Ann Vickers, by Sinclair Lewis (2024)

by Sinclair Lewis

All the characters in this story are entirelyfictitious, and no reference is intended toany actual person. And while it is believedthat an entirely accurate account is givenof prisons, settlement houses, and suffrageorganizations, none of the institutionsdescribed refer to actual institutions.

SINCLAIR LEWIS

TO DOROTHY THOMPSON

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

ANN VICKERS

Chapter 1

Slow yellow river flowing, willows that gesture in tepid August airs,and four children playing at greatness, as, doubtless, great menthemselves must play. Four children, sharp-voiced and innocent andeager, and blessedly unaware that compromise and weariness will come atforty-five.

* * * * *

The three boys, Ben, Dick, and Winthrop, having through all the pastspring suffered from history lessons, sought to turn them to decent useby playing Queen Isabella and Columbus. There was dissension as to whichof them should be Isabella. While they debated, there came into thatwillow grove, that little leaf-littered place holy to boyhood, a singinggirl.

"Jiminy, there's Ann Vickers. She'll be Iserbella," said Winthrop.

"Ah, no, gee, she'll hog the whole thing," said Ben. "But I guess shecan play Iserbella better than anybody."

"Ah, she can not! She's no good at baseball."

"No, she ain't much good at baseball, but she threw a snowball atReverend Tengbom."

"Yes, that's so, she threw that snowball."

The girl stopped before them, arms akimbo--a chunk of a girl, withsturdy shoulders and thin legs. Her one beauty, aside from the freshclarity of her skin, was her eyes, dark, surprisingly large, and eager.

"Come on and play Iserbella 'n' Columbus," demanded Winthrop.

"I can't," said Ann Vickers. "I'm playing Pedippus."

"What the dickens is Pedippus?"

"He was an ole hermit. Maybe it was Pelippus. Anyway, he was an olehermit. He was a great prince and then he left the royal palace becausehe saw it was wicked, and he gave up all the joys of the flesh and hewent and lived in the desert on--oh, on oatmeal and peanut butter and soon and so forth, in the desert, and prayed all the time."

"That's a rotten game. Oatmeal!"

"But the wild beasts of the desert, they were all around him, catamountsand everything, and he tamed them and they used to come hear him preach.I'm going to go preach to them now! And enormous big bears!"

"Aw, come on play Iserbella first," said Winthrop. "I'll let you take myrevolver while you're Iserbella--but I get it back--I get the revolverwhile I'm Columbus!"

He handed it over, and she inspected it judiciously. She had never hadthe famous weapon in her hand, though it was notorious through all ofchildland that Winthrop owned so remarkable a possession. It was a realrevolver, a.22, and complete in all its parts, though it is true thatthe barrel was so full of rust that a toothpick could not have beeninserted at the muzzle. Ann waved it, fascinated and a little nervous.To hold it made her feel heroic and active; it is to be feared that shelost immediately the chaste austerity of Pedippus.

"All right," she said.

"You're Iserbella and I'm Columbus," said Winthrop, "and Ben is KingFerdinand, and Dick is a jealous courtesan. You see all the guys in thecourt are crabbing me, and you tell 'em to lay off and----"

Ann darted to a broken willow bough. She held it drooping over her headwith her left hand--always her right clutched the enchantedrevolver--and mincing back to them she demanded, "Kneel down, my lieges.No, you Ferdinand, I guess you got to stand up, if you're myconcert--no, I guess maybe you better kneel, too, just to make sure. Nowprithee, Columbus, what can I do for you today?"

The kneeling Winthrop screamed, "Your Majesty, I want to go discoverAmerica.... Now you start crabbing, Dick."

"Ah, gee, I don't know what to say.... Don't listen to him, Queen,he's a crazy galoot. There ain't any America. All his ships will slideoff the edge of the earth."

"Who's running this, courtesan? I am! Certainly he can have three ships,if I have to give him half of my kingdom. What thinkest thou,concert?--you Ben, I mean you?"

"Who? Me? Oh, it's all right with me, Queen."

"Then get thee to the ships."

Moored to the river bank was an old sand barge. The four children racedto it, Ann flourishing the revolver. She led them all, fastest and mostexcited. At the barge, she cried, "Now, I'm going to be Columbus!"

"You are not," protested Winthrop. "I'm Columbus! You can't beIserbella and Columbus! And you're only a girl. You gimme thatrevolver!"

"I am, too, Columbus! I'm the best Columbus. So now! Why, you can't eventell me the names of Columbus's ships!"

"I can too!"

"Well, what were they?"

"Well, I can't just----Neither can you, smarty!"

"Oh, I can't, can't I!" crowed Ann. "They were the Pinto and the SantaLucheea and--and the Armada!"

"Gee, that's right. I guess she better be Columbus," marveled thedethroned King Ferdinand, and the great navigator led her faithful crewaboard the Santa Lucia, nor was the leap across that three feet ofmuddy water any delicate and maidenly exhibition.

Columbus took her station in the bow--as much as a double-ender scowpossesses a bow--and, shading her eyes, looking over the thirty feet ofcreek, she cried, "A great, terrible storm is coming, my men! Closehaulthe mainsail! Reef all the other sails! My cats, how it thunders andlightens! Step lively, my brave men, and your commander will lend ahand!"

Between them they got down all the sails before the hurricane struck thegallant vessel. The hurricane (perhaps assisted by the crew, standing onone side of the barge and jumping up and down) threatened to capsize theunfortunate caravel, but the crew cheered nobly. They were encouraged,no doubt, by the example of their commander, who stood with her rightleg boldly thrust forward, one hand on her breast and the other holdingout the revolver, while she observed, loudly, "Bang, bang, bang!"

But the storm continued, viciously.

"Let's sing a chantey to show we have stout hearts!" commanded Columbus,and she led them in her favorite ballad:

"Jingle bells, jingle bells,
Jingle all the way.
Oh! What fun it is to ride,
In a one-horse open sleigh!"

The storm gave up.

They were approaching Watling's Island now. Peering across the turbulentwater, often broken by the leap of a pickerel, Ann perceived savagebands roaming the shore.

"See, yonder, among the palms and pagodas! Pesky redskins!" warnedColumbus. "We must prepare to sell our lives dearly!"

"That's right," agreed her crew, gaping at the dread row of mullen weedsacross the creek.

"What d'you kids think you're doing?"

The voice was perfectly strange.

They turned to see, standing on the bank, a new boy. Ann stared withlively admiration, for this was a hero out of a story book. Toward suchmates as Ben and Winthrop, she had no awe; except in the arts ofbaseball and spitting, she knew herself as good a man as they. But thestrange boy, perhaps two years older than herself, was a god, a warrior,a leader, a menace, a splendor: curly-headed, broad-shouldered,slim-waisted, smiling cynically, his nose thin and contemptuous.

"What d'you kids think you're doing?"

"We're playing Columbus. Want to play?" The crew were surprised at Ann'smeekness.

"Nah! Playing!" The stranger leaped aboard--a clean leap where theothers had panted and plumped. "Let's see that gun." He took therevolver from Columbus, casually, and worshipingly she yielded it. Hesnapped it open and looked into the barrel. "It's no blame good. I'llthrow it overboard."

"Oh, please don't!" It was Ann who wailed, before Winthrop, the owner,could make warlike noises.

"All right, kid. Keep it. Who are you? What's your name? My name isAdolph Klebs. My dad and I just come to town. He's a shoemaker. He's aSocialist. We're going to settle here, if they don't run us out. Theyrun us out of Lebanon. Haa! I wasn't scared of 'em! 'You touch me andI'll kick you in the eye,' that's what I told the policeman. He wasscared to touch me. Well, come on, if we're going to play Columbus. I'llbe Columbus. Gimme that gun again. Now you kids get busy and line theside of the boat. There's a whole slew of redskins coming off incanoes."

And it was Adolph-Columbus who now observed, "Bang, bang, bang!" as heintroduced European culture to primitive Americans by shooting themdown, and of all his followers none was more loyal, or noisy, than AnnVickers.

She had never before encountered a male whom she felt to be hersuperior, and in surrender she had more joy than in her blithe and co*ckysupremacy of old.

* * * * *

In this town of Waubanakee, Illinois, a little south of the center ofthe state, Ann Vickers's father was Superintendent of Schools, knownalways as "Professor." His position made him one of the local gentry,along with three doctors, two bank presidents, three lawyers (one ofthem justice of the peace), the proprietor of the Boston Store, and theEpiscopal, Congregational, and Presbyterian ministers.

Physically, Waubanakee does not much enter Ann's story. Like mostAmericans who go from Main Street to Fifth Avenue or Michigan Avenue orMarket Street, and unlike most Britons and Continentals from theprovinces, after childhood she kept no touch with her native soil; neverreturned to it after the death of her parents; had no longing to acquirea manor there, as a climax to careers and grandeurs, or, like anAnglo-Indian pro-consul, to be buried in the village cemetery.

Her mother died when she was but ten, her father a year before Ann wentto college. She had no brothers or sisters. When she was middle-aged,Waubanakee was a memory, a little humorous, a little touching--a pictureshe had seen in youth, unreal, romantic, and lost.

Yet that small town and its ways, and all her father's principles ofliving, entered into everything she was to do in life. Sobriety, honestwork, paying his debts, loyalty to his mate and to his friends, disdainof unearned rewards--he once refused a tiny legacy from an uncle whom hehad despised--and a pride that would let him neither cringe nor bully,these were her father's code, and in a New York where spongers andsycophants and gayly lying people, pretty little people, little playingpeople, were not unknown even among social workers and scientists, thatcode haunted her, and she was not sorry or Freudian about it... and,though she laughed at herself, if she had not paid all her bills by thefourth of the month, she was uneasy.

She once heard Carl Van Doren say in a lecture that before he had lefthis native village of Hope, Illinois, he had met, in essence, everyonewhom he was ever to meet. Ann agreed. The Swedish carpenter atWaubanakee, who talked of Swedenborg, differed only in accent from theRussian grand duke whom thirty years after she was to meet in New Yorkand hear amiably flounder through a froth of metaphysics.

Yes, so deep was Waubanakee in her heart that all her life Ann caughtherself naïvely classifying acquaintances as Good People and Bad People,as implicitly as had her Sunday-school teacher in the WaubanakeePresbyterian Church. Here was a Charming Chap, witty, smiling, belongingto the best circles of New York, and never repaying the money he"borrowed," never keeping his dinner engagements. Well! To the littleAnn Vickers of Waubanakee, who was never quite extinguished in thatGreat Reformer, Dr. Ann Vickers (Hon. LL. D.), this man was Bad--he wasBad just as the village drunk of Waubanakee was Bad to her father, theProfessor.

It was a prejudice she could never much regret.

She came far enough along in American tradition to be as little ashamedof an American provincial origin as a British Prime Minister is of hisScottish village birth, or a French Premier of Provence. Till her dayand moment, it had been fashionable among most Americans with a keenawareness and some experience of the world either to sigh that pride inArkansas is insular and chauvinistic or, with a reverse humility, toboast of its rustic perfections. But Ann had the extraordinary luck(along with some 120,000,000 other Americans) to live in the magnificentthough appalling moment when the United States began awkwardly to seeitself not as an illegitimate child of Europe but as the master of itsown proud house.

There are but frayed cords binding such ambitious, out-stepping Americangirls as Ann, not only to their native villages, but even to theirfamilies, unless they are of recent Jewish or German or Italian origin.If they thus lose the richness and security of European familysolidarity, equally they are free from the spiritual and social incestof such nagging relationships.

But in Manhattan, Ann was some day to be mildly glad that through herfather and Waubanakee she was related to the bourgeois colony which, upto 1917, was the only America.

Chapter 2

Waubanakee did not vastly care for the newly come cobbler, Oscar Klebs,father of the dashing Adolph. In Ann's childhood, the prairie towns,from Zanesville to Dodge City, still had no notion that they were partof the Great World. They felt isolated--they were isolated.

Oh, it was all right to be German (only they said "Dutch") like OscarKlebs.

"There's some darn' good Dutchmen, by golly--just as good as you and me.Take the priest of the German Catholic Church. Course a lot of hiscongregation are dumm Dutch farmers, but he's a real guy, he certainlyis, and they say he's studied in Rome, Italy, and a lot of these places.But believe me, he hasn't got any more use for these darn Europeans thanI have. But now this Dutch shoemaker, this fellow Klebs, they say he's aSocialist, and I want to tell you, we haven't got any room in thiscountry for a bunch of soreheads that want to throw a lot of bombs andupset everything. No sir, we haven't!"

But it chanced that the only other cobbler in town was a drunken Yankeewho could never be trusted to half-sole shoes in time for theI. O. O. F. dance on Saturday evening, and, regretfully, irritably, thereigning burghers of Waubanakee took their work to a man who was soanarchistic as to insist, even right at the bar of the Lewis & ClarkeTavern, that the Stokeses and Vanderbilts had no right to theirfortunes.

They were cross with him.

Mr. Evans, president of the Lincoln and Douglas Bank, said testily, "NowI'll tell you, Klebs. This is a land of opportunity, and we don't likethese run-down and I might say degenerate Europeans telling us where weget off. In this country, a man that can do his work gets recognition,including financial, and if I may say so, sir, without being rude, youcan't hardly say it's our fault if you haven't made good!"

"By golly, sir, that's right!" said the hired man for Lucas Bradley.

* * * * *

Professor Vickers was dimly astonished when Ann brought her everydayshoes to him and complained, "Papa, these need half-soling."Customarily, Ann was unconscious of worn soles, missing buttons, oruncombed hair.

"Well, my little girl is beginning to look after her things! That'sfine! Yes, you take 'em around tomorrow. Have you done your Sundayschool lesson?" he said, with the benign idiocy and inconsequentialitycharacteristic of parents.

This was on Sunday, the day after the miraculous appearance of AdolphKlebs, the king-Columbus. On Monday morning, at eight, Ann took theshoes to Oscar Klebs, in his new shop which had formerly been the ChicJewelry Store (the first word to rhyme with Quick). On the shelf abovehis bench, there was already a row of shoes with that curiously humanlook that empty shoes maintain--the knobbly work-shoes of the farm-hand,with weariness in every thick and dusty crease, the dancing slippers ofthe slightly dubious village milliner, red and brave in the uppers butsleazy and worn below. Of these, Ann saw nothing. She stared at OscarKlebs as she had stared at his son Adolph. He was quite the mostbeautiful old man she had ever seen--white-bearded, high and fine offorehead, with delicate pale blue veins in a delicate linen skin.

"Good-morning, young lady," said Oscar. "And what can I do for you?"

"Please, I would like to get these shoes half-soled. They're my everydayshoes. I got on my Sunday shoes!"

"And why do you wear a different pair for Sundays?"

"Because it is the Sabbath."

"And isn't every day the Sabbath for people that work?"

"Yes, I guess it is.... Where's Adolph?"

"Did you ever stop to think, young lady, that the entire capitalistsystem is wrong? That you and I should work all day, but Evans, thebanker, who just takes in our money and lends it back to us again,should be rich? I do not even know your name, young lady, but you haveluffly eyes--I t'ink intelligent. T'ink of it! A new world! From each somuch as he can give, to each so much as he needs. The Socialist state!From Marx. Do you like that, young lady? Hein? A state in which all ofus work for each other?"

It was perhaps the first time in the life of Ann Vickers that a grown-uphad talked to her as an equal; it was perhaps the first time in her lifethat she had been invited to consider any social problem morecomplicated than the question as to whether girls really ought to throwdead cats over fences. It was perhaps the beginning of her intellectuallife.

The little girl--she was so small, so innocent, so ignorant!--sat withher chin tight in her hand, in the terrible travail of her firstabstract thinking.

"Yes," she said, and "Yes." Then, thought like lightning in her brain,"That is what we must have! Not some rich and some poor. All right! But,Mr. Klebs, what do we do? What shall I start doing now?"

Oscar Klebs smiled. He was not a smiling man--he suffered, as always thesaints have suffered, because Man has not become God. But now he almostgrinned, and betrayed himself, chuckling:

"Do? Do, my young lady? Oh, I suppose you'll just go on talking, likeme!"

"No," she said pitifully. "I don't want to just talk! I want WinthropZeiss to have as nice a house as Mr. Evans. Golly! He's lots nicer,Winthrop is. I want to----Gee, Mr. Klebs, I'd like to do things inlife!"

The old man stared at her, silently. "You will, my dear, God bless yoursoul!" said he--the atheist. And Ann forgot to ask again about theglorious Adolph.

* * * * *

But she did see Adolph, and often.

Oscar Klebs's shop became her haunt, more thrilling even than the depot,where every afternoon at five all detachable children gathered to watchthe Flyer go through to Chicago. Oscar told her of a world that hithertohad been colored but flat, a two-dimensional mystery in the geography;of working in 1871 in a lumber camp in Russia--where some day therewould be a revolution, he said--of the Tyrol (he combined with atheisman angry belief that in the stables of the Tyrol the cows do talk aloudat Christmas midnight)--of carp that come up and ask you for crumbs inthe pool at Fontainebleau--of the walls of Cartagena, which are ten feetthick and filled with gold hidden there by pirates--of the steamers onwhich he had sailed as mess-boy, and what scouse is like in thefo'c'sle--of the lone leper who sits forever on the beach in Barbados,looking out to sea and praying--of what sort of shoes the EmpressEugénie wore--of prime ministers and tavarishes and yogis and Icelandfishermen and numismatists and Erzherzogen and all manner of menunknown to Waubanakee, Illinois, till the Socialism to which Oscarconverted her was not very clearly to be distinguished from the romanceof Kipling.

And while he talked to the ruddy girl, on her stool, her eyes exalted,Oscar Klebs kept up a tat-tat-tat, tat-tat-tat, like a little drum.

And Adolph came in.

He never sat down. It was hard to think of that steel spring of a boyever sitting. He belonged not to the sedentary and loquacious generationof his father, but to a restless new age of machinery, of flashingcam-shafts, polished steel, pistons ramming gayly into a hell ofexploding gas, dynamos humming too deep for words. Had he been a boy in1931 instead of 1901, he would have responded to all his father'sponderous propositions with "Oh, yeah?" But in 1901 his "Yuh, sure!" wasequally impertinent, sharp, and antagonistic to fuzzy philosophizing.Tall, mocking, swift, leaning against doors and walls as though he wereabout to leap, his hands ever in his pockets, he was to Ann Vickers theone perfect hero she had ever known.

Now the theory was that Ann was being respectably educated by her fatherand mother, by the Waubanakee public schools, and the Sunday school ofthe First (and only) Waubanakee Presbyterian Church, with the select andfrilly children of Banker Evans for social guidance. Actually it wasfrom the cobbler and his son, and from her father's vices of payingdebts and being loyal, that she learned most of what she was ever toknow, and all this was dual and contradictory, so that she was herselfto be dual and contradictory throughout her life. From old Oscar shelearned that all of life was to foresee Utopia; from Adolph she learnedthat to be hard, self-contained, and ready was all of life.

Sitting by the Waubanakee River (which was no river, but a creek) sheonce or twice tried to tell Adolph what she regarded as her ideas:

That Oscar was right, and we must, preferably immediately, have aSocialist state in which, like monks, we labor one for another.

That it wasn't a bit nice to drink beer, or to appear in certain curiousrevelations, behind barns, of the differences between little boys andlittle girls.

That algebra was pretty slick, once you got onto it.

That the Idylls of the King by Mr. Lord Tennyson was awful exciting.

That if Jesus died for us--as, of course, He did--it was simply horridof us to sleep late on Sunday, and not take our baths in time to get toSunday school.

Adolph smiled always while she was earnestly talking. He smiled whilehis father was talking. All his life he was to smile while people weretalking. But it cut Ann and made her a little timid. She did mean, sointently, the "ideas" which she babbled forth--on a sand barge, by aslow river flowing in the shadow of willows that slowly waved in thetepid August airs.

If his supercilious smile was really from a higher wisdom, fitted to thesteel of the machine age, or if it was only a splendidly total lack ofintellect, neither Ann nor any one else will ever know. Some day he wasto be the manager of a fairly good garage in Los Angeles, and Oscar tosleep irritably in the Catholic Cemetery of Waubanakee, Illinois.

* * * * *

Even without old Oscar, Ann would never have been completely aconformist. In Sunday school in the Girls' Intermediate Class (teacher,Mrs. Fred Graves, wife of the owner of the lumber yard) she firstexploded as a feminist.

The lesson was of the destruction of Sodom, with the livelier portionsof the tale omitted. Mrs. Graves was droning, drowsy as a bumblebee,"But Lot's wife looked back at the awful city instead of despising it;and so she was turned into a pillar of salt, which is a very importantlesson for us all, it shows us the penalty of disobedience, and also howwe hadn't ought to even look at or hanker for wicked things and folks.That's just as bad as if we actually had something to do with them orindulged----"

"Please, Mrs. Graves!" Ann's voice, a little shrill. "Why shouldn't Mrs.Lot look back at her own hometown? She had all her neighbors there, andmaybe she'd had some lovely times with them. She just wanted to saygood-bye to Sodom!"

"Now, Annie, when you get wiser than the Bible----! Lot's wife wasdisobedient; she wanted to question and argue, like some little girls Iknow! See, it says in Verse 17: 'Look not behind thee.' That was adivine command."

"But couldn't the Lord change her back into a lady again, after He'dbeen so cranky with her?"

Mrs. Graves was becoming holy. Her eyes glittered, her eyeglassesquivered on their hook on her righteous brown-silk bosom. The othergirls crouched with the beginnings of fear--and giggling. Ann felt theperil, but she simply had to understand these problems over which shehad fretted in "getting" the Sunday school lesson.

"Couldn't the Lord have given her another chance, Mrs. Graves? I would,if I was Him!"

"I have never in my life heard such sacrilegious----"

"No, but--Lot was awful mean! He never sorrowed and carried on aboutMrs. Lot a bit! He just went off and left her there, a lonely pillar ofsalt. Why didn't he speak to the Lord about it? In those days folks werealways talking to the Lord; it says so, right in the Bible. Why didn'the tell the Lord to not be so mean and go losing His temper like that?"

"Ann Emily Vickers, I shall speak to your father about this! I havenever heard such talk! You can march yourself right out of this classand out of this Sunday school, right now, and later I'll talk to yourfather!"

Stunned, anarchistic with this early discovery of Injustice yet tooamazed to start a riot, Ann crawled down the church aisle, through aninnumerable horde of children giggling and sharpening their fingers ather shame, into a world where no birds sang; a Sabbath world of terribleand reproving piety. Her indignation was stirring, though, and when shereached home, to find her father just dressed for church, shoe-shined,bathed, and wearing the Prince Albert, she burst out with the uncensoredstory of her martyrdom.

He laughed. "Well, it doesn't sound very serious to me, Annie. Don'tworry about what Sister Graves will say."

"But it's very important about how that nasty man Lot acted! I got to dosomething!"

He was opening the front door, still laughing.

She fled through the kitchen, past the hired girl, astonished in hercooking of the regulation fricasseed chicken, through the back yard, tothe path up Sycamore Hill. She scolded to herself, "Yes, it's men likeLot and the Lord and my Dad--laughing!--that make all the trouble for uswomen!" She did not look around; she kept her sturdy back toward thevillage till she had dog-trotted halfway up the hillock.

She swung about, held out her hands to the roofs of Waubanakee, andcried, "Farewell, farewell! Sodom, I adore thee! All right, God!" Andshe raised expectant eyes to Heaven.

Chapter 3

From eleven to fifteen Ann cuddled to her a romantic affection forAdolph Klebs. It is not to be supposed that she made herself more thannormally and wholesomely ridiculous by mooning over him, or that she hadnothing else to do. She was busy--like a puppy. There were adventuresevery day, then: skating, sliding, fishing, swimming, trapping arabbit--just once, and releasing it afterward with screams of pity;nursing dogs and cats and ducklings, often to their great distress andinconvenience; discovering Vergil and Lord Macaulay and Hamlet and thevast new art of motion pictures and the automobile. Hearing a lovelyelocutionist gentleman with black wavy hair recite Kipling at theentertainment of the Order of the Eastern Star. Baking and sweeping andironing--she loved ironing; it made things so crisp and smooth. Doingall the housework in the not infrequent hiatuses between hired girls.Always, caring for her other-worldly father, who seemed far more of anorphan, more bewildered and disorganized than herself: laying out hishandkerchief, putting his muffler on him, hustling him out for a Sundayafternoon walk. She came to look on the race of males so protectivelythat it was questionable whether she would ever love one whom she couldnot bully and nurse.

But daily she saw Adolph and his mighty ways.

They were in the same class in school, and though all his scholarshipconsisted in smiling condescendingly when he didn't know the answer, heseemed superior. He could swim better, fight better, skate better, andpitch better than any boy in the gang. He was not afraid of the townpoliceman, even on Hallowe'en, when the gang perilously stole certainouthouses and arranged them as a miniature street in the school yard,with signs from the Main Street stores upon them, to the delight of theribald next morning. And he could dance better--but other girls besidesAnn had learned this, and sometimes at a party of the young set, sheached for his "Mave honor thdance thyou?" all through a barren evening.

Perhaps the grandest party Ann had yet seen was given by Mrs. Marston T.Evans, wife of the president of the Lincoln & Douglas Bank, president ofthe Midstate Plow & Wagon Works--the Lorenzo de' Medici, the J. P.Morgan, the Baron Rothschild of Waubanakee--for their daughter Mildred,on her fifteenth birthday, which happened to be two months after thefifteenth birthday of Ann Vickers.

Ann had always admired, had envied a little, the Evans mansion. It waswhite, with a green turret, very tall; it had both a parlor and alibrary. The parlor had a parquet floor, dark and much polished, with agenuine tigerskin rug, and on the wall two genuine hand-paintedpaintings, very ancient, perhaps seventy-five years old, said to beworth hundreds of dollars apiece. In the library there were rows ofbooks in gilt and leather bindings, behind locked glass doors.

All that Saturday in May, while the hired girl helped prepare her partydress, Ann wondered whether Adolph Klebs would be at the party. She hadnot dared to ask him, and rumors differed. Adolph did not answerpersonal questions; he had a witty way of retorting, always, "Who stolethe fish-pole?"

It was hard to think of a socialistic cobbler's son invited by Mr. andMrs. Marston T. Evans. But Mildred was believed to be "crazy about him."

"I'll die if he isn't there--and my dress so pretty!" agonized Ann,seemingly so sturdy and independent over the ironing-board.

Her new party dress was not a new party dress. Last summer it had been anew white organdy with a red sash, noble for summer evenings. Now shehad with her own hands (which for a week looked like those of a SolomonIslander) dyed it pale blue, and all day the cook and she had beensewing on little white cuffs and collar, and ironing the frock till itflared out fresh as new.

She had a lace shawl of her mother's for her head, and her father hadvoluntarily bought for her cobalt-blue dancing slippers. (Sometimes,years after, she wondered whether her father, the Professor, so soberover his school records and Carlyle and Educational Review, had reallybeen so incurably adult a parent as she had thought him. She missed him,when he was dead and she would never hear again the chuckle that oncehad infuriated her.)

The party was to be late--some of the gang said they were expected tostay till eleven, and they were summoned for eight o'clock, not seven orseven-thirty, like an ordinary bourgeois party in Waubanakee.

There was no moon as she scampered to the party, a little late after herdressmaking. But there was an afterglow warmer and more tender thanmoonlight, which, for all its celebrity, is a somewhat chill and mockingillumination, made of the breath of dying lovers. The thick sycamoresalong Nancy Hanks Street showed sculptured blocks of leafa*ge against theafterglow, and the bark-stripped gashes on their trunks were mysteriousblanks in the dusk. The air was full of village murmur, of distantlaughter and clopping horses and the barking of a farm-yard dog--ashadow of noise. And Ann was happy.

She was excited, a little startled, as she came round the corner and sawafar the exceeding glory of the party. There were lighted Japaneselanterns on the Evans lawn, and not just a string or two, as at a churchfestival, but lanterns hung from the box-elders along the front picketfence, lanterns in every spruce and rosebush scattered on the lawn,lanterns entirely across the immense front porch! It was Paris! And,nearer, Ann saw that on the lawn--right outside, outdoors, in theevening!--was a Refreshment Table heaped with every known delicacy inthe world: several kinds of cake, innumerable pitchers of lemonade andother delicate drinks, with three visible freezers of ice cream, while agirl help--not the regular Evans hired girl but an extra one, for theevening--was already serving ice cream from these freezers to youngladies and gentlemen palpitatingly holding out saucers.

Refreshments right from the beginning of the party, maybe all throughit, and not just at the end!

But, fretted the conscientious spirit that was always nagging at theadventurous in Ann, wouldn't maybe some of them get sick to theirstomachs, with so much rich food all evening?

Sudden and brilliant as a skyrocket the music flashed, and she saw thatthere was dancing--on the porch, outside, outdoors!--and to no merephonograph, but a full, complete orchestra: piano (moved right out onthe porch!), fiddle, and clarinet; and the clarinet was played by noless a one than Mr. Bimby of the Eureka Dry Goods Store, leader of theWaubanakee Band!

It was too much. Ann fled. She--the diver, the walker on ridgepoles--hadsocial panic; she dashed into darkness and stood biting the end of herforefinger. (She was later to feel just so when, after blandly presidingover a large meeting of wealthy, high-minded, and complacently dullladies, importantly gathered for impossible reforms, she was suddenlyescorted into a screaming night club in New York.)

With no more exhilaration but with aching dutifulness she marched backto the Evans mansion and through the gate. It got worse. She feltherself dressed in old calico. The other girls were so dainty: MildredEvans in lace over pink satin; Mabel McGonegal (the doctor's eldest) inruby velvet with a rhinestone necklace; Faith Durham in airy Japanesesilk--so dainty, so feminine, so winsome, so light; herself so ordinaryand stodgy!

(She did not note that most of the twenty other girls displayed evenmore familiar and less exotic frocks than her own. At any party Mildredand Mabel and Faith managed to preen and giggle and arch themselves intothe foreground. They were not very good at Latin or cooking, but theywere born to be brilliant, to marry Lithuanian counts, to be moviestars, or to live gloriously on alimony and co*cktails.)

Like a sturdy old farm dog amazed by a high-stepping greyhound, Annstared at them as they revolved to the heavenly strains. But Mrs. Evanssailed up to her so graciously, she so benevolently cackled, "Why, Anniedear, we've missed you--we did hope you wouldn't fail us--you must comeand have a nice fruit lemonade before you dance!" that Ann was restored.And what a lemonade that was! The great soda fountain had not yet in itsmorning splendor dawned on the Western World; at the drug store you tookvanilla ice cream soda or you took vanilla ice cream. The fruit lemonadewhich Mrs. Evans introduced to Ann (without explaining just what anon-fruit lemonade might be) was seething with cracked ice, slicedpineapple, sliced orange, and two red cherries! Ann sipped as inparadise, until she realized that Mrs. Evans had left her.

Alone! She wanted to sneak away.

She saw then that, shadowed by a spruce, sitting on a camp stool andalso drinking a fruit lemonade, was Adolph Klebs.

"Hello, Annie. Come on over and sit down," he called, and he wasactually wheedling.

It was a tribute Adolph was not likely to have again in this life thatAnn set her lemonade down on the refreshment table not only unfinishedbut with one of the cherries unsecured. Beside Adolph was another canvasstool, and Ann squatted on it, her chin on her hands.

"Why aren't you dancing?" she said.

"Oh, the hell with 'em! They're too tony for me. I'm the crazy oldshoemaker's kid! Why aren't you? Your old man is rich, like them!"

She did not stoop to the false modesty of denying this; it was true, ofcourse--her father made twenty-eight hundred a year. But: "Oh, you'recrazy! They're all crazy about you! Why, Dolph, you're the best dancerin town! The girls are all crazy to dance with you!"

"Hell with 'em! Lookit, Ann, you and me are the only square kids here.Those girls, they're just a bunch of flirts. They can't go hunting andswim and everything like what you can, and they ain't half as smart inschool, and--and you never lie, and they're all a bunch of liars and soon. But you're a dandy kid, Annie. You're my girl!"

"Am I? Am I honest your girl?"

"You bet your sweet life you are!"

"Oh, Dolph, that's dandy! I'd like to be your girl!"

She held his hand. He awkwardly kissed her cheek. That was all of theircaressing. Long kisses and greater intimacies did exist, in this eveningof the Age of Innocence, but "necking" was not yet a public and acceptedsport.

"Let's go and dance. We'll show 'em!" she said stoutly.

As they crossed the lawn into more brilliant light, she realized thather Man was as magnificently clad as Morgan Evans--a real blue sergesuit, an enormously high collar, an elegant green bow-tie with figuresof tiny white clover leaves and, fashionably matching it, a green silkhandkerchief drooping out of his breast pocket.

Though it was curious that he, the shoemaker's son, had no pumps, likesome of the aristocrats, but only his high thick black shoes.

A square dance was just finished; a two-step starting as Ann and Adolphdefiantly mounted to the porch. Oh, that foaming, moonlight music, towhich the entranced romantics sang:

"Oh, this is the day they give babies away
With a half--a-pound--o' teeeeea!"

In Adolph's arms she was not earnest. Her strength flowed into his andshe was borne effortless round and round. She was a soap-bubble, abutterfly, an evening swallow. She forgot her rivals with theirelegancies; she hadn't even to dodge them in dancing. Adolph led her,with magic sureness. Though they danced morally, eight inches apart, hisdear, strong, nervous hand was against her back, electric as a battery.

Then the music ceased, she tumbled from Heaven, she stood bewildered,while Mrs. Evans shrieked in her clear, strong, Christian voice, "Now,children, let's play 'Skip to Malloo'!"

Ann and her Beau were separated. His shyness before the grandeurs ofthis new Fête of Versailles seemed to have waned. No one bounced moreblithely in the game, sang louder. Adolph was older than the others, buthe was adaptable. Last night he had been surreptitiously drinking beerwith worldly men of twenty; tonight he dominated the children. When theydanced again, Ann looked for Adolph, her glance toward him likeoutreaching arms, but he danced first with Faith, then with MabelMcGonegal, courtly daughter of the doctor (she could play the banjo andrecite French Canuck dialect poems), and at last with Mildred Evansherself.

Mrs. Evans, looking on, clucked to her lord, "You see, the Klebs boy isquite a gentleman."

"Yes. After all, this is a democracy. After all, I was born on a farmmyself," marveled Mr. Marston T. Evans.

But Ann Vickers watched that swaying waltz of Adolph and Mildred withthe eyes again of a hurt old farm dog.

She was "sitting out." She had danced a two-step with her faithfulcomrade-at-arms, Winthrop, but after the quicksilver of Adolph, it wasagony. She had seemed to be dragging Winthrop like a cart. They bumpedinto every one. And though Winthrop's hearty and irritating hummingfollowed the music, his honest feet protested against all frivolity andwalked right on through the nonsense.

They played Post Office.

When the Postmaster, stationed at the door of the darkened library, withAdolph within as the fortunate receiver of kisses, inspected the girlsto see which he should choose, they looked more than commonlyself-conscious. Adolph was at once an outcast and king of the party; hewas a Robin Hood fluttering the provincial court.

"Uh--uh--Ann!" called the Postmaster.

Giggles.

"She's crazy about um!" Mabel whispered to Mildred.

Ann did not hear, which was well for Mabel. Ann's vengeance was in amodest way terrible as the Lord's.

She did not hear. On wings she sailed into the darkened room. It hadceased to be an elegant library and became a cave of wonder andexaltation. She knocked against things that surely had not been there.She was lost and joyous. She held out her hands to--what? Of bodilyardors she had in her innocence no idea. It was the essence of love shewanted, now, not its husk... however realistically she was some dayto know that flesh is not the foe but the interpreter of love.

"Come on!" she heard Adolph grunt.

He dabbled at her; his kiss licked the corner of her jaw; he muttered,"Now it's your turn!" and her knight was hastily opening the door, andgone.

It was Ben who came in then. Since babyhood he had adored Ann, followedher, brought her apples, and never kissed her. Now that he was turningman, it would mean something to him to kiss her. So he giggled ratheridiotically as he groped for her. "Gee, I'm scared!" he snickered. Hefound her in an armchair, and as he diffidently embraced her he cried,"Why, golly, Annie, you're crying!"

"Oh, oh, please don't kiss me, Ben!"

"But you're crying! Was Adolph mean to you?"

"Oh, no, no, it's just--I ran against a table in the dark."

Quietly they sat, Ben monotonously patting her shoulder, till shewhispered, "I'm all right now. I better go out."

As she appeared in the door, there was a storm of laughter from theyoung people, in a circle facing the library door. "Oh, what you an' Benbeen up to! Oh, I guess that was some kissing, Annie!"

And Adolph leered at her.

Only by the sternest and most conscious will did she keep from marchingout and going home. She had a definite desire to kill; kill all of them.She made herself sit down, saying nothing. She never did know which girlit was who now went into the library to submit herself to the tepidcaresses of Ben.

But she was aware enough when Adolph was summoned to entertain MabelMcGonegal in the dark.

It had often been whispered in the gang that Mabel was a flirt, that shewas "awful sweet on the boys." The party, all save Ann, watched thelibrary door with embarrassed giggles, with all the stirrings ofpuberty, for five minutes.

"And he stayed with me for five seconds!" Ann raged to herself.

Mabel came out, tossing her slightly ruffled head. But she was, unlikeAnn, worldly wise. Before they could mock her, she screamed, "And maybeI didn't get kissed right!"

In Ann's heart was cold death.

But when Adolph, in his turn, reappeared, swaggering, proud, she did notagonize as she had expected, but suddenly laughed, as she thought, "Why!He's just a tomcat! He walks like one!"

And in that instant her love for the hero was gone, so that she did notsuffer when she heard Adolph mutter to Mabel McGonegal a canonical, "Maysee y' home?"

Herself she was "seen home" by Ben, stumbling foolishly beside her andprefacing all his observations by "Aw, gee," or "Lookit."

The afterglow was gone.

At Ann's gate, Ben complained, "Aw, gee, Ann, why haven't you got afellow? You never did have a fellow. Gee, I wish you were my girl!"

Ben was profoundly astonished and embarrassed by being smacked with ahearty kiss, and more astonished that Ann followed it up with, "You'resweet, but I'll never be anybody's girl!" and dashed into the house.

Chapter 4

"I hate that Evans house! All shiny! I like it here!" raged Ann, whenshe had left Ben and come into the brown and comfortable dowdiness ofthe Vickers sitting room.... Gritty Brussels carpet; Hoffmannpictures of Christ; old college textbooks, and Walter Scott and Dickensand Washington Irving and the "English Men of Letters" series and TheJungle and The Birds' Christmas Carol and Cruden's Concordance; ahighly tufted sofa with an autograph sofa-cushion; and Father's slippersin a wall-case worked with his initials.

"I like it here. It's safe!" said Ann, and trudged up to bed.

She took off her splendor of organdy frock scornfully. But she was tooneat a soul to do anything so melodramatic as to tear it, to hurl itregally on the floor. She hung it up precisely, smoothing out the skirt,her fingers conscious of the cool crispness.

She brushed her hair, she patted her pillow, but she did not go to bed.She put on her little mackintosh (the Vickers household did not, in1906, run to dressing-gowns) and sat in a straight chair, looking aboutthe room solemnly, as though she had never seen it before.

It was of only hall-bedroom size, yet there was about it a strippedcleanness which made it seem larger. Ann hated what she called"clutter." Here were no masses of fly-spotted dance-programs, withlittle pencils, hanging by the mirror on the bureau; no snapshots ofbathing parties on the beach during that wonderful camping party; andnot a single Yale or University of Illinois banner!

One shelf of books--Hans Christian Andersen, Water Babies, Lays ofAncient Rome, David Copperfield (stolen from the set downstairs), LeGallienne's Quest of the Golden Girl, her mother's Bible, a book aboutbees, Hamlet, and Kim, its pages worn black with reading. A bureauwith the comb and brush and buttonhook in exact parallels. (Like manyrackety and adventurous people, Ann was far more precise in arrangingher kit, wherever she was, than the steady folk whose fear of living ismatched by their laziness in organizing their dens.)

A prim cot-bed with one betraying feminine sentimentality: a tinylace-insertion pillow. The straight chair. A reasonably bad carbon printof Watts's reasonably bad view of Sir Galahad. A wide window, usuallyopen. A rag carpet. And peace.

It was Ann herself, this room. Since the death of her mother, there hadbeen no one to tell her what the room of a well-bred young lady shouldbe. She had made it. Yet she looked at it now, and looked at herself, asalien and strange and incredible.

She talked to herself.

Now it is true that Ann Vickers, at fifteen, was all that she would everbe at forty, except for the trimmings. But it is also true that shecould not talk to herself so acidly sharp as she would at forty. Hermonologue was cloudy; it was inarticulate emotion. Yet could thatemotion have been translated into words, there where she sat, huddled inher little mackintosh, her nails bitter against her palms, it would haverun:

"I loved Dolph. Oh, dear Lord, I did love him. Maybe even not quitenice. When that funny thing happened to me, that Father told me not toworry about, I wanted him to kiss me. Oh, darling, I did love you. Youwere so wonderful--you had such a thin hard body, and youdived--dove?--so beautifully. But you weren't kind. I thought you meantit, what you said to me tonight under the spruce tree. I thought youmeant it! That I wasn't just a husky girl that could do athletics butnobody could love her.

"I shan't ever have a real Beau. I guess I'm too vi'lent. Oh, I don'twant to be! I know I plan all the games. I don't want to. I just can'tkeep my mouth shut, I guess.... And all the rest are so damn stupid!...Dear Lord, forgive me that I said 'damn,' but they are so damnstupid!

"Ben. He would love me. He is so kind.

"I don't want to be loved by any spaniels! I am me! I'm going to see thewhole world--Springfield and Joliet and maybe Chicago!

"I guess if I ever love anybody that's as husky as I am, he'll always bescared of me----

"No, Dolph wasn't scared. He despised me!"

* * * * *

Suddenly--and there is no clear reason why she should have done so--shewas reading the Twenty-fourth Psalm from her mother's Bible, which wasworn along the edges of the black, limp-leather binding, and her voicenow, articulate and loud, rose as she chanted:

"Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall standin his holy place? He that hath clean hands and a pure heart;who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworndeceitfully.

"He shall receive the blessing from the Lord, and righteousnessfrom the God of his salvation. This is the generation of themthat seek thy face, O Jacob. Selah.

"Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, yeeverlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in. Who isthis King of glory? The Lord, strong and mighty, the Lord mightyin battle.

"Lift up your heads, O ye gates; even lift them up, yeeverlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in. Who isthis King of glory? The Lord of hosts, he is the King of glory.Selah."

Her father was knocking, with a worried, "Ann! Annie! What is it? Areyou sick?"

She hated men then, save the King of glory, for whom she would sacrificeall the smirking Adolphs and complaisant fathers of this world. She feltsavage. But she said civilly:

"Oh, no. I'm sorry, Daddy. I was just reading--uh--rehearsing somethingwe thought we'd do. I'm terribly sorry I woke you up. Good-night, dear."

"Did you have a nice party?"

Ann was always to lie like a gentleman, and she caroled:

"Oh, it was lovely. Good-night!"

* * * * *

"Yes, I'll have to give it up. The boys, the ones I want, they'll neverlike me. And golly, I do like them! But I just got to be satisfied withbeing a boy myself.

"And I don't want to.

"But I'll do something! 'Be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors!'

"He was so strong. And slim!

"Oh, him!

"I'll never be cheap again and want anybody.

"That picture doesn't hang straight, not quite.

"Girls like Mabel! That hang around the boys!

"I won't ever give 'em, I won't ever give the boys another chance tomake fun of me for being square with them!

"'Be ye lift up!' I'm going to sleep."

* * * * *

Though often she saw him in the grocery to which he tranquilly retiredfrom the arduous life of learning in the high school, though it was theperiod when her gang was definitely aligning itself into Girls andFellows, Ann showed no more interest in Adolph Klebs.

"Jiminy, Ann Vickers is funny," observed Mildred Evans. "She's crazy!She says she don't want to get married. She wants to be a doctor or alawyer or somethin', I dunno. She's crazy!"

Oh, Mildred, how wise you were, how wise you are! Today, married to Ben,have you not the best radio in town? Can you not hear Amos 'n' Andy, orthe wisdom of Ramsay MacDonald relayed from London? Have you not aBuick, while Dr. Ann Vickers jerks along in a chipped Ford? Do you notplay bridge, in the choicest company, while she plays pinochle with onesilent man? Good Mildred, wise Mildred, you never tackled the world,which will always throw you.

Good-night, Mildred. You are ended.

* * * * *

That Christmas Eve, when Ann was seventeen, was a postcard ChristmasEve. As she scampered to the church for the Sunday school exercises, thekind lights of neighbors' houses shone on a snowy road where the sleightracks were like two lines of polished steel. The moon was high andfrosty, and the iced branches of the spruce trees tinkled faintly, andeverywhere in the good dry cold was a feeling of festivity.

Ann was absorbed and busy--too busy to have given such attention toclothes and elegance as she had in her days of vanity, at fifteen. Shedid wish she had something more fashionable than her plaid silk blouse,and she a little hated the thick union suit which her sensible fatherhad bought for her but--oh, well, her days of frivolity were done.

She was teacher of the Girls' Intermediate Class of the FirstPresbyterian Church, which had once been taught by Mrs. Fred Graves, nowasleep in Greenwood Cemetery, and from which a girl named Annie Vickershad been driven for flippancy about the necessity of disciplining women.The Girls' Intermediate Class was to present the cantata "Hark, theHerald Angels Sing" at the Sunday school exercises, and Ann washurrying--hurrying--because it was so important that she should bethere, that she should take charge of things, that her class shouldimpress the audience.

The church was a very furnace of festivity as she came up to it. Thewindows were golden, the door was jollily framed in a wooden Gothicarch. On the church porch were all the small boys who, though perhapsneglectful of their Sabbath duties for fifty weeks out of the year, hadbeen edifyingly attendant the past two weeks.

Inside, the church was a cave of green and crystal. Even the helpfulmottoes painted on the side walls, "Blessed be the Name of the Lord,"and "Are you saved?" were almost hidden by holly wreaths. But thesplendor of it all was the Christmas tree on the platform. Ten good feetit rose, with candles and papier-mâché angels--for on Christmas Eve thePresbyterian Church permitted itself to be so Roman as to admit angels,along with the Christ Child. Candles against the deep green; candles andwhite angels and silver balls and plentiful snow made of rich cottonbatting. And at the foot of the tree were the stockings, one for each ofthe Presbyterian children, even those who had been convincedlyCalvinistic only for the last two weeks; stockings of starchy net, eachcontaining an orange, a bag of hard candy, including peppermints printedin red with such apt mottoes as "Come on, baby!", three Brazil nuts(better known in Waubanakee as "nigg*rtoes"), a pamphlet copy of theGospel According to St. John, and a Gift--a tin trumpet or a whistle ora cotton monkey.

They had been purchased by the new pastor, young Reverend Donnelly, outof his salary of $1,800 a year--when he got it. He was not altogetherwise, this young man. He frightened adolescents, including Ann Vickers,by the spectacle of an angry old God watching them and trying to catchthem in nasty little habits. And his sermons were dull, suffocatinglydull. But he was so kind, so eager! And it was Reverend Donnelly (not,locally, the Reverend Mister) who dashed down the aisle now to greetAnn.

"Miss Vickers! I'm so glad you're early! We're going to have aglorious Christmas Eve!"

"Oh I do hope so. Ismyclassready?" demanded the energetic Ann.

The exercises went superbly: the prayer, the singing by the choir andcongregation of "Come All Ye Faithful," the comic song by Dr. Brevers,the dentist, the cantata, with Ann leading, very brisk with her baton;and they came to the real point of the exercises--distribution of theChristmas stockings by Santa Claus, very handsome and benevolent in ared coat and snowy whiskers. Privately, Santa was Mr. Bimby, of theclarinet and the Eureka Dry Goods Store.

Mr. Bimby speaking:

"Now, boys and girls, I've, ur, come a long way, all the way from theice and snow and, ur, the glaciers of the North Pole, because I've heardthat the boys and girls of the Waubanakee Presbyterian Church wasparticularly good and done what their parents and teachers told them to,and so I've given up my dates with the Pope at Rome and the King ofEngland and all those folks to be with you, myself, personally."

Ann Vickers, as a participant, had a seat in one of the front pews. Alittle uneasily she watched a candle drooping on a lower bough of theChristmas tree. She rebuked herself for her phobia, but she could scarceattend to Mr. Bimby's humor as he rollicked on:

"Now I guess there's some of you that haven't been quite as good asmaybe you might of been, this past year. And maybe some of you ain'tgone to Sunday school as often as you might of. I know that in myclass--I mean, I got a phone call from my friend Ted Bimby, the teacherof the Older Boys' Class here, and he says sometimes on a nice summermorning----"

The candle was drooping like a tired hand. Ann's fingers were tight.

"--some of the boys would rather go off fishing than hear the Word ofthe Lord, and all them lessons that you can learn from the example ofJacob and Abraham and all them old wise folks----"

The candle reached the cotton batting. Instantly the tree was aflame, agusty and terrible flame. Reverend Donnelly and Santa Claus Bimby stoodgaping. It was Ann Vickers who sprang onto the platform, pushing Bimbyaside.

The children were screaming, in the utter reasonless terror of children,fighting toward the door.

Ann snatched up the grass rug which adorned the pulpit platform, threwit over the incandescent tree, and with her hands beat down the flameswhich the rug did not cover, while her whole scorched body hurt liketoothache. She raged, she said, "Oh, dear!" in a tone which made itsound worse than "Oh, damn!"

Just as she dropped, she was conscious that the fire was quenched andthat Dr. McGonegal was throwing his coonskin coat over the tree. She washoping the coat would not be burned.

* * * * *

For two weeks Ann lay abed. She was, said Dr. McGonegal, to have noscars save a faint smirch or two on her wrists. And for that two weeksshe was a heroine.

Reverend Donnelly called every day. Mr. Bimby brought her a valuablebead wreath. Her father read David Harum to her. The WaubanakeeIntelligencer said that she was kin to Susan B. Anthony, QueenElizabeth, and Joan of Arc.

But what excited her was the calling of Oscar Klebs--his Homeric brow,his white beard, his quiet desperation.

Rather fussily and somewhat incredulous at such a proletarian caller,Professor Vickers brought in the old man, with a falsely cheery,"Another visitor for you, dear."

The authority of being a heroine gave Ann a courage toward her amiablebut still parental parent that she had rarely shown before. She dared todrive him out with an almost wifely inclination of her head toward thedoor, and she was alone with Oscar.

The old man sat by her bed, patting her hand.

"You were very fine, my little lady. And I am not so bigoted I t'ink itall happened because it was in a church. No, maybe not! But Icome----Little Ann, don't let it make you t'ink that you are a herowine!Life, it is not heroism. It is t'ought. Bless you, my little lady! Now Igo!"

It was much the shortest visit she had. And for a week, freed from theduty of being brisk and important about unimportant affairs, she layabed, thinking--the one week in all her life so far when she had hadtime to think.

Oscar Klebs seemed always to be sitting beside her, demanding that shethink.

"Um--huh. I enjoyed it too much," she brooded. "Being a heroine! I putout that fire before I had time to realize it. Annie, that was nice ofyou, putting out that fire. Yes, it was, dear! Mr. Bimby was scared, andso was Reverend Donnelly. You weren't! And what of that? You just movequicker than most folks. And yet you couldn't make Adolph love you!

"Oh, dear God, make me solid! Don't let me ever be too tickled byapplause!

"'Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in hisholy place? He that hath clean hands and a pure heart.'

"But by golly I did put out that fire, while all those men stoodgoggling!"

Chapter 5

Point Royal College for Women is a pleasant place of Georgian brickbuildings, of lawns and oaks and elms, on the slope of a hill above theHousatonic River, in Connecticut.

Ann Vickers's father had left her, at his death--he died very quietlyand decently, for he was that sort of man--a thousand dollars, all hisestate. For the rest of her tuition she waited on table at Dawley Hall,the college dining-room, and corrected papers in sociology.

She was a Junior, now, in the autumn of 1910.

Ann Vickers, aged nineteen, was "appallingly wholesome-looking." Thatwas her own phrase for it. She was rather tall, large-boned, threatenedby fat unless, as she always did, she fought it. Her hair was brown andonly by savage attention did she keep it from being mutinous. Her bestfeature was her eyes, surprisingly dark for her pale skin, and they wereeyes that were never blank; they flashed quickly into gayety or anger.Though she was threatened with plumpness about her hips, she hadbeautiful slim legs, and long hands, very strong. And she, who thoughtof herself as a quiet person, a field mouse among these splendorousshining girls from Fifth Avenue and Farmington and Brookline, wasactually never still, never meek, even to the daughter of a Pittsburghsteel millionaire. She was always being indignant or joyful or deep insorrow or depressed--in what Lindsay Atwell was later to call her "smallmood." When a play came to Point Royal, and the other girls said "Thatwas a nice show" or "I didn't think that was so swell," Ann walked forhours--well, minutes--after it, hating the villain, glorying with theheroine, sometimes loving the hero.

She was, without particularly wanting to be, Important. She was on thebasketball team, she was secretary of the cautious Socialist Club, shewas vice president of the Y. W. C. A. and, next year, as a Senior,likely to be its president.

For two years she had roomed alone. But this year she was sharing ahandsome apartment (it had running water) with Eula Towers, the pale andlovely Eula, given to low lights and delicate colors, to a pale andlovely leaf-green art--a fin de siècle exquisite held over ten yearstoo long. Eula was doing most of the drawings for the Class Annual:portraits of young ladies with swan necks and a certain lack of mammaryglands, pre-Raphaelite young ladies, very artistic and pretty dull.

Ann had always admired Eula, and never known her. To Ann, who couldbandage a leg bruised at basketball, or fret over the statistics in asociology paper, or with false jollity reconcile the dreadfulcontroversy in the Y. W. as to whether they should have a jointcamp-meeting with Bethel College Y. W., it was overawing that Eulashould be able to draw portraits of the faculty, that she should wearfive bracelets at once, that she should sometimes wear a turban, andthat for the Point Royal Literary Argus she should have written themoving poem:

Night--and the night is dark and full of fear--
Night--and I walk my lonely ways alone--
Oh you are far, and dear--you are too dear--
Under the deadened Moon.

And Eula was rich. Her father was a significant wholesale drug dealer inBuffalo. While Ann insisted on paying her half of the rent, she did letEula furnish and decorate their two rooms, and what a furnishing, what adecoration that was! Eula was all for fainting pastels and a generalescape from the bright exactitudes of the wholesale drug business. Theyhad a study and a bedroom. The study, which she called "the studio,"Eula furnished in black and lavender; gold and lavender Japanese fabricsagainst the cream-colored plaster walls provided by the unestheticcollege authorities; black carpet; a couch, covered with black silk, sowide and luxurious that it was impossible to sit on it without getting abackache; chairs of black-painted wood with lavender upholstery; andpictures and pictures and pictures.... Aubrey Beardsley, Bakst, VanGogh, a precious signed photograph of Richard Mansfield, and whatappeared to be several thousand Japanese prints, not necessarily fromJapan.

This groundwork once laid, Eula attended to dimming the light andexcluding the air. The three gas-mantel lights, one on each desk and onefrom the ceiling, she cloaked with triple lavender silk shades. The twogood windows, looking on oaks and grassland and far hills, she correctedwith curtains of lavender silk and drapes of black velvet.

And on a little table she had a gilded cast-iron Buddha.

Ann was agitated but silent. She fretted that she "didn't know muchabout all this art."

The beauty and wonder complete, Eula glowed to Ann, "Isn't it lovely!The rooms at Point Royal, oh, they're so hard and bold, most of 'em. Sodreadfully masculine and vulgar and bromidic! We'll have a real salon,where we can talk and loaf and invite our souls. And dreeeeeam! Nowhere's what I plan for the bedroom. Let's keep the black motif, but haveold rose for the subsidiary theme. Black velvet drapes again, but----"

"Now look here!" Ann's reverence for high and delicate things was gonein a demand for light and fresh air, two of the greatest gods in hersmall, hard Pantheon, along with courage, loyalty, and the curiosity ofan Einstein about what makes the world go. "This room is certainlyswell, dear. It certainly looks pretty. Yes, I guess it certainly ispretty. But I'm not going to have any heavy curtains or any swelllamp-shades in the bedroom. I got to have air. And if you don't mind,I'm going to move my desk in there and study by the window, with just agreen glass shade on the lamp. You keep this room. And then in thebedroom we'll have a coupla cots and a coupla bureaus and a grass rug,and that's enough."

Eula smote her breast at this Philistinism. (It was in 1910: they stillused the word "Philistine.") She wailed, like a silver trumpet in afuneral march, "Ann! Oh, my darling! I did it only because I thought youliked--you liked----Oh, if you had only said!"

"Sure, it's swell to have the sitting-room like this. But gotta have oneroom to work in. You see how it is!"

"Oh, of course. My darling! Whatever you want!" Eula advanced on Annlike a snake: she clasped Ann to her, kissing her neck. "I just want todo what you want! Anything that my talent can add to your greatness----"

"Oh, stop it! Quit it!" The curious thing is that Ann was more alarmedthan angered by this soapy attack. It seemed unholy. With no visiblegallantry, she fled. "Got to hustle to the gym," she grumbled, breaking,away, seizing her tam-o'-shanter.

"I don't understand it. I don't like it when girls hug you like that.Gee, I just felt somehow kind of scared. Not nice, like Adolph!" shemarveled, on her way to the library.

But after a happy hour with Danby's Principles of Taxation and ItsRelationship to Tariffs, she sighed, "Oh, it's just one of thoseidiotic school girl crushes. Just because she kisses you, you get up onyour ear. You think you're so sacred!... But we're not going to haveany Babylonian--Carthaginian, is it? whatever it is--decorations in thebedroom!"

They didn't.

Eula, though she squeaked plaintively against windows open on coldnights, declared in company that she was enchanted by "the fine Spartansimplicity of our sleeping-quarters."

* * * * *

Six girls were in Eula's "salon," this third day of their Junior year.The room was not yet completely furnished, but the wide black couch anda few hundred Japanese prints were in place. The six sat about a chafingdish in which Welsh rabbit was evilly bubbling. It was rather like sixyoung gentlemen of Harvard or Yale or Princeton in a dormitory roomabout a precious bottle of gin in 1932, except that the Welsh rabbit wasmore poisonous.

They talked--they trilled--they gabbled--they quivered with thediscovery of life. The first two years of college, they had beenschoolgirls. Now they looked out to the Great World and to the time whenthey would be Graduates and command thrones and powers andprincipalities, splendid jobs in the best high schools, or lordlyhusbands (preferably professional men); when they would travel inFrance, or perform earnest good-doing upon the poor and uneducated.

"There's so many girls in the class that just want to get married. Idon't want to get married. To wash a lot of brats and listen to ahusband at breakfast! I want a career," said Tess Morrissey.

It was 1910. They talked then, ardent girls, as though marriage and a"career" were necessarily at war.

"Oh, I don't! I don't think it's quite nice to talk about family lifelike that!" said Amy Jones. "After all, isn't civilization founded onthe hearthstone? And how could a really nice woman influence the worldmore than by giving an example to her husband and sons?"

"Oh, rats, you're so old-fashioned!" protested Edna Derby. "Why do yousuppose we go to college? Women have always been the slaves of men.Now it's women's hour! We ought to demand all the freedom and--andtravel and fame and so on and so forth that men have. And our ownspending money! Oh, I'm going to have a career, too! I'm going to be anactress. Like le belle Sarah. Think! The lights! The applause! The scentof--of make-up and all sorts of Interesting People coming into yourdressing-room and congratulating you! The magic world! Oh, I must haveit.... Or I might take up landscape gardening, I hear that paysslick."

"I suppose," Ann snarled, "that if you went on the stage you'd do someplays as well as get applauded!"

"Oh, of course. I'd like to help elevate the stage. It's so lowbrow now.Shakespeare."

"Well, I don't care," said Mary Vance. "I think Amy is right. It's allvery well to have a career, and I want to keep up my piano and banjo,but I do want to have a home. That's why you get a swell education--soyou can marry a really dandy fellow, with brains and all, and understandand help him, and the two of you face the world just like--like thatFrench king, you remember and his wife."

"I'm not afraid of the world. I'm going to be a painter. Study. Paris!Oh, dear Paris, gray old town beside the Seine. And canvases that willhang in the salons forever!" opined Eula.

"Yes, and I want to write," mooned Tess.

"Write what?" Ann snapped.

"Oh, you know. Write! You know--poems and essays and novels andcriticisms and all like that. I think I'll start out reading manuscriptsfor a publishing house. Or I might take a position on a New Yorknewspaper. I've got the cutest idea for an essay right now--about howbooks are our best friends and never turn you down no matter if you dohit bad luck. But what are you crabbing about? You don't mean to sayyou're going to fall for this husband and hearthside stuff, aftergetting educated? Aren't you going to have a career, Ann?"

"You bet your life I am! But where I differ from you dilettantes--youMarys--I always did think Martha got a raw deal that time!--but where Idiffer is, I expect to work! I want all the cheers and money I can get,but I expect to work for them. Besides! I want to do something that willhave some effect on the human race. Maybe if I could paint likeVelasquez and make your eyes bung out, or play Lady Macbeth so peoplewould fall off their seats, I'd be crazy to do it, but to paint footlinglittle snow-scenes----"

"Why, Aaann!" from Eula.

"--or play Charles Klein, that's all goulash! I want to be somethingthat affects people--I don't know what yet--I'm too ignorant. Maybe amissionary? Or is that just a way of getting to China? Maybe a lady doc?Maybe work in a settlement house? I don't know. But I want to get myhands on the world."

"Oh, yes," that future literary genius, Tess, said virtuously, "ofcourse I want to help people, too. Elevate them."

"Oh, I don't mean pass around the coal and blankets and teach the SouthSea Islanders to wear pants. I mean----" If Ann was struggling harderthan the others to say, to discover for herself, what she meant, it wasbecause in some elementary way she did have something to mean. "It'slike what you get in this new novel by H. G. Wells, this Tono-Bungay.I'd like to contribute, oh, one-millionth of a degree to helping makethis race of fat-heads and grouches something more like the angels."

"Why, Ann Vickers!" said the refined Amy Jones. "Do you think it's niceto call the human race, that the Bible says were created in God's image,a bunch of fat-heads?"

"Well, John the Baptist called his hometown folks a generation ofvipers. But I don't think we're as good as that--we haven't got as muchspeed or smoothness as a nice viper. We need more poison, not less.We're all so--so--so darn soft! So scared of life!"

Into the room slammed Francine Merriweather, and the discussion of thepurposes of life, which had become exciting, curled up and diedinstantly as Francine shrieked, in the manner of Greek tragedy:

"Listen, sistern! What do you think! The Sigma Digamma gang are going torun Snippy Mueller for class president, and Gertie for chairman of theLit.! We got to do something!"

"Do something!" cried Ann. There was singularly little of the savior ofmankind in her now; she was all briskness and fury. "Girls! Let's put upMag Dougherty for president! Let's get busy! And if you don't mind, Ithink I'll just pinch me off the vice-presidency for myself! And we'llnominate Mitzi Brewer for secretary."

"Why, you said just yesterday she was nothing but a tart!" wailed EdnaDerby.

"Oh," vaguely, "I didn't mean it that way. Besides, if we ring her in,prob'ly we'll get the whole vote of the Music Association. They're abunch of simps, but their votes are just as good as anybody else's."

"Why, Ann Vickers, you sound like nothing but a politician. I don'tbelieve you mean a word you said--all about making mankind like H. G.Wells and all that."

Ann was authentically astonished. "Me? A politician? Why, politiciansare horrid! I wasn't thinking about any politics. I was just thinkingabout how to get the best class ticket--I mean, the best that we can putover!"

* * * * *

As sharply as practical affairs had cut into their solution of theproblems of life, so sharply did a yet more interesting topic cut intopolitics when the newly come Francine thrilled, "Oh, girls, have any ofyou met the new European History prof, Dr. Hargis? I saw him in hisoffice."

"What's he like?" the maidens cooed in chorus.

"Listen! He's swell! Be still, my fluttering heart! What the Regentshave let in on this nunnery! He's one of these good-looking red-headedmen."

"Are there any good-looking red-headed men? Women, yes, but men!"sniffed Eula.

"Wait'll you see this Greek god! The kind of red that's almost golden.And curly! And lovely gray eyes, and all tanned, like he'd been swimmingall summer, and swell shoulders and a grin--oh, how you young Portiasare going to fall for him!"

"How old is he?" in a chorus.

"Not over thirty, and they say he's a Chicago Ph. D., and Germany andeverything. I bet he dances like a whiz. Do I take European History? Allin favor signify by raising the right hand! The ayes have it!"

But Ann vowed privately, "Then I won't take European History....Still, there is that one hole in my curriculum yet.... But I'm notgoing to have any Greek gods in mine. Men are troglodytes--whatever thatis!... What was it Father used to say: 'Men is veasels and vimmen isvipers and children is vorms'? No, men are just animals.... Butstill, I couldn't stand much of Eula here.... But I'm never going tofall for any male again, as long as I live.... But I do suppose Imight consult this Hargis person about the course."

Chapter 6

Glenn Hargis, M. A., Ph. D. Assistant Professor of History in PointRoyal College, was in his office in the basem*nt of Susan B. AnthonyHall; a small office: pink plaster walls, that carbon print of theParthenon which is so familiar that it must be contemporaneous with theParthenon itself, a flat desk, very meager, a World Almanac, a PointRoyal catalogue, and a large class record, the latest New HavenJournal-Courier, Dr. Hargis himself, and that was all, till AnnVickers strode in and this dungeon, accustomed to dismal discussions ofcuts, marks, flunks, themes, and required reading, suddenly came alive.

Dr. Hargis, at his desk, stared up at her rain-shining cheeks andexcited eyes. She stared down at him. He was, Ann noted, certainly notthe "Greek god" that the hungry Francine found him, but he was a square,healthy, personable young man, with a broad forehead and cheerful eyes.He was smoking a pipe. Ann observed this with unexplained approval. Mostof the male teachers at Point Royal were gray and worried and timid, andgiven to morality and peanut butter.

He stood up. His voice was unexpectedly thin, almost feminine, as hepiped, "Yes? What can I do for you?"

As they sat down, he puffed his pipe grandly, she thought. Herself sheleaned forward in the torture-seat in which, the year before, so manystudents had tried to explain to the professor of mathematics why youngfemales sometimes prefer dancing to a mastery of differential calculus.

"I have a nine-thirty free," she hurried, "and I can choose betweenHarmony, Shakespeare, and Gen European History to 1400."

"Why not Harmony or Shakespeare? Fine fellow, Shakespeare. Taught aboutcakes and ale--a subject much neglected in this chaste atmosphere, Ishould judge. Or Harmony? My Gen to 1400 class is pretty full."

"Oh, I couldn't do anything with Harmony. I'm afraid I haven't got muchartistic temperament. I used to play the organ in church, but that's asfar as I ever got with music. And Shakespeare--my father and I used toread him aloud, and I hate this picking him to pieces that they call'studying' him."

"Very pretty, but then you ought to hate picking European History topieces, too."

"No, because I don't know anything about it."

"Tell me, Miss Uh--tell me precisely why would you like to study GenEuropean, aside from its convenience in occurring at nine-thirty?"

"I want to know it. I honestly do! I want to know! I hope some dayto----A girl accused me of being a politician, yesterday, and I deniedit, and then I got to thinking: perhaps I'd been lying to myself.Perhaps I will be a politician, if women ever get the vote. Why not?There has to be some kind of government, even if it's not perfect and Iguess there can't be one without politicians."

"Politicians, my dear young lady, are merely the middlemen of economics,and you know what we all think of middlemen. They take the EconomicTruth and peddle small quantities of it to the customers, at aninordinate profit."

"Well, aren't--aren't teachers, even college professors, middlemen ofknowledge?"

He grinned. "Yes, maybe. And writers are middlemen of beauty--theyadulterate it judiciously and put it up in small packages, with brightpatent labels and imitation silk ribbon, and sell it under a snappytrade name. Perhaps. And lawyers are the middlemen of justice. Well,maybe we'll let you be a politician. But what has that to do with GenEuropean and the hour of nine-thirty?--a chilly and dreadful hour inthese Northern latitudes!"

"Well, if I did get to be a politician, I'd like to be the kind thatknows something beyond getting a new post-office building forPassawumpaic Creek. Now that there won't be any more great wars, I cansee America being in close touch with Europe, and I'd like to work forthat. But anyway, I want to know!"

"You are accepted for my class." He rose; he beamed. "And it mayinterest you to hear that you are the first young lady in this culturedestablishment that I have accepted gladly. Because you 'want to know.'Your confrères--or cosoeurs, if you prefer--seem to have as cheerful anantipathy to scholarship as the young gentlemen I have known in theUniversity of Chicago and my aboriginal Ottawatamie College. Doubtless,though, I shall find myself wrong."

"You won't," said Ann, glumly. "Women are industrious, but they rarelyknow what they're industrious about. They're ants. You'll find lots ofgirls that will work hard. They can recite everything in the book. Butyou won't find many that know why they're studying it, or that'll readanything about it you don't tell them to."

"But you, I take it, will!"

"Why," with a surprised candor, untouched by his irony, "you know Iwill!"

As she walked to the Student Volunteers' meeting, Ann gloated, "He'sswell! He's the only prof here that it's fun to talk to!"

The Student Volunteers are an intercollegiate body whose members are sospecifically pledged, so passionately eager, to become missionariesthat, out of the forty-two Volunteers enrolled this year in Point Royal,five did later actually become missionaries. The Volunteers at theirmeetings sang hymns and prayed and heard papers on the rapid spread ofChristianity in Beluchistan, Nigeria, or Mexico--which last, from thestandpoint of Point Royal, was not Christian at all.

Today they had a real missionary, just returned from Burma. She did nottalk of gilt domes and tinkling temple bells nor in the least of sittingwith delicate native wenches when the mist was on the rice fields andthe sun was dropping low. She talked of child mothers, of fever, and ofscabby babies playing in the filth. Now Ann Vickers was less interestedin mosaic temples than in feeding starved babies; nor was she cynicalwhen the missionary sighed, "Oh, if you will only come help bring themthe tidings of Jesus, so that the heathen may, like our own belovedChristian country, be utterly free from the spectacle of beggars andstarving babies!" Ann nodded agreeably--but she had heard nothing. Shehad been thinking of red-headed Glenn Hargis.

Was he really witty, or just (her words, in 1910) "sort of flip andbrash?"

How was it that she liked pipe-smell better than the glossy, warm scentthat hung about Eula?

And, dejectedly, why was she so absent of mind, when they were receivinga missionary message right from the Field?

And, was Dr. Hargis married?

* * * * *

He was not.

Within twenty-four hours every girl on the campus knew that.

It was against Point Royal custom to have on the faculty a bachelor,especially a good-looking bachelor. But it appeared that Dr. Hargis wasa cousin of the late president of Point Royal, the sainted Dr. MerribelPeaselee, and therefore guaranteed to be sound.

"Well, maybe," said Mitzi Brewer, the Junior Class Problem, "but helooks like pie for breakfast to me!"

"Don't be disgusting!" said Ann. "He has a very fine mind. He doesn'tthink about anything except the lessons that history can teach us abouthow to reorganize human society. He has a real ideal of scholarship."

"Well, Annie, he can't teach me anything about how to reorganizesociety. Kick out the dean, run a free bus to the Yale Campus, and adance every evening. And how would you like that? You're pretty doggonepure, Ann. It hurts, when I look at you. But wait'll you feel your oats,lamb! When I'm home knitting socks for my sixth sprig, you'll be bustingout, and yeaow!"

"You make me sick!" said Ann, with a feebleness which astonished her.

* * * * *

Though in her personal habits Ann was as respectable as the dean, Dr.Agatha Snow, though she was almost tediously wholesome and normal, withher basketball and course in domestic science, yet privately she hadbeen restless about the conservatism of all thought (if any) at PointRoyal. The shadow of old Oscar Klebs still hovered gray behind her. Shewas irritated that not a dozen of the girls considered the workers asanything but inferiors; that they assumed that New Washington, Ohio, wasnecessarily superior to Vienna, Venice, and Stockholm combined. Thoughshe regarded herself as a solid Christian, even a future missionary, shewas distressed that it should be regarded as ill-bred to criticize theBible as one criticized Shakespeare. It was not that Point Royal, in1910, was as "fundamentalist" as a frontier camp-meeting of 1810. Thegirls did not accept the Bible unquestioning because they werepassionately uplifted by it, but precisely because they were not enoughinterested in the Bible, in Religion, either to fight for them or todoubt. They hadn't enough faith to be either zealots or atheists. Annknew that there were greater women's colleges--Vassar, Wellesley,Smith--in which some small proportion of the girls did actually regardscholarship as equal in rank with tennis. But Point Royal, like a hostof Midwestern denominational colleges, exhibited perfectly that Americansuperiority to time and space whereby in one single Man of Affairs maybe found simultaneously the religion of 1600, the marital notions of1700, the economics of 1800, and the mechanical skill of 2500.

This irritation, and her memory of Oscar Klebs, had driven Ann to formthe Point Royal Socialist Club. It was rather mild, and very small. Theaverage attendance was six, and they sat on the floor in one of thegirls' rooms and said excitedly that it wasn't fair that certain menshould have millions while others starved, and that they would all readKarl Marx just as soon as they could get around to it. Once TessMorrissey, a stern young woman, said they ought to study birth-control,and they gasped and talked with nervous lowered voices. "Yes, womenshould be allowed to govern their own destinies," Ann whispered. Butwhen Tess, from her work in biology, murmured of actual methods ofcontrol, they looked uncomfortable and began to discuss the beauties ofwoman suffrage, which was to end all crime and graft.

No one in the Socialist Club saw anything inconsistent in Ann'sbelonging to it and to the Student Volunteers. It was the era of afantasy known as Christian Socialism. It was the era of windy optimism,of a pre-war "idealism" which was satisfied with faith in place ofstatistics, of a certainty on one hand that Capitalism was divinelyappointed to last forever, and on the other that Capitalism would besoon and bloodlessly replaced by an international Utopian commonwealthrather like the home-life of Louisa M. Alcott. It was from this era thateveryone who in 1930 was from thirty-five to fifty-five years oldimbibed those buoyant, Shavian, liberal, faintly clownish notions whichhe was to see regarded by his sons and daughters as on a par withBaptist ethics and the cosmogony of Moses.

Ann Vickers, with the most aspiring mind of her class, as a collegeJunior in 1910, was nevertheless nearer mentally to William Wordsworthand the pastoral iconoclasms of 1832 than to the burning spirits who asJuniors in 1929 and 1930 and 1931 and 1932 were to be so clear-headedthat they would be bored by the ghostly warriors who in the 1930's wenton blowing defiant conch-shells over the body of a dead Victorianismquite as much as by the original Victorian proprieties; and who woulddespise more than either of these the sour degeneracy of the decade justbefore them, when the wrecked Odysseuses of the Great War had from 1919to 1929 unceasingly piped, "Let us eat, drink, and be nasty, for theworld has gone to hell, and after us there will never again be youth andspringtime and hope."

So unprophetic of this new crusade was Ann and all her generation thatthough in 1932 she was to be but forty-one years old, yet her story mustperforce be almost as much of an historical romance, a chronicle ofmusty beliefs and customs, as though she had lived in Florence of theMedicis. So is it with all of us who are old enough to remember theGreat War as an actuality. In the forty or fifty years that we havelived by the lying calendar, we have gone through five centuries ofhectic change, and like Ann we behold ourselves as contemporaries atonce with Leonardo da Vinci and the dreadful beard of General Grant andthe latest vulgarian of the radio and the latest twenty-two-year-oldphysicist who flies his own aëroplane and blandly votes the Communistticket and, without either clerical sanction or the chatter about"sexual freedom" of the slightly older radicals, goes casually to livingwith his girl, and who familiarly tames and spins and splits the atomwhich, when we were his age, seemed as mysterious and intangible as theHoly Ghost.

* * * * *

Outside these pious socialistic retreats, Ann heard no more ofrevolution than if she had been a bridge-player. She hoped that shewould hear something of its gospel from the lively Dr. Glenn Hargis, andshe did, during his first lecture.

It was in Classroom C2, in Susan B. Anthony Hall, a room of hard shinychairs with tablet-arms like a Thompson's Lunch, of blackboards, a lowdais for the instructor, and a dismal portrait of Harriet Beecher Stowe.It had that traditional and sanctified dreariness characteristic of allclassrooms, marriage-license bureaus, hospitals, doctors' waiting-rooms,and Southern Methodist Churches. In this cavern, designed to makelearning uncomfortable and virtuous, the forty girls were anold-fashioned garden, and Glenn Hargis, glistening on the dais, ared-headed gardener.

He grumbled for a few minutes about the cooking and laundry ofscholarship--office appointments, themes, required reading--then smiledon them and launched out:

"Young ladies, if I am granted the skill, I wish in this class not somuch to add anything to your knowledge as to try to subtract prejudices.Despite the living evidence of uncovered Pompeii today, we tend all ofus to feel that people who lived before 1400 A. D., certainly people wholived before 500 A. D., were somehow as different from us as men frommonkeys. It is the most difficult feat of scholarship cum imaginationto understand that the citizens of Pompeii, when it was sealed by ashesin 79, had elections and electioneering and political posters, graft andreformism and the pork barrel, exactly like ourselves; that ladies wentshopping and bought sausages and wine, that haughty and probably faultyplumbers fussed over the water pipes.

"A characteristic misconception of ancient history as beingfundamentally different from our own is heard frequently in the idioticdiscussion 'Why did Rome fall?' An ecclesiast will tell you that Romefell because they drank wine and had races on the Sabbath and permitteddancing girls."

Ann nodded. She had heard the Reverend Mr. Donnelly and half a dozenother Reverends explain just this, in Waubanakee.

"The vegetarian will prove that Rome fell because the degenerate lateRomans departed from their pristine diet of herbs and fruit, and gorgedon meat. The professional patriot will explain the fall by the Romandegeneracy in military training and armaments. And in the early days ofAmerica, when bathing was just coming in, there were sages who explainedthat Rome fell solely because the Roman dandies took to daily hotbathing.

"But none of these retrospective prophets ever consider the fact thatactually Rome never did fall!

"Rome did not fall! Rome changed! It was invaded by barbarians--theancestors of the present English, and rather like them in rude healthand possessiveness. It was invaded by plagues. In the Middle Ages it wasan insignificant town, plainly inferior to Venice and Naples in thatthey had seaports, while Ostia Mare, the San Pedro of Rome, had siltedup. But Rome did not fall. It has gone on, always, through changingfortunes, and is today along with New York, London, Berlin, Paris,Vienna, Peking, Tokio, Rio, and Buenos Aires one of the--let me see: howmany does that make?--one of the nine, or is it ten, ruling cities ofthe world, with a population nearly equal to the entire Roman Empire ofthe classic day!

