her voice lifted.

“Ben!”

“Oh, mamma, he’s asleep!”

“Oh, Ben!”

“Mamma, how can you?”

“Y-yes, Carrie.”

“Isn’t that assistant buyer down at Slocum-Hines’s, the one you say has thrown some orders in your way, named Penny?”

“Mamma, surely that will keep until morning.”

“Isn’t it, Ben?”

“Yes, Carrie; but come back to bed.”

“I knew it! He’s one of the coming young men at Slocum-Hines’s. Vincent Bankhead swears by him. He throws some fine orders in your papa’s way. I knew the name had a ring. Lilly, did he ask to–call?”

“Mamma, I’m sleepy.”

“Did he?”

“Yes–maybe–sometime.”

Then Mrs. Becker, full of small, eager ways, insisted upon tucking her daughter into bed, patting the light coverlet well up under her chin and opening the windows.

“Good night, baby,” she said, giving the covers a final pat. “Sleep tight and don’t get up for breakfast. I want to bring it up to you.”

But, contrary to the blandishment, Lilly lay awake, open-eyed, for quite a round hour after her mother’s voice, broken into occasionally by the patient but sleepy tones of her father, had died down.

From her window she could see quite a patch of sky, finely powdered with stars, the Dipper pricked out boldly.

For some reason, regarding it, a layer of tears formed on her eyes and dried over her hot stare.

CHAPTER X

On the 6th of the following July, Lilly Becker and Albert Penny were married.

The day dawned one of those imperturbable blues that hang over that latitude of the country like a hot wet blanket steaming down. The corn belt shriveled of thirst. The automobile had not yet bitten so deeply into the country roads, but even a light horse and buggy traveled in a whirligig of its own dust. St. Louis lay stark as if riveted there by the Cyclopean eye of the sun. For twenty-four hours the weather vanes of the great Middle West stood stock-still while July came in like a lion. The city slept in strange, improvised beds drawn up beside windows or made up on floors, and awoke enervated and damp at the back of the neck.

Throughout the Becker household, however, the morning moved with a whir, the newly installed telephone lifting its shrill scream, delivery wagons at the door, the horses panting under wet sponges and awning hats, Georgia wide-eyed at the concurrence of events.

For the half-dozenth time that morning Mrs. Becker suffered a little collapse, dropping down to the kitchen chair or hall bench, fanning herself with the end of her apron.

“I’m dead! Another day like this will finish me. Georgia, have you polished the door bell? Those delivery boys finger it up so. I’m wringing wet with _prespiration_. If only there is a breeze in the church to-night. Georgia, if that is Mr. Albert on the telephone, tell him Miss Lilly isn’t going to leave her room until noon. No, wait. I want to speak to him myself. Hello, Albert? Well, bridegroom, good morning!… What’s left of me is fine…. I’m making her stay in her room. Poor child, she’s all nerves. Don’t be late. I hate last-minute weddings. Did you see the item in the morning _Globe_?… Yes, the name is spelled wrong, Pen-nie, but there’s quite a few lines. ‘In lieu of a honeymoon,’ it goes on to say, ‘the young couple will go to housekeeping at once in their new home, 5199 Page Avenue, directly across from the parents of the bride.’ I’m sending over now to have all the windows opened so it won’t be stuffy for you to-night. Wait until you see the presents, Albert, that came this morning. A check for five hundred dollars all the way from her uncle Buck in Alaska. That makes six hundred in checks. Three beautiful clocks, a dozen berry spoons from my euchre club, and an invitation in poetry for her to become a member of the Junior Matron Friday Club. If I wasn’t so rushed I think I–I could just sit down and have a good cry. Albert, be careful of those silk sleeve garters I sent you for your wedding shirt, don’t adjust them too tight; and you know how you catch cold. Don’t perspire and go in a draught. And–and Albert, I see I have to remind you of little things the way I do Ben. You men with your heads so chock full of business!” (Very _sotto voce_.) “Send Lilly flowers this afternoon. Lilies-of-the-valley and white rosebuds. Remley’s on your corner is a good place. Tell them your mother-in-law is a good customer and they’ll give you a little discount…. Yes, she’s upset, poor child. I was the same way. My mother almost had to shove me into the carriage. Well, Albert, call up again about noon. She’ll be up by then. Good-by–son.”

A pox of perspiration was out over her face, sparkling forth again after each mopping. A box arrived from a jeweler’s and one from a department store. They were a pie knife and a table crumber in the form of a miniature carpet sweeper. The usual futilities with which such occasions can be cluttered and which have shaped the destinies of immemorial women into a tyranny of petty things.

Then Mrs. Becker hurried upstairs, her white wrapper floating after.

In the bathroom her husband leaned to a mirror, his jaw line thrust to the cleave of a razor.

“I really envy you, Ben. Not even your daughter’s wedding day can disturb you. For a cent I could cry my eyes out. It’s only excitement keeps me going. I–could–c-c-cry.”

“Now, now, little woman.”

She sat down on a hall chair, regarding him through the open bathroom door.

“Has she said anything to you, Ben, since yesterday? It’s made me so upset.”

“Now, now, little woman, you must make allowances for a young girl’s nervousness.”

“I know, Ben, but it worries me so. It’s not natural for her to have crying spells like that one yesterday.”

“Nonsense! I’m not so sure you weren’t a red-eyed bride.”

“My nervousness wasn’t anything like hers. She’ll make herself sick.”

“You mean you will.”

“Have you heard her moving about her room yet?”

“No.”

“Shall I knock?”

“No, Carrie; now let the child alone this morning.”

“I never knew her to stay in bed so long. It’s after eleven, and the hair dresser coming at twelve. It will seem funny, won’t it, Ben, her–little room empty to-night.”

“Now, now, no waterworks. What if she was moving away to another city instead of just settling down across the street? You worked this thing your way, and even now you don’t feel satisfied.”

“I do feel satisfied, Ben, but I want her to be, too.”

“Now, little woman, mark my word, Lilly may feel that she is doing this thing in more or less of a spirit of sacrifice to our pleasure, but inside of a week she’ll be as busy and happy a little housekeeper as her mother.”

“Is that her calling?”

“Yes. Go to her, Carrie.”

Out in the little upper square of hallway Lilly appeared suddenly; her hair still down in the beautiful way she let it toss about her in sleep, and her body boldly outlined in a Japanese kimono she held tightly about her.

“Mamma, will you and papa please come to my room? I want to talk to you.”