"It is such a point of view that I want you to seek, that I want myselfto preserve, throughout this entire course; to keep the scientificattitude, and to inquire, whenever wiseacres explain, in classroom orpulpit or by the cracker-barrel, just why Rome fell, why the Dark Ageswere dark, why the people endured the tyranny of feudalism, and why theProtestant Reformation was divinely appointed--to inquire whether Romereally did fall, whether the Dark Ages were so very much darker thanSouth Chicago in 1910, whether a feudal serf was necessarily moremiserable than a freeborn Pittsburgh miner in this blessed year ofstar-spangled civilization, and whether there may not be quite decentand sensitive persons who get as much solace from the high mass, eventoday, as from a sermon by Gypsy Jones."

* * * * *

In that pre-Mencken day, Dr. Hargis was preaching heresy so damnablethat Ann broke her quick breathing of delight with a gasp of fear. Sheglanced about. Some of the girls looked shocked, some of them lookedbored... and most of them were obediently making examination-passingnotes in their neat little books with their neat little fountain pens,precisely as they would have if Dr. Hargis had said that the leghorn hatwas invented at Sienna in A. D. 12 by a lame maiden aunt of AugustusCæsar. She was relieved, and turned again toward Glenn Hargis as she hadturned toward no masculine magnet since Adolph Klebs.

Chapter 7

It should have warned her.

When, after this first-class, she impulsively went up and murmured, "Oh,Dr. Hargis, I've never enjoyed a lecture so much in my life, and I hopethey won't think you're too radical, here," he giggled, "Me radical?Why, my dear lady, I am the soul of conservatism--a good Republican, anda vestryman in the Episcopal Church, and I really like the pictures ofMillais and Leighton!"

"But that--about the Pennsylvania miners and the serfs?"

"Oh," airily, "that was just by way of illustration!"

And confusedly she gave place to fellow students who desired to ask Dr.Hargis whether Gibbon and Buckle were Required Outside Reading or justOptional.

Trudging home, Ann thought, with a maternal anger, "It's a shame for himto be so flip about his gifts, when he has so much. But maybe he's muchmore radical than he knows. Just caught this silly Ph. D. hand-wavymanner, I suppose it's part of the trade--the way Mr. Klebs used to lookat a shoe sole, look wise. Scientific attitude. I wonder if I'll everlearn it. I will! Or am I just sentimental?... He's sweet. Hiseyebrows almost come together. He has such thick red hair on the backsof his hands."

* * * * *

They met, as people inexplicably do meet when they are interested ineach other; they met after class, at conferences in his office, atY. W. C. A. teas, at the chaste orgies of cocoa and exotic Huntley &Palmer biscuits held by the Dean on Thursday evenings, at the debatingsociety, of which he had been appointed director. The Ann who haddespised that synthetic and self-conscious argument called "debating"suddenly found it a powerful training for politics. Scores of girls hadshown a delicate interest in Dr. Hargis. But, so far as Ann could makeit out, the domestic Amy Joneses of the college bored him because theywere less interested in the Carlovingian kings than in cake-dough andthe inexpensive decoration of small houses; the Mitzi Brewers becausetheir come-hither eyes menaced the job of an earnest young assistantprofessor. Aching for him and his blindness, Ann watched him circleround one girl after another, and when he seemed to settle--but oh, inthe purest, most friendly way, you understand--upon herself, she feltthat she ought to be supercilious to him, and she wasn't.

They were friends.

They talked by the hour in the lounge-hall of the Y. W. building. Hedropped his superior airiness, which she analyzed as a protectionagainst the greedy students who would expect him to know everything andwho would snigg*r at catching him out in an error.

And they walked--but on the campus, strictly.

It was the rule at Point Royal that males, either faculty members orvisiting cousins, might stroll with the girls on the campus, in fairview of the titters and yearning eyes of the other vicariously excitedyoung ladies, but they might not go walking or picnicking elsewhere. Forall the brave discussions at Point Royal, for all their biology andphysiology, their pretended impersonality about the mistresses of kingsand the economic causes of prostitution, for all their assumption thatthey were both normal and, as they had it, "up to date," ready formatrimony and child-bearing, or business on half-equality with men,these girls were in a convent, herded by nuns, male and female. In theco-educational state universities, the girls might be jolly and casualenough with young men, and, daily seeing them fumbling in library andlaboratory, not take them too seriously. But in this cloister even thegirls who had been wholesomely brought up with noisy brothers were sooverwhelmed in the faint-scented mist of femininity that they became asabnormal as the hysterical wrens in a boarding-school.

They were obsessed by the thought and desire of men, and most of themtook it out in pretending to despise men--when there were no men about.But when there were----The plainest masculine teacher, the ReverendHenry Sogles, M. A., Professor of Latin and Greek, had after each classa twittering of girl students about him, listening with reverence tosuch interesting remarks as that Sophocles was a better writer, alsomore moral, than David Graham Phillips. And they scurried to find hisworn, high, dusty overshoes. A minx who had stepped out of a Frenchprint found them under a desk and handed them to him, breathing quickly.

But it was when a student had a personable young male visitor that thegirls went boarding-school mad. As the unfortunate came up the MainCampus Walk, scores of pretty heads hung out of windows. As he came intothe dormitory, timidly, hat in hand, he was aware of a squeaking andpeering and scampering up the stairs as though from thousands of activemice. As he sat awkwardly in the drawing-room and tried to be gallant tohis current only love, it was strange how many young ladies had to edgeinto that room to find a book. And afterward they discussed every detailof the errant god, from his doubtful yellow shoes to his splendidly highcollar.

They heard of girls from the greater women's colleges going quitenaturally to dances at Yale or Harvard. And they themselves, home onvacation, danced at the country clubs which, all over newly richAmerica, were suddenly turning cow pastures into rich tourney fields.Yet once back in Point Royal, this essence, this ritual, this scent offemininity swept over them again, made them dizzy and unreal, as one whowalks in fog. They fell into an orgy of daintiness--lace and ribbons,imitation French underclothes, little silver penknives inadequate forthe constant chore of pencil-sharpening, teacups fragile as they couldafford. For one another they dabbled perfume and exclaimed of itssoftness--yet not for one another but for imaginary heroes.

In each class a few girls revolted against this daintiness by arrogantlydisplaying thick flannels and serving tea in stoneware mugs, and a few,still fewer, put on a conspicuous, smartly tailored masculinity and weretimidly yearned upon by the overloaded girlhood about them.

This cloying hypnotism of involuted sex Ann Vickers had resented; hadfought it with basketball and hearty, if perhaps heartless, praying atthe Y. W., and with the dry sexlessness of economics. Yet it caressedher always with treacherous sweetness, and this year she cursed (inrespectable Presbyterian curse-words) to find herself more stroked andbewhispered than ever, by Eula Towers, her roommate.

The first month, Eula alarmed her. The second month, Eula bored her. Thethird month, Eula infuriated her. And each month of Eula made GlennHargis's hairy maleness seem more desirable.

She could not quite dismiss Eula. That chiffon-misted esthete, despiteher generous exhibition of fake, did know a great many things which wereclosed to the brisk, efficient mind of Ann Vickers. She taught Ann to beexcited over Keats and Shelley, Beethoven and Rodin, though Ann nevercould abide Eula's real idols, Swinburne and Edgar Saltus and OscarWilde. With a shrill whinnying of laughter, she ridiculed Ann out of herplacid liking of Elbert Hubbard. Mr. Hubbard had a "very fine message,"Ann insisted, until Eula demanded just what Mr. Hubbard's "message"might be. And in a piquant hour Eula closed up forever one of Ann'sfavorite booklets. It was such a nice little book, Ann sighed, andReverend Donnelly had sent it to her one Christmas. It was an anthologyof extracts from the most poetic sermons of American pontiffs, startingwith Henry Ward Beecher, and it was called Heaven-Kissing Hearts.

"Oh, my God!" shrieked Eula, in an hysteria of delight, clutching herankles, throwing wide her arms, yelping with a joyous vulgarity rare inher esthetic life. "Heaven-Kissing Hearts! Why not Seagoing Livers? OrPansy-Faced Heroism?"

Ann, to be honest, never did exactly know what was the matter with hernice little book, which she had loved so much that she had often plannedto read beyond the twenty-first page. But she gave it up and hid it inher trunk, and one day admitted that she did prefer, now, Eula'sfavorite:

The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold.

But when she showed herself grateful to Eula, when she stirred out ofthe fortress of briskness which she had erected against that insinuatingyoung woman, then Eula flung herself on her, kissed her, and breathed,with a tenderness sickening to the outdoor Ann, "Oh, my darling, I'm soglad to see you smile! You have been distant and aloof, as thoughsomething were troubling you. Oh, I have wanted so much to sympathize,to help you! Oh, yes, let me kiss your hand! It's my reverence for you!"

"Hey! Quit! Are you trying to get a hammer lock on me, Strangler? Yououghta go out for wrestling, not sketching!" snarled Ann, with a voiceunrecognizable to herself--a voice hateful not with hatred but withpious fear.

And Eula wanted to crawl into bed with her on cold mornings and smokethe nastiest scented cigarettes, murmuring, "Oh, let's not go to classtoday! Classes--muck! Let's just lie here and dream about what we'll dowhen we're free from this prison. Think--you and I will have a villa inCapri, and dream all day long above the purple sea, under theviolet-crowned hills! Dearest, would you like a cup of coffee? Liestill, lie still! I'll skip out and make you one on the alcohol stove!"

"You will not! I got an eight-thirty test!" lied Ann, emerging anddressing with a speed which would have astonished her father.

* * * * *

There were only four or five Eulas in all of Point Royal, but they wereenough to make Glenn Hargis, and walks with him on the moth-eaten grassof the campus, an adventure brave and cleansing.

By no especial arrangement, they fell into the habit of meeting on theoak-scattered promontory where a Civil War cannon and the statue ofElizabeth Cady Stanton looked on the brown Housatonic, wrinkled withgold in the sunlight of Indian summer, and across the river to an uplandfarm with red barns rising from poplar groves. He talked, there,exuberantly, of German universities, of cafés on Unter den Linden andthe Kurfürstendamm, of the simple law student who proved, really, to bea Herr Graf and who had taken him for a holiday to the old familySchloss in Thüringen, and of the rare, exalted week (paid for by monthsof doing without breakfast or new shoes) which he had spent in Egypt,where he had seen the excavation of a king's tomb and, viewing thosefresh natural colors of paintings buried four thousand years, hadrecognized all history as a living thing, so that he was not bound tothe year 1910 and to this meager Connecticut campus, but walked andtalked also, this moment, in Thebes in 2000 B. C., and perhaps in someAsiatic or South American New Thebes of 3000 A. D. "It did something tomy life, as an astronomer's life is richer when he looks through histube and adds the moon and Mars to his own pasture!" cried Hargis, inone of the few moments when he dared to be unbarricaded, simple,sentimental.

She liked his intellect--no, his knowledge. She guessed that he wasvain, finicky as an old maid, not large enough to be awkwardly sincere;and because he was the one resonant male in this nunnery, and because hehad evidently chosen her from all the sisters, she was pitiful and carednot at all for his childishness.

But she could not go on being meek and reverent with him--the brightyoung student with the sage master. She did not deceive herself abouthim, as she had with Adolph Klebs, which was discerning, for AdolphKlebs was far more of a piece, far more consistently selfish andcontemptuous, than Glenn Hargis, Ph. D. She was soon answering him witha placid "Uh-huh" instead of a breathless "Oh, yessss!"

He resented it. "You don't take me seriously!" he said plaintively.

"Well, do you?"

"I most certainly do! Well, perhaps I don't. But you ought to. I don'tpretend to have any better mind than you, Ann, but I happen to knowmore."

"So does everybody. I'm the executive type, I guess. I'll always havepeople working for me that know more than I do, only I'll run 'em. Idon't think it's any especial virtue to be a walking encyclopedia whenyou can buy the nice sitting kind, second-hand, for fifty dollars!"

"I'm not an encyclopedia! My purpose in class is to inspire the studentsto think for themselves."

"Well, I'm thinking for myself--about you, Dr. Hargis, so you ought tolike that."

"You are the most offensive young woman!"

"Honestly, I don't mean to be! I guess I am. I don't mean to be. Butsomehow, all men, including my father--especially he--have always seemedto me like small boys. They want to be noticed. 'Mother, notice me! I'mplaying soldiers!' And that Boston preacher they had in chapel lastSunday: 'Young ladies, notice me! I'm so noble, and you're just poorlittle lambs that I've got to lead.' If he'd heard some of the gigglesat the back of the chapel!"

And, irritably from Hargis, "I suppose you charming maidens giggle at mein class, at the back."

"No, we don't. We get awfully thrilled. You make Richard Coeur de Lion asreal as President Taft."

"Well, I ought to. He was a lot realer. Did you know, by the way, thatRichard was a fair poet and a first-rate literary critic? He said..."

Dr. Hargis was off, agreeable as ever when he forgot himself, and Annwas off, listening, agreeable as ever when she forgot him as a man andlistened to him as a book talking.

* * * * *

When, palpably, Dr. Hargis was unable to impress this effective youngwoman by bullying, or by being a sad, lonely little boy, he adoptedtactics against which she was helpless. He became quippish; he made funof the store of naïveté that she still had--that she was always to have.And she, who thought swiftly enough when there were jobs to be done, wasslow and confused when it came to defending her own illusions.

He made fun of her for fretting over anyone so obviously flabby as Eula,for worrying over the status of the current basketball team, for caringwhether or not the new class secretary, Mitzi Brewer (her own evilcreation), was playing the cat and fiddle with the records, for hersimple beaming pride in receiving high marks in the dry realm ofmathematics, for her zealous belief that it would ever matter a hangwhether women got the vote, for her Waubanakee conviction that a glassof whisky was a through-express ticket to hell.

Then his fumbling fingers touched her religion, and she really wincedand in anguish betrayed herself to his mastery.

It started innocently, a mere bout of intellectual gymnastics, and itended in her wretchedly doing the most dramatic thing of her life sofar--in tearing out of her heart, for the doubtful sake of honesty,something dear to her as love.

They had hung over the cannon on Stanton Point, and beat their chillyfingers against their legs, in the colorless November air; but in theirintoxication of talk they had been unconscious of cold.

"We had the nicest meeting of the Y. W., last evening. Harvest Festival.It wasn't like an ordinary meeting. Everybody seemed so sort of happy,"said Ann.

"Well, well, my dear Ann, and what did we do at our Happy HarvestFestival?"

"Oh, you needn't sneer! It was nice. We sang, of course, and weprayed--but really prayed, not mechanical. Everybody seemed to getexcited and wanted to join in. Honestly, do you know, even Mitzi Brewerwas there, and when the leader called on her----"

"I suppose you were the leader?"

"Yes, I was, if you want to know! There! And when I called on Mitzi,why, she actually got up and made the nicest prayer."

"And what invocation did our kittenish friend Miss Mitzi offer up to theDivine Throne?"

"Oh, you know. Just prayer. About how she didn't always do what sheought to, but she hoped to be guided."

"Hm, our Mitzi must have been up to some special deviltry lately. Seemsto me I've heard something about her and that handsome young garage manat the Falls. Very suitable. So you had a chaste Harvest Festival, andprobably sang, 'Bringing in the Sheaves.' Splendid! Of course, beingChristians and very modern, you wouldn't do anything so primitive andignorant as to have a festival of the early Romans. Do you remember thatJune festival in 'Marius the Epicurean'? Ceres and Dea Dia carried insacramental chests by white-clad boys--the altars with wool garlands andflowers that were later thrown into the sacrificial fire, and the smellof the bean fields, and the priests in old, stiff, ancestral robes. AndMarius had the duty of laying honeycomb and violets on the urn of hisfather. Violets and honey! Oh, those hill pagans weren't a bit up todate! They didn't listen to Mitzi praying off her last flirtation, andthey didn't drone 'Work for the night is coming, when man works nomore'--which I have always considered the worst non sequitur inliterature."

"Oh, probably the Romans sang something just as bad! I don't believe Mr.Pater knew all the stuff they sang! Anyway, we were happy. There was areal--oh, sort of a quiet, twilight happiness there--real religion."

"You're so exquisitely, so touchingly childish about your religion, mydear child! You're perfectly convinced that all the miracles happened.You take the tale of the loaves and fishes feeding the multitudes asthough it were documented historical fact, instead of a charming myth.You actually believe in the Bible as history, not as poetry."

"But, good heavens, don't you? Why, you're a vestryman!"

"Of course I do. It's the mores. I shave, too, but I don't regard itas sacred; if it were the fashion for amiable young professors to wear abeard, as it was not long ago, I'd wear one. Oh, yes, I've been avestryman, but you'll notice that I don't often attend. Now don't say'hypocrite!' I know clearly what I do and what I think. You haven'tdared to. You've never applied the test of reality to these vagueemotions of yours that you call 'religion,' the tests that you'd applyto a medieval historical record. After all, Ann, you're typical of allwomen; you're realistic enough about things that don't touch youremotions; you weigh the butter and count the change, so the poorwretched serving-maid can't cheat you out of one cent. But you refuse toask yourself what you really do believe, and whether your belief came byhonest thinking or was just inherited from the family. And some dayyou'll have the same--probably worthy but certainly irrational--the samefaith in your husband and your sons! Just a commonplace woman, afterall, my dear Lady Scholar!"

"I think you're beastly!"

"I know I am! I don't for a moment, though, want to rob you of theconsolation of your superstition. I just want you to understandyourself--that's the chief purpose of college, isn't it?--and so long asyou're a sweet, serene, wholesome Hausfrau, don't try to be arazor-edged intellectual also!"

"I am not wholesome! I won't have you----You're----you're----"

"'Beastly,' I think it is?"

"Well, you are. You are so!"

She was querulous all the way back to her dormitory, while he trodlightly, a school-teacher smile of satisfaction on his face at havingquelled her. He said good-night with cheerful affection.

* * * * *

Neither affectionate nor cheerful was Ann during the week before theytalked again.

Worst of all, she raged, it was true that she had never evaluated hercreed. She had weeded out some details; after a good deal of emotionalsuffering, she had, in Freshman year, decided she did not believe in theVirgin Birth or in Eternal Damnation. But she had never faced herselfand demanded whether she believed in a Future Life, the concreteexistence and omnipotence of God, or the divinity of Christ.

She did face herself now, with considerable worry. Eula took this weekof agony in Gethsemane to propose that they get up a publicpoetry-reading, and she was throbbingly shocked when Ann turned on herwith "Don't bother me--go to hell!"

Ann hung over her Bible. The miracles did seem improbable to her, nowthat she saw them with unsoothed, irritated, unfamiliar eyes. What wasall this about Jesus's driving devils out of a possessed man, and into aherd of two thousand grazing swine, so that they went mad, fled into thesea, and were drowned? Not very probable, she worried, and a strange wayto treat innocent swine and their ruined owner!

And in Luke IV she came with new eyes upon the tale of the devil'staking Jesus up on a mountain, showing Him all the kingdoms of theworld, and offering them to Him if He would worship.

Ann gasped: "Why! It's a symbol, obviously! A dramatic fable, but only afable!"

With astonishment she perceived that all her life she had taken it as achronicle of exact fact; she fancied that she had taught it as fact, inthe Waubanakee Sunday school. Viewing her own mind as impersonally asthough she had just met herself, she discovered that she had neverthought about the Bible and the church-creed of her childhood, butswallowed it undigested. Even the vague agnosticism of old Oscar Klebshad been only phrases, which she had adopted without applying them toher actual creed.

"And all the miracles--they're like that--beautiful myths--real only asSanta Claus is real to a four-year-old enchanted by Christmas!" shemarveled.

She felt like one who has for years unknowingly been deceived by ahusband, while everyone else has known and giggled. She tried to recoverher serene faith by reading the Nineteenth Psalm:

The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showethforth his handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and nightunto night showeth knowledge. There is no speech nor languagewhere their voice is not heard. Their line is gone out throughall the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In themhath he set a tabernacle for the sun, which is as a bridegroomcoming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to runa race.

The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul; thetestimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple; thestatutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart; thecommandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes....More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold;sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb.

For the first time it seemed to her great poetry; she rolled it outmagniloquently, thankful that Eula was not at home to snicker. But forthe first time, also, it seemed to her to have nothing to do with dailylife. It was all words, however lovely the words, like "Kubla Khan." Andshe again heard Glenn Hargis's fluty mocking: "You take it as though itwere documented historical fact, instead of a charming myth."

* * * * *

With a sturdy ferocity she marched out to meet Dr. Hargis on StantonPoint.

As they walked the path on the edge of the cliff, looking on the valleygray with frosted grasses, he jeered, "Have you thought anything moreabout your interesting medieval religion?"

"I have!"

"And have you decided about the seven loaves and a few small fishes?Splendid way to solve the economic----"

"Oh, hush! I've decided. Tomorrow evening--in another couple months I'dprobably be elected president of the Y. W. C. A., but at the meetingtomorrow evening, I'm going to resign and tell 'em why. I no longerbelieve, and if I don't, I can't lie about it."

"You mean you're going to stand up before all that massed spectacledpurity and say you don't believe in Christianity, any more than you doin Buddhism?"

"Of course!"

"But, uh--what business is it of theirs? It's your private problem. Nota matter of lying, at all; simply that there's no law that compels youto tell every ragtag and bobtail what you think."

"Maybe not, except that I've led meetings, I've prayed, I've confessedmy faith--on false grounds, it seems. Oh, I'm not going to try todeconvert them. No! Let them keep their faith, if they like it. But Iowe it to myself to tell them where I stand now."

"But look here, Ann!" Dr. Hargis's mockery was gone, and his joy inhaving shown himself superior to the young female. His eyes werehelpless and babyish; his thin voice was a squeak: "I don't know that Icare to be mixed up in this, and have my private opinions dragged outfor the inspection of a bunch of jabbering provincials. Not that I'm inthe least afraid, you understand! But if they knew, especially thepresident, that I'd influenced you, it might seriously interfere with mymission of teaching history intelligently!"

"Oh, you needn't be afraid. I won't expose you!"

"Don't be an idiot! I? Afraid? Of these hick teachers? Nonsense! I justdon't care to give them a chance to infringe on my privacy."

"I told you. I won't expose you. Dafternoon!"

She was off, a loping lioness.

The next evening, addressing the meeting of the Y. W. C. A., she saidgravely and briefly, with no nervous wrigglings or exultations ofself-inflicted heroism, that she was unable to accept the Bible or anyChristian creed as anything more than a brave, bright fable, like thecycle of King Arthur. She announced that she was resigning asvice-president--and suddenly, with the jolly helpfulness of allpoliticians, that she did hope they would elect Amy Jones in herplace!

She did not mention Dr. Hargis, either then or afterward in her roomwhen all her friends save Eula wailed, "What has come over you? Youmust be mad! If you do think that way, why do you give all the fanaticssuch a chance at you?" (Eula made hay by weeping that her dear, darling,belovedest Ann could believe whatever she wanted; she would follow Annthrough hell fire or even exegesis.)

It was, in rather a dull month at Point Royal, a sensation. Thepresident, who was pious though she was the sister of a popularEpiscopal bishop, summoned Ann to struggle with her, and read Newman toher--the early, correct Newman, before he was deceived. At a specialmeeting of Y. W. directors, a frightened, anæmic girl named Sarah prayedloudly for Ann, to her annoyance. It was curious, but now, in a week, itseemed to Ann as though her struggle had been over and forgot for years.

Only to Dr. Hargis could she talk about it; certainly not to Eula, withher wreathing damp thin arms.

Though she a little despised Hargis's panic, she felt that they sharedtogether the danger of exile and--oh, he was a male, and she needed thesecurity that, or so she had heard, only males could give a weak woman.

Chapter 8

It was December; too cold now for them to meet beside the cannon. Nordid either of them want to encounter the rebuking faces of praiseworthyyoung ladies at the Y. W. C. A., though at the Y. W. was the onlyspacious and comfortable lounge in the college--not the Social Hall,with its Morris chairs, mass photographs of former classes, spectacledand dolorous, and tables covered with missionary magazines, but ratherthe Y. W. cafeteria and the small flowery tin tables where, anyafternoon, were to be seen such erotic tableaux as the lady professor ofgeology giving tea and cinnamon buns to the pastor of the FirstUniversalist Church, and the head of the physical culture department, abouncing young lady don who was rumored to have been seen smokingcigarettes at Mouquin's, in New York, giggling in a corner, over CocaCola and Nabisco Wafers, with a giddy clothing-merchant from the town ofPoint Royal.

Such comparatively aseptic café life Ann and Hargis would have enjoyed,but they could not stand chatter; they were absorbed in each other; andthey met in the waiting-room of Ann's dormitory, a below-stairs closetwith a large rusty radiator and eight stiff armchairs.

"I can't stand this hole!" snapped Hargis. "Let's sneak off into thecountry, Saturday afternoon."

"Against the rules, Glenn." If she had overlooked his cowardice, ifa*gain they were intimates, mind sliding into mind with no moreself-defensive quibbling, yet she no longer accepted him as a superiorofficer; she called him "Glenn", and refused to salute him.

"Oh, hang the old rules!" he whimpered.

"Certainly. I just don't want to be expelled. Too much bother."

"You needn't be--rather, we needn't be. Look, lamb. Last Saturday Itramped up Mt. Abora, and I found an old woodman's shack--logcabin--door gone. Be a splendid place to make a fire and have picniclunch--wooden table left--wonderful view down the valley. I'll get allthe stuff for the lunch--girls'd be snooping around and asking questionsif you did. Come on! Let's get away from this cursed convent and behuman beings. Damn it, I believe I'll go into the advertising business.I'm sick of being a little tin teacher: can't say what you think. I'vegot a friend, a classmate, who's got one of the very most importantadvertising positions in Chicago! He wants me to join him! Oh, let's getout. You needn't be afraid of me in the wilds, Annie!"

"I'm not! Mt. Abora?"

"Yes. Tramp up the Letticeville road, and meet me by the old brickchurch, twelve o'clock, noon, next Saturday. Will you? Will you?"

Log shack, camp fire in open air, view down the valley from a mountainthrone, escape from the stares of close-pressed girls--it was enticing,and she hesitated only seconds before she nodded. "All right. Twelve.G'night."

Afraid of him! Heavens! And yet the tease, the playboy, he did haveglistening eyes and meaty hands.

* * * * *

She had not seen him before in English tweeds, grass-colored, with plusfours. Anyway, they were practically English, for they came fromMarshall Field's, in Chicago, along with the crinkly orange tie of rawsilk, very worldly and artistic. And he told her, thrilling, that hisknapsack was a real German rucksack which (far horizons in a littlecanvas!) he had carried in the Schwarzwald.

He carried it lightly. He seemed sturdier than ever in the folds oftweed, and he stepped lightly and sang. For all his splendor andEuropeanism, as they tramped he did not discourse highly, but took herinto his own rank by snickering intimately--as though they were bothJuniors or both faculty members--about such scandals as the ladypresident's moral union suits, betrayed by the lumpiness beneath herthick cotton stockings; the fond, loose-jawed, yearning glances whichProfessor the Reverend Mr. Sogles cast upon the bouncing physicalculture instructor, and him with a poor bed-ridden invalid wife, who wasso patient; and the rumor that the wife of Professor Jaswitch (Frenchand Spanish) wrote all his lectures and corrected all his papers forhim.

"She's an awfully smart woman. But they say she drinks co*cktails!" saidAnn. She was ashamed of herself for it, but she was enjoying thisgossip--as, of course, she should have.

"co*cktails? And what, my brave young Ann, may be the matter withco*cktails? I wish I had some with us, for our lunch."

"Why--why--they destroy the brain-tissue! That's scientifically proven!You can find it in every physiology!"

"I congratulate you on having read every physiology. In Russian andSpanish, also?"

"Oh, you know what I mean!"

"Certainly! But do you? Matter of fact, a co*cktail might be good foryou. Might elevate you above your bloodless earnestness about thingsthat don't matter; might make you almost human and jolly! Wouldn't youlike to live, for once--love, or war? Wouldn't you?"

His insistence was like a finger poked into her ribs. She wasuncomfortable.

But otherwise he was neither airily professorial nor shroudinglyamorous.

* * * * *

It was a scene out of a Western motion picture, or a novel about therude, survirile hill-billy who kidnaps the frail city maid and makes herlike it. The cabin was of rough logs, clay-chinked, authentic. Inside,were a puncheon floor, empty bunks, a rusty box-stove, and an unplanedtable in the center, so that sitting at it you looked through thedoorway, over a stony pasture, quiet with four inches of snow, and downthe valley where the spruces were massed in dark clusters. She had gonea hundred years back from the Point Royal campus, and seemed to herselfin a frontier life vigorous as the cold, sweet mountain air.

And Hargis, did he not combine the virtues of the romantic pioneer andthose of the Cultured Traveler?

"Come on now!" he bullied. "Here's a good pile of kindling and smallwood--gathered 'em when I was up here the other day, and if I must, I'lladmit I gathered 'em with the treacherous hope that Ann would share 'emwith me! Come on, shake a leg! Be useful and start a fire--here'smatches--while I unpack."

But it was the Cultured part of him that from his rucksack produced,along with the sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs and coffee pot, a slimbrown bottle.

"Why, it's wine!" she marveled.

"It certainly is! Rüdesheimer. Genuine!"

"I don't think--I don't remember ever seeing a bottle of wine before.Just in pictures."

"Do you mean to tell me you've never tasted wine?"

"No, never. I've had a few glasses of beer, German picnics, back home,but I never cared much for it. But--wine!"

"Does it afflict that chronic moral sense of yours?"

"No. I'd love to taste some. Of course, it's against the rules. Butthen," agreeably, "so is being up here with you at all, Glenn."

"Exactly, my dear!"

She was truthful; she had never tasted wine. Her alcoholic adventures,besides the beer, had been an annual teaspoonful of hot whisky for acold. So was it with half the college girls, even with the more seriousand unpopular brands of college men, in 1910. The pendulum was to swingwith American feverishness--in fact, in America, generally, a pendulumis not a pendulum; it is a piston. By 1915, the excellent wines ofCalifornia were triumphing; Americans were everywhere beginning to drinkthem; yet in 1920 the girls were again like Ann--they knew nothing ofwine, though they had this slight difference, they knew all about gin,and about raw alcohol colored with burnt sugar, called "whisky." But by1930 Prohibition had, despite all, proven itself a blessing, for it hadtaught American women to drink wine with their men, as European womenhad always done; taught not merely gin-experimenting schoolgirls, butthe worthiest matrons, the testiest women college professors, the mostdevout uplifters, such as Superintendent Ann Vickers, LL. D.

* * * * *

With the wine, fussily wrapped--he screamed at her womanishly, "Oh, dobe careful of those!"--he had brought two thin glasses on stems.

After a sandwich she tasted her wine. It seemed a little flat to her,flavored like mild vinegar. She was disappointed. Was this the nectar,the liquefied jewels, that launched young women on luxurious sin? Shelonged for a strawberry malted milk.

"Another glass, Annie?"

"Thanks, no. I guess you have to get used to the taste, to appreciateit."

"Oh, come on! When I've brought it all this way? Of course you have toget used to it. Well, never mind. All the more for me, my dear!"

She was grateful to him for not insisting. And now the cool wine hadturned to a glow in her stomach. She poured herself half a glass, whileHargis had the unexpected good sense not to comment. She felt warm andhappy; the white strong valley was enchanting in its stillness; andHargis was talking softly of vine-covered booths beside the Rhine.

They sat on the bench by the table, facing the open door. Lunch done,without comment he gave her a cigarette. For perhaps the dozenth time,she tried smoking, and for the dozenth time did not like it, though shefound it part of all this magic: frail wine, far hills, secret cabin,Rhenish vineyards in the sun and, after so much feminine flutter andcooing on the campus, a Man.

She was not startled; she was comfortably pleased when he put his armround her and drew her cheek down to his shoulder. She snuggled there,warm against the tweed. But she was annoyed when he lifted her cheek tokiss her, when he touched her breast.

Not much experienced, she had yet known enough dances, enough sleighrides, not to be utterly naïve. "Oh, Lord, do all men follow this samecareful-careless technique? All the same? And expect you to be surprisedand conquered? Just as all cats chase mice the same way, and each thinksit's the first bright cat to discover a mouse? Now the idiot will drophis arm and paw at my thigh."

He did.

She sat up, furious that in betraying himself as just another Model Tout of the mass-production, he betrayed her also as nothing but amechanism, to be adjusted like a carburetor, to be bought like a gallonof gas. She threw off his arm, as his hand smoothed her thigh. "Oh, stopit!"

"Why, Ann! Why, my Ann! Are you going to spoil it by----You go and spoilit all by thinking beastly thoughts, when we were so happy, together,away from the campus----"

"'Beastly!'" She was more furious. "I don't mind your trying to seduceme. (Only you can't!) But you're old enough to not do the injured smallboy!"

"I wasn't trying to seduce you!"

"Weren't you?"

"You make me sick, all you nuns, with your books and your littlecommittees and your innocent little songs! Emotionally ten years old!Green-sick! And you'll keep yourselves from life till you're safelydecanted and marry insurance men and live in bungalows with plate-glassin the front doors! When you might live--have all the world--purpleGreece and golden Italy and misty England----"

"I don't see just what being seduced has to do with visiting purpleGreece and misty England. New way of paying for Cook's Tours, I shouldthink!"

"Everything! It has everything to do with it! Women who aren't afraid,who have rich, exciting emotional experiences, they don't get stuck insuburbs; they see the world--no, not just see it, like a tourist, butknow it, live in it where they choose, mistresses of their own fates.You jeer, you try to be funny, when I bring you the wisdom and grace ofEurope, along, of course, with what the European hasn't got, what theAmerican man has, the loyalty and dependability and kindness and----Youidiot!"

To her considerable astonishment, she was seized and kissed soundly, sothat she choked. She stopped despising him, and stopped being rationaland lofty, and her lips seemed alive. "Oh, please!" she begged.

"Don't you want to be a real woman, not just an educated phonograph?Don't you want to feel, to have your whole body burn, to know glory, andnot just timidity in a pinafore?"

"I do but--I'm not ready----"

"Shocked like a Sunday school brat!"

"I'm not shocked at all! Good heavens, this is the modern age! It's not1890! I've studied biology. But one doesn't do these things lightly. I'dhave a lover, if I wanted him enough, that particular him!"

"You wouldn't! You're too afraid!" He kissed her again, coarsely,fiercely. She was blinded a moment, for a moment thrilled, as though shewere a barren estuary through which the returning tide was gushing. Thenshe was cold and empty as he overdid it. He was too realistic to bereal.

"Stop it, I said!" she demanded. He loosed her but he stared hopefully,the ambitious little boy, sure that he really was going to the circus,and he urged, "You have no passion!"

"Oh, yes I have! Since we seem to be rather frank, I'll tell you that Idid feel the beginnings of a thrill, just now, till you decided to trythe rôle of cave-man. Wude and wuff! Oh, Dr. Hargis!"

"No passion. Printer's ink for blood. You're a biological monstrosity,you and all the girls here. Too superior, you think, to meet a man onhis own honest grounds! Biological monstrosity, that's what theso-called well-bred American woman is! Not one atom of healthy, splendidpassion!"

"Could it possibly occur to you that I might have plenty of passion forsome men but not for you? Possibly you aren't the heroic and temptingmale you think you are. Once, I wanted to fall for a shoemaker's son whoworked in a grocery. He was a male. But you--fingering at seductions,turning your history into little smart-aleck attitudes! I'd rather beseduced by the Anthony Hall janitor!"

He threw his coffee pot into the rucksack, swung the sack brusquelyround his shoulders, and tramped off, down the wood-road, not turningback.

She wanted to call to him. She didn't want to be seduced--not now atleast--but he was her intensest friend--at his worst he was warmer andmore solid than any girl----

She piped up a feeble "Glenn!" but too late. He was out of sight.

Then she was touched by the small boy who had been so proud of hislittle lunch, his European knapsack, his copper coffee pot, his winethat he could not afford.

"Maybe he was right. Maybe I just talked myself into virtue," said themoral young woman who had defied the vile seducer.

Then all effort to find out what she really thought was lost in a grayloneliness as the valley below her turned gray and chill and lonely.

Chapter 9

She had never been very conscious of her body. It was an acquaintanceoften encountered, rather than an intimate. She had known it glowinglytired after basketball or tramping; she had known it softly relaxing insleep under a comforter on a winter night, or rejoicing in hotcorn-bread and cool milk, or upsetting her self-respect by being sick.Yet mostly it had served her, without much demand. Now it was alldemand, inescapable.

The caress of Hargis had awakened her body to its rights, itspossibilities of joy. Ann lay sleepless--after more than commonirritation at the good-night of Eula, sticky as honey, slippery as coldcream--and her loins ached, her breasts ached, and in dismay she foundtantalizing images of Glenn Hargis charging like traffic through herbrain: his gray eyes that taunted her placidity; his hands, not puffy,but with the skin stretched taut over hard knuckles; his chest, notfeminine and pneumatic, but solid as an oak barrel; his skin, not softlike talcum powder, but faintly rough, like the good bark of a beechtree. She lay in her iron cot, her arms behind her head, her hands underthe pillow, staring, longing for him to come to her.

It was a fairy story that, wordlessly, she told herself over and over:Eula would somehow, some miraculous how, be gone, and she would awakento see Glenn striding in, not meeching, not apologetic, not insincerelytrying to show himself a dominating cave-man; he would come to her bed,sit on its edge, and murmur, "No matter what, we need each other--bothso lonely, so longing."

The clever Dr. Hargis could have captured her any time in the monthafter the picnic on Mt. Abora. He showed no signs of knowing it.

She never went to his office now, never talked with him after class noronce walked with him. In class, he badgered her with unbelievablysmall-boyish resentment, so that everybody talked of it, gleefully. Hemocked her eagerness in answering questions. "Will you please give moreattention, young ladies: Miss Vickers is about to share her excitementwith us. I don't know that inspired intuition is the soundest method ofestablishing historical fact, but I may be mistaken." He rode her forthe split infinitives in her themes--she grimly saw to it that there wasnothing else he could pick on and, contemptuously, continued to give himthe split infinitives, even when she had awakened to their heinousness.

She was, till passion died clean out of her and she again slepthealthily as a cat, incredulous of his pettiness in revenge. The onlything more surprising than to find a person spectacularly false to hisbeing is to find someone always running true to it, with not one naturalhuman slip. She had thought him weak but original; she found that, inhis obstinate spite, his refusal to be for a moment gallant, he wasstrong as a venomous wronged woman.

Once she was openly angry at him. He had been sniffing that medievalserfs were better off than the "free" workmen of today; and now sheperceived, as she had not during the first lecture, that he was notreally indignant about the insecurity and wretchedness of the workersbut, rather, contemptuous of them as natural morons, fitted only forsubjection to slavery.

"Do you mean, Dr. Hargis," she protested, while the class staredmoon-faced and happy at this row between the reputed sweethearts, "thatwe have made no progress toward a reasonable state at all? That thestruggle of the workers and the liberators has just been a farce--WolfeTone, Cromwell, Washington, Debs, Marx?"

"Why, certainly, we have progressed, my dear Miss Vickers, providedyou consider President Taft an improvement on Queen Elizabeth, HowardChandler Christy an improvement on Leonardo da Vinci, and WilliamJennings Bryan a more edifying philosopher than Machiavelli! Degustibus! I should never venture to argue about opinions. I have onlyfacts on my humble shelves, you see!"

College professors, some of them, used to talk like that; nasty littlegang slogans like "de gustibus." Perhaps a few of the breed stillexist.

Before spring, Ann was solaced by forgetting him, outside class hours.Through her Senior year, having no class with him, she never saw himsave at faculty teas, and her passion turned into bustling activities ofa vaguely social aspect.

Since she was out of her religious whirligigs, Y. W. C. A., StudentVolunteers, class prayer-meetings, decorating the chapel, her briskextrovert soul, her very Theodore Roosevelt of a soul, demanded othercrusades, and she blithely went into them with all the illusions, thepriest-worship, the love of familiar ceremonial, the belief that shecould mother and change the world, that she had shown in religion.

She pounced on the Socialist Society, which was rather sickly, and,canvassing for members, doubled its size. They triumphantly presented aportrait of Eugene V. Debs to the college library, and the president ofthe college, a sly, tricky, cynical old lady, ruined their defiance byordering the portrait accepted and hung in a back corridor of thelibrary, where no one ever went. (After Ann's graduation, the frame wasused for the portrait of the Reverend Mary Wilkerbee, missionary to theFlathead Indians.)

Ann also galloped into the Debating Association, and in Senior year tookthe course in Public Speaking.

Her religious apostasy and rumors of her intimacy with Dr. Hargis hadqueered her with all the high-minded young ladies not members of theSocialist Club. Indeed, though she had been a certainty as classpresident for their last and most sentimental months together, she wasnot even nominated. She was not greatly welcomed in the DebatingSociety, and she felt a little frightened; she who had been a leader ofthe class was frightened as the little girl who had gaped at theJapanese lanterns at the birthday party of Mildred Evans.

But in the try-outs for the Debating Team, in her Senior year, Annshone. She had always been an earnest speaker, convinced that she hadsomething important to say; she had always been credulous enough toenjoy and be heightened by direct applause. A few lessons in PublicSpeaking taught her to stand straighter and more still and added to hernatural urgency a professional trick of imbecile gestures which--for noperceptible reason, unless that the gestures were inherited from sound,seasoned witchcraft--seemed to carbonate audiences till they fizzed likesoda water. This new staginess, backed by her genuine sense, made her ariotous debater, and she was chosen leader of the team that went on agreat adventure, far to the north, to debate with the celebrated andundefeated team of the Southern New Hampshire Christian College forWomen the topic: "Resolved: That the Church is More Important than theSchool." Ann, who didn't believe anything of the kind, led theaffirmative. A pirate voyage! Going off with two splendid other girls,unchaperoned! A cheering crowd of twelve to see them off, with flowersand a two-pound box of Park & Tilford candy, and a copy of Life!Strange men in the train staring at them invitingly, till they allgiggled in communal delight! The sweet seriousness of planning theirstrategy for the debate! New towns, cold upland air, the excitement ofarriving, and an even larger, more cheering crowd of sixteen wonderfulS. N. H. C. C. W. girls welcoming them! Two luxurious rooms for them ina sorority house, and a private bath! And an enormous audience of twohundred, but so generous and friendly!

After the other debaters had prettily spoken their pieces in favor ofchurch or school, like nice girls in a class in elocution ("thequestion, don't you think, my dear friends, is whether the Little BrownChurch in the Wildwood, the Little Brown Church in the Vale, for all itsdearness to our hearts and mem'ries, is any more sacred than the visionof the devoted schoolma'am in the Little Red Schoolhouse by the RoadWhere the World Goes By")--after all these pansies and dewy rosebuds ofthought, Ann tore loose, forgot nice ladyness and, quite convincingherself for five minutes, savagely trumpeted the glories of thechurch--inspirer of the crusades, architect of the most gloriousbuildings ever seen, prophet which taught the schools the moral basiswithout which their little lessons would mean nothing, founder of ourperfect democratic government, arouser of the heathen bowing down towood and stone. "The school, yes, it is our older sister, kind-heartedand loyal, but the church, it is our mother, who gave us birth and lifeand all we have! Forgive me, oh, forgive me if I offend the decorum thatmany think proper in a debate--forgive me if I speak too hotly--but whocan be calm and decorous when folks analyze, when they criticize, whenthey mock at one's own, only mother?"

The applause was like a cloudburst, the unbeatable S. N. H. C. C. W. wasbeaten, and Ann was guest of honor at the sorority house, with alicentious spread of coffee and lettuce-and-tomato sandwiches anddeviled eggs. The name of the last, coming after a religious debate,inspired many an innocent joke. And next week Ann's picture was on thefirst page of the Weekly Point Royalist, and she was invited toaddress the Woman Suffrage Association of Torrington and the YoungWomen's Society of the First Disciples' Church of Amenia.

But her spirited defense of the Little Brown Church in the Wildwood gother into complications. The officers of the Y. W. C. A. pounced on her,like six kittens on a tennis ball, and demanded why, if she was sofilially devoted to the church, didn't she come back to the Y. W.? Whenshe refused, a little feebly, Miss Beulah Stoleweather, faculty adviserto the Y. W., bubbled, "After all, Ann, you really are with us. You see,my dear, I know you better than you do yourself! At heart, you're acomplete Christian--so much more than you know! Haven't I heard you say'God bless you!' at parting? You'll see! You'll be with us again!"

So Ann was restored to respectability. But she was not satisfied. Hernights of longing shamelessly for arms about her had awakened somethingthat could not now be content with committees and buttery words fromlady faculty advisers. She was furious that she had not been electedclass president... "not, of course, that she wanted to be anything sobothersome and committee-ridden as president. But it was the principleof the thing. Well, she'd show 'em! She'd go out of college somethingfar more popular, grand, and memorable than any idiotic little classpresident!"

In a fury of popularity, in a maelstrom of politics without policy, sheraged through Senior year, regaining whatever she had lost by apostasyand the rumor of having been jilted by Dr. Hargis. Her room--her singleroom, not scented this year by the presence of any Eula Towers, thankGod!--became the gathering-place of all the debaters, economists, futuresettlement-house workers and other intellectuals of Point Royal, andover hot lemonade they settled Suffrage, World Peace, and the Problem ofWages.

She called on girls whom she disliked. She was blandly affable on thecampus to girls whose names she did not remember. Especially she plottedin and for the Debating Association. She awed the whole college by thestupefying project of wangling a debate with Vassar, which had regardedPoint Royal as on a level with agricultural schools, Catholic academies,and institutes for instruction in embalming. (Two years later, ithappened, but Ann was gone then.)

Heaven knows what effect, good or evil, this Senior year of dictatorshiphad on Ann's later ventures into more masculine politics. It is notpretended that the good little Ann of Waubanakee was not somewhatsoiled, yet the rather helter-skelter and embarrassed young woman didgain new power, and might have gone on booming into cynicism andgrandeur but for her hour with the grotesque Pearl McKaig.

Pearl was the high-ranking scholar of the class after Ann's. She was athin, undersized, priggish, knubbly-browed child, humorless, eager, andprecocious, two years or three younger than the average of her class.She took scholarships as a drunkard takes free whiskies; and herclassmates laughed at her, and petted her, and hated her for her naïvefrankness.

She had tried out for the debating team and failed--one of her fewfailures, since she had never tackled athletics. Her speeches intry-outs were as statistical as a thermometer and as dry as flour. Butshe hung about, opening her pale eyes in worship as Ann flashed andstormed and juggled with words; she joined the Socialist Club, andagreed in stammering ecstasy when Ann bubbled that we all belong, ofcourse, to the gentlewomanly and highly educated caste, and it is ourduty to help the Less-Fortunate Workers. And when Ann, busily passingher on the campus, waved with amiable recognition, Pearl flushedhappily.

Yet it was Pearl McKaig who came to Ann's room, just when Ann shouldhave been leaving for a Vernal Vespers Meeting of the Campus TreePlanting Society, to Say a Few Words, and plumped down in the Morrischair, stared unspeaking till Ann wanted to scream, fumbled at herinsignificant chin, and burst out:

"Ann, you're--you speak lots more easily than you did two years ago,when I first heard you in Y. W."

"Yes?"

"Lots more eloquently. You know better how to catch the crowd."

"Oh, that's just----"

"And you're interested in lots more things. You aren't just a small-towngirl any more. I still am, I guess."

"Well, of course----"

"You could be an awfully big woman--nation-wide."

"Oh, nonsense, my dear!"

"Then why, Ann--why have you sold yourself? Why do you want to bepopular with every kind of fool on the campus?"

"Well, really----"

"You've got to listen! Because I love you! And because I'm the only onethat dares tell you--maybe the only one that knows! When you resignedfrom the Y. W. I was there. I admired you, oh, terribly. I got out then,too--only I didn't say anything to anybody. Just quit going. And I guessnobody much noticed, with me! You were wonderful. And now you hangaround with the Y. W. leaders and kid them and pat their backs and make'em think that maybe, inside you, you're kind of sorry you ever got out,only you got to stand by what you said. And you're getting pompous. Yes,you are! Like that Reverend Dr. Stepmoe that comes here and callseverybody 'sister' and mentally pats your back--prob'ly he doesphysically too, with the girls that got softer backs than I have! You'repompous! And affable! All things to all men, and still more to allwomen! Suave! Managing! Executive! Snappy! Clever! So jolly, when insideyou're sore as a crab! Bright and quick! And false! Oh, Ann, don't sellout! And don't think you're so important--you're too important to wallin your heart by thinking that. And now you'll never speak to meagain.... That's how much I love you, though!"

Pearl fled from the room, wailing.

Ann Vickers did not go to the Vernal Vespers nor say the few well-chosenwords. She sat into the darkness, cramped in her soul as her shoulderswere cramped with sitting.

"It's all true," she said blindly. "Now I need my religion again, topray for humility. Probably I'll never get it; probably I never had it.But after that--only I could kill that brat, with her boiled-eggforehead and her smirking righteousness, for making me doubtmyself!--but anyway, after that, maybe I'll be a little less obviouslyoffensive. Humility! 'Blessed are the poor in spirit for----'

"No, I'm hanged if they are! Blessed are the rich in spirit for theyshall not need the Kingdom of Heaven. Blessed are the fearless inheart, for God shall see them!"

But she was strangely quiet till graduation and after; she refused anoffer as assistant in economics during the Bryn Mawr summer school, andwent to work in a steamy Fall River cotton-mill, where she learned howmuch less the gentlewomanly caste knew than French Canuck mill-handsabout love, birth, weariness, hunger, job-hunting, and the reason forlabor unions and the way of concealing bricks for window-smashing duringstrikes.

And thus she did learn humility--enough of that dangerous element toenable her to get through a world that equally praises and despises it.

Chapter 10

For ten years after her graduation, in 1912, Ann had a wild medley ofjobs. For a year she studied nursing at the Presbyterian Hospital, inNew York, as a basis for social work, which was to lead to politics onthe inevitable day when women should have the vote. Her friends told herthat she ought to be in a graduate school, or a school for socialworkers, to read books and hear lectures about the downtrodden; but shepreferred to learn with eyes and hands and nose, decidedly with nose,something of the agonized bodies of the people with whom she would haveto deal.

With the campaign for woman suffrage booming, she became an organizer,in the New York Headquarters, whence she was sent to a certain city inOhio--call it Clateburn, for disguise. She was the best of the youngwomen of that piratical crew, and they were pirates. Years before theorganization of the aggressive National Woman's Party, with its cheerfulrioting and its pestering of senators in their sacred offices, therewere in several American cities groups of young devils who mademiserable the lives of the congressmen that for years had enjoyed thesunniest seats on the fence, from which they purred that women were thesaviors and life-givers of the race, the conservers of culture and goodbreeding, the inspirers of all that was noble in the male, but thattheir delicate bloom (though proof against washtubs, diapers, andminding the chickens) would be rubbed off in the awful sordidness ofpolling-booths; that certainly women ought to have the vote some time,but not quite yet. This "some time" was apparently of exactly the samedate as the "some time" when Britain would find hoary India, and Americafind the Philippines, capable of self-government, when employers wouldclap their heels in joy at giving non-union employees wages equal tounion members, when married couples, universally, would ceasequarreling, when prostitution and love of hard liquor would disappear,when college professors would have a knowledge of life equal to that ofthe average truck-driver, when farmers would know the rudiments ofa*griculture, when atheists would rationalize all the pious into happymaterialism, when dogs would be born house-broken, and cats would playtenderly with mice.

Suffrage Headquarters in Clateburn were in an 1880 residence known asthe Old Fanning Mansion. It was a large and hideous pile, covered withbrown plaster crossed with white lines not so much to imitate stone asto symbolize it. The surly portico had Ionic pillars of wood coveredwith brown paint over which sand had been scattered, so that theyresembled brown sandpaper and greatly vexed the finger-tips of WesternUnion boys waiting with messages at the door--suffragists always, inidle moments, send agitated telegrams to one another. The roof was flat,with a pressed zinc cornice.

The Fanning Mansion resembled an aged hospital, except that it was lesssympathetic.

Inside, the high-ceiled, flatly echoing, immense parlors were crammedwith desks and tables which were piled with dreary suffrage tracts andenvelopes to be addressed. On the third floor were slant-roofedbedrooms, once belonging to the Fanning servants, occupied now by fourof the suffrage workers, including Ann.

The Empress and Lady High Executioner of the Clateburn Headquarters,whether because of the large contributions with which she had boughtimportance, or because of her heavy-handed energy, was Mrs. EthelindaSt. Vincent, a large, determined lady with purple hats and a bosom likea sack of wheat. Eleanor Crevecoeur, of Headquarters, said that Mrs. St.Vincent had been Miss Ethel Peterson, daughter of a plumbingcorporation, till she had married Mr. St. Vincent who, though hemanufactured binding-twine, was an aristocrat, which meant that he hadgone East to college, that his family had been in Clateburn for two anda half generations, and that the twine factory had been founded not byhimself but by his father.

Mrs. St. Vincent was given to dropping into Headquarters after thetheater--she called it "after the theater," though the ribald Eleanorsaid that it meant "after the movies"--and if she found the youngworkers idle and chattering, at 11 P. M., she blared, "Do you ladiesfeel that suffrage is merely a job, like working in an office, and thatyou must watch the clock?"

But she never was assaulted, for the suffragists had read Luke VI:37:"Give and ye shall be forgiven."

Mrs. St. Vincent had entertained, in her Georgian house on St. BotolphAvenue, the more prominent suffrage speakers, including an Englishwomanwith a genuine title, who had been shipped to Clateburn, and thisintellectual atmosphere had won her her election to the Phoenix MusicalClub of Clateburn.

But the real executive and boss of Headquarters was the paid secretary,Miss Mamie Bogardus, known to all the workers and to much of Clateburnoutside as "The Battleaxe," and to the Ohio press as "The Carrie Nationof Suffrage."

Miss Bogardus was to the eye and ear the comic journal picture of asuffrage war-horse: a tall, scraggly spinster with ferocious eyes and aloud, shrill, ragged voice. (What has become of them, the haggardAmazons, the "shrieking sisters," of before-the-war?) She was impudentlyaggressive or completely fearless, depending on your interpretation. Ifshe thought the aldermen were grafting, no decent awe of theirmagisterial dignity restrained her; she went to their meetings andrebuked them, very audibly, with figures. If she saw a man mistreating achild, a horse, or a fiddle, she up and told him so. She was presumablya virgin, at fifty; she neither smoked nor drank; and she said often andpublicly that all males (of seven and upwards) were clumsy as dogs,dirty as monkeys, tyrannical as grizzlies, and dull as guinea pigs. Shewore the most astonishing garments in Ohio. With a mannish suit and flatmannish shoes, she combined canary-yellow blouses with scarletbuttons--such buttons as were not missing--turbans of golden Chinesefabrics, always raveled and awry, and at least a dozen necklaces ofcheap glass beads or wooden disks. Her infrequent frocks for afternoonor evening were of crêpe de Chine, in violent crimson or faintinglavender, always mussy, the skirts hiked up above her toes and draggingbehind and askew over the hips. Everyone asked where she managed to findsuch dresses, since no sane dressmaker would make them and the Battleaxeherself was clumsy as a ditch-digger when she took a needle between herlarge, liver-spotted fingers.

She ran the junior suffrage workers ragged. She scolded them worse thandid the voluptuous Mrs. Ethelinda St. Vincent, and she was atHeadquarters more often for the scolding. She scratched them out of bedat seven, and yammered when they staggered off to sleep at midnight. Shesniffed at the infrequent young men who came calling, and asked them ina voice like ammonia whether they smoked. She complained if her girlsdressed decently, because that was wasting money that should go to theCause, and she complained worse if they were not exquisitely neat,because that "might give the wrong impression." Almost anything they didor didn't do might, according to the Battleaxe, "give the wrongimpression."

When Ann Vickers arrived in Clateburn, she was so horrified by thisembattled fury that she almost gave up the job.

And within a fortnight she had found that Miss Mamie Bogardus, theBattleaxe, was the bravest, the most honest, the kindliest, and the mostwistful woman alive. If she was aggressive, it was because she wasconvinced that most men and women let themselves be misgoverned throughcowardice or sloth; if she was slovenly, it was because all her acutethought was going to her work. Though she drove her lieutenants, she wasthe first to defend them, as Ann discovered when she heard the Battleaxeprivately snarling, even at the rich and succulent Mrs. St. Vincent,"You quit picking on my girls; I'll do all the picking necessary!" Andwhen one of them was really sick, it was the Battleaxe who kept her inbed and brought up a bowl of beef tea--not particularly well seasoned.

The public, the press, even some of the suffrage sympathizers, and allmen lively and full of moist wisdom in front of bars, said that MissBogardus was a suffragist because she had never caught a man; that shewanted something, but it wasn't the vote.

It was true, Ann guessed, only to the extent that the Battleaxe hadnever found, and resented the fact that she had never been able to find,a man big enough to understand her loyalty, her piercing honesty, and apassion too tempestuous to wrap itself in little pink prettiness. Annwas presently certain that Miss Bogardus, if she were married and themother of ten lusty sons, would be equally the fighter, would equallyhunger and thirst after righteousness.

Ann remembered her American history (a topic not popular in theClateburn press, save as it dealt with baseball batting-averages, GeorgeWashington, and the development of the automobile self-starter) and sawin Miss Bogardus the pioneer grandmother with a baby on one arm and arifle for the Indians on the other.

* * * * *

Besides Miss Bogardus and Ann, there were two other paid agitators,Eleanor Crevecoeur and Patricia Bramble.

Both of them were to Ann romantic and endearing comrades-at-arms. Todescribe Pat Bramble, in any record, no matter how realistic, the word"dainty" would have to be fetched forth from the boarding-house ofshabby and pensioned words. Dainty. Out of a Victorian novel. Kin toLittle Nell and Miss Nickleby and Harry Maylie's Rose, with thedifference that she had the vocabulary of a fo'c'sle hand, the cynicismof a fashionable priest, the joy of an Irish trooper, at least duringsuffrage riots, in fighting policemen, and the honesty of MamieBogardus. But she was small and willowy enough to please even thelickerish eyes of Dickens; she was golden of hair and her cheeks werepetals; and in private she smoked only rose-petal-tipped cigarettes,where Eleanor flaunted a small pipe.

Eleanor Crevecoeur was the mystery of the Fanning Mansion. Ann Vickerswas complex only as environment clashed with her simple desires forfrankness, efficiency, kindness, and sexual freedom; Miss Bogardus wasas obvious as any other woman of the frontier; Pat Bramble had a soundfoundation of commonness under her airy daintiness; but EleanorCrevecoeur was always a divided personality, and divided not merely intotwo recognizable factions, but into three or four or a dozen.

She was twenty-eight, now, to Ann's twenty-three and Pat's nineteen. Shewas tall and rapier-thin; thin legs, thin tapping feet, thin veinedhands at the end of arms so frail that it seemed the wind would snapthem, with a brown eager face and a nose too large and hooked. But shewas not at all ugly; there were in her too much fire and will; mendrifted to her and laughed with her where first they had smiled at her.

The chief mystery about her was her origin. She could ape Pat Bramble'sblasphemy and wholesome commonness, but it never seemed altogethernatural. In Clateburn suffrage circles it was whispered that Eleanor wasfrom a noble French family; that there had been a Marquis de Crevecoeurwho had married a wild, blown-haired wench who was the daughter of anIndian princess (whatever an Indian "princess" may be) and an Englishgeneral.

Neither Ann nor Pat ever had the truth. Of Eleanor's childhood they knewonly that she came from Canada and had for some time gone to a conventschool. They suspected that the legend of her nobility grew from thefact that, in a city like Clateburn, composed of Smiths and Browns andRobinsons, of Müllers and Schwartzes and Hauptschnagels, of Joneses andLewises and Thompsons, and of Cohens and Levys and Ginsbergs, the nameCrevecoeur sounded aristocratic. Ann looked it up in the dictionary, andannounced to Pat, impressively, that it really meant "heartbreak" andwas guaranteed to be romantic. But Pat looked it up in a largerdictionary and bawdily announced to Ann that crèvecoeur also meant "aFrench variety of the domestic fowl, heavily crested and bearded, andhaving a comb formed like two horns--see Fowl."

One other girl, though she did not live in the Fanning Mansion, was withthem nearly every evening: Maggie O'Mara, organizer for the Waitresses'and Lady Dish-washers' Union, and herself of late a waitress and ladydish-washer. She was ruddy and bright-eyed; she had arms like awasherwoman; she was a whooping and successful soap-box speaker; and shewas, she pointed out, all the vulgar things that Pat and Eleanorpretended to be.

And these four, Ann, Pat, Eleanor, and Maggie O'Mara, made up the groupwhich, for causes presently to be stated, came to be known throughoutOhio suffrage as the "Ball and Chain Squad."

* * * * *

Their private life--not that they had much private life, aside from sixor seven hours of sleep in cold lone beds, with a theater perhaps once aweek and a dance sanitarily flavored with liberal conversation once amonth--was never free from the itching topic of Woman and women; Woman'srights and Woman's duties and Woman's superiority to man both inconstructive mentality--whatever that might mean--and in physicalendurance of weariness and pain.

They cooked and dined in the old kitchen of the Fanning Mansion, astone-floored cavern looking out on a yard decorated with chickweed,sunflowers, and archaic heaps of ashes and tin-cans. They were supposedto take turns cooking, but usually it was Ann, assisted by MaggieO'Mara, who came as guest and remained as amateur hostess, who got thedinner; and always it was she, or Maggie and she, who wiped the sink andthe linoleum strips on the stone floor, and washed out the dish towels.

Ann whistled then. She liked using her hands, as she had innursing-school, and as a child, when she had cared for her casualfather. And, as half-trained nurse, it was she who understood bedmaking,and night after night she remade the aristocratic but tumbled couch ofEleanor Crevecoeur, whose idea of domesticity was to shake the sheetsand blankets, yank the top coverings straight, pat them once, and callit a job.

In these moments of housework only was Ann an individual at the FanningMansion. Otherwise she was a Worker in the Movement, a private in ajammed barracks, a conjunction in a particularly long and complicatedsentence.

The others, even Maggie O'Mara, did not seem to mind being mere units inthe collective mass; they did not seem to have, even, an ambition to bechief and most titled unit. But the Ann who made speeches when she wastold to, addressed envelopes when she was commanded, ridiculed maleswhen it sounded proper, was still the Ann Vickers of Waubanakee, freewoman of the woods and river, lone bandit who had wanted to socializecrime in childhood, provided she remained dictator.

The Ball and Chain Squad got away from Woman only when, in whisperedconfidences at midnight, sitting cross-legged on beds or on the floor,with the Battleaxe asleep in the hall across the way, they talked aboutMan.

Even then, in 1914 and 1915, with the World War begun, though someanonymous genius had already invented Sex, it had not come into popularuse and quantity production. Maggie and Eleanor might refer frankly tocommunal sleeping, Pat might use the sacred words as expletives, Annmight be free from the reticences of Waubanakee, yet none of them feltthey could discuss Lesbianism, incest, or any of the other drawing-roomtopics of fifteen years later. But it is not recorded that their privateemotions were different from those of 1930. It came out in anxiousqueries and uneasy desires for confession.

Pat, to whom flocked all of the rare males who were tabby enough, orventuresome enough, to invade the Fanning Mansion socially, was as coldsexually as any other rosebud, Ann guessed. Maggie O'Mara only laughed."You're all babies, with yer fine educations. What do I think of lovingup the boys? Well, I'll just say I'm no virgin!"

"Well, I am," said Pat, "and I think it's a lot less trouble!"

Eleanor cried, "You both make me tired! Sex! You neither of you know adamned thing about it. To you it's guzzling corned-beef and cabbage. Ifyou want to know, and I don't suppose you do, I'm a nymphomaniac. If Ilet myself--only I've got a will like a steel trap; you can laugh if youwant to, but it's true!--if I let myself go, I'd be diving into men'sbeds all the time. Like a crazy woman. I'm not a virgin either, my proudMaggie! Twice I've tried it, and I had to quit--I just ceased to exist,then--my whole body was like flame, with skyrockets shooting off atthe center. I never will again, unless I meet a giant, and wenches likeus, that try to untie our brains, just don't meet giants. But if I go tothe movies with any male between the ages of eight and eighty and see afilm about catching herrings or making glass, and the back of his handbrushes mine once--why, when I get back here, I snap 'good-night' so hethinks I'm cold as a frozen axe, and run upstairs, and all night I pacethe floor. We suffragists that hate men! Sure! And I bet that when theBattleaxe was young, she was bad as I am! Oh, nice young ladies don'tfeel passionately, like men. No indeed! We mustn't experiment; we mustfold our gentle hands and wait till some male mouse comes up and flickshis whiskers at us. Hell! Well, Ann, what's your confession? Vulgar likeMag, or inhuman like Pat, or crazy like me?"

"I--don't--know! Honestly, I don't!" stammered Ann.

Since Glenn Hargis, she had longed to escape any mania that wouldobscure her clear and cheerful eyes. So when men came calling at theFanning Mansion, to sip chilly tea and eat bakery cakes, or in theevening to help address envelopes and confer about raising funds--worthymales, unexplained business-man husbands dragged in by feminist wives,liberal clergymen, usually unmarried, very young or very oldfaculty-members from Clateburn University, and back-patting politiciansgambling on these probable future feminine votes--it was Pat and Maggieand college girls come in as part-time helpers who talked with them,occasionally danced with them to the phonograph, down aisles betweendesks and tables, while Ann and Eleanor vanished away, or sat incorners.

"Some day, some man that I want to kiss, like Adolph, is going to wantto kiss me, like Glenn Hargis, and then I'm going to forget all thestatistics on the underpayment of woman workers, and kiss him back sohard the world will go up in smoke. Or am I just an icicle, like Pat?"fretted Ann.

* * * * *

They worked; they worked like sailors in a gale, like students before afinal examination. It was a life of perpetual midnights. They smiledwhen bedraggled house-wives said, "If you girls were married, like me,and had to cook and wash and take care of the kids, if you had towork, like me, you wouldn't have no time to think about the vote, nomore'n I do!"

They were sent out to address meetings--women's clubs, men's churchclubs, the W. C. T. U., the D. A. R., and incessant suffrage rallies innarrow halls where you got sniffly colds from lack of ventilation.Alone, or commanding flying squadrons of amateur workers, frequentlysmart flappers who darted and giggled and did not greatly increase thedignity of the Cause, they went canvassing for funds and politicalsupport, among handsome houses and poor tenements, in Chinese laundriesand grain elevators and the offices of millionaire brokers, whereoccasionally some weak-chinned underling wriggled playfully at them andcooed, "Come on and give us a kiss and then you won't want a vote!"

And sometimes they found an illiterate husband (quaint word!) whoadmitted that he was all for the women having the vote, but entirelyagainst "suffrage," which he had identified as meaning teas at theFanning Mansion, which would interrupt his wife's labors for him. Andonce a housewife (yet quainter!) chased Ann with a broom when Ann askedto talk with the husband. "You get out of here! I know you an' yourkind! You ain't going to get the mister away from me, with your sneakingand prying and--and----A bunch of chippies, that's what you are! Beatit!"

Among the four girls and Miss Bogardus, it was Ann who was usuallychosen to scrabble the publicity material which they were always sendingto the newspapers: notes about the rare success of the meeting at OddFellows' Hall, about the sympathy of Senator Juggins, about the comingto Clateburn of the celebrated Reverend Dr. Ira Weatherbee who had"accepted an invitation" (given at the muzzle of a shotgun) to addressthe ladies of the Sycamore Avenue Christian Church.

Eleanor Crevecoeur wrote more lucid and fetching prose than Ann but,probably for that reason, she could not scrawl publicity with theliveliness and false jollity suitable to the art. It may be that Ann'sdebating had given her the proper glibness. Certainly she became a briskand popular propagandist; and later, she was able to advance any causeby writing Sunday newspaper articles full of statistics selected withpious discrimination. She wrote with passion about the evils of theworld, but she was never able to see why one adjective was juicier thananother; and she was wistful and a little hurt, years afterward in NewYork, when newspaper friends hinted that she was a dear sweet woman buther journalism was atrocious.

* * * * *

Ann, Pat, and Eleanor were each of them sent out, alone, from Clateburnto help local Mothers in Zion organize suffrage associations; out tosmall, suspicious, masculine towns, where woman's entire place was stillin the home, which meant in the kitchen and the nursery. They werereceived by acid matrons who croaked, "Well! I'm kind o' surprisedHeadquarters couldn't find nobody but a young gal like you to send us,when we've worked so hard and all!" Supported only by three or four ofthese old war-horses--which support, since they were usually known asthe local cranks, pests, and Mamie Bogarduses, was worse thannothing--they hired a grocer's delivery wagon or a shaky automobile andspoke on street corners, while the slowly gathering audience catcalledand whistled and made sounds of kissing; and at night they slept infunereal black walnut beds in the unaired "spare-rooms" of the localCassandras. For breakfast had fat bacon and chicory. And in the evening,when they came back to the Fanning Mansion, on the local train, often inthe acrid smoking-car, came back discouraged and clean-beat, theBattleaxe yammered at them, "What are you sitting around for? We're 'waybehind on addressing envelopes!"

Envelopes, then, till another midnight, with another God-forsakenjourney to the hinterland in view for next morning. If Ann had had time,in those days, to read Kipling, she would probably have rended the bookfor its assumption that it was only the male (and only the British male,at that) who could make punitive expeditions to the native tribesmen andwith serenity face the hairy, horrid throng. Pat Bramble and she madesuch punitive expeditions twice a week, and did not return to any messand whisky-soda or C-spring barouche at Simla, either.

Envelopes!

Envelopes to address!

Envelopes, with "N. A. W. S. A., 232 McKinley Ave., Clateburn, Ohio,"neatly printed in the upper left-hand corner in a watery blue.Envelopes. In piles. On tables, along with city directories, telephonebooks, blue books, and mimeographed sucker-lists, for addresses.Envelopes containing mimeographed appeals for funds, appeals to "Writeyour congressman and senator," appeals to "Vote in the primaries onlyfor candidates who understand that Women Are People"; envelopes withlittle four-leaved tracts reminiscent of Waubanakee--except that it wasthe vote and not the Blood of the Lamb that was to save and make perfectthe entire world--and envelopes with thick little cards in which youcould, if you longed to, insert a quarter, moisten the red wafer, andreturn to Suffrage Headquarters.

Ann believed--Ann and Pat and Eleanor and Maggie all believed--that thevote was necessary, both that women might enter public affairs, and thatthey might be freed from the humiliation of being classed (vide any ofAnn's hundreds of speeches of that period) with children, idiots, andcriminals. But she did get tired of envelopes. She went insane over thethought of envelopes. For years after she had done withsuffrage-organizing, she was to be plagued by the recollection of pilesof yellow envelopes, printed in blue with "N. A. W. S. A., 232 McKinleyAve., Clateburn, Ohio," and below it the oval union label, and thesymbol F16. Envelopes that piled up mountainously in her dream till theytoppled and smothered her. Faith, hope, envelopes, these three; and thegreatest of these was envelopes.

Chapter 11

No task of Ann, Pat, and Eleanor was considered weightier than forming aguard of honor for the feminist celebrities who were referred to, aftermidnight at the Fanning Mansion, as "the Visiting Firemen."

Some of the Visiting Firemen were pretty terrible. And some werecharming--"inspiring" they called it.

A year after Ann had begun organizing, there came to Clateburn for asuffrage-rally in haughty Symphony Hall the renowned Dr. Malvina Wormserof New York. She was chief surgeon of the Agnes Caughren MemorialHospital for Women, in Manhattan; president of the Better ObstetricalLeague; an officer in all known birth-control organizations; author of"Emancipation and Sex"; and D. Sc. of Yale and Vassar.

The Ball and Chain Squad were nervous about Dr. Wormser's coming. Theyexpected a raw-boned, horse-faced woman, as much sterner than MamieBogardus as she was more famous.

Dr. Wormser was to be the guest of Mrs. Dudley Cowx, the one reallysmart woman in the Clateburn organization. Mrs. Cowx (a Dodsworth bybirth) had gone to school in Montreux, Folkestone, and Versailles as agirl; she had a summer villa at Bar Harbor; and her sister had married aGerman baron. At suffrage rallies she wore tweeds, rather severe exceptfor the fresh ruffles at her throat; and she snubbed the flamboyant Mrs.Ethelinda St. Vincent whenever they met. She did not snub the Ball andChain Squad; she nodded to them and thereafter ignored them.

That Mrs. Cowx should be entertaining Dr. Wormser in her Norman châteauon Pierce Heights made the good doctor the more intimidating.

At ten on the morning of Dr. Wormser's show in Clateburn, while all theorganizers and volunteers were answering the telephone and addressingenvelopes--envelopes!--into the Fanning Mansion came a small, plump,dowdy woman with white hair, cheeks round and powder-pale, bright eyes,and soft little pads of hands. To Ann, near the door, she said--and herdeep voice was astounding in such a wren of a woman, "Is Miss Bogardusin? I'm Malvina Wormser. I believe I'm to stay with a Mrs. Cowx, whoevershe is, but I trotted straight here from the train. You look pale, mydear. I might prescribe a tonic, but I honestly think a little rougewould do just as well--grand psychological effect."

* * * * *

For all her belligerent frankness, Miss Bogardus had trained herself andher serfs to be cautious in talking with the press. The reporters, or atleast their editors, longed for something scandalous from the FanningMansion: some hint that it was a free-love colony or, nearly as good, afrenzied zoo of man-haters, anarchists, atheists, spiritualists, oranything else eccentric and discreditable. The Battleaxe explained toher young ladies that they might attack the water and gas departments,the city orphanages, President Wilson, or even the Allies in the GreatWar now dragging on, but they must do so only as Christian gentlewomenand solid taxpayers. They must be convinced, no matter what they thoughtprivily, and they must convince others, that the vote would not lead to"moral laxity" (another folk-phrase of the era) but would immediatelyend prostitution, gambling, and the drinking of beer.

In horror, then, after admiringly greeting Dr. Malvina Wormser, MissBogardus heard the little doctor cheerily booming the most poisonousopinions at the delighted reporters who had run her to earth at theFanning Mansion:

"Do I believe in free love? What do you mean by that, young lady? Howcan love be anything but free? If you mean: Do I believe that anyauthentic passion--not just a momentary itch in the moonlight--issuperior to any childish ceremony performed by some preacher, why ofcourse. Don't you?

"Do I think women are brighter than men! Tut. What a question! Notbrighter--just less mean. But don't try to get me to riding men. I'm aforlorn old maid, but I adore 'em, the darlings--the poor silly fish!What do you suppose men doctors would ever do without their women nursesand secretaries? I know! I was a nurse myself, before I became a doc.And now my chief satisfaction in life," Dr. Wormser chuckled fatly, "isthat I don't have to stand up when a surgeon enters the room! You see?Silly customs like that--just what a man would institute--poor lambs,we have to take care of 'em and their little egos! That's why we needthe vote, for their sake!

"Do I think a woman'll ever be President? How do I know? But let mepoint out that women rulers--Queen Elizabeth, that lovely rakehellCatherine of Russia, the last Chinese Empress, Maria Theresa of Austria,Queen Anne, and Victoria--were better rulers than any equal number ofkings. Or presidents!

"You boys and girls might as well know that I don't believe in hedgingand puss*-footing. This is going to be a long struggle. Not just gettingthe vote. That's a matter of a couple of years. Then we got to go on.Birth-control. Separate apartments for married couples, if they happento like them. What women need is not merely a vote but something more uphere." She touched her forehead. "Don't need just exterior opportunity,but something interior, with which to grab the opportunity, when we getit, and use it. Freedom's no good to a puss*-cat, only to a tigress! Andwomen have got to stick together. Men always have had the sense to--drat'em. Sex loyalty. We ought to lie for one another and sneak off and havea good drink together, like the men.

"I believe that there is no field that men control now that women can'tenter, completely. Medicine, law, politics, physics, aviation,exploring, engineering, soldiering, prize-fighting, writing sweet littlerondels--only I hope women'll be too sensible for either theprize-fighting or the rondels, which are both forms of male escapism,and singularly alike if you look at 'em!

"Only I don't expect women to imitate or try to displace men in any ofthese fields. I'm not one of the gals who believes that the soledifference between males and females is in conception. Women havespecial qualities which the human race has failed to use forcivilization. I know a woman can be as good an architect as any man--butshe may be a different sort of architect. I bring something to medicinethat no man can, no matter how good he is. And if you think women can'tgo to war, remember what the Teuton tribes, marching with their womenalong, did to the beautiful, virile, professional men soldiers of Rome!But the pig-headed masculine world forgot that lesson for fifteenhundred years and never discovered it till Florence Nightingale happenedin and bullied the masculine British War Office into some of the commonsense that any normal girl would have at seven!

"No, I don't want to rival men. But I don't want to be kept by thetradition of feminine subjection from the privilege of working eighteenhours a day. I'm not much of a democrat. Believe inferiors ought to besubjected. If they are inferiors! But if a girl secretary is smarterthan her male boss, let him be her secretary. Listen! In 1945, maybeyou'll have to go to England (where they invented this Inferior Womenmyth, so men could have their clubs) to find anybody so benighted thathe'll even know what you're talking about when you speak of consideringcandidates for a job as male and female, or on any other basis excepttheir ability!

"I speak of 1945 because I have a hunch that after we get the vote,we'll be less ardent feminists. We'll find that work is hard. That jobsare insecure. That we must go much deeper than woman suffrage--maybe toSocialism; anyway, to something that fundamentally represents both menand women, not just women alone. And a lot of suffragists that pretendto hate men will find the dear brutes are nice to have around the house.We'll slump. But then we'll come back--not as shadows of men, or asnoisily professional females, but, for the first time since QueenElizabeth, as human beings! There! You ought to be able to getsufficient out of what I've said to make trouble enough for me tosatisfy even a suffrage speaker! Good-day."

* * * * *

The reporters gone and Dr. Wormser departed to Mrs. Cowx's for lunch,after having posed for the press photographers, the Battleaxe wailed,"This is going to be terrible! They'll make the home editions of theafternoon papers with the whole story, and it'll be dreadful! There'llbe a big enough audience tonight! No fear of that! But how nasty they'llbe! Ready for trouble! You girls--I'd meant to have you on the platform,but you'll have to mix with the crowd and see if you can stop any row,if it starts. Oh, dear, when we've been so careful! Free love!"

Ann had never before seen Mamie Bogardus tremble. They were allrespectful to her, and tender, that afternoon. They themselves trembledwhen they had dashed out for the four o'clock editions of the afternoonpapers and read the front-page blasts.

This is, in part, what the newspapers made Dr. Wormser say:

Love is nothing but a temporary itch caused by moonlight, but even so,it is more important than lasting marriage, because marriages areperformed by ministers, who are all childish. Free love, that is, takingany sweetheart any time you choose, is not only permissible butnecessary for any free woman.

Men are much meaner than women. Men doctors boss their nurses around andtreat them simply terribly.

The next president of the United States will be a woman, and she will belots better than any man. Marie Louise of Russia was the greatest kingwho ever lived.

As soon (two of the papers printed in bold face, and one in red, aparagraph more or less as follows): as soon as we get the vote, thenwe're going on and advocate birth-control, Socialism, and atheism. Allmarried couples will live in separate apartments. And women will imitatemen and sneak off and get drunk together. Women must lie about oneanother's whereabouts, to fool the men.

Women will make better soldiers, prize-fighters, engineers, and poetsthan men, and men are fit only to be the secretaries and servants ofwomen. I know that talking frankly like this will get me into trouble,but all suffrage speakers love publicity, and I guess I'll get plenty onthis.

* * * * *

Till time to leave for the Symphony Hall meeting, the girls wentmouching about the Fanning Mansion in a misery too deep for talk. EvenMaggie O'Mara, when she came in from the Waitresses' Union office tojoin them, was depressed to silence. They put on, not frocks suitable toa public feast of reason and politeness, but jackets and sailor suits.

And with all her anxiety, Ann was furious, because she had painfullysaved up enough to buy a blue taffeta evening frock so inspired, shefelt, as to impress an audience even of Mrs. Dudley Cowxes. She did,she raged, want to be something for once besides the frowsy, grubbyorganizer who snooped into tenements and addressed envelopes and spokeon the corner of Main Street.

"I like pretty things! Suppose I were to meet some grand man theretonight, wearing this old gym skirt. Damn!"

The Ball and Chain Squad and Miss Bogardus went solemnly to SymphonyHall in a trolley-car (not once a year could any of them afford a taxi)and they felt that every man on the long seat across the car wasglowering at them as immoral and dangerous women. Before they slipped bythe stage-entrance into the security of the "artists' rest-room," theydiffidently sneaked through the crowd in front of Symphony Hall. Thatnoon, only half the tickets had been sold. Now a blue and gilt attendantwas bawling, "Standing-room only--all seats sold--standing-room only!"And there were three thousand seats in the hall.

Despite the attendant's warning, hundreds were penned against the tripledoors, trying to get through. The panting, ruffled crowd was snarling:"... ought to ride 'em out on a rail--bunch of floosies--all crazy,that's what they are--wouldn't have a woman doc for a sick cat--freelove, I'd like to show 'em some free love, with a club--bunch of crazyanarchists..."

The crowd did not rise to the dehumanized horror of mob rage. There wereamong them too many sympathizers with suffrage, too many who did notbelieve that Dr. Wormser had been accurately quoted; and the interestingthing is that these defenders were either prosperous "leading citizens,"or rugged and shabbily clean workmen; none of them worthy citizens inbetween wages and directorates. The portico of Symphony Hall, with itstall marble pillars like highly polished bread pudding, its serenethough slightly imbecile bust of Mozart in a niche, and its associationswith evening clothes and chypre and the Annual Ball of the St.Wenceslaus Society, did not encourage violence. No, Ann guessed, the mobwould not talk of lynchings, but they might keep Dr. Wormser from beingheard, and it suddenly seemed to her that Dr. Wormser was the mostimportant and sensible person she had ever known.

Back of the stage, they found Dr. Wormser looking serene, though herhand trembled. The slim Mrs. Dudley Cowx, in severe black crêpe withonly a string of corals, was with her, and Mrs. Cowx seemed less afraidthan any of them. "Those cursed newspapers!" she snapped. "Will some ofyou explain to me why every single reporter and editor on a paper can bea liberal, or perhaps a Red, and the paper itself as conservative as themeasles? Don't worry, Dr. Wormser. I have my Dudley and two large andquite beautifully stupid brothers out there. They'll have stopped at theclub for a drink, and by this time they'll be equal to handling at leastthree hundred bullies."

But Mrs. Cowx's suave chatter did not loosen the tension. It was adreary apartment, this "artists' rest-room," with plaster walls againstwhich cigarettes had been crushed out, clusters of shaky kitchen chairs,and dismal piles of slatted folding chairs and music stands. TheBattleaxe sat by a table, her fingers drumming the most irritatingtattoo upon it; Dr. Wormser strode, or rather rolled, up and down, herlips moving as she rehearsed. The clock moved so slowly on toeight-thirty, hour of the speech, that it seemed to have stopped.

From in front they heard laughter, derisive whistles, a hash of excitedvoices, then stamping feet.

"Eight twenty-seven--oh, let's get started, Doctor, and get it over,"groaned Miss Bogardus. "Listen, you four girls. The minute the Doctorstarts talking, you all skip to the back of the house, and if anythingstarts, see what you can do."

She stalked out, ahead of an apparently meek little Dr. Wormser, and asthey appeared on the stage they were met by a hurricane of ironicclapping, pounding feet, and a blare of "Hurray for the Battleaxe!Hurray for the lady doc! Votes for the skirts!"

The Ball and Chain Squad hurried through the pass door, up a side aisle,to the back of the house, which was jammed with people standing, in timeto hear Miss Bogardus's introduction as chairman. If she had beennervous, behind the scenes, this old war-horse, this professional whohad played her Lady Macbeth to much worse houses, did not seem nervousnow. She beamed on the audience as though she were Editha with theBurglar, as though she loved them all and had no doubt that they lovedher--and the Vote.

"I'm afraid that in the unavoidable haste of getting out the newspapers,our friends the reporters considerably exaggerated the radicalism of thespeaker for this evening," began Miss Bogardus, before a stilled hall;then flatly, without ornamentation, she introduced Dr. Wormser asprobably the greatest physician since Benjamin Rush.

For their hometown scourge, Miss Bogardus, the gang had something of thesame jeering fondness that they might have had for a celebrated localdrunkard who always broke hotel windows and assaulted policemen in hisheightened moments, or for a politician caught with a daughter of joy,or a notoriously mendacious fisherman, or any other romantic butstrictly native eccentric. But when the alien infidel, Dr. Wormser,began, the crowd exploded.

In the thick-woven bawling, Ann could hear no individual voice save one,coarse, powerful, drunken, which belched, "Gwan back t' N' York!"

Dr. Wormser was so small and pleasant and comfortable-looking, she stoodso bravely, holding out her pudgy little hands in appeal, that the crowdquieted, and she was able to speak.

"Ladies--and gentlemen--and also anti-suffragists!" (Laughter andwhistling.) "I agree with you! If I knew myself only through reading thepapers this evening, I would thoroughly disapprove of myself!"(Laughter.) "I would tell Malvina Wormser to get out of this lovely cityand go back to the sinfulness of New York!"

Light clapping--through which tore the raucous voice Ann had heardbefore: "Gwan back then! Skiddoo! We don't want you!"

Ann had elbowed through to the back row of seats, and she saw that theheckler was halfway down the center aisle. He had risen, turned aboutfor applause. He was a bulky, red man, swaying, grinning fatuously.Encouraged by this Agamemnon, the lesser breed of youth without the lawbegan again to whistle, to stamp.

There were half a dozen uniformed policemen gaping foolishly beside Ann.She seized the sleeve of one; she demanded, "You've got to throw thatman out! He'll start a riot."

"Aw, he ain't doing nothing, lady. He'll shut up."

The red man started singing.

Ann lost her temper completely, instantly, and beautifully. She scrougedher way through the mass, she darted down the aisle, like a retrievingspaniel; and Maggie O'Mara followed her like a bull-terrier, EleanorCrevecoeur like a coursing greyhound. But Pat Bramble was not in sight.

The policemen followed them like a parade of ice wagons.

Ann caught the red one's collar. Her voice was not loud, but it wasvenomous: "You get out of here, you drunk!" He shook her loose, andMaggie slapped him. It was a grand stinging slap; the slap of a waitresstrained in midnight lunch-rooms. While the whole audience rose,shrieked, peered, and Dr. Wormser was forgotten, the red one reached forMaggie, but suddenly, somehow, Eleanor was in front of her, too cold,blade-thin, and calm for even a sot to attack.

(But where was Pat? She was a coward, a deserter!)

"Here, you! Take him out!" Ann demanded of the foremost policeman.

But other males growled, "He's got a right to talk--you and your toughmolls--oughta be ashamed yourselves--call yourselves ladies?--let abunch of hellions like you have the vote?"

The policeman said, rather hastily, "You git back to your seat, lady!You're making all the fuss, not this guy! You beat it, and we'll takecare of the rumpus." And retired, in broad blue-bottomed dignity, whilethe red one bawled over Eleanor's thin shoulder, "Yeh! Come on, boys,let's spank the whole lot of 'em, and then start in on the lady doc!Come on!"

A cyclone. Sudden. An express-train bursting through house-walls intothe parlor. A herd of crazed steers, down the center aisle. Pat Bramblewas leading a cheerful gang of young men in University of Clateburnsweaters. "Take him out!" cried Pat, pointing to the red one. Hevanished under sweaters; his reversed heels and ankles were seen kickingabove the crowd at the back of the hall. "And take that one--and thatone!" demanded Ann.

Two men, then half a dozen, were hauled over the protesting heads ofauditors and lugged out like limp rag-bags. Now the policemen becamegallant and active, and, supported thus by the U. of C. sweaters, beganto drag out anyone who so much as squeaked--including a venerable andfeminist U. of C. male professor, who was rumored to have voted twicefor every known pro-suffrage candidate since he had been eighteen.

The policemen and the sweaters paraded the aisle. All was quiet, and Dr.Wormser charged on again, for a blissful hour, and ended to reasonableapplause.

But the Ball and Chain Squad did not hear her address. They were back ofthe stage, exhausted. Eleanor was weeping. Maggie was glaring, furiousthat the beautiful fight was over.

"Where the heck did you get all those young giants?" she asked Pat.

"What a chance I took! I'd noticed 'em, front row of the balcony. I knewfrom his pictures one of 'em was Tad Perquist, football captain. Iskipped up to him and I said, 'Oh, Mr. Perquist, I'm a friend of yoursister. You've got to come and help.' I took a chance on his having asister. He came, with all those earnest young scholars, and what alovely bit of research they did!"

But Ann, sitting apart, was brooding, "It's disgusting! Our real work,committees, canvassing, envelopes--those envelopes!--we never get creditfar them. And now we go melodramatic, like college boys, and probablythe newspapers will all say we're fine brave wenches, because we're justas dumm as men and try to settle things by violence, like men.... ButI wish I'd slapped him once, just once, like Mag!"

* * * * *

As they left the hall, guarding Dr. Wormser, a frail, delicate littleold lady pounced on Ann and Eleanor and sizzled, "Young women, I havebeen a suffragist for forty years. My dear late husband and I havecontributed a great deal of money, a great deal of money, for what weconsidered the Cause. But after tonight I am entirely opposed to womansuffrage. You and your fellow ruffians were not at all ladylike, not onebit!"

Eleanor whooped, "Not ladylike? Oh, Lord, the next movement I take up isgoing to be the Needlewomen's Guild!"

But Ann did not laugh. She was depressed. The evening's melodrama hadshaken her out of the hypnotizing routine of the Fanning Mansion. Shebrooded, "I've stopped being an individual. I'm a cog, whether it'sriots or addressing envelopes. One more year--got to give them anotheryear--and I'm going to quit and find out what Ann Vickers is now, andwhether she's become anything besides 'one of those young women atSuffrage Headquarters.'

"And then I suppose I'll get into some other confounded uplift movementand be another cog in another wheel.

"Is all this reform mania like that?

"Anyway, I won't get into another riot. Just exhibitionism, that's whatit is! Finished!"

Chapter 12

The next of the Visiting Firemen was neither so distinguished nor soamiable as Dr. Malvina Wormser. She was a Miss Emily Allen Aukett, oneof those prominent women about the reasons for whose prominence everyonewas vague. She was referred to in suffrage magazines as an "author,lecturer, and reformer," but what she had written, what she had lecturedabout, and for what reforms she had battled, nobody at the FanningMansion was quite certain, when National Headquarters sent her out fromNew York to inspire and quicken the local laborers.

They were directed to see that Miss Aukett was handsomely housed andfed, and they were warned that she would require a hot supper beforeretiring, also taxicabs for viewing the battlefield and for taking theair.

"Huh! Hot supper! Taxis! Our idea here of a hot supper is a nice longglass of hot water!" grumbled Miss Bogardus to Ann. "You and Eleanorwill have to steer her and baby her. I'm not guaranteed to be safe frombiting, as you've probably observed!"

Miss Emily Allen Aukett wore more bracelets than Eula Towers of PointRoyal, and she was full of lavish toothy smiles. She was thirty-five bycandlelight and forty-five by the sun. She cooed, but she criticized.She hinted that the room they gave her at the Fanning Mansion was ratherdreadful, and the Fanning Mansion food a little worse. She suggestedthey hire a "nice negro mammy" to do their cooking--they who often couldnot afford pie.

"It's so refreshing to be out here in your simple, vigorous Middle West,after New England and London and Paris," she gushed to Miss Bogardus,who had been born in Maine.

Miss Bogardus would not have minded if Miss Aukett had wrung heraudiences in her two speeches--a rally in Schützenverein Hall, on theNorth Side, and an address to the Old Elm Station Ladies' LiterarySociety. But Miss Aukett was too refined to do any wringing, and notsufficiently refined to do anything else. She said a few chaste thingsabout the Wrongs of Women, but she hadn't thought up any new ones, andall of Clateburn, even Mamie Bogardus, was a little sick of theregulation Wrongs. What she did blithely and toothily lecture about washer acquaintanceship with the great of the world: the time she hadcrossed the ocean with General Wood and the cute thing she had said tohim when they were docking; the observations on the nobility ofmotherhood that Elbert Hubbard had confided to her.

And at night, twitchily exhausted after her orgies of eloquence, she wasrather curt about the hot supper, consisting of cocoa and warmed-overtea-biscuits and honey, of which Ann had robbed her own perpetuallyhungry self.

"Honest, Miss Bogardus, I don't want to kick, but that Aukett woman is apest," Ann complained later that night, while Miss Bogardus was tryingto finish on time her editorial for the Ohio Suffrage Banner, duethree days ago.

"I know it, my chick. I used to think that any girl that believed insuffrage had been saved, but I guess we backslide like the men. Whatshall we do with her?"

"You know we four have to go down and try to organize in Tafford, andit's the toughest proposition in the state. Why not send the Aukett withus?"

"I will. Now skip to bed, child, and get----Or no. It isn't midnight,Ann. I know you're tired, but that nasty Bandolph woman laid down on ustonight and didn't get her pile of envelopes all addressed. These awfulvolunteer workers! Don't you want to finish them, dearie? And MissAukett--I'll tell her she'll love Tafford!"

* * * * *

Tafford was a small industrial city, but an old one, withthree-generation industries, watches and rifles and typewriters,demanding well-paid, cautious, skilled craftsmen rather than newly comeroustabouts, Polish and Hunky and Italian, and it lacked the Socialismto be expected in factory towns. It was, like Hartford, Conn., or anyAmerican city named Springfield, so conservative that it resembled anEnglish cathedral town, minus the cathedral. Tafford snubbed suffrage;particularly did the mayor, Mr. Snowfield, whose high-nosed andjet-encrusted wife was a vice president of the Ohio Anti-SuffrageAssociation. But there was in Tafford one old stalwart, a Mrs. Manders,widow, a sister Battleaxe to Mamie Bogardus, who went on fighting forthe vote, went on asking Clateburn Headquarters for speakers, and couldnot be choked off, because her father had been an Ohio Methodist Bishopand a division superintendent on the Underground Railroad before theCivil War.

To the mercies of Tafford, the Hon. Mr. Snowfield, and Mrs. Manders, theBattleaxe sent Emily Allen Aukett, but as guard she mercifully sent Ann,Pat, Eleanor, and Maggie O'Mara. Mrs. Manders had engaged the GrandOpera House and placarded Tafford with announcements that the citizenrywould hear, in Miss Emily Allen Aukett, "one of the greatest thinkersand authors in the world." Mrs. Manders met them at the 5:18 fromClateburn, and looked sharply over the five, trying to find which onewas the great thinker and author. She sniffed when, on the platform,Emily danced forward with outstretched hand and teeth, and gurgled, "Iam Miss Aukett--these are my lieutenants--such dear girls--so lovely tobe in this bustling Mid-Western city, with its vigor and simplicity,after Paris and London and New York."

"Don't know if it's so lovely," piped Mrs. Manders. "Tried to get you bywire on the train. Owner of Grand Opera House broke our contract. Guessthe antis got to him. Scared him. Tried to get another hall. Couldn't.They've got us sewed up."

"Can't we hold a street meeting, or vacant lot, Mrs. Manders? (I'm AnnVickers, from Headquarters.) We're used to it, and I'm sure Miss Aukettwouldn't mind."

"But I'm afraid I do mind!" wailed Miss Aukett, with diminished thoughstill pestilential sweetness. "I feel that in a street meeting you can'tput so much reasoning into your message. And such unimportant people!"

Mrs. Manders (and she looked as motherly and dove-gray and pious as anyother deacon's widow) rasped, "Guess the unimportant folks will get allthe message tonight! I know a nice vacant lot; a little muddy but nobricks for the children to throw. We'll take a chance on going to thecalaboose. Too late now to get a permit from the mayor for a streetmeeting. Not that you need one legally--vacant lot, private property.That won't stop the police in this town!"

Ann, Eleanor, and Pat looked casual as mercenaries. Maggie chuckled.Miss Aukett choked. Then Miss Aukett smiled. But all the gold andbenevolence had gone out of Miss Aukett's smile, and she sounded asthough she had bitten something gritty: "I'll do what I can, of course.I always do. But I'm afraid these young women will have to do therough-and-tumble speechifying. They're used to it!"

* * * * *

Mrs. Manders was a hustler. She had immediately caused to be hung on ashop across from the entrance of the Grand Opera House a hand-scrawledposter:

At the corner of the lot she had stationed a small boy with a drum and alame Spanish War veteran with a bugle. They were proud of their art andwilling to demonstrate it.

When the crusaders came up in Mrs. Manders's asthmatic Pope-Hartford carat five minutes to eight, the lot was full. The audience were notunsympathetic, like the respectables at Symphony Hall in Clateburn; mostof them were the dispossessed, the unemployed, the boiler-tenders, thejanitors, the roustabouts, the scrubwomen, and they admired the pluck ofthe lady bandits; they cheered jovially as Mrs. Manders and the girlscoaxed the automobile into the center of the crowd, unpacked leaflets,and set up a gasoline flare. But under that murky and nervous flame, thecrowd looked wild: unshaven jowls, corded throats above collarlessshirts, hats smeared with coal dust or lime, bold eyes of womendishwashers.

Miss Emily Allen Aukett gasped to Eleanor, the only female in the gangwho seemed to have traces of recognizable gentility, "Oh, they're adreadful mob! Do persuade Mrs. Manders that it's dangerous! We must getout of here!"

"Yeay! Go it, girls. Give 'em hell! Hurray for the vote!" roared thecrowd, as Mrs. Manders climbed on the rear seat of the car and held upher two hands.

"They'll mob us!" sobbed Miss Aukett.

Mrs. Manders had spoken to the audience as to neighbors; Ann had begunher familiar--too familiar!--exordium about women looking not forprivilege but for a chance to work, when a police car came shrieking upthe street in imperative agony. A dozen officers, clubs waving, headedby a lieutenant, were seen buffeting through the crowd.

"Thank God!" whimpered Emily Allen Aukett; and the ladylike EleanorCrevecoeur turned on her with, "You chump! How much will you take to goback to New York?"

It is improbable that, in her terror, Miss Aukett heard. She slipped outof the car door; she cuddled as near as she could to the big policelieutenant when he pushed through to the side of the car; she poured outon him the bland, bright balm of her smile. He did not notice. He wasdemanding of Ann, who was looking down at him from her station on theseat of the car, looking down at his malignant mouth in the torchlight,"Hey, you, lady! Where's your permit to speak?"

"We don't need one. Don't need one at all," Mrs. Manders said primly."You'll please to go on about your business, officer. This is not astreet meeting. Private lot. Don't need----"

"The hell you don't need a permit! Lookit how the crowd's stretching outinto the public highway! That makes it a street meeting. Now, you shutyour traps and get out of here or I'll run the whole bunch of you in!"

The primness of the bishop's daughter vanished, and Mrs. Manders yelledback, "Run us in! Go on! We want to be run in!" (Miss Emily Allen Aukettwas seen by a coldly grinning Eleanor to slip behind the lieutenant andoff into the crowd.) "That's the only thing that'll impress themuttonheads like you, that make up this town!"

"That'll be enough out of you, Mrs. Manders! I know all about you. Oughtto be ashamed of yourself, old gal like you, preacher's daughter,associating with these chippies from out of town! Bunch of Reds andanarchists! If you wasn't related to the best families, I'd pinchyou--yes, and if I got any of your lip, maybe I'd have an accident withmy night stick! Your swell relatives won't stand your acting-up muchlonger, you take it from me; I've got the low-down. Now you----Boys!Clear the crowd! Pilwaski! Get in here and drive this car to this oldgal's home--you get in, too, Monahan, and see that none of thesehell-cats get loose!"

As Pilwaski drove their car off, Ann saw the admonishment of a mob bythe officials whom that same mob had hired to guard the peace. Shewanted to leap out, to kill the policemen, to battle and kill until theykilled her, but she was held in by Officer Monahan, and from theelevation of the car saw something she never could forget; somethingthat made her fundamentally a revolutionist even in the days when shewas to be a cautious public official. The big lieutenant at their head,eight policemen waded into the crowd. Eight against five hundred! Itwould sound heroic, as told in the newspapers. It wasn't. She discoveredsomething that later made it impossible for her to accept the emotionalpacifism fashionable everywhere (save in Russia and Japan) from 1920 to1930: an unarmed mass is helpless against an armed trained squadron;that neither age, sex, arguments, nor sweet reasonableness is proofa*gainst guns and clubs.

The policemen started into the crowd, simply and systematically bangingevery head in sight old men, women, boys of eight, along with matureworkmen. When anyone protested, he was hit twice, and kicked in thesides as he writhed in the mud. When they had slashed halfway throughthe audience, and everyone was fleeing, stumbling, pushing at the man infront, the eight policemen collared the first eight auditors at hand,kicked them into the patrol wagon that had followed the police car, anddrove clanging away.

As Mrs. Manders's car, Pilwaski driving, edged after the patrol wagon,Ann looked back to see men with blood dribbling in divided streams fromcut foreheads down into their blinded eyes, or lying face up in the mud,or staggering with fluttering hands, sobbing. She ceased that moment tobe merely a feminist and became a humanist, in the only orthodox senseof that harassed word.

* * * * *

Miss Emily Allen Aukett had, by taxicab, reached the residence of Mrs.Manders before them. She was crying prettily beside a pot of geraniums.

Mrs. Manders ignored Emily. When they were in the parlor, safe from theears of Officers Pilwaski and Monahan, she declared, "We'll go to themayor tomorrow morning and tell him we want a street-speaking permit. Wewon't get it. But maybe some day the citizens will see who owns thestreets, along with the gas and water! What say, Miss Vickers--yougirls?"

"Grand!" said the Ball and Chain Squad.

"Oh, no!" wailed Emily Allen Aukett. "I told you beforehand what wouldhappen tonight! It's all so undignified!"

Then spoke the daughter of the bishop: "Yes, and so is giving birth to ababy, my dear woman! You needn't worry. Your train leaves at 11:16tonight. I'll drive you down. Now, you others, we'll leave here at ninein the morning..."

Before she went to bed, Mrs. Manders telephoned to the death-watch atthe evening papers that there might be something interesting on thesteps of City Hall tomorrow; telephoned to the mayor at his house toexpect them at nine-thirty. For the first time the girls heard theMethodist Boadicea chuckle: "Why, your honor, I'm surprised at suchlanguage, though I do remember you were a shocking, nasty little boywhen you used to steal Father's apples and..."

Mrs. Manders beamed. "He'll be sure to have the police there."

"And you won't have me there, thank Heaven," sniffed Miss Emily AllenAukett.

Five years later Ann was to meet Miss Aukett in New York, to have tea ather apartment in Tenth Street, and to discover that, secure and at home,Miss Aukett was gracious, amusing, clear-headed, and, worst of all, thatshe really did know the celebrities she had pretended to know. Annsighed, "Oh, no one ever understands anybody, except the people you metjust last evening!" That Miss Bogardus, the snapping-turtle, should bethe kindest of women; that Eleanor Crevecoeur could and did shock MagO'Mara; that Glenn Hargis, the virile, should be weaker than Eula Towersand more timid than the Reverend Professor Henry Sogles, M. A.; that thebumptious and cowardly Emily Aukett should be courageously disdainful ofpopularity; that she herself, Ann Vickers, should give her life, hermost ardent ambition, to uplift and reform and general pediatrics foradults, yet all the time wonder whether any of it was worth-while--wheredid it leave her in the study of mankind?

* * * * *

They came meekly enough up the steps of City Hall, between the massycolumns which were revered in Tafford as solid marble, but which, owingto some unfortunate accident in the civic labors of Mayor Snowfield'sparty, were actually shells filled with broken stone. Six reporters,seven photographers, and nineteen policemen were awaiting them on thesteps.

"Yuh can't go in there, lady," said the police captain to Mrs. Manders.

"I am a citizen of Tafford, and I demand my right----"

"You go on down in the street and demand your rights there!" said thecaptain. A policeman seized each of the women, not painfully, but withconsiderable rudeness.

Mrs. Manders, Eleanor, Ann, even Maggie stood quietly enough, and Annwas thinking, "We can be back in Clateburn by three this afternoon. Ithink I'll take a vacation and clean up my room----"

But Pat Bramble, the small and dainty Pat, snatched herself loose fromher policeman, lowered her head, and rammed him agonizingly in thegendarmish belly. He howled, he slapped her, he grappled her wrist andtwisted it till she screamed. Mechanically, not thinking much about it,the other three girls fell to their duty, struggling with the policemen,trying to slap them, while Ann remembered the rebuking old lady atSymphony Hall, and casually reflected, in the calm space inside herbrown hatless head, that was so furiously yanking itself away from thepoliceman's pressing shoulder, "Not at all ladylike, not at all ladylike...I hope the photographers get this; ought to be swell publicity forthe Cause.... Not at all ladylike, not at all ladylike."

And with that she bit her policeman.

* * * * *

To be arrested, anywhere, for any reason, had always seemed to Ann aspermanently disgraceful as being caught in adultery. Anyone who had everbeen arrested was a criminal, essentially different from human beings;doing appalling things for no comprehensible reason, belonging to abewitched world of courts and prisons and torture-chambers and agoniesof inhuman guilt. A criminal was as sorcerous as a ghost; a judge or ajailer as awesome and unordinary as a Catholic priest; and the precinctsof a court, a prison, anything connected with an arrest, was made not ofbrick or stone or wood, but of leprous and unterrestrial material thatobscured sun and air and secure sleep.

Yet as they drove off in the Black Maria, with its two long seatscovered with quite ordinary black oilcloth, a massive policeman standingon the steps at the back and shutting off the light, she did not seem toherself to be in any bewitched and terrifying place, but only in arather bumpy and uncomfortable Ford truck with the curtains drawn. Shedid not feel like a criminal. She wondered if many prisoners did notfeel not like criminals, but merely like human beings who had beenarrested by rather dull policemen.

They were held for half an hour in a bull-pen at the municipalcourthouse, along with three prostitutes, a negress shoplifter, and avery drunken lady. Ann had no horror of them. She did not believe thatshe, a Respectable Young College Woman, had been put upon by beingconfined with these drabs, but the opposite, that they were not sodifferent from herself, and that possibly they were no more to blame forbeing arrested than herself and the bishop's daughter.

And now Ann, Pat, Eleanor, and Maggie became what they were hereafter tobe called: "The Ball and Chain Squad."

They were arraigned before a magistrate, neither sad*stic nor humorous:a commonplace plump man with a commonplace tan mustache, to whomsentencing offenders was as unemotional a routine as eating pork andbeans.

Standing before the magistrate's high and greasy pine desk, the fivewere charged (to Ann's wonder and Eleanor's snicker) with breach of thepeace, use of abusive and profane language, resisting officers in thedischarge of their duty, and causing a crowd to collect. The fiveofficers, each of whom was as large as any three of the defendants, gavetestimony that "these here women" had threatened to assault the mayor,that when they had been told that the mayor would be unable to see them,they had set upon the officers, struck them, bitten them, and causedthem serious distress.

The magistrate looked down on Mrs. Manders, then at her police guardian.Ann thought that he winked at the policeman as he demanded, "But thiselderly lady--she didn't join these young women in their shockingbehavior!"

"No, yonor. She tried to prevent 'em. They're strangers from out oftown--claim they come from Clateburn. They claim to be anarchists orsuffragettes, or something like that, and it looked to me like they wastrying to mislead the old dame."

"They were not! If they're guilty, I'm twice as guilty!" wailed Mrs.Manders.

"Mrs. Manders discharged. The others, two weeks in county jail. Nextcase!"

"I demand to go with these girls! This is a disgrace----"

"Officer! Take the old lady out. Next case, I said."

As the Ball and Chain Squad were led through the right rear door, Annlooked back to see Mrs. Manders, kicking and slapping, lugged out tofreedom by three grinning giants in blue.

Chapter 13

Like the worthy magistrate who had sentenced them, their jail wasneither fiendish nor amusing. It was just drab, dirty, and perfectlysenseless.

They heard enough, from their fellow criminals, of other county jailsand state prisons, for women as well as for men, that were dens ofsecret and irresponsible cruelty; of solitary confinement in dark, damp,lice-crawling cells till the victims went insane, of strait-jackets andwhipping, of stout women keepers, vicious as any man warder, who enjoyedstripping prisoners, lashing them, nagging them to frenzy and, inpunishment for the frenzy, playing the icy fire-hose on them.Incredulous that such things could happen, in the United States, theyheard a prisoner describe a Georgia county jail in which not one of thewomen prisoners had any clothing beyond a thin skirt, not even shoes,and in which the man jailer--there was no matron--walked among the barewomen whenever he chose, and the gallant town loafers wandered in tolook at these wretches on the toilet--and no one cared, and the GoodCitizens, when they were told, did not believe it.

But in this particular jail at Tafford, it was not cruelty, but thewaste and stupidity, the good-natured ignorance of the sheriff and theconstant, sneaking, sickening, amorous approaches of the deputy sheriffsthat exasperated the Ball and Chain Squad. They were confined to thewomen's wing of the county jail: a lofty room, ill-lighted, dreary and,now that December was coming on, clammily cold. Round the room were twotiers of cells for sleeping, kept unlocked save in the rather commoncases of hysterical or violent inmates. On the bunks in the cells weremattresses covered with damp gunny-sacking. In the center of the vastroom were some dozens of rickety straight chairs, a few greasy tables, arusty stove--and the prisoners.

When the four girls were sentenced, the floor was muddy, the chairssticky to the touch, the cracks in the walls alive with lice. They beganreforming at once. Possibly had they remained a year, their fresh andinnocent vigor would not have lasted, but for their fortnight, they wereas optimistically busy as a Mormon missionary. As the matron "didn'tguess it was necessary" for them to clean up, they bought mops, brushes,soap, insecticide, with their own money, and, bawdily but cheerfullyassisted by two of the prostitutes, they got rid of the grease and someof the garbage-like smell. They started classes in English, ineconomics; and one of the other prisoners, a born Parisian, in forstealing furs from checking-rooms, gave them lessons in French, thoughthey never afterward dared to use most of the words she taught them.

They had plenty of books, for they had not been in jail twenty-fourhours before Miss Bogardus had swept down from Clateburn, and aftergiving a spirited interview to the papers, called on the Ball and ChainSquad, kissed them all around, cried, said that there was a considerableargument as to whether judges or policemen were the worst jackasses, andleft with them all the books that in her haste she had been able to pickup around the Fanning Mansion or buy at the Clateburn Stationnews-counter. They included the Gospel According to St. John, the secondvolume of Les Miserables, The New England Cook Book, The Jewel ofJandaphur, by E. Phillips Oppenheim, Gulliver's Travels, Arranged forChildren, The History of the Mammoth Cave, an aseptic novel calledHelen o' High Tor, and Weininger's Sex and Character, of which MissBogardus had remembered nothing except that it had something to do withwomen.

Mrs. Manders came, daily, and brought the newspapers, Life andJudge, cold chicken and large, meaty, perdurable plum puddings, whichwere more interesting than Weininger to four healthy young womenstarving on a menu consisting entirely of gluey porridge, sour bread,oleo-margarine, dematerialized coffee and tea, lukewarm boiled potatoes,stew crusted with grease, molasses, and orange marmalade made ofcarrots.

Washing the tin dishes in which these luxuries were served was the onlyoccupation the other prisoners had, save for incessant conversation. Allday, sometimes half the night, the women talked--petty thieves,prostitutes, women who had maltreated their children or slashed theirlovers, drunks, dope-fiends. They told smutty stories and sang "Frankieand Johnnie"; they boasted of their lovers and sobbed about the crueltyof their husbands and the stinginess of the customers for whom they hadscrubbed floors or washed clothes. Seventeen of them, aside from thesuffragists; all talking, hating the world and a little bewildered byit.

Seventeen of them, out of whom, by count, fourteen seemed to Ann no more"criminal" than herself. Poverty, unemployment, early underfeeding and,on the part of the prostitutes, plain feebleness of mind and puerilelove of silk and bright lights, had sent them here. Fourteen slovenlywomen who presently seemed to her as good friends and understandable asPat or Eleanor or Maggie--and some of them less calculating than Pat,less ribald than Eleanor, less belligerent than Maggie.

As day by day they became more knowable and more human, more like girlsin Waubanakee or Point Royal, so did the jail itself seem lessextraordinary and strange with dread. It was not a "prison," smacking ofmysterious terror; it was, like the Black Maria, just a place, a placewhere she happened now to be, as she might have been in a railwaystation, bored with waiting and thinking about the inefficiency of theworld. For it was not the cruelty of the whole system of laws and courtsand prisons which she resented now so much as its futility. "Let'sassume that the court is right and that I am a criminal," she fretted."All right. What does the state accomplish by shutting me up here fortwo weeks? The theory is that I am a violent rowdy who injures thelittle policemen and threatens the mayor. What is there about sittingidle for a fortnight among professional prostitutes that is going tomake me so gentle, that is going to teach me so much self-restraint,that when I come out the policemen and mayor will be safe?"

She saw that war was stupid, that conducting business for the profit ofa few owners was insane, that thrones and crowns and titles and degreeswere as childish as playing with tin soldiers, but that in the entirerange of human imbecility, there was nothing quite so senseless asimprisonment as a cure for crime... and that the worse the crimesbecame, the more serious it was that there should be only so barbaric aneffort to cure.

And that perception, mingled with the remembered sour smells and slimytables and acrid food, with the picture of women prisoners puzzled andhopeless and stupefied, and the guards' sly amorousness, was to send herone day into prison reform, and to keep her in it even when she longedto escape from the naggings and exhibitionism of reform to the securityof a man, a house, children, land, and the serene commonplace.

Land and children and a hearth and her man!

She had never so closely yearned for them as in this idleness.Skittering about in Waubanakee, bustling in Point Royal, tub-thumping inClateburn, she had been too busy to consider adequately what thisindividual Ann Vickers was, and what she wanted.

Perhaps, she sighed (looking at one of the co*ckroaches, which bredfaster than they could slap them to death)--perhaps she was one of theMarthas who could never be so showily wasteful as to anoint the worldwith the spikenard of sexual exaltation, who would always be serving thedinner for Lazarus and Jesus, who would be for and of the mass, andnever an "individual." But it was an individual enough Ann who thoughtabout men in the sordid and perverted feminism of the jail, among womenstaled and bound by sex.

Men! They had existed at the Fanning Mansion scarcely more than at PointRoyal. To the Fanning Mansion had come only hog-tied husbands, literarybank-clerks, and Socialists who called you "comrade" and immediatelychucked you under the chin in an alleged spirit of fraternity. But thegirls had been too driven for any vast yearning. They had time now, andAnn daydreamed and dreamed by night of a lover and mate who should havethe irony of Adolph Klebs, the ruddy freshness of Glenn Hargis. He cameto her down the rough grass of a hillside pasture, and they racedthrough uplands, light as the shadows of the clouds.... She met himin a worn doorway, in a city worn and old and thunderous, on anafternoon of fog and watery street-lights; there was something illicitand exciting about it; they slipped away together--she shivered happilyas she took his arm--and had tea in their secret place.... Togetherthey walked through the alleys of Venice and came back to an apartmentin a palazzo with lofty ceiling riotous with little loves, and a vastblue and golden bed at the distant end of a room floored with scarlettiles and lit by a crystal chandelier.... And by magic, they were ina Connecticut cottage with a vegetable garden smaller than thechandelier, but more exciting.

Everything from every romantic novel, every motion picture she had seen,came to her now and appeared more real, in her detached brooding, thanthe co*ckroaches on the rusty bars of her cell, the screaming prostitutefive feet away, the piles of envelopes awaiting her back in Clateburn.

* * * * *

The Ball and Chain Squad were released in a storm of roses, confetti,and a brass band playing "Tipperary." The four, with Mrs. Manders, MissBogardus, and the Reverend Chauncey Simsbury of St. Gondolph's P. E.Church, addressed two thousand Tafford people, who clapped lustily andwent out to vote against municipal suffrage for women.

At Clateburn, at the station, were all the press photographers in town,sixteen commercial photographers, and seventy-two amateurs, with abattalion of reporters, and another brass band. At Symphony Hall theyaddressed three thousand, and the only man who tried to heckle them wasthrown out by two enthusiastic business-men of the kind who went to thebarber's every fortnight.

They had had no time for any dinner beyond chocolate almond bars betweentrain-arrival and the Symphony Hall rally. When they escaped from thehundreds of lady stalwarts who came up to shake their hands after therally, and reached the fortress of the Fanning Mansion, they found thatthe flustered Miss Bogardus had forgotten to prepare supper. They suppedon cold canned corned-beef and moldy biscuits.

But their cots in the Fanning Mansion attic seemed like couches in aMohammedan paradise.

* * * * *

Her brooding in jail had encouraged Ann to escape from the righteousbondage of the suffrage movement. The very virtuousness andself-sacrifice of Miss Bogardus, which made her expect equal virtue andsacrifice from others, was a worse tyranny than dungeons. In this worldno one ought to be more than decently virtuous; it is too hard on theneighbors. Ann was more afraid of the Battleaxe than of any squad ofpolicemen. But she was tired--not only of envelopes, which Miss Bogardushad them addressing again within twenty-four hours after leaving jail,but of the whole theological vocabulary of suffrage: "economicindependence of women," "equal rights," "equal pay for equal work,""matriarchy." Like such senile words as "idealism," "virtue,""patriotism," they had ceased to mean anything. And she was tired too ofthe perpetual stories about women's wrongs. There were plenty of wrongs,Heaven knew: young widows with three children working twelve hours a dayfor just enough to starve slowly on; intelligent women ridiculed andmade small by boisterous husbands. But the women who came to tea at theFanning Mansion merely to say that their husbands did not appreciatetheir finer natures, to them Ann had listened long enough. She began tosympathize with the husbands.

Yet it took her four months of bullying her fear, of whisperedconferences with Pat and Eleanor, to escape from Clateburn and theenvelopes. Probably, in her perfectly normal cowardice, she would nothave eloped from the Fanning Mansion till the suffrage amendment hadbeen passed if Pat and Eleanor had not confessed that they too plannedto invade New York and be human and sinful and free ofenvelope-addressing. They would see Ann there--why didn't she pioneerfor them?--they would try to back her up when Miss Bogardus indictedher treachery.

In 1916 Ann found a job with a committee "investigating conditions" inthe textile and garment industries in New York, with an insult insteadof a salary but with board and room at the Corlears Hook SettlementHouse guaranteed, in return for teaching classes of foreigners.

A little dazed, free, and not quite sure what to do with freedom, hergood little Mid-Western-cum-Connecticut conscience writhing over theBattleaxe's crisp, "If you don't feel happy here, we won't try to keepyou," Ann rode miserably through coaxing April to the towers of NewYork.

When from the elevated platform she saw the spire of the WoolworthBuilding, then looked down on a throng of Chinamen, Italians,Hungarians, Yankees, of billionaire bankers, and sailors just in fromJava, and intellectual Jewish lawyers, and whistling structural steelworkers, her spirit soared with the tower, quickened with thequick-flowing blood of a great seaport, and she cried, "Now I'll dothings.... I wonder what?"

Chapter 14

When America entered the war, in 1917, Ann Vickers had risen fromordinary resident of the Corlears Hook Settlement, in lower New York, toassistant head-resident, in direct charge of the classes in elementaryEnglish, composition, modern drama, economics, physiology, and cooking,for the poor of the neighborhood, of the clubs for mothers, girls, andmilitant small boys, of the dramatic association, and of the lecturesdelivered gratis by earnest advocates of single tax, trout-fishing,exploring Tibet, pacifism, sea-shell collecting, the eating of bran, andthe geography of Charlemagne's empire.

She had been rushed from the social solitude of the Fanning Mansion intoa typical, inescapable New York maelstrom of acquaintanceships, with thetelephone always ringing. Pat Bramble, after teaching for a term inDenver--she had apparently been discharged for inefficiency--had come toNew York and was some sort of glorified stenographer for an advertisingagency; Eleanor Crevecoeur had come as assistant editor on a trade-paperdevoted to household furnishing, for which she wrote lyrics aboutlavatories, panegyrics about wall-board, and martial melodies on theconvenience of folding luggage-stands in guest-rooms.

In New York Pat Bramble was as cool, sweet, and frostily virginal amongthe rugged copywriters, and the salesmen whose socks, ties, andhandkerchiefs matched, as she had been among the male spinsters whom shehad met at the Fanning Mansion. But Eleanor observed, "Like you girls, Ikid myself that I came here to make a career, but what I really came forwas to catch me a good husky male," and quite successfully, withoutmarriage-license, she went to living with a large, athletic younggraduate of the University of Oklahoma, one Mr. Ewbank, secretary of ataxicab company, whose only social gifts were imitating a Chineselaundryman, playing bridge, and keeping restfully silent when hisbetters, the women, discussed taxation and immortality.

As soon as she had arrived in New York, Ann had diffidently called onDr. Malvina Wormser, the embattled suffrage speaker whom she had guardedat Symphony Hall in Clateburn. The plump and cheerful little doctorembraced her, gave her a prescription for a cold, and immediatelyannexed her to the human zoo of which, like all women doctors, she wasproprietor. Dr. Wormser's flat, a high-ceiled upper floor of anold-fashioned mansion on Fifth Avenue, in the Thirties, was filled withGerman medical books, Chinese pottery, dust, violins which Dr. Wormserbelieved to be Strads, oak cupboards from Sussex, piles of unreadmagazines advocating the causes of vegetarianism, Macedonia, Chineseorphans, and colonic irrigation, with cigarette butts, inscribed volumesof agonized poetry, obstetrical customers, begging letters, and people.Here, Ann met architects, wounded French officers, wounded German spieswho were always supposed to be Swiss bankers, male and femalebacteriologists, Episcopal rectors who had been unfrocked fororthodoxy--i. e., for taking the Bible seriously, secretaries ofpublishers, and women chemists, of which last category one half werespectacled and harsh, and the other half golden and frivolous andregularly kissed behind Japanese screens at Dr. Wormser's impromptudances.

"You'll like my bunch," Dr. Wormser said to Ann, "and it will train youfor the day when you become the first American woman ambassador. You'llsee that all the earnest scholars that come here think I'm light-mindedand frivolous, and all the hell-raisers think I'm depressingly serious,and so between them, I never get any of them for patients, and I have tomake my living out of free clinics and free advice to rich women whoought to be spanked. I have some nice Benedictine here. Come tomorrowevening. There's either an aviator or a conchologist coming, I forgetwhich."

But Ann's most constant intimacies were necessarily with her neighbors,her fellow residents of the Corlears Hook Settlement, and out of thetwenty of them, seven were males: Columbia graduate students, a youngliberal lawyer who despised the law and worshipped Clarence Darrow, amiddle-aged librarian, the inevitable liberal clergyman who arguedhumorously, and a certain rich young ruler who was eager to do anythingfor the downtrodden except to sell all that he had and distribute untothe poor. He lived among the poor, but he retained his room and hisevening clothes at the house of his father, who owned four acres of NewYork tenement real estate.

Ann had breakfast and dinner with them, at a long table with theatmosphere and the routine fodder of a boarding-house in a college town.The rooms of the men residents were close enough to hers, along thethird-floor corridor of the settlement house, for chatty visits indressing-gowns and pajamas. She liked their quality and their roughsmell; it was more adventurous to go to the theater with these men thanwith Eleanor. But, she sighed, they were all seven so--so liberal! Theywere judicious and full of lively conversation, but they had in themneither fire nor earth.

* * * * *

The Corlears Hook Settlement House entered the war along with PresidentWilson. Like the great Socialist thinker, Mr. Upton Sinclair, all thesettlement workers except Ann proclaimed that while they were pacifists,opposed to all other wars, this crusade was to overthrow the Prussianmilitary clique, after which there would forever be universal peace.Ann, remembering old Oscar Klebs of Waubanakee, and her professor ofGerman in Point Royal, could not believe that the Germans were of anespecially belligerent breed, but her friends screamed her down. (Thisis ancient history, now, forgotten particularly by the people who madeit and who address peace societies three times a week and go back toBerlin and explain to their German friends that they, personally, werealways against the war.)

The settlement made bandages, sent out its workers to collect for theY. M. C. A., and entertained the new soldiers passing through New York.It was the headquarters for "social workers" from other cities, who didtheir bayonet practise with peculiar purity of purpose. In June 1917,the settlement had a large dance for the guest officers, and the Italianand Jewish children of the neighborhood, accustomed tosettlement-workers with floppy poetic ties, now had the privilege ofseeing uniforms.

For the dance the large hall used for lectures and concerts had beencleared. Entwined American, British, and French flags concealed theportraits of Jesus and Karl Marx. On the stage, settlement workers wereserving coffee, lemonade, and ice cream. There was no liquor, though theguests did one by one disappear to the room of the rich young ruler, whowas also in uniform.

Ann's slight prejudice against the war had not kept her from dancing, onthis June evening, with the windows open to cheerful Ghetto sounds,street cries, tinkling barrows of peddlers, children dancing to thehurdy-gurdies. The orchestra jazzed marching-songs into one-steps, andshe circled with young, eager men glorified by adventure, rejoicing tobe out of the dust and hypocritical virtuousness of their "social work."

"Gal! Better come over and drive a truck! We'll have a swell time OverThere! I'll buy you a bottle of fizz in Gay Paree!" the best of herpartners bawled cheerily at her.

He was agate-faced, smooth as agate. He was a Ph. D. in philosophy.

She liked to dance, though she did gird at herself, "Now for Heaven'ssake, Annie, don't bounce as if you were playing basketball!" But thegayer and more wanton the warriors became, the more cramped withcreeping depression was she. They were her brothers, these young men,even if they were a little sentimental and excitable, like all males.That this solid chest against which she agreeably leaned in dancingshould in a few months be a heap of ragged muck, crawling withmaggots--oh, God, no cause was worth it, and certainly not the cause ofshooting the cousins of Adolph Klebs!

She slipped away to the stage and took the place of a flashing Jewishgirl of the neighborhood--a good Socialist except when she saw thetailored uniform of an officer--at the splintery pine planks which madeup the refreshment counter. She sat in a slatted folding chair at theend of the counter, melancholy.

A man in captain's uniform ambled across the stage, dropped sighing intoa folding chair beside her. He looked like a Welsh evangelist; thin,sallow, not tall, with unsteady hands and imploring dark eyes. He seemedto be two or three years older than Ann--she was twenty-six now.

"Tired, Captain?" she said.

"No--yes--I suppose so."

"Some ice cream?"

"Heavens, no! I've just had too many highballs up in Room 17--thatmillionaire duffer's place. Six, I guess. Highballs, I mean. And thehell of it is, I don't feel them."

"Really?"

"Yes, really. And I wish I did."

"Why?"

"So I'd forget, of course. Eh? Forget where we're going. I'm aneurotic--like most social workers, the other portion being dumm--butsame time, I wonder how many of the other heroes down there are asscared as I am. Yes, scared, that's what I said! When I'm going tosleep--if you can call it sleep, now!--I picture a big Heinie jumpingdown on me in the trench, with a bayonet, straight at my belly. Hell!Forgive me for being a cry-baby! I don't usually talk this way. Tonightit's just that some fool girl I was dancing with said, 'Captain, bayoneta couple of Fritzes for me, will you!' and I just went to pieces! Oughtto be ashamed----"

"Oh, I can understand! Why shouldn't you feel neurotic, if it's naturalto you? I'm not a lady patrioteer! Can't you transfer--you'reinfantry?--to some other branch where you won't--you know, with yournerves all on the surface; s'pose perhaps mine would be, too--not facebayonets?"

"No. I can't. Just because I am a damned neurote! I'm just the sortthat would go into the trenches, and over the top. I'll either getshot for cowardice--and bawling in battle!--or I'll get theCongressional Medal. No; got to carry on. Owe it to myself!"

"I do think that's awfully brave--even if it's perhaps foolish. By theway, my name is Ann Vickers--I'm a resident here."

"My name is Resnick--Lafayette Resnick--Lafe, to pretty girls like you.What was your college?"

"Point Royal.... I am not pretty! Nice eyes--that lets me out."

"Nice? Lovely! And swell ankles. And thank Yahveh, no magazine-coverprettiness. I should have said handsome rather----"

"What was your college, Captain?"

"B. A., University of Minnesota. M. A., Chicago. Been working toward myPh. D. in sociology. Don't suppose I'll ever get it now--not even intime for my obituary--'body found horribly mangled; his Phi Beta Kappakey had been driven by the bayonet six inches into his guts.'"

"Stop it, will you!"

"Oh, you're right. Do forgive me, Ann. Honestly, I'm not like thisoften. Guess the highballs did get to me, more than I thought. Timor invino!"

"And after your M. A.?"

"The usual. Saving the world, especially the unfit--people like myself,but without my Pop's suspender-and-nightshirt-selling money. Taught fora year in high school in Winnetka. Wrote criticism of the movies inMilwaukee--say, I met Victor Berger; you know, he's the St. Paul of theSocialist party; Debs is the St. John, and old Karl the Messiah. Gotfired for saying what I thought--bad habit of neurotics; see how italmost got me in Dutch with you, tonight. Since then, probation officerin Chicago. And now, a hero!"

"Stop it!"

"Try to! And what about you, darling?"

"Oh--the usual also. Suffrage organizing. Investigating. A littlenurse's training."

"Nursing? Then you better join us and come on over. See you in Paris."

"That's the second invitation I've had tonight."

"But I mean it, terribly. The other galoot just thought you were a sweetgirl. I think you're--oh, if you had charge of me, I might give up thedelicate delights of being neurotic and be normal. You might even marryme before we sail. Though God knows what you'd get out of it! But ithappens I've never had a gal that was man enough to boss and mother meand sweet enough to cuddle. You are! The invitation aux noces is quiteserious, by the way, Ann."

"To the----Oh, yes. Well, it's seriously received and placed on file."

"'We'll let you know in case any vacancy turns up.' Oh, I know! I'mafraid you're not very serious about it. Or maybe you have a nicehelpful highbrow husband in the background?"

"No, Captain; if you really care to know, this is the first proposal ofmarriage I've ever received. And I've always thought I had some talentfor mothering--I suppose most females think so--but I warn you, I'm notquite so stolid and dependable as I seem. I have nerves, too, under thefat."

"Not fat!"

"Tendency, anyway. If I didn't exercise. Yes, I have plenty of nervesconcealed. I once bit a policeman!"

"I adore you! Let's get out of this--this damn military-plus-Yiddishatmosphere. Little too kosher----"

"But aren't you----?"

"Of course I am, idiot! Grandfather a rabbi (or so my Dad claims; but Ithink he ran a butcher shop on the side). Can't we----You live here? Gota nice sitting-room or something where we can get away from hearing 'emtry to harmonize 'Smile, Smile, Smile' in here with 'Ole Clo'' out onthe street?"

"No, just a single room, very single, under the matronly eyes of thehead-resident."

"Is she venomous?"

"Well, I'd say she was efficient."

"Then let's go to--I know a restaurant--fact there's one across from myhotel, where a bold soldier in uniform can get a drink as if he were asgrown-up as a civilian. Staying at the Hotel Edmond, on IrvingPlace--little one, you probably don't know it; most respectable,highbrow place; they give you copies of the Nation and the NewRepublic instead of a Gideon Bible. Let's go up there and have adrink.... Do you mind a drink?"

"No, not one. But I can't get away. I ought to be down on the floorright now. I'm more or less in charge of this dance."

"Dine with me tomorrow night?"

"Yes."

"Meet me at the Edmond at seven?"

"Yes."

* * * * *

She was sure enough of his "intentions," as they were politely called.She was not at all sure of hers. She was not unwilling to "mother him."(Detestable vicarage phrase, she thought!) But she was not sure that, attwenty-six, edging toward spinsterhood, she did not want considerablymore. Certainly she was not afraid of him. She realized that heincredibly had meant his proposal of marriage--for the moment. Could sheconsider it? His skin was goose-fleshed with twitching nerve ends. Hewould be cruel from timidity and cold from the heat of Levantinepassion; he would lie to her and pinch the folds of her soul. But hewould be clever; he would know suave surfaces; he would show her a worldcolored like the geography book--not just brown common earth, butscarlet and yellow and blue and garish green. He would torment her, buthe would, surely, never be smug and heavy and jocular, like all the menshe had known, all except Adolph and Glenn Hargis.

Well. She would be wise. Not soppily romantic, like the slum girls whowere always "getting into trouble" and galloping in to her for help. Shewould walk with Lafayette Resnick as she would with Pat Bramble.

"No. Lafe. Not Lafayette. Anyway, it's better than Irving or Milton orSidney!"

* * * * *

She was at the Hotel Edmond at a quarter after seven. She had had towalk up to Twenty-sixth Street and back in order to be late enough forpride.

She had thought of wearing her new gray suit--she was smarter in a suitthan anything else--but however Lafe might talk of appreciating reasonin women, he would like them unreasonably feminine, and she had put on asemi-evening frock of soft lavender in which, she rather hoped, she wasfragile as Pat. "Anyway, I do have a good mouth and a pretty nice skin,"she grumbled, while she was dressing, five minutes after having scoldeda Jewish stenographer for putting so much of her salary into rayonstockings and so little into green vegetables.

She wondered how Lafe would look. Strange thing--she remembered nothingabout him except his eyes, like those of a wild deer caught in a trap.

The modest lobby of the Hotel Edmond, lined with panels of red burlapdivided by pilasters of mock-marble, was filled with respectablemiddle-aged ladies with literate but worried faces and some inattentionto their hair. They all looked as though they had come from New Englandretreats to New York to see editors about their contributions, to seemarried daughters about their new babies, or to see newly enlisted sonsabout their chances of a commission, and as though, in all cases, theyhad been disappointed. They sat in imitation mahogany armchairs,waiting. It was a place of waiting, and the air was a little stale.

Through this tension of mild bovine worry Captain Resnick dashed, and hewas like a brown wild deer, as she had remembered. He was quick andbrown and slender, and the welcoming light of his eyes, the two thinhands that caught hers, dissolved all her doubtfulness, made her certainthat they had known each other long and loyally.

"Come up to my apartment. We'll have a drink and skip right out."

"All right."

It was a drab enough little suite, a pocket in space, withcomfort-grudging brown velvet chairs, and chromos of female childrenwith doting animals: spaniels, cats, and pigeons unhygienically feedingat their mistresses' lips. Lafe had added a silk kakemono ofchrysanthemums and a tooled crushed levant edition of Goethe, which madethe suite possibly a little more dismal. It was Lafe himself and hisgaiety, unrestrained as his depression last evening, which reallylighted up the place.

"Let's see something of this town together, shall we?" he demanded, ashe poured a co*cktail. "I have a week's leave, then I have to report atCamp Lefferts, in Pennsylvania. Do you know New York much?"

"No. Kaffeeklatsch and Blinzes and gehackte Leber, Zionism and theBonnaz, Singer Embroiderers, Tuckers, Stitchers, and Pleaters' Union.The Corlears Hook Dramatic Association in a Yiddish version of Ghosts.Concerts at Carnegie Hall. The Metropolitan Museum and Grant's Tomb. Anda red-ink joint where you get half a bottle of red with dinner forseventy-five cents. That's all. I suppose there is more to New York!"

"There is! Quaint old-fashioned Amerikanski places where there are noYids or Hunkies, but foreigners from New England, who still eatcorned-beef hash and clam chowder and beans and brown bread. Let's gofind 'em!"

"I'm terribly tied up at the Settlement, you know. I'm assistanthead-resident."

"Really? Salaams! But I'm the United States Army. I'm saving you frominvasion by the Germans. Think! I have only a week before----And it'lltake all of that to make up for my having been such a chump with youlast evening, neuroting all over the place! You see, I had anunfortunate boyhood. My father and mother and----"

Ann sat on the lumpy day-bed in the parlor of the suite; Lafe sat at herfeet, pointing his story by waving his empty co*cktail glass.

"--and cousins and aunts and uncles, they all--and you know how hardthis is on an imaginative kid--understood me perfectly! I was nervousand jumpy. All right, they didn't mind! Jews are too intelligent tobelieve there is any virtue in pain or any heroism that doesn't pay!Then I was fanciful and poetic. All right, they encouraged me--theyenjoyed selling forty-nine-cent overalls (with Kantluze buttons) to buyme books and send me to a prep school. I wanted to be an explorer, achemist, a New York stock-broker, a composer, an anarchist, a Christianmissionary. Fine, go ahead!

"I met some prejudice in college--not much--and I was just as muchprejudiced against the Goys' dumm Anglo-Saxon lack of taste, so that wasall fair. I've never had to fight. That's why getting into this war,once the first thrill of adventure was over, has scared me so much. Whatuse will I be in the trenches? High explosive shells blowing up!"

He clung to her hand; she impulsively leaned over to stroke his hair,not soft like her own, but confusingly male; thick, harsh, sleek, andblack as a horse's mane. He seemed to her--just then--so gay, soneedle-fine, so honest about his fear, while the other recruitspretended to bland blond heroism. As he kissed the side of her hand, asshe wonderingly touched the taut muscle below the hinge of his jaw, shewas outraged by the picture of him hanging, a dried leathery stiff, onthe insane zigzag of barbed wire.

Never letting go of her hand, yet holding it lightly with his warm drypalm, he darted off into stories of his boyhood, always with a humorousdeprecation of his own eccentricity, of his oriental crimson amid theOctober brown of Bavarian Catholics and the icy blue of Minnesota Swedesand Norwegians and Vermonters. How he had learned the Greek alphabet outof a dictionary and impressed the entire boys' realm by chanting, "Alphatau omega tau zeta omicron!" How passionately he had admired theMethodist Church and its mystic, incomprehensible hymns like "Rock ofancient, cleffer me."

He sprang up to cry, "Let's have dinner here, brought up. You won'tmind? It'll be heaven for me, after these months when I've never beenalone--jammed in barracks, on trains, being so hearty and communal!"

"No, I don't mind!"

She expected him to be more pretentious than Dr. Glenn Hargis when heexhibited his bottle of Rüdesheimer at their mountain picnic. But quitecasually Lafe Resnick ordered dinner from the room-waiter, brought outBurgundy from a bureau drawer, went on talking, and made her talk. Shefound herself giving him Waubanakee and Point Royal, Mamie Bogardus andjail. She found herself puzzling aloud as to what it was all about;whether she would not have "done as much good" if she had become asecretary to a banker; but insisting that, good or not, she was notgoing to be submerged in business or marriage.

Suddenly it was a quarter to eleven, by her wrist watch, and she was ina warm bath of Burgundy, with a diminutive cognac or two. Lafe wascrouched with his head on the couch, his cheek against her knee. Halfuneasily and half regretfully, she murmured, "So late! I must fly!"

He raised his head slowly, as in a daze looked at his watch. "Is itlate? Quarter to eleven. Is that late? Must you go?"

"Yes! Really!"

"I'm so sorry--you darling! I wish you were staying. You let me talkabout myself! But you'll dine with me again tomorrow evening--you must;only a week, remember!--and I won't even mention the gallant CaptainResnick! You'll come?"

"Y-es, if I can change a date. Phone me in the morning."

"Good-night, angelic!"

He kissed her at the door, and as she stood in the corridor, she wasdizzy and astonished with the fire of that kiss, in which all herindividuality had been burnt away, so that for a second she had not beena separate person, but one flesh with him, fused in an electric flare.

Her eyes were sightless on the subway as she swayed with the cars,swayed with remembrance of him.

She was confused when, awakening at three in the morning, she could notrecall how Lafe looked nor how he had spoken. Even then she did notsuspect that she had never once seen him and never heard him; that fromthe first second to the last she had read into his boastful whining allthe wise gallantry for which she had been longing in man, and into hisglittering eyes a cleansing passion which was not his at all but onlythe projection of her own desire.

She did not know.

Chapter 15

That second evening when she arrived at the Hotel Edmond (absurd namefor lovers!) she was glad that Lafe sent down word that she was to comestraight up. She could not have endured greeting him among the peering,waiting ladies in the lobby. And she could not have endured it if he hadbeen suave and glib when she knocked at the door of his room. If he hadchattered, she would have been impertinent to him; if he had straightwayurged a drink on her, she would--she could not have avoided it--haverasped out some jeer about his "plying his girls with liquor."

But he said nothing at all. He looked pale, beseeching. With no word,trembling a little, he embraced her, kissed her, led her by the hand tothe bumpy day-bed, and sat silent beside her, his arm trustfully abouther. After her night and day of agitation, she rested in the feeling ofhis presence; and his kiss, her kiss in answer, seemed part of aneternal relation. When they sank to the couch together, he was notfumbling and technical and ludicrous like Glenn Hargis. He lay besideher quietly, his hand under her cheek, and very quietly he talked ofthings they might some day do together.... Study in London, with aflat in Bloomsbury and walks through High Wycombe.... Do aninvestigation of Mid-Western agriculture and its future; not justgraphs, but something really human, that would stand as a classic, likeBryce.

It was he who discovered that it was already nine. Without the fussinessof asking whether she wanted to go out, he ordered dinner. And when thewaiter had taken out the last tray, she curled in his arms as naturallyas though they had been intimates these many months. So natural, sosweet, so unrestless, she thought in drowsiness, as his nervous fingertraced the outline of her lips, her throat.

For ten days then--he had his leave extended by some necromancy which henever explained--they were together at odd hours every day and most ofevery night. If the settlement house staff stared a little at thetardinesses of the immaculately punctual Miss Vickers, they saidnothing, for she was abrupt with jocular male liberal humanitarians wholiked to gossip.

It was only the more exciting, after having met with a feeling ofperilous secrecy at a kosher restaurant for lunch, to meet again fordinner only six hours later, at the Hotel Edmond or at an Italian caféor in the cosmopolitan but polite Bohemianism of the Brevoort. In thosesix hours they had thought up so many things to say that only byvirtuous restraint had they kept from telephoning; significant, excitingthings, such as that she was curiously like Ethel Barrymore, that hereally must read Ethan Frome, that why couldn't he with entireself-respect transfer to the morale corps, that it was nonsense for herto plan going to a gymnasium for regular exercise--her ankles wouldalways remain slim and he didn't think so much of these skinny flappers,anyway, that Beethoven's greatness didn't prevent one appreciatingMozart, that tanks must be more terrifying than machine-gun fire, thatthe I. W. W. were more logical than the American Federation of Labor,that Mrs. Buzon Waverley, of the Cleveland Federated Charities, was aterrible politician and soft-soaper, that Lafe's green and purplepajamas were hideous and very funny, that they longed to go to the GreenMountains... that there was really no topic worth their earnestness,as they leaned over tablecloths speckled with cigarette ashes, savetheir own curious selves.

* * * * *

She met him in a worn old doorway, in a city worn and old andthunderous, on an afternoon of fog and watery street-lights; there wassomething illicit and exciting about their meeting; they slipped awaytogether and had tea in a secret place.

It was on Cedar Street, where he had mysterious business with astock-broker, in a quarter of New York where on slate-colored afternoonsthe tortuous streets retained a memory of London.

He stopped at the squeak of a beggar woman with a basket of pretzels anddropped a quarter into her hand.

"That's a fine thing for a professional charity worker to do!Encouraging parasite beggars!" she said.

"I know it! I wanted to give somebody something uselessly--like pouringout sacrificial wine before the altar--to tell the Gods how happy I amto have found you!"

* * * * *

She came in early one afternoon, when she would not be able to see himtill nine in the evening, and brought him red roses. He stared; therewas a tear in his eye. "I've never had any girl bring me flowers! I'venever heard of a woman bringing a man flowers!" he cried.

* * * * *

They wanted to arrange the parlor of his suite to make it more nearlyhomelike. They had almost belligerent conferences as to whether theday-bed ought to remain along the wall, beside the radiator. Puffing andstraining, grunting, "Swing y'r end round!" they lifted it and tried itin a corner, beside the door.

Hopeless!

The parlor was sui generis, like a Ford car, and nothing they could dowould change it. But she did buy for him on Mulberry Street a majolicacoffee set, and they had coffee from it, while he exulted, "Think! Thisis just the first of the funny homes we'll have together, all over theworld!"

* * * * *

She had read once somewhere in H. G. Wells, "The jolly littlecoarsenesses of life," and had sniffed at the phrase with the primnessof Point Royal and Waubanakee. She understood it now. She laughed atLafe's socks--those absurd lumps attached to threadbare but oncevoluptuously purple garters. She laughed at the small-boyish absurdityof an "athletic" undershirt, with its little bobbed tails. She laughedat his combination of an old-maidishness equal to her own in arranginghis comb, brushes, nail-scissors, and shoehorn in absolute parallels onthe bureau with a masculine heedlessness in scattering cigarette asheson the floor.

Lafe was much given to handsome accessories. Ann was obliginglyimpressed by his gold cigarette case, his gold-and-platinum watch chain,his ruby solitaire ring, his imported English military brushes, hisleather-and-crystal flask, his thin damascened pocket knife from Sweden.But what touched her was his very unhandsome old slippers--red morocco,peeled, the backs crushed flat on the heels. "Oh, you poor darling! I'llbe domestic and send you some new slippers for Christmas," she cried,absurdly pressing the slippers to her breast.... And stopped,writhing. Where would he be next Christmas? In no place where men woreslippers!

* * * * *

She had thought, she had even said, to Eula Towers and to Pat Bramble,that there must be something sickeningly vulgar about a man's shaving.If she ever married, all those sordidnesses would be shut away, inbathrooms! Yet now she smiled to see him smearing lather on his blackbristles, comically leaning his head on one side and pulling the skintaut with the fingers of his left hand while he scraped, all the timearguing with her about Vachel Lindsay. Good hard malebristles--luxurious cream of shaving soap--man's humorless enthusiasms!

And she learned certain bawdy words and flinched over them, while helaughed at her.

* * * * *

It was he who spoke of marriage.

"Let's bounce out and do it right now!" he cried. "Shall we be marriedby an alderman, like sensible people, or by a rabbi or by a Presbyterianpreacher or----It would be fun to make a grand show of it and be hitchedby a High Church Episcopalian padre with his nice little dress on----"

"Episcopal!"

"Eh?"

"Episcopalian is the noun--it's an Episcopal church, and so on."

"All right, my love! You can't expect a small-town Jew boy to understandall the fine points of this cat's-cradle game that you call religion!But I mean, let's get married at St. Something's, with all the agony. Iguess the Episcopalians would marry us. We haven't either of us beendivorced--not yet! And we've committed only a reasonable amount ofadultery. And think of the sensation. We'll invite everybody we know.It'd be a circus to see all those good conscientious agnostics in aswell Episcopalian church!"

"Darling! Be serious."

"I am!"

"Are you sure you want to marry me?"

"Am I!"

"How do you know?"

"I adore you!"

"How do you know?"

"Oh, Lord, that's unanswerable. I just do! But it seems to me----Do youwant to marry me, Ann?"

"I'm not sure. It would keep me from being bored."

"Then let's up and at it, with a heart for any fate!"

"No, please think seriously. You're going to France, and over thereyou'll meet grand American girls driving ambulances, and pretty Frenchones. You'll be furious, then, if you're tied to me. You'll say, 'Inever really knew her. I was crazy with war-hysteria.' Then you'll hateme."

"Never! I know what I want!"

"But you have liked girls, uh, fairly intimately, before, haven't you?"

"Oh--yes--no, not really. Anyway, I mean I never would again, not if Iwere sure of you! And besides--you know I might not come back."

"Oh!"

"But I might not, you know. Got to face it. And something might happento you. We don't seem to have taken any precautions and--oh, I think I'mradical enough about this sanctity of marriage rot, but it would be kindof hard lines on a kid if he had to explain to his friends in school--Imean it would be kind of tough on him to have to explain he didn't haveany Dad, any name. Yes. We'd better."

"Oh, that couldn't possibly happen. Things like that don't happen to asocial worker. No, really; don't laugh. They just don't, somehow.Besides, I could do something."

"Not so easy."

"Don't be silly. It must be. I guess it's funny; I talk soauthoritatively to the girls at Corlears House about sex, but I don'treally know much about the technique of not having babies. But I canfind out. Besides, as I say, there isn't a chance... middle of themonth, this way; oh, don't make me so beastly and unromantic! I justmean----No. I won't marry you now. I will like a shot when you comeback----"

"If I come back!"

"Well, all right then! If you come back, and still want to. Darling!It's time for me to hustle."

He did not again speak of marriage. She was glad. It showed howcompletely, without chatter, they understood each other.

* * * * *

Like all lovers, though it was beguiling to meet in secret, she had toshow off the beloved to her friends. She took him to Dr. MalvinaWormser's where, under the doctor's soothing touch, Lafe purred andbecame rather funny about the top sergeants who worshiped "disCIPline."But Dr. Wormser was beyond earth, like Gene Debs and Cardinal Newman andEl Greco, like stars and comets and the depth of midnight blue; she wasnot comprehensible, like trees and ice-storms and dust, like Pat andEleanor and Adolph Klebs and Pearl McKaig; and it is knowable, earthyfriends whom a lover would impress with the wisdom of her love, as it isnot to celestial heroes but to familiar rivals that the strong man wouldshow his power, the famous man his renown.

Ann telephoned to Pat Bramble and Eleanor Crevecoeur for a party. It wasto be held at the flat on Thirteenth Street where Eleanor was living inpastoral sin with her inarticulate male mistress, George Ewbank of theGlidewell Taxicab Company. The flat was the top floor of a loftbuilding, with a warehouse of a living-room, plastered with theviolently colored originals for magazine covers which Eleanor had stolenfrom the fashion journal to whose staff she had climbed from thefurniture trade-paper on which she had begun her New York career. Therewere also dusty strips of batik, couches, insufficient chairs, and thelarge, wide, stammering, restful presence of George Ewbank. Behind theliving-room (inevitably known as "studio") were a bedroom, a bath, andan elementary kitchen.

And there was Pat Bramble, fragile and shining as ever and stillchina-smooth, save for a line or two beside her eyes; EleanorCrevecoeur, so radiant that she seemed to the glance, if not to thetape-measure, less edgy; and Lafe Resnick; and Ann, almost slender in atight and hopelessly extravagant coral evening frock. It was, then, ametropolitan, sophisticated, socially conscious group, typical of NewYork and a goal for Main Street and Zenith, and it was only to beexpected that the conversation would be brilliant.

"This is my friend Captain Resnick--Miss Crevecoeur, Miss Bramble, Mr.Ewbank--our host--Captain Resnick."

"How do you do," said Eleanor.

"Well, I see you've gotten into the army. I guess I'll have to begetting in," said George.

"You will not! With all those French hussies over there? Fat chance!"said Eleanor.

"Well, I don't know. Fellow has to sort of do his duty. Don't you thinkso, Resnick? That's the way I feel about it, anyway. Do his duty. GuessI'll have to be getting into the army. Not drafted yet, but I guess I'llhave to get in," said George Ewbank.

"Yes, I guess we all have to do our bit," said Lafe.

"Yes, you can't duck it. I'm an ardent pacifist, but I'm convinced it'sup to all of us--way things are, I mean, with what Germany stands forand all--to do our bit, now, I mean," said Pat Bramble.

"You're all idiots. But I suppose I do understand what you mean. But I'magin it," said Ann.

"Now, Ann dear, this is no time, things being what they are, to be flipabout the war. It's a big beastly job that we've got to do," saidEleanor.

"Yes, that's the way I look at it. Got to do our bit. I mean--I'm adues-paying, card-carrying party Socialist, but I guess with thesituation what it is, we all got to carry on and finish up the job,"said Lafe.

Ann was delighted that Lafe fitted in so well with these old friends,that presently he sat beside Pat, held her hand and flirted gayly--butnot meaning it, of course!--and that they seemed to like him. She beganto make him do his tricks. "Tell us the story about the obstetrician andthe professor of agriculture," she begged, and "Listen! Captain Resnickinsists Russia will go Communist this year. Tell 'em about it, Lafe."

When she went out with Eleanor to serve dinner (the best cold turkey andsalad and pickles from the delicatessen on Sixth Avenue), Eleanorgurgled, "My dear, he's lovely. But he's a nervous devil, isn't he! Buthe's awfully keen. And sweet. Are you very chummy with him?"

"Fairly so. Yes."

"Thinking of----Where the dickens is that cranberry sauce? Damn thatcat, it's been at the turkey! Are you and he thinking of marriage?"

"Oh, no. Not really. I'm like you. I think this marriage bond is just asuperstition. I wouldn't want to bind him even if he wanted it." Andprivately, "Let him try and get away!"

At one o'clock, Lafe was calling them all by their first names, he hadkissed Pat and Eleanor--Eleanor gasped and wilted and grew blank ofeye--and he had sat at the piano for an hour, playing Gilbert andSullivan.

As he put Ann on the subway, Lafe yawned, "They're a nice bunch,darlink. Even George, even if he is a little dumm. It'll be great tohave 'em come stay with us some day. When we have a cottage on Cape Cod.Gee, think of it--early morning and fog over the beach and the ocean andyou and me--rush out for a dip before breakfast!"

"Yes!"

They came to the end of their ten days, and next morning he would taketrain for Camp Lefferts, in the Pennsylvania hills. They had all night,at the Edmond. She had told the head-resident at the settlement that shewas going out to Connecticut for the night.

She awoke at dawn. Lafe's arm was about her, his cheek against hershoulder, and he breathed placidly. She slipped softly from bed andsmiled down on him--the unbuttoned jacket of his screaming saffronpajamas, the olive tinting of his chest, his arm that, once she hadcrept from its encircling, lay with the pajama-sleeve drawn above thesoft dark inside of his elbow. His relaxed hand, palm up, was curved,and never free from a slight twitching. But, she thought proudly, heseemed so much less drawn and anxious than when she had met him. Howstrange his slimness, the young oriental prince in that absurd bed ofrumpled cotton sheets! Probably the bedstead was of imitation brass, ifthere was such a thing as imitation brass!

She crept to the window, looked out on the street, which was crowdedwith still emptiness. Summer, summer dawn, and her lover there, dreamingof her embrace. The pavement below her smelled fresh from earlysprinkling. A milk-wagon horse clopped amiably down the street.

Gramercy Park, to her right, had not, in 1917, yet been overwhelmed withapartment houses; Madison Square Garden, to the left, not become acemented haunt of civic righteousness; there was neither American Legionflagpole nor communistic rallies, only ragged, contented trees underwhich, on worn benches, slept the tramps. Trees! A lover, she thought,should have trees about her to symbolize her love, its sturdiness andendurance at the trunk, its delicate pattern of fantastic twigs forfulfilment. Across the street from her was a lone elm, sunk in cement.It was drooping and many boughs were withered, yet its green wasgallant, and since it was alone, with no vulgar forest to mock it, itwas to Ann a Forest of Arden, bright glades, dim copses, song andfeasting. The sun was coming up, joyous on a drab gray house across thestreet. Summer and sunlight and a tree and her lover sleeping! Shesmiled round at him, smiled out on the street, and halted, the smiledried and her eyes fading. She had heard the distant marching of men,clump, clump, clump, clump, clump, clump, and suddenly it was notsummertime or lovers' time but only war.

That he should have to face the black horror--he, the quick andoverstrung! She remembered, with sad anger at herself, that she had beenirritated sometimes by his neurotic jumpiness. He was afraid of dogs,the best-natured fawners, sure that they would bite him. He was doubtfulabout cats--said they had malicious eyes--and afraid of crossing throughstreet traffic, of the murky thundering subway, of taxicabs on a skiddywet day. Absurd! Why couldn't he try to be a little stolid, like anAdolph. But that such an over-tempered blade should be ground betweenboulders...

(And she loved him so! She hadn't known she could love with suchflooding surrender.)

It was the abomination of desolation. Again she saw him--there: Theyhad trotted out in an attack. Bitter gas, searing the tissue of theirlungs, swept over them--over Lafe--blinding him to the horrors of moldycorpses, riven stumps, smashed motor trucks. The gas was a threshingscorpion in his lungs. (She felt it, whimpered with it.) He stumbled,slid down a shell-crater, fell over a rotting body. It was too steep; hecould not crawl out; could not escape this body of death. He wailed,unheard. Then, overhead, an aëroplane with the German crosses on itswings crept snail-like through the upper air, dropping bombs in a trailthat came nearer, nearer----

"Oh, I can't! I won't let him!" she screamed.

She turned aghast toward the bed. She had awakened him.

"What's the matter? What was that noise?" he said nervously.

"Oh, oh, nothing. Just somebody--newsboy, I guess--down on the street!"(How swiftly Love taught to lie!)

"Eeeeeuh! Golly I'm sleepy! Come on, sweet, crawl back in. Oh, God! Iforgot. It's today I go to camp. To the gallows! My last night in thedeath house! Any day, then, they may ship us to France!"

She was as angry as she could make herself--but not for herself, only tobrace him. "It's scarcely complimentary to call a night with me a nightin the death house!"

"Oh, I didn't mean----You know----"

"And besides! You've got to stop writhing, making yourself scared andmiserable! Simply lack of decent inhibitions. You look here, my boy! Ifyou don't stop your exhibitionism, I'll come to camp and I'll march youout on the parade ground by the ear, before your colonel and all, andtell them I've come to take you back, and I'll set you at gardening inthe suburbs, and you'll hate that worse than being a hero!"

She succeeded in getting a thin smile from him, and promptly she herselfbroke. She clung to him, sobbing, and now first it was that he forgothimself in comforting her. Her head on his breast, he soothed her."We'll sleep a little while yet, beloved. Don't have to get up and packtill seven. Must be early. Sleep, and forget what a yammering brat Iam."

And she might have slept, but looking through the curtained double-doorinto the parlor of the suite, she saw the majolica coffee set she hadbought for him in Italian-town. "We'll use it this morning, and then notagain, maybe never again," she agonized to herself, and kissed himdesperately, so that he altogether awakened and was too conscious of hernearness to sleep again.

* * * * *

She crossed the ferry with him and saw him off at the Baltimore & Ohiostation--not a swift express, not a vociferous troop-train, but a vulgarlocal, with half a dozen detached soldiers taking it.