“Your father is shaving, Lilly. Can’t you talk to us out here? How is our girl on her wedding day? Frightened? You’re me all over again. Ask your father if I wasn’t as pale as you are.” She kissed her daughter on lips that were cold, brushing back the shower of hair from her shoulders. “You ought to see the presents, Lilly, that just–“

“Mamma–papa–you must listen.”

“Yes, Lilly.”

“Please, won’t you let me off? Please!”

Her father regarded her from behind the white mud of lather, his eyes darkening up.

“Now, now, sweetheart,” he said, using one of his rarest words of endearment, “this won’t do at all.”

“But I can’t, papa. I just can’t. I know it’s terrible, this last minute, but–but–I tell you–I can’t.”

“My God, Ben!”

“Can’t what, Lilly?”

“Can’t! I never had such a funny–a terrible feeling. I can’t explain it, only let me off. Please! It’s not too late. Lots of girls have done it–found out at the last minute they couldn’t–“

“My God! What are we to do, Ben? Ben!”

“Carrie, if only you will hold your horses I’ll handle this.” He mopped off his face hurriedly, sliding into a dressing gown.

“Come now, Lilly, into the front room. Sit down.”

She moved after him with the rather groping look of the blind.

“Now what is this nonsense, Lilly, you’ve been hinting these last few days?”

“I’ve made a mistake, papa. I should have said so weeks–ago–from the start. It isn’t Albert’s fault. It isn’t anybody’s fault. I’ve had it all along, this queer feeling all through the engagement and parties, but I kept hoping for your sakes I’d get over it–hoping–in vain–“

“Why, of course, Lilly, you’ll get over it! It’s natural for a young girl to feel–“

“No! No! My feeling won’t lift! If only I had said nothing the night he–proposed. But mamma was waiting up. She–she pressed me so. It was so hard the way you put it. I know he’s a fine fellow. I know, papa, he’s thrown big orders in your way. But I can’t help being what I am. Please, papa, let me off! Please!”

An actual shrinkage of face seemed to have taken place in Mrs. Becker.

“What’ll we do? What’ll we do, Ben?” she kept repeating, rocking herself back and forth in what seemed to border on dementia.

“You see, papa, it’s only to be a small wedding. We could so easily call things off. I’ll take all the blame–“

“No! No! No!”

“Mamma dear, I’m as sorry–about it as you are, but–“

“No! No! She’s ruining our lives, Ben–disgracing–“

“Lilly, are you sure that you are telling us everything?”

“I swear it, papa. I know I’m inarticulate, I don’t seem able to explain the terrible state I’ve been in for days–“

“It’s nervousness, Lilly.”

“I tell you, no! I can’t make you understand. But I’m not cut out, papa, for what I’m going to settle down to. I’m something else than what you think I am. I guess I–I am a sort of botanical sport, papa, off our family tree. I know what you’re going to say, and maybe you’re right. I may have more ideas than I have talent, but let me go my way. Let me be what I am.”

“Lilly, Lilly, let us take this thing step by step, quietly. Surely, daughter, you appreciate the enormity of the situation!”

“I do. I do.”

“Now to go back to the beginning. Did you consent to this engagement of your own free will?”

“I did and I didn’t.”

“You didn’t?”

“Oh, I know you let me decide for myself, but don’t you think I felt the undercurrent of your attitudes? All the other girls settling down, as you put it. You and Albert such good friends, and then Albert himself so–so what he should be.”

“Now you are talking. If your mother and I hadn’t felt that Albert was the fine and upright man for their little girl to marry, do you think they would have–“

“I know! There we go around in the circle again. Everything is perfect. The little house, Albert’s promotion to first assistant. Everything perfect, but me. I don’t want it. I don’t love him. You hear me! There is something in me he hasn’t touched. Respect him? Yes, but respect is only a poor relation to love and comes in for the left-over and the cast-off emotions.”

“Her head is full of the novels she reads!”

“You can’t keep me from thinking like a woman. Feeling like one. Is it shameful to want to love? Is it wrong to desire in the man you are to marry that fundamental passion that makes the world go around? I’m not supposed to know any thing about the thing I’m plunging into until after I’ve plunged! I’m afraid, papa. Save me!”

“Ben, I could swear who is at the bottom of this indecent talk of hers. I found his picture cut out of the school magazine and pasted in her diary. She’s a changed child since that Lindsley came to the High School the year before she graduated.”

“Mamma! Mamma!” fairly exploded to her feet by the potency of her sense of outrage. “Oh, you–you–“

“I know I’m right.”

“Why, I haven’t even seen him since I graduated! I’ve never talked ten words to the man in my life! Oh–oh–how can you?”

“Just the same, he’s been your ruination. Since you got him into your head not one of the boys you met has been good enough. I knew you had him in mind the day you told me you wished Albert was a little more bookish and musical. I know why you wanted him to subscribe to the Symphony. The spats you made him buy. Poor boy! and his ankles aren’t cut for them. Love! Your father and I weren’t so much in love, let me tell you. Only I knew my parents wanted it and that was enough. I wish to God I’d never lived to see this day–“

“Carrie!”

“I do. Noon of my daughter’s wedding day, and she can’t make up her mind whether she’ll be married or not. O God! it’s funny–love, now at the last minute–oh–oh–” A geyser of hysteria shot up, raining down in a glassy kind of laugh. “Oh–oh, it’s funny!–love–“

“Carrie, you’re hysterical. Here, smell this ammonia.”

“The little house–my heart’s blood in it. A doll’s house, ready for her to walk into. Membership in the Junior Matrons–trousseau–oh, it’s funny–funny–“

“For God’s sake, papa, try to calm her!”

“Funny–funny–funny.”

With a wave of sobs that broke over her, she went down, then, literally to her knees, her back heaving and shuddering.

“Her wedding day–O God–funny–“

“Mamma! Mamma! It’s all right, dear. Don’t–holler like that. I just got upset, that’s all. Frightened like–like any other girl would. I’m all right now, mamma. I’m sorry.”

“We want to see you happy, baby. It’s for your good.”

“Of course you do. I know it. I’m all right now, mamma.”

“We’re your best friends, Lilly. We would go through fire for you.”

“Of course, mamma. I–I was nervous, that’s all.”

“There’s no finer boy breathes than Albert.”

“You’re right.”

“He’s sending you lilies-of-the-valley, baby. He’s ordered himself some white-flannel tennis pants, too–the kind you admired. He got his report from the life-insurance people and he’s a grand risk, Lilly. In as fine a condition to marry as a man could be. Baby, tell me–tell papa–aren’t you happy?”