She met a girl she knew, Tessie Katz, young, vibrant, hook-nosed,handsome, a fur worker who sat about the Corlears Hook Settlement andoften brought her troubles (mostly amorous) to Ann. Tessie was alsoseeing off her hero, a round-faced young man like a bartender, withcorkscrew curls and a foolish mustache. Tessie hung on his shoulders andwailed, till she noticed Ann. She had always seemed to regard Ann as oneof the vestal virgins, and her dramatic sorrows did not keep her fromwatching Ann and Lafe with thrilling wonder.

It was embarrassing. But Ann forgot it, for Lafe was clinging asdesperately as a child. "You'll write me every day, Ann? Twice a day!You'll give me your blessings? Listen! I won't whine. Honestly, I don't,among the men. They think I'm a blinkin' little man of granite. It'sjust your darling sympathy that makes me let loose. Off, now! At it! Andback with a Cross of the Legion of Honor--back to you!"

"All aboooooard!"

"God keep you, dear!" Ann fled, not looking around, not daring to betrayher smeary eyes.

But as she rested, leaning against a pillar, Tessie Katz caught up withher.

"Hel-lo, Miss Vickers! I didn't know you had a fellow, too! Gee, he'sa swell-looking guy! The real kolinsky! And a captain! My!"

"Why, how do you do, Miss Katz! Were you seeing someone off, too?"

"Yeh, my boy friend. He's just a privut, but lissen, that bozo is fullof pep. He'll be a sergeant or captain-general or something before thisman's war is over. Say, he isn't the fellow I was telling you about lastmonth. That poor fish! He was just a big bum. But Morris, he's apeach. He's going to marry me, just soon's he gets back."

Ann Vickers did not feel that her own love, her own grief, wasburlesqued by Miss Tessie Katz's tragedy. Tessie was her friend, hersister. The two young women clung arm in arm, and murmuring togetherclimbed painfully to the top deck of the ferry-boat.

Only for a minute was Ann the superior uplifter again. "Tessie, Ithink--you know how they all gossip around a settlement house--I thinkI'd just as soon you didn't say anything about my seeing Captain--seeingthe Captain off."

"Sure, you bet your life, Miss Vickers. None of their business. Whatthey don't know won't hurt 'em none. And----Oh, my God, how I am goingto miss that bum, Morris, and maybe him getting shot to pieces!"

They held hands and wept, shamelessly, under the summer sun.

Chapter 16

Ann fancied that her ten days of truancy had made the Corlears HookHouse staff, especially the plump and polite head-resident, suspicious,and she flew at her work. It was not her conscience alone that quickenedher. She felt keener, gayer, more whole and fulfilled than ever in herlife, and more capable of driving herself, of driving others. Herpatchwork of little neighborhood tasks seemed to take on some purposeand point, though exactly what the point was she did not know.

She persuaded a Broadway manager to help the Corlears DramaticAssociation produce a neighborhood revue, and it had a success not yetknown in any activity of the settlement. They repeated it four times,and orthodox parents who had been doubtful about permitting their youngto go to Corlears House now regarded it as next in importance toSchule.

The credit went to the Broadway manager, who had spent one hour on thescheme, to Ann Vickers, who had spent perhaps ten hours, to thehead-resident, who had spent none at all, and not to the native authors,nor to the cast, who had worked from 8 P. M. till three in the morningevery night for a month. This taught Ann the art of being an executive;of not wasting her time on little speeches, and giving little advices tothe unfortunate, and addressing envelopes--envelopes!--but of getting animprobable idea and smiling on the underlings who sweat blood to carryit out.

She got great glory with the head-resident and began now to be regarded,therefore to regard herself, as a driver, a leader, a person whoseopinion on anything--taxation, alcohol, immortality, the best hotel atAtlantic City, or the morality of short skirts--was valuable, and towhom any large and vague job could be entrusted.

But she was not quite lost in the slough of politics and success andimpressiveness. She laughed a little that her new vitality should be dueto such relations with Captain Resnick as could scarcely be confessed inthe liberal but strictly chaste confines of a settlement house.

* * * * *

And she was living all the while not in her success but in letters fromLafe.

For three weeks he wrote every day; he wrote of his colonel's comicbreeches, which stuck out behind like a bustle, and of his adoration forAnn; he wrote that he was reading Napoleon's campaigns, and that when hewent to sleep he could see nothing behind his closed lids save the curvefrom her shoulder to her breast; that he had hiked with his men twentymiles, and that he had imagined, every step, that he was tramping withher through the Salzkammergut.

Her own letters to him were a little longer. But then, of course, he wasbusy, as menfolk must always be.

When he had packed, on their last morning at the Hotel Edmond, he hadsaid, "Look! I'll have the porter send you down this Japanese kakemonoand this complete Goethe and the coffee set you gave me. Can't use 'emmuch in a dugout! You keep 'em for me. Will they remind you of me alittle when I'm so far away, my darling?"

They had actually come, and when Ann opened the box she found hiddenamong them Lafe's disreputable old red slippers, the very lines of hisfeet in the welter of wrinkles. She sobbed over them. They were dearerinfinitely than the bleak handsomeness of the morocco-bound Goethe. Shehid them among her lingerie, and daily she took them out.

One afternoon she invited Tessie Katz to have coffee with her out of themajolica cups, and the two girls, the volatile city Jewess and thesmall-town Mid-Western Nordic, forgot all differences as they contestedfor chances to talk about Morris and Captain Resnick.

After three weeks, Lafe wrote only every other day--then twice aweek--then once a week.

He had insisted, in New York, that she must spend a week-end inPennsylvania as soon as he could find a comfortable inn near CampLefferts. He seemed never to find the comfortable inn.

For ten days she had no letter, and when one came it was all aboutdiscovering an amiable Jewish family in Scranton, not far from the camp.He had had a day and night's leave and spent it with the new friends.The Birnbaums. The father, lawyer and bank-director; clever, scholarly,sometimes funny, imitating Pennsylvania Dutch. The cooing mother, whofed him goose. The daughters, Leah Birnbaum, twenty-two, and littleDoris, nineteen.

Such darlings, clever, etc., swell--Leah is simply a wiz atchemistry, and golly that does get so much farther down into thesources of human life than all our darn old sociology, etc.,doesn't it--you would just love them!

"I would not!" remarked Ann and, after she had read the letter overagain, "Oh, she does, does she! Leah! With her damn smelly test tubes!"Five minutes afterward, when she was ironing out handkerchiefs, shestopped aghast. "A day and a night! He could have come up to New York.I'm going down and see----No, my beloved, I can't come to you till yousay you want me!"

* * * * *

He had been gone for ten weeks, and for another ten days she had had noletter. She made bountiful excuses; of course he was insanely busy;training, marches, musketry. But----She had had only two letters ineighteen days. No excuse deleted the fact.

Ten weeks? Ten years!

Only by violently calling on her conscience and will did she keep up hernew energy. "What's the matter? You look a little frazzled," said onefellow worker and another.

In mid-afternoon, she was racing through the main-floor corridor of thesettlement house, between a committee on the prevention of cruelty toabandoned cats and the circle for making bandages for the Red Cross,when Tessie Katz stopped her. She had not seen Tessie in three weeks.She was alarmed. Tessie's lips and fingers were twitching like palsy.

"Why, Tessie! Not at work today? You're lucky. What is it, my dear? Youlook worried."

"Oh, my Gawd, Miss Vickers, I am worried! Worried ain't no word for it.Look, Miss Vickers, I got to talk to you, I just got to!"

"Couldn't you wait till this evening?"

"I can't wait! Honest, I'll go bugs if I don't find out! Can't I see youa minute? Now!"

"Come in my office. Or shall we go up to my room?"

"Oh, I'm scared to death somebody will butt in. Can't we go somewherewhere nobody will horn in? Please, Miss Vickers, please!"

"Well--let's try Clubroom D. Nobody there, this hour."

Clubroom D had piles of folding chairs and collapsed card-tables, acouple of highly fretted emerald-green easy-chairs presented by anenthusiastic Grand Street dealer, a cupboard of dishes, and a gas-stovein a curtained alcove. The room was barren as a country railway station,yet warm with the memory of a thousand Kaffeeklatsches, a thousandinterchanged confidences of Jewish and Italian matrons about theirAmerican grandchildren.

Tessie did not wait for the revered Miss Vickers to sit down; sheslopped into an armchair, pressed her fingertips into her eyes, andsobbed.

"Stop it! Unless you want people to come in. Now, what is it? Don't beafraid of me, Tessie. Nothing'll shock me. Especially not in wartime. Iknow how it is," said Ann briskly.

"Gee, oh, gee, Miss Vickers, I guess maybe you guess----Oh, Gawd, and Iwas so careful! I'm going to have a kid. That dirty Morris! I'll clawhis eyes out. He ain't written to me, not one word, for a month."

"Are you sure?"

"It's over two months now. And my boss will fire me--he's awful'strict--he's a swell boss--he never tries to make none of us girls. Butit's my Dad I'm scared of. Oh, Gawd, Miss Vickers, honest, he'll killme!"

"Want to marry Morris?"

"That Mamzer! Oh, I wouldn't mind. But I guess he's got a new girl andhe'll tell me--oh, gee, you don't know how violent that guy gets--he'lltell me to go jump in the lake! If I only had a fellow like yours! Butit's my Pop. We're orthodox, and Morris, he ain't hardly better than aGoy. Honest, if I was to marry him, Pop would come after us both with ashotgun. And if I was to have a kid without marrying, he'd come after mewith a coupla guns!"

She was trying to be humorous. Her voice cackled with the effort. Sheeven smiled sweatily. But Ann could not smile back. Tessie's brittle,anæmic youth was gone already, in ten weeks. Her hair was stringy anddribbled out in greasy locks under the brim of her cheap, smart pinkhat, and in her cheap, smart near-silk stockings were long runs throughwhich peeped black hairs. She looked forty, and ill, and abandoned.

Ann flitted across to sit on the arm of Tessie's chair, to smooth hershoulders, and there was more tenderness than usual in the cool,professional voice by which a social worker protects herself from theagony of too much sympathy:

"It's hell, Tess. I understand. What can I do?"

"I got to get rid of it, somehow. I've tried exercising and running upand down stairs till... I fainted, this afternoon, just after I runup five flights to our fur loft. I guess I got to have a doctor dosomething. A girl told me about one, but he's a stinker. You got to findthe name of a good one for me!"

Instantly, in ten seconds, Ann skimmed through the whole subject ofabortion and came out convinced.... Life demanded that normal womenbear children, without the slightest consideration of the laws passed bypreachers, or by small-town lawyers in legislatures. But these lawsstill remained. And society punished by a lifetime imprisonment in thecells of contempt any girl who was false to them and still true to thelife within her that was the only law she knew. Then it was as righteousfor a girl thus threatened to flee from her neighbors' spitefulness asit was for a revolutionist to flee from the state's secret police.

"Yes," said Ann. "I'll find someone. Got any money?"

"Not a red. And I dassn't borrow."

"I have a little. I don't need it. Come see me tonight--no, tomorrowevening."

"Oh, Gawd, you been nice! I wish I was like you, Miss Vickers. See youtomorrow evening. Be good!"

Already hysterically gay as she had been hysterically frightened, Tessieskipped out by the basem*nt entrance of the settlement house, stoppingto repair her streaked make-up.

Ann Vickers tramped slowly up to the clattering slate floor of the maincorridor. Her knees felt watery, and her back was raked by claws ofpain. Each dragging step sounded flat and dull on the carpetless stairsas the drum of a funeral cortège. She did not go to the Red CrossCircle. She trudged ever more wearily, often stopping with one hand onthe balustrade, one on her back, to the second floor, to the third, anddown the unending hallway to her room.

She opened the door, closed and locked it. She stood bowed as incontrite prayer, her arms drooping lifelessly beside her.

"'Wish I was like you, Miss Vickers!'" she groaned, in bitter caricatureof Tessie Katz; then, "I've got to face it. Ten weeks. There's no doubt.But--me--Ann Vickers! And I can't even write to Lafe that I'm going tohave a baby, unless he shows some sign that he wants me. I don't knowwhat to do!

"And my 'social work'--oh, that's all ended, of course."

Chapter 17

Just as it is felony to help a condemned murderer cheat the state of itsbeloved blood-letting by passing poison to him, so that he may diedecently and alone, with no sad*stic parade of priests and guards andreporters, so is it a crime to assist a woman condemned to the titteringgossip that can be worse than death by helping her avoid having what isquaintly known as an "illegitimate baby"--as though one should speak ofan "illegitimate mountain" or an "illegitimate hurricane." A physicianwho keeps a rich woman abed and nervous is a great and good man; aphysician who saves a girl from disgrace is an intruder who, havingstolen from society the pleasure of viciousness, is rightly sent toprison. It is, then, difficult for respectable people to find anabortionist; it is only the notoriously sinful who are rewarded fortheir earnest cultivation of vice by being able to find ways out of itspenalties.

Had Ann been a pickpocket or a professional gambler, she would have hadno difficulty in unearthing an abortionist on whom she could depend tocare for Tessie Katz. Being an industrious servant of humanity (atsomething like a quarter the salary of a good insurance saleswoman and atenth that of a pleasantly bawdy actress), it was as hard for her to getinformation about abortionists as about unclaimed diamond mines. Shewhispered to fellow settlement workers, she hinted to Dr. MalvinaWormser, and it was not till she remembered that Eleanor Crevecoeur washappily living in sin that she found the address of the savior. (Eleanorhad six addresses of what were called "specialists," guaranteed to becareful, cheap, and discreet, all neatly noted down, with telephonenumbers, in her little black book.)

It was a youngish Italian doctor on East Broadway who was mostrecommended. Ann called on him and found him brisk, chuckling,cinematographically professional with his quirked mustache and tinybeard.

"I, uh--I want to speak to you very privately," hesitated Ann, feelingrustic, not at all like the crisp social worker. In the curtainedfastnesses of the consulting-room (where no one overheard them save thedoctor's nurse, his secretary, and a fellow savior, comfortably awaitinghim behind the curtains) Ann ventured, "Doctor, I'm a resident at asettlement house. There's a poor girl there, just a working girl, on lowwages, who--well, she got into trouble. The man won't marry her, and herparents would turn her out. It would be a great mercy to help her. Ofcourse she has no money, but I'd--I don't get a high salary, but I'd seeyou were paid, and right away, if you'd make it reasonable."

The doctor yelped with laughter. (He was a kindly person, who wassupporting three relatives in America and five in Italy. He played theclarinet and was a champion swimmer.) He stood over Ann's chair,caressed her shoulder, and insinuated, "Now, now, little girl! You don'thave to be shy with the doctor. That's our business! Wartime--I know howit is. Maybe I'll go over to the Piave myself--and Lord knows how manyangry girls I'll leave behind! Sure--wartime--perfectly normal,darling--and you look like a grand sweetheart! When did you have yourlast period?"

"When----I tell you, it's not myself! How could you! Ridiculous! Itell you, it's a Jewish girl who's one of my charges."

"And you're going to pay for her, on a reformer's salary? Hmmmm. Well,you'll have to--even docs have to live, you know--I'll have to ask youto pay for her in advance.'

"Very well. How much?"

"Why--why----Well, fifty dollars is the very least I can do it for, andthat's pure charity."

"Very well. When shall I bring her? (I'll have the money with me.) Andhow much would it cost you to keep her here or some safe place for threeor four days afterward, so there won't be so much danger?"

"Ten dollars a day. Got a fine room upstairs. That includes a nurse,part-time, and I'll keep a close eye on her, just like she was my ownsister. Sure, I'll do her a fine job. You'll be satisfied--why, sure, Ibetcha you'll be sending me all the girls from the settlement. You're afine educated young lady--I could tell, the minute you come in--I wasjust joking about thinking it was you and not the Yid."

* * * * *

Ann staggered as she walked to the subway. Curious how faint she feltsometimes, these days.

When she had gone to the doctor, she had had a notion of engaging hisservices not for Tessie alone but for herself. Impossible! Impossible!

It was no physical fear. She was certain that the little scoundrel of adoctor would be skillful, but even if it had been dangerous, she wouldhave had no physical fear. She did not worry about dying now. It wouldbe so lucid a solution of her disgrace if she died. But it would beintolerable to her dignity as a social worker, as a physician to frettedsouls and aching purses, to submit herself to that jocular little quack.

She had been assuming these past days that of course she would imitateTessie. Perhaps that way out was closed.

Suicide?

But she could only say the word to herself. "Suicide." It was only aword, fantastic, meaningless, like "abracadabra; it was not an act thatshe could imagine the busy Ann Vickers humorlessly performing. To fussabout solemnly stuffing silly wads of paper into door-cracks and turningon the gas! To put on her best nightgown and carefully shoot herself inthe forehead! Nonsense.

"Either I haven't got enough imagination or too much I dunno!"

Have her baby, then! Be disgraced! All right! Change her name and takethe baby and get an honest job washing dishes!

"Yes, it sounds so easy," she jeered at herself. "But how would you likewashing dishes, for keeps! And you might not even be good at it!"

Oh, dear Lord! What escape for a woman who had been such a fool as toforget her dignity and egotism and grant her whole self to another humanbeing; who had been so naïve as to believe the sages meant it when theypreached that love was a greater way of life than hard insensibility orgiggling coyness; who took seriously the myth that Tristan and Isoldeand Romeo and Juliet, and the Song of Solomon, as duly read in allProtestant pulpits, were loftier than the saws of Polonius? What way outfor a woman who had apparently been created by the Lord God Almighty inaccordance with His regular biological principles, and not by aY. W. C. A. secretary?

* * * * *

Tessie's operation was (unlike some of them, Ann had to admit) safe andcompetent. In a week she was back at work, a little silent, her rougestanding out more than formerly on her drained cheeks, but rescued fromher sentence of social death.

They became friends, Ann and the fur worker. Tessie had learned manyunholy and fascinating things from the Italian doctor and his livelynurse. Ann discovered from her (not looking at Tessie, as she listened,but bending over the majolica coffee set) that abortion was impossiblydangerous after the fifth month.

And she was three months into peril now.

She had not had a letter from Lafe Resnick for a fortnight, and thenonly a meretriciously jolly anecdote about a drunken colonel, and a hintof further intimacies with the Birnbaums... what a shrewd oldadvocate the father was, what lovely girls Leah and Doris.

There was no hint as to when he might be ordered to Prance, as to whenhe might be coming through New York.

"I must see him! I'll go to the camp! Perhaps he's wondering why I don'tcome--thinks I don't want to," she fumed, for the hundredth time and,for the hundredth time, "Oh, he's not such a shy bud. He's not soinarticulate. He'd let me know."

But with all her agonizing, Ann admitted that she had never felt so fullof well-being. She could work fourteen hours a day. Contempt now forgood repute among the settlement workers made her more daring andvigorous. She found a merchant who had gone through the stages of beingpoor and Jewish, and well-to-do and anti-Jewish, into the supreme stageof being wealthy and patronizingly pro-Jewish, and persuaded him to setup a camp for the Jewish Boy Scouts on his Long Island estate. (To thisday, did they but know her name, Ann would be cursed by neighboring LongIslanders, Jewish and Gentile, who woke up betimes to discover thedescendants of Gideon palming up water from the fountain on the lawn,and singing, without inhibitions, "Dere's a Long, Long TrellA-windink.")

She taught the girls at the settlement house to clean their classroomsproperly. She ruthlessly discarded the pure elderly gentlewoman who hadbeen teaching Sex Hygiene and replaced her with a flippant young womanwho knew something. (All the settlement workers, especially the head,were volubly shocked by this harshness, and greatly relieved to lose theelderly gentlewoman.)

There were murmurs that the head-resident was going to retire, to besucceeded by Ann.

She heard it grimly. Before then, she would be an outcast.

She escaped from the prying friendliness of her fellow workers and dinedalone whenever she could.

On an evening some fifteen weeks after she had seen Lafe off on thetrain, Ann dipped into the basem*nt of the Brevoort, for dinner byherself. The basem*nt, with its French aspect of mirrors along the wall,was humming with literary talk, but Ann did not know authors andeditors. She felt secure as she took a small wall-table in the middleroom. With pleasantly vulgar anticipation she ordered the larded loin ofbeef, the snails, the Haut Sauterne. She raised her head, tapping theedge of her menu on the table, thinking of how to wangle free textbooksand a cheap teacher for the class in Elementary Russian, consisting oftwo cloth-hat-and-cap workers and a venerable Christian atheist. Thenher clouded vision cleared sharply. She went cold. Out from the welterof unknown faces leaped that of Captain Resnick.

But he had on his shoulders not the twin bars of a captain but the goldleaves of a major. And he was dining, tête-à-tête and far too absorbedto have seen Ann enter, with a girl who was all white silk, young flesh,and hair of black glass.

It was so disastrous that Ann felt nothing at all.

She pronged out her snails like a solemn little girl playing with shellsin a garden. She did not eat half of them. She solemnly cut her beef,but she did not taste it.

Then Lafe looked up. She did not remember afterward whether she noddedto him, smiled at him, cut him, or, in her embarrassment, all three. Hehesitated. He spoke urgently and intimately to the girl opposite him,and plodded toward Ann, a stuffed smile on his face. He leaned over her,kissing her hand in a wonderful imitation of a Spaniard, and bubbled,"Darling! How marvelous! I just got into town half an hour ago. Wasgoing to call you up right away. I had to escort the daughter of afriend of mine--that's her over there--Leah Birnbaum--nice girl fromScranton, but just a kid, of course--promised her father I'd bring herup to town. But I'll drop her at her hotel, and I'll be free aftereight--nine at the latest. You must come have coffee with us when youfinish your dinner. She'll be awfully thrilled to meet you--of course,she's only a kid, just a Backfisch, though quite bright for a flapper,and of course I've told her all about you, what a swell uplifter you areand--uh--oh, she'll be awfully thrilled to meet you and----Look! Willyou be free after nine--or say nine-thirty, just to play safe? Got tocall up some people. Can't you come up to the Edmond then?"

She let him struggle on, without one generous interruption. She answeredgravely, "No. That's impossible. But I really must see you. Come down tothe settlement house--as late as ten, if you want to. That will give youtime to say good-bye to your Leah. Oh, I'm sorry. But will you come, atten?"

"Well--all right."

She did not join them for coffee. She went out mutely. She was certain,back at the settlement house, that he would be late; but ten minutesbefore his time he was announced.

"Of course! How rotten my psychology was. He would be early. That giveshim something on me," she reflected, as she marched from her office tothe main corridor, where he was waiting.

Strange how the face that from the midst of any crowd had shone dear andpeculiar, seemed now, among the students gossiping in the corridor,commonplace and indifferent.

"Let's go downstairs. We can talk undisturbed," she said. She led him toClubroom D, where Tessie had confessed--where she had confessed toherself.

She sat primly in an armchair. (Afterward, reliving it, she was to hateherself for that superior primness. Why couldn't she have been splendidand violent?)

He closed the door and stood as though supporting himself with thefingers of his right hand outspread against the wall. He was almostweeping. "Ann! Ann! What is it? What have I done? I was going tosurprise you!"

"You did! (Forgive me!) Please be honest! I can stand it. Are youengaged to that Birnbaum girl?"

"Engaged? Good heavens, no!"

"Then are you and I to be joyously married?"

"I must say, my good woman, that you don't sound as though you were sodevilishly keen about it!"

"Are you?"

"Why--yes, I am."

"When? I assume you're on your way to France now."

"Maybe you assume a lot of things that aren't so! Oh, sorry. I justmean----There's not as much hurry as you think; time enough for us to besure what we really want to do. You see, I've been transferred to thepersonnel corps--given a majority; perhaps you noticed!--and I may nothave to go to France at all. Anyway, for some months I'll stay atLefferts."

"Oh! Then of course there could be nothing that would hurry us." She hadtried not to sound bitter; she had not succeeded. "I congratulate you.Though you didn't trouble to let me know, to write at all."

"I've been awfully----"

"But I do want this straight. I'm not prying--well, not unusually. Ijust must know where I stand. You are pretty fond of Leah, aren't you?(I watched you two.)"

"Oh, yes, in an uncle sort of way----"

"Huh!"

"--but what of it? Single men in barracks, you know."

"Just this of it. I--that is, you and I--are going to have a baby."

"Oh, my God!"

"In something less than six months now. Well?"

"Oh, I'll marry you! Hell, I'll marry you! I'll keep my word!"

"That's all I wanted to know. We'll never be married. Be kinder to Leah!Good-night!"

She fled out of a side door of the clubroom before he could stop her,fled to her room, prepared to weep, and didn't. She was suddenlylaughing, sitting on the edge of the bed, smoking an illicit cigarette,feeling free and resolute. Weep? Why, it was comic! It was all toocomplete: the picture of the innocent country girl seduced by the cityslicker who became engaged to the heiress and was reluctant to marry hisvictim.

Weep the fair frail, distraught and ragged! Bring out irate father withthe chin whisker and the shotgun! On the city directory, lettered"Bible" by the stage carpenter, let swear an oath of "vengeance, by theEtarnal!" Come the brave country lover, back from heroism as corporal inthe army; let him return in nick of time with bags of gold, wed her inhappy haste and save her from Shame, what time the false LafayetteRessington met death beneath the vengeful wheels of the Yorktown Flyer!

"That's how I've been feeling! And it wasn't actually any more his faultthan mine, and what's funnier, I don't really want to marry him. No!"She plodded to the bureau, drew out his worn red slippers from beneaththe ribbon-flaunting lingerie... which she had bought for him. Shetried to laugh at herself and at the slippers. That was a failure. Shehid them in the closet, and it was a moment before she could go on:

"I don't really feel sinful and disgraced. I'm not really going to quitmy social work. It was just the tradition in all the novels and sermons.I'm going to have a baby--entirely normal--nothing more to do with mymorals and my work than having typhoid, and lots more interesting. Lafe!You gave me love. I've known love! I'm grateful to you. And tonight youfreed me from you. Perhaps I'll begin to be a human being, and not anearnest young woman who's taught Sunday school and read Veblen. And I'mgoing to have a girl baby. It will be such an exciting time for her,this next generation. But--oh, my God, I am so frightened!"

Chapter 18

Not till midnight, when the party was over, was Ann able to talk withDr. Malvina Wormser by herself. The gray little doctor bent over thefire, her legs wide apart, elbow on knee, long cigarette holder in herplump hand. Against her venerable frock of coffee-colored silk she worean old brooch of seed pearls.

"What have you been up to, Ann? You looked seedy a month ago. Tonightyou're quite rosy. What's been the sorrow? All any doctor can do is tofind out what the patient thinks she has and then encourage her in it."

"Well, I do feel better. I've stopped worrying about the baby I'm goingto have."

"The----Santa Maria! Honestly?"

"Yes."

"Here's a shoulder. Go on and weep. But honestly, Ann, my poorchild----"

"No. All the agonizing is over. What do you advise? Shall I have it? Oran abortion?"

"Good Lord!" Dr. Wormser walked smartly up and down, stamping her tinyhigh-heeled shoes, hands clasped behind her, revolving the cigaretteholder in her mouth. "There's no use being melodramatic. But, my goodgirl, don't imagine this isn't a serious business. Weren't you trying topump me about an abortionist a few weeks ago?"

"Yes. But not for me. I found one. But I don't think I could stand him,for myself.... We're all so democratic, we 'socially minded people,'till it comes to the marriages of our sisters and daughters, or to anoperation. Then, phut! I wouldn't do anything for Tessie that I'd dofor myself! No use lying about it!... Think you can help me? Pleaseunderstand, I don't insist. I don't want you to take risks."

"Yes. It is a risk. I might get ten years in Auburn. Plus everlastingdisgrace to me--and what's worse, to all women medics. Funny! Women arethe first, the natural docs. It's they that bind up the baby's fingerand plan his diet; it's they that have patience and endurance. It's theythat take pain seriously, as something that must be gotten rid of--mostmen doctors (except Jewish ones, who have brains!) say that 'pain isperfectly normal, so why worry about it'--that is, when the pain is insomebody else's belly--a man doctor is just as scared as any of hispatients when it's in his own belly--worst patient in the world, a mandoc! Yet in the one profession (besides government and the third one)that's naturally theirs, women are just tolerated. But I do owesomething to that profession and its principles."

Ann did not listen. Her ears rang. She felt dizzy and lost. So she wasagain to be sacrificed, in the good old religious way, for "principles."She roused sharply to hear Dr. Wormser grumble:

"But I owe something to you, too. And I think you're too useful to letthis pack of mad dogs that we call 'society' chase you like a frightenedkitty. Now, listen, my child."

Dr. Wormser whirled her chair about, plumped into it, and, shaking herfinger, spoke with unnatural sternness:

"As an unofficial officer of the State, Ann, I must make it clear thatabortion is a crime. Speaking as a physician, I advise you againsthaving an abortion. It is abnormal and dangerous. You may never be ableto bear a second child. And every woman ought to bear a child, if onlyfor the sake of functioning properly. But, speaking as a woman, Istrongly advise you to have the abortion and keep your mouth shut aboutit afterward. As long as men--and what's worse, the female-women thatlet themselves be governed by men's psychology--have made our onepeculiar function, child-bearing, somehow indecent and exceptional, wehave to fight back and be realistic about it, and lie and conceal asmuch as they do.

"So! I give you my word, I've done only five abortions. In each case Ithought the patient was more valuable to the world than what I'm pleasedto call my honor as a physician and a citizen. I won't trust you toanyone else. You will get a ten-days' leave, starting Friday week. Youwill report here at 4 P. M.; we'll go out to my little cottage on LongIsland, do the operation there, and you'll stay there ten days. I won'teven take a cook along. I'll take my pet nurse, Gertrude Waggett. She'sfine. Raw-boned as an Irish wolfhound, silent as snow in winter woods.You've made me get poetic! She'll stay with you when I come back totown. Good-night, my child. Four o'clock, understand, Friday week.Good-night!"

* * * * *

From the station far out on the South Shore of Long Island they drove toDr. Wormser's bungalow. It was September. The trees had faded toleathery brown and washed-out golden. Ann looked across lifeless marshesto a leaden sea; the air was fresh and salty, mixed with the fishy smellof the marsh, but it was chilly, and she shivered. Dr. Wormser wassilent; the tall, pinched-faced, gold-spectacled Miss Waggett was notnegatively but positively, aggressively silent. Ann shivered again.

By a worn and rutted macadam road through swamps they came on a longsand spit, littered with summer cottages. Doubtless in July they hadbeen gay enough, with children whooping and phonographs yammering andbrown young men in scarlet bathing suits. Now, the cottages were forlornto desolation. The windows were boarded up; the porches empty of brightchairs; the gray shingle sidings pitted with blown sea sand.

Barren! And what were these two stern women going to do to her? She waskidnapped. No one to appeal to, in this wilderness rimmed with saltoozing swamps and shouting breakers. Leap out now and flee!

"It's pretty quiet, except the waves," she said.

"Yes." Dr. Wormser came out of her trance and smiled, like a kind andworldly aunt. "I know. Must seem oppressive. Try to like it. If you canrelax for ten days, you'll not only have the operation over but go backrenewed. Wise old alchemists! Elements--earth and air and fire andwater. We lose 'em, in the city; just turn into nerves, and arteriesmade of chalk. Don't try to be intelligent, this week. You're not thebright Miss Vickers. You're an erring sister. Splendid! You may become areal leader of women, not a lady reformer. And I've brought you what youreally need for mental fodder--sixteen detective stories!"

"I was going to read through what Freud I've----"

"You are not! You're going to read about nice domestic things, likemurders and Scotland Yard. Here we are! We'll get the house warm andoperate at nine this evening."

"Oh, no, no! Can't we wait till tomorrow?"

"And let you get more scared than you are now? Huh! Funny about youhusky basketball girls. More nervous than social climbers, because youdon't take it out in hysterics and new frocks.... Ann! Darling! Itwon't be a bit serious!"

Dr. Wormser's cottage faced on rolling ocean, with grassy dunes andendless beach between. It was as simple as the abandoned summer placesthey had been passing, except for a collection of books miscellaneous asa crazy quilt, a really capacious fireplace, and, off the kitchen, anoperating-room and dispensary with white-enameled wainscoting halfway upthe wall. "Only decent surgical equipment, or bacteriological either,for fifteen miles," boasted Dr. Wormser. "I do a good deal of practisehere in the summer--city people. In the village, there's just onedoctor. Old one. Male, of course. How he laughs at 'hen medics'! I'm hisfavorite supper joke. And his operating table is an adjustable tablethat looks like a worn-out barber's chair--maybe not so clean! See,here's my fulguration apparatus; here's my closet for reagents andstains and so on...."

As Dr. Wormser prattled, Ann knew that she was trying to be reassuring;to tell her, with insultingly obvious petting, that she would becompetently treated. Ann did not listen. There was nothing in her brainor heart save a cold blankness of pain.

There were two bedrooms, with hospitable possibilities in two couches inthe living-room. "You'll take this room on the right--looks right out onthe ocean. Miss Waggett and I will bunk in the other."

Ann was too numb to protest.

"Now, while Miss Waggett and I heat up some hot water and get theoperating-room warm--got an electric stove; regular little Vesuvius, itis--and get us all a cup of tea, you just trot in and put on anightgown. Miss Waggett has laid out a nice plain one, on yourbed.... Ann! You do look scared! Rather wait till tomorrow?"

Only primitive terror spoke in Ann's croaking: "No! No! For God's sake,get it over."

"Right! You bet, darling!"

She undressed slowly, dropped the coarse nightgown over her head, andsat on her bed, rather chilly, twitchily lighting a cigarette. Shewondered if, in this death-cell in which she had suddenly been trapped,They would let her smoke.

Miss Waggett was in the doorway, in white overall and cap, gauze overher mouth. "All right, Miss Vickers; all ready."

The slow tramp to the gallows.

Relentlessly led into the operating-room, she found a new Dr. Wormser,also muffled in white, with a new, huge, hideous, and veryefficient-looking pair of spectacles owlishly masking her eyes. She wasunrecognizably brisk:

"There we are! Now, Ann Vickers, you damn well stop pitying yourself andworking yourself up! You an officer in the social army? Rats! Why,every Wop mother that you condescend to knows more about reality! Andme--do you realize I sometimes do ten majors in a morning, and most of'em literally a hundred times worse'n yours? Cheer up, honey! Soondone!"

* * * * *

At just what stage they had stopped giving her ether, she could notremember. In her drugged half-sleep, she felt that it was important toremember. And she seemed to recall a moment in which all humanness, allindividuality, all self-respect had been lost in a flame of agony, butshe could not be sure whether that had happened to her or to someoneelse. Over these two tremendous lost problems she pondered wretchedlyfor hours. Or it may have been seconds. Her brain cleared suddenly offumes, and she opened her eyes on Dr. Wormser standing placidly by herbed while Miss Waggett, yet more placid, was setting out a tray with aglass of water.

"There we are! All over! Fine!" chirped the doctor.

All over! Life was free to her again, and if this had been a crime,condemned by all respectable nations--such nations as were this moment,in 1917, showing their respectability and hate of crime by a display oftanks, poison gas, and liquid fire--then she was confused as to what wascrime and what were criminals.

(In Tafford county jail she had taken the first step, now she took thesecond, on the path which was to lead her into the darkness of prisonsin which sensible people shut away from their eyes the agony and tediumof what they call "criminals." To Gene Debs in prison, Jesus on thegibbet, and Savonarola chained to the flames, she now could add Dr.Malvina Wormser as a scoundrel. Later, she would be able to add TomMooney, Sacco and Vanzetti, the I. W. W.'s of Centralia, and the eightnegro boys of Scottsboro, Alabama. But she did not know this, now, whenshe still saw America as the only Galahad among the nations, clad inarmor of the best stainless steel, and entirely engaged in questing theSangrael of international peace and holiness.)

* * * * *

With Dr. Wormser gone, and Miss Waggett silent about the preparation ofeggnogs and creamed toast, Ann sat all day, all week, snuggled in mostfeminine and domestic pink comforters in a deck chair on the porch. Fromthe operation itself, she was recovered in two days, and could have gonehome. It was from the wound of futility that she was recovering. She didnot see the breakers--to see, they were just a bit monotonous, breakerafter excited breaker, as unoriginal and as noisy as a series ofpoliticians. If she did not watch the ocean, she felt it. She hadleisure to forget her fussy tasks and be part of the greatness of theearth.

For days she puzzled over her unromantic romance. She did not feel atall "ruined," nor could she get up much pleasant indignation against her"betrayer," against men in general, or against society. She was rathersorry that she probably never would experience the melodrama of being"ruined"; no parent calling upon God to punish her or casting her forthinto the tempest with the baby under her threadbare shawl; no deacon ofan employer making an example of her; no prospect of illness andstarvation while, in an attic through which the winter blast whistledfrom broken windows, she actively sacrificed herself for the Child ofShame.

That did seem a more stirring life than sitting at her settlement-housedesk planning a class in Commercial Arithmetic.

She sat wondering how many other traditionally dramatic situationswould, under the bleak light of reality, lose their horriblesplendor.... Did wartime heroes really hate the fiendish enemy asmuch as they did salty beef or crabbed officers? And when they weredying in the muck, did they really rejoice such a lot at giving up theirlives for their several kings and countries? Were any traditions sound?Did judges always consider their duties as sacred, or did theysometimes, like a school teacher slapping an annoying pupil, yield topersonal malice? Were Americans always generous and neighborly, Germansalways efficient, Englishmen always honorable, and Frenchmen alwayslogical?

Those queries were not to Ann disturbing. From 1890 to 1926, all brightyoung men and women were expected to engage in a liberal socialcriticism that was "drastic but sane"--i. e., never carried into action.Through all that generation, the bright verbal violences that had becomecorrect in the early days of Bernard Shaw were favored in middle-classsociety. It was the period when the sons of senators and the grandsonsof bishops spoke with loving anticipation of the rather vaguely datedmillennium when "the last king should be hanged with the entrails of thelast priest." As the Mid-Victorian age was serene in its assurance thatall vicars were pure and many of them intelligent, that all royalprinces had good manners, and that Turkey red Brussels carpeting was ahandsome floor-covering, so, two generations later, the "intellectuals"were so touchingly free from complexities that they believed all bankersspent their midnights plotting to make the poor poorer; that all membersof Congress and Parliament received enormous bribes and invariably diedin palaces on the Riviera; that all ministers of the gospel, especiallysmall-town Baptists, kept mistresses in gaudy apartments; and that allsocialist agitators devoted themselves exclusively to the cause ofmankind and rejoiced in living on bran and cold water.

"Well, but roughly speaking, all those things are true!" protestedAnn. "Only it's not quite so simple. Is that going to be the nextintellectual hurdle; to expect radical propagandists to stop being assimple-minded and obvious as a Missouri evangelist? Wasn't it nice whenwe all believed that if we just voted the Socialist ticket, then bubonicplague would cease, and husbands would never leer at stenographers, andwheat would always grow forty to the acre, and every child would get hisD. Sc. in bio-physics at the age of six!"

She began to question the certainties of radicalism as harshly as shehad the certainties of respectability. What had she accomplished as asocial worker at Corlears Hook? Had she given the youngsters of theneighborhood anything they could not find at the public schools? Wouldthe vote for women really, as she had once prophesied from soap-boxes,lessen crime, assure food and education for all children, and expertmedical attention for all child-bearing mothers, and induct hundreds ofsplendid women statesmen into public life, so that by 1930 the countrywould have scores of women senators and cabinet ministers scarcelydistinguishable from Joan of Arc?

Were the statistics-stuffed and liberal-minded social workers whom shemet at Corlears House really capable of instituting a vastly bettersystem of government than the greedy and cynical politicians of TammanyHall and Republican headquarters?

Was she certain only that she could not be so certain of anything as inthe good old days; that in the grammar of social science, all thetriumphant Therefore's had been replaced by But's?

Then she forgot it in attention to the narcotic detective story whichDr. Wormser had recommended.

* * * * *

In her earlier apprehension of being disgraced, Ann had thought solelyof her own dilemma. Neither she nor the realistic Tessie Katz had beenso imaginative as to give much heed to the rights of the coming babies.Now, unreasoningly, her baby became a reality to her, and she longed forit, wistfully, then savagely, accusing herself of its murder. It becamean individual; she missed it as though she had actually nursed it andfelt its warmth. She began to want it more than she wanted any career,or the triumph of any beautiful principle.

It would have been a girl. "How did she know? Oh, she just knew, thatwas all! Trust a mother to know things like that! Instinct. Somethingbeyond the cookery of science! And how splendid! For this cominggeneration belonged to women." Let's see (she mused): if the baby hadbeen born early in 1918, it would have been only forty in 1958. By thattime, the world might be all one nation; it might all be communized; itmight be shattered again into little warring monarchies. Helicoptersmight be common as motorcars now, or might be forgotten in a waste ofdead civilization. Whatever happened her baby would see--no! she sighed,her baby would have seen--as many dizzy changes in forty years as hadhappened in any other two centuries.

The baby took shape. She would have her Grandfather Vickers's blackhair. (Ann refused to credit the hair to Lafe.) She would see that thebaby had a healthy body. She should be educated in character, first ofall; in integrity. And, in a world where professional castes mightvanish along with individual wealth and rank, she should learn to useher hands; not be humbled in comparison with the honest skill ofwasherwomen and cooks and carpenters and machinists.

The joy she would have in the baby's education----

Then she remembered, aghast, that she had killed the baby. It wouldnever be there to educate.

* * * * *

Her breasts longed for the baby; her imagination longed for extension ofher ego through the baby into a vicarious immortality.

It would be named----Girl babies had of late been named someaninglessly: Ann, Dorothy, Lois, Gertrude, Betty. A hundred and fiftyyears ago names had meant something: ingratiating symbols like Charity,Hope, Faith, and Patience. But dumb patience, dull hope, and hang-jawedfaith, these were no longer the only merits of females. No, her girlshould be named Pride, and pride of life, pride of love, pride ofwork, pride of being a woman should be her virtues. Pride Vickers--theone person whom Ann was always to see and understand!

Ann was not definitely a mystic. Indeed, she believed that she washard-minded. Yet from now on, without her realizing it, the personalityof Pride Vickers was as real to her as that of any Italian child playingin front of the settlement house. She was convinced, without knowing shewas convinced, that Pride had not been slain but had only postponed hercoming; that when another child was born of her, it would be Pride andonly Pride.

Not often did she hear Pride's voice, but it was never utterly forgottenas she went back to a world in which she was the efficient Miss Vickers,of whom it was equally inconceivable that she should be vulgarly"ruined," that she should ever be a mystic, or that she should for asecond doubt that the instruction of immigrants' children inShakespeare, basket-weaving, Swedish gymnastics, and the salute to theflag would immediately produce a sweetly reasonable state.

Seven weeks after her return, the Russian Jewish quarter about her wentmad with the news of the Bolshevik revolution, and she wondered if Pridemight not be destined to know this November 7, 1917, as perhaps thegreatest date in history; as either the beginning of a good new world,or the end of a good old world.

Chapter 19

As Ann came into Eleanor Crevecoeur's flat, top floor of a loftbuilding, Eleanor and her temporary husband were quarreling. Eleanor waswaving her arms, George Ewbank sitting tight.

"Listen, Ann! Of all the bonehead plays! Listen! George is about due tobe drafted. If we were married and I chucked my job, so I'd be adependent wife, I think he'd probably get out of it. And he won't do it.Oh, the fool says he wants to marry me--he better!--and he doesn't mindsupporting me. But he won't ask for exemption."

"Feel a fellow ought to do his bit. Once we set our hand to the plow, wegot to keep on till we make a safe harbor. Anyway, that's how I figureit," said the mild warrior.

"But you do want to marry me?"

"Hell, you know I do. Didn't I get a license once last year?"

"Well, I won't, do it! Marry a man that wants to butt into a war thatdoesn't belong to him? Mamie Battleaxe was right, Ann. Women, cats, andelephants are the only animals with sense."

But George did go to war, and Eleanor, refusing even during the finalflag-waving to marry him, turned to Ann in a panic of loneliness.

Ann had never been much given, professional "social worker" though shewas, to pious fussing and intrusiveness; to saving people's souls andcorrecting their diets and censoring their friends. But now she wascalled on to be as fussy as a mother hen. Eleanor telephoned to herthrice a week: could she go to the theater, could she drop up for a biteof supper and a Tom Collins?

Ann met the intellectual parasites who frequented Eleanor's place asthey did any New York flat which supplied free drinks. After two yearsin New York, she was as innocent of the "Bohemians," the "GreenwichVillagers," as she had been in Waubanakee. She did not know them evenfrom fiction; her notion of refreshing literature was an article on theAssimilation of Latvian Elements in Southeastern Arkansas. Now sheencountered all of them: poetic editors of trade journals; nymphomaniacand anarchistic lady managers of tea-rooms; tramp poets whose hoboinghad most of it been done in Italian restaurants about Washington Square;reporters who were continually out of jobs because city editors werejealous of their superior diction; daughters of rich up-town bankers whowanted to paint but were willing to take it out in loving. Ann foundherself with fifty new acquaintances who called her by her first nameand, to her fury, since she hated to be pawed, kissed herlingeringly--male and female. They were all so opposed to the war thatshe became a patriot; they were so liberal that she turned Presbyterian;they were so besotted that her innocent pleasure in a bottle of winebecame a sour teetotalism. She had singularly little happiness out ofshrieking parties where untidy youths and maidens lolled in oneanother's laps and sat before you, on the floor, feeling your ankle andgiving you confidences about their glands. Her use of mouth-wash andbath-salts that month increased a hundred per cent. But she continued tofrequent their parties because of an authentic worry about Eleanor.

She was fond of Eleanor. She remembered her making cocoa, and slapping apoliceman; scrubbing the Fanning Mansion sink, and quotingKrafft-Ebbing; telling scandalous myths about the doubtful purity ofMamie Bogardus, and walking three miles in a snowstorm to address adreary little suffrage meeting; shocking Maggie O'Mara by her obscenity,and looking all the time like an anæmic Bourbon princess.

She was conscious that, since George's exit, Eleanor had been having aseries of lovers. And just now, in mounting resentment of Lafe Resnickand appreciation of Dr. Wormser, Ann was convinced that she hated allmen, and that she was enlisted with the angelic females in war againstthe male oppressors. She particularly hated the complaisant sweetheartswho attached themselves to Eleanor's affections and free gin: an old,creeping, fingering playwright who so deftly repeated the latest fromthe Club that he seemed clever; an explorer who devoted twenty-threemonths of lecturing to every one of exploring, and who describedinsinuatingly the strange marital customs of "native tribes"; and asweet, gentle, helpful Professional Youth who had for twenty-five yearsbeen one of the most promising very young authors and most dependableself-invited guests. Ann did not at first quite believe that thesemarooners were Eleanor's lovers. With George Ewbank, Eleanor had been asdomestic as Tib My Wife. Now she could not be true to any lover for aweek. She did not much confide in Ann, whom she considered a sound eggbut a bit of a prude. Of Lafe and abortions, Eleanor knew nothing, andshe condescended to Ann a good deal.

With a certain nausea, Ann thought of lady dogs in the rejoicing spring.Eleanor was always disappearing into the kitchen with one or anothersoftly attentive new male, and taking fifteen minutes to mix theco*cktails. She was always leaving dinner with Ann at the Brevoort tomake anonymous telephone calls. But Ann could not find that it was anyaffair of hers as Eleanor grew jerkier, more voluble and meaningless,and as her sunk eyes looked older.

It was Dr. Belle Herringdean who brought it up.

Isabel Herringdean, Ph. D., known to some two or three hundred intimatewomen friends and to some six or eight men as "Belle," was an executiveof Emmanuel & Co., a department store that was one of the wonders of theages, occupying in modern New York much the same place as the Parthenonin ancient Athens, but altogether bigger and more practical. AtEmmanuel's you could buy a diamond-and-emerald bracelet for $17,000, oran excellent imitation of the same for seventeen cents; you could buynice Gates Ajar funeral wreaths, cotton socks, saints' statues,joke-books for the use of senators, editions of Apuleius on hand-madeJapanese paper, floor mops, canary seed, personal manicure outfitscosting $178, overalls, tickets to Cairo via Madeira and Algiers,prunes, genuine Chinese back-scratchers, shoes for plowmen, theautographs of Judah P. Benjamin and Zane Grey, chewing tobacco, importedFrench hats, goldfish, comic valentines ætat. 1870, portable countryhouses, and pins. There were four thousand employees, and the vicepresident in charge of packing and shipping was an ex-brigadier general,and over the whole army of them was a Personnel Department to decidewhich, by the inexorable laws of Behaviorism, was gifted in the matterof ladies' cotton pants, and which conditioned to comprehendmouth-organs.

Ann, first meeting Dr. Herringdean at Eleanor's, had been repelled byher and fascinated. There was something of the sleekness and sinuosityand color of the coral snake in this slim woman. She might have beentwenty-eight or thirty-eight; her face, enamel-smooth, imperturbablesave for quick-glancing eyes, would never show her age. She wore thinsuits, with linen collars and men's ties and tricorne hats, and shestood about listening as though she knew everything better than thespeaker, while she did graceful things with a cigarette holder.

They were alone at lunch, Ann, Eleanor, Dr. Herringdean.

"Eleanor," said Dr. Herringdean, "isn't that gent you bowed to--comingout as we came in--a new one?"

"Why, I haven't known him very long. He's a great dear. A lawyer."

"That doesn't necessarily make him a great dear.... Dr. Vickers,don't you think----"

"Just Miss Vickers."

"Well, 'Miss,' then. Though, as a matter of fact, I'm going to call you'Ann.' I've heard so much about your grand work at Corlears House that Ifeel as though I knew you. And you must call me 'Belle.'" Dr.Herringdean looked at her with such a smile, wrinkling the corners ofher long eyes, that Ann was unwillingly captivated. "And don't youthink, Ann, that Nell does have the damnedest men hanging around, nowthat George is gone? Dear George!"

"You never called him that when he was here!" said Eleanor.

"I do now, with these human guinea pigs for contrast. That explorer ofyours! I'll bet there isn't a man living that's braver at taking chanceson Pullman diner grub! And so informing and illustrative! Can you tellwhen he's kissing you like a Maori and when like a Kumasi--nice andslobbery? Ugh! No man living can make love elegantly and amusingly. Onlywomen!" Dr. Herringdean reached out her hand, molded like wax, to strokeEleanor's thin claw, and uneasily Ann watched Eleanor yielding to thatwarm allurement, that cool impertinence.

Suddenly it seemed to Ann that Dr. Herringdean was all over the placeand on all sides of her at once. She never went to Eleanor's withoutfinding Dr. Herringdean straddling the fireplace and being cynical--acynicism which reduced optimists like herself to rusticity. No need nowto worry about the male hallroom-boarders in Eleanor's affections. WhenEleanor nipped off to the kitchen with one of them, Dr. Herringdeanwould stroll after and be heard delicately mocking the suitor intoclumsiness.

When she could get Ann and Eleanor to herself, Dr. Herringdean talked ofgreat women friends, of auto-eroticism, of religious symbology. Beforeshe had taken her Doctor of Philosophy degree in psychology she had hadthree years of medical school, and since then she had apparently readevery book on sexual abnormalities.

"Isn't it curious," she complained, "that in 1918, in the age of Freudand ragtime and little war-widows, the view about women, even amongwomen themselves, is still that they are angels, lacking all organsexcept hearts and lungs and rudimentary brains! I tell you, my dears,that until everybody understands that a girl can be a charming morsel,like a rosebud, and still have a healthily functioning colon, there willnever be any actual advance in the position of women. After all, thelittle dewy rosebud is not unacquainted with slugs and manure, andanyone who is too delicate to recognize it had better stay out of thevulgar garden and go back to tatting!" And Dr. Herringdean was off withsome absorbing statistics about the periodicity of passion, whichreduced the glory of Juliet to dots on Romeo's calendar.

Ann was worried. There was nothing of this so very new to her. She hadlearned about a rather foreign, impersonal thing called "sex" inphysiology class in Point Royal. She had heard Dr. Wormser talk ofprostitutes male and female, of the darknesses behind every silvertemple veil. But the wise and comfortable Malvina Wormser seemed asdifferent from the lip-licking Dr. Herringdean as Ann's father from LafeResnick. Nicer, she fretted, but weren't they less wise? No, sheinsisted; less exhibitionistic.

"Look!" she demanded of Dr. Herringdean. "Why need one talk ofabnormalities? We're none of us precisely so innocent that we thinkbabies always come from under gooseberry bushes!"

"No, my own dear, but you are so innocent that you think babies alwayscome! And what do you mean by 'abnormalities'? How can anything thathappens so often that you can chart it be called an abnormality? Thereare savage tribes--oh, that's your little explorer again, Nell!--butanyway: there are savage tribes that believe it is indecent to seeanyone eating. We don't think so. And sex, any manifestation of it, isjust as normal as eating and digesting food and eliminating it."

"Probably. But we don't sneak close together and lower our voices andtalk about food all the time!" insisted Ann. "If we did, it would be abore. There are fat people who tell you by the hour about the wonderfultruffles they had in Dijon and the kidneys they gorged in Barcelona. Doyou like them? And besides, normal or not, I'd think that a person whoconsidered eating steak was naïve, and who lived only on curry andCamembert, was losing a lot of fun!"

"Ann, my little darling, I always said there was something theologicalabout social work. You're using the typical preacher's trick ofmistaking a metaphor for an argument!"

* * * * *

However discomforted Ann was by Dr. Herringdean's conversationalpeepshow, Eleanor was enthralled, and under that spell she became frank.

"I agree with you about men, Belle," she said. "They are hogs. I can'tget along without 'em----"

"Some day you'll see!"

"--but I detest 'em. The worst of it is that all of 'em combine lecherywith a maidenly pretense that nothing is happening. They'll chase youall evening with loose mouths, and you're supposed not to notice. But ifyou, a woman, are crude enough to hint that you'd like to do what theywant above everything, they're shocked. You must have no passions! Youmust sit and wait for their insinuating coughs, and always be sosurprised when you find out what they mean! And if any evening theyhappen to feel noble and virtuous, and you don't, how shocked they are,how high-minded and cruel, even though you've seen 'em looking foolishin pajamas only twenty-four hours before!"

"Haven't I told you that, all of it, about men?" crooned Dr.Herringdean, strolling over to cup Eleanor's chin with her palm, to tiltback her head and smile down on her.

Ann was uneasy. She was the more uneasy a week later when Eleanorannounced that Belle was going to move in and share the flat with her.Yet Eleanor was so jolly, so casual about it, that Ann was ashamed. "Benice living with Belle," said Eleanor. "Of course she's crazy as abedbug. Loves to shock people by talking about all sorts of crazyinversions. Even pretends to admire cruelty. But I know her. Actually,Belle is one of the hardest-working, most sensible femmes I know. Ihope she'll like my new beau. He's a peach--you must meet him--firstofficer on a transport--grand lad--smashes submarines the way you wouldmosquitoes. Belle'd better like him!"

* * * * *

But Belle apparently did not like him.

A month after she had moved into the loft-building flat with Eleanor,adding to it a closet-full of liqueurs, some scores of pictures of youngwomen undisturbed by modesty, and a bookcase of German books on sex, thecumbersome but hearty males who had been wont to look gap-mouthed afterEleanor were vanishing, and the only men who appeared were languidyouths with rouged cheeks.

It was dismaying to Ann to see Eleanor, so independent once at theFanning Mansion, so acidly lofty with impertinent hecklers, insubjection now to Dr. Herringdean. With edged scoffing Belle slashedthrough Eleanor's chatter; with cold silence she discomforted theold-time friends of George Ewbank, whom Eleanor tried to hold; and whenEleanor was miserable and almost weeping, with warm caresses Dr.Herringdean restored her. Astonished, Ann watched Eleanor turningdiffidently to Belle for approval. And for Belle, Eleanor, who hadalways scorned feminine prettinesses, began to wear an apricot silklounging-robe embroidered with black peaco*cks, and silver mules withpompons.

"You don't appreciate Belle," she wailed to Ann. "She's an initiate. Iused to laugh at esoteric wisdoms, but I was a fool. She makes oneunderstand."

"Understand what, for God's sake?"

"Everything. Life. Real passion of living. And you needn't useprofanity. Belle doesn't like it."

"And this from you, Eleanor!"

When Dr. Herringdean had Eleanor thus reduced, she suddenly became acidto her and turned all her spells on Ann. She crinkled the corners of hereyes at Ann. She patted her. She waved her cigarette holder at her. Shepurred at her. She told her that she--Ann--had treasures of singularlyprecious but as yet unnoticed powers of love And always, smiling, almostwinking, she acted as though Ann and she were adults who were secretlyamused by the silly child, Eleanor.

Eleanor was daily more haggard, twitching like a drug-addict. Indeed Annwondered if she was not using drugs, and when she mentioned cocaine shenoticed that Dr. Herringdean fell uncomfortably silent.

Eleanor had lost what unobvious beauty had lain, for all her boniness,in shrewd friendly eyes and soft brown cheeks. And didn't the gooddoctor tell her so, playfully and often, while Eleanor sat and tried tolook superciliously amused--her thin nails gouging at the thin fleshunder her forearms the while. And when Eleanor followed her about thestudio, trying to find out what she had done, so that she might begpardon, Dr. Herringdean snarled, "Of course, my dear Nell, it doesn'tmatter, doesn't matter, why must we talk about it! Of course you didoffer to have some supper ready for me when I came home----"

"But you said you'd telephone if you wanted some."

"--came home late, assuming you'd understand, all tired out, andneedless to say, no supper. Not a thing. Naturally."

"I'm so sorry! Belle! Darling! I'm terribly sorry! Really I am!"

It was then that Ann interrupted sharply, all in one angry word,"Wellimgoinome!"

Dr. Herringdean cooed at her, "Oh, darlingest, we've been boring you.This idiotic discussion! Ittle Annie wun away? Don't, dear! Does itlook as though I were going to have a very cheerful evening if youleave? With Nell working herself up to a good old Victorian case ofvapors, and maybe swooning, to show how aristocratic she is? Wait, Ann,and I'll go with you."

"No, I must----"

Ann never did finish it. She realized that Eleanor was looking at herwith murderous jealousy in her eyes and twisting fingers.

* * * * *

Ann was in her office late, at nine in the evening. Dr. Herringdeantelephoned to her:

"Ann! I wish you could come down to the studio. Afraid something'shappened to Nell. I know she's in there--key's on the inside of thedoor. She won't answer me. Afraid she's angry with me. You know what anhysteric she is. I got home late and----Key on inside the door! I'mphoning from the drug-store. Oh, do come!"

Dr. Herringdean sounded really human.

"But she's probably just sore, Belle. A row?"

"Yes. I'm afraid it was serious." But Dr. Herringdean chuckled. "Ofcourse I was just teasing her--you know how I am; Nell, the idiot, takesmy fooling seriously. I told her Vivie Lenoir was not only a hundredtimes as pretty, which of course she is, but a lot more enfranchisedand----Oh, Nell was so furious! She actually pushed me out of the doorthis morning--me!"

"I'll come right away--taxi--meet you at the door of the flat." Ann hadno desire to do anything for Dr. Belle Herringdean, but she might beable to do something for Eleanor; might even miraculously show herBelle's cruelty.

When Ann came, Dr. Herringdean was pacing the slate floor in front ofthe door to the apartment. She was coldly lovely in a leaf-green suitthat was more a mockery than an imitation of masculinity. "I've knockedand knocked! And hollered! Oh, I'll pull your hair out, Nell, my goodwoman!" she snapped. "You try, Ann. Nell trusts you.... I mean, shedid, at least."

Ann pleaded, shrieked. The apartment door was of steel, without transom.On it she bruised her hands. No answer from Eleanor.

"We've got to get in there! Maybe she's fainted. Perhaps she'senceinte!" said Dr. Herringdean.

Ann's desire to murder her that moment was not fanciful or vague. Yetshe admired the woman as Dr. Herringdean ran downstairs, shouting back,"We'll bust in through the office below. If we wait to get permissionfrom the janitor, take all night."

On the floor below was an unlighted office with a plate-glass doorlettered, "The Dandypack Sawdust & Shavings Corp." Dr. Herringdeanlistened, stripped off a green slipper with an aluminum heel, smashedthe glass, reached in to turn the catch, dashed across the dim office,among astonished-looking pale oak desks and chairs, and raised a window.

Ann hesitated a second at a peculiarly open-looking fire-escape. Dr.Herringdean did not hesitate. She clattered up the iron steps, Annslowly after her. She jerked open a window of the studio and climbed in,bawling cheerfully, "Nell! Little Nellie!"

There was no sound in answer, nor any sight of Eleanor. They looked intothe bedroom, the kitchen, the bathroom. At the bathroom door, Dr.Herringdean stood rigid, screaming, "Oh, my God! Don't come in here!" Itwas too late. Ann saw. Eleanor was lying in a bath of crimson, with adrying crimson film in waves along the white enamel sides of the tub. Asmeared safety-razor blade was on the ledge. Eleanor was looking up atthem with scared eyes and drooping lips, like a hurt child, astonishedby pain, begging for their help. But her gaze was fixed. It did notchange.

* * * * *

At midnight, when the doctors were gone, and the police, except for apatrolman who stood on guard outside in the hall, Dr. Herringdeantumbled on a couch. Her arms flopped down beside her as though they weredead things, unattached to her body. She had not been hysterical.Neither had Ann, but Ann could not copy Dr. Herringdean's cold claritynow. She felt flabby; she was sure she had looked guilty.

Dr. Herringdean sat up, lighted her fiftieth cigarette that evening,spoke abruptly: "Ann! I know it's horribly tragic about Nell. But whatreally gets me isn't her. Poor woman; her worries are over. It's you.I'm afraid you'll be all cut up about her. Listen! I'm being sent toEurope by the store, to look over methods in Paris and Berlin. Come onalong--I'll work you in on expense-account. Come on, little darling!We'll have such a grand time! Basking on the sand, in the thinnestbathing-suits, my sweet! Oh, forget Nell! After all, she was a weak,sentimental failure!"

Ann liked to believe, afterward, that she had struck Dr. Herringdean.Actually, she did nothing of the kind. She fled--and awkwardly,apologetically.

Safe in her little room at Corlears House, Ann croaked, with greatinjustice, "Anyway, I won't hate men again. They're better than that!"

Then for years she forgot men and women both, and in a turmoil of workthought only of those inescapable social problems, Man and Woman.

Chapter 20

For two years Ann Vickers was the head-resident of a settlement house inRochester. She was apparently successful; she was invited to addresswomen's clubs, church forums, and girls' schools, on such varied andglowingly meaningless topics as "Methods of Americanization," and "TheValue of European Folk Songs in the Education of Immigrants." For therewas in Rochester a rich old woman, a benefactor of Ann's settlementhouse, who was so liberal that she allowed Hungarian gypsies to doHungarian gypsy dances, providing they were willing to learn meanwhilethe operation of National Cash Registers and Ford automobiles. TheUniversity of Rochester gave Ann, at twenty-nine, an honorary M. A.degree; and she was sixth on the Times-Register's annual list of "TheTen Most Useful Women in Rochester." In her settlement house, onehundred and sixty-seven Europeans learned English, so that they wereable to read about murder and adultery in the tabloid newspapers; andtwo hundred and seventy-one girls learned to sew and cook, so thatthereafter they could make their dresses at home, at not more than sixtyper cent. above the cost of similar dresses at a department store, andfor fifteen cents prepare a nourishing vegetable soup for four peoplewhich would have cost, at the very least, ten cents at a chain grocery.

Yet daily, these two years, as well as through her last year asassistant head at Corlears Hook House, Ann questioned the value ofsettlement work. It was too parochial. It touched only a tinyneighborhood, and left all the adjoining neighborhoods that did not havetheir own settlements, which was most of them, without provision forsuch recreation, education, emergency relief, and advice as thesettlement could give. It wasn't, Ann decided, much more valuable thanits parent, the good old heart-warming and tear-bringing system wherebythe elder daughter of the vicar (the one who had never married) amusedherself by taking coals and blankets and jelly to such of the bed-riddenparishioners as were most slobberingly obsequious to the vicar and tothe squire.

In the modern version, the settlement house, the gayly mendacious andclutching Jew boy with the big black eyes, who brought presents to theworkers and who most loudly bawled the Salute to the Flag at Boy Scoutrallies, was the one who got the extra golf pants and the left-over icecream and, later, the scholarship in dental school; while the sullen boydown the street, who had nothing but a genius for wood-carving and forminding his own business, got nothing at all.

The settlement house (or so Ann Vickers believed) was nothing but aplayground, much less well managed than the official city playgrounds.It smelled of the sour smell of charity. It taught, but it did not teachwell. The professional teachers of the city schools were better, andconsiderably more enduring, than the earnest volunteers (so like theSunday school teachers of Ann's childhood) who, out of a wealth ofignorance and good intentions, for a year or so instructed the poor Jewsand Italians and Greeks concerning George Washington and double-entrybookkeeping and the brushing of teeth. The night schools did it better.The ambitious youngsters--the only ones who were worth the trouble--didit better by themselves.

So far as Ann could see, the virtue of the settlement houses was thatthey had given birth to such impersonal and trained organizations asLillian Wald's Visiting Nurses Association, and to modern organizedcharity.

Oh, there were plenty of faults in organized charity--plenty, Annsighed. It had too much red tape. Often, complete records of families indistress were considered more important than relieving the distress. Andcharity workers did tend to become hard, from familiarity withmisfortune. But so did surgeons, and no one was suggesting that surgeryshould be handed over to the sympathetic spinsters and grandmothers ofthe parish. At least, organized charity was impersonal. It based reliefnot on the smiles and quaint friendliness of the victims, but on theirneed. It was not restricted to one district; it planned, at least, forthe whole community. And it busied itself not with the victims' desiresto become better poets or cooks or bootleggers or interpretativedancers--delicate, holy aspirations, much better let alone than pawedover by liberal yes-sayers--but with their need of food, shoes, andmoney for the rent.

As for her own self, Ann was as sick of living in settlement houses asJoan of Arc would have been of living in one of the more genteelnunneries. She was sick to death of these cultural comfort stations,rearing their brick Gothic among the speakeasies and hand laundries andkosher butcher-shops, and upholding a standard of tight-smilingprissiness among a mob who, tragic or jolly, were veritably living,making sausages, making love, making jokes. It had been annoying to obey(or deftly break) rules as an assistant: to pretend to enjoy coming downto a tough mutton dinner; to pretend that she hadn't been smoking whenher bedroom was blue with it; to get enthusiastic year after year overIkey's scheduled but curiously delayed success in leaving the fried fishshop and getting his degree of Doctor of Naturo-therapy.

But it was worse as head-resident. There was no secret adventure inbreaking her own rules; no real and agreeable venom in denouncing aworker for smoking when she had been smoking herself; no avoidance, now,of the Patrons--the rich women, the jovial clergymen, the estheticstock-brokers, the philosophical-anarchist bankers--who provided thefunds for the settlement and thereby, at a price rather less than oncewas paid for a sturdy black slave, purchased the soul and body of thehead-resident.

With the mild horror of a boy recalling a camp where for all onedreadful summer he has been compelled to be athletic, musical, merry,and full of civic righteousness, under the Godlike eye of an anæmic butvigorous schoolmaster in shorts and spectacles, Ann recalled years ofdinners in hall, of looking down the cotton tablecloth and the ironcladplates, and listening to the older young ladies among the workersnickering over a story in which the resident male wit had dared to usethe word "damn."

"Settlement houses!" Ann groaned. "Teaching short-story-writing to girlswho ought to be learning to overhaul aëroplanes! Teaching pottery toLithuanians born to be excellent farmers! Teaching the grandsons ofgreat Talmudists to imitate the manners of a Yonkers country club!Teaching basket-weaving as a means of bringing in the Kingdom of Heaven!Encouraging decent truck-drivers to become chiropractors!"

She knew that she was tired and unfair. She did recall great people,sound work: investigation of flies and typhoid, campaigns for publicplaygrounds, and contributions to poor relief. But the fundamentalwickedness of settlement houses, she decided--and suddenly she extendedit to all "charitable work," in all cities, in all ages, whetherchurchly or just liberal--was precisely the feature for which it wasmost praised in optimistic sermons, enthusiastic magazine articles, andthe dim reasoning of well-meaning benefactors: that, as such sermons andarticles always stated, "it brings together the well-to-do and theunfortunate, so that the prosperous may broaden and deepen theirsympathies by first-hand contact with the poor, and come to understandhow noble a heart may be concealed by blue jeans, and the unfortunatemay have an opportunity to learn and to better themselves by thisfriendly contact with those who can instruct and help them."

"Sure!" snarled Ann, in this unfortunate revolutionary mood.

"Yes! Pad the naked little egos of the charitable! Give them a chancefor exhibitionism! Let them watch themselves being superior to theunfortunate! And encourage them to do their uplifting in nice, practicalways!

"Soviet Russia doesn't teach bricklayers that it's better to besoda-clerks or insurance agents or advertising men--or settlementworkers! It teaches them to lay bricks better. And the Russians don'tthink that it's a charity to get jobs and food and education. Theybelong to them!"

* * * * *

At a convention of social agencies in New York, Ann met ArdenceBenescoten.

New York village gossip said that Miss Benescoten had inherited fiftymillion dollars--and she really had inherited seventeen million--fromher father, the miner. (His being a miner did not mean that he becamefilthy and risked death by going underground. Indeed he rarely saw amine. He remained in his New York office and thought up ways of kickingout the leathery-faced prospectors who had found the mines first and hadcome to one of Mr. Benescoten's friendly, well-dressed agents forfinancial aid.) She was unmarried, at fifty, but it did not seem toannoy her. She lived with a woman friend, a singing teacher, once famousas a coloratura soprano. Miss Benescoten was famous for her charities.She gave discreet donations and boundless advice to Pentecostal missionsin Spain and Catholic missions in Nebraska, to a home for the widows ofConfederate officers and another for negro graduate students, a schoolfor faith healers and an institute for psychiatry, a refuge for dogs anda rather small museum to which came three and four people a month tostudy coins from Crete and Lesbos. At least twice a week her name wasmentioned in the newspapers, as one of a committee for encouragingMexican art or for raising the "age of consent"; at least once a monthher picture appeared in the rotogravure sections, either at the layingof a corner stone, or--when she reluctantly forsook her humble works ofcharity and for a moment resumed her proper place in the bestsociety--on the lawn of her Bavarian Schloss at Newport, surrounded byher nephews and nieces, such as Thornton Benescoten, the ranking poloplayer, Nancy Benescoten, the divorcée, and Hugh Harrison Benescoten,the judge.

Miss Benescoten, on a committee with Ann, growled, "Heard your speechabout dental clinics yesterday. You have sense, my dear. Come home tolunch with me today."

Her dining-room was as dim and almost as large as a train shed. Thelunch was composed of objects whose names Ann did not even know, thoughlater she recognized them as plover's eggs, cold pheasant in aspic,asparagus vinaigrette, bar-le-duc.

"I've watched you at the convention, Miss Vickers. And I've nosed intoyour record at Corlears House and Rochester and Clateburn--yes, and injail at wherever-it-was--amusin'! I run a big charity show of my own.I think it's more practical than most of these institutions. (A littlemore Heidsieck for Miss Vickers, Stone.) Not bound by any of theseidiotic rules. Help 'em out whenever they look amusin'. Yes, amusin' wayto do charity--not make it painful--diff'rent, eh?"

So, abruptly, Ann chucked her settlement work and became almoner to thismodern Grand duch*ess.

* * * * *

Ann had a small, smart, black-and-silver office on the third floor ofthe Benescoten château on Riverside Drive, with a dictaphone, astenographer, and four telephones--one public, one outside but private,one to the house switchboard, attended by a footman, and one to MissBenescoten's own suite.

There were routine duties, the chief of which was the answering orgetting rid of begging letters, begging telegrams, and begging callers.After one morning's mail, broken by telephone calls from mysteriouspersons who "had to see Miss Benescoten personally--won't take but amoment of her time--can't very well explain my business over the phone,"Ann had for Miss Benescoten a considerable pity, with a considerable andirritable surprise at the number of fellow-citizens who wanted to getsomething for nothing. That first morning's mail, of two hundredletters, included a chatty plea from the widow of a small-town carpenterwho wrote that she had enough to live on, but would Miss Benescotenkindly send for the carpenter's daughter--including Pullman fare withticket--and adopt her socially. "In return, am sure she will be glad tohelp you round the house anyway possible. Has not learned to cook butotherwise would be glad to help you anyway except of course sweeping orscrubbing as is to hard work for girl brought up like her reads Frenchlike I do English." A request for a grand piano for a young woman whowould be a "musical progeny if only got a chance." Seven requests to payoff the mortgage. Sixteen requests for loans, to be repaid within amonth, by blameless persons who would, if Miss Benescoten insisted,give as security such objects as "a genuine antique grandf.'s clockdon't know how old," an ice-cream parlor in Hohokus, a wedding ring, anda theological library.

A young man whose drawing was admitted by "Prof. Otto Staub, the bestknown music teacher in Memphis, also author and lecturer" to equalFrederick Remington and Franz Hals, desired five thousand dollars, to goto Paris and complete his studies. "Kindly answer at once as am nowmaking plans."

An eighteen-year-old girl confided that

...though the whole world has fought me and tried to keep medown all these years, I have fought back. Nothing can stop me!I am of the stuff of success. It is in my stars, yes, in mystars. I am going to be a SUCCESS. I am going to be most famousauthor in U. S. Now dear Miss Benescoten, I guess you get a goodmany letters from strangers asking for help, and probably yoursecretary just throws same in the wastebasket, but I am notasking for help. Or a loan. My proposition is this: If you willjust advance me $3,000 (three thousand dollars) I will finishthe book (novel) I am now writing have already begun it. I havea splendid plot, never before used, also characterization, etc.If you do this, when novel is finished, I will PAY YOU BACKDOUBLE! So you see I am not asking for a favor, and I guess evenwith your stocks, bonds, etc. you can't get a better investmentthan that! Also understand you are a very charitable person, andby doing this, you will be helping the puzzled world by givingthem a new Voice, as novel is not mere story but containssplendid moral, also solutions for many problems now puzzlingworld. I know you are a fine person, not bound by socialconventions, so come on, Miss Benescoten, and send check for$3,000 (three thousand dollars) by return mail and of course ifyou WANT to make it more, it won't hurt my feelings any! don'tmind my little joke. P. S. I can't tell you why maybe I'mpsychic but I feel as if we knew one another personally andcould look into one another's eyes face to face we would callone another Alys and Ardence even if you are so much older thanme. Please don't forget and it will be such a dandy surprise ifyou do send it right away return mail.

And pleas from fifty-two organizations devoted to helping mankind inevery known manner, from the study of numerology to the reduction incost of carpet-tacks.

But the letter from the old lady with the crippled husband did soundauthentic. For all her experience of settlement houses--which areregular stops, along with ministers' studies and newspaper offices, onthe pan-handlers' route--Ann could not harden her heart enough to keepfrom agonizing over these trembling scratches on cheap paper with faintblue lines.

Ann wondered whether a real, orthodox, thirty-third-degree Bolshevik,"free of all ideological divergences," would the more despise ArdenceBenescoten for believing that she was divinely chosen to dispenseseventeen million dollars, or the writers of begging letters forcringing to her.

Out of the two hundred letters, Ann answered twelve, kept six others toshow Miss Benescoten.

She was to see Miss Benescoten each morning, at eleven. She expected tofind the great philogynist's boudoir as stark as a nunnery cell. Itwasn't. Ann passed through an Adams private drawing-room to a hugebedroom, ivory and rose: a huge bed with golden nymphs on the cornerposts; chairs of petit point; a pink marble fireplace; adressing-table like an entire drug-store. Miss Benescoten was lolling ona chaise-longue, smoking a small cigar, and being merry with her friendand house-mate, the ex-diva, Mme Carrozza.

"Oh, Nalja, this is my new pauperizer, Miss Vickers--a dear girl!"

Madame Carrozza glared.

"May I disturb you for a second, or shall I come back, Miss Benescoten?I've finished the letters. I think these six cases are worthinvestigating, especially the old lady with the sick husband."

"Oh!" Miss Benescoten did not sound at all tender or philogynic. "Ithought I'd made it clear to you, Ann. We must rejectindividuals--except, of course, really amusin' worth-while ones, like,for instance, that jolly girl--you remember, Nalja?--that was so muchfun, and such jolly ideas about the use of black glass--set her up in adecorator's shop. But these old, poor people--very sorry for 'em, 'msure; most unfortunate. But they must go to their relatives. We can onlytake up coördinated causes, that have some direction, do you see, Ann?"

* * * * *

It took the trusting Ann all of three days to discover that she wasnot almoner for the Grand duch*ess; that Miss Benescoten did not carein the least about any charity whatsoever; and that Ann's only reasonfor being there was to get journalistic publicity for Miss Benescotenapropos of her uncharitable charities. A pound of candy for each of tenthousand factory girls--yes, that was an amusin' charity and a real"news-story," with pictures of Miss Benescoten, the celebrated MmeCarrozza, and the Princess Frangipangi handing down the first twohundred boxes from a Glasstop Kandy Ko. delivery wagon. (And it didn't,as the papers said, cost $5,000; Ardence was as shrewd as her father hadbeen; she had, by emphasizing the publicity they would get, bought thelot from the Glasstop Ko. for $780. And there weren't ten thousandboxes; only six thousand.)

What publicity, what feeling of power, was to be had from paying theinterest on the mortgage for old Mrs. Jones back in the Connecticuthills? But when Ardence endowed the English Village for GirlArtists--ever so jolly a red-roofed colony in the Catskills--and openedit to the strains of a symphony orchestra, which she had made Ann wanglefor her, gratis, there was a whole page in the New York Sunday papers,and Ardence was voted a medal by the League of Graphic Arts, and ahandsome scroll by the Association for the Disurbanization of EstheticCreation.

Ann was expected to write pleasantly diversified accounts of Ardence'slatest charity, to take them wheedlingly to the Sunday editors inperson, to say casually, "Oh, by the way, I just happen to have some newphotographs," and display a batch taken this week: "Miss ArdenceBenescoten, Heir of Mining Magnate, Inaugurates Night Class for LaundryWorkers: Left to right, Conte Dondesta, First Sec'y Italian Embassy,Miss Benescoten, Rt. Rev. Dr. Slough, Bishop of Alaska, Bill Murphy ofLaundry Workers' Union."

* * * * *

Sometimes Ann felt like a guest in the Benescoten house; sometimes likean intellectual chambermaid. For days she would see Ardence only atbrief conferences, and go out alone for lunch, at the Coffee Pot onupper Broadway; then, abruptly--causing her to break an engagement withPat Bramble--she would be ordered in for state luncheon, to be shown offto some college president, criminologist, Swiss psychiatrist, or othersocial benefactor whom Miss Benescoten was that day impressing with herwisdom and her Venetian glass.

Ann was living in a hotel dreary and small as the Hotel Edmond, butlarge enough to entertain her intimates--Pat Bramble, Dr. Wormser, twoor three residents whom she had known at Corlears Hook. It wasgratifyingly cheap. She knew that her days with Ardence were numbered,and she was saving. Ardence was generous in money; Ann had eightthousand a year, as against the three thousand, including board androom, she had had at Rochester. She wanted to be extravagant; she poredover python slippers and Talbot hats in the shop windows. But she didnot want them so much as she wanted a half year of wandering or ofsitting still, away from offices and "case records" filled out with theagony of a human soul reduced to a few figures. She wanted again to findout whether there was still an individual called Ann, with the abilityto love and be angry and foolish, or only a human pigeon-hole named MissVickers.

She stayed on, spoiling the Egyptians, and all the while wonderingwhether that much lauded activity of Moses hadn't been a dirty orientaltrick. But each week saw another comforting ninety dollars put away inthe savings-bank. There was no day on which she did not long to quit; onwhich she did not feel that she must have the luxury of leaving beforeshe should be discharged. At the Benescoten house there was richmaterial for irritation. Ardence was alternately snappish and, on dayswhen she admired herself as a benefactor, lush as an overripe banana.There were quarrels. Ardence's butler (real imported Stilton) was neverquite sure whether Ann was a servant or a lady. (Neither was Ann, butshe cared less than did the butler.) And Miss Benescoten had a privatesecretary for her own correspondence, aside from Ann's Department ofRighteousness and Publicity, and she was unquestionably a lady. She wascalled a "social secretary," and she was the daughter of an admiral. Shetold Ann about the admiral, often. When she came in on a conference andfound Ann insisting that as Ardence had kept the Home for RespectablePostal Employees waiting for a month now, she must give them someanswer, the social secretary would run forward, kiss Ardence's fat hand,glare at Ann, and whimper, "Oh, Miss Benescoten, they all drive you likea nigg*r! Don't let them pester you, dear!"

Two things kept Ann from quitting: the sordid savings-bankaccount--comforting and wholesome, like most sordid things--and theoccasional presence of Lindsay Atwell.

* * * * *

He was almost bald, and on the bridge of his nose was a deep gouge fromthe horn spectacles which he wore when reading. Yet he looked youngenough, this Lindsay Atwell, with his air of a tennis-player: tautwaist, eyes clear of blur, gray military mustache, and ruddy skin. Hisbald head was not pale and glossy; it was tanned and, in a pleasant way,a little freckled. He smelled of fresh air--unaccountably, for though hedid walk forty blocks now and then, he disliked the fashion-magazineparade of riding in the park along with other Yankee and Semiticimitators of Rotten Row. Nor were his vacations particularly given togolf or to heroic camping between layers of balsam and mosquitoes; hesaid, at least, that he spent them on an Adirondacks lawn, reading ConanDoyle.

He was, she thought, forty-seven or -eight.

Lindsay Atwell was Ardence Benescoten's lawyer; the most scholarly andleast thunderous member of the firm of Hargrave, Kountz, Atwell &Hargrave.

For weeks Ann was certain that he belonged to old things: Harvard, theRacquet Club with the Century Club in sight, boyhood summers in BarHarbor, and a family known back to Plymouth Colony. She was just thusfar right: he was from Harvard Law School. For the rest, he had beenborn in Kansas, gone to the University of Kansas, and spent his exoticyouthful summers fishing for bullheads in prairie sloughs, and readingWalter Scott and Victor Hugo. "But I served rather heroically in thewar," he said; "I was in the Advocate General's show, and sometimes Ididn't get out of my office till after 6 P. M." As for his family, itwent back to Cro-Magnon man, but then the genealogy skipped, down to hisgrandfather, who had been a much esteemed Ohio farmer till the mortgagegot him. Lindsay was, in a word, a Typical Well-Bred New Yorker.

He talked rather elaborately, but he did not seem to Ann pompous.

She saw him often. There was much litigation over assembling the parcelsof land to make up the thousand-acre tract for the English Village forGirl Artists, and much consultation of Lindsay by Miss Benescoten as towhether she should engage a famous architect or a good one.

Atwell visited Ann in her office, and sighed, "I say, Miss Vickers,there's no use--I've known her longer, and there isn't a bit of usetrying to persuade Our Ardence to have Tipple for architect merelybecause he has ideas and ability. Why, he's unknown, whereas Mr.Tuftwall has led the profession ever since he did the glories of theFalconer Building Tower--all except the general plan and the details--ofcourse he farmed those out! And he has his own press agent, a reallyenthusiastic one--not reluctant, like you--who would enjoy coöperatingwith you in getting free advertising for Ardence as well as for Mr.Tuftwall. You must learn that in these modern days even Beauty can bemade of practical use!"

Ann dropped her neck, gaped at Lindsay Atwell, and marveled, "Do youmean to say that you're on to Ardence, too?"

"Hush! You'll be criticizing President Wilson, or even ChristianScience, next!"

Thereafter, when he came to see Ardence, Atwell wound up in Ann'soffice, and they talked of James Joyce and other polite butnon-compromising topics, and once he took her affably to lunch atSherry's. That was on the autumn day when, having been scolded by MissBenescoten for wasting time on the affairs of a newsboys' home which wastoo well-established now to provide further publicity, Ann curtlyresigned, at 3 P. M., six months after taking the job.

She was in a travel agency at four.

Three days later, at Saturday midnight, she sailed for England, with noplans beyond the pier in Plymouth.

* * * * *

What excited her at sailing was not the menagerie saying farewell withkisses, bouquets, and gin, for she was used enough to the voluble crowdsof the East Side. It was the feeling of power and resoluteness in thelong swift curves of the ship, the glaring white-painted steel walls,and the monstrous commanding roar of the whistle. Power! Not craftypower, like Miss Benescoten's, but the clean power of steel andsteam.... And England no longer away than the drowsy drudging fromMonday to Saturday in an office!

Down to the surprisingly compact luxury of her rose-and-gray cabin.

Pat Bramble, tired-eyed but demure, in a white lapin coat with highcollar, Dr. Wormser, Miss Dantzig of the Rochester settlement, Miss Edesand Dr. Wilson Tighe from Corlears Hook House, were seeing her off,vociferously dropping roses, candy, and copies of Moon-Calf and TheAge of Innocence all over the cabin. Then at the door smiled LindsayAtwell.

"Oh, I'm glad!" murmured a maidenly Ann. "How did you know about mysailing?"

"Not hard for a really profound legal intellect. I heard you say toArdence's butler that you were sailing tonight, and this is the onlyboat out. Ann, I hope it will be glorious. Do this for me! Go down toCornwall. There's a village there, perfect--St. Mawgan, in the Vale ofLanherne, so old, so quiet, all hidden among the trees, with aPerpendicular tower older than America. Then go through Newquay, and siton Pentire Head, all gorse and golden samphire, in summer, as I rememberit. Sea extraordinarily wide and purple. I sat there hours, leaningagainst my knapsack. Tell me about it when you return. Good luck--blessyou!"

He was gone; and the steamer bellowed, "Onnnnnn! Gangwaaaaay! Onnnnnn!"

Chapter 21

There was a visibility of three miles. The ship was shut off from allthe known world, in a gray limbo of rain-spattered swell and horizonlesscircle of ragged cloud. The dull steadiness of land was gone. There wasan even roll which Ann found exhilarating, once her landlubberliness wasconvinced, from watching the cheerful deck stewards, that this was allnormal and proper. Deep in robes in her steamer chair, she felt asthough all briskness had flowed out of her, leaving her as detached asthe lonely ship.

"From now till I touch foot on the pier in New York again, I'm not forone second going to think about social service or reforms or jobs orforward-lookers or anything else but being adventurous," she vowed.

She was going to dance, here aboard, to flirt, to bet on the ship's run,to have two co*cktails every evening. Then she was to see only the Europeof ruined castles, half-timbered villages, cafés, and great galleries;the Europe of the picture postcards.

For guide and inspiration she had taken Andrew Lang's "Romance":

"My Love dwelt in a Northern land.
A gray tower in a forest green
Was hers, and far on either hand
The long wash of the waves was seen,
And leagues and leagues of yellow sand,
The woven forest boughs between.

"And through the silver Northern night
The sunset slowly died away,
And herds of strange deer, lily-white,
Stole forth among the branches gray;
About the coming of the light,
They fled like ghosts before the day."

That was the Europe she quested; a Europe without strikes or statisticsor inflated post-war currencies or American tourists trying to findbuckwheats with maple syrup. She was so tired that weariness was rubbedinto her flesh like ashes in a mourner's hair. But--oh, just a moment ortwo more of shop-fret. She did have to wind up the inventory of herthoughts about jobs.

Yes, she was glad she'd worked for Ardence Benescoten, for four roundreasons: She had discovered that the worst professional "socialworker"--the sketchiest investigator of applicants for relief, thesnippiest telephone girl at the Organized Charities Institute, thecrankiest manager of a free employment agency--was better than the bestrich amateur, condescending to committees and treating "charity" as analternative to bridge. Weren't professionals always better in the longrun--whether in charity-work, authorship, medicine, automobile-driving,or prostitution?

Second, she had learned so comforting a scorn of the Very Rich that shewould never again aspire beyond a cottage with the electric light billpaid. She had met them at Ardence's: the banker who knew senators; theangel of explorations who was sometimes contemptuously allowed to goalong as assistant geologist; the manufacturer of toilets who hoped tobe minister to Siam; the blanched old woman whose only conversation wasthe slyness and sloth of her twenty-seven servants. They were not,despite the Socialist journals, a race of supermen conspiring withfiendish foresight to keep down the honest workers. They weren't thatgood! They were just dull and mostly bored.

Next, she need not worry about what she was to do when she returned.Lindsay Atwell was a trustee of the Organized Charities Institute, andhe had spoken to the director. She could have an excellent opening asassistant director whenever she wished.

And the fourth gift which Miss Ardence Benescoten had, without knowingit, given to her was the friendship of Lindsay Atwell. He was there,back in New York; a permanent and reassuring fact, like Dr. Wormser, orsmoky sunsets, or Fifth Avenue in the snow at twilight.

* * * * *

There was the diamond buyer. As he crossed from twice to six times ayear, he knew all about ships. Certainly, no captain could have been soglidingly eloquent in explaining the automatic steersman, no headsteward so emphatic about what to order from the menu and wine-list. Buthe made all his information apropos of a little affair. He managed toinsinuate "Let's sleep together" even when he said, "I saw a porpoisethis morning." Ann did not, theoretically, mind being seduced again.Nice time for it, vacation, with no lecture engagements. But she didobject to being not an individual woman, but merely a coupon.

There was the boy just graduated from Princeton, going over to study atthe Sorbonne. He was refreshing as cold water. But he seemed so young!Herself eight years out of college, Ann felt a hundred, a little scarredand clinging to optimism only by sheer will and obstinacy, when the boyyearned to her, "You're in social work? Oh, I'd like to be! Don't youthink that, after all, the most important thing in the world isjustice?"

Dear child! What did it mean? What was "justice"? She could haveanswered, a year ago. "He was right, Pontius Pilate," she brooded.

There was the sound, earnest, unamorous, unidealistic group of drinkingmen in the bar who, by the end of the passage, had almost admitted heras a fellow male. They did not, like the diamond merchant or thetheatrical manager, snoop about women's cabins, their hackles rising atthe scent of lingerie. They took it out in high-balls and endlessguffawing stories. They were the mining engineer, a couple ofnewspapermen, an Austrian doctor, a cranky and conservative manufacturerfrom Chicago, an Italian-American antipasto importer, a Scotchbank-manager from Trinidad, and an ex-congressman from Arkansas.

They called themselves the "True Tasmanian Sabbath-Observance andRabbit-Hunting Association."

They were reality.

Ann scolded herself for that artless conclusion.

How were these hearty, unsubtle scoffers more "real" than poetsunveiling the mantled soul, than harried reformers who viewed a humanbeing not as a hundred and sixty pounds of flesh maintained by beefsteakand rest upon horsehair mattresses, but as integers in a social equationthat expressed paradise?

"Well, they just are more real!" said Ann.

With her drinking set, forgetting a world in which the population wasdivided between worried "uplifters" and "problems," Ann regained much ofthe wisdom she had possessed as a child of ten in Waubanakee, andperceived that most men were neither spectacled angels nor tubercularpaupers, but solid, stolid, unpicturesque citizens who liked breakfast,went to their offices or shops or factories at seven or eight or nine,admired sports connected with the rapid propulsion of small balls,cherished funny stories and the spectacle of politicians and bishops,quarreled with their wives and nagged their children yet were fond ofthem and for them chased prosperity, were unexpectedly competent in thesmall details of their jobs and, despite the apprehensions of prophets,had somehow managed to get through 30,000 years since the last ice-age,to invent coffee and safety-razors and oxy-acetylene welding, andpromised to muddle on another 30,000. And they were kind, where theyunderstood. Their most dismaying monkey-capers--wars, gossip, malice,vanity--were due not to inherent fiendishness but to lack of knowledgeand lack of imagination.

No! The True Tasmanians again taught her that the mass of ordinaryhumans were not the hopeless morons and sad*sts that Mamie Bogardus,Belle Herringdean, and even, when she had to rise before eight-thirty,Dr. Wormser thought them, but sound stock, lacking only some unusualnessof the glands, or a chance crisis, to be saints or heroes. And that wasgood. For if most people were fools, as the highbrows Ann had beenmeeting seemed to think, then why vote or start hospitals or writearticles or support the public schools or do anything whatever butcollect a set of Shakespeare and a ton of beans and retire to a cave?

It was not so light or obvious a discovery of Ann's that people actuallywere people.

For a century the preachers had wailed that most people were not peopleat all, but subhuman or fiendish, because they drank and fought andwenched and smoked and neglected the church. Now, since war-days, therehad arisen in America a sect which preached just as earnestly that mostpeople were not people at all, but subhuman or even Baptist, becausethey did not sufficiently drink, fight, wench, denounce the church, andsmoke before breakfast. In trusting the human race to get along, then,Ann was not merely revolutionary; she was nihilistic.

With mental apologies to the Battleaxe and Eleanor, she guiltily enjoyedthe exclusively male companionship of the True Tasmanians, from elevento one, and five to midnight, delighted at being accepted as a fellowmale, who would not be too easily shocked by good clean dirt; the moredelighted at being the subject of feverish gossip by all the other womenaboard.

The True Tasmanians did not encourage her to go on expecting to see afairy-tale Europe, entirely of gray towers in a forest green, and herdsof strange deer, lily-white. What they expected to see, she gathered,was the Savoy Bar, the racetrack at Longchamps, and offices in Cheapsideand on the Boulevard Haussmann and Unter den Linden. But she was boundfor the Tower of London, the chapter-house at Salisbury, and a cliff ofgolden samphire above the sea.

* * * * *

Late on her first afternoon in London, Ann left her strait-lacedtemperance hotel in Bloomsbury. She was so reckless as to walkplanlessly, without consulting her Baedeker. She did peer into Lincoln'sInn and the Temple; she was gratified by the half-timber of PrinceHenry's Council Chamber, by memories of Lamb and Thackeray, by the tombof Goldsmith, and the Norman round-church. But after a confusion ofbridges and thundering highways, she was in Bermondsey, and she found aLondon not mentioned in the lush advertisem*nts of the steamshipcompanies.

"You must see the real London," everyone had said to her. Well, she wasin the real London, at least a real London, in Bermondsey, and sherealized that majestic London, like valiant New York, presumably likeevery city in the world, was nothing but a square mile or two ofhandsome shops, bedrooms, public buildings, surrounded by square leaguesof houses like pens in a slaughter-yard, pinchbeck shops, and dirtyfactories. The side streets of Bermondsey, drearier even than Brooklyn,stretched out in flat-faced houses in which, it seemed, human beingscould no more have a rich and individual existence than ants in a hill.The innumerable children were dirty; the men, returning from work, weretired and threadbare; the women were creeping things.

Intellectually, Ann knew that poverty in England would be no gayer thanpoverty in Harlem or San Francisco. Yet emotionally she had not believedanything of the kind. By the British authors who, lecturing in America,let it be deduced that they belonged to a civilization mellower andsweeter than American harshness, Ann's imagination had been convincedthat all of England was composed of picturesque cottages among meadowsconstantly, summer and winter, riotous with larks and roses, plus aLondon made up solely of ancient churches, Buckingham Palace, the smartflats of baronets, the delicate attics of poets, and the speeches of Mr.Winston Churchill.

But here were miles of two-story brick houses grimy with coal smoke.Then the pubs opened. And the London public houses were the mostgrievous insult to Romance of all that she saw.

She had learned from such itinerant bards as Mr. Gilbert K. Chestertonthat all British establishments for the sale of beer were bristling withmelody, laughter, jocund signboards, and conversation about sunsets. Shewanted to behold these shrines. She noticed shawled women dribbling intoa pub on Tooley Street--the Boar and Bull, it was called, but it mightmore reasonably have been called the Cold Pork and Boiled Beef. Muchdaring, she followed them in, asked for a glass of beer, and sat on aclean but dreary bench in a clean but drab-hued room. The bar was a pinecounter, painted yellow and grained to imitate a wood that never was onland or sea; the barmaid was a tight-lipped, tight-haired lady of sixty,who kept polishing the same glass, as though she had a grudge againstit. In front of the bar were two venerable dames in shawls and aprons,and an undersized gentleman with a scarf for a collar.

They coughed as a preface to speech. Ann listened. Now came the lyricworthy of Chesterton's rolling English drunkard in the rolling Englishlane:

"Good-evening, Mrs. Mitch."

"Ow! Didn't nowtice it was you! Good-evening, Mr. Dewberry."

"Bit chilly today."

"It is, rather."

"Well, good-evening, Mrs. Mitch."

"Evening, Mr. Dewberry."

Silence, then, glum and beer-scented, save for the barmaid assenting toan unseen gay blade in the saloon bar, "Pint of bitter? Right you are!Pint of bitter!"

Ann went home by way of an A. B. C. restaurant and dinner of gravy soup,Brussels sprouts, and mutton. As it was too late to do anything else,she returned to her hotel, the Royal William, and sat in the lounge,with its aspidistra plant and its panels of varnished brown linoleum,and tried to cheer her depressed loneliness by reading the list of peersin Whitaker's Almanack which, with Bradstreet's and the A. B. C. Guide,composed the library of the Royal William.

She, like all Americans, had believed that most titles went back to theNorman Conquest, and she was astonished to find how many peerages hadbeen created since 1890, how few before 1600. Then; "Oh, stop it! Can'tI ever forget figures? Dates! Vital statistics! Number of divorces perhundred thousand--nine point seven plus! Wage-scales! Exact distance inkilometers from the Marble Arch to the Metropole, Brighton! What a mind!That's what you get from settlement houses! Can't you ever let yourtape-measure of an intelligence go, and live in your imagination? Can'tyou feel the presence of John Keats and Charles the First?

"No, if you want to know, I can not! Charles the First! Just becausehe had a lace collar and a dentist's beard! I want to knowwage-scales! Quite a few people with Saturday pay-envelopes seem tothink they're as important as aumbries and barbicans!

"But the lovely names! If Father could only have been Leopold E.Godolphin Walmesley Wilfrid Cavendish Tatem Vickers, K. M. G., D. S. O.,F. R. F. P. S. G., First Baron Waubanakee, what a chance you might havehad, my girl!"

* * * * *

She tried to perform her duty as a tourist. She went humbly to Oxford,but she remembered a gowned and bearded don on a bicycle better thandomes and arches. She solemnly went through Kenilworth Castle, and toldherself that she could hear the clank of armor; but afterward, over oneof those soft white fish which are supposed by the English to be edible,confessed that she hadn't heard one clank, and that so far as she wasconcerned, Kenilworth was practically ruined.

She did not thereafter see a single castle, a single hiding-place ofBonnie Prince Charlie. She prowled through the factory towns aboutManchester (not quite so sordid as Pittsburgh), the modern rayonfactories in Surrey, the missions along Commercial Road, the docks atPoplar. She did find Cornwall--a Cornwall not of golden samphire but ofharsh stone cottages belonging to tin miners who earned two pounds aweek.

And because she saw the workaday England, the boilers and coal-pits anddynamos behind the theater lights, she loved it, and felt vastly more athome in it than in shattered abbeys. The England that she saw now wasnot dead, like lovely Venice, or slumbering Charleston, or Athens withits marble turned golden and crumbling. Like her own America, it hadproblems; it fought; it was alive. It was the shrine of Shakespeare'sblood, not of his bones!

Inquiring thus, she was not confined to the customary acquaintances ofthe tourist: vergers, waiters, ticket-sellers, and fellow tourists veryweary in the legs and homesick and a little confused between Cistercianpriories and cistaceous rock-gardens.

She mailed the letters of introduction she had sworn she would not mail,and she was presently intimate with Labor M. P.'s, women journalists,Hindu nationalists, and pacifist generals, and with at least a decentreverence, she went to Toynbee Hall, father of all the settlementhouses. She plaintively admitted that for her there was no use in tryingto be cultured about cathedrals, to remember at which address Dr.Johnson used to drink tea (it was tea, wasn't it?) with Mrs. Thrale (ifit was Mrs. Thrale), or to learn which Soho restaurant had the wonderfulsnails and the quaint waiter who had known Anatole France--or maybe itwas Voltaire; and she let herself go in talk with her London shop-matesabout disarmament (regarding which, she had much enthusiasm and nofigures), the plebiscite at Memel, the oedipus complex, Antioch College,Ramsay MacDonald, and the best method of teaching cricket to Jewishtailors.

* * * * *

Ann had not yet seen the Continent, though her money was low and it wastime to go home. But it was spring, English spring. She learned againwhat automobiles had made all sound Americans forget, the use of legs.She walked in Kew Gardens. With a pair of English girl students shebicycled from Reigate to Tonbridge, from Petworth to Petersfield. Seeingthe country thus humbly, pushing the bike uphill, she did not feelherself a foreigner in England; she belonged to it as she belonged toAmerica. Quiet Sussex was nearer to quiet Waubanakee than was FifthAvenue.

Before she sailed, she had a week-end to herself, without her studentfriends.

All her life she had never had intimates, except for her father, OscarKlebs, Lafe Resnick, Pat Bramble, Eleanor, and Dr. Wormser. Yet she hadalways been in crowds. She discovered now that the purpose of travel isnot to seek new people, but to escape from people, and in unfamiliarityto discover one's unfamiliar self.

She went by train to Arundel, and bicycled to Amberley, beneath theSussex downs. It was the perfect picturesque village, off a Christmascalendar. For several minutes Ann gloated, like any good tourist, anddid not think about compulsion-neuroses and the wages ofherring-fishermen. She climbed to an oak-sheltered rock high on thedowns, and considered the case of Ann Vickers in this complicated worldwhich could include Sussex downs, Liberian slavery, Belle Herringdean,Prince Kropotkin, who had just died this year, and President Harding,who had just been inaugurated.

She must go back to work. If she returned to "social work," it wouldprobably be for good.

She had to be clear about it. She would never again be thirty, sittingalone in spring sunshine on a Sussex hillside, independent of everyoneso far as a human being could be, free to choose jobs and landscapes tosuit herself.

It was a definite, powerful realm, this of "social work," ofprofessional dissatisfaction with things as they are. It was unknown tomost of the people who sold groceries and weeded potatoes. It was asclearly marked off from ordinary affairs as the navy or the priesthood,and, like them, it was equally passionate whether it was wrong or right.Reform. A whole world--charity distribution, prison improvement,fighting for free speech and free divorce and birth-control and bobbedhair and spring cots in lumber camps--a hectic world composed of saints,grafters, publicity-grabbers, humorists who found senators in Stetsonhats funny, senators in Stetson hats who found Wall Street atrocious,earnest vegetarians who warred on beefsteak, cynical doctors who warredon vegetarians, and gay young people who just generally liked to throwdead cats into tabernacles.

That world had its obvious faults. Rather more than the hard-boilednewspaper paragraphers who slurred every manner of "ist," Ann, becauseshe had had to deal personally with them, disliked the lunatic fringe:the undernourished pastors who got into the newspapers by advocatinganarchism or even cubism, and the overnourished pastors who drew crowdsby denouncing alcohol and prostitution (with attractive illustrations).The people who loved authority and could best get it by dealing with thetimid and unresisting poor. The people who wanted to take out on theentire human race the sorrows of their own small childhoods. Thedemagogues who with equal glee would be elected representatives ofMoscow or of Rittenhouse Square.

Yes, said Ann to herself, it is a mad, difficult world. But all worlds,she said, that transcend mattresses and trolley-cars and porridge, aremad and difficult.

"So long," she said, "as there is one hungry and jobless man, oneill-treated child, one swamp in all the world causing malaria--and thatwill doubtless be forever--I must go on scolding at slackness andcruelty. I must do it even at the cost of hating myself as a prig--asentimentalist--a charlatan--an egotist setting up my own itch againstthe wisdom of the ages (that stupidest of superstitions!)."

But it was not yet too late to save herself from the frenzy ofsalvation. She was not a reformer because she had been a failure inpractical affairs. She had found nothing difficult in conducting anoffice, being punctual, giving directions to stenographers, imaginingwhat her competitors would do--all those occult rites whereby men becomepresidents, and bathtub manufacturers so princely that their biographiesare printed in the magazines. She could "do well" in business. She hadbeen offered the managership of the Women's Department of a Rochesterbank.

Why not?

Business--it wasn't just the sordid peddling that the highbrowspretended. It was as normal for a woman or man in the early twentiethcentury to "go into business" as for a citizen of 1200 to join thecrusades. It was the spirit of the age, and how could one affect an agesave by being in the spirit of it? Did not business men today controlpolitics, cause ministers of the gospel to preach a message comfortingto prosperity, inspire authors to write such tales of detectives aswould divert the barons of business? Was it not an inspiring notion toinfluence the more brilliant youngsters to go into business and therebyrender more intellectual the surely not ignoble affair of supplyingpeople with good shoes, tender beefsteaks, latherable soap and estheticlinoleum?

Wasn't it sense?

"Oh, probably," sighed Ann. She felt weary now. The sun was overcloudedand the breeze chilly. "But I've never yet sought sense, in a job or ina lover. I've sought what the soldier calls 'adventure,' what the priestcalls 'sanctification.' I will go on being a pest and a meddler! Forthe wisdom of this world, yea, even the wisdom of the Baptists and theMethodists, the laundrymen and garagemen, the Republicans andgolf-players, is foolishness with God."

But it seemed to her, as she bicycled back to Arundel, that her daughterPride was beside her, begging for the security of a home and not forhard paths across windy uplands.

So in the joyous spring--which manifested itself on the Atlantic in twogales and three days of fog--Ann returned to America.

Chapter 22

She had, during her year as assistant director of the OrganizedCharities Institute of New York, so much to do with discharged andparoled women convicts that she remembered her own fortnight of beingelevated and purified in the Tafford County Jail. The ex-convicts whomshe now met had not been much reformed; they came out of prisons, eventhe decentest of prisons, not with repentance but with a desire to geteven with Society. So her experience led her into what is known as"penology."

(Penology! The science of torture! The art of locking the stable-doorafter the horse is stolen! The touching faith that neurotics who hatesocial regulation can be made to love it by confining them in stinkingdens, giving them bad food and dull work, and compelling them toassociate with precisely the persons for associating with whom they havefirst been arrested. The credo, based on the premise that God createdhuman beings for the purpose of burning most of them, that it is sinfulfor an individual to commit murder, but virtuous in the State to murdermurderers. The theory that men chosen for their ability to maul unrulyconvicts will, if they be shut up in darkness, away from any publicknowledge of what they do, be inspired to pray and love these convictsinto virtue. The science of penology!)

Ann went for a year to the Green Valley Refuge for Women, in NewEngland, as educational director. She found here not much of which theprisoners could complain, though very much by which they could be bored,for a lady who has these ten years been divertingly shoplifting, gettingdrunk, being consecutively seduced and arrested, is left unstirred byeven the most competent professor of laundering. Green Valley Refuge, afifty-year-old brick hulk in walled grounds on the edge of a New Englandcity, had been built before the day when prison authorities believedthat anything could be done with lawbreakers--aged sixteen orseventy-six, morons or brilliant psychotics, sentenced for torturingchildren or for breaking Sabbath-day ordinances--except to keep themtoiling, keep them frightened, and keep them secure.

Behind the red-brick administration building, with its mansard roof andexcessive flagpole, was a cell-block with wooden floors which noscrubbing would quite free from lice and co*ckroaches, and lacking alltoilet facilities save pitchers, bowls, and buckets. There wasinsufficient room. Succeeding state legislatures, those divinely chosenvoices of the people, declined to realize (though the State Board ofControl told them often enough) that when a state doubled in populationin fifty years, the prison population might increase also. Insteel-barred wooden cells, seven feet wide, eight feet long, seven feethigh, meant for one person fifty years ago, there were now two personssuffocatingly penned, and many sleeping in cots in the corridors, whilethe legislature debated what ought to be the fine for a person catchingshort trout. The scanty grounds of the Refuge had so long been graveledthat no manner of digging by the lady convicts would produce flowers andgrass.

Yet against all this the chief officers at Green Valley, superintendentand assistant and doctor and steward and now Ann Vickers, struggled,themselves living in bare rooms, abominably paid, fed little better thanthe convicts. They had got rid of contract labor; they sought to makethe prison work a vocational training. A few women convicts who had comein as cocaine-filled, hot-eyed enemies of society actually went outeager to go straight... and if they were lucky, thereafter werepermitted to cook and wash dishes fourteen hours a day and be treatedlike virtuous hired girls instead of like fiends.

They were good women, the Green Valley officers, and during such raredebauches as their relaxing over hot cocoa at midnight, Ann loved themas she did Malvina Wormser and Mamie Bogardus.

She was going on in prison work. Yes! She pictured prisons that shouldbe combinations of hospital, technical institute, psychoanalyticallaboratory, and old English garden. She would be a power. She would makelegislatures understand that the sick in spirit needed more care thanthe sick in body.

For a year--living largely on faith, beef tea, and tutoring--she tooksociology, especially criminology, in the Columbia graduate school,teaching three evenings a week at a women's reformatory. She shared aflat with Pat Bramble, a real estate salesman now, still virginal andshining with wild-rose sweetness, but not at all wild-rosy in the matterof making clients complete their final payments. And Ann managed to getin one blissful, lazy Saturday afternoon every week, with Pat, Dr.Wormser, or Lindsay Atwell.

Lindsay had wirelessed a welcome to her boat when she returned fromEurope. He came often to see her, but he was as innocuous as the politeyoung men, the "promising young men" who would never keep the promise,who hung around Pat's apartment and helped wash dishes as a way ofsinging for their supper. For a time Ann resented it, as even careeristwomen do, that Lindsay apparently did not find her worth making love to.But she saw that he was tired. He was fighting--always fightingsomething--a million-dollar war between a railroad and a coal mine, awill-case in which one set of wastrels was trying to get away fromanother set of wastrels the money a miser had squeezed out of patentmedicines, or sometimes, not often, opposing an injunction against alabor union. When it was this last, Ann would get all radical andpleased, and Lindsay would sigh, "Yes, they're a fine bunch, the leadersof the union. But they made a bad mistake this year. They didn't hire asgood gunmen and gorillas as the Communist union, so they lost thestrike."

He came into the flat beaten with weariness. He seemed in the presenceof Pat, as much as of Ann, to find peace. Presently he stopped rubbinghis flushed eyes, and croaked, "Can't you two get away tonight?" He tookthem to restaurants of which they had never heard--the new, secretspeakeasies now beginning to creep into New York, with authentic winessmuggled in on French freighters. When he said good-night, Lindsaykissed them both, lightly.

Ann lay awake--one minute--to dream of Pride, her daughter. Wasn't Pridevery like Lindsay?

* * * * *

Not Columbia nor the convicts she taught nor Lindsay Atwell was Ann'streasure-trove, that year, but Dr. Julius C. Jelke, professor ofsociology at Columbia.

Dr. Jelke was a beer-keg of a man, very fond of billiards, port, JamesBranch Cabell, and white doeskin shoes. He began his seminar incriminology, ardently attended by Miss Ann Vickers, by drawling:

"Ladies and gentlemen, we must consider the state of prisons in Americatoday. We shall find that some of them are decent and human, and somedecidedly indecent and inhuman, and this difference will at first seemimportant. Against such naïveté I must at the beginning warn you. Thereare no good prisons! There cannot be good prisons! There can no more bea good prison than there can be a good murder or a good rape or a goodcancer.

"Even where there seems to be obvious superiority, where Prison A iscleaner, better ventilated, and less given to painful punishments thanPrison B, it is not necessarily 'better.' It may be filled with apriggish nagging which infuriates and destroys a good, sane, wholesomeyegg more than vermin and lashing. Even those of us who think we are notof Mr. Lombroso's 'criminal types' have been known to prefer slovenlybackwoods vacations to the clean houses of self-righteous shrews. Goodprisons? Good for what? For anything save to please the smugness of us,the respectable?

"At its best, any prison is so unnatural a form of segregation fromnormal life that--like too-loving parents and too-zealous religion andall other well-meant violations of individuality--it helps to preventthe victims from resuming, when they are let out, any natural rôle inhuman society. At its worst (and it is surprising how many prisons areat the worst, in this age of tender humanity, 1923) the prison is almostscientifically designed to develop by force-ripening every one of theanti-social traits for which we suppose ourselves to put people intoprison. (I say 'suppose' because actually we put people into prison onlybecause we don't know what else to do with them, and so, police andjudges and laymen alike, we hide them away from us, and show ourselves,adult human beings, the mental equals of the ostrich.) Prison makes theman who hates his bosses come out hating everyone. Prison makes the manwho is sexually abnormal, sexually a maniac. Prison makes the man whoenjoyed beating fellow-drunks in a barroom come out wanting to kill apoliceman--a perhaps not unworthy result of imprisonment, consideringthat in most cities and villages the mental test for a policeman is thathe shall weigh a hundred and ninety pounds and have a skull equallyinvulnerable to clubs and to civility.

"I will give you a formula whereby you can test the intelligence andthought of all officials, of all persons dealing practically anddirectly with prisons: Any prison official who is intelligent believessecretly, no matter what he says or writes, that all prisons, of everykind, good or bad, must be abolished.

"And what is to take their place? A hundred and fifty years ago, mosteven of the authorities who believed that torture (a practice still veryfashionable in the United States, under the name of the Third Degree)was shameful and futile, still did not see what could be substituted forit. Doubtless privily they said, 'Theoretically I'm against torture, butafter all, I'm a hard-boiled practical criminologist, and until we getsomething better, we'll have to go on using the rack and the ironmaiden--though, being a humanitarian, I believe in putting a nice softpillow under the scoundrel's neck when you tie him on the rack.'

"Probably we cannot tomorrow turn all the so-called criminals loose andclose the jails--though of course that is just what we are doing, on theinstallment plan, by letting them go at the end of their sentences. No,Society cannot free the victims Society has unfitted for freedom.Doubtless, since the Millennium is still centuries ahead, it isadvisable to make prisons as sanitary and well-lighted as possible, thatthe convicts may live out their living death more comfortably. Only,keep your philosophy straight. Do not imagine that when you have bycarelessness in not inoculating them let your victims get smallpox youare going to save them or exonerate yourselves by bathing their brows,however grateful the bathing may be.

"What is to take the place of prisons? Something will. Fundamentally,such institutions as parole and probation for those who merely need alittle help and reconstruction. For the ethically diseased, for theincurable, safe-keeping in hospitals. There is no more reason forpunishing the ethically sick than the physically sick. And, since therevolutionist in criminology is actually so much more 'hard-boiled' thanany Tammany judge, he would not infrequently give a sentence for life tounfortunates who now get only five years. If a man is incurably rotten,if he is an incurable homicide or rapist or torturer of children, thenhe is not going to be any better after five years in prison. He must beshut away for keeps, not vengefully, but in the same attitude as we shutaway incurable carriers of typhoid. Only I want his 'incurability' tobe passed on, not by a judge whose training in psychiatry has beenacquired by playing poker and attending clambakes with the leadingpoliticians of his district, but by trained psychiatrists... if suchpersons exist. If not, let's for a season shut up West Point andAnnapolis and see whether it may not be as useful socially to trainhealers as to train killers.

"The infamy of criminals is a favorite dinner-table topic. But thefutility of prisons is a topic as little known among allegedlyintelligent people as the teleology of the Tibetans. In certain socialproblems, a trace of knowledge has now been spread about, so that oneexpects even a hobo, a Fifth Avenue rector, or a president of the UnitedStates to have some elementary notion that war and capitalism--theconduct of business solely for the private gain of the more foxlikehuman beings--are not sacred and permanent. But that darkness, stench,obedience to inferiors, a mode of life which combines the horror of abayonet-duel with the petty meanness of village gossip, are not theremedies for complex sicknesses of the soul is a theory as unknown tomost judges, lawyers, wardens, legislators, and plain citizens today asit was to the bloody cess-pool of Newgate Prison a hundred years ago.

"The ordinary citizen, when he hears of infamous crimes, alwaysexclaims, 'We must increase prison sentences!' He is right, in hisdetestation of crime. But what he should say is, 'Since crime increases,obviously the prison-system is proven a failure. We must try somethingelse.'

"Before the next meeting, I wish you would read..."

Ann came out of it a little dazed. Where, then, were all her plans forcoaxing the public to make "good" prisons? Oh, well, she had to workon.... There is no good work, she thought, that is not in essence afinal destruction of itself that something greater may take its place.

* * * * *

She had passed her New York State civil service examinations. In a fewweeks she would have that symbol of cloistered learning, a Master ofArts degree (strange mystic title!). She went to Professor Jelke andspiritedly demanded:

"I've seen a good penal institution--Green Valley. I planned to stay inNew York. But now I want to see the worst possible pen, or I shan't knowanything about penology as it really is. What do you advise?"

"Well, there are plenty of bad ones. You mean for women? Well, I shouldthink one of the worst was the Women's Division of the Copperhead GapPenitentiary in the state of Blank. But it would be hard to get you inthere. Jobs as prison matrons, especially in backward states, arereserved for the politicians' female relatives who are too mean andignorant to get jobs keeping pigs. But there's one chance: Mrs. AlbertWindelskate, who's on the Blank State Board of Control--wife of aloan-shark, I believe. She's a very charitable and intellectual lady,and pretty terrible. I meet her at prison conventions. She writesme--oh, God, how she writes me! About castrating criminals, only she'stoo delicate to call it that--she just loves to think about it. I'llwrite her. By the way: if you should go to Copperhead, my friend JessieVan Tuyl is doing three years there on a charge of criminal syndicalism.Splendid woman."

* * * * *

Miss Ann Vickers, M. A., was appointed educational director and chiefclerk (combined salaries, $1300 and maintenance) of the Women's Divisionat Copperhead Gap, in a state whose patron saint was William JenningsBryan.

Dr. Wormser said, "Fine! If you last till the middle of fall, threemonths from now, what say we spend October out at my cottage?"

Pat Bramble said, "Oh. How much do you get? Lord, is that all? Oh, comeon and sell real estate."

Lindsay Atwell said, "Copperhead Gap? I don't know what they do to womenthere, but I had a man client who went in a forger and came out amurderer. Though of course I mustn't exaggerate; the world has grownbetter, and so have prisons. We've got rid of torture.... Ann! It'sso hot this evening--I think I'll run over to Scotland for amonth--let's walk up Riverside Drive."

* * * * *

They sat on a bench above the Hudson. The heat had softened New York toa tropic languor. The miles of benches were filled with summer lovers,and past them strolled sailors with arms about noisy girls. The fleetwas in; its searchlights clashed in the sky; and the tinpanny bands atPalisades Park across the river were jungle tom-toms.

"Ann!" Lindsay sighed. "I've taken a beastly advantage of you, this pastwinter. I realize now that I've always assumed you would be willing toplay around with me when I was tired. I do get tired, and yet it boresme to rest. You've rather saved my life." He squeezed her hand, buttheir palms were damp, and he let go. She could feel the pressureafterward, stirring her a little out of the July lassitude.

"You have so much reality, Ann. One doesn't have to fence with you.You're not vain and egocentric, and you don't appraise every man just inratio as he serves you. For that reason, because I've been so securewith you, probably I haven't realized how desperately fond of you I'vebecome. This horrible plan of yours to go to that pocket edition ofhell, Copperhead Gap, has waked me up. Don't! It's mad! Come to Scotlandwith me--in the proper connubial relationship, I mean, of course. You'denjoy tramping through the Trossachs, I think."

"If you were passionately in love with me----"

"I would be!"

"When you are, you'll come grab me, and not argue over it, like a willunder probate! But I am fond of you. But I wouldn't give up a chance tofight Copperhead Gap for anything--well, almost anything. No."

* * * * *

She wished afterward that she had coaxed him into embracing her,overpowering her. But it was too late, now when she could with suchdesperate clarity see his kind eyes. What were these "women's wiles" ofwhich she read in novels? Couldn't she master them: be complimentary; becoyly aloof, be wistful, be fluttered by his handclasp, rouse him to aconviction that she was a swooning mystery which he must penetrate?

"In other words, lie and play-act! No, I'm hanged if I will!" said Ann.

Her solitary bed was hot with July.

"'The world has grown better--we've got rid of torture,'" she cynicallyquoted him.

Chapter 23

Mrs. Albert Windelskate, that most public-spirited lady who gave hertime free to the State Board of Control of Prisons and to the ensuingnewspaper publicity, had a summer cottage at Timgad Springs, theprincipal resort of her state. It was on the way to Olympus City, thestation for the Copperhead Gap Penitentiary, and she had invited Ann tospend a day of rest and mutual eleemosynary congratulation.

Mrs. Windelskate met Ann at the station with a handsome sedan, equippedwith a pressed-glass vase containing artificial flowers.

"It's so hot! My, you must have just suffered, on the train. I thoughtwe'd go out to the country club for lunch. Your train for Olympus Cityleaves at three; that will get you to the penitentiary about five. Oh,Miss Vickers, we all think it's just grand you're coming to take part inour prison reform, with your education and training in the East and all.A lot of New York and Boston folks seem to think that in the South andWest we aren't up to the latest stunts in scientific criminology, andyou'll be able to go back and tell 'em the fine things we've done. Why,they've got a gymnasium now for the female convicts at Copperhead! Thatwas all my idea, my husband and I. We ourselves contributed a hundreddollars. 'I reckon you think we'll go broke, with all our charities,' Isaid to him, but he just laughed, and he says, 'Oh, I reckon we canstand it.' That's just like him. You wouldn't think to see how smart heis in business--he's in the loan and mortgage business--he does such alot of good--why, I don't know what a lot of farmers and storekeeperswould do in Pearl County if he didn't let them have the money and helpthem out, and I'm sure he never forecloses if there's any earthly wayof preventing it, he just does all he can to prevent it, though Heavenknows they're so improvident--buying autos and washing-machines and soon and so forth when they pretend they can't pay the interest. But as Isay, seeing him in his office, he's so peppy and efficient and so on,you'd never guess that when it comes to criminology and charity and all,his heart is as soft as--as soft as anything. And then Dr. Slenk--at theprison, I mean--the warden, Dr. Addington Slenk--I was largelyresponsible for getting him appointed in place of that old crank theyhad there for warden before--he's such an up-to-date scientificpenologist--you'll just adore Dr. Slenk."

(During this delivery of the oracle, Mrs. Windelskate was driving Ann tothe Indian Mound Country Club and leading her to the red tile terrace atthe edge of the sloping golf course.)

"Of course, as Dr. Slenk says, there is a great deal of nonsense andsentimentality talked about prison reform. Prisons aren't intended to bepicnics. If a man deliberately goes and steals, you aren't going toreward him by treating him like a millionaire! As Dr. Slenk says, toomany merely theoretical reformers tend to lose sight of the fact thatwhile prisons must primarily regenerate people who have gone wrong,still they must also have a good wholesome deterrent effect, so thatcriminals won't want to come back in any hurry!

"And here in the mountains we get a lot of pretty hard cases, and itdoesn't do to treat them too soft. They aren't used to it; they'd justtake advantage of you if you gave 'em a lot of luxuries--pie every day,and a lot of bathrooms that I'm sure a lot of decent law-abiding folkslike us can't even begin to afford! For a lot of these hill-billies,prison is the most regenerating and civilizing force, when it'shandled by a fine gentlemanly man like Dr. Slenk. You just can'timagine! Why, at home those folks just live on sorghum and sow-belly,and they're too pleased for words when they get prunes and like that inprison!

"No, as Dr. Slenk says, the great regenerative force is hard, usefullabor. In the men's division, we have some perfectly fine industries--afoundry where we make kitchenware, and an overall mill, and in thewomen's division, a fine shirt and underwear factory. Maybe ourmachinery isn't quite so up to date as we'd like it, but that'll come intime. It's a shame, though, that the contractors that take our finishedgoods off us can't be persuaded to pay us what they ought to. No civicfeeling! We'd like to pay the inmates a quarter a day for their labor,to encourage them, but we can't afford more than five cents a day, andthat really doesn't come to much, even in a long sentence. But still,all this modern industry does teach those poor unfortunate wretches howto take their place in society when they come out. Sobriety! Chastity!Hard, unceasing labor! Obeying rules, promptly and without chewing therag! What priceless lessons!

"It's time to order lunch. I hope you like our club. Sweet littleclubhouse, isn't it! Do you know, it cost a hundred and fifty thousanddollars. Made of the very finest materials. I often say to Mr.Windelskate, 'There! That's one building that's going to last, in thisday when there's so much sloppy building.' I do believe in building forthe future. That's why I work so hard over the poor lost lambs inprison, though Heaven knows I never get any thanks or credit for it,though the Governor, the Governor himself, did say to me, 'Mrs.Windelskate,' he said, 'I doubt if you'll ever know what it means to theinstitutions and public activities of this state to have a leading womanlike you take such a personal interest in them'--though, as I told him,I don't claim to have any special knowledge of all these sociologicalstunts, but I just do feel you can't afford to neglect the advice andinterest of any earnest and public-spirited woman! And you'd besurprised how much money Mr. Windelskate and I put into our charitiesand all, and into our little home--we live in Pearlsburg, in winter, ofcourse. It's ten times as big as Timgad Springs. The last census gave us27,000 population, and I shouldn't be in the least surprised if when itcomes time for the 1930 census, let's see, that will be six years fromnow, we'll have 30,000 population, if not thirty-five!

"But now about the prison, there's one thing I must warn you about.Heaven knows no one could be closer to the actual running of it than Iam. And so when disgruntled people claim the prisoners don't get verygood food and sanitation and have to work too hard--it's just too bad,now, isn't it! lot of degenerate criminals actually having to work ashard as you and me and other decent people!--and when I hear peoplesaying and making criticisms like that--oh, yes, there's blatherskitesand soreheads and Heaven knows what all--a so-called liberal preacher, aUniversalist, in Pearlsburg, that he'll say anything to cause asensation and get himself talked about!--folks that can only see thedestructive side--not one constructive thought in their heads!

"But I happen to know what's the source of all these false rumors, andthat's what I wanted to warn you about. There's a prisoner in thewomen's division at Copperhead that calls herself Mrs. Jessica Van Tuyl.She's a Communist and anarchist and labor agitator and trouble-maker ofthe very worst sort. I happen to know this Van Tuyl woman wasresponsible for all sorts of dynamitings and sluggings and shootingsfrom ambush and all kinds of outrageous conduct on the part ofstrikers in the recent coal and tenant-farmer strikes. She was sent upfor criminal syndicalism and conspiracy for three years--it should havebeen life, if our judges weren't so weak-kneed and so afraid of publicopinion! And this is the woman who's been managing to sneak out allsorts of lying letters about conditions in the prison, and getting allsorts of false and damaging reports spread about.

"Oh, it's a thankless task, but still I do feel, don't you, that it'sthe duty of our better families and our better-educated class to go intopolitics and not leave it to a lot of ignorant, prejudiced, commonpoliticians, don't you think so? I'm so glad you've come to help us. Youjust watch this Van Tuyl woman, and let her understand how decent,strict, law-abiding people feel about her. Shall we have a co*cktailbefore lunch?"

* * * * *

Ann had been given to a certain neatness of hair and gloves and shoes,but as the heat glared in from the red-clay hills, as dust danced on thered-plush seats of the day coach, and the stink of peanuts and baby grewthicker, she gave up worrying over the fact that her hair was in wispsover her forehead.

She carelessly noticed a woman three seats ahead who kept fidgeting,peering out of the window, looking back, like one to whom travel wasunfamiliar and exciting. She was an ash-gray old negress, in rusty blacksatin Sunday dress and a chip hat of 1890. Ann wondered why the negresswas not in the Jim Crow seats at the back of the car. It was probablybecause she was with a man who, though he did not turn his head, seemedfrom the planes of his thick neck to be white.

The negress was afraid of something. While she was staring slack-jawedat some alien wonder--the Italian matron who wore enormous glassearrings and chewed salami out of a basket; the urbane traveling-manwith gray-flannel suit, silk shirt, and large thumb ring--her neck wouldseem to drop down into her body, her lips part and quiver.

"Olllllllllympus Ciiiiity!" chanted the brakeman.

Ann could see the negress's lips, in profile, form, "Oh my God!" Thewoman turned about then, and Ann forgot her in lifting down from therack her bags, such heavy bags of books that were all filled withstatistics about the trickiness of human nature, about psychology, athing that the ash-pale negress up there could never understand.

The station, as Ann staggered out to it--the brakeman gallantly helpingher with her bags--was a frame shanty with the red paint peeling, theplatform like an open blast-furnace. Against the depot wall leaned halfa dozen loafers, barefoot and in tattered straw hats. But in front ofthem stood out a figure not at all languid; a man tall as a pine,resolute, terrifying; a man with a long yellow horse-face, acute littlered eyes, and hands like bloated centipedes. Three front teeth weregone; the rest were black. He wore a gray hickory shirt, red suspenders,a Stetson hat like a circus tent, and a belt from which hung the holsterof a long revolver.

He opened his thin mouth like a snapping-turtle. Toward him a shortbroad man, with a face like a beefsteak, and as expressionless, wasdragging the negress whom Ann had been watching, and Ann saw now--theback of the seat had hidden it on the train--that the old woman washandcuffed to her white companion.

"Hello, Sheriff," bawled the tall pine to the man with the negress. "Sothis is the old nigg*r bitch. Croaked her man with an axe, eh? We'llshow her something better than an axe!"

The loafers, the sheriff, the tall man himself grated with laughter,like the grinding brakes of a rusty car.

"Yep, Cap'n, here she is--Sister Lil Hezekiah. Sister, want you to meetthe gentleman that'll have the pleasure of tying a rope round yourskinny neck, you murderin' old hell-cat! God, Cap'n, back yonder I swearshe almost bit me!"

"She won't bite me!" The tall man reached out an arm, fingers extended,like the arm of an approaching monster in a nightmare. The fingers creptslowly down on the negress, seemed to thrust into her eyes, clamped onher shoulder, while she dropped to her knees on the blistering planks ofthe platform, her still handcuffed wrist twisted by the brawny sheriff.She foamed at the mouth, with a panic wailing out of the jungle. Thetall man held her while the handcuffs were unlocked, ran her toward amotor truck lettered, "Copperhead Penitentiary," boosted her up into it,and half turned away. Her cobwebbed gray face looked out. He swung andslapped her--it sounded as though her thin skull had cracked--and shevanished into the truck again, while the loafers chuckled.

"They say Sister Hezekiah is a powerful prayer, real Prayin'Pentecostal, even if she did kind of go and git absent-minded andsharpen up the axe on her old man!" giggled the sheriff.

"Well, she better pray! Whyntch you lynch her, like you ought to done,and save the state all this expense?" growled the tall man.

"Why, Cap'n!" stammered the sheriff, surprised and hurt. "You can'tlynch a nigg*r for just killing another nigg*r! Fact, hadn't ought tohang 'em, for that! But she did almost bite me! By God, I'd like to helpbump her off myself! Don't forget I get to see the hanging. Never didsee a hanging, Cap'n. Ain't that funny?--not even a nigg*r. Say, is ittrue they get their heads yanked right off sometimes when they drop?"

* * * * *

A hand touched Ann's sleeve. She had not been aware, in her trance, thata slouching, heat-drugged, negro driver had been mumbling, "Taxi, lady,taxi?"

"Oh. Taxi? Oh, yes, I want a taxi," she whispered.

"Where to, lady?"

She could not admit that she was going to the prison--that she was acolleague of "Cap'n," the tall man with the long yellow face.

But perhaps the driver would merely think that she was the wife or thefriend of a convict.

"To the prison," she panted, and indeed the driver did believe, fromthe terrified hate she put into the word, that she was one of the womenwho, more than the prisoners, pay for their men's crime.

* * * * *

Main Street, Olympus City, was distinguished by drifted piles of reddust, in which dogs were sleeping or lazily scratching unambitiousfleas, one- and two-story frame shops, not recently painted, in front ofwhich, in tilted chairs on the plank sidewalk, the owners were sleeping,and dusty sycamore trees, in which the sparrows were sleeping.

The road from Olympus to the penitentiary was across a clay upland,rimmed with hills. The road was unyieldingly straight, and sped amongfarms of unpainted small shanties and unpainted large pig-pens,cornfields, and tobacco fields that seemed a little wilted. It was adesert; it was not of sand, but of red soil and yellowy-green leaves,yet it was a desert, and hot, like Death Valley.

"I can't stand it! Hitting that poor old insane woman! I'm going back!"agonized Ann, too paralyzed to do it. She was weak with shame that shehad not denounced the sheriff and the Cap'n.

She expected the Copperhead Gap Penitentiary to look altogether hideous.But she saw, haughty beyond red fields, a shining building of limestone,with tall pillars. The car shook itself up a low hill, through asycamore grove. At the foot of the hill was a creek, lined withfresh-looking willows. The driveway to the pillared entrance was edgedwith lawns and rose-beds.

"Why, it's a palace! Perhaps that horrible man, that 'Cap'n' wasn'ttypical. I'll get rid of him!" Ann comforted herself.

An obsequious negro-trusty in well-washed black alpaca opened the bronzegates of the main building and waved her gushingly into a lobby of whitemarble floor, pink marble columns, and yellow marble stairway, with nohint of prison about it.

"Miss Vickers, ma'am, yassum, Miss Vickers. Been expecting you, MissVickers. The warden's office right here on the right, ma'am."

"There's nothing," said Ann to herself, "mean and beastly about allthis. If anything, my girl, it's a little too Ritzy for you. Oh, Isuppose Dr. Slenk has to put up with what beastly guards the politicianswish on him!"

She hesitated into the warden's office; was ushered by the brisk youngwoman secretary into Dr. Slenk's private room. It was a handsome, tallapartment, with oak pilasters, a carved oak fireplace, and portraits ofRobert E. Lee, John William Golightly, present governor of the state,and the Good Shepherd being merciful to His lambs. The open casem*ntwindows let in the brilliance of the lawns and rose-beds.

Dr. Slenk was rising to greet her, his hand out almost affectionately."Miss Vickers! It's a real privilege to have you with us! I hope youwill enjoy your work here. I certainly do. Oh, there's sad tragedies.And we make so many mistakes. But what greater privilege than trying tohelp the unfortunate, to help the sinner go straight? I hope you'llenjoy your work here with us. Yes, I certainly do! Have a hot journey?And how did you find Mrs. Windelskate? I don't know what we'd do withouther help and suggestions. But I'm sure she never did anything morepractical than getting you here. Yes, I certainly do!"

He was such a nice little man, Dr. Slenk--as neat as a fox-terrier--theneatest little linen collar and polka-dotted blue tie and white shirtand little black oxfords--the neatest and most literary tortoise-rimmedfolding eyeglasses, which he merrily closed and snapped open as hetalked.

"Yes, it was pretty hot. Yes..." She went on, but she did not knowwhat she was saying; she had no proper notion of making an impression;she was thinking, "I wonder if I dare tell him about that brute at thestation?"

"Oh, so you went to the country club with Mrs. Windelskate! Well! I doenvy you, on a hot day like this! Wish I'd been there! Lovely place,isn't it, the club--wish we could give our poor Boys and the Women herea place like that, but 'fraid it wouldn't be quite deterrent, hee, hee,hee! Oh! Here comes my right bower--the deputy warden and captain ofguards--Captain Waldo Dringoole."

Into the room, like a slouching elephant, was coming the horse-facedhigh man who had slapped the negress at the station. He wore a blueuniform coat now, but he hadn't removed the umbrella-like Stetson.

"Yes," cooed Warden Slenk, "I reckon you might say Cap'n Waldo here isthe real boss of the prison. I'm just the gadabout, you might say. Imeet the citizens of our good state, and I talk with the officials andfind out what they want us to do, but it's Cap'n Waldo that reallycarries it out.... Miss Vickers, Captain Waldo Dringoole!...Cap'n, Miss Vickers is in for the comparatively minor crime of being asociologist, so let her off easy--don't give her the dark cells--notyet! Hee, hee, hee."

He was a jolly little man, Doc Slenk--except during riots. Always likethat, joking and friendly, and snapping his trick eyeglasses open andshut.

Before Ann could flinch away, Cap'n Waldo had smothered her hand in hisvast hoof, and from his rocky elevation was bellowing down, "Welcome toour city, like the fellow says, little lady! Saw you at the depot, but Iwas kind of tied up. I don't know what the hell a 'sociologist' is, butif you're it, it's all right by me! But you ain't going to like it! Wegot some pretty tough cons here. We try to treat 'em square, but, Lordlove you, they just take advantage of you. Well, you better stick arounda month or so--be good experience for you--and then beat it back to yourcolleges and houses of refuge and all that soft-soap bunk. Say, in youroff time, the Old Lady and me would be tickled to death if you'd come tothe house and have a bottle of Coca-Cola with us." Ann perceived thatthe man was trying to be cordial. But his gap-toothed smile, as heloomed over her, was terrifying. "Now you're making a first beginning,little lady, let me warn you. There's a lot of cranks and sentimentaltheorists--the-orists!--especially where you come from, that seemslike they got the idea you can handle a lot of yeggs, that'd shoot youjust 's soon 's eat, by begging 'em to be good boys and girls, andcoddling 'em, and giving 'em bathtubs and champagne wine and surpriseparties and God knows what all monkeyshines! That's fine for a lot ofthese theorists that never been nearer a real, honest-to-God prison thana college campus. But me, I'm only fifty-two, but I been right inpractical prison work, and sheriff and like that, for thirty-two mortalyears, and I tell you the only way you can handle criminals--they simplyain't human, what we call human, and the only way you can handle 'em isto put the fear of God into 'em, so they'll behave themselves whilethey're in the pen and not want to come back when they get out. Besquare with 'em, of course. But just let 'em see you're the by Godboss, and not scared to punish 'em proper if they try to get awaywith anything! I'm not scared of 'em, and they know it. Long's a mantreats me right, and does just exactly to the last detail what I by Godtell him and no argument about it which way or t' other, why, I treathim right, and the damn cons know it!"

(They were seated now: Dr. Slenk beaming and nodding at his desk; Cap'nWaldo flooding an armchair and making the gestures suitable to hisoratory; Ann hypnotized, save for her fingers, which nervously gallopedon her knee.)

"That's real 'scientific criminology,' ain't it? Cause and effect! Raisehell and you get hell! Anything more scientific than that? And talkabout psychology (of course I was just kidding when I said I didn't knowabout sociology; I'll bet I've read a hell of a lot more real, deep,learned books than most of these guys that claim to be so wise, only Idon't shoot off my mouth about 'em)--and when it comes to psychology,here's the real low-down on it. Why are criminals criminals? Becausethey think they're too good to mind the rules. Then what ought a keeperto do with 'em? Why, break 'em! Show 'em they ain't better than therun of folks--matter of fact, show 'em they ain't any good at all, andthe only way they can get along, in prison or out, is by minding allthe rules, no matter what they are, and minding 'em quick, and noback-chat! Fact, it's a good thing to give 'em fool rules that don'tmean nothing, just so they will learn to do what they're told, nomatter what it is! And if they don't--break 'em! I do! I'm not afraidto lash 'em (not supposed to, by law, but we're just talking betweenourselves now, not for the fool legislature). I'm not afraid to keep 'emin the hole for two months if necessary, with no clothes and no bed andno light, and mighty little bread, and just enough water so they'realways thirsty, night and day. I'm not afraid to truss 'em up in theblanket-roll--that's what we call the straitjacket here--till they feelthey're busting. (The warden isn't supposed to know about these things,so don't tell him. He passes the buck to me on all that!)"

They laughed knowingly, both men--laughed with shrill pleasantry, likeuncles laughing at the pranks of a baby.

"You see, Miss--Vickers, is it?--here's the point. It's not only a loteasier for us, but it's a lot kinder to the cons themselves, to let themknow there's no use their trying to beat the game. My God, it's right inthe Bible: 'Spare the rod and spoil the child'! The quicker theyunderstand what they're up against, the happier they are. They got tolearn discipline. Discipline! That's the greatest word in the Englishlanguage! I tell you, if the truth were known, the worst trick that wasever played on these poor devils was to do what the fool theorists call'reforming' the prisons! Chumps like this wind-bag Osborne, and thisschool teacher Kirchwey! Why if I could just have some of the good oldpunishments, if I could brand the incorrigibles so's people could seejust what those skunks are, if I could lash 'em, not on the Q. T. but inpublic, so's it'd be a warning and a deterrent to everybody, give 'emfive hundred strokes with a real cat-o'-nine-tails--stop when theyfainted, and go to it again, and put plenty of salt in the scratchesafterwards--why, say if I could do that, I'd cure all crime in ajiffy! Yes, sir, it's an outrage that a fellow is prevented by thenewspapers and these damn so-called reformers from doing what experienceteaches us would turn all these wretched offenders into good, straight,God-fearing men! Well, say, sister, I didn't mean to make a Fourth o'July oration! But I just thought you ought to know the real inside factsof the matter at the start, so you can't go out afterwards and complainwe were putting anything over on you. I tell you, with my experience Ican learn you more real, honest-to-God, practical penology in fiveminutes than you could learn in these colleges and wishy-washyreformatories in five years. Hey, Warden?"

"Well, Cap'n Waldo, you know I disagree with you about a lot of things.But there is much to what he says, Miss Vickers. We all like to work outnew theories of psychology, but as Shakespeare, or whoever it was, says,'the plow-horse Practice cannot with the trotter Theory keep pace.'Well, Cap'n, will you take Miss Vickers out and introduce her to Mrs.Bitlick and the girls and show her where to hang her hat?"

It may be that Ann's paralysis of rage looked like complaisantstupidity. At least Captain Waldo gazed at her not unapprovingly as hegrowled, "Well, sister, maybe you'll learn this game, even if you didwaste time going to college.... Enker! ENKER!" His roar wasterrifying. The negro-trusty doorman popped into the office like thehumorous servant in a farce.

"Yassah, Cap'n Waldo!"

"Take Miss Vickers's satchels and the rest of her truck to the Matrons'Dormitory, and make it snappy."

"Yassah!"

The doorman yearned at the black-toothed, pigskin-faced giant, Cap'nWaldo, like a worshiper before a sacred statue. It is a question whetherAnn was more sick, more frightened, or more homicidal, but all threewholesome emotions were so mixed and confounded in her that she wasstill silent as she rose to Cap'n Waldo's, "Well, come on, sister."

Outside, Cap'n Waldo snigg*red, "Say, you know I don't have to go downto the depot for cons, like I done today. Hell no! I'm the boss! Butit's just kind of fun to go, when you got a tough homicide!"

Chapter 24

At the back of the slick and marbled lobby of the entrance hall, withits air of a hotel for promoters and the higher blackmailers, was a lowdoor with no hotel aspect to it whatever: a steel door with steel studs.(What the studs were for, except to look nasty, Ann never did discover.)Cap'n Waldo flourished his ring of keys in the lofty way in whichofficials do flourish keys, and led Ann through the door into acorridor of cement and brick. It was damp, and lighted only by electriclights in small, fly-spotted globes. It was like a large sewer. Up aspiral steel stairway then, in a cement well, as though she wereascending a lighthouse.

"Wait!" puffed Cap'n Waldo. "I'll show you something! Men are most of'em in the shops or out on the farm, and you can peep in." He sounded asthough he were giving her candy. "You ain't supposed to--men'sdivision! But I'll let you for once."

He pompously flourished his keys again, opened a steel door, andescorted her out on a floor of dark steel plates cast in a pattern oftiny raised diamonds. She tilted her head in amazement. She was at thefocus of a building like a gigantic Y, each arm of the Y three hundredfeet long and fifty wide. Here at the focus was a circular lobby, opento the roof, from which she could look up at three stories of barredcells stretching in two double rows the length of each arm. The brightsteel bars were like racks of rifles in an unending armory. Toward herthese glaring lines swooped like the nightmare of a cubist.

A man, a human being, could no more live in that multiple cage than in adynamo!

The small prisons she knew--the cottages at the Eastern Girls' Refuge,the steel and wooden cages at Green Valley--were homely as an old-timegarret beside this Grand Canyon of steel bars.

The July heat was thickened by stinks of sweat, old food, old toilets,slops, cheap pipe-tobacco, crushed co*ckroaches, and disinfectant, yetthe spreading lines of steel seemed icy. Ann shivered.

"Fine cells, eh?" said Cap'n Waldo. "Sixteen hundred of 'em--enough so'swe ain't hardly crowded a bit--only three hundred cells where they'redoubled up!" The Cap'n looked at the bars as proudly as King Solomon athis sixteen hundred children. "Yes, sir! Now that's real prison reform!The hardest steel on the market!"

Toward them, on the cell floor where they stood, wavered a half-humanfigure; an unshaven old man, pale as veal, in a ragged dressing-gownonce black and purple, flannelette pajamas of a sickly green, and canvassneakers.

"How-do, Cap'n! How-do! How-do! Sweet gal you got there! Yessir, sweet!Come here, sweetie!" The old man was advancing in a sneaking sidewisecrawl, waving his talons.

"Git out of here, Daddy, or I'll put the bloodhounds on you!" Cap'nWaldo sounded not ill-natured, but the old man crept away, leering atAnn over his shoulder. As Cap'n Waldo motioned her back to the stairwayhe chuckled, "Funny old cuss, that. We don't hardly make him work atall--still, he's a good block man--sweeps the corridors pretty good. Andlet me tell you, there's one man that obeys and does what I tellhim--yessir, he'll follow me like a licked dog!"

"What is he in for?"

"Oh, he kind of got in trouble with his daughter, and then a lot ofneighbors claimed he killed her kid. Don't believe it. Why, say, he's afine old fellow. Obedient. Though they do say they had to give him ahundred lashes one time, his first sentence."

"Oh. His first one. When was that?"

"Before my time, but----Let's see. Must have been about fifty-five yearsago. But we got him reformed now."

* * * * *

Up two more steel flights, down two, through another sewer-likecorridor, and they came into the Women's Division, which occupied threefloors at the end of one arm of the giant Y. They entered by thecell-floor. It was not so overpowering as the three-tiered cage seenfrom the rotunda; there were but eighty cells here, occupied by ahundred women, as against the nineteen hundred men convicts. It was notoverpowering, no; it was merely terrifying, to walk past the emptysteel-fronted cement cages. Each cell had a double-decker bunk of steelpiping, a rickety stool, a staggering little wooden table, a tin bowland tin pitcher, and a large tin bucket, as sole furniture in a woman'shome for two--ten--forty years of her life.

co*ckroaches scuttled in front of Ann across the gangway between thecell-rows, and once a rat flashed over. Like the men's division, thecorridor stank with disinfectant and the odor of sweat.

"Damn, dirty, lazy wenches--just can't get 'em to kill off the bugs,"said Cap'n Waldo cheerfully. "Look now. Got four condemnedcells--separate room at the end--special stairs from it goes down to thegallows, in the basem*nt. Makes it handy when we have to execute awoman. You'll see we allow the gals in the condemned cells to havepictures--but limited to pictures of near relations, of course, and onlytwo apiece. We like to do that, to cheer 'em up in their last days. Herethey are."

With another flourish he revealed a room of four cells. There wasunexpected turmoil. Two beefy men guards, in blue and brass buttons,were thrusting into a cell what seemed to be a crazed dog strugglingwith claws and teeth to get out of a bag. Ann made it out as LilHezekiah, the negro murderess. They had taken her black satin best dressaway and her little straw best hat, and put her into a uniform ofgingham so washed-out that it looked like a dried old dishrag.

"Shove her in, boys," Cap'n Waldo said casually to the guards. "Got hermugged and fingerprinted? Hey! Don't let her kick like that! What's thematter with you boys? Afraid of a skinny old nigg*r hag? Grab her legs.That's the way! There!"

As one of the guards closed the barred door, he beamed on Cap'n Waldoand croaked, "Yeh, got her all mugged. God help the matron that has tomake her take a bath, though! She must be crazy, that old devil!"

Then, out of her stunned horror, Ann began to speak, as a hundred timesshe had almost begun. "She's not crazy, Captain Dringoole! Oh, I'm sureof it! She's simply terrified."

"Sure, I know, honey. She'll be all right now. She'll get used to it,and anyway, we'll yank her downstairs and hang her quick, so it don'tmatter. They do get scared; ain't got sense enough to see they can't donothing. But they shut up--see, like this other old coot here. We had amonstrous lot of trouble with her, but now she behaves herself and keepsquiet."

He was pointing at the one other woman in the condemned block, watchedby two matrons. She was indeed quiet. She had no face; merely two holesburning in a mask of white cotton. She sat hunched on her stool. She didnot move, save that her fingertips crept round and round and round herlax mouth. Her head hung a bit on one side, like the head of a woman whohas been hanged.

* * * * *

Cap'n Waldo left Ann at the office of Mrs. Bitlick, head-matron of thewomen's division, on the floor above the women's cells.

"Afternoon, Sister Bitlick. Behaving yourself? Here's the young ladythat's come from Boston-way, I reckon it is, to teach us old codgers howto run a pen. You girls be good now. Think over what I said,Miss--uh--Vickers. In a week, you'll see it just like I do."

"Well!" said Mrs. Bitlick, when Cap'n Waldo had gallantly waved hishat and gone. "I declare! First time I ever knew Cap'n Waldo to take thetrouble to bring anybody here himself! Most generally sends that freshnigg*r, Enker. Reckon you must have made a hit with him. Better becareful of him!" Mrs. Bitlick was laughing, in a vague, pop-eyed,amiable way.

For one half hour then, Mrs. Bitlick (there is no describing her; shelooked more or less female, with more or less gray-streaked brown hair;and she more or less wore a blue uniform dress) explained that thoughAnn apparently was a great friend and favorite of Mrs. Windelskate,she must put her mind to it and learn that here at Copperhead Gap,nobody played no favors, never, and Ann must take her place and obeythe rules for officers just like she'd come from way up yonder onStarvation Ridge.

Mrs. Bitlick said it all rather hopefully, as though no matter whatpessimists might think, she herself was certain that Ann would breakthose rules and be kicked out after a stay just long enough to give themall a good laugh.

"And now I reckon you'd like to go to your room and wash up," said Mrs.Bitlick.

She did not escort Ann. She rang, and into the office trotted averitable Brownie: round eyes, round nose, round mouth with a roundgrin; a lively, jiggling, white Topsy, who looked fifteen, who looked asthough she had put on only for a masquerade this prison costume ofwashed-out-dishrag dress and square-toed high black shoes. She grinnedat Ann, she grinned at Mrs. Bitlick.

"Birdie! You been smoking again. Yes you have! I can smell it!"

"Oh, no, Mis' Bitlick! Me? I never smoke no more! I just study all thetime on being a good girl when I get out, and smoking is bad--my!smoking leads to all kind of devilments! I just think about everythingyou and Mis' Kaggs tells me, all the time. You're so good to a po' gal!"

Mrs. Bitlick sighed. "This is Birdie Wallop, Miss Vickers. She's abooster--shoplifter. But she's not like most of the women here. Sheseems to realize and appreciate what we're trying to do for her, and youcan see how happy she looks--she shows what we accomplish. Now, you takeMiss Vickers to her room, Birdie, and if I do catch you smoking again,I'll whale the everlasting daylights out of you!"

Birdie wept. Birdie howled. "Oh, 'tain't being scared of being punished,Mis' Bitlick! But it'd break my heart if you didn't think I appreciatedall the lovely things you done for me!"

"Huh! I hope so. Run along."

Outside, Birdie Wallop's tears instantly ceased. Her round jaunty eyeslooked uncannily through Ann, and she grinned more impishly.

"Birdie! How much do you appreciate the lovely things Mrs. Bitlick hasdone for you?"

Birdie laid a finger beside her plump nose. "Ask me, lady! Ask me! Say,you're going to have an elegant time in this joint! I'm on. Say, I was awaitress two years, and I know people. When they get to nagging you, youjust tell old Aunt Birdie your troubles. Come on."

Along the corridor, Birdie held up a grave forefinger, darted into aroom with two chairs, a desk, and perhaps a hundred frayed and fadedbooks, laid a leaflet on the desk, picked up her long black skirts, anddid two solemn dance steps.

"What's all this?"

"Swear you won't tell? I reckon you won't. We know about you--beats hellwhat a lot of chewing the rag us gals can do in our cells when thetheory is we ain't talking! We heard how swell you were. And educated!Gee! An educated matron here! Well, see, it's like this. The ReverendLenny--Doc Gurry--he's the chaplain, and a fine piece of Roquefort heis--he'll be in the library this evening and I want him to find thatlittle piece of litteatoor. What a fit Lenny is going to have!"

"What did you put there?"

"Oh, just an ad of 'Old Dr. Thorpley--you can tell him the truth,' thatmy boy friend soaked off a lavatory and sneaked in to me!"

"Birdie! Do you realize that--do you realize I'm supposed to be anofficer here and make you mind the rules?"

Birdie tapped her nose and winked. She had completed the work, begun byCap'n Waldo, of making Ann perceive that she belonged in no matron'splace, but on the other side of the bars, along with Birdie and Mrs. VanTuyl, with Gene Debs and Galileo and Walter Raleigh.

* * * * *

The room which Ann expected to have as refuge was not a private room atall, but a dormitory with three frowsy beds, three pine bureaus, threechairs, three cracked mirrors, and a bathroom with three skinny towels.

In the farthest bed a woman bleary with sleep raised her head, clearingher throat as she groaned, "Heh? Heh? What is it? Oh. Are you the newmatron? Vickers? Oh, God, what time is it? Didn't hardly sleep all day,it was so hot.... I'm Mrs. Kaggs, the night-matron. That's your bed,in the middle. Hope you'll try and help keep this room decent.... Oh.Mis' Bitlick said you was to put on your uniform that you sent down themeasurements for--it's in that middle section in the wardrobe--betterput it on now--Cap'n Waldo, the old bastard, raises hell if he ketchesus girls out of uniform. Well, I'm going to catch me some more sleep.For God's sake try and be a little quiet, will yuh?"

Mrs. Kaggs instantly burrowed again into her pillow.

Ann stood studying her: an oldish woman, sallow, anæmic, with a molebeside her nose, her face slack in the defenselessness of sleep.

Panting with heat and the odor of carbolic acid and old sheets, Anndragged off her suit and wriggled into a uniform of blue serge withbrass buttons and an absurd Sam Browne belt. In the milky mirror shetried to study herself.

"I look like a tough policeman. I wonder how soon it will get me andI'll enjoy relieving my boredom by using a club?"

She sat straight, in a flimsy chair that creaked to her breathing. Shelooked out of the window on a cinder courtyard of the men's division, inwhich three men in blue uniforms with red stripes, and grotesque stripedcaps, the very jeer and humor of shame, were walking endlessly round andround and round, stooped over wheelbarrows piled with rock.

"I can't stand it! I can't stay here! Not one hour! I'd go mad and killCap'n Waldo, and that woman on the bed, and the Bitlick woman! I've gotto! Make a protest they can understand!

"No. I've got to stick, just because it is hard. I've been rather of afailure. Skipped around, job to job; suffrage, settlements, O. C. I.,nibbling at reformatories. You're not a promising young woman anylonger, Annie. You're thirty-three. But if you can stick this for oneyear, then maybe you can help blow up every prison in the world!

"But--one year! I've been here one hour, and I'm already a homicidalmaniac! I'll end in a cell with Lil Hezekiah. My God, I'd like to! I'drather be with her than here with Mrs. Kaggs!

"Look, girl, you've got to keep your mouth shut. It's a woman-sized job.You're a spy in enemy country. No matter what you see, till the timecomes you keep your mouth shut!"

She stood at the window in a cramp of horror. The cinder courtyardburned; the three men staggered round and round and round, wheeling therocks, a toil pointless and degrading, revealing that as prisoners theyhadn't even the free man's first privilege of working for a purpose.

"Yes. 'We mustn't exaggerate. The world has grown better--we've got ridof torture!' Oh, quit agonizing! You, wailing over your little miseries,when you can get away, any time, while those slaves down there--yes, andprobably this Kaggs wreck, and the Bitlick--are stuck here for years,for life. And you, with your abortion, your killing of Pride, as much acriminal as any of them. All of us criminals, but some of us don't getcaught!"

Chapter 25

"There are no tramps--there are only men tramping," said Josiah Flint.And there are no doctors--only men studying medicine; there are noauthors--only men writing, there are no criminals and no prisoners, butonly men who have done something that at the moment was regarded asbreaking the law, and who at the hit-or-miss guess-verdict of a judge(who was no judge at all, but only a man judging, in accordance as hisdigestion and his wife's nagging affected him) were carted off to aprison.

So Ann was among women who were not merely prisoners and keepers, butvariable human beings, and she did not for twenty-four hours a day go onrelishing horrors. Like her Tafford County Jail, the prison wasuncomfortable and futile, but it was not magically different from othermonuments to stupidity. It was more uncomfortable than the two modernwomen's reformatories she already knew, but it was no more futile. Itwas scarcely worse than many institutions to which people are condemnedfor the crime of being born, such as a Pennsylvania mine and itsappertaining shacks, a Carolina cotton-mill town, or a New Yorkspeakeasy jammed with clever women who get drunk to forget suicide. Anncame to take most of her disagreeable hours casually. As they say ofslothful people, she "got used to things." She slept, breakfasted,worked, quarreled, dined, read the newspaper, slept, in that mechanicalacceptance of environment by which mankind endures living in a trench, aNorth Polar igloo, a tuberculosis sanitarium, or a house with a graspingwoman, without going mad.

Had it not been for this healing human complaisance, Ann might well havegone mad, for horrors enough she did see during her fifteen months:Cells with vile air, co*ckroaches, rats, lice, fleas, mosquitoes.Punishment in the dungeon, lying on cold cement with neither a blanketnor any clothes save a nightgown, with two slices of bread everytwenty-four hours. A dining-room filthy with flies, which left theirhieroglyphics bountifully on the oilcloth. Food tasting like slop andfilled with maggots and beetles. Undergarments coarse as sailcloth,stiff with sweat after work in the shirt-shop. The fact that Mrs.Windelskate's handsome gymnasium was kept locked, was never used, exceptwhen Cap'n Waldo found it convenient for conferences with theprostitutes among the women prisoners. The shirt shop with antiquatedand dangerous machinery and a dimness that ruined the eyes. Silence fortwenty-three hours a day--speech permitted only for an hour aftersupper, in the exercise yard--though naturally the rule was broken bytapping the walls at night and grunting out of the corner of one's mouthall day long, since it is the duty, pride, and pleasure of all convictsto break all prison rules, exactly as it is the duty, pride, andpleasure of the keepers to enforce them. The only difference is that thekeepers celebrate their triumphs, not quietly and decently, like theconvicts, but with clubs, straps, and taking away the privileges ofletter-writing and walking in the cinders of the courtyard, whereuponthe convicts, with natural bitterness at this unfairness, break therules all the more proudly. The more punishment there is, the morethings there are to be punished, and the general philosophy of the wholebusiness is that of an idiot chasing flies.