“I am–I–oh, I am, dear! Why, here is Elsa ready to dress my hair! Mamma–dear–I’m all right now. Fine.”

* * * * *

At eight o’clock that evening, in the Garrison Avenue Rock Church, little Evelyn Kemble, in the bushiest of white skirts and to the accompaniment of organ music rolling over her, placed a white-satin cushion before the smilax-banked altar.

Kneeling on it, and to the antiphonal beat of the Reverend Stickney’s voice, Lilly Becker and Albert Penny became as one.

CHAPTER XI

By a strange conspiracy of middle-class morality, which clothes the white nude of life in suggestive factory-made garments, and by her own sheer sappiness, which vitalized her, but with the sexlessness of a young tree, Lilly, with all her rather puerile innocence left her, walked into her marriage like a blind Nydia, hands out and groping sensitively.

The same, in a measure, was true of Albert, who came into his immaculate inheritance, himself immaculate, but with a nervous system well insulated by a great cautiousness of life.

He was highly subject to head colds and occasional attacks of dyspepsia, due to his inability to abstain from certain foods. He was, therefore, sensitive to draughts and would not eat hot bread. He carried an umbrella absolutely upon all occasions and a celluloid toothpick in his waistcoat pocket.

Then, too, he gargled. To chronicle the heroic emotions that motivate men is a fine task. Love and hate and all the chemistry of their mingling that go to form the plasma of human experience. It is a lesser, even an ignominious one to narrate Lilly’s kind of anguish during this matinal performance of her husband. She suffered a tight-throated sort of anguish that could have been no keener had it been of larger provocation. Her toes and her fingers would curl and a quick ripple of flesh rush over her.

Mornings, when he departed, his kiss, which smelled of mouth wash, would remain coldly against her lips with the peculiar burn of camphor ice. All her sensibilities seemed suddenly to fester.

On a week day of the third week of her marriage, in her little canary cage of a yellow bedroom dominated with the monstrous brass bedstead of the period and a swell-front dresser elaborate in Honiton and flat silver, she endured, with her head crushed into the chair back, those noisome ablutions from across the hallway. She was wearing, these first mornings, a rose-colored negligée, foamy with lace and still violet scented from the trousseau chest, and especially designed to pink this early hour.

It lay light to a skin that, strangely enough, did not covet its sensual touch. She craved back to the starchy blue-gingham morning dresses. It was as if she sat among the ruins of those crispy potential yesterdays, all her to-morrows ruthlessly and terribly solved.

Something swift and eager had died within her. She was herself gone flabby. A wife, with a sudden and, to her, horrid new consciousness that had twisted every ligament of life.

Her husband’s collar so intimately there on the dresser top. His shirt, awaiting studs, spread out on the bed–their bed. His suspenders straddling the chair back. The ordering of the evening beefsteak lurking back in her consciousness. He liked sirloin, stabbing it vertically (he had a way of holding his fork upright between first and third fingers) when he carved, and cutting it skillfully away from the T bone. After the first week, he liked the bone, too, gnawing it, not mussily, but with his broad white teeth predatory and his temples working. She was a veritable bundle of these petty accumulated concepts, harrowed to their quick.

She knew that presently he would enter the room in his trousers and undershirt, which he did upon the very minute, the little purple circle, like a stamp mark on the rind of a bacon, showing just beneath his Adam’s apple, the shag of his yellow hair wetly curly from dousing, like a spaniel’s.

“Certainly fine water pressure we have in the bathroom, Lilly. I am going to bring home some tubing from the store and attach a spray.”

She looked out of the window over the languid little patch of front lawn, more gray than green from the scourge of heat. Insect life hung midair like a curtain of buzzings. Directly opposite the dusty, unmade street, she could see her parents’ home standing unprotected except for one sapling maple, the sun already pressing against the drawn shades. There was a slight breeze through this morning that turned the sapling leaves and even lifted the little twist of tendril at the nape of Lilly’s neck.

It was just that spot, while tugging at his collar, that Albert Penny stooped to kiss.

“Little wife,” he said.

“Ugh!” she felt.

“Poor little wife, it was ninety-four and a half at six-thirty-eight this morning.”

His capacity for accuracy could madden her.

He computed life in the minutiae of fractions, reckoning in terms of the halfpenny, the half minute, the half degree.

She sat now, laying pleats in the pink negligée where it flowed over her knees, a half smile forced out on her lips.

“Well, Albert,” she said, wanting to keep her voice lifted, “I guess we’re in it, aren’t we? Up to our necks.”

“In what?”

“Marriage.”

Leaning to the mirror for the adjustment of his collar button, he paused, regarding her reflection.

“Well now, what an idea! Of course we’re in it, and the wonder to me is how we ever stayed out so long.”

She reached up to yawn, her long white arms stretched above her head.

“Oh dear! oh dear! oh dear!” she said in what might have been the key of anything.

“Poor little girl!” he said. “I wish I could make it cooler for you.”

“It isn’t that.”

“What then is bothering your little head?”

“I–oh, I don’t know. I guess it’s just the reaction after the excitement of the wedding.”

He came back to kiss the same tendril at the nape of her neck.

“I’m glad it’s over, too. Feels mighty good to settle down.”

“‘Settle down.’ Somehow I hate that expression.”

“All right, then, Mrs. Penny, we’ll settle up. Speaking of settling up, I guess the missus wants her Monday-morning allowance, doesn’t she?”

“I–guess–so.”

He placed three already counted out five-dollar bills on the dresser, weighting them down with a silver-back mirror.

“See if you can’t make it last this week, Lilly. You watch Mother Becker market and you’ll come out all right.”

“Oh, I can’t pick around raw meat the way mamma does. It makes me sick.”

“Housekeeping may seem a little strange at first, but I’m not afraid my little wife is going to let any of them get ahead of her.”

“Whoever wants it, can have that honor.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“What’s the program for to-day, Lilly?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“I’m going to send Joe out from the store to-day with some washers for the kitchen faucets and some poultry netting for a chicken yard. I’ll potter around this evening and build one behind the woodshed. Chickens give a place a right homey touch.”

“And send out a man from Knatt’s to fix the piano. They delivered it with a middle C that sticks.”

“Yes, and I’ll send a can of Killbug out with the wire. I noticed a cockroach run over the ice box last night. You must watch that a little, even in a new house.”

“Ugh!”

“I hope I’m not getting a cold. I feel kind of that way. Mother Becker fixed me up fine with that wet cloth around my neck last time. I’ll try it to-night.”

“Come,” she said, “breakfast is ready.”

They descended to the little oak dining room, quite a glitter of new cut glass on the sideboard and the round table white and immaculately spread. There was a little maidservant, Lena Obendorfer, the fifteen-year-old daughter of the Kemble washerwoman, shy and red rims about her eyes from secret tears of homesickness.

“Why, Lena, the breakfast table looks lovely; and don’t forget, dearie, Mr. Penny takes three eggs in the morning, and he doesn’t like his rolls heated.”

The child, her poor flat face pock-marked, fluttered into service.

Lilly regarded her husband through his meal, elbows on table, cheek in her palm. He ate the three two-minute eggs with gusto, alternating with deep draughts of coffee, and crisp little ribbons of bacon made into a sandwich between his rolls.

“This is certainly delicious bacon.”

“Mamma sent a whole one over yesterday.”

“I like it lean. Always buy it with plenty of dark streaks through it. Don’t you like it lean?”

Silence.

“Can’t you eat, Lilly? That’s a shame.”

“Too hot.”

“Poor girlie!”

“Lena, bring Mr. Penny some more bacon.”

“Certainly delicious. I like it lean.”

She watched his temples quiver to the motion of his jaws, her unspeakable depression tightening up her tonsils and the very pit of her scared and empty.

“Albert–“

“Um-hum!”

“I–What if you should find that I–I’m not–not–“

“What?”

“Not right–here. Not the–wife for you.”

He leaned over to pinch her cheek, waggling it softly and masticating well before he spoke.

“If my little wife suited me any better they would have to chain me down. Ah, it’s great! I tell you, Lilly, a man makes the mistake of his life not to do it earlier. If I had it to do over again I’d marry at twenty. Solid comfort. Something to work for. I feel five years closer to the general managership than I did six months ago. Certainly fine bacon. Best I ever ate.”

“Albert–let us not permit our marriage to drag us down into the kind of rut we see all about us. Take Flora and Vincent. Married five months and she never so much as wears corsets when she takes him to the street car, mornings. And he used to be such a clever dresser, and look at him now. All baggy. Let’s not get baggy, Albert.”

“I agree with you there. A man owes it to himself and his business to appear well pressed. It’s a slogan of mine. Clothes may not make the man, but neatness often goes a long way toward making the opportunity. Don’t you worry about me becoming baggy, Lilly. I’m going to send one of those folding ironing boards up from the store this day.”

“I don’t mean only that. You mustn’t be so literal about everything. I mean let’s not become baggy-minded. Take Flora again. Flora was her class poetess and I don’t believe she has a literary thought or a book in her head now except her account book. Let us improve ourselves, Albert. Read evenings and subscribe to the Symphony and the Rubinstein Evening Choral.”

“Speaking of Rubinstein, Lilly, I’m going to take out a thousand dollars’ burglary insurance with Eckstein. One cannot be too careful.”

She pushed back from the table. “We’re invited over to the Duncans’ to-night for supper. They’ve one of the new self-playing pianos.”

He felt in his waistcoat pocket for the toothpick.

“I’ll go if you want it, Lilly, but guess where I’d rather eat my supper.”

“Where?”

“Right here. And fry the sirloin the way Mother Becker does it, Lilly, sprinkle a few onions on it. If I were you I wouldn’t let Lena tackle it.”

“This is the third night for beefsteak.”

“Fine. You’ll learn this about your hubby, he–“

“Don’t use that word, Albert. I hate it.”

“What?”

“Hubby.”

“All right then, husband. Bless her heart, she likes to hear the real thing. Well then, your husband is a beefsteak fellow. Let the others have all the ruffly dishes they want. Good strong beefsteak is my pace.”

She let him lift her face for a kiss.

“I’ll be home six-forty-six to the dot. That’s what I’ve figured out it takes me if I leave the office at six-five.”

He kissed her again, pressing her head backward against the cove of his arm, pinching her cheeks together so that her mouth puckered.

“Won’t kiss my little wife on the lips this morning. I’m getting a head cold. Good-by, Mrs. Penny. Um-m-m! like to say it.”

“Good-by.”

“Mother Becker coming over to-day?”

“Yes. We had planned to go to the meat market together.”

“Fine.”

“But I’m not going.”

“Why?”

“I–don’t know. Too hot, I guess.”

He looked at her rather intently.

“That’s right, Lilly,” he said, his eyes, with something new in them, roving over her figure; “if you don’t feel up to the mark, just you take care of yourself. Jove!” he repeated. “Jove!” kissed her again, and went down the front steps, whistling.

CHAPTER XII

At eleven o’clock Mrs. Becker, hatted, crossed the sun-bleached street, carrying outheld something that wetted through the snowy napkin that covered it. At the door she surrendered it to Lena.

“Put this in the ice box for Mr. Albert’s supper. It’s some of my coldslaw he’s so fond of, and a pound of sweet butter, I took from my dairyman. See that Miss Lilly never uses it for cooking, Lena; the salt butter I brought yesterday is for that.”

“Yes’m.”

“And, Lena,” drawing a palm across the banister and showing it up, “look. That isn’t nice. In my house I go over every piece of woodwork from top to bottom on my hands and knees. You mustn’t wait for Miss Lilly to tell you everything. Where is she?”

“Upstairs, ma’am.”

She ascended to a jeremiad of the cardinal laws of housekeeping, palm still suspicious. Her daughter rose out of a low mound beside the window.

“Good morning, mamma.”

“Lilly, you should help upstairs wash days with the housework. Eight o’clock and my house is spick span, even my cellar steps wiped down. Take off that pink thing and I’ll help you make the bed. It was all right to wear it around the first week for your husband, but now one of your cotton crepes will do. Come, help turn the mattress.”

“Oh, mamma, Lena will make the bed.”

“Who ever heard of not doing your upstairs work on wash day? Really, Lilly, I was ignorant as a bride, too, but I wasn’t lazy. I wouldn’t give a row of pins for–“

“Please, mamma–don’t begin.”

“Well, it’s your house. If it suits your husband, it suits me.”

“Well, it does suit him.”

“Not if I judge him right. Albert likes order. I went over his socks the other day, and he kept them matched up as a bachelor just like a woman would. He’s methodical.”

“Don’t lift that heavy mattress alone, mamma. Here, if you insist upon doing it, I’ll help.”