If Ann got used to the unpleasantnesses, as one does to cancer, shenever did get used to the fact that her study of the prison was blockedby the rustic slyness with which Cap'n Waldo pranked up his cruelty. Shehad expected to talk with the Copperhead convicts, to get their side ofthings, as freely as at Green Valley. But here there was no rule morestrict than that officers might not, except with trusties like BirdieWallop, talk at any time with any prisoner, save to give orders.

Ann had looked to knowing Mrs. Jessie Van Tuyl, the labor leaderimprisoned for the metaphysical atrocity of "criminal syndicalism" asshe might have looked to knowing Jane Addams. On her first evening shehad gayly started for Mrs. Van Tuyl's cell, but had been halted by Mrs.Bitlick, and told, "No talkin' to the inmates. If you're so welleducated and all, you might study your Book of Rules!"

It seemed an excellent notion--she must, like her comrade-at-armsBirdie, know what rules there were to break. She spent her first eveningat Copperhead reading such jocularities as:

The only purpose of this institution is to enable transgressorsto so correct former bad habits that they may be able to resumea full and happy position in society. For that reason, aprisoner should obey all rules not merely because they arerules, but that he may develop a fuller and richer personality.

"Dr. Slenk or some other Y. M. C. A. man wrote that. Cap'n Waldo neverenjoyed good, clean fun that much," murmured Ann.

Do not ever forget that making any commotion in cells at nightis not only a serious infraction of prison rules but also aserious disturbance of other inmates. If you do not appreciatethis opportunity for quiet meditation so that you may get rightwith society and your Maker, remember there are others that do,and selfishness is at the bottom of almost all criminality.

No offense is more serious than breaking, marking, or otherwiseinjuring the furniture in your cell, machinery in the workshop,or any other prison property whatsoever. Remember that the Statehas gone to great expense to provide you with equipment.

Ann reverted to the diction of Waubanakee, Illinois, and groaned, "Nowhon-estly!"

With the hypocrisy which is the chief means in all prisons fordeveloping a fuller and richer personality and which Ann was learning asrapidly as any other inmate, she perceived that the way to avoid therule against talking to prisoners was to flatter Cap'n Waldo and getspecial permissions. The method had faults. Cap'n Waldo held her hand,suggested evening walks, and looked at her with knowing obscenity. Butby managing never to be alone in the gymnasium or her dormitory when hewent inspecting--Cap'n Waldo did love to inspect and improve the women'sdivision, especially the bathroom--Ann skated past, wondering when shewould be caught and shot, like any other spy.

With his special pass, she was able to call on Jessie Van Tuyl in hercell within a week.

She expected to see a personage, a Joan of Arc, an orator at home. Mrs.Kaggs let her into the stifling cell. The light was so thin that Ann sawonly--a typical convict: the dishrag of a uniform, the shoes likeblocks. As Mrs. Van Tuyl, who sat reading on her stool, raised her head,her hair was untidy over her hot forehead, and down her face dribbledstreaks of sweat. She was the more grotesque that in the midst of thissmeary face of an inmate she wore perky eyeglasses. Not for minutes didAnn make out the broad forehead, the steady eyes, the kind mouth, themotherly breast. A Copperhead Gap uniform, a Copperhead cell on a Julyevening, could make a vagrant out of even Jessie Van Tuyl.

"Why, it's Ann Vickers, isn't it? I wondered if you'd come! Ann, mydear, this is my brightest minute in months! I know Mamie Bogardus alittle, and Malvina Wormser----"

"You, Van Tuyl!" It was night-matron Kaggs; she had remained at thebarred door, listening. "Miss Vickers is supposed to be an officer!You certainly ain't allowed to address an officer by her first name, nomatter how well you knew her outside!"

"Mrs. Kaggs!" Jessie Van Tuyl's voice was considerably sharper than thenight-matron's. "That poor Inch girl is sick again I've already told youshe's a psychotic--ought to be at Brisbane. I insist on your having thedoctor see her right away, tonight."

"Doctor's got no time to fool with that thievin' little nigg*r! Probablyplayin' possum."

"You heard what I said! A lovely report I shall have to make to thenewspapers when I get out of here!"

"Aw, you and your talk about what you'll do when you get out of here!That's what all you yeggs pull! I'll get the doc, but not because yousaid so. Was going to anyway! Now, Miss Vickers, remember you ain'tallowed but half an hour in there!" Mrs. Kaggs bobbed away like anoffended hen.

Jessie Van Tuyl laughed. "If that woman only knew how right she is! I doget a few things done by threatening them with newspaper publicity, butactually, when I get out----What newspaper would find the fact thatslavery exists in the United States, and with torture, important news,like a baseball game, or Coolidge's having a cold? You didn't mind mycalling you 'Ann'? I'm one of these dratted sociable radicals. If I werea Methodist, I'd call everybody 'Sister.' Oh, Ann, my dear, my dear! Letme gabble! For seven months, except one visitor a month allowed to seeme, half an hour, with a guard listening, I haven't heard or talkedabout anything except meal bugs in the mush--beat the Inch girl till shefainted--syphilitics use the same bath--tuberculotics can't stitch fastenough--'the conversation damned souls use in hell!' And a beastly fightwith Bitlick every time I try to slip some of my food to a starvinggirl. This is what they did to me for saying that the workers have aright to unite! There! Now tell me the news--the scandal--the low-down!I'm like a trapper in the Arctic, with you landing in anaëroplane.... What's Malvina doing? What's the dope on ourrecognizing Russia? How I want to get out into that beautiful worldagain, and just stand and breathe fresh air and look at a birch tree forfive minutes, then jump right into the first glorious fight that'shandy!

* * * * *

"The girl that's sick--the Inch girl? Oh, she's a very seriouscriminal! She's a little colored girl, born in a cabin where her motherlived in sin--lots of sin and frequent. Pure psychotic. She'sdelightfully named Eglantine Inch. Worked as second girl for a richtobacco broker in Pearlsburg. Three dollars a week. Her boy friendneeded more money--for his automobile payments, naturally. She stole adiamond worth five hundred dollars, sold it for five--and got fiveyears. She won't live out the five years, of course. She has everythinga girl could ask for to make her repentant and virtuous. Presumably forher sins the Lord, Who marketh the falling sparrow but seems singularlyunaware of convicts, has sent her a touch of asthma, and I suspectsyphilis. The doctor just hasn't quite got around to giving her aWassermann yet. He's not a bad egg, the doctor, but he's a dreadfulalcoholic--that's why he's doing time here, like me and you!

"Why they don't send her to the hospital? Why, my dear girl, there's afairly decent hospital for the men, or so I hear, but there's none atall for the women, because there isn't room--the highly profitableshirt-factory takes up so much space--and because some time in the nextten years they hope to have a nice new separate hell of their own forwomen, so why make improvements? No, all sick women convicts are treatedin their cells, with the same greasy food we get in thedining-hall--only colder and served later, of course.

* * * * *

"What does Cap'n Waldo have on Dr. Slenk, to make him so complaisant?Nothing, really. Slenk is the kind of amiable scoundrel you don't haveto have anything on. He just agrees with anybody that has a deeper voicethan his. He would agree with me, as he does with the Cap'n (good, old,honest, murderous, lecherous Cap'n!) if I had him here. Incidentally,Dr. Slenk isn't an M. D., as he lets you think, as most people in thestate think. He's a veterinarian, and he used to be a horse-trader, andhe had one year in a college of osteopathy. How did he get in? Byagreeing! By kissing everybody's foot. Didn't he yours? Why, he wasalmost polite even to me, a criminal! Then, too, he has a brother who'sa rich contractor--built part of this prison.

* * * * *

"Graft? Of course there's graft. All the shirts and underclothes we makehere, all the overalls and castings and barbed wire the men make intheir division, are contracted for by outside firms, who get their laborhere for forty-five cents a day, and sell the goods under fake labels,so purchasers won't know they come from convict labor. Good business forthem. And for the officers here. I have no proof, but I'm told thatCap'n Waldo, at twenty-three hundred dollars a year and maintenance,drives a Packard, owns two boarding houses at Timgad Springs, and hisson is going to Yale. And Mrs. Bitlick and Miss Peebee, who is theshop-matron and forewoman, are partners in a beauty parlor (partners, Isaid--obviously not customers!) in Pearlsburg! And certainly the wayPeebee drives us to get our tasks done in the shop, to make more moneyfor the contractors, the way she calls in men guards to slap us, drag usto the hole if we don't get them done, would indicate something morethan a mere normal love of torture--it must be that even higherinspiration, the dollar! Certainly the contractors, considering thatthey get power free and labor almost so, have a glorious graft, andeither Cap'n Waldo and Slenk and Bitlick and Peebee share the graft, orelse they're worse fools even than they seem. Oh, Lord bless me!Sometimes I'm afraid prison will make me a little bitter! Listen,Ann--hear Kaggs coming--hold on--keep your mouth shut--stay onhere--the world needs you as witness--they won't believe me, a notoriousRed--maybe they'll listen to you and believe you!

"Maybe they will. Good-night, my dear!"

* * * * *

Ann's days were not entirely given to observing cruelties and talkingabout them. She had a job. She kept the books for Mrs. Bitlick--she hadhad fair training at the Rochester settlement, and in any case, she wasbetter than Bitlick, who could not add seven and seven and six and getthem to total nineteen twice in succession. She had evening classes incooking, waiting on table, making up rooms, and fine sewing, along withafternoon classes in reading, writing, arithmetic, and very elementarygeography and history for the women, a third of whom had not gone beyondthird grade, a fifth of whom were entirely illiterate. Mrs. Bitlickcomplained that it was "just a doggone fool waste of time for thelegislature to make us learn all these hicks and chippies a lot ofbook-learning--lot better for 'em to work in the shirt-shop, so's theycan get nice jobs when they come out and earn maybe twelve dollars aweek and be respectable." But Mrs. Windelskate and a number of pastorsand editors had insisted that the inmates be forcibly educated right upthrough the fourth grade, and to such safe advisers the legislators hadbeen willing to listen.

Ann helped supervise the cooking, which meant that she nagged thekitchen workers into a certain cleanliness. She was not shocked by theircheerful filth; she had learned in settlement work that cleanliness isnot an inborn talent but, next to yachting, the most unnatural andexpensive form of luxury.

Driven till her brain felt dusty, penned in the office, the classrooms,the kitchens, she failed (and realized that she failed) to see threequarters of what went on in the prison. She felt as though she wereliving in one of the old, huge, sea-cliff mansions, beloved of Englishwriters of detective stories, in which people are murdered in roomslocked from the inside, shrieks are heard from empty attics, and lurkingfootsteps rustle at dawn, while the heroine shivers in her bed andwonders if this is really quite nice.

In the corridor, once, she watched two men guards drag a wailing girl,Gladys Stout, a prostitute, from the shirt-shop to the basem*nt stairs.An hour later she saw Gladys staggering up. Her waist was torn, andthere was a gashed welt across her shoulders. Ann asked Miss Peebee, theshop-matron, but that lady knew nothing--oh, nothing.

Ann had never yet found a way to see the dungeon--the "hole"--fourutterly dark cells, like covered graves, in a crypt beneath thebasem*nt, but from it she had heard insane crying.

She got used to seeing girls in the confinement cells, "the solitary."They were like the ordinary cells, that is to say, no nastier thancommon, but they were segregated. Girls who did not complete their dailytasks in the shop, who talked back to guards, who spoke in thedining-hall or in the procession from shop to cells, were locked up herea day, a week, a month, on bread and water, with no evening hour inwhich they might talk, no letters, no books--just generally improved andfitted for return to society by being quietly reduced to terrifiedstupidity.

If Ann herself saw so little, what, she wondered, did the visitors learnwho once a week came to be conducted through the prison and enjoy thethrill of beholding criminals? On an afternoon off, free of herdetestably pert uniform, she joined the weekly sightseeing tour. Shehadn't till then known in what a shrine she lived. She walked beside ayoung woman who resembled Gladys Stout and who giggled, "Oh, gee, lookat that guy with the big jaw--I bet he's a murderer." (The guy happenedto be a dental mechanic who, when he was out of work and his wife wassick, had stolen some gold.) They were taken by a handsome and jovialguard through the rose gardens to the Ritz-like lobby of theadministration building and to the warden's stately office, through themen's cell-block, through the men's overall-shop--it was modern andalmost clean, and the guard did not show the antiquated foundry--to themen's library, a handsome room containing volumes of sermons and thenovels of Zane Grey, Harold Bell Wright, and Temple Bailey--to themagnificent mosaic chapel, and to the men's exercise grounds, with itsimpressive parallel bars and rowing-machines, which the prisoners wereallowed to use regularly, three hours a week, providing they hadperfectly observed every rule.

"There!" said the guard, as he brought them back to the gate. "We don'tuse the cons so bad, do we?"

"You certainly don't. My! There's a lot of decent people outsidethat'd be glad to have advantages like this!" said a Baptist.

"But aren't you going to show us the women's part of the jail?" said aCampbellite.

"That's under repair, just this minute, so we can't show it," said theguard. "But it's just as nice--women got a gymnasium, fine library, bigclassrooms, elegant dining-hall--say, it's a regular university!"

"If you ask me," said a Presbyterian, "you treat these crooks too good!"

"Well, maybe we do. But we're firm with 'em. We teach 'em disCIPline. Nononsense.... Oh! Thanks!" said the guard, as an Episcopalian gave hima quarter.

* * * * *

Ann had a look at the shirt-shop, on the floor beneath the cells, onlyby occasionally intruding. Miss Peebee, the shop-forewoman, alwaysglared, and spoke to her about it prayerfully. (Miss Peebee had a small,earnest Bible class of girls, including Birdie Wallop, every Sabbathafternoon.) But Ann kept on.

She had never before seen a place in which there was absolutely no pridein work, no satisfaction in getting a task done, and no companionshipwith other workers. The prison was teaching its pupils that howeverdangerous crime might be, anything was better than disciplined labor.

The power sewing-machines in the shirt-shop were out of date. Theneedles were unprotected; often the women had their hands gouged. Thelong clamorous room was lighted only by small windows high in the wall,and by weary-looking electric globes, and as for ventilation--there wasnone. The women often fainted at the machines, and were restored by coldwater and nagging. No talking of any kind was permitted, except to theforewoman, on business. Miss Peebee sat on a high platform, tapping alight cane. She needed it often, to correct the colored girl, EglantineInch, who loved to sing. Eglantine's lips sometimes moved when she wassinging to herself, under cover of the roar, and then Miss Peebee wasconvinced that Eglantine was talking to the girl at the next machine andcame down to correct her by lashing her arms. But Eglantine was lucky;she rarely got sent to solitary; she was too fast a worker and turnedout too many shirts for the contractors, for all her spells of asthma.

But Josephine Filson, a murderess who had killed her own illegitimatechild, was always in trouble. She was slow, she looked vague, she seemednever to arouse herself to pride in sewing hickory shirts; and in hercase slackness was inexcusable, Miss Peebee pointed out, for had Filsonnot been a school teacher and had opportunities?

Ann came into the shop at closing-time--struck in the face by the suddencrashing silence as the machines shut down. Most of the women filed out.Those who had not completed their tasks were held behind, foradmonishment. A man guard, with loaded stick, had been summoned. MissPeebee was waving her cane and shrieking at Josephine Filson, "This isthe second day you're short! Aren't you ashamed of yourself! Thesolitary for yours!"

"Oh, no, please, Miss Peebee!" begged Miss Filson. "I tried sohard--I've had a headache--tomorrow I'll make my task, oh, honestly Iwill! Don't send me to solitary! You aren't allowed to read there, andI'm right in the middle of such a nice book, about a lord----"

Miss Peebee yelped at the guard, "Solitary for hers!"

The blue beef advanced, yawning. Miss Filson screamed, clung withwizened fingers and cracked nails to a sewing-machine. He snatched herloose, marched her out, while Miss Peebee chattered at Ann, "The idea!Thinks she can lay down on her task and then get to read! Upon my word!"

Ann got, that evening, permission from Cap'n Waldo to visit Miss Filsonin her confinement cell.

It was like Miss Filson's own home cell, but she was deprived of allfood save bread and water, and all the household treasures which wereenabling her to get through a life sentence--a pair of slippers, apostcard view of Pearlsburg, a yard of crimson ribbon, and a dust-cloth,stolen from the shirt-shop.

* * * * *

"Excuse me if I was rude," said Josephine Filson. "I thought you'd belike the other matrons, Miss Vickers; either they come scold you becauseyou didn't make your task--and I did do it today, but that poor littleEglantine Inch stole some off my pile, and I couldn't complain on her,because she's crazy, poor little thing--or else they come talk religionto you: how you've been a sinner and you have to get right with God.

"I used to try and be a good Christian and fear God. But now I've beenhere and seen Miss Peebee and Mrs. Bitlick and Dr. Slenk--they all claimthey're good Christians, and teach in Sunday school, and I'd rather belike the worst woman here, like that Kittie Cognac that sells cocaine,than like them. I wonder if the preachers do know so much? They've neverspent nine days lying on wet cement in a dark cell.... I prayed forGod to come save me, then. He never answered. I reckon God is like yourrelations--when you need Him, He throws you out, so He won't be shamedby you.

"Yes, I had a baby, and I wasn't married, either. I was teaching in CoonHollow. I had sixteen pupils, and I got twenty-five dollars a month andboard-round. It was high altitude--awful cold. I used to get up at sixand walk through the snow sometimes and start the fire and sweep theschool. I didn't mind; I had some real bright kids. There was one lovelyboy, so bright, and I used to tutor him evenings, and now he's in StateUniversity and doing real well! I liked teaching. You can see, I'm notpretty. The boys never paid much attention to me, somehow, when I was agirl. Never listened much. But my pupils would listen to me, and lots oftimes they'd bring me presents and all--goldenrod and persimmons andeverything. I just loved teaching.

"But I never did have a beau--not till then. I was living for two monthson the North Road--you know, where you go up from the Hollow--oh, youdon't know Coon Hollow, of course; it's real pretty; I used to thinkbefore I lost my religion that the hills were like a temple. Well, Istayed first at Ad Titus's, and Ed, he was Ad's oldest boy, he was a bigtall boy, only twenty, but he and I used to fool around and dance. Inever was one to cut up much, but I did love to dance--you feel solovely, all your muscles running so slick, why, it's better thanhorseback. Seems funny, don't it, to talk about dancing and horseback inthis cell!

"Well, Ed had a fight with his girl--she was that Lora Dimond's girl,that lived down at Johnson's Forge--and of course, him being that sillyromantic age, he just thought he had to have a girl all the time. 'Don'tbe so foolish,' I used to say to him, evenings, when we was there inAd's kitchen--it was a big nice room, with a real old fireplace, and soclean and all--my! Mis' Titus would have died if she could see theco*ckroaches here! I told Ed, 'You do your work and some day you'll be abanker or a lawyer, like as not, and you can have your pick of thegirls, so you forget 'em now,' I told him. Well, seems as if the more Italked, the more bound and determined he was that he was going to fallin love with me--me, so old and ugly and stupid, twelve years olderthan he was! I just laughed at him, but one night when his Pa and Mawere away, and we were fooling around, and the dog was barking, Ed hegrabs me around the waist and he kissed me so hard--I never have beenable to understand--it was just like I'd fainted. I'd never been whatyou might call kissed before. And I just kind of went crazy. I couldn'tthink of anything night or day but him--there I'd be standing in theschool, drawing a map of Europe for the children--I used to love to drawmaps, all the red and green and yellow crayons, and I was really quitegood at geography; I could remember things like the rivers of Roumania,and I guess I made the children like it, because I'd always been socrazy to travel and see places and all; and I used to read the NationalGeographic at the doctor's house every month, he took it regularly, andso I could tell the children about Venice and the canals and all, and Ireckon they liked it. But, as I say, I'd be drawing a map, but all thewhile I'd be thinking of Ed--his big hands and his voice, my! it was sodeep!--and the way he laughed and you could hit him in the chest allday, hard as you liked, and it never seemed to wind him a mite! And Ijust couldn't think it was wrong, somehow, to think about him; like I'dfound a buried treasure and all the lovely things I could do with it.

"And so one night when he came and crawled into my bed, it didn't seemwrong, it honestly didn't; we were so happy and loved each other so. Oh,I was kind of scared and surprised and all; I didn't know it would belike that. But still, it did make me so happy to think I was making himhappy, and by and by I got to like it--I'd been so hungry for love,and--funny!--I hadn't really known I was!

"And then when I moved on to Bart Kelley's and then ol' Mis' Clabber's,I still wasn't but a mile or so from Ad's and Ed used to come everynight and hoot like an owl, and I'd slip out, and we'd lie side by sidein the woods, holding his hand, and kind of humming old songs like 'MyBonnie Lies Over the Ocean' or 'Joyland, Toyland' or talking about howwe'd get some money somehow and get married and go to California.

"He was working for his Dad, but he thought he'd get through and go workin a garage somewhere and we could get married--he was real good atmechanics, but seemed like he never could find a job anywhere. I toldhim, I said, 'Now don't be silly, Ed; I'm just ages too old for you,'but he said, oh, he was so sweet to me, he said, 'Jo, you got more pepthan any of these kids.' Oh, I reckon maybe he did mean it, too. I liketo fool myself he did.

"We had a game--we'd look up at the stars through the trees (I tried tostudy a little astronomy, but I reckon I was pretty poor at it)--andwe'd think, my! maybe those stars are worlds just like this one, butthousands of times bigger, so maybe the people there are five thousandfeet tall, and maybe they have cities with walls of gold, a hundredthousand feet high. 'Think! Ed,' I'd say, 'maybe if our eyes are sharpenough, we can actually see those gold cities. There's the star--nothingbetween us and it!' I know. I was just a plain, silly, ridiculous oldmaid, in love with a boy almost young enough to be her son. It must haveseemed real comic. Talking about gold cities in stars--and a babycoming.

"When I found out and told him, he was real nice; stood right by me. (Ifhe was here, but thank Heaven he isn't, he'd kill that Cap'n Waldo andthat red-headed guard, if he saw 'em coming around running their filthyhands over the girls' bosoms!) But we didn't either of us have anymoney--I had saved sixty dollars, but I'd gone and bought him a goldwatch and chain with it and told him to tell his folks he found it onthe road.

"So while we were trying to think up ways, it came summer vacation.Usually I worked in the Notch House, waiting on table, summers, but withthe baby coming, I was terribly sick every day, and I stayed with UncleCharley, he was a Methodist deacon but he was a real good kind man, andhe guessed about the baby, and didn't throw me out, but his second wife,she found out and threatened to send me to jail, so Charley had to letme go, and Ed's folks found out about it, and they just went crazy, andthey shipped Ed off to Pearlsburg--actually brought in the constable,and made Ed think they'd send him to the reformatory if he didn't getout and stay away.

"He wrote me. Wanted me to come join him. Said we'd make out somehow or'nother. And I wanted to, so much--I just went crazy thinking about himand me and the baby in a nice little house with pictures, and us threegoing walking on Sunday. But then----I was staying with a tough crackerfamily, across the tracks; Uncle Charley had put up the money. ThenCharley's wife and the preacher and some others got hold of me andpersuaded me I'd ruin Ed's life if I went and married him, and I don'tknow, maybe they were right, and I wouldn't want to do that.

"So I ran away, so Ed couldn't find me and have his life spoiled. I wentup in the mountains. Stayed with some folks--I reckon they were poorwhite trash, all right, but they were awful nice to me. Then I tried towalk on. Thought I'd get to some hospital or something--I hear they letin poor folks free, sometimes. But the baby come sooner than I expected.Had it up on the mountain, with just one old nigg*r lady that livedthere helping me--she was ninety, and she couldn't help me much--andthen she had so little for herself, I couldn't take any more, and Iwalked on, with the baby in my arms, and I came to a deserted cabin, andI just set there for--I don't know; I guess my mind was kind ofwandering--maybe it was four or five days, and when I came to, the babywas dead, lying in a puddle--honestly, I don't know whether I put itthere, or somebody that came past. But then the officers came and said Iwas a murderess! Me! And the judge--Judge Tightam; he's a famous trapshot, known all over the state, you must have heard of him, I guess--hesaid I was worse because I had a position of honor and responsibility,and he gave me life. Even yet I can't quite realize it--I'll never goout of here again.

"But Ed's married now and got two little babies. Uncle Charley writeshe's doing well.

"But----You're an officer. Could you fix it so some time I could justwalk out in the country just once, one hour?"

* * * * *

As Ann walked away from Josephine Filson's cell, she saw her daughterPride.

"That's why I'm here. That's why I must stay here. I killed my baby,too," she said.

Chapter 26

"I hate to say this about any professional crook, but honest I thinkKittie Cognac is a stool and a squealer," complained Birdie Wallop."When you talk to her, Miss Vickers, you make sure you don't sayanything you don't want her to repeat to Mis' Bitlick. I know damn wellKittie got Doc Sorella into trouble for telling her about how theystarve J. Filson. If you want to belly-ache--and that's a good thing todo sometimes, if you ask me--you go and beef to Jessie Van Tuyl. Saaaay!there's one grand skirt, Van. When I talk to her, I almost feel likegoing straight. But then I get an earful from Miss Peebee, and it makesme so mad, I know I'll go out and get revenged on the entire damnpopulation of this state for sticking me in here with Peebee and Bitlickand Kaggs.... I will say this for Kit Cognac, the old plush-linedhooker, it was her that started us calling Peebee 'Pious Bitch' insteadof 'Poor Boob,' like we was simps enough to do before."

* * * * *

Miss Kittie Cognac--she had been christened "Catherine Meek," exceptthat probably she never was christened--was a blackmailer, badger, dip,snowbird, hotel-prowler, creep-artist, and general thief. She shouldnever have been in this comparatively rustic prison. By what sheconsidered a joke on herself, after escaping the police of Chicago, NewYork, San Francisco, and Montreal with only two or three years ofassorted sentences, Kittie had kidnaped quite a small ordinary child inPearlsburg and, for all her protests that she was the wife of an Englishbaronet--whom she mentioned in court as "His Grace"--and that herbeloved old father lay dying, she had been sent up for sixteen years.Despite the most generous use of money among relatives of members of theState Parole Board, it looked seriously as though Kittie would serve atleast five years of her sentence, though now the kidnaped childpractically never woke up screaming at night any more.

Kittie Cognac was thirty-five; velvet-voiced, mahogany-haired, withhands like Diana.

At different times she confided that she had been born in Iowa, Texas,Ireland, New York City, and London. London, she told Ann, she knew well;His Grace, her husband, and she had often walked down Savile Row toBuckingham Palace, and while she didn't know the King personally, theyhad often smiled at each other, at the races at Brighton, in Cornwall,just north of London.

She was the chief trusty of the prison, not merely because, from themoney which mysteriously arrived for her each month, she presented allthe matrons with candy and silk stockings, and the men officers withcigars and very funny genuwine French magazines, but also because shewas the only competent boss among the women prisoners. Mrs. Kaggs, thenight-matron, said admiringly that Kittie could by just looking atEglantine Inch scare her into an epileptic fit. That was true; shecould. And did. Kittie was officially assistant to Mrs. Kaggs; actuallyshe was often the whole night force; let Mrs. Kaggs sleep, kept perfectorder, and still had time to receive Cap'n Waldo in the gymnasium.Against all rules, Kittie wore high-heeled shoes and a string of pearls,and her blue gingham uniform was fresh, unlike a dishrag, and hung justbelow her knees.

* * * * *

"You and me don't belong in a hick jail like this, Miss Vickers," purredKittie, swinging her legs on a table at one end of the cell corridor,making forbidden coffee in an inconceivably forbidden glass percolator."You know New York, but these rubes, yes, and I mean the officers justas much as the lags (that's what we call cons in dear old Lunnon), why,they don't know what swell company is, or real excitement.

"Now take one time: I had to beat it out of Chicago on the lam, becausethey had a warrant out for me for robbing an old preacher. Golly, thatwas a funny stunt. I was running a creep joint in Chi. I sees an oldpreacher at a station, regular old white beard, buying a ticket for K.C., and he had a roll would choke a horse. So I makes him and I tellshim I'm a stranger in town and I see he's a pulpit-pounder and would hetell me where's the best place to go to church in Chi. He tells me--say,you'd laugh your head off. Coupla years later, I actually did go to hearthe old goat he'd recommended, for the fun of it; and just to play hell,I nicked a sawbuck out of the collection basket while I was making a lotof noise putting in one buck. God, that was funny! But I approve ofchurch-going, you understand, and many's the time I've bawled out thesesons that make fun of it. Well, I thanks him for being so kind, andwouldn't he come around to the house while he was waiting for thetrain--I had my old mother with me and Ma, I tells him, is just bustinga gut to go to the toniest church in town.

"So one thing leads to another, and I gets him up to my room. Dandyplace--swell little bed-sitting-room; nowhere you can hang your clothesexcept on the top bedpost, and a sliding panel right by it for mytrailer to reach in and go through the sucker's pants. So I gets himthere and--oh dear, 'Ma must have gone out! We'll wait.' And--this'llgive you a laugh, Miss Vickers. You know, I wouldn't be so frank withyou like this, but I've decided to reform, and knowing psychology like Ido, the first step to really reforming is to be frank with theauthorities, don't you think so? I may of been a thief, but I see my wayclear now, and they can't none of 'em say I was naturally anything buthonest; it was just environment and circ*mstances made me go wrong! Butsay, this'll give you a laugh. I got the old sky-pilot sitting there,and damn' 'f I didn't start playing hymns! Honest! You see, I was inthe choir in Oklahoma, where I was brought up.

"Well, I sort of sat on the old guy's arm of his chair and tried toginger him up a little so he'd make a pass at me, but nothing doing--theold hound's joy-joy days were over. He took my hand and patted it andwhat do you think? He started telling me about his Community Church! Canyou tie it?

"I gets an idea. It was a pretty hot night. I suggests he take his coatoff--he had the oof in bills in his inside pocket, in an envelope. No,he says, it wasn't polite in the presence of a lady. I wanted to lam himone and holler, 'Oh, don't let that stop you, you old son of a hound,I'm not demanding any swell manners--I just want your dough,' but I putson the Cute Kittie expression and I says, 'But you're going to takeyour coat off, because you're going to help me make some old-fashionedhomemade fudge.'

"You see, I had a little electric plate there, and some groceries. Ialways found it useful--get the sentimental slobs to cooking, when youcouldn't get 'em loving. That's my own invention, and I hope to God Iget credit for it. Chicago May nor Sophie Lyons nor nobody ever thoughtof that!

"So I tries to look domestic, and I brings out some brown sugar andbutter, and I tells him, 'When I was a littley-bitsy girl in Oregon'--Iguess I told him Oregon, or some place in the sticks I never seen. 'WhenI was a little girl, my four sisters and I used to go to our dear oldpastor's and make fudge, and he always took his coat off and helped us.So if you don't, I won't feel at home--and oh, how I miss those happyinnocent days back in my childhood home, here in the great wicked city.'You know, something like that, with the old puss*-cat smile.

"Of course he fell. Takes his coat off--but say, the old devil hung iton a chair that ordinarily I had stuck away in the closet so theycouldn't do just that. Well, was I sore! But still, I was fair; I alwaysam fair; I didn't blame the old bastard for putting his coat there; Ijust blamed myself for leaving that chair out; I just told him I wasafraid the chair'd tip over, and I stuck his coat on the bedpost, wheremy trailer reached in through the panel and got the coin, P. D. Q., andfilled up the envelope with pieces of newspaper and stuck it back in hispocket, so's if he felt it to see if his wad was still there when hechecked out.

"Well, I'd have been kind of sorry for the old coot; he was enjoying ourmaking the fudge so much, and saying he hadn't tasted any for years--itseems his Frau was sick, and he didn't have any real home-life, hardly.But--my--Gawd! How bored I got! Me eating fudge! I wanted to slap him!He'd have kept on till the train went! Why, he wanted me to sing somemore hymns! (Oh, and say, before I forget it, the big laugh was, theminute we'd cooked the fudge, the old codger--don't you hate thesePuritans?--he went and put on his coat again, with the nice sweet piecesof newspaper in the envelope instead of the Redeemable in Gold. Wouldn'tthat give you the Willies? Like I would try to make him, the oldsmut-hound, if he was in his vest and shirt-sleeves!) But I got rid ofhim and saaaaay! I was dead sure he wouldn't look over his wad till hewas in his nice little Pullman upper. But he was suspicious--and say,honestly now, don't you think that for all his playing the holy game,that shows he had evil thoughts?--and seems no sooner was he out andwaiting for a trolley--no taxis for that bird, the damn tightwad!--whenhe gives his in-thee-I-do-trust the once-over, and instead of thehandsome engravings, there was nothing but clippings.

"Well, I was just getting ready to beat it--and say, this'll give you alaugh: I was singing one of the hymns I'd played for him!--when he bustsin on me with a bull. And he has the nerve to try to talk me down!Claims he hasn't tried to make me! And say, here's the real Chrismus-Evejingle-bells stuff for you. The Dominie claims the jack wasn't his;claims he's collected it from some come-on to build a kitchen anddining-room onto his damn Community Church! And the cop runs me in!Takes me to the station!

"Well, that was all right. I'd fixed it with a guy I knew to put up bailif I ever needed it, with the understanding that I'd beat it out of townbut send the bail back to him. And I would of, too, but when I got toNew York, I got to thinking, this gentleman friend of mine that put upthe bail, he could afford to lose it, while me, I was just a poor girltrying to get along. And who'd done all the work on this case? I had,while he'd just put up the money. So I just couldn't see, in justice tomyself, why I should pay him back, can you?

"But can you beat that for injustice? Way I figured it, I was givingthis old preacher a lesson. Didn't I teach him to not pick up unknownwomen? Wasn't it worth what he lost? Didn't I deserve the seven hundredbucks I got out of it--for, mind you, I had to give my trailer threehundred for doing nothing but just grab the dough out of the old gent'scoat.

"And then he goes home, this preacher, and he commits suicide.Newspapers blamed it on me; said it was because of the notoriety. Butwas that my fault? Was it? Listen! You know what my hunch is? I think hebumped himself off because he realized he'd gone right against all hepretended to believe in--such a great Christian!--calling a cop andgetting me pinched, and so absolutely denying his Saviour that said,'Let him that is without sin cast the first stone'!

* * * * *

"I don't know for sure just what I'll do when I get out of here. Maybe Imight go in for spiritualism. What a racket that is! But nothingcrooked, you understand, and you do a lot of good. Of course, you shakethe suckers down for all the traffic will bear, like any other business,but you take a lot of these old stiffs, say, they get more damn comfortout of your telling them that Aunt Mariar is ringing 'em up from Heaven!

"And besides, of course I believe in spiritualism. You don't? Hell, no,I wouldn't expect you to. That's the trouble with all you earthboundspirits. Mrs. Bitlick and Cap'n Waldo are the same way. Too dumm, toomaterialistic to hear the voices from beyond. Why, many's the time I'vecomforted myself in my great troubles--none of you eggs can understandwhat I've gone through--by talking with the spirit of General Grant orsome great soul like that. That's the real reason I'm in stir--becausematerialists like you and the judges can't understand me. Yes, I think Imight do the medium dodge.

"And then again I might write a book about how wicked I've been, and howto get away with it, and how I've repented. Believe me, I can do it,too! Say, I guess I've read everything that's worth reading. I bet Iknow Frank Harris and Oscar Wilde and Arthur Brisbane better'n anycollege professor. Yes, you're damn whistling, I'd like to get into somenice clean graft like mental healing or confessions. I dunno. I guesssome ways I haven't been a very good woman. You see, my Dad hated me.Well, all right, all right! I'll show him! He's been dead these twentyyears, but I'll show him! To get even with him, I'm going to take it outon every living man I can get my hooks on!"

* * * * *

Ann leaned her head against the wall of the corridor.

"So there are convicts who are just as vile as their keepers!"

Chapter 27

Of the two women in the condemned cells, the first was hanged at elevenon the night after Ann's coming to Copperhead Gap, and that night Annknew the restlessness in the prison, the wailing, the pounding on bars,which began at seven in the evening and lasted till dawn.

Lil Hezekiah, the old negress who had come to the Gap with Ann, asinister classmate in the university of the damned, was in her last weekof waiting now, and the death-watch was put on her, night and day; andnight and day, two out of the nine matrons watched in front of her cell,two hours at a stretch.

Ann was one of the nine.

The death-watch sat in crazy rocking chairs--the kind that are found inlakeside summer cottages--in the corridor before Lil's cell.

Seven days left. Six days left. Five days left. In five days more themajestic state would take this living human being out and kill her.There she was, probably mad, old and wizened and ashen, yet full of themiracle of life--eyes magically seeing things and thus making themexist, ears delicate to catch the wonder of sound, womb that had broughtforth strong copper-shining sons, hands that had woven bright rugs andmixed corn pone--and in five days, four days, three days now, the statein its wisdom and strength would take her and turn her into a heap ofsenseless and putrid flesh, and be proud of its revenge, and certainthat by thus murdering Lil Hezekiah it had prevented all future murderforever and ever.

By the grace of God Amen in our Christian nation wherein we rage not asthe Heathen but under the gentle teachings of Jesus do combine in onegrand union for the purpose of gently murdering skinny old coloredmammies let us now sing the Land of the Free and the Home of theBrave----

Yes, Ann did rave. She disliked murder. She was sorry that this mad oldcolored woman had committed murder. But, she thought, Lil did not planit coldly and dispassionately, as we are doing.

* * * * *

Two days now. Twenty-four hours.

* * * * *

Leading penologists of the state, like Mrs. Windelskate and Dr.Addington Slenk, often announced that in this enlightened district, theywere rid of the barbaric notion of revenge against criminals. That waswhy they put a death-watch on Lil Hezekiah, to prevent her committingsuicide and thus depriving the community of the pleasure of killing her.

She was not allowed one second of privacy. She had to sleep, think,pray, urinate, ponder on the fact that in a day now she would be dead,all under the bored observation of Kittie Cognac or Mrs. Kaggs or someother matron. She was an old mountain woman, used to the stillness ofhigh valleys. It prolonged her death agony to see death in the eyes ofthose peering women night and day, night and day.

But Lil, greatly given always to prayer, had the consolation of dailyprayer by the prison chaplain, the Reverend Leonard T. Gurry, though ofcourse Mr. Gurry was a very busy man and could not allow her more thanfive minutes a day.

He came briskly down the corridor and hailed Ann and Mrs. Kaggs:"Good-evening, ladies. I hope you are not too tired with your errandof mercy! But you can rest soon. Only twenty-two hours now!"

"Oh, my dear loving God!" wailed the mad old woman in the cell."Twenty-two hours!"

Mr. Gurry observed, "Lil! You must never speak the name of the Almightyso lightly!" He let himself into the cell, but he stood with his backagainst the door, as far from Lil as possible. He was practicallycertain that colored folk had souls, but he did not like their skins.

"Now, sister, this is one of the last chances I shall have to pray withyou--in fact, I can stay only a moment. So, if you will just kneel--justkneel, I said--O Lord our God, have mercy on this poor soul. Forgive herif Thou canst. She has repented of her grievous sin and soforgiveheramengoodnightlil."

"You do think maybe He'll forgive me? Don't you? Don't you?"

"Oh, yes, yes. His mercy is infinite. But I must hurry."

There was no regulation at Copperhead Gap whereby a trusty could takethe place of a matron in a death-watch, but actually Kittie Cognacusually appeared for Mrs. Kaggs, and once Ann and Kittie watchedtogether.

"Be game, old girl," clucked Kittie to Lil. "Keep your chin up. You'rejust as good as any of these folks."

"Oh no I'm not, miss," wailed Lil. "I was a very bad woman. I reckon Icertainly deserves to die. I didn't pray hard enough, that's what waswrong with me. Preacher tole me I ought to pray more, but I didn't. Myold man used to get drunk and come home and beat me and my daughter,that's a widow, and I prayed--I prayed--I prayed he'd quit drinking thatnigg*r gin. But it used to just make him mad to see me kneeling--he'dhit me with his shoe heel and so I reckon I weakened in my faith, and Ididn't pray where he could see me. That's where I done sinned--that'swhy God's punishing me--'cause my faith got all weakened that way, andone night when he come home and started kicking one of the grandchildrenthat was sick, I hit him with the poker, and when he started choking me,I declare to goodness, I just forgot my religion and I busted him withthe axe. Oh, I was a bad woman, miss."

"Oh, rats, you weren't so bad." Kittie yawned, and lighted a forbiddencigarette. While Ann was wondering whether she ought to do anythingabout the cigarette, Lil stood clutching the bars, her eyes angry,mouthing:

"I know what's bad and what's good! I know if I was bad--and who elseis, too! I ain't like you women! High heels! Smoking cigarettes! Thetorches of Hell, that's what they are! I smoked a pipe, but I give thatup, too, for the sake of religion, for the sake of my Lord! Cigarettes!"

"Now you look here!" cried Kittie. "A hell of a lot you know aboutreligion, you old axe-hound! What do you know about the great esoterictruths of spiritualism? Can you call up the spirits? I can! Say, listen!Do you want to talk with your son-in-law that's passed over? His namewas Josephus, and he used to like your gravy."

"Oh, my God, miss! That's the truth! He always liked it. Oh, is he here?Is he got a message for me? Will he intercede before the Throne of theMos' High for a poor wicked old woman?"

Ann whispered, "Kittie! Don't! Or do be careful!"

"Sure, I'll give the old gal a five-dollar message!"

Lil was looking on the blackmailer with adoration. She had come alivewith the drug of hope which Kittie Cognac had concocted out of a guessabout gravy, and Lil's family-record. Her little old monkey facetwitched with smiling; her fragile hands, rubbed by long labor towhiteness on the inside, fluttered on the bars; and she made nervoussounds of prayer as the blackmailer chanted:

"Josephus says to tell you that you'll be received in glory. He says thearchangels will guide you."

"In glory! In glory! Amen!"

Twenty-one hours, and those bright worshiping eyes would be blankludicrous things, like boiled onions.

* * * * *

Dr. Arthur Sorella, the prison physician, looked like Edgar Allan Poe.The matrons gabbled that he was a graduate of Hopkins, that he had beena city surgeon of the rank of two Packard cars, that he had taken todrink when his wife left him. He alone among the officers, as Ann hadseen him ghostly in the corridors, had been gentle.

When he came to glance at Lil Hezekiah, Ann begged of him--the othermatron on watch, a long red woman whose cousin was a state senator, wassafely asleep--"Doctor, you know they execute her this evening. Just tenhours now. Do you ever give them a shot of dope before? Can't you,with her? She's so scared! Listen how she's praying!"

"I'd like to. I would if I could. In fact, if there is to be any capitalpunishment at all, I'd give the poor devils a chance to commit suicide,decently and unobserved; hand 'em some poison they could take when theywanted to. But as it is, I don't dare even give them morphia. In the olddays the warden would get a condemned prisoner nice and drunk, so heswung off happily. But the preachers and Good People of this statedecided that their God wouldn't get enough relish out of His vengeanceif the sinners weren't sober, and aware what He was doing to them."

"But can't you----"

"Hush!" Dr. Sorella glared at her, peeped at the sleeping matron. "Ofcourse, you fool! I always slip them something. If I didn't, I'd have tokill my own self. Kindly don't tell Cap'n Waldo. Listen! Get out of thisplace! Either it will kill you or, worse, it'll get you, so you'll be assad*stic, in a polite way, as Cap'n Waldo! No human being that everlived is kind enough or wise enough to stand year after year of havingthe power to torture people. Me, I don't matter; I'm done. Get out! MyGod, how I need a drink."

Ann looked in at Lil Hezekiah, holding up her skinny hands in anecstatic vision of her God.

"So do I!"

They drank fiercely, with no toasting courtesies, from the pint of acridmoonshine he had in his inner coat pocket.

* * * * *

Ann was on duty most of the thirty-six hours before the hanging of LilHezekiah. She could most easily be spared. Aside from her accounts, shehad no important duties, such as keeping the prisoners from escaping, ordriving them to finish their tasks in the shirt-factory--she had, infact, nothing but teaching, which, as Mrs. Bitlick pointed out, wasmerely a fad.

She had time off for naps, those thirty-six hours, but she did notsleep. She lay awake in her dormitory, seeing not the reformatory anddeterrent spectacle of Mrs. Kaggs, yawning and scratching her armpits,but a Lil Hezekiah, who believed in God.

* * * * *

At half-past ten on an early winter evening, when the air of thecorridors was that of a frigid cellar, and the wind harped in leaflesstrees, Mrs. Bitlick and Ann and Mrs. Kaggs marched to Lil Hezekiah'scell. At Mrs. Bitlick's nod the two matrons on guard tiptoed away.

Lil looked out at the chief matron and sprang up from her knees. Shestood slumped, her head almost on her thin chest, her hands weaving. Shewhimpered wordlessly.

The three strong women in blue uniforms threw open the cell door.

"Now, stand straight there, Lil, and take off them clothes," said Mrs.Bitlick pleasantly.

But they had to hold her to get her stripped to the dark gray skin, toput on the new undergarments of clean coarse cotton, the new dress ofblack sateen. "Oh, for God's sake, brace up! You aren't the only onethat's gone this road!" snapped Mrs. Bitlick. To Ann, apologetically,"Hate to nag even a wench like this at such a time, but folks that can'ttake their medicine always make me tired!"

At twenty minutes to eleven the Reverend Mr. Gurry came into the cellwith a brisk and cheery, "Good-evening, ladies!"

He laid a natty handkerchief on the cell floor and knelt on it, besideLil, in her new black sateen dress. The dress was factory-made. Theseams were not straight.

The three matrons stood outside the cell. Mr. Gurry prayed. It did notseem to Ann to mean anything; she heard only a string of glossy words:Our Merciful Father, take this soul, for this our great fault.

While the chaplain was praying, Dr. Sorella slipped past the matrons,into the cell. He was feeling Lil's pulse. Ann thought he passedsomething to Lil which, with sly quickness, she popped into her mouth.Her face presently lost its twitching terror; she began to shout, "Ohyes, Lord! Amen! Hallelujah! Praise the Lord!"

Dr. Sorella went away.

Ann dropped into a chair, clean-beat.

Mrs. Bitlick grabbed her shoulder, grunting, "Why, the idea! And youthat think you're so superior! Haven't you got any sense of religion atall--sitting, during the last prayer! I never heard of such a thing!"

So Ann stood again for years while the patter went on, "And so receiveunto Thyself this erring soul," and Lil shrieked, "Ain't it de truth!Praise God! Amen!"

At five minutes to eleven, tramping heavily, two men guards came downthe corridor, followed by Dr. Sorella again, and the tappering dancestep of Warden Slenk.

Dr. Slenk nodded to the three matrons, but as he entered the cell hisface became pious, his voice a very balm of tenderness: "Come, Lil. Ihope you have made your peace, my poor woman." He jerked his headsharply toward the two men guards. They lumbered over, seized Lil'sarms, snatched her to her feet.

From unknown depths of the prison, from hundreds of cells, a muffledmoaning.

Lil was so thin, so frail, and half drugged now. The two guardssupported her between them, her feet dragging, her head drooping, buther lips never ceasing to murmur, "Praise the Lord, bless His holyname!" Just behind her came the Reverend Mr. Gurry, praying briskly, andDr. Slenk, Dr. Sorella, and the three matrons. Ann's knees felt sick.

They stumbled down winding stairs, two horrible dark flights, and outinto a room, light-glaring, painted a lively robin's-egg blue, with Itin the center--a platform with a stout beam from which hung a noosedrope. Ann scarce saw the gallows; she was embarrassed by the crowd offorty witnesses, standing, staring, goggling, half-grinning in theirexcitement--rustic reporters trying to look hard-boiled, lanky sheriff'sofficers pleased and professional, shy, eager colored relatives of LilHezekiah.

Ann saw the sheriff who had brought Lil to prison. She heard him gruntto a reporter, "Sure, I know the corpse very well."

They rushed Lil through it.

The guards had to lift her from step to step--thirteen steps, painted alively robin's-egg blue, from the floor to the platform. She looked solittle up there, above the mass of red-faced men. While she swayed,supported by the chaplain's arm, they hastily tied her wrists andankles, most modestly bound her skirt so that it would not fly up, anddropped the noose about her neck, a black hood over her head. Instantlythe warden raised his hand, nodding, and two guards, at a table on onecorner of the platform, chopped lines of which one--nobody knewwhich--released a weight. The Reverend Mr. Gurry with neat nimblenessskipped aside, and Lil slumped to her knees. A trapdoor opened downwardwith a bang, and through it the black-capped form dropped grotesquely,fell, stopped with a jerk, and spun, spun, till Dr. Sorella, green-facedand slouching, caught it.

But it hung there, twitching, as though still alive, still struggling toget free. The veins on the hands swelled till they seemed to crawl.Eight minutes it hung, while Ann fought to keep from going out into thesick blackness that wavered all about her.

Stethoscope at the breast of the twitching thing, Dr. Sorella quavered,"I pronounce her dead."

The spectators crushed out, feeling for cigars, muttering, "Prettyhanging." Ann started to follow. Mrs. Bitlick commanded, "You! You wait!Your work ain't even begun!"

A guard cut the rope, while two others lowered the body to the floor,and loosened the noose.

"Ohhhhhhh!" shrieked the dead Lil Hezekiah, as the air compressed in herlungs rushed out.

Ann rushed to a corner of the room and vomited. She heard Mrs. Bitlicksnicker. When Ann came back, the hood had been lifted from Lil's head.Her eyes were forced half out of their sockets. Her mouth was archedwith horror, and on her lips was bloody foam.

Mrs. Bitlick, after an interested look at that twisted face, said,"Well, girls, we must wash the poor woman and get her ready for burial.The relations will be waiting for the body."

The men guards carried Lil into a small adjoining basem*nt room, whichsmelled of decay and formaldehyde. Cap'n Waldo Dringoole appeared at thedoor and said to the warden, "Go off nice, Doc? Sorry I didn't have timeto come see it--had some trouble with that bastard of a registrationclerk."

"Went lovely, Cap'n. Never saw a nicer hanging. Bing--and the old galwas gone! Well, let's beat it and leave the corpse to these ladies.Good-day, ladies."

In the little room there was a workbench, with bowls of water and rags,and a coffin.

Ann knew that she was going to be sick again.

Mrs. Bitlick yawned, "Well, come on, gals, let's get back upstairs."

"Don't we have to wash----"

"What? Us wash an old nigg*r stiff? Hell, no! That was just taffy forthe warden. Come on, Mis' Kaggs, give me a hand."

The two women heaved the body into the coffin, slammed on the cover, andcheerfully marched out, leaving Lil Hezekiah to her relatives and toGod. But later the relatives failed to return, and she was buried in thejail yard. What God did is not known.

Chapter 28

From her first day at Copperhead Gap, Ann had struggled to clean thewomen's division of the prison. She discovered that Jessie Van Tuyl hadaccomplished from her cell as much as she could from her dormitory. Mrs.Van Tuyl had smuggled notes out to the newspapers about moldy oatmealspiced with moldy worms, about the imprisonment in the same cell of agirl of fourteen and a tertiary syphilitic with running sores, aboutwhipping women who did not finish their "tasks" in the shop. Enough ofthis had been printed to make the authorities uneasy--for a moment.

"I wish we could get rid of that Van Tuyl woman. Can't we get herpardoned?" Ann heard Mrs. Bitlick sigh to Cap'n Waldo. "Till then, Ireckon we'll have to make a noise like reforming. Give 'em some freshbeef, and separate the sick women, more or less."

What, fretted Ann, was the use of tiny reforms, so long as the statepermitted this festering old building, these slave-drivers?

But she was a trained and incurable meddler and, so far as wasconsistent with the vow to keep her mouth shut, she kept on dailyprodding Mrs. Bitlick and Cap'n Waldo. She argued with the former,coaxed the latter, and to Dr. Slenk she hinted that "things would getout." She persuaded them to give better food. She was, without proof,certain that all three of them were grafting on the food; that they got,and sold, most of the cream from the prison-farm milk; that theyreceived refunds from the grocers, the butchers.

The prison food was about equally bad in quality and in monotony. Weekon week they repeated cornmeal mush, hash, coarse bacon, beef stew,potatoes, baked beans, bread with corn syrup, willow-leaf tea, sausagesfrom filthy butcher's-scraps, and stewed prunes; there was never, notonce, fruit or a green vegetable, nor even unskimmed milk to drink.There were sometimes maggots in the hash, weevils in the bread, and thestewed fruit was spoiled. It all tasted rancid. It all tasted nasty. Andwith a serene sureness the prisoners starved, till to their otherhatreds of prison, which made them determined to get even with the stateby doing more crime, there was added the murderous despair of incessanthunger plus incessant indigestion.

Hinting, begging, finally threatening to go out and tell the world aboutit, Ann did force Mrs. Bitlick (and it was curious that there was noaddition to the reported expense for food) to add fresh greens, corn,and string beans; an orange once a fortnight; cocoa once a week;occasional lemon juice, apples, and stewed apricots. The milk forcooking became suddenly and curiously richer.

(From Mrs. Bitlick's remarks, one would have supposed that the fare nowwas that of Foyot's.)

Ann tackled ventilation and cleanliness.

Her trouble was with labor. There are, with a few exceptions, only twosorts of prisons: those in which the inhabitants rot away with dulledidleness and those in which, sometimes on behalf of outside contractors,the inhabitants are worked to sick dizziness. In the second sort, theprisons are dirty because the prisoners are too exhausted to do anycleaning; in the first, because they become too lazy.

Ann had to fight for a few women, stolen from the kind contractors, towash floors, to clean away the accumulated dust and fuzz whereby thescreened ventilators had ceased to ventilate. She had to godiscouragedly through the whole beg-coax-hint-threaten business all overagain for enough hot water, enough soap, scrub-brushes, pails, enoughbug-killer, traps for rats. To get two dollars' worth of soap was anentire Dardanelles campaign... the next two dollars' worth,naturally, Ann herself paid for.

Then plans toward a hospital for the women.

Ann was to learn, later, that there is no more beloved excuse for badconditions in any prison, any county jail, than, "Oh, no use monkeyingwith it; we're going to have a fine new building soon." Now, she wasbaffled by that excuse at Copperhead Gap. How could she make theofficers understand that even for three or four years, it might be wellto treat sick women as well as one would treat a sick cow?

But she was wrong in surmising that Copperhead Gap never would build thenew and separate annex for women. Since 1925, when Ann left Copperhead,a fine new separate building for women has been erected, with cellslight and large and airy, with an adequate hospital room, with admirableshower baths. The women work in the large kitchen garden or vocationalsewing-rooms instead of for a shirt contractor. It has been erected forsome time. In fact, now, in 1932, it has been erected so long that it isagain satisfactorily overcrowded, with two women in a cell meant forone; the shower baths are half of them clogged up and the rest slimy;the handsome tiled floor of the dining-room (laid by the brother-in-lawof Warden Slenk) is cracked into the hiding places for co*ckroaches; andthe shining hospital-room lacks a microscope, sufficient bedding, and inwinter, any heat whatever from the radiators (installed by a cousin ofEx-Governor Golightly); and the really elegant pair of bathroomsadjoining the hospital just do not work.... The chief matron is stillMrs. Bitlick.... As none of the matrons have time for much teaching,in winter, when there is no gardening to occupy them, most of theprisoners sit in idleness, and Mrs. Windelskate is beginning to pointout that it would have been much better if the "so-called reformers" hadnot interfered, and had left them the good, healthy, character-buildingwork in the shirt-shop.

* * * * *

What most balked Ann was the belief, sincere in them, she believed, ofCap'n Waldo and Mrs. Bitlick and the other matrons that conditions inthe prison weren't really bad. (What Dr. Slenk saw and felt wasdifferent and did not count--he was a politician.)

"I thought at least we might clean the place up," Ann had tactfullybegun to Mrs. Bitlick.

"Clean? What do you mean? It is clean!" marveled Mrs. Bitlick.

"It is not!"

"Well, I'd just like to see----I declare to goodness, I don't know whereyou get your ideas!"

"Well, you come and take a look."

Then Ann pointed out--and it is truly doubtful whether Mrs. Bitlick hadever noticed these little matters before--what seemed to her flaws inthe majestic structure of Copperhead Gap, women's division. The nightbuckets in each cell had a faint sickening reek which filled thecell-house night and day, year on year. The day toilets leaked, drippingfecal matter on the floor. For all of the women, both for bathing andfor washing stockings and underwear--their uniforms only were done bythe prison laundry--there were just two tubs, both of iron, rusty, andso ill-set that the mucky water never quite drained out. The bedding wasmost of it black with filthiness and was usually passed on unwashed fromprisoner to new prisoner, so that it sometimes went from a prisoner withinfectious syphilis or late tuberculosis to a girl who, however she hadoffended the local customs, was young, healthy, eager for life. Themattresses were full of bedbugs. Few of the cells had ever had a ray ofsunshine since they had been built. And when a sick patient vomited onthe floor, which was often--the undying stench of the night bucketsalone was enough to cause it--there was no one save the patient to cleanit up--when she got well.

Mrs. Bitlick, following Ann, looked surprised when she was forced to seethese details, which had been under her eyes not oftener than daily.Back in her office, she was silent, then spoke pontifically:

"Yes, maybe you're right. I reckon we ought to clean up some. I'll speakto Dr. Slenk again about getting those toilets repaired. I did speakabout it, last year, but I reckon it slipped both our minds. But, MissVickers, you got to take this into consideration: You and me are used tonice clean homes. But cattle like these cons, they just don't know anydifferent--bless you, they don't mind one mite!"

* * * * *

Ann was certain that drugs were plentiful in the prison--heroin,cocaine, morphine. She suspected Kittie Cognac of selling them; she wasnot quite free of suspicion of Dr. Sorella, whose kind weakness might beas poisonous as Kittie's vicious strength. But she mentioned no oneperson to Mrs. Bitlick when she made her report.

"Well," said Mrs. Bitlick placidly, "if you ketch anyone peddling thatstuff, you just turn 'em in, and we'll give 'em the dark cells. You kindof sneak around and keep your eyes peeled."

And what did Ann do then? Was she to turn stool pigeon?

* * * * *

Of adequate physical examination, of competent and patient treatment fordrug addiction, venereal diseases, tuberculosis, or the welter ofpsychoses and neuroses, there was no question whatever. Dr. Sorella hadcharge of nineteen hundred men and a hundred women, assisted by twounskilled orderlies, with the part-time services of a couple of medicalhacks from Olympus City who regarded prisoners as a lower species ofmammals, to be treated with quinine, salts, and curses. Dr. Sorella wasintelligent, when he was not drunk, but Dr. Sorella was often drunk.

It is not true that every person who came as a first offender toCopperhead Gap, with only amateurish notions of crime, learned in thatuniversity of vice about new and slicker crimes, learned the delights ofdrugs and of prostitution, learned that it was his duty to get even withsociety by being more vicious next time. Not every one. A few of themwere too numbed and frightened to learn anything. But it is true thatnot one single person failed to go out of Copperhead Gap more sickly ofbody and more resentful for it and more capable of spreading diseaseamong the Decent Citizens who had been breeding him to their own ruin.

* * * * *

Mrs. Bitlick was not offended by Ann's statement about the secrettraffic in drugs. She was just bored. But she was offended, hurt,shocked, horrified, incredulous, and generally Methodist when Annhesitatingly asked whether they could not do something abouthom*osexuality in the prison. Ann knew why Kittie Cognac had arranged toshare a cell with Gladys Stout; she knew why the wicked old baby-farmerfrom the dreadful place of graves near Catamount Falls was so greasilyagreeable to the girl pickpockets.

Mrs. Bitlick listened to her, in horror, then screeched, "I've never inmy life heard such a dreadful thing! Miss Vickers, I hate to say it, butyou have a dirty mind! I don't think you better stay in this prison anylonger! I wish you'd get out! I dread to think of your influence on theprisoners! hom*o----I've read the word, but I never in my life before metanyone so dirty-tongued as to use it!"

"Oh, rats!" said Ann, and went away, and from that day Mrs. Bitlickglared at her.

And the milk began to grow thin again, and when next she asked for helpto clean cells, it was refused. She didn't quite see what to do aboutit; the force of public indifference and privileged hatred was more thanshe could deal with. It took her a while to accept it. She had had avague belief, probably from reading novels, that the resolute and moralhero can always, in the last chapter, conquer the unconquerable.

* * * * *

It would be agreeable to relate that though the officers resented her,with a resentment rapidly sliding into hatred, the prisoners were filledwith lively gratitude.

They were not. For an hour they were glad to have cleaner cells, and fora day they rejoiced in more varied food... though most of them wouldrather have had the addition of cream puffs than of greens and lemonjuice. Then they forgot.

Fortunately, Ann was a professionally trained uplifter. She had learnedin settlement two things: that she must not expect "gratitude," and thatpeople who did expect gratitude were the eternal amateurs, the eternalegotists. She was as indifferent--well, almost as indifferent--to theopinion of the people for whom she carried on "reforms" as a soundsurgeon is to the opinion of a patient on his technique.

She wasn't even vastly roused by the hatred of the fellow-officers whom,with so little success, she was trying to double-cross.

"No," she pondered. "It's not true that women aren't as selfish, ascruel, and as hard as men. We have all the masculine strength! I'd liketo torture Mrs. Bitlick!... No! No! It is getting you. That's justthe kind of righteous wrath that she has! Women! The times are out ofjoint, and we not only have to set them right, but we have to take a fewmillion Mrs. Bitlicks along with us. Oh, well, no matter how much I canaccomplish here at Copperhead, I'll upset the whole applecart when I getout and tell the world about it!... How sick I am of that smell ofdisinfectant!"

Chapter 29

Birdie Wallop was in trouble, for all her ability to soothe Mrs.Bitlick, to amuse Mrs. Kaggs.

Birdie had what she called a "boy friend." She was not the only womanprisoner who was so fortunate. Among these hundred women, supposedlyshut away by brick walls, steel bars, and frosted windows from even thesight of men, desire for them throbbed more than the longing for food orrest in sweet air. Ann heard the women, during the hour after dinnerwhen they were allowed to converse as they tramped the cinder recreationground, talking always of men--what He had said, how He had kissed, howgenerous He had been at the restaurant, the certainty that He would bewaiting at the prison entrance. It was a tropism, beyond all humanplanning.

For a manless retreat, it was surprising how many men contrived to comein. The guards were always snooping about, staring into the shirt-shopwhere, on the days that now burnt into Ann's second summer, the womentoiled with denim dresses open in front. Workmen trusties--carpenters,the plumber, the photographer and fingerprinter--appeared, and somehowthey never finished their work till the guards drove them out, and fromjogs in the corridor you could hear, all day, a whispering, a giggle.

But Birdie Wallop was one of the few who had a "steady." He was anelectrician, an excellent electrician, and a beautiful young man with ablack mustache. He had also been an excellent telegrapher in the fakewire-tapping racket, and he was doing twelve years. When Ann met him inthe corridors, he twitched the greasy uniform cap which he wore asco*ckily as a soldier's helmet, and smiled as though they shared asecret, and her heart bumped.

He had reported that the wiring along the women's cell corridor wasdefective, and he labored there all day, while Birdie, supposedlycarrying messages, or bringing coffee and aspirin for Mrs. Bitlick'sregular and unbeautiful colds, was seen winking at him, leaving notesfor him between the braces of his stepladder.

Till Mrs. Bitlick caught her.

Mrs. Bitlick had passed blessedly beyond all desires for sex. It waswhispered that she had once been very gay, but if so, she was making upto God for it now.

She came down the corridor and saw the electrician drop a package fromhis ladder down to Birdie, saw Birdie scoop it into her pocket. She ran,in her rubber sneakers, caught Birdie's arm, snatched the package,opened it. It contained two packages of cigarettes, two books ofmatches, and chewing gum.

Now Mrs. Bitlick was indignantly and righteously opposed to all smokingamong women. And Mrs. Kaggs was equally affected, because Mrs. Kaggs andKittie Cognac had a monopoly on the sale of cigarettes to women. Bothsprang on her. Birdie was dragged in to a court-martial of Mrs. Bitlick,Mrs. Kaggs, and two or three other matrons--whom Ann joined, withoutinvitation. And the good Kittie Cognac was brought in as witness.

The matrons sat in stiff chairs, in a crescent, in Mrs. Bitlick'soffice. Birdie stood before them, her smile doubtfully coming and going,as she tried to work its former magic on them. Her eyes were frightened.

"I saw her with my own eyes, smuggling cigarettes!" said Mrs. Bitlick."Now we know how these nasty coffin-nails get into the prison!"

"Oh!" said the shocked Mrs. Kaggs.

"And I suspect her of smuggling dope."

Birdie wailed, "Honest, I never----"

"Shut up!" said Mrs. Bitlick. "Now, Kittie, you said you had someinformation."

Kittie advanced, stylishly. "You bet I have. It's Birdie that's beensmuggling out all these notes--including those from this Van Tuyl woman,where she belly-aches about conditions! I found one in her cell, like Itold you!"

(Ann knew that Birdie had not smuggled out all of Mrs. Van Tuyl's notesbecause she had smuggled a good many herself.)

"Well, ladies, I think we've heard enough. You go back to theshirt-shop, Birdie--this afternoon!--and I'll tell Miss Peebee to seeyou tend to business!"

"Oh, please, Mrs. Bitlick, please!" That was as far as Birdie got.Three matrons, hustling her between them, pushed her out, down to theshop.

Ann heard that the friendly electrician was lying in a damp, dark cell.

* * * * *

On the evening after Birdie's wailing demotion, Ann called on Dr. Slenkin his private mansion--a handsome abode, its parlor adorned with adavenport, a radio, a closet of Scotch and Bourbon, and two hand-paintedwinter scenes by a former convict, in which the snow glittered withpowdered mica.

"Did you hear about Birdie Wallop, our messenger, getting sent back toHard, Dr. Slenk?"

"Yes, I had a report on it."

"I wish----She's a good child. She really is. I'm sure I have someinfluence with her, and I think I could get her to promise not todistribute cigarettes or carry notes, and keep her promise."

"I really can't interfere with Mrs. Bitlick's control. I have everyconfidence in Mrs. Bitlick. And if I may say so, I don't regard it asquite loyal in you to try to go over her head."

"Oh! Loyalty! But I feel some loyalty to these poor women prisoners,too!" Ann was speaking desperately. It was the first time she had evertried to talk with seriousness to the airy Dr. Slenk. "I've neveraccused any prisoner. It doesn't seem fair. But when one of them takesadvantage of her fellows----See here, Dr. Slenk; please listen to me. Iknow! The source of half the trouble we have is this Cognac woman! She'sa real bad character! She sells dope and cigarettes, and she arrangessexual perversion----"

The little horse-doctor leaped up, threw his excellent cigar into theelectric imitation of hot coals in the imitation fireplace. "That willdo! I've heard enough! Never before have I heard a woman shame herselfby mentioning such subjects! And, my dear young woman--" his voice hadall the nice nastiness of a spinster Sunday school teacher--"just how isit that you know about these things?"

Ann lost her temper, wholly and wholesomely, for the first time atCopperhead Gap. "That will do! You can't get away with it by making anysuch accusations! I'd love to have you make them at a public trial! I'mnot going to stay here long----"

"No, I shouldn't think you would!"

"--and I might be doing you a favor by preventing a public scandal thatwould blow you and the Bitlick woman and your 'Captain' Waldo right outof the prison! It's happened before, and you know it! There's graft,cruelty, perversion, everything horrible. I might be able to clean upand save you--for if it all came out you'd never hold another politicaljob, even here, my good man. I suggest that you retire Kittie Cognac tothe shop, put Birdie back, and then, for head trusty, put in a womanthat's more intelligent and honest than both of us put together--JessieVan Tuyl. Now, are you going to consider this, or shall I go to thenewspapers and start something?"

Dr. Slenk had faded into his chair. His dainty legs, to whose slicktrousers and their pressing a prisoner valet gave much of his time, weretwitching. The little man was not very brave when he was not protectedby some dragoon like Cap'n Waldo or Mrs. Bitlick. He squeaked:

"Oh! But that would be impossible! I'll do what I can about Birdie--getMrs. Bitlick to reinstate her after she's been disciplined a little. AndI'll tell her to not give the Cognac woman so much rope. But Mrs. VanTuyl! Why, she's a Communist!"

"What of it? Isn't she the most capable woman here?"

"Oh, yes, I suppose she is. But she's a Communist!"

* * * * *

Mrs. Bitlick and Ann were in the office at five in the afternoon. Annwas totting up figures. The lean point of her pencil made a climbingnoise as she ran up the columns of figures on a sheet laid on the desk.Mrs. Bitlick was ostensibly reading the kitchen-matron's report, but shewas looking at one blurred spot on it, thinking, and Ann knew of whatshe was thinking. Mrs. Bitlick's thoughts were almost visible--whirlingshapes of hatred, lightning and thunderclouds and quivering masses ofdung-colored fog.

"I'm going to get kicked out," considered Ann contentedly, the while herpencil was tapping. "I'll see Lindsay, Malvina, Pat! House party atMalvina's!"

She had scarcely been able to write to them, these fourteen months atCopperhead Gap, but they seemed always to walk with her, shadowy as herdaughter Pride.

In the shirt-shop below, the machines shut down, and the silencecrashed. Directly there was a mounting shriek of mixed voices. Mrs.Bitlick darted out, Ann after her, Kittie Cognac joining them in thecorridor, and they ran down to the door of the shirt-shop.

While the workers, about to file out, hesitated and looked embarrassed,Miss Peebee was shaking Josephine Filson and yelping, "You haven'tfinished it again! I'll have the head-matron give you the solitary forten days," and Miss Filson was wailing, "No, no, please not!" MissFilson snatched herself free and slapped Miss Peebee, beautifully,across the eyes and long nose. Miss Peebee struck her across the facewith her long thin cane and shrieked, "Guards! Ring for guards!"

Mrs. Bitlick pressed the guards' button and, Kittie at her heels, likean English setter gone warlike, ran toward Miss Filson.

Birdie Wallop leaped out of the column of women, flew to the doubledoors, locked them, threw the key under a power sewing-machine, andshouted, "Girls! Come on! Let's kill 'em! Kill Peebee! Kill Bitlick!"

The riot was instantly and confusingly on. No one knew afterward justwhat happened. But a mass of women were dashing at Mrs. Bitlick, MissPeebee, Kittie, yanking their hair, tearing their blouses, slappingthem, forcing them back to the end of the room, while the men guardswere already bawling and knocking outside the locked door.

Ann was thinking twenty confused thoughts to the second. She wouldjoyfully have joined in mauling Bitlick, Peebee, Kittie. But she didn'twant to go to jail--no, that she couldn't endure. But oughtn'tshe--wasn't she a coward? But what of her loyalty to her uniform? Andwasn't this rioting the worst thing the girls could do for themselves?And didn't Bitlick, Peebee, Kittie beat her hollow, beat all of them, inphysical courage? For the three women, back to the wall, were fightingferociously, with not a whimper, no yowl for mercy--clawing, kicking,striking back, any one of them equal to three of these rebel slaves solong starved of food and air.

Into the mêlée a new figure, voice ringing, fearless as theBitlick--Jessie Van Tuyl, shouting, "Stop it, girls! Stop it! Do nogood! They'll get you afterward! And it's not fair--seventy to three!"With her sturdy body Mrs. Van Tuyl was shielding the exhausted Peebee...whom she hated more than anyone dead or alive since time was.

Ann, all her busy little thoughts gone now in the excitement, dashed in,to protect the rioters by protecting the matrons. She tried to getthrough the mob. She caught the arm of a prisoner who was about to hurla monkey wrench. And the prisoner, new to her, yammered, "Here's anotherscrew! Let's kill her!"

A more veteran prisoner--a weighty mountain woman, stalwart as Cap'nWaldo, a truly celebrated stealer of pigs, turkeys, and farmwagons--answered, "No! She's Miss Vickers! She's all right!" And,tucking Ann under her arm, the mountain Boadicea removed her as thoughshe were a stealable pig, plastered her against the side wall, away fromthe riot, and held her there with one hand, while with the other shemeditatively tried lobbing spare spindles over the crowd upon the headsof the matrons.

"Make 'em stop! Make 'em stop!" begged Ann. "They'll get terriblypunished!"

"Wall, yes, I reckon that's so. But they'll get punished now, anyway, sothey might as well have some fun. I reckon they're fixing to kill Mis'Bitlick," ruminated Boadicea.

"There's much," Ann meditated to herself, "to what she says."

The door smashed in, and Cap'n Waldo and half a dozen guards withrifles, blackjacks, and night sticks went to work. It was prettysickening. They were systematic. Smashed noses. Cut scalps messing hairwith blood. Bloody spit. Broken wrists. Eyes blackened. Women twistingon the floor.

Cap'n Waldo himself took care of the huge woman holding Ann, by sockingher in the jaw, breaking the jawbone and removing two teeth. "There'stwo teeth she ain't never going to have no ache in no more!" he shoutedmerrily, when he recounted it afterward.

* * * * *

It was a difficult verdict, even for a politician like Dr. Slenk. Hecould, and did, stop for a month the daily hour of recreation and talkof all the seventy women in the shop. (True, only about thirty of themhad rioted, and the rest had stood back, cowed.) But in justice, as Dr.Slenk explained to a gathering of all the matrons, with Cap'n Waldo,they ought also to cut their rations down to bread and water for a monthand send to the Hole half the rioters (it didn't, he said, with a touchof his old untroubled gaiety, really matter which half!). But they hadonly four dark cells in the Hole, and as for food, if the hell-cats weredieted as they deserved, they would not be strong enough to get theirtasks done in the shirt-shop, and didn't the officials owe this to thegood contractors, who were paying the state forty-five cents a day perworker? (How much the good contractors were paying Dr. Addington Slenk,if anything, he did not state then nor at any other time.)

"Well, if I was running it, I'd starve 'em good, and I'd make 'em dotheir task just the same. Remember what the New York cops say: 'There'sa lot of law in the end of a night stick'? Well, there's a lot ofencouragement to a loafer in a soaked leather strap!" guffawed Cap'nWaldo.

Ann had then a horrific admiration of Mrs. Bitlick. She was a littlefrightened; she had asked for a man guard to be stationed always nearthe shop. But she had courage enough to agree with Cap'n Waldo that itwas desirable to starve all the women for a month.

Dr. Slenk apologetically overruled. He knew the contractors better thanthey did! And it was he who had to minimize the riot for the press.Severe punishment would emphasize it. No. They would just stop therecreation hour for a month, feed only bread and water for two days,whip six of the women, and shut four out of the same six in the darkcells for fifteen days.

The four chosen were Birdie Wallop, Josephine Filson, a Pearlsburgbootlegger, and the pig-stealer who had protected Ann.

Ann was shrieking, "You can't do that to Miss Filson! It will kill her!She isn't strong! And Birdie isn't bad--just a wild kid!"

They turned on her like automata in a waxworks.

Dr. Slenk was ever so plucky now, with Cap'n Waldo and the Bitlickbeside him. "Miss Vickers! I've been waiting and expecting you to openyour trap! It's a grave question as to whether you ain't largelyresponsible for this villainous and inexcusable outbreak, you and theVan Tuyl woman! I think we've had enough of your swell Boston cultureand sociology! I've been considering whether the time hasn't come to tryyou on charges of fomenting disorder. Or do you prefer to resign, righthere and now?"

"No! You can try me!" Ann was suddenly exhilarated with hatred. "I'dlove to be tried! I'll see there's plenty of reporters present, and notjust local men!"

"If you think for one minute," stated the real boss, Cap'n Waldo, "thatwe're afraid of the newspapers----But we'll take that up afterwards! Butthere's one more thing, Doc. Ain't there some way we can put that VanTuyl bitch--excuse me, ladies, just a slip of the tongue--can't we puther across the jumps instead of the bootlegger gal? The bootlegger ain'tso bad--just kind of rough. She don't preach free love and anarchism andrevolution, like Van Tuyl."

"No. I'd like to," sighed Dr. Slenk. "But I tell you what we can do.We'll put that insane nigg*r wench, that's always hollering, in the cellwith Van Tuyl, and I reckon that'll keep her too busy to start any moreriots!"

* * * * *

Ann realized that she was as completely finished as though she weredischarged. Her classes were taken from her; she was permitted to talkwith no prisoner; she could go nowhere save to her dormitory--where Mrs.Kaggs and the other matron never spoke to her--and to Mrs. Bitlick'soffice, for accounts.

She did not see the whipping of the six women. She believed that it tookplace in a room next to the Hole, in a sub-basem*nt beneath thegallows-room--below even the gallows. She had to get down to the fourwomen penned there. The stairs from the gallows-room to the Hole werewatched always by a particularly surly guard. Ann crept about, peeringinto the gallows-room, as though she were herself a prisoner, trying toescape. You learn sneakiness in a penitentiary, criminal or politicalprisoner or officer, high or low. Late one night, while Kittie Cognacnodded at one end of the cell corridor and Mrs. Kaggs snored at theother, Ann tiptoed through the corridor, down the spiral stairs to thegallows-room. No guard in sight. She could see smoke. He had gonecomfortably behind the gallows for a cigarette. She slipped over to thenarrow stairs to the sub-basem*nt.

The door below was not locked. No need! She came into a room like thecenter of a hollowed block of cement; no doors save the one by which sheentered, and a narrower, lower door across from it; no windows;ventilation through four holes, six inches square, from the floor above...from the gallows-room. One milky light. In the center of thiscement cube was a wooden upright, with a cross-arm at each end of whichwere manacles.

The upright was splashed with dried blood.

The whipping-post.

She fled from it to the door opposite. It was locked, but with the keyin the door. In desperate fear (suppose They kept her there, once shegot in?) she opened on a passageway of rough rocks, dripping, clammy. Itwas utterly dark. It was grotesquely melodramatic and improbable.

She made her way, in the light from her electric torch, along it. Shehad to stoop, and she could not keep away from the slimy rocks on eitherside. After ten feet the passage opened into something like a cave outof pirate fiction--the Hole. It was a chamber eight feet high,windowless, utterly dark, of stone and brick, with a damp cement floor.One side was given over to four cells. In them was neither bed norstool. Each was furnished with a night pail, a thin and dirty blanket, acup for water--filled once a day, to accompany two slices of bread--andnothing else whatever, unless one cared to include a human being withthe remains of a priceless soul.

Four women were lying hunched each on her blanket in a cell, shiveringin sleep.

The first to come out in Ann's torchlight was Josephine Filson. She hadrolled half off her blanket; she lay on the chill and slimy cement withher arms thrown out in an attitude of crucifixion. She had a curiousbreathing, a moan of torture.