They dressed the bed to its snowy perfection, a Honiton counterpane over pink falling almost to the floor.

“Well, that’s more like it.” Her face quickly moist from exertion, Mrs. Becker regarded her daughter across the completed task.

“Now for the carpet sweeper.”

Lilly returned to her chair, lying back to fan her face with a lacy fribble of pocket handkerchief. “You can wear yourself out if you insist, mamma, but I can’t see any reason for it. I’m–tired.”

Mrs. Becker sat down, hitching her chair toward her daughter’s.

“Lilly,” she paid, eagerly forward and a highly specialized significance in her voice, “don’t you feel well–baby?”

“Of course I feel well, mamma. As well as anyone can feel in this heat. If only you wouldn’t harass me about this–old house.”

Mrs. Becker withdrew, her entire manner lifting with her shoulders.

“Well, if that’s the way you feel about it, you need not be afraid that I’m going to interfere. That’s one thing I made up my mind to from the start, never to be a professional mother-in-law in my daughter’s home. The idea!”

“Mamma, I didn’t mean it that way, and you know it. I realize that you mean well. But I suppose many a family skeleton rattles its bones to the tune of ‘they meant well.'”

“Lilly, you’re not yourself. I’m sure you don’t feel well. Baby, you mustn’t be bashful with your own mother.”

“Please, please don’t ask me that again in–in that voice. You know I always feel well.”

“We’re both married women now, Lilly. If–if there’s anything you want to say–“

“No.”

“I always say, a single woman doesn’t know she’s on earth. Isn’t it so, Lilly?”

Suddenly Lilly shot her hand out to her mother’s arm, her fingers digging into the flesh.

“You should have told me something–beforehand!”

“I’d have cut out my tongue sooner. What kind of a mother do you think I am? Shame!”

“It’s wicked to rear a girl with no conception of life.”

“You’re no greener than I was. That’s what a man wants in the girl he marries. Innocence.”

“Ignorance.”

“It all comes naturally to a woman after she’s married, life does.”

“I–I hate life.”

“Lilly!”

“I do! I do! I do!”

“You poor child!” said Mrs. Becker, stroking her hand, and her voice pitched to a very private key. “Life is life and what are you going to do about it?”

“Only love–some sort of magic potion which Nature uses to drug us, can make her methods seem anything but gross–horrible.”

“What’s on your mind, Lilly? We don’t need to be bashful together any more. We’re married women.”

Lilly rose then, moving toward the dresser, drawing the large tortoise-shell pins from the smooth coil of her hair.

“If you want me to go to the meat market with you, mamma, I’d better be dressing before it gets any hotter.”

“You’re too warm, Lilly. I’ll go myself. You can learn the beef cuts later.”

“I would rather stay at home and practice awhile. I haven’t touched the piano since–“

“Tack up your shelf paper while I’m gone, Lilly–your cupboards look so bare–and then come over to lunch with me and we’ll go to the euchre together. It’s your first afternoon at the Junior Matrons and I want you to look your best. Wear your flowered dimity.”

“If you don’t mind, mamma, I want to unpack my music this afternoon and get my books straightened. I’d rather not go.”

“The nerve! And that poor little Mrs. Wempner goes to extra trouble in your honor. I hear she’s to have pennies attached to the tally cards. Pretty idea, pennies for Penny. Well, I’m not going to worry my life away! Work it out your own way. I’ll send you home a steak and some quinine from the drug store for Albert to take to-night.”

Presently Lilly heard the lower door slam. It came down across her nerves like the descent of a cleaver.

For another hour she sat immovable. A light storm had come up with summer caprice, thunder without lightning, and a thin fall of rain that hardly laid the dust. There was a certain whiteness to the gloom, indicating the sun’s readiness to pierce it, but a breeze had sprung up, fanning the Swiss curtains in against Lilly’s cheek, and across the street she could see her mother’s shades fly up and windows open to the refreshment of it.

At twelve o’clock the telephone rang. It was her husband. “Yes, she was well. Pouring downtown? Funny. Only a light shower out there. No, the man had not brought the missing caster for the bedstead. Yes, six-forty-six, and she would put the steak on at six-twenty. Yes, the poultry netting had come. Fine. Bathtub stopper. Yes.”

For quite a while after this she sat in the hallway, her hand on the instrument, in the attitude of hanging up the receiver.

She did piddle among her books then, a vagabond little collection of them. Textbooks, in many cases her initials and graduating year printed in lead pencil along the edges. Rolfe’s complete edition of Shakespeare. A large illustrated edition of Omar Khayyam. Several gift volumes of English poets. Complete set of small red Poes that had come free with a two-year magazine subscription. Graduation gift of Emerson’s essays. _Vision of Sir Launfal_. _Journeys to the Homes of Great Men_. _Lucille_, in padded leather. An unaccountably present _Life of Cardinal Newman_. _The Sweet Girl Graduate_. _Faust_. _How to Interpret Dreams_.

They occupied three shelves of the little case; the remaining two she filled in with stacks of sheet music, laying aside ten picked selections marked “Repertoire” and occasionally sitting back on her heels to hum through the pages of a score. Once she carried a composition to the piano, “Who is Sylvia?” to be exact, singing it through to her own accompaniment. Her voice lifted nicely against the little square confines of reception hall, Lena, absolutely wringing wet with suds and perspiration, poking her head up from the laundry stairs.

“Oh, Miss Lilly, that’s grand! Please sing it over again.”

She did, quickened in spite of herself. Her voice had a pleasant plangency, a quality of more yet to come and as if the wells of her vitality were far from drained.

She could hear from the laundry the resumed thrubbing and even smell the hot suds. The afternoon reeked of Monday. She left off, finally, and rocked for a time on the cool porch, watching the long, silent needles of rain, wisps of thought floating like feathers.

“Who am I? Lilly Becker. How do I happen to be me? What if I were Melba instead? What if Melba were frying the sirloin to-night and five thousand people were coming to hear me sing in the Metropolitan Opera House? Albert–husband. What a queer word! Husband. Love. Hate. Lindsley. Language. How did language ever come to be? We feel, and then we try to make sounds to convey that feeling. What language could ever convey the boiling inside of me? I must be a sea, full of terrible deep-down currents and smooth on top. How does one know whether or not he is crazy–mad? How do I know that I am not really singing to five thousand? Maybe this is the dream. Page Avenue. Lena in the laundry. That sirloin steak being delivered around the side entrance, by a boy with a gunny sack for an apron. Dreams. Freud. Suppressed desires. That’s me. Thousands–thousands of them. Am I my conscious or my unconscious self? Can I break through this–this dream into reality? Which part of me is here on this front porch and which part is Marguerite with the pearls in her hair? Bed casters, they’re real. And Albert–husband–the rows of days–and nights–nights of my marriage. O God, make it a dream! Make it a dream!”