"It's pneumonia," quaked Ann.

Hastily, as though looking for help, she lighted up the next cell, andthe creature in there sprang up and crouched, clawing at her filthycheeks, whimpering. Ann at first did not know her. This was a cagedanimal, a sub-animal, with eyes fierce and stupid, and dirty hanginghair.

Ann saw then that it was Birdie Wallop.

Birdie could not see beyond the blank blaze of the electric torch. Shewas screaming, "Oh, don't! I'll do anything! Only I won't squeal! Idon't know anything about Van Tuyl or Miss Vickers!"

"Hush! Birdie! It's Miss Vickers--Ann!"

"Oh, my God! Have you come to get me out? I'm going crazy! I am crazy!"

"I'm trying! Birdie! What's the matter with Miss Filson?"

"I think she's dying. She couldn't stand the whipping. Fainted, twice.They whipped us. Stripped us to the waist--the men guards. Tied us tothe post, with our arms out, and licked us with a strap with holes init. Look!" Her "look" was a scream. She tore off her waist. Her back wasthick not with stripes but with dripping sores. "And every day they'vefastened us to the door here, six hours every day, with our armsstretched way up, so we could just touch our toes. Your arms feel likefire. You hang there and God! how you want some water, every minute! Jokept crying all the time, except times when she fainted, hanging to thedoor. Know what I'm going to do?" Birdie's quiet was abnormal, like thecenter of a hurricane. "I'm going to murder somebody when I get out ofthis. This is what they done to us. I'm not going to go straight! I'mgoing to kill! But Jo--I guess she won't never get out, never."

Ann turned, staring. Through the door, still open behind her, twotorches were shining.

The voice of a guard, invisible behind his glare: "What the hell is shedoing down here? How'd she get here?"

The voice of Dr. Sorella: "It's all right. I told her to come. Beat it!"The guard gone, Sorella complained, "Ann! My God, how did you get downhere? Don't you know they're laying for you? They'll find some way offraming you--of having you jugged down here!"

"I know! I know! Look! Miss Filson is dreadfully ill."

"Yes. Pneumonia. I ordered them to take her out of here. Ordered! Me!They wouldn't take my 'order.' Slenk and Bitlick wanted to. Scared. ButDringoole held out. Said it was her own fault if she did die. Said she'dstarted all the trouble--along with Birdie and you! Let me look at her."

He opened Miss Filson's cell door, listened to her breathing, came outlaughing as hysterically as Birdie:

"Order! I gave an order! I'll give another!" In the steady light ofAnn's torch, he had brought out his pocket flask, was gulping, "Don'tyou want a drink? Don't, eh? Wise girl. I've been drinking all night.I'm so far gone now that they won't even take my word for it and savethis woman from dying. Come on, get out of here. Want a drink?"

Ann did want a drink. But she did not take it.

As they marched out of the dungeon, Birdie shrieked after them, "Don'tleave me here! It's so dark! I'm scared! I'm going crazy!"

* * * * *

Ann ignored every regulation.

She went up to her room, changed from the hatefully pert uniform intoChristian clothes, left a note on Mrs. Bitlick's desk, saying that shehad been "called away for a few hours," and had the outer guard orderout a station wagon for her. She knew that there was a train forPearlsburg at 8:07 that morning.

At half-past eleven she was taking a taxicab from the Pearlsburg stationto the commodious and respectable residence of Mrs. Albert Windelskate,of the State Board of Prison Control.

She had telephoned from the station.

The Windelskate château was of brick and limestone, with mullionedlattice windows featuring heraldic shields.

A maid suspiciously let her into a drawing-room so large and sohandsomely furnished that it resembled a hotel lounge, with a hint offurniture warehouse. Mrs. Windelskate was ostentatiously reading TheHouse of the Dead. She looked up casually; she said "Yes?" sweetly; butshe was trembling with anticipatory fury.

Ann was warned. She said, as gently as she could, "I do beg your pardonfor rushing in like this, without warning. And I do beg of you to listento me. I feel there's things about Copperhead Gap that only an insidercould tell you, and just now there's a terrible emergency, immediatelyaffecting the lives of two, possibly four, women--their very lives!"

Mrs. Windelskate burst, and it has been well said that Hell hath no furylike the wife of a loan-shark seeking respectability:

"My--dear--young--woman! I know all about you! Every particle! I'veheard, personally, from Dr. Slenk, whom I happen to know, to trust; whomwe entertained in Our Own Home! And from Mrs. Bitlick! How I could havebeen so deceived in you! I know now that you are a bosom associate ofJessie Van Tuyl--that Communist, that anarchist, that atheist, thattrouble-maker! I have little doubt that you are a paid propagandist ofMoscow, sneaking into our midst, a spy, like a rattlesnake! I know howyou can lie and give false reports! Dr. Slenk has warned me! I alreadyhave an appointment to talk to the newspapers and see to it that anylies you try to spread will be nailed on the head before you are able tospread their socialistic poison..."

There was more of it, much more.

Ann was not too soft in answer.

All that half hour, the hideousness was for Ann turned almost into comicmelodrama by the fact that, waiting in the front hall, obviously peepingin, were the maid, a large negro gardener, and a uniformed policeman...to guard Mrs. Windelskate against Ann Vickers.

* * * * *

"Tomorrow, I'll go see the Governor himself," vowed Ann, waiting at thestation. "But I'll get back to Copperhead tonight. See what I can do.See what I can do.... There's nothing I can do."

She looked at the passengers waiting in the station, the Great CommonPeople, the Safe and Sane, the Men and Women in the Street, the Backboneof Democracy, the Electors of Governors and Presidents, the Heirs of Allthe Ages, the Successors of King and Priest, the Lords of the Universe,the Creators of the Creator. Traveling salesmen with briefcases,rubicund and jolly, or neat and eyeglassed. Wives of grocers andbank-clerks, going to spend a week with Aunt Molly, good clean women whohad never consciously lied or hurt. Ample peasant women with lunchboxes, strong and gentle. A priest with his lovely little red-and-blackbreviary containing words of intimacy with God Almighty, and a briskyoung Baptist preacher daring to show his forward-looking liberalism byreading the Christian Century. A tall man in black, perhaps a judge,his eyes wrinkled from smiling and from many books.

"Yes, it's you I'm talking to!" Ann shrieked at all of them--thoughvoicelessly. "It's you, the good people, the solid people, theresponsible people! It's you, and not the ragtag or the criminals, thatare responsible for giving power over thousands in darkness to sad*stsand sots, so they become torturers, and you don't know, you don't care,you won't listen!"

At the side gate to the prison, nearest to the women's division, theguard, a not unkindly oaf, growled at Ann, "How are you? Been traveling?Woman croaked today--woman named Filson."

* * * * *

In her dormitory, back in prison uniform, it occurred to her again thatshe had no notion as to what she could do to help Birdie. See theGovernor----Oh, yes, she would. Would it help at all?

It occurred to her also that she was hungry. She had had no breakfast(save Cracker Jack and Coca-Cola on the train), and no lunch, and shewas too late for dinner.

She felt utterly beaten.

Into the room popped Birdie's successor as messenger, anotherbootlegger, suspected by Jessie Van Tuyl of being a stool-pigeon.

"Oh, Miss Vickers! Mrs. Bitlick wanted to know was you back. Did you getsome supper? Did you hear about Jo Filson? Wa'n't it too bad! Poor Mis'Bitlick, she cried and carried on like anything--she'd had Jo took outof the Hole and put right in her own room, and then," indignantly, "Joturned right over and died on her. But I wasn't sent about that. Cap'nWaldo sent me. The jail croaker, Doc Sorella, is took bad. Between youand I, I reckon he's on the edge of D. T.'s, and he keeps calling foryou. They've got in another doc, from the town, but he can't seem to donothing, and he wants you should come and see can you maybe gentleSorella down a little. Won't you come? Needs you something fierce, theother doc says!"

"Of course I will!"

The messenger-trusty took Ann through short cuts, up and down and behindand under, to the wing in which were the men's hospital, theconsulting-room, the operating-room, what was called the "laboratory,"and Dr. Sorella's two-room private apartment. It opened from the"laboratory," a dirty closet containing a cheap microscope, broken testtubes, reagent bottles, most of them empty, a bicycle, a pot ofgeraniums, dead and withered, and two pairs of rubbers. The messengergently pushed Ann into Dr. Sorella's living-room. It had a cot with aworn imitation Turkish cover; box-stove; Morris chair with one legbroken and bound with twine; table of perky golden oak; medical bookspiled on two straight chairs; and a set of Stevenson on a shelf. It wasadequately clean. Ann fancied that Dr. Sorella himself had cleaned upthis living-room, last night, in his sleepless frenzy of futility.

"This way, right in here!" chirruped the messenger, laying a hand onAnn's arm with offensive intimacy, propelling her toward the bedroomdoor.

Over the floor were scattered the doctor's clothes, and on a pine bureauwas an empty whisky bottle, still reeking.

Dr. Sorella was lying across the bed, his head hanging over the side. Hewas wearing a collarless shirt, and covered only by a maculate sheet. Helooked dead. But he was breathing, with a subdued moaning like that ofJosephine Filson. His forehead was glistening wet.

"Why! Where's the other doctor--the outside doctor?" Ann demanded.

"Just stepped into the hospital, I reckon. I'll run fetch him," themessenger said.

Ann had no sense of disgust. Dr. Sorella seemed not merely dead-drunk,not "sleeping it off"; he seemed a little delirious, with a hot fever.Ann bent over him, tried his pulse--it was ticking like a clock. Shedipped a towel in his pitcher of water and sat on the edge of his bed tobathe his forehead. (Why didn't that confounded outside doctor comeback?) Sorella lurched in his sleep. He would fall out of bed.Straining, Ann tried to lift him back. He struggled. She had to hold himtight to her, in an embrace----

Bang! A flashlight went off, and as she started up, as she gaped at thedoor, she saw a camera, a smear of faces--Slenk, a little embarrassed,Cap'n Waldo gawping with grins, two guards, the prisoner-photographer,and the stool-pigeon messenger, all snickering.

"So, kidlets, thought you'd sneak off and do a little necking with yourboy friend!" Cap'n Waldo guffawed. "Too bad we had to interrupt you!...Snarkey! Beat it and bring me rough proof as quick as the Lordwill let you. Ought to be a nice pretty picture for anybody'sparlor--little Ann and the doc hugging--and him half undressed!"

* * * * *

They had been lucky. The picture, as they saw it in proof--all thematrons, including Ann, with Slenk and the Cap'n--was better than Cap'nWaldo had hoped. Ann was highly distinguishable: her profile, heruniform. Sorella's face was hidden against her breast; her arms wereabout him, apparently in rapture, beside the bed.

"And we have witnesses!" said Dr. Slenk, gently. "Need we waste any moretime? Do you resign now? Shall I send a print of this to the Governor?He's got a great sense of humor. He'd love to show it around toeverybody--to all the boys on the press."

"Oh, I----Will you take Birdie out of the dark cell! Take all three of'em out?"

"Yes, I'm willing. Well?"

"Oh, I resign. But I'll see Birdie first! And Jessie Van Tuyl! Or I'llstand my trial!"

"Now, by God----" roared Cap'n Waldo.

Dr. Slenk held up his trim little hand trimly. "Yes, we'll even do that.I want Miss Vickers to take home a pleasant impression of us. I'm surethat when she gets a little more experience she won't be such atheoretical little fool. Vindon! Let them three women out of the Hole.Restored to work. Bring the Van Tuyl woman to the gym. Let Miss Vickerstalk to her. You see, Vickers, we don't care a damn what you do, now!"

Cap'n Waldo stared in admiration at his chief as he realized that,despite his sweetness of nature, Dr. Slenk was the greatest warrioragainst crime and radicalism of them all.

Chapter 30

The girl who arrived in New York on the Quaker Limited, on the lateafternoon of September 16, 1925, looked a little countrified. Her suitwas certainly two years old; it was too long, prudishly so, according tothe new styles, and it hadn't the fashionable flare. She had new gloves,neat shoes, good ankles, eyes dark and impatient, a fine skin. She was arestrained person, irritatingly unaware of the inviting looks thetraveling-men gave her. Perhaps a school teacher? Anyway, a woman introuble. Often she stopped reading, to brood. Her teeth kept chewing herlower lip.

In the Pennsylvania Station she followed a redcap, with her bags, asthough she did not see him. In the looming vastness of the station sheglanced up, once, rustic and astonished, and hurried on, looking at thepavement. When the redcap queried, "Taxi?" she hesitated. "Ye-es, Ireckon--I guess so." In the taxicab she pressed close to the window, topeep up at the Gibraltar of the Pennsylvania Hotel, muttering, "My!" Butshe drew back, seeing nothing outside herself, not even the shoulders ofthe driver at whom she was apparently staring.

She had given a West Sixtieth Street address. There, at one of theinnumerable New York apartment houses which try to cover the smell ofcabbage and home laundering with marble slabs in the lobby and with gilton an untrustworthy elevator, she said agitatedly to the driver, "Wait!Wait! I'll see!"

She demanded of the negro hall-boy, "Is Miss Bramble home yet? MissPatricia Bramble?"

"She ain't here no more. Gone to New Rochelle. Gone into business in NewRochelle, New York, ma'am. Yes sir!"

"Oh!" It was an "Oh" of indignation, angry helplessness. To the taxidriver she gave another address, on Fifth Avenue, in the Thirties. Shedismounted there at an old mansion whose ground floor was turned into atrunk-shop, the upper floors into flats.

She trailed, panting, across the wide sidewalk; she rang one of a nestof electric buttons and, as the door clicked, darted in. She crawled upthree flights, like a sick woman; knocked at a dun-colored double-door.It was opened by a small plump woman with shrewd eyes, and unfashionablelace at her wrists, who cried, "Why!"

Ann swayed in and dropped on a couch, too gone, too beaten, to speak.

"My dear, what is it? How did you get here? Never mind. Just sit there,"said Dr. Malvina Wormser.

"Send--send--" Ann was gasping like a fish--"send Gertrude Waggettdown--pay off taxi--running up fare--bags."

Dr. Wormser whooped. "Death and despair ne'er shall keep your good oldNew England economy from working!"

"Well, I'm a poor prison matron, and I resigned from Copperhead Gapthree evenings ago. I resigned, I did. Some people call it that. I'm allright now. I won't be tragic any more."

She wasn't. But she was boiling over with a crusading wrath. She wasgoing to end the whole prison-system by telling the world what it waslike. She talked half the night, inconsequent but sharp as a newsreel.... Tea at Warden Slenk's; Mrs. Bitlick in mufti, with shortskirts above piano legs; Cap'n Waldo in white duck, his coat like acircus tent; Cap'n Waldo telling the comic anecdote of the convict whohad spent weeks in tunnelling under the walls--idiot thought he'd gethome to his wife for their wedding anniversary--all the while the guardsknew about it, and watched him, snickering, and let him dig--caught himon the last night, as he emerged outside the wall and, laughing so theycould hardly lay on the lash, whipped him and stuck him in theHole.... Birdie Wallop solemnly practising on the mouth organ....How fried maggots look in prison hash.... Jessie Van Tuyl'simprisonment in solitary for a week, for having slipped one slice ofbread to a woman in solitary.... The brief epic, full of Americandemocracy, of a girl of sixteen, a virgin, wild and gay, but ignorant ofeverything save village flirtations, who entered Copperhead two daysafter Ann, for having stolen bananas from a storekeeper and havingslapped the man for accusing her. She was in prison for one year, andshe received the education which is a purpose of prison along withrevenge and deterrence, for did she not share a cell with a woman offorty, wise in such matters as blackmail, carrying the gun for a gangleader, prostitution, cocaine? The education took. Two months after herrelease, she was back, to do life, for murder.... The refusal of goodDr. Slenk to let the prisoners have any Christmas celebration whatever,because there had been a "bread riot"--the prisoners had thrown theirbread on the floor, one day, when it was weevily.... Tadpoles in thestale water that would not drain from a bathtub.... Miss Peebeeyelping at the timid Dr. Sorella for ordering out of the shirt-shop awoman with a swollen and infected hand.... Cap'n Waldo striking awoman full in the mouth when she refused to share a cell with asyphilitic.... Three matches for ten cents, obligingly sold by thefirm of Kaggs & Cognac, and thereafter the pleasant scent of cigarettesall night, in cells where smoking was Strictly Forbidden.... A womanevangelist telling the prisoners, in chapel, that their kind officersyearned over them and longed to make them better women.... The timewhen a broken pipe dribbled an inch of water over the floors of the darkcells in the Hole, and the four women confined in them were not removedfor a whole night, but slept sitting up, in the water.... The statelegislature which, after defeating a bill to spend $200,000 on a newwomen's annex for Copperhead Gap, voted $250,000 for a Soldiers'Memorial--a series of statues around a cenotaph.... The eminent statesenator (an ambitious father, a kind grandfather, a college graduate, atrustee of the State University, a practically honest wholesale grocer)who made oration: "These vile women prisoners already live like a lot ofqueens--three fine meals a day, without having to stir one finger toprepare them like my old mammy did, by thunder! A handsome recreationground just for them to walk in. Modern bathtubs, while most decentChristian women in this state still have to use the family washtub. Adoctor and a preacher at their beck and call; free classes in languages,sewing, and, I have no doubt, bridge-whist and how to make pink tea! Andnow the gentleman from Carter County proposes to build 'em a stilllordlier mansion! Just what is his idea? Does he want to make prisonlife so lovely that every woman in the state will be committing crimejust for a chance to break into prison?"

* * * * *

Dr. Wormser let her talk--encouraged her, indeed, and did not looktired, as Ann raved on till three in the morning. (Sometime during thehours, a light supper had miraculously appeared, and Ann been coaxed totaste an egg.) By three, the bitterness had been drawn from Ann, and anoptimistic belief restored that the Great Common People would dosomething about it, if they only knew. And Dr. Wormser had alreadyplanned what editors Ann was to see.

Charley Erman, managing editor of the morning Chronicle--he was thebest man to see; a friend of Dr. Wormser; a liberal newspaperman on apaper which, though conservative as an Episcopalian banker, yet lovednothing so much as printing a Socialist speech attacking theChronicle. And then, of course, an article or two in the Statesman,the liberal weekly which had been the first publication in America toassert that not Germany only, but also France, Britain, and Russia hadheard the news about the Great War before 1916.

* * * * *

In two days, Ann was again a New Yorker, not an awed and desperaterustic. Dr. Wormser had prescribed some new clothes and expensivelunches. Ann was rich. Out of the $1,500 salary she had received infourteen months, she had saved $997.93. (The rest had gone forcigarettes, books, railroad fare, and loans to released prisoners, ofwhich 100 per cent. were still unpaid.) She bought a suit, more silkstockings than she needed--which is the definition of luxury--an eveningfrock, and a jade-colored cigarette holder, and she went to a revue,which she left abruptly in the middle, because of a very funny sketch inwhich was shown a Modern Prison, with valets bringing champagne inice-buckets for the happy burglars....

* * * * *

Lindsay Atwell was away, still on vacation in Vermont. Two days afterAnn had telephoned Lindsay's office, he telephoned her from Dorset, "Mydear, I am glad you're back! New York has been intolerably dullwithout you. Would you like to be associated with the New York prisons?Right you are! Judge Bernard Dow Dolphin--New York State SupremeCourt--is staying here. He has a great deal of influence. I'll speak tohim immediately. See you soon."

Well, she would rather have heard that her lips were rubies, but warmer,and that he longed for them but----It was nice that he was so practicaland keen.

* * * * *

Charley Erman, managing editor of the New York Chronicle, had beenspoiled by service as a foreign correspondent: he sometimes drank tea attea, instead of hinting for a co*cktail. He was drinking tea now, in Dr.Wormser's dowdy living-room, while Ann talked of Copperhead Gap ascoolly as she could.... Birdie Wallop, who was Topsy and Ariel andSkippy, hanging by her wrists for hours, against a rusty barred celldoor, in darkness, her back bleeding, her throat like flannel withthirst; all this for defending Jo Filson.

And prisons or county jails like this (did the newspaper want to sendher out to make sure?) in Missouri and Maryland, Oregon and Ohio, Kansasand Illinois--a little better, a little worse.

Erman cleared his throat a lot. "Well, what do you want us to do?"

"For myself, nothing."

"I know! I know! A newspaper's worst trouble is with people that don'twant something for themselves but for the world. I haven't any doubtthat everything in your prison is as bad as you say, and probably worsein other jails. But it's all been said--in Mrs. O'Hare's In Prison,for instance, and Frank Tannenbaum's Wall Shadows, and Fishman'sCrucibles of Crime, and--oh, dozens of books. But people mostly don'tpay attention to things that aren't under their eyes. No one ever made arevolution for people more than a hundred miles from himself. But thereal point is, you have no news, since this condition goes on all thetime, and a newspaper exists to publish news--new things. If there's aprison riot or scandal, we'll publish it all right, and every detailabout lack of sanitation, bad grub, cruelty, or anything else. We didjust that with the scandal about tying up women just a couple of yearsago. If you want to go back to Copperhead and get up a petition thatwill make the Governor act, or if you'll just assault the warden, or dosomething that will get you tried and bring out the facts, we'll publish*t, plenty--and you'll probably go to prison for five years. Want to dothat?"

"I do not!" Ann sounded shaky. "Once, I thought I would never be afraidof anything. But I'm afraid of going to prison, dead afraid!"

* * * * *

All the other newspaper editors said, "Yes, we don't doubt it, butthere's no news. It's horrible, but it's old stuff, and people wouldn'tread it."

* * * * *

The editor of that distinguished liberal weekly, the Statesman, wassighing, "Yes, I'm sure you're not exaggerating, Miss Vickers. And thereare even worse prisons. Have you read the articles we've run in the lasttwo years about the French Guiana penal colony, and the Floridachain-gangs?"

"No, I haven't. I'm afraid I didn't get to them."

"Do you see? Nobody much does 'get to them.' You say you feel a ghastlyfutility because you can't get the world to listen to you. Well, forthirty years I've been trying to get the world to listen to honestaccounts of all sorts of preventable abuses, and the result is that evenpeople like you mostly don't 'get to them'! What do you suppose I feel?I've more or less, after a good deal of cussing, learned to be patient.I'm afraid you'll have to. And----So many abuses! Sometimes I want tochuck the whole Cassandra business and just go fishing. I like fishing.And when I fish, at least I do catch fish!

"Let me show you the tips on assorted outrages that have come to me justthis morning alone, in letters or propagandist publications or telephonecalls, begging me to tell the facts and get something done, right away."He fumbled at the pile of papers on the Gargantuan desk in his minusculeoffice. "And mind you, all these people want me to help them communicateto the world, as you do. Um. Let's see. Well, here, for instance:Political prisoners are starving in Roumanian prisons. Miners arestarving in West Virginia, and their representatives are shot down, anda perfectly respectable school teacher who protested about it wasdeported in the middle of the night, and his family left terrified andpenniless. The natives of the island of Pafugi, British possession inthe South Seas, are exploited by the white sugar-planters--paid twentycents a day. The descendants of the liberated Southern slaves whosettled in Liberia have now made the descendants of original inhabitantsslaves. Emma Goldman says the Bolsheviks treat anarchists worse than aNew York State Republican. Chinese workers in textile factories, ownedby fellow Chinese, get six cents a day. The residents in a WesternY. M. C. A. hotel say the secretary is a degenerate, and got a finedecent young workman who protested pinched as a criminal syndicalist. Inan Eastern university, a professor with twenty years honorable servicewas dismissed because he praised the Mormons.

"A thousand others! And I've run so much about prisons. I ought to hushup for a while. But I'm going to let you, if you'd like, tell thestories of Josephine--Filson was it?--and Birdie Wallop, and the oldlady, I forget her name, who was hanged, in three short articles, sayabout two thousand words."

* * * * *

She wrote her three short articles in a fever; they appeared handsomelyin the Statesman.

They made as much noise as a bladder hurled into the ocean. They had asmuch effect as a tract left in a speakeasy.

There was a complimentary editorial about them in a liberal churchpaper. Three newspapers quoted a paragraph apiece. A new magazine calledWoman Triumphant (born but to die, alas) sent an ambitious young ladyinterviewer who reported Ann as asserting that she had been head-matronof a penitentiary at Rattlesnake Gap, and that with the warden, Dr.Dringoole, she had instituted classes in sewing which had reformed allthe prisoners.

She had a long letter from a gentleman who observed:

It is sentimentalists like you, who want to turn prisons intopicnics, who are largely responsible for the present crime wave.

(For there was a crime wave in 1925, as in 1932, 1931, 1930, 1898, 1878,1665, 1066, 11 B. C., and most years in between.)

The best informed and most experienced authorities on crime nowstate that lashing, with a provision that the lash must drawblood, should be universally restored, as the only deterrentagainst crime which a crook really fears.

But the chief response to Ann was in the Proletarian Pep, the chiefCommunist journal of America:

With characteristic impertinence, the Statesman, thewishy-washiest of all milk and water liberal sheets, has beenpublishing some pieces by a woman named Vickers about conditionsin a Southern jail at Copperhead Gulch. This writer is a SocialFascist, like all contributors to the Statesman, alsoSocialists, and agent provocateur, under a disguise of so-calledLiberalism secretly helping the Capitalists to bring about warwith the U. S. S. R. How true this is can be seen from the factthat she does not even mention Comrade Jessie Van Tuyl, who isimprisoned in this jail at Copperhead Gulch, and it is a factknown to all comrades who are free from ideological deviationsthat Comrade Van Tuyl, and her alone, is responsible forwhatever reforms are making at Copperhead Gulch. That this toolof the Capitalists, Mrs. Vickers, could have been there andapparently not even aware of the presence and leadership in jailof Comrade Van Tuyl shows where she stands and the necessity ofall comrades being alert to the smug hypocrisy of SocialFascists, and supporting Proletarian Pep which because of itsstruggle to unmask the conspiracy of the Liberals to overthrowthe U. S. S. R. is at this moment in serious financial straits.All comrades are urged to set aside five per cent. of theirwages for Proletarian Pep.

Two years later Ann learned that Dr. Sorella had committed suicide bydrinking poison in his bedroom at the prison.

Chapter 31

Ann Vickers had been superintendent of the Stuyvesant Industrial Homefor Women, the most modern prison in New York City, for only a year,assistant superintendent for two, yet through her book VocationalTraining in Women's Reformatories she had become known to allsociological and juridical groups in America, and she was receivingtoday, in January, 1928, the degree of Doctor of Laws from ErasmusUniversity, Connecticut.

A Day in the Life of a Great Woman....

Her train left the Grand Central at seven-thirty, and she had time onlyfor a cup of coffee and a doughnut, sitting on a high stool at a counterin the station, in that amazing underground city of cigar stores,magazine shops, haberdasheries, on streets whose sun and stars wereelectric lights. She shook her head at the redcaps and carried her ownbag, containing her academic robes, a private box of candy, and thelatest prison handbook of the National Society of Penal Information. Atfive thousand a year salary, without quarters or maintenance, you don'tcarelessly give tips to porters, if you are the superintendent of awomen's penitentiary, because every woman prisoner has the same idea ofborrowing from the superintendent when she is about to leave and enterupon a life of holiness and sobriety.

The Great Woman did not read long, during her two-hour journey. She satquiet, not jiggling, looking out of the window, apparently unseeing. Herdark eyes seemed resolute yet contented. She glanced at people quickly,as though she were used to sizing them up and giving them orders, yetshe had none of the roving, hungry look of an egotist who expects to benoticed. She could be very alone in a crowd, one thought.

At the Erasmus station she was met with grave hand-shaking by thepresident of the university, two professors of sociology, and an officerof the State Federation of Women's Clubs.

"We shall feel deeply the honor of having you as an honorary alumna ofold Erasmus," said the president, being a small man.

"Did you have a comfortable journey?" boomed one of the professors. Asthough she had come from China.

"My home club is just aching for the privilege of getting you to lecturefor us, whenever it's convenient, though we do appreciate how terriblybusy you are, with that great Institution in your charge," breathed theclubwoman. She was quite pretty, too.

"If you'd care to come up to my house, my good lady would be enchantedto help you don the academic vestments," said the president, smiling toindicate that he was being slightly humorous.

At the presidential mansion, when Ann had put on the dolorous robe andfunny hat that are somehow associated with the labeling of learning, thepresident's wife said brightly, "Is there anything I can do for you?"

Ann longed to remark, "You bet there is! I'd like a human cup of coffeeand an egg." But you don't, when you are becoming a Doctor of Laws, askfor coffee and fried eggs, do you? She remained classic and calm. Thatwas ever so important a part of being a Great Woman, she was learning:being silent when she didn't know what to say.

The convocation was held in a hall like an armory, very modern, allsteel girders and curving walls of cement and loud-speakers. There werea good many undergraduates--Ann suspected that the sociology professorshad dragged out their unwilling students--more clubwomen, and most ofthe faculty. The hall was a quarter filled.

Before the ceremony, behind the stage in a neat room adorned withautograph letters from William James, Henry Adams, and Robert UnderwoodJohnson, Ann was introduced to the other celebrities who were to receivehonorary degrees: the president of a Schenectady bank, who had given ahundred thousand dollars to the Erasmus School of Higher Business; thegovernor of a Mid-Western state; and the world-authority on the botanyof Beluchistan. She would not have noticed any of them, had she merelymet him on a train, but since she knew they were celebrities, she wasthrilled by them.

The Governor said, "You must come out and look over our prisons someday, Dr. Vickers. You'll find 'em right up to date. Dark cells andwhipping forbidden. By law! We got a real modern penological system."

She chanced to know that no state in the union had more prisoners strungup by the wrists, spread-eagled against cell doors, than the goodGovernor's, and none had more weary, degenerating idleness amongprisoners but--how do you reply to a Governor in such a case?

The bank president said to her, and he said it merrily, for he was arenowned after-dinner speaker as well as so renowned an amateur ofeducation that he was already an A. M., a D. C. L., a Litt. D., and anLL. D. four times over--he said: "Well, Dr. Vickers, here's something Ibet no one ever called to your attention: I've got a lot of respect forthe sympathy you show for the Unfortunate, but personally I think it'smisguided. Way I look at it, prison ought to be made just asdisagreeable as possible, so's it'll have a deterrent effect and makefolks not want to go there!"

The botanist-explorer shook hands and winked at her. She loved him.

It was a handsome procession.

The president, sixteen faculty members, two members of the Board ofTrustees, and the four candidates for honors, all in their academicrobes, with hoods of black and scarlet and purple, preceded by a gaunt,white-mustached man carrying a silver mace, marched out of the back ofthe hall, around to the front, through a mass of students andphotographers, and up to the platform, while Ann, trying to movemajestically behind a pair of heavy but enthusiastically polished blackshoes, said to herself, "I ought to feel impressed--this is a finething--it certainly is--a great moment--I wonder what the dickens Mrs.Keast is doing about the butter for the prison?"

She got more applause than the other three when she stumbled over to thepresident, at the reading-stand, to wait with watery knees and receiveher diploma. And it irritated her. "Getting rolls of parchment!Applause! What am I doing here? If I were any good, I'd be in a cellwith Jessie Van Tuyl." Meantime the president was baying, "...difficult to know whether we should the more honor Ann Vickers for herlearning in the complex co-ordination of sociology and psychiatry whichconstitutes contemporary criminology, or for the greatness of heartwhich has enabled her to take to herself the sorrows and suffering ofthe misguided..."

And then she was Dr. Vickers, with a diploma under her arm; and then,somewhere, minus her robes and with a fresh rosebud in the lapel of hersuit, she was addressing a large luncheon at the Faculty Club, withperfectly enormous applause whenever she came to a halt--no matter whatshe had said before the halt--and presently she was on the train again,very tired and, for all her efforts at cynicism about honors, very proudof herself; and just before six she was bustling into the StuyvesantIndustrial Home for Women, of which she was superintendent. Immediatelyall purple honors and degrees were submerged in details of butter forthe prison dining-room, the unfortunate conduct of Prisoner No. 3712,who had been caught distilling alcohol in the kitchen at night, and thefeeble pedagogy of the teacher of dressmaking.

* * * * *

The Industrial Home for Women, in the Borough of Stuyvesant, in GreaterNew York, was an entirely modern prison, but adapted to a jammed city.There was no room for gardens, but there was a central court, with afountain, a not very extensive bed of flowers, hand-ball courts, andstandards for basketball; and on the roof, nine stories up, there wasroom for all two hundred of the prisoners to walk in the sun at once,with no sense of jail about it save a high wire screen necessitated bynotions of suicide.

The assembly-hall had none of the damp garish stoniness of chapel atCopperhead Gap. There were theater seats, subdued decorations in crimsonand dull gold, a stage with curtain and scenery.

There were no cells. Each prisoner had, at least when the prison openedand was not overcrowded, a room to herself, with wire-glass windows butwithout bars. The rooms were ten feet by eight--not large, yet luxuriousby comparison with other jails; each with a bed, a chair, a table, awardrobe, bookshelves, such pictures as the prisoner cared to bring,running water, and, on the linoleum floor, a rug. Each dwelling-storyhad a sitting-room with books and magazines, open from after-supper tillbedtime to all inmates not undergoing punishment, and on each floor wereshower baths and toilets.... They were clean.... The plumbersregarded Ann as a holy terror.

A rug on each floor! No one could quite believe it!

It was extraordinary, a matter for discussion at penologicalconventions, that a woman should have a $1.98 rug on the floor of this,her only home!

The entire building was of steel, cement, brick, and glass. It could bekept spotless; under Ann, it was. Whatever else she might leave to Mrs.Keast, the assistant superintendent, Ann herself, with the doctor,inspected every corner three times a week; and the sight of a co*ckroachcaused the entire staff to be mobilized, to the martial sound of wireswatters and Flit-guns.

The inmates wore blue Indianhead uniforms all week. They were suggestiveof uniforms only in being uniform. On Sunday--when they were not, as inrespectable prisons, locked in cells from Saturday noon to Mondaymorning, but allowed to go to chapel, read in the sitting-rooms, loaf onthe roof, as they wished--they could wear their own clothes.

At no time was any rule of silence enforced.

There was, in the Industrial Home, a small, very modern knitting-works,which made sweaters, mufflers, caps of colored wool. It paid back to thestate a part of the expenses of the prison, and the workers receivedfrom thirty to seventy cents a day--no vast sum, yet several times asgreat as was paid for labor in the other prisons of the world. But theheart of the prison was what Ann sentimentally called the "SalvageCorps."

There were vocational classes, as good as she could make them: classesin cooking, housekeeping, stenography, sewing, dressmaking, millinery,fur-repairing, which turned an almost satisfactory percentage of thepetty criminals into self-dependent wage-earners. Ann was asunscrupulous as most reformers in getting teachers for nothing in theseclasses. There was the most complete parole department in America, andit regarded itself (with a certain encouragement from Ann) as existingonly to help discharged prisoners, not as a set of cats trying to trapthe mice. And most important of all in the Salvage Corps was the officeof the psychiatrist. He was a good psychiatrist--or so Ann thought. Hisbusiness was to study not the crime that had been committed, but theindividual who had committed it, and to find out why. He could not, orso Ann insisted, be greatly shocked by a woman who had killed ablackmailer; he could be perturbed by a woman clerk who had stolenstamps.

With the psychiatrist was a full-time general practitioner. Theirsalaries were, on the books, eighteen hundred dollars each a year. Theyreceived seven thousand each. The extra money came from Lindsay Atwell,Ardence Benescoten, the Carnegie Foundation, and the Dr. Ann Vickers whodid not use redcaps. It was doubtful whether it was not in some way aform of graft and pull. Certainly Ann had used pull enough when she hadbeen assistant superintendent, three years ago, and the StuyvesantIndustrial Home had been built. She had pestered Lindsay to influencethe state authorities to keep bars off the windows of the women'srooms--the number who were willing to escape by jumping out of asixth-story window was negligible--to install the basketball equipment,to keep all wood out of the construction, and to employ the twofull-time doctors.

There were no executions. Ann was a little ashamed to have that supremetask done for her at Sing Sing.

* * * * *

Her greatest trouble was the wits. The wits in the newspaper columns andcartoons. The wits in the magazines. The wits of the dinner-table.Whenever a cartoonist had nothing whatever to draw, he could make sureof commendation by depicting the Industrial Home as a funny university,as a funny speakeasy, as a harem. It did hurt, that the wits should maketheir living out of being humorous about women in agony, and other womenwho tried to save them from that breaking agony by making them feeldecent and clean and trusted again.

* * * * *

The staff rushed up to the Great Woman when she arrived at her desk atthe Stuyvesant Industrial Home after the ceremony at Erasmus University.

The telephone girl had a message from Mr. Lindsay Atwell to the effectthat he had to address the banquet of the New York County Home FloristsAssociation, and would not be able to telephone Dr. Vickers thatevening, but he certainly did congratulate her on----"Gee, Miss Vickers,there's one word I didn't get. It sounded like 'doctorate.' Is theresuch a woid? Say, lissen, gee, I'm glad they made you a doc, MissVickers! Ain't that funny? My boy friend said, he said, 'She's neverstudied medicine.' 'Say, lissen, fathead,' I says to him, 'if MissVickers wants to be a doc, lissen,' I said, 'the State Medical Boardwould be tickled to death to make her a doc and----' Gee, I wastickled pink! Say, Doctor, what do you do for a headache?"

The kitchen and dining-room matron, a quiet woman, said, "May Icongratulate you, Dr. Vickers? We are all so pleased! About the butter,now. I know it's bad. It's the politics. Honest, Doctor, I can't dobetter. If we don't get it from the Aegis Dairy Company, we're in Dutchwith the district leader. And I'm not getting any graft out of iteither. I swear I'm not! I wouldn't do that to you, Miss Vickers!"

"I know.... I know.... I'll do what I can."

The psychiatrist ambled in to say, "Ann, I've never been so pleased!Shall I call you 'Doctor'? Was it fierce?"

"Well, if you want to know the truth, Sam, I was proud as Punch!"

Then a minor New York paper was calling, asking for an interview. Andthe Sevigné Club of Lima, Ohio, was calling, long distance, asking herto lecture for them--"I'm afraid we can't pay you a very large fee,Doctor, but we'd be very happy to pay your expenses and to entertainyou, of course." And her old Settlement, in Rochester, was calling, longdistance, to invite her to Settlement Old Home Week. And the chiefjanitor of the Industrial Home was at her desk, cap in hand, muttering,"Doc, I got to have a couple more ash-cans, right away--I stole one, butthat's all I could get." And there were telegrams, like yellow snow.Twenty telegrams were still in front of the Great Woman when Mrs. Keast,the assistant superintendent, came in.

Ann had once said that Mrs. Keast was "Mrs. Kaggs plus New Hampshireinhibitions." Mrs. Keast had been Ann's rival for the position ofsuperintendent of the Industrial Home. She believed in purity. She wasreasonably honest. She was unreasonably terrifying. She had, possibly asa result of fifty-five years complete abstinence from tobacco, alcohol,laughter, sexual excitement, and novels, a dark bagginess under hereyes, and twitching fingers.... She hated Ann rather more than shehated the rest of the world.

"Oh, good-afternoon, Miss Vickers. I don't know whether you would carefor my humble congratulations, but I venture to give them to you,anyway. I suppose that I ought to call you 'Doctor' now!" She neighedexactly like an indignant horse.

"Well, I don't think it matters very much."

"Well, I'm sure, Dr. Vickers, I'm sure I hate to interrupt you on yourgreat day, I'm sure it must have been a great day--for you! I hate tointerrupt you with the practical problems that have entered today--whileyou were away!"

"Well, that's just too bad. That's the way life is. What're theproblems?"

Mrs. Keast sniffed.

"Well, the first is the woman that was caught making moonshine while shewas in charge of the kitchen and dining-room at night."

"Yes. I don't like that. I'll talk to her, later. But what's the other?"

"Well, there's a woman brought in this afternoon--while you wereaway!--for blackmail, and she just won't listen to reason. Regularrecalcitrant. Cursed me! I've got her in the Jug."

There were only two forms of punishment at the Industrial Home: dockingof sitting-room privilege, and solitary confinement in rooms as clean asthe others, and as light, but solitary and apart; and these twopunishments Ann used as little as possible. But Mrs. Keast and the otherVeteran matrons preserved some savory memory of the older days oflicensed sadism by referring to these confinement cells as the "Jug."

"All right, all right, Mrs. Keast. I'll see her before I go home."

Mrs. Keast sniffed herself away.

The Great Woman rang for her secretary, Miss Feldermaus, who giggled,"Gee, isn't it dandy, Doctor," saw a few more subordinates, read a fewmore telegrams of congratulation, went quite cheerfully down thecorridor to the "Jug," alone, unlocked the cell, and heard from theRecalcitrant therein: "Well, Annie, and how the hell are you? Hear fromyour boy friend, the Copperhead prison doc, often? God, that was a swellpicture of you and him!"

The lady in the cell was Miss Kittie Cognac.

Ann laughed.

Kittie did not look so elegant as she had three years ago, nor quite sovicious.

"Why, Kittie, my dear! In again?"

"Hell, no! I'm skating across the Atlantic!"

"Hard luck. Oh, just a moment."

Ann bustled out of the cell, leaving the door open. Kittie dashed afterher.

"Want to escape, Kit? I don't mind!"

The woman stood glaring.

On a wall-telephone, Ann called the prison psychiatrist:

"Dr. Alstein? Miss Vickers speaking. Will you please come to D2, rightaway?" She looked around. Kittie's hands were clenched, her eyes dartinglike lizards. Ann called again on the telephone: "Mrs. Keast? MissVickers. Will you have a room prepared for Miss Cognac? I'm taking herout of solitary. What? Yes, that's what I said, Keast, understand!"

But as she spoke, Ann was thinking, "Dr. Sorella was right. It's gettingme, beginning to make me a tyrant, this prison life. No human being isgood enough to be a jailer!"

Dr. Alstein was racing down the corridor--a small, compact man withkind, neurotic eyes. Then Kittie spoke:

"How are you, Doc? Aren't you the guy that tried to make me in a speaklast week?"

"I am not!" The doctor spoke with quite unprofessional rage.

"Oh, ain't you? Well, it was some Jew boy that looked like you. Well,Annie, so you and the doc think you're going to soft-soap me into beinga hypocrite like you two! You! Miss Vickers! Dr. Vickers! Youround-heel!"

Dr. Alstein blazed, "Doctor, shall I----"

"No!" cried Ann.

"All right. But she's going back to solitary."

"No. She's not. It would flatter her too much. Doctor, here's your case.My friend Kittie is essentially an egomaniac. I knew her at Copperhead.But she's rather competent, and I'm planning to see that when she leavesthis health resort of ours, she'll be set up in a smart gown or hatshop. She'll be a success. But meantime it will be a little difficult toconvince her we're friends of hers. And we'll have to get her off thesnow, cold-turkey. Do you mind, Kit? I hate to have to do it this waybut----"

Kittie Cognac was crying. "Oh damn you, damn you! Won't you even getinsulted?"

* * * * *

As she went down in the elevator, Ann remarked to herself, "Annie, Ihave never known you to be so hateful as when you took that sweet andforgiving and superior attitude toward Kittie Cognac. Poor Kit! TheAlstein was much more human--losing his temper. Miss Vickers! Dr.Vickers! The Woman Leader! You poor semi-literate brat! Giving you adegree! If they only knew!"

And so the Great Woman came home, by subway--not many Great Women canafford taxicabs--and in her apartment she sat by the telephone,thinking, "I wish I had a date for this evening. I wish some nice personwould call me up and invite me to dinner and the movies, the way theywould Tessie Katz or Birdie Wallop."

For dinner, she made for herself, as women do when they live alone, acup of tea and a slice of toast, and as she consumed them, standingbefore the drain-board of the sink in her kitchenette, she brooded:

"Funny how I hate the phone when it rings in my office, all day long.But now----I wish Lindsay would chuck his cursed Florists' Dinner andcome. Florists! I wish I had a husband, who came home nights--no, no,not every night, but sometimes, for a surprise. I wish I had Pride. Mydaughter! I would be proud of her. I'm afraid I'd send her to a terriblyconservative school, and be proud of her horrible smart friends, likeany other Waubanakee mother. And I killed you, I murdered you, Pride,and so I am Dr. Vickers, superintendent of a prison! And with a greatsum obtained I this freedom. But Paul said, 'But I was free born.' Hewas not! No one is!"

Ann Vickers brewed herself another cup of tea. It was bitter.

Chapter 32

Her apartment was as modern as the Stuyvesant Industrial Home and,though she didn't like it, almost as hard. It had been pleasant enoughto take the trouble of housekeeping when she had shared with PatBramble. But now, when once or twice a week she had to go out andaddress Dinners with a capital D--Dinners of the League for theUrbanization of Agricultural Communities, or the League for theRustification of Industrial Centers, or the Committee on the Employmentof Non-Recidivist Penal Offenders, or the Alumnæ of the Phi Tau DeltaSorority of Point Royal College, or the Illinois Society, or the St.Stephen's Women's Sociological Study Circle (Brooklyn), or the Citizens'Independent Mutual Union of the Borough of Stuyvesant--when sometimesshe had to stay at the prison till midnight--when gentleman reporterstelephoned to her daily for her opinions on bobbed hair as an accessoryto crime and the effect of novel-reading on crimes of lust--whenbrightly tender lady reporters called to get her opinions ondivorce--when lady ex-convicts waited at her door for advice and aslight temporary assistance--when insurance agents called up in theevening to explain that hers was a peculiarly hazardous occupation (theyhad statistics about the number of prison officials who had been killedin riots)--when 750,331 young women wrote to her monthly, asking for herautograph or for suggestions on how to get to New York and enter theromantic realm called "Social Work"--when you could never tell whetherLindsay would appear at six or seven or eleven, and want a snack here ortake her to the Casino--when there was no Pride whose fresh air andquiet must be considered--when, in fact, she had become a Great Woman,and generally lonely, it was too much to fuss over housekeeping andinnumerable bills, and she had taken a little flat in the new HotelPortofino, in the East Nineties, halfway between the prison and theplace of theaters and restaurants.

It was not a very large hotel. But to make up for that it had untoldmarble, telephones, radios, bellboys with monkey-jackets and grins andcrisped Sicilian hair, mysterious and unhappy-looking old men with bluedenim jackets and long gray mustaches who were always going somewherewith kits of tools to repair something that never quite got repaired,proud Persian carpets and rather less proud Japanese prints, supplies ofWhite Rock, and telephone girls saying, "Yeah? Well I givum the message,I don't know where he is."

* * * * *

Ann had a living-room with the clean, hard, efficient brightness ofsteel and cement and prickly plaster. Tall windows with metal mullions.From them you could see the East River, and hear the beckoninghoarseness of steamers which she imagined were outbound for Seville andGötteborg and Mangalore. Unyielding floors of linoleum laid in cement.High walls--straight walls that went bleakly up and up to a ceiling ofrigidly squared beams enclosed in plaster.

She had made it as human as she could with her small store of kind,human, old things. The lounge on which Professor Vickers had slept onSunday afternoons. His set of Dickens. The David Copperfield that shehad read every year since she had been ten. The Water Babies that hehad given her, and Idylls of the King with Glenn Hargis's signature.Four soft chairs, and little tables, and lights by the chairs so thatyou could read. Shelves of brown dim books about criminology andpenology and psychology and all the dim desperate sciences in which shesought wisdom.

Beyond this tall living-room was a bedroom rather smaller than she hadhad in Waubanakee, Ill., and a bathroom so small that she had only ashower bath. And the kitchenette--New York was the greatest city in theworld, so she had no room for a spacious stove or a line of copper pots,but there was ever such a nice electric coffee percolator, and she had alarge tomcat named Jones.

A good many people came in: Malvina Wormser, Lindsay Atwell, PatBramble, whenever she was in town, and a clique of social workers, suchas Russell Spaulding. He had been christened James Russell LowellSpaulding, and he signed it "J. Russell Spaulding," but, for reasons Annnever did discover, he was known throughout the whole world ofradical-dinner-attenders as "Ignatz." She had met him at the OrganizedCharities Institute, of which he was a department head. He wasunmarried, at forty--three years older than Ann--and zealous at being aMan about Town as well as a Progressive Humanitarian. Mr. Spaulding waslarge, round-faced, and given to little jokes. As a small boy, Annguessed, he had been the wistful fat one on whom the gang in his Boytownin Iowa had played all their jokes, and he had never quite got overtrying to impress the gang--trying, in New York; to impress a shadowy,unescapable Iowa. Ann liked him because he was kind, because he neverminded being invited to dinner at the last moment, and because heremembered to telephone you, when you were kept home by 'flu, asdependably as did Lindsay Atwell.

Chapter 33

He was so thin and fine and gray and gracious, Lindsay Atwell. Hisruddiness had faded. Pat Bramble insisted that he was an old cat, butAnn saw him as a greyhound. He remembered flowers and candy andbirthdays. He kissed her, tenderly and not too briefly, but nothingmore. Sometimes she reflected, "If that man doesn't propose to me prettysoon, I'm going to propose to him," but she always forgot it. He was asfamiliar to her as her right hand, and as unregarded.

He came in for what New York politely called "tea," when she wasparticularly tired, and particularly glad of his restfulness. A bad day.Kittie Cognac was turning so sweet and pious that Ann knew she was up tosome deviltry. And Ann's pet prisoner, No. 3701, an ex-school teacher inprison for stealing rare books from libraries, had been caught sellingfalse teeth out of the dental infirmary. "A swell reformer I turned outto be!" sighed Ann, in the jargon of the day. She felt clinging. WhenLindsay came, she kissed him, to his placid surprise, till she almoststrangled him. But she did not tell him she was tired: being tired washis privilege. She drew the bridge lamp nearer to the deepest chair,gave him the evening papers, and went out to the kitchen to mix theco*cktails.

As she dumped the magic ice-cubes out of the electric refrigerator, asshe measured and shook, she hummed excitedly, and planned. "What ablessed security we'll have when Lindsay and I are married and he comeshome every evening like this! He'll be a Justice of the Supreme Court ofthe United States, and I think I'll be Governor of New York. Together,we'll have royal power. Like a medieval king and queen. I'll give himsome of my belief in the co-operative commonwealth. He'll give mesomething of his common sense. But how can I be in Albany and he inWashington?" She laughed, as she carried in the co*cktail shaker, on asilver tray with glasses and a prim, unfeminist doily. "I'm a littlepremature, to worry about that!" she jeered to herself.

Lindsay sipped judiciously. He folded the newspaper before he laid itdown, with its edges exactly parallel to the edges of the little tablebeside him, and judiciously he spoke:

"I think you ought to know, Ann: I am going to be married. To MargaretSalmon--you remember, the banker's daughter."

Ann sat quietly. She, who usually did things jerkily, put down herco*cktail carefully. "Yes? Miss Salmon? A nice girl. I remember her. Atyour flat."

(But inside her, the Ann who had defied Cap'n Waldo was ragingprofanely, "You are not! You're going to marry me! That Salmon flapper,that limp, skinny bonehead that can only dance--drives a car so badlyshe's always getting wrecked and----Oh, my dear, this is the end,Lindsay, my dear!")

"You are the first to whom I have told this, Ann, because I dare tothink of you as my best friend. Yes. My best friend." He stopped. Hescratched his upper lip with his left forefinger. He was standing now,still holding his undrained co*cktail, but his hand was trembling, and heset down the glass. A few drops on the little table. He absently wipedthem off with his pure handkerchief before he faced her again. "Ann, Ihad hoped once I might venture to ask you to marry me. You are the mostworth-while woman I know, and the dearest. But I'm afraid you're alittle too big for me. I have a career of my own. And if I married you,I'd simply become your valet, I'm afraid, my dear."

"Yes. Yes, perhaps. Yes, it might be so."

("It would not be so, you fool! I'd protect you and help you----")

"You see, it's just because I do think you and your career are soimportant----You know. I wouldn't even want to interfere, Ann.Encourage."

"Yes, well, I think perhaps I do appreciate----"

"But, on the other hand, it seems certain I'll have the Democraticnomination for Justice of the State Supreme Court and----But I'm afraidthat you----Oh, in all helpfulness and sweetness. You'd want to adviseme, and a judge has to stand alone--or sit, ha, ha!--and----And in dailylife you'd be fretting about me----You see, sort of smother me withkindness. You see, because you have resolution and a point of view ofyour own, and conceivably I'd let you control me and----You see?"

"Yes, well, I suppose perhaps that's so."

"And, dear, you must come to appreciate my Margaret! You probably thinkshe's unformed but----Such a fine, delicate nature--simply too shy toexpress herself publicly, but so dear and----Oh, Ann, oh, my God!"

He was kissing her in the awkwardness of passion, almost sobbing as hekissed her ears, her hair, her throat, her shoulders. Then, crying, "Ican't stand it!" he was fleeing out of the room, out of the flat.

She did not move; just stood, with her arms out toward the door.

* * * * *

For an hour she sat far forward in a deep chair, stooped over, biting aknuckle. A hundred times she thought, "I'll telephone him. I will! No. Iwon't!" She rose, mechanically, her head filled with the vision of himand of his kisses; she drained his co*cktail, washed the shaker andglasses, put them away, and unseeingly caressed Jones the cat when, tomake her notice him, he vainly played at cat-and-mouse with a ball ofpaper. "I'll telephone him. I must! I can't let him go, not to thatbeastly little flapper!"

She turned on the radio, but after a moment of Terry Tintavo crooning"That Atlantic City Mooooon" she snapped it off viciously.

Mostly, through her hour of agony, she sat like a softer "Thinker." She"went to pieces." That is the accepted phrase. The fact is the opposite.The scattered pieces of her at last flew together; the pieces of AnnVickers that had been dropped in so many corners: in Humanitarianism,which, being interpreted, means putting diapers upon old evil judges andold evil tramps; in sketchy dabblings at psychology, in affection forfriends, backdrifts to the conditioning of a village childhood, fear ofbeing afraid, desire for an impossible perfectionism with some goodsaline humor about that spectacle of herself trying to be perfect, in amuted pride at having become a species of Great Woman, in the romanticguidance of the shreds of Keats and Tennyson that she still remembered,in the drag of such daily and inescapable ordinarinesses as unpaidbills, and the taste of fresh peas, and the smell of pinks on a streetbarrow, and the corn on her toe that made a little ridiculous someinterview with a state official, and how much to tip the hotel janitorwho, after all, had only fixed her bathroom light this past month, andthe ever-imagined sound of Pride's crying, and her neighbors' radioswhen she wanted to sleep, and the regret that she had forgotten to sendflowers to Dr. Wormser on her birthday--all these dissevered pieces ofAnn Vickers flew together and she became one integrated passionatewhole, a woman as furious for love as Sappho.

To the eye she was a modestly dressed and comely woman sitting on theedge of an overstuffed chair in one cell of a skyscraper hotelscientifically provided with electric lighting and electricrefrigeration, in the cinematic city of thousand-foot towers and steeland glass and concrete. But all the layers of niceness and informedreasoning and adaptation to the respectability of concrete had beenstripped off, till she was naked, nude as a goddess--a woman triballeader in the jungle.

Rarely did she think in words, but chiefly in emotions, explosive andscarlet. Yet now and then her inner words were clear:

"I do want to add a millionth of a degree to civilization. Like FlorenceNightingale. (Not so cranky, I hope!) I do like a job of some dignityand respect. I like power. I do! I do not want to spend my life payinggrocery bills! And I can put it over. I have! Power and initiative andthe chance to give Kittie Cognac a chance.

"And I don't care one hang for all of it! I want love; I want Pride, mydaughter. I want to bear her. I have a right to her. I want to teachher. I would be glad if some ranchman out of an idiotic 'Western novel'came along and carried me off. I'd bear his children and cook his beans.And I wouldn't become a drab farm-wife. I'd learn grains, soils,tractors. I'd fight for the coöperatives. I'd go into politics. And allthe time I'd have Pride and my man----

"But maybe I couldn't have Pride and my ranchman and still haveambition, any more than I can have Pride and Lindsay and ambition. Howsimple we were when we used to talk about something called 'Feminism'!We were going to be just like men, in every field. We can't. Eitherwe're stronger (say, as rulers, like Queen Elizabeth) or we're weaker,in our subservience to children. For all we said in 1916, we're stillwomen, not embryonic men--thank God! I'm glad of it, because whileLindsay has his judge's robes and his leech of a Margaret, some day I'mgoing to have my daughter Pride!"

* * * * *

Russell Spaulding on the telephone.

"Don't suppose there's a ghost of a chance you're free for dinner 'sevening, Ann. You're probably dining with the president of Columbia orthe Pasha of Pezuzza.

"Oh! No! Russell! I'd be enchanted----I take it this is an invitation?"

"By my halidom, yea! I'll be right around."

Her only side-thought was, "I do hope he won't be too joky."

* * * * *

Mr. J. Russell Spaulding of the Organized Charities Institute, variouslyknown to reform circles of New York as "Ignatz" and as "Russell," was acompetent social worker who had read the books, who could chivvyunderpaid stenographers at the O. C. I. as efficiently as any manager ofan insurance office--one of the first qualities of any executive in ahumanitarian movement--and who could in ten seconds tell whether anapplicant for charity really wanted to work. (Which, charity subjectsbeing like carpenters, authors, fishermen, aviators, and doctors, mostof them earnestly did not.) Yet with all his qualities as a leader ofmen, Russell reminded Ann, in private life, of a good old farm dog,hearty and simple, frisking and crouching and shaking his broad behindwith the longing to go for a run.

By the time he came Ann had changed from a suit to the first frock athand, had washed her eyes and gargled, and was convinced that she hadconcealed her sorrow as only a Great Woman, used to facing and denyingthe public, ever could. He bounced in, crying, "How about some grandChinese eats--chicken pineapple, eggs fou yung---- Why, Ann, darling,what is it?"

"What is what?"

"Something's worried you. Tell old Uncle Russell."

He loomed. He was so taller and wider than Lindsay; his chest so morekeg-like than Lindsay's fastidious bosom; his wavy black hair had anatural pompadour. She wanted to lay her head on his shoulder and howl.But she said briskly, "Not a thing. Oh, just the usual fusses at theIndustrial Home. I want to forget 'em. And if I do look a little palelyloitering, it's probably because I'm famished. Let's go eat."

His big hands, a little flabby, pinioned her arms. He kissed herforehead, brotherly, and grunted, "Well, I shan't butt in, my goodDoctor, but if I can do anything, proud to meet you. Yes, let's forgetit. But no Chinese chow for you this evening, my good woman. What youneed is----I know a Wop speakie where nobody will recognize even goodand great leaders of public opinion like us, and the Chianti ispractically drinkable. Come on!"

And he wasn't too joky. He wasn't apparently sympathetic. He talkedshop--that only really satisfactory talk aside from dirty stories andlove, which latter is itself a form of shop-talk. He had her furiouslydebating with him about eugenics, Commonwealth College for Workers,minimum hours for women's labor, reorganization of the textile industry.Lindsay would have been charming and witty about the theater andTrouville, and Ann have been delicately happy. But with Russell, she wasaggressive and emphatic and already half-healed.

Back home, Russell said cheerily, "Lookit. If you aren't going off withyour boy friend Atwell next Sunday, why don't you and I try to get holdof Malvina Wormser and Bill Coughlin and have a picnic in Westchester?"

"I'll phone Dr. Wormser and phone you tomorrow. Thanks a lot, Russell."

He stooped for a kiss, then didn't, and went off leaving her toweep--only the weeping did not come now. It seemed a grief dead thesehundred years, and Lindsay was someone of whom she had only read.

But the mention of Dr. Wormser made her long for that fount of life.With Malvina, she could weep. And if she did not weep, she would die.

It wasn't so late--quarter after eleven. She telephoned, and in half anhour was across the fireplace from the dumpy little woman, smoking, andsaying with careful gravity, "Malvina, I think the jig is up--mypretending, or at least wanting, to be a woman as well as a glorifiedschoolma'am. Lindsay chucked me tonight. I haven't come forencouragement, but more, sort of, to make a public and officialregistration of the fact that something, God knows what, makes itimpossible for any real man to love me."

"That's not true, Ann. You have something, I have something, allsuperior women have something (I s'pose we are superior, aren't we? Idunno) that makes the pretty real men afraid of our overshadowing'em--the men who are ambitious, not commonplace, yet won't standcomparison with better stuff. We have to depend either on men so smallthat they get their pride and egotism out of being known as ourassociates, or on men so big they're not afraid of comparison withanyone.

"It has nothing to do with sex attractiveness. You and I have passion,some charm. In fact, Ann, you must get it right out of your head thatit's only ambitious women that suffer so. It's men, too. A first-classman marries a mean woman, and after she gets over her first awe of himas a celeb, she puts in the rest of her life, till he chucks her, intrying to convince the world that she's as good as he is. She suffers,almost to insanity, over the fact that most people see her only as thegreat man's wife. She tries to make him feel guilty for it.

"Even among friends of the same sex--A and B start out as youngsters,apparently equal. A makes good. B doesn't. It's a terribly rare and fineB that will endure it, and won't try, by recalling A's early breaks andthrowing them at him, to make him feel humble.

"Good heavens, Ann, it's world-old. It's the story of Aristides theJust. Three-fourths of the mass hate superior people. Verily I say untoyou, there shall be more rejoicing over one good man pulled down to themob than over nine and ninety that are elevated for an example tomankind.

"It's only an improbable accident when a woman and a man who are both ofthem big enough not to be jealous of each other's bigness do meet--andthen, probably, when they do meet, one of 'em will already be married tosome little pretentious squirt and they can't marry--but thank Heaven,there hasn't yet been passed a constitutional amendment preventing thesacred old custom of illicit love. In a long life devoted to meddlingwith other people's intimate affairs, I don't know of half a dozensuccessfully married couples who are both important people. But it hasnothing to do with your feminine attractions, my love.

"But----Curious. If a woman were handsome as Diana, a better physicistthan Lord Rutherford, President of the United States, worldtennis-champion, mistress of seventeen languages, a divine dancer, andpossessed of a perfectly functioning adrenal gland, still she would bemiserable and humble in the presence of any bouncing chorus-girl, if nomale had ever looked at her moist-eyed. And I'm afraid it will be thesame world without end, amen. Hell!"

Somehow, when Ann went home, she could not feel tragic--just dreary andfutile and not at all a Great Woman, but a Little Woman.

* * * * *

Their picnic was agreeable. For three weeks Russell Spaulding waschubbily attentive and blessedly unquestioning. Ann did not telephone toLindsay. He called her, tentatively, suggesting a party with hisMargaret, but she begged off, with hoarse politeness.

Ann was alone in her apartment, at mid-evening, engaged, as a weightypart of prison work, in studying a pamphlet, "122 Economical Ways ofPreparing Rice." She was humming. A knock, and her careless, "Come in."

No apparent response. She looked up. Lindsay Atwell was in the doorway,staring. His hat was in trembling hands. There was something indefinablyaged and degenerated about him. His collar was proper enough, but hisfastidious tie was a little crooked, his hair not quite sleek. He lookedlike a sick man, and hopeless. He stumbled as he came toward her desk.She did not rise. This was a man she could barely remember.

"Ann, I'm going crazy! I can't stand Margaret! She's a little peaco*ck!Oh, I need your richness and realness----Forgive me! Marry me!"

"Why, I'm sorry, Lindsay, but Russell Spaulding and I were marriedyesterday afternoon. Announcing it tomorrow."

"Why? Oh, God, why?"

"Why? Oh, I suppose because he asked me to. And I do like him, you know.Yes. Of course I do."

Chapter 34

It happened to be convenient for these two people, busy about all goodworks, to be married Thursday afternoon, but for that night Russell hada dinner of the Single Tax Advancement Program and, the next night, acommittee meeting of the Friends of Russia, and he delicately statedthat it might be very nice if they didn't do anything nuptial tillSaturday, when they would start their three-day honeymoon at MalvinaWormser's cottage.

"Sure. All right," said Ann.

They arrived at the cottage at six of an early-spring evening, withmoon. Russell had been very funny on the train, telling how the editorof the Statesman had spent an hour at the committee meeting trying tocombine entire loyalty to Soviet Russia with entire pacifism andloving-kindness toward counter-revolutionaries.

There was no porter at the station. She admired--she was alwaysforgetting how strong Russell must be--the way in which he tossed theirbags on his shoulder and wafted them into the station; the executive wayin which, by telephone, he ordered a taxicab.

In Dr. Wormser's pine-ceiled long living-room, with its scent of woodand salt breeze and books, she was morbid about Pride, who had beenmurdered in this house. But she forgot, as Russell lifted her from thefloor, held her to his breast.

"Hm! Some feat! I'm not a lightweight," she said.

"To me----" Peering, she decided that he actually was not joking. "To meyou're just a fragile little thing, to shield and baby and protect, forall your giant brain!"

"Well, that's a new way of looking at it. But if you should ever meet afriend of mine called Katherine Cognac, don't tell her that. How aboutsome supper? Did you really remember to bring the grub?"

"Honey, your old man may be a frost as a sociologist, but as a picnicprovider, he's IQ 100. He's the king of boy scouts!"

"Russell, my dear, say anything else you want to about yourself, butnever that."

She did not sound particularly merry.

But she was touched by the thoroughness of his shopping. Out of a woodencase, which he had carried in as easily as though it were--well, aseasily as though it were a pretty heavy wooden case--came half aSmithfield ham, Irish bacon, a chicken, two squabs, veal chops whichthey immediately popped into the electric refrigerator, cans and boxesof corn, tomatoes, instant oatmeal, flapjack flour, Roquefort----Sheloved a grocery store, as do all healthy dreamers, and here was one oftheir own.

Apron about his waist, singing "Smile, Smile, Smile," Russell helped herprepare the first honeymoon meal, deftly setting the table. In fact, hewas almost too helpful and merry. Ann wished, presently, that he wouldbe quiet. She was tired with a nameless tiredness. She wanted to dinewell, to sit silently looking at the moon-webbed sea, to be kissedthoroughly, till she reeled, and go off to sleep with a man's arm aroundher.

"'There's a long, long trail a-wiiiiinding----'"

"Damn it, let it wind!"

"Why, darling!"

"Oh, I'm sorry, Russell. You know. I sort of got tired of that songduring the war."

"Then I'll sing that funny one, 'She was poor but she was honest.'Or----Maybe I'm too noisy. Getting married is a little nerve-racking,isn't it! But delightfully. I'll be a li'l' mouse, then, as much as ahundred-ninety-pounder can be a mouse--mouse crossed withelephant--co*ckroach crossed with hippopotamus--Lord might have inventedmuch more amusing animiles----"

He did run on. But seemingly he did not expect her to listen, and shewas almost happy. They sat and regarded the guaranteed spectacle of moonon ocean, and he held her competently--neither with a stale and fishliketimidity, nor with too avaricious a passion.

Abruptly, at eleven, he said, "Let's go to bed."

"Well----" She felt virginal and frightened.

In the living-room he seized her hand, led her to the window seat, drewher down. She was nervous till she saw his face; then she wanted tolaugh. He looked so lugubriously sentimental, and his voice was soY. M. C. A., at its manliest and most ponderous:

"Ann, the moment has come----We are both of us people of the world, andI think we're rather unusually endowed with senses of humor, but let usfor once forego humor and treat this hour as sacred. Perhaps I shouldhave told you before, but anyway, I must now. While I have certainlynever been a roué, I am not quite altogether a virgin."

"What?"

"No, I grieve to say, not altogether a----"

"Well, neither am I."

"You're not?"

"No--not quite."

"Oh. Well, of course, that makes it----Still. Of course. You're amodern."

"I am not! I'm a woman! I hope that's not merely a modern creation!"

He struggled. His face worked like that of a puzzled little boy whoseemed large only because he was glimpsed in a magnifying mirror. Thenhis face cleared; he laughed:

"And by golly, I'm glad you're not! Oh, Ann, I'm a sentimentalist, amake-believer, a wind-bag, an exhibitionist! I'm a reformer only becauseI'm an exhibitionist! (I'll kill you, my good girl, if you ever remindme of my confession!) I guess I was planning a fine juicy scene--noblyadmitting how very bad I've been! Oh, I'm a typical sentimental liberal!And you so big, so honest, so----No, by God, you're not! Not tonight!You're my girl! Come here! How do you unfasten this?"

* * * * *

She had liked Russell. At least she had liked his liking her. Thisnight, from the moment when he had admitted his tendency to childishplay-acting till the moment when she woke in his arms, they two curledclose together as piled plates, she believed that she loved him.

Once convinced that he need not be delicate and reverent, Russellenjoyed being bawdy. Next day he made a good deal of swimming naked, ofsetting the table clad only in straw sandals and an apron, and he toldher stories that were not only slightly filthy but, much worse, veryold.

For a day, she enjoyed abandonment to lively coarseness, nor did shelater mind it. But after many Kittie Cognacs, she did not think thatcoarseness was in itself particularly interesting. She began to findRussell a little too noisy, too proud of his athletic powers, in theirgreater intimacies. He was as lacking in restraint as Lindsay Atwell waslacking in boldness.

She meanly sneaked away from him when he was peeling potatoes on theporch and, leaving him babbling on in his belief that she was in thekitchen, she ran down the beach and sat in the bowl of sun between twodunes. She looked happy and young as she ran, and her hair fluttered atthe edges of the red handkerchief tied round her head. But she grewserious as the sun lulled all of her save the little machine that tickedunceasingly in her skull.

"He's a child. He does mean well. He is not a fool. (I do wish hewouldn't be so joky, and I wish to Heaven he wouldn't tickle my sides!)But he's a child. He's vain. He's pretentious. I don't want him as thefather of my children--of Pride.

"No. It's not true. He'd probably be an excellent father--understandingand jolly. But I don't want Pride to reproduce him. That's what a womanwants in her child: to perpetuate the man she loves.

"Oh, my God! How could I have done this? Just to get back at Lindsay,just to show him! Russell! This bumble-puppy! This joker! This teaserthat thinks it's funny to call me 'Doctor'! This fat rustic that hankersafter bouncing love, under hedges! I that was proud and free andpowerful! To get myself into a position where I have to share the bed ofthis clown--and what's worse, have to listen to his jokes!"

She hissed with fury.

But the sun was coaxing, the waves were gay, and she was a healthy womanwho had been starved. She crept back, and was gratifyingly received onthe window seat. But after that she took precautions that she should nothave the children of Russell Spaulding, of Ignatz, of the playboy ofliberalism.

Chapter 35

Spirals, stars, rays, beams, zigzags----
TALK
as, radical talk, progressive talk, liberal talk, forward-looking
talk, earnest talk, inspirational talk,
as, of Roget, of Thesaurus, to,
cry, roar, shout, bawl, brawl, halloo, whoop, yell, bellow,
howl, scream, screech, screak, shriek, shrill, squeak, squeal,
squall, pule, pipe, yawp, vociferate, raise the voice, lift up
the voice, call out, sing out, cry out, exclaim, rend the air,
shout at the top of one's voice,
as, in a radical party in a radical party a radical party,
as,
of,
Tom Mooney
prison paroles
Stalin
sterilization of the unfit, unfit for what
kulaks
Gastonia
hom*osexuality
commission form of govt
syndicalism
Haiti, conditions in
Nicaragua, conditions in
China, conditions in
Upper Silesia, conditions in
Liberia, land of the noble free, conditions in
hom*osexuality
capital punishment
birth-control
gold standard
glands
Sacco and Vanzetti
Ramsay MacDonald
Senators, conditions in
A. F. of L.
A. F. of Matty Woll
social equality
race equality
what is equality
hom*osexuality
Majority Communist Party not a chance without Bill
Foster
but if Bill Haywood had lived
hom*osexuality, conditions in, prejudices against, why not
Tom Mooney
tariff, down with tariff
steel industry, conditions in
no conditions in it
hom*osexuality
Rand School
social diseases--why social
Macedonia irredenta where is Macedonia
Mexico irredento
the J. A. B. of the A. I. C. P. & the C. O. S.
the I. L. D.
the L. I. D.
the A. A. A. A.
not the A. A. A. never
the T. U. U. L.
the L. I. P. A.
the N. A. A. C. P.
the American Civil Liberties Union
the Theatre Guild
Clarence Darrow
Freud
Adler
Jung
Bertrand Russell
John Dewey
Al Smith
Sam Gompers
the United Front
the Llano Colony
Mooney and Billings
why never Billings and Mooney
conditions
TALK
as,
to,
cry, roar, bellow, blare, bark, bay, yelp, yap, yarr, yawl,
grunt, gruntle, growl, neigh, bray, mew, mewl, purr,
caterwaul, bleat, moo, croak, caw, gobble, cackle, gaggle,
guggle, buzz, hiss, blatter,
as,
TALK,
with,
all the several sorts, manners, and classes of persons interested
in Reforming the World whether from lively
morality, astringent fanaticism, the most excellent pleasure
of hell-raising, the on-holding of weekly salaries, the
to-wealthy-women-common desire of seeing learned rebels
obsequious at their dinner-tables,
indeed, all these votaries of Justice,
as,
editors of journals of revolt
Communist agitators out on bail
statisticians
presidents of garment workers' unions
Columbia instructors
members of the Lucy Stone League
Socialist reporters from Republican newspapers
wives of bankers who get back at their husbands by bailing
out Communists and feeding them champagne when they
need porridge they both need porridge both the banker
husbands and the Communists but the bankers' wives,
the bankers' wives, the jolly bankers' wives they'll be
damned if they'll cook porridge for the faith--'tis prettier
far, tra la, tra la, to have the butlers pour out the champagne
for the starving Bolos again and again
lobbyists for Roumania, for North Dakota, folk song,
Navajos, vegetarianism, song birds, and the instruction of
bright little Jew-boys in sculpture to be of use to same later,
tra la, in modeling gents' suitings
foreigners (1) with beards (2) with beards
all these coin-bright uplifting souls and all full, not as in a
Greenwich Village literary party, of gin but full of
TALK

The talk of that evening, at a party densely populated with radicals andprogressives, came quivering back to Ann as she lay in a twin bed,beside Russell's. (She liked a room of her own but he thought this was"ever so much jollier.") She recaptured it not as sounds but as figuresof flame inside her shut eyelids.

Despite her years of "social work," she had been intimate with only afew friends. But Russell was a Beau Brummel of liberalism. He had tohear many voices. He was unhappy if he was not invited to every publicoccasion. He was miserable if he was not recognized by everycelebrity--of his world.

For there are as many sorts of celebrities as there are occupations.Only a few men are universal celebrities; in 1932, for example, in allthe world there were only Colonel Lindbergh, George Bernard Shaw, thePrince of Wales, the Kaiser, Freud, Einstein, Hitler, Mussolini, Gandhi,Hindenburg, Greta Garbo, Stalin, Henry Ford, and, most of all, AlCapone; and of these fourteen, five will be forgotten by 1935. But thereare engineers famous among engineers; there are doctors whose recordtime in snatching out appendices is known to medicos in Kamchatka andParis; there are dry-cleaners whose appearance on the platform atNational Conventions of Laundrymen causes the zealots to rise inhysterical cheering; there are authors whose names remain familiar tobook-reviewers a year after their deaths. So, in reform circles, the manwho put through the short ballot in Nebraska and the woman who was for ayear juvenile court judge in Miami are known literally to dozens, andwith such maestri Russell itched to be seen. He attended banquets. Heintroduced speakers. He signed petitions to Congress to abolish povertyand sin. He rejoiced in being one of seventy Honorary Vice Presidents ofassociations to rescind blue laws or to release from jail allright-minded rioters who had been imprisoned for beating policemen. Andin between these more stellar activities, he just liked to Go Out.

Ann had been given to going out--to theaters, to concerts, to sedatehours by Dr. Wormser's fire. But Russell longed for places where therewere talk and liveliness and vocal solution of the insoluble. Notdrunkenness--no loose Bohemianism. At his parties there was no need ofgin. They could get enough kick out of the wickedness of prosperousRussian kulaks, and the virtue of prosperous Dakota farmers.

* * * * *

At such an evening of spiritual diversion Ann again met Pearl McKaig,that meager and earnest young woman, with a brow like a hard-boiled egg,who once in Point Royal College had rebuked her for being too affable apolitician. (It seemed strange to Ann now that the awkward, naïve AnnVickers of those days could ever, even by Pearl, have been viewed as toosuave and amenable!) Pearl had come to New York as a social worker; hadbeen a propagandist for coöperative stores; after the war, apropagandist for Macedonia; then plumped into the deep river and becomea Communist complete. She was an organizer for the Trade Union UnityLeague, Communist rival of the American Federation of Labor; shepreached Communism on anything from a soap-box to the rostrum of aKansas City church forum; she wrote for the Daily Worker, explainingthat all Socialists and liberals were secret agents of J. PierpontMorgan; and she wore, changelessly, a brown wool suit, cotton stockings,Ground Gripper shoes, and a zipper jacket of imitation chamois. Pearlregarded evening clothes, churches, James Branch Cabell, meat, havingservants, Walter Pater, Herbert Hoover, Clarence Darrow, patent-leathershoes, cigars, wine, going fishing, Joseph Hergesheimer, the Ritz Hotel,first-class quarters on steamers, Oswald Garrison Villard, investmentsin steel stock, Trotzky, the Prince of Wales, the Pope, the New YorkTimes, Evening Post, Sun, and Herald Tribune, Heywood Broun,silk underwear, cigarette holders made of anything other than paper,Japan, charity societies, smutty stories, diamonds, Aucassin andNicolette, Harvard, polo, William Randolph Hearst, single tax, RamsayMacDonald, golf, Christmas, Velasquez, rouge, Tolstoy, bath-salts, PeterKropotkin, avocados, the Saturday Evening Post, bankers, lawyers,doctors, lying in the sun except as it was done purposefully and in thepresence of other nudists of all three sexes, Evelyn Waugh, Poland, H.G. Wells, Norman Thomas, Roy Howard, linen handkerchiefs, rising laterthan 6 A. M., Pullman cars, the New Republic, Anglo-Catholics, ThreeSeeds in the Spirit Baptists, Christian Scientists, the Redbook, theCosmopolitan, the New Yorker, H. L. Mencken, John D. Rockefellerfirst second and third series, Will Rogers, all motor cars except Fordsand second-hand Chevrolets, Dean Kirchwey, Vogue, the ChicagoTribune, Cardinal Hayes, Jane Addams, the National Association for theAdvancement of Colored People, Palm Beach, roulette, gin, truffles,dressing-gowns other than those of a blanket aspect, taxicabs, and Dr.Ann Vickers, as being equally bourjui, vicious, individualistic,old-fashioned, and generally treacherous to the Workers and theU. S. S. R.

She said to Ann, with the cold steadiness of a deaconess, "Are you stilltrying to patch up the capitalistic system by reforming it? I supposeyou reserve your darkest punishment-cells for political prisoners."

"I certainly do!" said Ann, with the boisterous idiocy which chemicallypure souls like Pearl produce in human beings.

* * * * *

During their honeymoon Ann had suggested to Russell that they take, aswith their joined incomes they could afford to, a cottage in a suburband have a home instead of a roost along with the other crows ofManhattan.