At six-forty-six Albert Penny came home to supper.

CHAPTER XIII

There was nothing consciously premeditated about the astonishing speech Lilly made to her husband that evening. Yet it was as if the words had been in burning rehearsal, so scuttling hot they came off her lips. There had been a coolly quiet evening on the front porch, a telephone from Flora Bankhead, a little run-in visit from her parents, and now at ten o’clock her husband, shirt-sleeved and before the mirror, tugging to unbutton his collar.

She did not want that collar off. It brought, rawly, a sense of his possession of her. She sat fully dressed, in her chair beside the window, the black irises almost crowding out the gray in her eyes, her hands tightening and tightening against that removal of collar. Finally one half of it flew open, and on that tremendous trifle Lilly spoke.

“Albert.”

“Yes?”

“Let me go!”

“Huh?”

“It’s wrong. I’ve made a mistake. I don’t want to be married.”

For a full second he held that pose at his collar button, his entire being seeming to suspend a beat.

“What say?” not exactly doubting, but wanting to corroborate his senses.

She was amazed at her ability to reply.

“I said I have made a terrible mistake. I can’t stand being married to you.”

He came toward her with the open side of his collar jerking like an old door on its hinges.

“Now lookahere,” he said, rather roughly for him; “it’s all right for a woman to have her whims once in a while, but there are limits. I’ve been as considerate with you as I know how to be. A darn sight more than many a man with his woman.”

“I’m not that!” she cried, springing to her feet.

“What?”

“That! Your–that!”

“Call it what you want,” he said, “all I know is that you’re my wife and I married you to settle down to a decent, self-respecting home life and that a sensible woman leaves her whims behind her.”

She stood with her hands to the beat of her throat, looking at him as if he had hunted her into her corner, which he had not.

“Let me go,” she said.

He seemed trying to gain control of his large, loose hands, clenching and unclenching them.

“Good God!” he said. “What say?”

“It’s no use! I’ve tried. I’m wrong. Something in me is stronger than you or mamma or papa or–or environment. All my life I’ve been fighting against just–just–this. And now I’ve let it trap me.”

“Darn funny time to be finding it out.”

“That’s the terrible part! To think it took this–marriage–to awaken me to a meaning of myself.”

“Bah! Your meaning to yourself is no better than any other woman’s.”

“A month ago it would have been so simple–to have had the courage–then. To have realized then! Why–why can life be like that?”

“Like what?”

“You remember the night coming home from the Highlands? I tried to tell you. Something in me was rebelling. Ask mamma; papa. They knew! That’s been my great trouble. My desires for myself were never strong enough to combat their desires for me. They’ve always placed me under such ghastly obligation for their having brought me into the world. Their obligation is to _me_, for having brought me here, the accident of their desires! But I let the molasses lake of family sentiment–suck–me in. If only I had fought harder! It took this trap–marriage! All of a sudden I’m awake! Don’t try to keep me, Albert. I haven’t known until this minute that my mind is made up. So made up that it frightens me even more than you. I’d rather be on my own in a garret, Albert! It’s kinder to tell you. We mustn’t get into this thing deeper. Nothing can change me. Don’t try.”

She put up her hands as if to ward off some sort of blow, but in her heart not afraid, and she wanted to be afraid of him. He did whirl a chair toward her by the back, but sat down, jerking her into one opposite, facing her so that their knees touched, and she could see the spots on his temples that responded so to beefsteak, throbbing. Her terror rose a little to the volume of his silence. His head was so square. She wanted him to rage and she to hurl herself against his storm. Her whole being wanted a lashing. She could pinch herself to the capacity of her strength without wincing.

But on the contrary, his voice, when it came, was muted.

“Lilly,” he said, “you’re sick. You’re affected with the heat.” His look of utter daze irritated her.

“Sick! You mean I was sick before! I’m well now.”

“You’re either sick or crazy!”

“I’m trapped. I was born trapped, but now I tell you I’m free! Something up here in my brain–down here in my heart–has set me free! You can’t keep me. No one can. I want out!”

“In God’s name, what are you driving at?”

“You wouldn’t understand. Love might have made you–this–possible, but it didn’t come. It didn’t come, Albert.”

He reached for his coat to plunge into it.

“I’m going across for your mother and father. I’m afraid of you. There is something behind all this. One of us is crazy!”

“No, no, Albert. Please, not them. I’ll run out of the house if they come. They’ve defeated me so often. That terrible wall they erect–out of flesh that bleeds every time I try to climb it. They’ve killed me with the selfishness of their love, those two. They put me body and soul into Chinese shoes the day I was born. I’ve never ceased paying up for being their child. Suppose they did sacrifice for me–clothe me–feed me–what does parenthood mean but that? Don’t you dare to call them over! Don’t you dare!”

“In God’s name, then, what!”

“Just let me go, Albert–quietly.”

“Where?”

She went toward him, her fine white throat palpitating as if her heart were beating up in it, something even wheedling in her voice.

“I’ve thought it all out, Albert. These unbearable days since–this. I’ll go quietly; I’ll take the blame. In these cases where a woman leaves it becomes desertion–“

“If you’re talking divorce, I’ll see you burn like brimstone before I’ll sacrifice my respectability in this community before your damn whims.”

She quivered, and it was a full second before she was able to continue.

“I know, Albert, to you it sounds–worse, probably, than it is. But think how much worse, how degrading it would be for me to stay here–in your house–hating. I’ll make it so easy. It’s done every day, only we don’t happen to hear of it. That’s what makes our kind the marrow of society. We’re too immorally respectable to live honestly. We build a shell of conventionality over the surface of things and rot underneath. Nature doesn’t care how she uses us. It’s the next generation concerns her. She has to drug us or we couldn’t endure. We’re drugged on respectability. On a few of us the drug won’t react. I’m one. Let me go, Albert. To Chicago. I was there once with mamma and papa to the Rope and Hemp Manufacturers’ Convention. Or, better still, New York. That’s the field for my kind of work. Many a girl with less voice than I has gotten on there. Albert, won’t you let me go?”

He was like nothing so much as a cornered bull, trying to bash his bewildered head through the impenetrable wall of things. Little red shreds had come out in the white of his eyes; he was sweating coarsely and feeling the corners of his mouth with his tongue.

“You won’t ruin my name–you won’t ruin my name.”

“I’ll take the blame. I’ll love taking it. You’ll have a clean case of desertion–“

Suddenly he took a step toward her with the threat of a roar in his voice, and again she found relief in the rising velocity of his anger and practically thrust herself in the hope of a blow.

“What are you that I am married to,” he cried, “a she-devil? What have I got to do? Treat you like one? Huh? Huh?”

He stopped just short of her, the upper half of his body thrust backward from restraining his impulse to lunge, his face distorted and quivering down at her.

“Be careful,” he said. “By God! be careful when I get my blood up. The woman don’t live that can touch my respectability. If you go, you go without a divorce. You’re trying to harm me–ruin my life–that’s what you are. Ruin my life.” And suddenly, before the impulse to strike had traveled down his tightening arm, collapsed weakly, his entire body retched by the dry sobs that men weep. He could so readily arouse her aversion, that even now, with a quick pity for him stinging her eyeballs, she could regard him dispassionately, a certain disgust for him uppermost.

He turned toward her finally with the look of a stricken St. Bernard dog, his lower lids salt-bitten and showing half moons of red flesh.

“What is it, Lilly? What have I failed in? For God’s sake tell me and I’ll make it right.”

“That’s the terrible part, Albert. You haven’t failed. You’re _you_. It’s something neither of us can control any more than we can control the color of our eyes. It’s as if I were a–a problem in chemistry that had reacted differently than was expected and blew off the top of things.”

“Bah! the trouble with you women to-day is that you’ve got an itch that you don’t know how to scratch. Well, it’s high time for you to learn a way to scratch yours by settling down like a respectable married woman has to.” His voice rising and his wrongs red before him: “I wish to God I’d never laid eyes on you. I thought you were more sensible than most and I find you a crazy woman.”

“Then, Albert, you don’t want a crazy woman for your wife!”

“Ah no, you don’t! No, you don’t! I’ve worked like a dog to get where I am. I’m a respected member of this community and I intend to stay one. No woman gets a divorce out of me unless over my dead body. I’m a leader of a Bible class and an officer in my lodge. I wore a plume and gold braid at the funeral of the mayor of this town. I’m first-assistant buyer and I propose to become general manager. I’m a respectable citizen trying to settle down to a respectable home, and, by God! no woman tomfoolery is going to bamboozle me out of it.”

She sat with her eyes closed, tears seeping through them, and her fist beating softly into her palm.

“Oh, Albert–Albert–how can I make you understand? My brain is bursting–“

“Lilly,” he interrupted, explosively reaching out and closing over her wrist, and sudden perception lifting his voice, “I know! You–you’re not well! You’re ailing. Women aren’t–aren’t always quite themselves–at times. You–Lilly–could it be–“

“No! No! No! I’ll go mad if you, too, begin to insinuate–that! I’m myself, I tell you. Never more so in my life.”

He regarded her through frank and even tender tears, his voice humoring her.

“Of course, you’re high strung, Lilly, and a high-strung woman is like a high-strung horse, has to be handled lightly. Don’t exert yourself. If–if I’m embarrassing to you–talk to mother. These are the times a girl needs her mother. You go ahead and pick on me to your heart’s content. I–I’m a pretty slow kind of fellow about some things. Never been around women enough. Come, it’s ten-thirty-six. You need all the sleep you can get. Come, Lilly. Why–I–I’ve been thick-headed–that’s all.”

She suffered him to kiss her on the cheek as she turned her face from him.

“Have it your own way,” she said, limp with a sudden sense of futility and as if all the reflex resiliency had oozed out of her.

“We’re all right together, Lilly. Just don’t you worry your head. We’ll get adjusted in no time. You and–and mother talk things over to-morrow. I’ve been a thick-headed old fool. Pshaw! I–Pshaw!”

She moved to the dresser, removing pins until her hair fell shiningly all over her, brushing through its thick fluff and weaving it into two heavy braids over her shoulders. He laid hesitant and rather clumsy hands to its thickness.

“Fine head of hair.”

She jumped back as if a pain had stabbed her.

“Don’t forget, Albert, to lock the downstairs windows.”

He was full of new comprehensions.

“I understand. Take your time to undress, Lilly. I’ll be about fifteen minutes locking up, and I want to attach some new safety locks I brought with me. Everything all right?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t need to keep the light burning.”

“I won’t.”

He opened his lips to say something, but, instead, turned and went out, the closed half of his collar drenched in perspiration.

When he returned, after a generous fifteen minutes, the room was in darkness except for a thin veil of whiteness from the arc light in the street. Between the sweetly new sheets the long, supple mound of Lilly lay along the bed, her bare arms close to her body.

Her breathing was sufficiently deep to simulate sleep. He undressed in the darkness and the silence.

Half the night through he tossed, keeping carefully to the bed edge, and often she heard him sigh out and was conscious that he mopped continually at the back of his hands. Once he whispered her name.

“Lilly–awake?”

She deepened her breathing.

About four o’clock he dozed off, swooning deeply into sleep, his lips opening and a slight snore coming.

She lay with her eyes open to the darkness, letting it lave over her as if it were water and she had drowned in it with her gaze wide.

She felt bathed in a colorless fluid of unreality. Those Swiss window curtains! To what era of her consciousness did their purchase belong? She and her mother had shopped them at Gentle’s. They hung now lightly against the darkness. The blond girl who had sold them to her must be sleeping now, too, in this same curious pool of unreality. She lay sunk in a strange pause. Once she propped herself on an elbow, gazing across the street to the blank front of her parents’ house. They were sleeping behind that middle upper window, their clothing folded across chairs, as if waiting. How eagerly they would greet their new day of small duties, small pleasures, and small emotions. What gave them the courage to meet the years of days cut off one identical pattern, like a whole regiment of paper dolls cut from a folded newspaper? She began to count. Uncle Buck, five hundred. Grandma Ploag, one hundred. Mamma and papa, one hundred and fifty. Seven hundred and fifty in the bank in her name! Her own little checking account. The tan-bound check book. The new tan valise, monogrammed, L.B.P. The stack of music marked “Répertoire.” New York! She fell to trembling, forcing herself into rigidity when the figure beside her stirred. She was burning with fever and wanted to plunge from the cool sheets. She could have run a mile–two.

Instead, she lay the long night through, her mind a loom weaving a tapestry of her plan of action, and dawn came up pink, hot, and cloudless.

CHAPTER XIV

At seven o’clock her husband awakened with an ejaculation that landed him sitting on the bed edge. She lay with her eyes closed, wanting not to blink. He dressed silently, but she could hear him tiptoeing about, and finally lay with her hands clenched against the gargling noises that came through the closed door of the bathroom. At last she was conscious that, fully dressed, he was standing beside her, looking down. She could tell by the aroma of mouth wash.

“Lilly?” he said, in a coarse whisper.

She continued to simulate sleep.

“Lilly!”

She did not employ the deception of a start, but opened her eyes quietly to meet his.

“Lazy!” he said. “It is twenty-six minutes past seven.”

“So late?” she said, twisting into a long, luxurious yawn. He kissed her directly on that yawn between the open lips.

“You stay in bed this morning. Rest up.”

“I think I will, Albert, if you don’t mind.”

“You turn right over and have your nap out. I’ll be home at six-forty-six.”

“Good-by, Albert,” she said into the crotch of her elbow.

He kissed her again on the ear lobe and the nape of her neck.

“Good-by, Lilly, and if I were you I’d have a little talk with mother if I found myself not feeling just right. I’m sending Joe up with a pair of granite scrub buckets and that stopper for the bathtub. All right?”

“Yes.”

After a while she could hear him below, the tink of breakfast cutlery and the little passings in and out of Lena through the swinging pantry door. Then the front door closed gently, and on its click she swung herself lightly out of bed, standing barefooted behind the Swiss curtains to watch the square-shouldered figure swing across the street toward the Page Avenue car. Her energy to be up and doing suddenly unstoppered, she turned back to the room, jerking out a dresser drawer until it flew out to the floor.

At nine o’clock she was still in her nightdress, sloughing about in an engagement gift of little blue knitted bedroom slippers. There were the new valise and an old dress-suitcase tightly packed and shoved beneath the bed, and over a chair a tan-linen suit inserted with strips of large-holed embroidery that had been dyed in coffee by Katy Stutz. It had originally been designed as a traveling suit for a honeymoon trip to Excelsior Springs until that project had been decided against in favor of immediate possession of the little house.

“Put that extra money into your furniture,” Mrs. Becker had advised, to which Albert had been highly amenable.

There was a large _pièce de resistance_ of a hat, too, floppy of brim and borne down at one spot by an enormous flat satin rose. Lilly had rebelled against its cart-wheel proportions, but in the end her mother’s selection prevailed.

She dressed hurriedly, emerging from her bath with her hair wet at the edges, but combing back easily into its smoothness.

Her nervousness conveyed itself to her mostly through her breathing; it was short and very fast, but she was as cool of the flesh as the fresh linen she donned. That was part of the clean young wonder of her. Her vitality flowed and showered back upon itself, like the ornamental waters of a fountain. She awoke like a rose with the dew on. Even Albert Penny, rubbing the grit out of his eyes, had marveled at the matinal bloom of her.

She ran in her movements, closing drawers and doors after her to keep down her rising sense of confusion, pinning where fingers could not wait to fit hook to eye. There were twenty-eight dollars in her little brown-leather purse and a check for seven hundred and fifty dollars, payable to “self,” in a little chamois bag around her neck.

The pretty solitaire engagement ring, a little aquamarine breastpin, gift of the groom, a gold band bracelet, and after some hesitation her wedding ring, she placed in an envelope in the now empty top dresser drawer, scribbling across it, “Valuable.” She pried it open again after sealing, to drop in a tiny gold chain with a pearl-and-turquoise drop, still another gift, suggested by her mother to the bridegroom. Finally, there were the little trinkets of more remote days which she dropped into her purse. A rolled-gold link bracelet dangling a row of friendship hearts. Her class pin. A tiny reproduction on porcelain, like the one burned into the china plate in the parlor, of her parents, cheek to cheek. Regarding it, her throat tightened and she sat down suddenly.

“O God!” she said, half audibly, “what am I doing?” But on the second she cocked her head to a passer-by and finally leaned out to hail in a neighborhood man of all work, paying him a dollar and car fare to carry her bags down to the new Union Station and check them. Seeing them lugged out of the house was another moment when it seemed to her that she must faint of the crowding around her heart.

Lena she dispatched to the grocer’s on the homely errand of beeswax for ironing, and, trembling to take advantage of the interval of her absence, hurried into her jacket and hat, her face deeply within the wide brim. Opposite, her mother was scrubbing an upper window sill, the brush grating against the silence. She waited behind the Swiss curtains for the figure to withdraw.

The wide, peaceful morning filled with order and sunshine! The pleasant greeny light cast by awnings into her bedroom. What devil dance was in her blood? What prickly rash lay under her being? Her mother at that ordered scrubbing of the window sill! Her eyes swung the smaller orbit of the room. The rumpled bed. That discarded collar on the dresser, the two stretched buttonholes like two tiny mouths. That collar…

She caught up her purse and ran downstairs. Her telephone was ringing violently as she hurried toward the Page Avenue car.

On the ride down there occurred one of those incidents that sometimes leap out like a long arm of coincidence pointing the way. A classmate with whom she had once sung in the Girl’s High School Glee Club, and whom she had long lost sight of, sat down beside her.

“Why, it’s Lilly Becker!”

“Vera Wohlgemuth!”

“Of all people! The same pretty and stylish Lilly.”

Remembering Vera’s readiness with the platitude, Lilly smiled down upon her.

“And you, too, Vera, you look natural”–but the words almost petered out on her lips. Much of Vera’s slender prettiness was gone. She had gone hippy, as the saying is, even her face insidiously wider and coarser pored.

“What are you doing, Vera? Have you kept up your music?”

“Oh no! I’m married!”

There was a little click to the finish of that speech that seemed automatically to lock against the intrusion of old dreams.

“A ten-months-old daughter furnishes me all the music I have time for. Didn’t I read where you got married, Lilly?”

“Yes. You had such a pretty touch on the piano, Vera.”

“Why, I don’t believe I’ve opened the piano in six months! Marriage knocks it out of you pretty quick, don’t it? And, say, wait until the babies begin to come. I said to him last night, ‘Ed, why is marriage like quicksands?’ He’s no good at conundrums. ‘Because it sucks you down,’ I said, and he didn’t even see the point. But it’s a fact, isn’t it? Mine is city salesman for the Mound City Shoe Company.