"Oh, no, I think you're wrong, dear!" protested Russell. "We'd losethe intellectual contacts you get in the city. It's so important for us.Think, in one evening at Maurice Steinblatt's you can meet the peopleand get the low-down on negro share-croppers and the Lipari Isles andthe foreign bond scandal. Oh, no! In the suburbs, they're nothing but abunch of bridge-players!"

Ann had never played bridge.

She wondered for a disloyal second if bridge might not be restful aftera day of trying to persuade wild young women that the nunnery graynessof a Model Prison was pleasanter than speakeasies.

* * * * *

They had a flat, because it was large and cheap, in an ancient, almostprehistoric apartment house built in 1895, with an exterior of minaretsand Moorish arches. It was above an extension of the Sixth AvenueElevated, which, along with trolley-cars, motor cars, trucks, and milkwagons kept startling Ann all night long, making her jump from sleep asthough leopards were yawping by the reed walls of her jungle camp. Ithad co*ckroaches. It had a smell of damp walls and cocoanut matting.

But the living-room was thirty feet long, eighteen feet high, a superbplace for radical parties, or even liberal parties, which are largerthough not so vociferous per unit. Between them, Russell and Ann hadsome eleven hundred books, divided into sociology, poetry, and detectivestories, and they made a learned display. In this intellectual solitudeone could pretend that there were no elevated trains coming--until anelevated train did come.

Here she heard oceans and surges and surfs of talk, and it was quite asundifferentiated as one surf from another.

The walls of their living-room were covered with a paper imitating brownstamped leather, divided into panels by strips of pine optimisticallystained to resemble mahogany. But they could not afford to change it,not just yet, and Ann discovered that Russell rather admired that SixthAvenue baronial air.

At one corner was an alcove which was almost a separate room. When theywere taking the place, Ann saw him looking at it wistfully, then urging,"You take this, dear, for your study."

"No. You take it, Ignatz. I'd really rather work in the open. And Idon't do much at home except just read."

Tenderly, a little amused, she watched him conduct visitorsinto--sometimes he called it his "Den," sometimes "Study," sometimes"Office," and she was sure he would have called it his "Studio" if ithadn't been so small. On the few evenings when he had no excuse to goout and could coax no one to come in, he would retire there in a secret,excited, youthful way, and she would watch him pasting stamps in hisalbum. He was a devoted collector. He had piles of, to her, utterlymysterious catalogues and notices about Charkhari Pictorials, Triangles,Surcharged Stamps, Imperforate Sheets, Airmails. He looked through amagnifying glass and bounded in his chair and scratched behind his earand clicked his tongue against his teeth as he found treasures inapproval sheets. He showed visitors his stamp book as his brother Henry,in Syracuse, showed the Kodak album of Junior from the age of one to theage of eleven.

* * * * *

In August, five months after her marriage and a week after their summervacation, which Russell had insisted on spending at a ProgressivePolitical Conference at a radical camp in the Adirondacks, Ann heardfrom Pat Bramble, in New Rochelle:

DEAR ANNIE:

How do you like being married? Why don't you come out and seeme, week-end? Things gehen nicht too well bei business. There'sa real estate agent in this town, Lester Pomeroy by name, aregular Babbitt, the tall, thin, jolly, kind, dumb sort ofBabbitt who's been getting all my customers away from me. He maybe dumb but he does know how to handle people who want a $75,000palace with a sunken goldfish pool for $35,000--six hundreddollars and a cigar down. He's snatched all my trade. So I havemarried him. Come see us. Bring Russell if you must.

Love,
PAT.

She went. She did not bring Russell.

Pat and the cheery Mr. Pomeroy had set up in a conventional and highlycomfortable imitation-Colonial cottage: chintzes, wing-chairs,davenport, the Five Foot Shelf of Books, gramophone, kitchen withcolored tiles and electric refrigerator, a small lawn with a round bedof dahlias, a two-car garage. Pat wore a flimsy, flowered house-dressand a beam of almost idiotic content.

"Oh, Ann," she caroled, "I'm happy as two larks! My old man adores me.He thinks I'm a combination of Mrs. Browning and Mary Pickford. We'regoing to have kids, if I'm not too old. But, oh, Annie, it isn't themild romance, such as it is. It's just the sordid, commonplace vulgarityof being protected--I mean as far as money is concerned; not having toget up early in the morning, every morning, and hustle to an office tobattle with a lot of hard-boiled males all day. I can actually lie abed,if I want to, and have the maid bring me breakfast! And I discover that,all these years, what I've been putting into suburban real estate was mylonging for houses and shiny new dish-pans and gardens and mop-closetsfor myself! I wonder a little if you don't put a lot of submergedlonging for children into your care of prisoners. Let me show you thehouse. As a salesman, I would rate it about E2. As its mistress, I rateit about Windsor Castle plus. But listen. I'm not lying down. I can tipeven Mr. Lester Pomeroy off on a few things about the mulish race ofwomen and how to sell 'em. I sold a house myself, last Tuesday, and Iget the commission! But not to have to do it--grand! Come see theshack!"

If Ann could not be quite so sentimental as Pat over the Russian linenluncheon set, the gas dryer, the candlewick bedspreads, she longed forthem.

They sat on the sliver of lawn, in basket chairs, rather quiet. It was,Ann bitterly thought, healing not to hear Russell's busy andintellectual boisterousness.

That evening, neighbors came in, solid, agreeable people, and they hadbridge, sandwiches, beer.

She lay in a fresh, gay bedroom and listened to the silver-colored riverof silence. There was a jew's-harp orchestra of insect sounds, but itwas only the background to the stillness.

She had been righteously irritated once by arty people who talked abouthearing colors and smelling hexagons and the smooth, cool feeling offlute notes, but for the past two months she had definitely seen thecity's noise, the unceasing, grinding roar at night, as a brown and evilharbor with burning ships.

She woke to robins and brightness, with no grease of the elevated in theair.

"Pride and I will have a place like this," she said.

Chapter 36

After months of marriage, Russell alternated between boyishexhibitionism, a delight in his singular possessions, and a loftyprudery when Ann slipped into any of the words which made him giggle inanecdotes by men. In neither case was he natural; in nothing was he everquite natural; and his self-consciousness kept Ann from rising into thesecurity of naturalness. But the little surface, social irritations werewhat occupied her, when they had been married for six months.

He most irritated her by treating her as a Little Woman. (He called herthat.)

He decidedly wanted her to be Big enough to hold an office which wouldmake them both socially important; he did not mind her paying the rentand grocery bills; he was irritated when she did not show off properlyat public dinners and when she fell into clichés like "The first problemof penology is the safe-keeping of prisoners." Only, privately, she hadto be a Little Woman--otherwise how, standing beside her, could he beBig Mans? (He had told her of a girl who used to call him "Big Mans."But even in her tenderest moments, when he had brought her Viennesechocolates and been funny, she'd be hanged if she would ever be aslittlewomanish as that.)

She asked him, once, to stop in at a bookshop and get Blözen's GestaltPsychologie. It was important. She would base her talk to the Mt.Vernon Current Problems Club upon it. She was home before him, and hadher German lexicon all out and dusted. He came springing in, like avernal ram, and gloatingly held out to her a bunch of chrysanthemums ofapproximately the size and appearance of a wheat-sheaf.

"They're glorious! You're a darling. Did you get the book?"

"What book?"

"Oh. Honestly! You promised! The German book about psychology!"

"My gracious! What an important little student we are! Just going to getright into the depths of things and be one of our best little seriousthinkers! Now what would we do with great big seewious books if we didhave him?"

He tried to pat her cheek. She jerked away, raging, "Oh, damn it! Allright! I won't bother you again! I'll get my own books!"

"Why--why--did I make you sore?" he gasped.

* * * * *

A girl discharged on parole from the Stuyvesant Industrial Home had comein this evening to see Ann--as they did, dozens a month. The girl hadserved a year for stealing silk from a dressmaking loft in which she hadbeen a seamstress. She "wanted to go straight," she said, but she couldfind no work, and she could get no help, only curt moral lectures, fromher parole officer, a high-church but high-powered lady who was agentfor the Lighthouse League for the Redemption of First Offenders. Anngave the girl a note to a pleasant, intellectual, and quite amoral ladywho ran a dress shop in Greenwich Village and, when the disapprovingRussell wasn't looking, slipped a ten-dollar bill (which she couldn'tafford) into her hand. The girl gone, she paced the floor oratorically,while Russell looked cynical in the deep chair which Ann had once calledher own:

"Parole! It's the key to punishment, and nothing's so neglected. Can'tblame the parole officers. Most of 'em are much too busy, and a lot of'em are too ignorant. If I had any decency, any energy, even any sense,I'd chuck my prison job, I'd go into politics, I'd force through a billproviding as many millions for parole as for prisons, if not a lot more,and make it obligatory to give as much attention to paroled, scared,sick-minded ex-cons as to sick-bodied tuberculars, I would. And Ibelieve I could!"

Russell crowed, "What a great thinker--what a great popular leader weare! My yes! Oh yes, dearie, sure! If you went into politics, TammanyHall would just do anything you wanted. Annie d'Arc--and how!"

* * * * *

She was holding forth at dinner at their pet millionaire's--the one whosurely would, though he apparently never did, endow all the littletheaters and all the little magazines and all the Russian films and allthe young poets and all the industrial schools for discharged convicts.Ann was, with plain tale and flourish of figures, maintaining that notone in ten of the prisoners, men or women, who are supposed to have atrade has really mastered it. The company seemed interested. Probablyshe was pontificating a little; probably she was forgetting that she wasa wife, and taking herself as seriously as a male golf player. But itdid hurt--not merely infuriate but hurt, deep in her heart where dwelther loyalty, when Russell publicly drawled:

"Well, now you've settled that for us, dearie, just explain Russia, andtell 'em about bio-physics!"

* * * * *

With a paradox that was only seeming, he bored Ann by praising her inher presence; telling strangers at a dinner what a penologist, anexecutive, a psychologist, she was; how bravely she had downed dozens ofriots in a rather vague Southern prison; and how sweet and forgiving shehad been to the mutineers afterward. Then, in the taxi home, when he hadthus glorified her and shared that glory, when she had enjoyed the showmore than she admitted, and was a bit insistent and opinionated, hewould prick her with, "Well, dearie, I'm glad you had a good time, but Ithink if you'd made a little effort, you might have gotten Dr. Vincentto talk some of the time, too!"

He was particularly explanatory in the taxi if someone had ignorantlycalled him "Mr. Vickers."

"I corrected the idiot! I admit that of course I am merely the husbandof the celebrated Frau Dr. Prof. Supt. Vickers, but still, I do have acertain small, meek, wifely place of my own in social work!"

Yet it is true that even this never vexed him quite so much as thediminishment which threatened the house of Spaulding-Vickers when somevery young or very old professor tried to contradict Ann about thepsychology of prisoners. Then that old grizzly, brave old Russell, roseand waved his paws and growled, "My dear fellow, Miss Vickers has had agood deal of practical experience along with the theory, you know!"

After such evenings, he was a lover.

There weren't many such evenings. Mostly, he enjoyed pushing down themarble Diana he had helped to erect.

She wasn't always meek to him.

When he went beyond amusing himself by hurting her stout affection andher longing to love, when he was really cross and natural and told herthat she was a rotten penologist and a worse executive, then the Dr. AnnVickers who handled murderers came into the room. He crawled, slaveringapologies, and then she despised him--then, and when he boasted ofhimself not as a competent, journeyman giver-away of other people'smoney, but as a sociologist.

He did boast that way. He talked of himself as a "social scientist." Heoften said, "In my research, I may seem perfectly passionless, but I dohave one uncontrollable passion--a passion for accuracy."

If that was true, thought Ann, it was one of the great Thwarted Passionsof history.

* * * * *

With all his proud attention to mastering her, Ignatz did do a good dealof quiet, earnest flirting--or "necking," as in this era it wastechnically called. He was always a Toucher and a Feeler and a Stroker.Even with men, he liked to link arms, to pat shoulders; and with womenhe could only by violence be kept from kissing the cheek, hand-cuppingthe shoulder, encircling the waist and, in more promising cases,stroking the ankle. At the larger parties, Ann became, after eight orten months of marriage, accustomed to seeing him slip off to pantries orbalconies with, invariably, the slinksiest, short-skirtedest, mostmouse-haired of the intellectual young ladies present, and they wouldcome back looking brightly ashamed.

Ann felt definite urges to murder him.

It wasn't so much his offenses toward her sex loyalty. That was growingthin in her, month by month, as she realized that she was to him not ashrine but merely another station on the railway. It was the insult toher dignity that he should prefer the rattiest young females to her. Shecould have endured it if he had peeped only at wise and lordlywomen.... So she told herself.

Yes, she could have murdered him with only the slightest readjustment ofher life. She thought again how curious it was that she happened to beon this side of the bars when she might--Malvina might, Pat Bramblemight, Eleanor Crevecoeur might--so easily have been on the other side,for murder, adultery, or any crime that was not ignoble or mean.

She suspected that he in his flirtations never went farther thangeographical stroking. She suspected that she would have despised himmuch less had he been courageous enough to go farther. Nor was he everovert enough so that she had excuse for a good, strong, wholesomedomestic eruption and kicking him out. She wished she had such anexcuse, as they slid greasily into a swamp of irritable dullness.

Anyway, she would not have him for the father of Pride. He was too weak,too coy, too glib; a creek over pebbles.

But--here was the heart and hell of woman's tragedy: if she did not havePride in the next two or three years, she could never have her. Atforty-five Ann would be young, just mastering ambition, yet too old forchildren. Russell, any cursed careless man, not really wanting childrenexcept as they might mirror him and butter his vanity and by theiradoration comfort him when older people were too bored to listen, couldnone the less have children at sixty.

The cards were stacked--and no amount of spirited Feminism would everunstack them.

A race now, a desperate one, between her unwillingness to let RussellSpaulding father her child, and the time when no one could father it.But all the same, she could not let him get his flabby hands on her andon Pride. No!

* * * * *

She was to attend a Women's Reformatory Conference, in Atlantic City,and for a week now she had plunged into material about the effect ofdiet upon prison discipline. She was reading sixty medical authoritiesall at once--and absently, really thinking aloud, she quoted them toRussell at home.

He flared, "Being married to you is like sleeping with the TaxationProblem!"

She was instantly remorseful, "Oh, am I neglecting you? Oh, my dear, I'mafraid I have a single-track mind! Let me get this dratted Atlantic Cityconference over, and I'll see if I haven't it in me to be a good wife.Perhaps I might make you fall in love with me, instead of just beingcurious about me!"

Marvellous kiss.

It was said at Atlantic City that Dr. Vickers's address on prison dietwas brilliant, almost revolutionary. The hardest-boiled of theMidatlantic matrons was so moved that when she returned to herreformatory, she gave her customers nine prunes a week instead of five,and added stewed apricots, and once every summer, fresh sugar corn. Butwhile Ann was sweeping her audience away, she was thinking pitifully ofRussell.

She had the curst blessing of being able to see the other person's sideeven when she was fighting him. Disciplining Kittie Cognac, she couldnever get over a sneaking notion that Kittie had not had a fairtraining. Now she saw that Russell had some reason for being irritatedby her greater notoriety, by her distressing independence; some reasonfor leading out upon balconies flimpsy little fools who would lean uponhis noble chest and breathe up at him. Russell was kittenish, Russellwas shallow, but Russell was a competent artisan, and kind.

She came home from Atlantic City and worked at being a devoted wife--theworst way, naturally, of being one.

But it seemed for a few days to succeed.

Russell was delighted when she produced no ideas after office-hours,when she seemed willing to sit still for quite a few minutes while heplayed "This little pig goes to market" with her strong fingers, wheninstead of leaving the dinner menu to the cook, she sought out theartistic and poignant dishes which his adventurous soul and stomachloved: Nuremburg Bratwurst, chicken chow mein, fat fried mushrooms likethe hats of kobolds, corn pudding, ravioli, Stilton cheese soaked inport, corn waffles with maple syrup... he would delightedly haveeaten them all at the same meal.

He promptly became authoritative, and never asked her before inviting tothe flat the friends whom she least liked--even when the maid was out,and she had to trot to the delicatessen for food, and after supper washthe dishes.

It was an odd scene; the final fruits of Feminism. There had been asupper of four. After it, Dr. Ann Vickers, superintendent of theStuyvesant Industrial Home, and Mrs. Werner Balham, who in public lifewas Miss Jane Emery, highly paid director of the Craftsmen's FurnitureShops, washed the dishes, while in the living-room Russell and Mr.Balham, a literary man whose visible production these two years had beenone eight-line sonnet and one five-line sestette in transition, satplacid and discussed the rise in real-estate values, and looked down onthe two females when they came in and began to talk privily about cooks.

Russell had marched in the first Suffrage parade up Fifth Avenue, andall such demonstrations afterward; Werner Balham risked rotten eggs bycampaigning for Feminism among the Boston Irish; both their wives hadmore tiring and more lucrative jobs than their own; but it neveroccurred to either of them that these working wives should not ordertheir husbands' meals, hire and--especially--fire servants, see thattheir husbands' socks were darned, that the studs were removed fromtheir dress-shirts before sending them to the laundry, that telephonemessages regarding such crises as engagements to play golf were takendown complete, with the caller's name, address, telephone number, placeof meeting, also time of the train to the golf course, all accurate. Toneither husband did it occur that if their wives had been out late at anevening business "conference," that was no reason why, when they camehome, they should not comfort their husbands by making fudge or Welshrabbits or shaking up a scrambled egg.

The cards were stacked against you, Ann. No doubt they will be againstyour great-great-granddaughter. But since birth and life have thrust youinto the game, at least be warned that the cards have been stacked.

Chapter 37

In nothing, not even in the recurrent habits of a drunkard or a man ofevil temper or a suspicious woman, is the pattern of life more surelyrepeated than in marriage. If Ann had never been an obsequious wife toRussell, no will to be one could make her so for more than a fortnight.She was off again, on the scent, vociferously hunting the foxy opponentsof wider probation for first offenders, forgetting that Russell was (toRussell) so important a person that she ought to devote to him all herromantic dreams instead of squandering them on the two-point-six failureannounced in a Rhode Island report on recidivism.

Their break came surprisingly.

Russell romped home, glowing. They had a free evening, also a splendidsteak for dinner, and everything looked rosy. She could tell by histremendous lightness that he had a secret, and when she said, "What haveyou got up your sleeve? Something nice?" he leaped up and chanted:

"Listen, baby, I've got the chance of my life! You know old Shillady,the big hotel-chain man--contributed a lot to the O. C. I.? Well, he'sgot an idea that the future money isn't in the big expensive hotels likehis--they're being overdone now--but in the cheap places, for workmenand so on. He has an idea for a chain of big cheap city hotels, superiorlodging houses, really. Well, of course, with all the lodging houses andlunch-rooms and so on that I've run for the O. C. I., I know a lot aboutthat stuff, and he's offered me the assistant managership of the wholechain, at twelve thousand a year--think of it! twice my salary now!--anda good chance ahead for the managership and maybe thirty thousanddollars a year per annum per omnia saecula saeculorum. God, isn't itmar-velous!"

"Why----Oh, Russell, do you really want to go into business?"

"Why not?"

"Oh, it's so awfully stupid!"

"Well, I'll be damned! From you, of all people! You that are alwaysquestioning the value of charity, always taking dirty little digs atpeople that think they can 'save the world' by the single tax orabolishing cigarettes!"

"I know. I know. So does Dr. Wormser question the value of everything inmedicine beyond setting broken legs and giving salts and insulin andquinine. But that doesn't mean she'd take a job in a grocery, not at amillion dollars a year. Why, Russell, however little we do accomplish,if anything, a social worker has a profession, like a lawyer or a doctoror an artist or a priest or a schoolmaster or a soldier, and he hasobligations to it, he has loyalties, almost, you might say, mystic, andif he has to give it up, it's tragic for him. You don't need this money.We make enough between us----"

"And now I suppose you'll throw it up to me that without your salary wewouldn't have enough to----"

"My dear Ignatz! That's so obviously what you would say that I'msurprised to hear you say it!"

"Well, if you think I'm going to go on tagging after you----I'll be amillionaire, one of these days, and----"

"And you'll get a great big shot-gun and shoot all the Injuns and be anengineer and drive the choo-choo cars! Do you intend to wait for themillion before you grow past the mental age of seven? A million dollars!Now, won't that be elegant! And what will you do with all this nicelovely money? I'll tell you: you'll be a philanthropist, and you'll beable to explain to an adoring tableful of young uplifters that in takingup business, you haven't given up any of your ideals! I'm going for awalk!"

* * * * *

Repentances there were, and apologies, and smoothings out, but for onceRussell held to his purpose. He did resign, to help start thehotel-chain and, seeing his joy in having for the first time in his lifeenough money to take taxis without calculations, Ann was certain thatshe had been unjust to him. But as to herself, she was not going on asan appendage to lodging houses organized for the purpose of makingmillions from the dimes of working men.

The lease on their Byzantine apartment was up on January 1, 1930, a yearand three quarters after their marriage. Russell had to go to thePacific Coast, on affairs of the hotel syndicate, and he left it to Annto find them a new apartment, one more modern, worthy of a rising younglord of hotel keeping--in America a rank almost equal to a peerage insteel or soap or motor cars.

She found an excellent apartment for him. Her own books and chairs andlinens she moved back to her old hotel apartment.

He stormed in on her, when he came back, but his he-man storminess blewover before her cold eyes. "What's the idea, leaving me flat like this?Just what have I done?" he begged.

"Nothing, my dear." She was kindly enough now, no longer cold. "But it'ssuch a good chance for the break, and the break is inevitable. Let's notdrag on, trying and failing and trying and failing again till everyoneis sick of it, as most married couples do when they crash."

"D-do you want a divorce?"

"Not particularly."

"Then let's----Oh, if you must, we'll live separately. For a while. Tryto see where we stand. Honestly, it isn't just that I don't want peopleto laugh at me because I couldn't hold you. I have loved you, betterthan I ever did anybody. I do love you! I don't understand! I don't knowwhat I've done! And I don't know what I'll do without you!"

He stood humbly, a large man, fumbling at his lips, and out of his plumpmiddle-aged face looked the eyes of a terrified child.

* * * * *

Then she was lonelier than ever she had been in her life; much lonelierthan when she had dwelt in this barren hotel before, for there was noLindsay Atwell nor Russell Spaulding to call, and Pat Bramble Pomeroyrarely came into town.

Russell did creep pleadingly around, every week, and once she let himstay the night. But it was strained, too eager to be eager.

Yet such was her loneliness, such the purposelessness of her undesiredfreedom, that late in March, when Russell quivered in to say that peoplewere beginning to laugh at him, she consented to come back. Only, shesaid, she must have another couple of months to herself--to discover, toexplore herself again, as she had after Point Royal and the questions ofPearl McKaig, after suffrage and Clateburn, after settlement houses andLafe and Ardence Benescoten.

For that exploration there were no charts.

Chapter 38

Dr. Malvina Wormser was giving a party.

The word "party" indicated, in that ultimate climax of civilization,1930 in New York, many things. To the artistic, it meant gin andnecking. To the raucously inartistic, it meant gin and necking. Topersons so rich and respectable that they had not yet begun to whimperabout the "Depression" that was just begun, it meant contract bridge andgin. But to the forward-looking group, it meant just Talk.

Dr. Wormser had no great strength with which to dominate theidea-merchants, but she had something better: a deep placidity, so thatshe could sit amiably indifferent by the fireplace, smiling on herparty, neither bored nor so inspired that she would not sleep thatnight. She would be operating at ten tomorrow morning, fresh and serene.Surgeons and sea-captains and aviators--they are solid people in aninsane world.

Ann watched her, across the room, enviously. Ann herself was bored. Shewas sitting on a couch, listening to a young person who assured her, onthe basis of magazines he had read, that in Soviet Russia all problemsof sex had been solved. He went on to sketch his more important ideasabout industrialization of farming (he had been born in New York, thenephew of a rabbi, and he knew all about farming except just what it wasthat they grew on farms).

Ann yawned internally, "I think I'll go home and turn on the radio!"

She roused then to a human curiosity. Shouldering into the room came asturdy, red-bearded man, not very tall, but of a bulldog build, a redbulldog. His beard was short, coarse, aggressive; his eyes were lively,and his forehead, under rusty and bristling hair that was turning gray,was fine, veined, distinctly paler than his apple cheeks. His hands werethose of a prize-fighter, but they were manicured. He wore excellentdinner clothes, the tie atrociously knotted.

Ann had never been introduced to him, but she had seen him, at a publicdinner. He was Judge Bernard Dow Dolphin, of the Supreme Court bench ofNew York State. He was an acquaintance of Lindsay Atwell; he had been ofvalue in lifting Ann to her position of superintendent. He was acompetent scholar, a giver of sane and honest verdicts--and he was anotorious devotee of wine and wenching; he delivered authoritativelectures in the law-schools--and he was an associate of all the mostextravagantly dressed, cynically dissipated higher politicians of thestate. Lindsay had told her that among all the temporary royalty of thegreat kingdom of New York State, with its twelve and a half millionpeople, there was no oligarch more virile, more competent, morecontradictory, more honorable as a judge or more crooked privately, thanJudge Dolphin.

In political circles he was known as Barney Dolphin.

He was a B. A. of Fordham University, with honors and with his letter inbaseball; he was a graduate of the Columbia Law School, with a year atthe Sorbonne; he was an honorary LL. D. of three universities; and hewas said to speak French, Italian, Polish, Yiddish, English, and EastSide with correctness and fluency. He also belonged to the Elks' Club ofBrooklyn and played a classic game of billiards. He was the firstauthority in New York City on railroad bonds, and he had once playedpoker for thirty-two hours straight. He could quote Balzac, Zola, andVictor Huge (sic) by the page, and he had never heard of Michelson,Millikan, or Compton. He was supposed to be a millionaire, and it wasalso supposed that the speculation which had led to this state of blisshad been honest. He was reported to own still the brick shanty on MortonStreet where he had been born, and to retire there to cook corned-beefand cabbage for himself when he was tired; and merely in fact was thisstory untrue. He was a favorite at Bradley's Casino at Palm Beach, andat the Queens County Orphanage. He was fifty-three years of age, and hecould run the hundred yards in thirteen seconds. He was a practisingCatholic, but his name had been uncomfortably in the air as a possibleco-respondent in three divorce suits. He was a merry man on the bench,but he could flash into horrifying cold rage at lawyers who sought toadvantage themselves of that merriment.

Ann watched Judge Dolphin stalk through the chatterers up to Dr.Wormser. His quick eyes seemed to snatch the soul out of everyone hepassed. He kissed Dr. Wormser's hand and held it. The young men came tospeak to him, and he answered them with the swift, heart-warming, andentirely meaningless smile of the politician.

It was half an hour before Judge Dolphin drifted Ann's way and, glancingat her noncommittally, murmuring, "May I?" dropped on the couch besideher. The earnest youth who had been tutoring her was gone, and she wasexhausted. She had to rib herself up to say warmly, "I have something tothank you for. I believe you were in good measure responsible for mygetting my job. I did write to you, but I've never had the chance tothank you in person."

"Oh. Oh yes."

"I'm Ann Vickers, of the Stuyvesant Industrial Home."

His glance at her was swifter than ever, and more blade-like. Then heshook his head. Every hair of his bristly small red beard seemed a wire,throwing off sparks.

"Nonsense, my dear girl! You a reformatory superintendent? Where's theglasses? Where's the thin lips? Where's the look of detecting a badsmell? Where's the patient-martyr expression?"

"Oh, I'm worse yet, Judge. I'm the matron kind. I mother the poor souls,and they have to stand for it."

"Yes, that may be true, but you don't look to me like the black lacemitts and little gray home in the West. You look reasonablydisillusioned."

"I'm not. I feel melancholy."

"This talk?"

"Yes."

"You a Communist?"

"How do I know? I don't know anything about it. I'm certainly notagainst it. But I'm bored by listening to these people."

"Yes? I've been here--" he glanced at the watch on his broad, hairywrist--"thirty-two minutes now, and forty seconds, and I've heard thesekibitzers settle everything except their rent. Let's go off and get adrink somewhere and kill a policeman, and then I'll sentence both of usto go live in your pretty jail."

His eyes--they fastened on hers, without evasion, with a mockingboldness that she had never known in any male since Adolph Klebs; theysaid that he considered her an extremely warm and tempting woman, andrather handsome, and that he would be pleased to live with her a gooddeal this side of her "pretty jail."

"Let's be serious," she begged. "I'm singularly poor at persiflagetonight."

"You're missing your Russell, then? Or just plain lonely?"

"You----"

"Certainly. I know everything. My business, as a politician. I knew youwhen I came in tonight. We were at the same dinner, two years ago--theVestal Association--you sat at the last table on the right from thespeakers' table, and you sat between----Wait! Wait! Don't tell me!" Hesnapped his stubby fingers; a dry, clicking sound. "You sat between Dr.Charlie Sargon and that dean from N. Y. U. And while I was discoursinglearnedly--I was by God--on aëroplane ordinances, I was looking atyou--you were smoking Turkish cigarettes, from a leather case, Wop orViennese, I should think--and I was looking at you, and thinking what asweet mouth you had to kiss--life in your lips, not wet parchment, inthis town of parchment women! But of course I gave up such evilthoughts, as a good Judge should!"

She was goggling. It was dismayingly accurate. She felt helpless--themore helpless when he laughed at her and tucked her hand over his arm.

"Honestly! You know yourself, Miss Vickers, that women in the upliftracket--and may the saints bless 'em, for it's a fine, self-sacrificing,lovely gang of noble souls they are, to be sure--but mostly, they getcold-blooded or cautious or dictatorial; they want to boss a gang ofmeek yes-women or they want to be received socially, like princesses;but you, says I to meself, Miss Vickers is still, for all her learning,the darling, I says, she's still the lovely tomboy of a swift-leggeddarling of a girl that she was when she was a kid, and, yes, I didkiss the Blarney Stone, as you are about to remark, Ann!"

He laughed at her again, tenderly, and squeezed her hand between hisprize-fighter forearm and his side.

She smiled at him, a little hazily, and complained in a small voice, "Isuppose I would have said something about the Blarney Stone. One does.Actually, are you Irish?"

"One quarter. And one quarter each, co*ckney fishmonger, Swedish, andAustrian. But like all the Tammany bhoys, like Al Schmitt, I'm exofficio Irish, just as Herbert Huber is ex officioIowa-California-Yankee. Write us a thesis on the new solution of racialminorities--transform your great-grandparents to fit your geography. Butyou said, let's be serious. I do want to be serious about one thing,darling; I want to thank you for giving such a swell chance to--do youremember?--girl, twenty-two, Carma Krutwich, stenographer? I had to sendher up for forging a small check, when I was in the Court of GeneralSessions. Couldn't help myself. Told her to come back to me when she wasparoled. She did. She said that after you took charge at Stuyvesant, youtreated her better than anybody since she was born; put her in youroffice, lent her books, used to drink tea with her. How that girl Carmadoes love you! I suppose you know she's going straight now, engaged to agrand kid?"

"Yes. I had them up for beer and a rarebit, last week."

"You would!... She told me, if she were a man, she'd marry you, ifshe had to commit couple of murders to do it. I say, Ann, do you know inwhatever blessed spot or bourne, in what strange corner of the ice box,keeps the gin? Malvina won't bring it out for another hour yet."

She noticed, in the kitchen, that he took a particularly small nip ofit, but that he seemed to relish it, throwing back his head, his beardlike a cropped Assyrian's.

"Let's get out of this, Ann. We don't want to listen to any more talk.If we want to know anything, the printing presses are still running, Ibelieve. Let's drive somewhere. Elegant night, for March. Come on!"

"All right."

Dr. Wormser co*cked her head a little when Ann came up with BarneyDolphin to say good-night. It made Ann feel young and agreeably guilty.

Judge Barney's car was a cream-colored roadster with low-set red leatherseats. It seemed long as a locomotive. He fished a fur robe from therumble, tucked her in neatly, with no insinuating fondling. He wasquick, and impersonal as a coachman.

"Are we going anywhere in particular?" she asked.

"I don't know. On Long Island. We'll stop and get warm whenever youwant. By the way: Barney Dolphin is the name."

He said nothing more, for miles. They slid over the Fifty-ninth StreetBridge, with its prospect of business buildings down the river. Thoughit was midnight, the spots of lighted windows marked the incredibleheights; fiftieth story, sixtieth. Who was up there, in those mountainplateaus, so late--what desperate bankrupt, what triumphantcondottiere of business ambushing his victims, what little officelovers trysting in airy towers? They lurched through streets of banalshops and barren apartment houses, passed a craggy desert made from amillion tons of waste ashes, sprang forward into open road, and smelledthe salty Sound. Nothing existed save the monstrous portliness of thegreat cream-colored hood before them, and a tunnel of light with sandyroad-banks and scrubby trees for sides. The motor was smooth; it merelyhummed triumphantly as the needle went up to sixty miles.

Creeping cold came insinuating under her fur robe. As her breast beganto creep with chilliness, he slid to a stop and silently gave her aflask, from which she drank excellent Scotch. He tucked in the robeagain and whisked on. He talked now, not glibly and a little foolishly,as at Malvina's, but slowly, as though he were bothered:

"Like it, Ann?"

"Love it!"

"I do. It's my one best escape from reality. Can you stand it if wedrive late?"

"Why----"

"Anything really crucial at the Industrial Home tomorrow?"

"Of course! Always! Number 3701 has been stealing doorknobs, just tokeep her hand in, nothing else being detachable. Number 3921 issuspected of getting heroin. Number 3966 has suddenly turned religiousand sends a message to the Superintendent that the Archangel Gabrielsays I'm all wrong. Mrs. Keast, my assistant, has had her feelings hurtagain because I was so curt, and the end of her nose is redder thanever. The new formula for hash is rotten. The Pentecostal Brethren wantto hold services in the chapel at the hour set for Mass, and is this ademocratic country, and what am I doing--selling out to the Pope?Crucial? Heavens, yes!"

"Then I think we'll keep on going. I'm not due in court tomorrow at all,and naturally, if it doesn't matter whether I get tired or not, thatwill be sufficient rest for you."

His hands lay on the wheel, seemingly without pressure. He drove as aman eats. His eyes were on the road every second, but never withstrained intensity. She wondered--how came she to think of him, when shehadn't for years?--she wondered if Adolph Klebs didn't drive like this,if he was still alive.

Save that they were somewhere on Long Island, she had no notion wherethey were. She did not believe that she had ever seen this road; it wasa road out of the movies, with no geography, no reality. She could makenothing of it save the sandy banks, untidy with jack-pine needles, thefilling-stations, lunch-stands, lone houses, all meaninglessly runningbackward. Sometimes there were red taillights ahead; instantly they hadslid back out of sight, without Barney's seeming to have moved thewheel. Once, for three seconds, the headlights brought out a parked carand, in the front seat, a girl's head on a man's shoulder. Then Barneyhugged her, but he did not look at her, did not seek to kiss her.

He was talking, abruptly:

"I'm glad you came, tonight especially. I've been worried. I'm going tobe investigated. New committee of the legislature. You see, I've made alot of money, I think honestly. I won't pretend I haven't had goodtips on the market, but I don't think I ever paid for 'em by anyinfraction of justice. My judicial record seems to me sound as a bell.But the publicity hounds may prove that any error I've ever made waspure racketeering. And all the babies I send up, won't they be happy tosee the press sniffing and snouting into my private affairs! I'mworried. It's been a devil of a comfort to have you here--as though youunderstood everything, without my having to tell you, Ann."

"Have they anything on you?"

"Yes: this. I've always been as careless as the devil about my privateacquaintances. I know gamblers, big bootleggers, grafting contractors,bucket-shop proprietors, all sorts of doubtful characters, and I playcards with 'em, I drink with 'em. I'd send any one of 'em up like ashot--or I hope I would--if necessary, but until they're indicted,they're my friends. I find them considerably more amusing than lawyerswho play chess and go to the opera. But my little buddies do give theinvestigators a beautiful lot of clues that ain't there! Do my palsshock you--considering how violently I have added you to them thisevening?"

"No." She studied. "Really no. My secret as a prison keeper--and itwould probably ruin me if anyone but you and Malvina Wormser knew it--isthat I find myself liking, and even admiring, the prisoners more thanmost keepers and guards. Some of the prisoners are really bad. Slimy.But so many have just been more adventurous--not willing to sink intodressmaking and cashiering all their lives. There was a darling I knewin the South, one Birdie Wallop--I hear she is running a successfulrestaurant in Spokane now. She used to come to me----"

For a quarter of an hour she talked of Birdie. She broke off to suggest,"Isn't it rather unusually late--Barney? I can't get at my watch. Whereare we going?"

"Yes. I'm afraid it's time to turn back. But we're almost out at mycountry place. Two miles more. Let's stop in there and have some coldturkey and a bottle of beer out of the ice box. Place is practicallyclosed--my wife and girls (two daughters--young ladies now)--they're inEurope, and I just go out occasional week-ends. But there'll besomething to eat, and we can get warm before we turn back."

She knew, she said to herself, that he had been craftily heading for hisden all the while. She felt that she ought to be indignant. She couldn'tbe. She liked him, through to the marrow.

She wondered what sort of a place he had--painty little new bungalow,shabby Colonial cottage, or prim mansion with mansard roof and plasterwalls. She did not care.

The two miles, at their speed, took two and a half minutes, and whileshe was still speculating they turned in between concrete pillars,rattled through the gravel of a quarter mile of curving driveway, andcame up all-standing before what seemed to be an immense house in brickand limestone Georgian. She had a feeling that Barney would ring and beadmitted by a butler and footmen. But he led her to a small side doorand through a white passage to a kitchen out of a house-wife's dream ofParadise--linoleum floor, tiled walls in canary-yellow, long gas range,coal stove with a hood, sink of Monel metal, and on the walls a familyof copper pots, from grandfather pot to baby, surely imported fromFrance.

An ice box seven feet wide, electric.

In it beer, a cold chicken, a cold duck, caviar; and in the pantry avast box of English biscuits.

"Too cold for beer, don't you think?" said Barney. "I'll make you a cupof tea. Like it?"

"Love some! I'm cold to the bone."

"Wish it weren't so late; I'd cook you a whole dinner. I may be anilliterate jurist, and even a Harvard man can beat me at hand-ball, butI'm the best damn cook outside the Colony restaurant." His way ofturning on the gas, lighting it, reaching for the teakettle, theprofessional sureness of it, proved his words. "My Mulligan stews arereverently spoken of even by the best bartenders, and my pineapplesauerkraut has caused exiled German princes to weep tears of pureLöwenbrau."

He refused Ann's help. Russell would certainly have taken it. She notedagain that it is a myth that the soft men are "handiest about thehouse." She could see Barney Dolphin as a camp cook, an army cook, aship's cook, enjoying it, while Russell puttered in kitchens and gawpedand got in the way. Barney stripped to his shirt-sleeves, and shenoticed his solid shoulders. She sat on a high stool, warm now, happilywatching him. He deftly made chicken sandwiches, made toast for caviar.He had their supper ready in ten minutes, and they ate it at the kitchentable, not very talkative, exchanging grateful scandal about judges andcourt officials and prison experts.

Elbows on table, chin on hands, he looked through her eyes into herbrain.

"It's cold out, my dear. It's late. Why not spend the night here? We'llstart as early as you'd like in the morning--or as late."

She ought to protest, at least to fence. But she did want to stay. Shewas, after years of loneliness, curiously at home in Barney Dolphin'spresence. She avoided his eyes, she played tattoo with her fork. Sheimpersonally heard herself saying, "All right."

He came around the table to kiss her, with a professional sureness whichcaptivated her while she felt that it ought to shock her. They went downthe white passageway to an entrance hall, with portraits which seemed toher old and handsome, and up the staircase. But she halted, nervously.On the landing, illuminated by a strip light, was the portrait of awoman as cool and clear and slender and proud as though she were made ofrock-crystal, and beside her were two girls, fragile and disdainful.

"It is your wife?" said Ann. She sounded stricken.

"Yes. Mona. And the girls. Good-looking, I believe." His hand was urgingher upstairs. He led her to a bedroom like a corner in the PetitTrianon, with a too-gaudy bathroom off it. The toilet table was of glassand lace and--she suddenly detested it--huge bows of pink ribbon.

"This isn't her room, Barney?"

"No. No. Honestly. It's a guest room. And I don't mind saying I think itlooks like a kept woman's boudoir. I'm not responsible for all thefrills. But the bed does have a swell mattress, anyway. I'll bring yousome night things."

When he came in with a pile of dressing-gown, pajamas, cold cream, anenormous bath-sponge, she had donned again the evening cape she hadtaken off in the kitchen. She was sitting cross-legged on the benchbefore the dressing-table, her back to the table, staring out into theroom, elbow on knee.

"Worried, dear?" His voice flowed over her, caressing her like a warmbath.

"No, but----Oh, Barney, it is a little sudden, but I'm afraid I like youimmensely. Defenselessly, almost! I think you like me."

His kiss explained that he jolly well did, and something was going to bedone about it.

"But we can't make love here," Ann insisted. "It's Mona's house, soutterly hers. If we were strays, meeting by chance off in some inn, Iwouldn't care. But I can't hurt her, Barney, and it seems to me (perhapsI'm idiotic) that the essence of her is here everywhere. I can't betrayher, not quite that much."

"Look here. Will you go off for a week-end with me, next week-end?"

"Ye-es--yes, I will!"

"Then sleep sweetly, and tomorrow I'll have you up at eight--that givesyou five hours--and you can change your clothes and be at your office atten-thirty, and on the way we'll make plans, my dear!" To his good-nightkiss she murmured, not really knowing that she said it, "My very dear!"

She dreamed that she was standing, a prisoner, before Adolph Klebs, injudge's robes. He looked down at her ironically. She loved him, and wasa little afraid of him, and utterly attendant on his whim.

She woke to Barney Dolphin sitting on the edge of her bed, in themorning light. His arm, in pajama-sleeve, was warm about her neck, buthis morning kiss was almost disappointingly innocent, and he said only,"Up, my darling, and away, to the little criminals."

There was a sort of bath crystals, apparently geranium, new to her andluxurious.

A frost-bitten unplaced servant had breakfast for them, and as Barneysmiled at her across the toast and honey and coffee, she felt that shehad been his mate for years.

Chapter 39

At midnight on Saturday, March 29th, they started out in hiscream-colored torpedo for the Valley of Virginia, meaning by the magicof speed to push the calendar ahead into full spring. They had dinedlazily and late and well, assured lovers--they who had known but fourkisses yet, and supper at a kitchen table.

Ordinarily Ann was capable of a judicious nervousness about fast cars,but tonight, with a confidence in Barney Dolphin that seemed based onyears of his swift resoluteness, she drowsed happily on their flight.Towns, railroad crossings, thunderous underpasses, they were onlyvisions in her dream. She woke once at angry voices. Barney was arguingwith two enormous state policemen with Sam Browne belts. He seemed, shethought foggily, to be laughing, to be handing the policemen a bill anda drink from a flask. Then the encounter was sunk in her sleep. Shenever did know whether it had happened in New Jersey, Pennsylvania,Delaware, or Ultima Thule. She was so warm and snug in her double robe,and he seemed never to be tired when she leaned against his shoulder,which continuously, smoothly, flowed in motion as his hand moved withthe wheel.

She was conscious, once in the night, of a very little voice, probablythat of Annie Vickers of Waubanakee trustingly driving with her father:"'S nice. 'S all very nice and proper. I like it here"; and conscious ofan arm that was around her for a moment.

She was awakened, scarily, by a sense that the comforting sway anddrumming had ceased. She sat up, startled. She was alone in the seat,and the car was stopped, in a city. By some completely mysterious meansshe had come to a narrow street that curved as New York streets rarelydo; a narrow foreign byway with high buildings of smoky brick. Sheblinked, and her whole body felt hungry for Barney's secure presence.Rubbing her eyes, feeling exploratory and observant, she decided thatshe was before a lunch-room. And Barney was coming out, carrying a tray,smiling, a little ironic. With immense gratitude she took a thick chinacup filled with the most superb coffee, and the hottest, in history.

"Where are we?" she muttered, half asleep again.

"Baltimore, my beloved. The hometown of Mencken and the crab--notnecessarily related, however."

"Um. That's nice. Kiss me."

Then, immediately, they were in front of the Mayflower Hotel inWashington--how the devil the hotel had suddenly got there beside theircar she could not understand--and Barney was calling, "Now for some realbreakfast and a wash, my beloved, my kit, my sleepiest of cats!"

(But when he talked the Little Language, it was so lightly that hewasn't cloying, like Russell.)

He lifted her out. He laughed. "I'm not sure but we ought to stop here,sleepy. By the time I get you to Staunton, you'll be an infant in arms.Just now you look about ten. I'll be pinched for kidnaping--and have aRepublican judge sit on the case, at that! Wake up, darling! Waffles!Toast and honey!"

* * * * *

They came at noon to the hamlet of Captain's Forge and a little inn ofbrick with a white portico, on a bright hillside over a valley ofstreams and quiet fields. It had been a plantation manor house; thelawns were springing with daffodils and jonquils; and on the parlorwall, over the white fireplace, was the sword of a Confederate general.They had a suite of lofty bedroom, sitting-room with horsehair furnitureand portraits in oval frames, and a balcony over a lawn edged withrhododendron, and this place seemed to Ann the first of all places sinceher father's house in Waubanakee that was, immediately and enduringly,Home.

They dined vastly, on fried chicken with corn fritters and fresh peas,and slept all afternoon, close-clasped, absolute in their unquestioningcloseness to each other; slept on that vast black walnut bed, whoseheadboard was prickly with carven walnut pears and wreaths and roses,with the jalousie making a twilight striped with gold.

Their days at Captain's Forge were on the surface bland and idle. Firstof all they saw immediately that it was a great nonsense to suppose thatthey would go back on Monday; and they telephoned very long and lyingtelegrams about the vague affairs which would keep each of them here fora week.

They walked, they swam, they picnicked. They played, though both wererusty, a fast, vicious, unlaughing tennis. Once, in a fast drive, theywhisked all the way to Richmond for an evening at a secret and gildedclub, but for the rest they were content to be absorbed by each other,by country airs and the smell of April earth. Ann re-read John Howard,Elizabeth Fry, Beccaria--the Wesleys, the Erasmuses, of prisonreform--and Barney growled, "I don't know why the hell it ever seemed tome like a slick idea to give up my classical Italian--the only Italian Iknow now is 'due bananas' and 'quanto costa the fine?'--in order topursue the playing of rummy with Tammany district leaders. Still, theLord may know His business. If I'd stuck to my books, I might be dean ofa law-school by now, or a Justice of the United States Supreme Court,and then I'd never have met you, and I must say I prefer kissing you totoying with the justices' whiskers in the shade. Gurrumph!" He divedinto La Figlia di Jorio--on the balcony, in a willow chair, with asiphon and a bottle of superior moonshine and a box of cigars on alittle iron table, and Ann, in brocaded dressing-gown and mules, readingThe Magic Mountain for the third time, but dropping it on her lap toglance contentedly at Barney, to stare, in a trance of happy formlessthoughts, down the green funnel of the valley.

* * * * *

Russell Spaulding (a man who was, Ann amazedly recalled, related to herby marriage) talked always in his lighter amorous moments of "playing"at things, of "making believe," and he engaged in these diversions sohysterically that he was as embarrassing to Ann as the spectacle of afat man dancing at a nudist colony. Barney Dolphin had probably not usedthe expression "make believe" since he was thirteen, forty years ago,and the verb "play" was in his rhetoric applied only to cards, golf, andbaseball. Yet it was Barney who excelled in the fond, secret games oflovers: the pretense that she was the shy nymph flying; the pretensethat she would not go to bed when he did, but would sit up readingunless he carried her off. He was grave about it, and did not hustle thegame by gabbling, but let it glide on in slow sweet idiocy. He couldafford to be grave. He had enough energy in him not to have to be noisy.

She noticed most, and most liked, the fact that they could understandeach other instantly, wordlessly, with a coup d'oeil. They went to arevival of that attractive church, the Episcopal Evangelical PentecostalUnion of the New Saints in the Living Word. The pastor (by day anexcellent carpenter), perhaps weary of the same old sins of the same oldmembers of that congregation of twenty-two excitable souls, wasdelighted to see in Ann and Barney new customers. He shouted, "And Iwant to tell you that fine clothes and living in cities ain't going tosave folks from going to damnation for their sins no more than wearingoverhalls." Barney's glance slid past hers and they glowed in sharedlaughter without having to laugh, without having to whisper thewisecracks of a Russell----

"Oh, why can't I stop this comparing the two men!" she admonishedherself. "It's childish! Making comparisons! And it isn't fair toanyone."

But the truth is, she was unbelievably happy, and it is a part of humanhappiness to make comparison with wretcheder days; it is the softest joyof relaxing in a warm bed to recall the chill walk homeward.

Unbelievably, unholily happy--and in especial because she knew thatBarney was equally happy.

* * * * *

There was a third who was with them always--Pride, her daughter.Certainly Ann was doing nothing to prevent Pride's finally coming out ofthe everywhere into the here, as the school reader in Waubanakee hadexpressed it. She saw Pride now as inevitably his daughter, Barney's.How, she sniffed, could a girl like Pride be fathered by Lindsay Atwellor Russell Spaulding or Lafe Resnick or Glenn Hargis or even AdolphKlebs?

"I will have my child, as I have my man!" she vowed. "A working womanhas a right to her child and her lover. Oh, I don't suppose she has anyspecific right. Probably there are no 'rights'--only the chance ofhaving good glands and good luck. But whatever the philosophy of it maybe, I'm going to have, Barney and I are going to have, our daughter!"

* * * * *

They were driving to the nearest town for the magazines. Not oncelooking at her, speaking steadily, Barney said, "I suppose you'd betterknow more about this legislative investigation of me. It will probablybreak just after we get back to town. I exaggerated a little when I saidI was completely innocent. Mind you, I do think that in criminal cases Ihave been a little unusually scrupulous, and unusually careful. I'venever let myself get bored and mechanical. But there have been civilcases that--oh, there was no real question of justice on either side;they were simply battles between two equally crooked gangs of guerillasand gorillas masquerading as high-minded business corporations; and inthose cases, sometimes I have been guilty--or it would be fairer to say,I've been realistic enough to side with the bunch I liked best. I'venever taken a bribe. I have taken tips on the market, and such things asthe location of new trolley lines, and I've had directorships. But neverbribes.... Though I don't know that makes me any the less guilty.Perhaps just more cowardly. But it does happen that they can't get me.But they'll have a lovely time bothering me. And--I've flattered myselfyou might worry, my darling, and I wanted you to know that I shan't bethe abused goat of the piece, but something much more like the cityslicker, the crafty villain, the crafty smiling villain. Do you mind?"

Drearily she told herself that this one man whom she loved beyond allhuman beings represented, then, precisely the cynical, vulgar dishonestyin public officials that she had been most passionately fighting.

She told herself that, quite clearly, but she did not hear herself.

She saw Barney hammered by the press, betrayed by fellow politicianscrookeder than himself, losing his debonair sureness, becoming moregray, wondering whether he ought to resign and, if he did resign, how hecould get through sapless day after day after day.

"No! No!" she wailed, and clutched his arm desperately. "They shan't getyou! Reform if you want to, but don't resign! Don't you resign! We'lltell them to go to the devil!"

He turned his head toward her, and he smiled gratefully.

* * * * *

He was talking, for the first time, of Mona, his wife.

This was in darkness, when they sat on the balcony, smoking, with thesmell of lilac bushes and wet grass slipping through the smell ofTurkish tobacco.

"I wonder if you've wondered if I've had many love-affairs? Well, Ihave. I suppose that's notorious. I've never tried to conceal it--toconceal much of anything, for that matter. And I'm not sorry. I've neverbeen sorry for anything I've done, I guess. Only sorry this way--it maymake you doubt me when I tell you the flat, hard, honest truth: thatyou're the first woman I've ever definitely loved, spiritually, anddecidedly physically; and if you were willing, I'd just see if I had mycheck book along, and you and I would start off tomorrow and never comeback, never--go on till we landed in a coconut plantation in Tahiti.

"I've known a lot of cuties that amused me when I couldn't stand Mona'sperfection. She's like a gilt Louis Seize chair, and a husky lout likeme expected to sit up straight in it, all evening, every evening! So yougo out and get a nice little pillow-cushion to squat on----"

"But, darling, what kind of furniture do I become in your metaphor? ASimmons mattress?"

"No! A throne--but with modern upholstery! But I mean: No sane personcould ever find fault with Mona. She's righteous, she's beautiful, she'squiet. She would have made the best abbess in Christendom. And in sevenminutes by the clock she can turn me from a normally decent andcompetent person into a foul-mouthed, awkward bum! She forgives you forwhat you might do before you do it, and then the least you can do is tosatisfy her by going ahead and doing it. She's so lovely. And oh, God, Iam so happy to be here with you!... Mona comes back to America inJune. It paralyzes me a little. I'm going to see you every day--and mostnights--till then? Shall I? Shall I?"

Dimly, "Yes, every day--every night."

In its sleep a night bird drowsed three notes.

* * * * *

They had only one quarrel, that very sharp; when he made fun of her for"coddling" prisoners. She won. Before it was finished, he had rathermeekly admitted that he had seen little of the prisons to which he hadsent so many convicts, so casually, for so many years; he haduncomfortably promised that he would go prison-inspecting.

"Yeah, and I might have had more sense than to have brought that up!"he said afterward.

* * * * *

They drove back to New York slowly, savoring every mile of spring; theygot in at dinner time and, as he had an evening engagement that couldnot by any possibility be broken, he did not leave her flat till tennext morning.

She was so proudly happy next day that she had to be kind, even if therewas no one around who would tolerate being bekinded. She telephoned toRussell that she was back. She was, yes, willing to have dinner withhim.

Russell arrived with gusty boasts about his success as a hotel-keeper,and he took her to dinner at Pierre's. But when they returned to herflat after dinner, his boisterous spirits drooped, and he beganshamefacedly to fumble at love-making. He was so childishly lonely, sotransparently lustful, that, from the heights of her own happiness, shelooked down at him in pity and let him stay. He believed, he almostsaid, that it was his own magic and wisdom as a lover which exalted themthat night. He believed that he was her husband!

When he was gone, in the morning--she pushed him out with the excusethat she must hasten to her office--she sat in wretchedness. "I feellike a prostitute! I must never do that again! So soon unfaithful toBarney--and with that human puppy, that man Spaulding, on the cheapground of 'not hurting his feelings.' Ugh! How did I ever stand it? Inever shall again. I'm glad I took extra care. But it only makes me feelmore sordid.... Why hasn't he telephoned?"

* * * * *

She slipped into the courtroom where Barney was to try a case, into theback row of seats, near the door. Among the counsel ruffling throughpapers or chatting at their long table she apprehensively recognizedReuben Solomon, the most famous trial lawyer in New York. Could herBarney manage so ferocious a fighter?

The court attendant beckoned the room to rise. Ann sprang up, proud atthis tribute to her man, when all of them, even Reuben Solomon, stood atattention, upon His Honor's entrance; prouder yet of the black silk robewhich Barney wore carelessly over his smart blue suit.

She studied the courtroom. It was rather stuffy and ugly, with spottybrown plaster walls, on which one stain resembled a map of Africa. Theonly decoration was the twin golden fasces behind the judge's high desk.Yet to Ann it seemed a beautiful room and cheerful.

She awoke to a tilt between His Honor Judge Bernard Dow Dolphin and thegreat Mr. Solomon.

"None knows better than the Court that the questions of my learnedopponent are entirely improper."

"Mr. Solomon, need I again remind you that this is not your office, buta court of the State of New York? If you again forget it, I shall takepleasure in fining you for contempt. You will proceed, Mr. Jackson."

Her Barney!

* * * * *

As she left the courthouse, she realized that she knew intimately twojudges. Lindsay Atwell also had recently been elected a Justice of theSupreme Court of New York. She had scarcely noticed the news at thetime; she only half remembered it now. Lindsay was something out of adream, blurred and unimportant.

* * * * *

She saw Barney every day, even the day on which Mona came home fromEurope.

He was to meet her boat at eleven and drive with her to Long Island. Atthree in the afternoon, Ann's secretary, the bustling Miss Feldermaus,skipped in excitedly: "Gee, Doctor, see who's calling: Judge Dolphin ofthe Supreme Court!"

Barney had never called on her at the Industrial Home; had telephoned asrarely as possible; and when he did telephone, had given the code nameof "Mr. Bannister." For women's prisons are precisely likeY. W. C. A.'s, smart finishing-schools, and Lesbian restaurants, intheir heated friendships, their furious loathings, their gaspingcuriosity, and their incessant gossip.

"Oh, yes, Judge Dolphin. Is Dr. Malvina Wormser with him?" said Annaffably, looking at a sewing-room report with more interest than thedocument deserved. "Uh--shoot him in. Say what he wanted?"

"How d'you do, Dr. Vickers," he said, as he came in.

Barney looked gray and stern. He wore a double-breasted blue coat, awing collar, a peculiarly moral and lofty black four-in-hand, andridiculous great horn-rimmed eyeglasses. And he carried a stick.

She adored him--her man, dressed just as politely as anybody; wearinghis blue serge almost as well as he had worn a sweater andgrease-specked bags in Virginia.

She jerked her head at Miss Feldermaus, to get rid of that slowlymoving, curiosity-devoured maiden.

Barney kissed her hastily, while she murmured, "No--no," and kissed himback.

"I couldn't do it," he said. "Mona. I was determined I'd be cordial,maybe lover-like. But when she came off the gangplank she looked at meforgivingly, and she said--God, she was polite--she said, 'I hope itdoesn't bore you too much, my coming home so soon.' I told her I was duein court and--I came here. I'm going, now. I just wanted to see you aminute--you know--just one quick drink of you, and how I needed thatdrink! We'll dine at six? Eh? Chuck it! Six, at the Brevoort, and then,God help me, I'll go out and eat chipped ice on Long Island!"

He was opening the door, calling back for the benefit of no one knowshow many pricking nymph-ears, "Yes, I really hated to send her up. Ithink you can reform her. Sorry I haven't time to see some of theprison. G'd-afternoon, Dr. Vickers."

And gone.

She laughed--at his eyeglasses, at the way in which he remained and nowwould always remain immanent in her office. Then she wanted to cry, atthe tragedy of the Good Woman who was accursed by having a red-beardedhusband, and the tragedy of the red-bearded husband who suffered fromhaving a pure, high-minded, frugal, and imbecile wife, and the tragedyof Ann Vickers, who had an excellent chance of being crushed betweenthem, with the squeaking of Little Russell Spaulding just as an addedtorture at the death.

Three and a half weeks later she had reason to believe that she wouldhave a baby.

Chapter 40

She would most certainly have her baby. It did not occur to her tomurder Pride again. Whether it was because this was Barney's definitiveedition of Pride, and not the limp-bound version that might have beenissued with Lafe Resnick as father; or whether, with a certaincowardice, she was willing to let the world think poor Russell was thefather, while previously she had had no husband to throw to the wolves;or whether she really and edifyingly had repented of her former murderof Pride and learned humble wisdom thereby; or whether it was becausethis was, at forty, probably her last chance to have a child--all thisno one knows, she did not know herself. Probably it was for all fourreasons, with a dozen other complicated desires thrown in. But she didnot mark them, nor puzzle over them, nor try to think herself into anattitude of virtuousness and credit. She merely went about singing, "I'mgoing to have Pride! I'm going to have my daughter! I'm going to haveBarney's child!"

She did not tell Barney for another month, not till she was altogethercertain.

He cried, "I'm delighted! I'm delighted! Unless you mind?"

"Of course not! I wanted your child. Terribly."

"Scared?"

"Not a bit. I'm strong as a horse."

"Then I'm simply tickled beyond words. I was born to be a patriarch. Andyou the mother of a tribe. If we'd met twenty years ago, we'd have tenkids, all hellions, and a thousand-acre farm and seven thousand booksnow, and I'd be almost a decent human being, instead of anoffice-holder. Ann! Our kid!"

They were in her little flat. As so often now, they had preferred a chopand salad brought from the hotel restaurant to the danger of meetingfriends of Mona and having to be bland to their hostile curiosity.

He kicked back the absurd card-table at which they had dined. He lighteda cigar. She watched him. He seemed, after his ruddy enthusiasm,suddenly weary and serious.

"Ann. Listen carefully. I'm not speculating. I'm suggesting thisseriously. Is there any reason why, with our child coming, you and Ishould not get up and git, the three of us, right now? Think of where wecould go--Paris, the Tyrol, Algiers, Bali, Devonshire, Cuba--anywhere!I've got enough money to take care of the two families. My girls aregrown-up. Don't need me. They have the Long Island society bug, anyway.They think I'm vulgar--no doubt correctly. I'd try to get Mona todivorce me, but if she didn't--what of it? Think of a villa in the hillsbehind the Riviera, and breakfast on the terrace, instead of a prisoncorridor and fighting with Sister Keast for you, instead of a stuffycourtroom for me, and a lot of fat-jawed politicians asking favors! Andwe wouldn't be just exiles--escapists. I might have been a scholar once;I want to pick up things again. Six months, and I'd be back in Dante andAriosto. And there's a devil of a lot you don't know, that you couldgrind on over there, my girl--painting, music, sculpture,architecture--you're ignorant as a rabbit! And our kid brought up tosomething besides radios and basketball. I mean it. Why not? I don'tthink I've ever accomplished one damn thing worth-while--never heard ofa judge that did--they're just actors spouting the lines written by thelegislatures, who are infamous playwrights. I suppose you have donesomething. Per-haps! But haven't you done your share? Must you give upyour whole life to the Kittie Cognacs? I could be ready to start in twoweeks, if you wanted to. Come! Yes?"

"Barney, I can't think of one single reason why we can't, but I know wecan't. I think it's that we're both terribly active people. We have tocarry out a job, even when it seems a little futile. We say we'd becontent studying Ariosto, taking music lessons, exploring Crete. Wewouldn't. We'd become restless and homesick and take it out on eachother, and then I might lose you. I think probably my only chance tokeep you is to have a job, be somebody besides just 'that damn womanthat's here in the room all the time.' And I like my work--and you willagain, once you get this cursed investigation over and stop feelingshaky. Kittie Cognac is like a novel I've read three quarters of. I wantto read the rest. And I've actually got Number 3921, Sallie Swenson,alias Cohen, to swear off heroin, I think. And----I can't! Let's plan tomeet a year from now, by accident on purpose, and have a month in Italy.But not stay and become shadows. We're too pink and meaty--we wouldn'tmake good shadows. Oh, my dear, I want so much to go with you! I can't.And you couldn't. You, with the funny face and the absurd red beard andthe atrocious reputation as a Casanova, that I adore!"

Not till midnight, tossing in her bed (regretfully alone), seeing thetwo of them in a lemon-colored villa above silver-colored sands, did sheremember that neither of them had thought of a man named RussellSpaulding.

"Whom God had put asunder, from the first, let no man, not even apreacher, try to join together," she piously observed.

Not for a week did she, the perfect Protestant, see that for Barney, whowas proud of knowing bishops and of having met cardinals, it must havebeen devastating to talk about being divorced and remarried. Sheprobably could never comprehend how much he had given her in that...the very cloak and garment of his soul.

* * * * *

She told Dr. Wormser about the baby.

They sat in the same position, on either side the fireplace, in the sameflat, as thirteen years ago, when she had confessed to Malvina aboutLafayette Resnick. But it was a different Ann Vickers from theembarrassed pregnant virgin of the settlement house. She was radiant,resolute, and almost flippant in her joy, so that Malvina needed not tobe so pattingly tender.

"What? Again? My God, Ann, it's getting to be a habit! Who's the fatherthis time? Russell or Judge Dolphin? Or have you been getting into badcompany?"

"I've never said one word to you about Judge Dolphin!"

"You haven't, eh? Well, I've seen you look at the man. It was anindecent look. You might just as well have sung Tristan and Isolde inJohn D. Rockefeller's church."

"Well. Anyway. No use lying to the family doctor."

"Heavens, no, nor any use in telling her the truth. A family doctor is,by definition, a person with such a reputation for congenital idiocythat she, or he, is expected to believe that the aftermath of a five-daybout with the speakeasies is 'a little attack of gastric 'flu, Doc'! Areyou going ahead and have this new child? I would, if----"

"Have her! Yes! I'm mad to! I'm walking all over God's Heaven about it,right now! But you must get this straight. This isn't a 'new child.'This is still Pride, that we wouldn't let come before, and she's givenus another chance, the blessed soul!"

"So? Interesting discovery. You might just let me send a note of it tothe Journal of the American Medical Association--and the ChristianScience Monitor! Oh, my darling, don't look hurt! You look like a childthat's been jumped on just when she thought she was being so good--yourlower lip's all quivering! I'm just as glad as you are about it, and Ibet Barney is. Is he?"

"'Tickled to death,' he says."

"He better be! Oh, well, I won't be Feminist. Wish I could have pinchedhim off myself, though there have been a fair share of nice men around,in my own day--so long ago. But you seem to have a problem or something,when I stop gabbling. (I feel like a grandma to the baby--is she stillnamed Pride?)"

"(She certainly is!) Yes, there is kind of a problem. Shall I tellRussell that the baby isn't his?"

"Won't he know? Could he conceivably have been the father?"

"Well, it's just possible. With his delightful vanity, he'll be sureit's his."

"Then don't tell him."

"Why not?"

"Why? My God, why? Who's to be the gainer by it--except your ownegotism, which you mistake as a high sense of honor? How will it helpyou? How will it help baby? How will it help Barney, to make a homicidalenemy for him? How will it help Russell, to tell him he's been acomplaisant cuckold? And most especially, how will it help Pride, tohave this known, so that she may hear it some day? Not why not, my goodwench, but why?"

"Because Russell'd find it out, and then be all the angrier--or the morehurt. I'm not a good liar. Wish I were! And then, too, it doesn't seemfair, with him; like taking candy from a child. I might try to lie toBarney or you; try to get away with it. But you may be right. I'll thinkabout it."

And so, when she left Dr. Wormser's, from the drugstore on the cornershe telephoned to Russell at his apartment. It was only ten. "Oh, yes,do come up, please do!" he begged.

He came out into the hall to meet her, urging, "Look, dear, I've gotsome friends here--Townsend Beck and Dr. Martin and Julia Casey and acouple of awful big hotel-men. Townsend--darn him, he thinks he's such atease!--he's been trying to kid me about your not being here. I told 'emyou were coming back, now I'm settled down to the hotel management herein New York, and I was so glad when you called up! You are coming back?For keeps?"

"Perhaps. We'll see."

("Russell would make a good father for Pride. He loves kids. He'd playwith them--pickaback--bear--little horsie. They wouldn't find hiscoyness trying, or even his little moralities. He'd read aloud to 'em.He'd even change diapers. He wouldn't be stern like Barney, or everdrunk.... How lonely I am for Barney! And I saw him this noon!")

This, swiftly, as she followed Russell in and dropped her wrap.

"Laaadies an' gennelmen, it gives me great pleasure this even-ing topresent to you that rare and celebrated animal my wife, and toan-nounce to you that Dr. A. Vickers Spaulding----"

("Good God! I suppose that I am 'Mrs. Spaulding,' legally!")

"--has come to agree with your humble servant, the chairman of thismeeting, that there is posolutely and absotively nothing to thisexperiment of two marrieds having separate apartments, no matter howbusy each--and--ev-ery--one of them may be with different jobs, and thatthe said Doc Spaulding and her old man will from now on join forcesagain!"

Much cheering from the group draped over chairs, couches, piano bench.

Russell was full of cheerfulness and mastery. His raid on commerce hadmade him more certain that he was a man of the world, and with evengreater firmness than he had once shown in regard to charity woodyardsand tickets to the Municipal Lodging House, he held forth on themysteries of the cheap hotel business: cost of cotton sheeting per tenthousand yards, great value of gelatine in hotel desserts, problem ofkeeping bums from loafing in lobby, also same in reference tolavatories, value of bill-board advertising (1) near R. R. terminus; (2)on roads frequented by tourists in flivvers. He was as learned as anarcheologist or an osteopath, and when the guests departed, one of the"awful big hotel-men" took Ann aside to inform her, "Russell is bringinga whole lot of new ideas into our profession, let me tell you. Even witha swell job like yours, it must give you a great kick to have a husbandthat's got a creative imagination like his."

* * * * *

He breezed on being masterful, even when they were alone, unconsciousthat he was ambushed and defenseless....

"Sit ye doon, now, and we'll have a good chin-chin, Anniekins. Well! I'mtalking poetry! But listen: I've been thinking. I see where I made mymistake. I never applied the principles of executiveship, in which Ithink I may with all modesty say I have been rather successful both incharity-work and in business, to my private life. I used to coax youinstead of insisting, even in cases where I knew I was right; and ofcourse a high-spirited woman despises a man who doesn't take the lead. Itell you I've learned a lot out of being in business--learned reality,instead of all this theorizing. (And you jumped me for going into it!Wisest thing I ever did!) So now----Let's cut out all the palaver andthe If, And, and But's, and make it a business-like proposition, andjust decide, bing! to do the only normal and possible thing for amarried couple: to live together, of course! And if you can't run thehousehold and your job, why, chuck your darn job! I can afford it now,even with the Depression. It would make a new woman of you. You wouldn'ttake yourself so doggone seriously if you could stay home and have agood rest and get things in their proper prospectus--perspective, Imean. There! Shall we call it a deal and say no more about it?"

"But I'm afraid, Russell, there are one or two things we must say aboutit." She tossed her hat on the couch, got herself into a deep chair,lighted a cigarette. She might as well be comfortable during theInquisition. He stood beaming on her, a man about to conquer his LittleLove who seemed so wayward but who, in her skittish secret way, reallyadored him.

"For certain reasons, Russell, it may be well that I should come back toyour bed and board----"

"Oh! Horrid phrase! Be more romantic----"

"--but it must be on a basis of that reality you talk about. Russell, Iam going to have a baby!"

"Eh?" Apparently he remembered their accidental night of love, these twomonths and more gone, and he shone. "But it's splendid! I'm simplyenchanted, dearie! I've always wanted a child, oh, God, so much!" He ranto sprawl on the floor by her chair, to kiss her hand with greatvehemence and wetness. "A child! To play with and watch grow and be ableto teach--maybe he'll avoid some of the mistakes we made! To give mesome excuse and reason for all the work I do! I'll send him toPrinceton! Our boy! And I didn't think you'd ever be willing to haveone!"

"Russell! This isn't easy. Maybe I'm a fool to tell you, but it isn'tyour baby."

"What d'you mean? Whose is it?"

"Well, primarily it's mine."

"Who is this man? How far along is the baby?"

"Little over two months."

"Then----Let's see. Then it could be mine!"

"Oh, yes, conceivably. But probably not. And listen to me, Russell; I'mnot going to be questioned, I'm not going to be bullied, I'm not goingto be audience at a self-dramatization. The child is mine and alwayswill be. I haven't the slightest right to ask the slightest thing. Youcan turn me forth into the snow, but that would be slightly ridiculous,as it's June and I can afford taxis and I have a nice flat of my own.I'm incorrigible. I'm going to have a baby, and I'm glad of it. And bythe way, she's going to be a girl, not a boy. But she must have a home.You would, I believe, make a good father. And a girl-child ought to havea male parent. Though she's mine, and will be! I'm a matriarch! Thereisn't the slightest obligation or claim on you. But you assert you wantme and want a child. Do you want me with this child, my child--which ispossibly all you'll ever learn about its parentage?"

"Good God, woman, don't, at least under the circ*mstances, talk like aprudish spinster putting a hallroom-boy in his place!"

"I guess I did sound prim. It's just--it isn't easy to talk about thiscasually. I suppose it's not exactly a daily situation!"

They laughed. That was better. He was instantly serious again.

"I won't pretend I'm not hurt, Annie. I had hoped you would want a childof mine, some day, somehow. And at first you were passionate. Andthen--I don't know what I did; oh, my dear, I never understood; youturned so cold with me, or so bored, or irritated! Oh, my dear, I wasmiserable! Part because of you. Part because I've always been crazy tohave a kid.... I've cut out pictures of babies from women's magazinesand hid them in my desk. Always pictured myself coming home at night andcute little tot toddling down the cement walk to me, and lifting it'way, 'way up in the air, and it squealed and said, 'Dada'----"

The man was pouring sweat in his revealed agony.

She came to live with him, to have a father for Pride, after a fortnightspent mostly with a Barney grieving and unusually silent.

Chapter 41

It was no easy thing for Ann to bear a baby, at forty. But it was easierthan her kind friends would give her credit for. They had such a goodtime, such a splendid vicarious pleasure, in cautioning her, fussingover her, finding out what she wanted to do and coaxing her not to doit.

Russell wanted her to go to bed at nine every evening--with the resultsthat she always woke at the grisly hour of four and lay turning tilleight, and that she was always handy there for him to try to make loveto. Pat Bramble Pomeroy wanted her to come and stay in New Rochelle, sothat, by daily commuting, she would be rather more wearied than bystaying in the city roar. Julia Casey (of the O. C. I.) wanted her totry vegetarianism and sun baths. And Mrs. Keast, assistantsuperintendent at the Industrial Home, urged, "My, we're all so proudthat we're going to have a baby! The whole staff of the S. I. H. arejust going to claim it as ours! Now, if you'll permit me the suggestion,why don't you take a four or five months' leave and devote yourself tothis sacred duty?"

While Ann was mouthing sweetly, "Oh, that's awfully thoughtful of you,but I simply couldn't let you take all the extra responsibility, Mrs.Keast," she was secretly raging, "Yes, and give you a chance to wormyourself in and carry out the great sacred duty of getting my job awayfrom me!"

Two people did not fuss: Dr. Wormser and Barney Dolphin.

She had insisted on Malvina Wormser as obstetrician. "All these accursedmale obstetricians," said Ann, remembering her days as a settlementworker, "say that pregnancy is 'just a normal process' and make theastonishing conclusion that therefore morning sickness isn't nauseatingand labor pains aren't painful! I don't want any sentimental sympathynow. I don't want to be dearied. I want to be treated likeSuperintendent Vickers. But when my time comes, I want all the sympathyI can get, I do!"

Barney did not talk overmuch; did not irritate her by asking for thesixteenth time that day, "And how do you feel now?" He just gathered herin and tucked her against his shoulder, where she belonged.

* * * * *

Before she had lived with Russell for two weeks, she knew that she hadbeen an inconceivable idiot, and that she was not unlikely to be killedby her folly. She had erected her own trap and, with such good sensiblereasons, such laudable planning for Pride's welfare, had bustled into itand heard the door bang. She was as much a prisoner as any woman in theIndustrial Home--she was more a prisoner, because the privacy of theircell-bedrooms was sacred.

By the end of that two weeks Russell was to her a pillow pressed overher head, a diet composed entirely of cream puffs and strawberryice-cream soda, a perpetual course of bedtime stories, a cornet thatnever for a minute stopped playing "My Wild Irish Rose," a hot bathscented with black narcissus in which she was bound with silken cords.

He was so damned kind, all the while, and so insistent on making heradmit how damned kind he was, and so damned forgiving--no, she snarled,she simply couldn't express it without the "damned's."

He treated her like a child who has been caught stealing or makingnasty, and whose anxious parents are determined to love it intoniceness.

Russell was feeling his oats. In this first year of the GreatDepression, when tens of thousands of employees were being discharged orcut in salary, Russell had soared from twelve thousand a year to fifteenthousand. He had, it seemed, a hitherto unlaureled genius for beef stew,communal shower baths, prevention of towel-stealing, economy in thecandlepower of incandescent bulbs, and all the other bright metaphorsand adjectives of the art of keeping cheap hotels. And this year men whohad formerly paid three dollars for a room were seeking rooms at adollar, and was it not nice that who should profit by this save oldRussell Spaulding, who was not a commercialized business-man but anindustrial engineer, fully equipped with ideals! He was a Success;already a Success to a degree of fifteen thousand dollars; and he was nolonger much impressed by his wife's being a Doctor and a Superintendentand a Speaker. No day now but he was begged to Speak--at Kiwanis Clubs,at Conventions of the Shoe and Leather Industry, at the Annual Banquetof the Caterers' and Restaurateurs' Association. And when he became amillionaire he would endow colleges, and not have to be content with onemangy LL. D. but be handsomely a Litt. D., a D. C. L., and probably aD. D.

He could afford to laugh at the Little Woman's pretensions, to ignoreher irritating vanity and be kind to her; and how inexorably kind hewas! He not only sent her to bed at nine, but came in at nine-thirty andtook her detective story away from her and turned off the light andtucked in again the well-tucked comforter. He brought tea in themorning, and if she did happen to have slept clear through, he woke her,so that he might enjoy the spectacle of her satisfaction at beingbekinded.

And while he did not know who was the Guilty Hound that had ruinedher--his friends said something about Judge Bernard Dow Dolphin, but heknew that could not be true, because he had never seen Dolphin, andcertainly Ann never had a letter from him nor a telephone call--while hehad not identified him, Russell beneficently made sure that Ann, thepoor kiddie, should not be pestered by the rat any longer.

She knew that her letters were being steamed open. Dear Russell, he wasso all-thumbs about sticking them together again! She knew that whenevershe telephoned the door of her bedroom was eased open, oh, so delicatelyand slowly, that Russell might listen.

She had not exaggerated, she sighed, in thinking that no prisoner in theIndustrial Home, no, nor any in Copperhead Gap, was held quite sotightly as Ann Vickers, on her voluntary commitment. But she toleratedit without one word, of anger, without more than a few quick breaths ofrage, because she knew that if she said one word she would say athousand; that she would leave Russell the same night; and that Pridewould be without a father.

"Besides," she fretted, "Russell has really been most awfully kind andforgiving, and I've got to play the game."

And of course she did not play the game, and every day she did see anddesperately kiss the improbable Judge Dolphin who never wrote to her,never telephoned to her flat.

* * * * *

The Governor had appointed a commission of members of the legislature,with retired judges and a couple of deans of law-schools, to investigatethe courts and jurists of the state. It was the investigation theprospect of which had worried Barney, but apparently he was no more thesubject of its searching than any other judge. The investigation went onmildly. They questioned every sort of magistrate, clerk of court. Thepress, at first excited with the hope of a good horrible scandal, becamebored.

Barney was relieved. "Nothing will happen. They're dumb. If I were onthat commission, I'd get something on the boys," he grumbled to Ann.

He had borrowed from a friend a flat in which Ann and he could meet forlunch, or tea when engagements prevented lunch. They cooked their ownmeals, or indolently got along with shredded wheat and cream. The flatwas in an enormous apartment house on the East River, and it was notlikely that she would ever be traced in it; but to make sure, she alwaystook a taxicab (insane extravagance!) to a corner two or three blocksaway. She fancied that she was being followed. Followed by Russell, bythe Mrs. Keast who so jealously wanted her job, or by enemies of Barney?It would have been a relief to be discovered by Russell or Keast andhave it out; but rather than let Barney be compromised she would havegiven him up... almost.

Whatever they talked about at lunch, they came back to the sameanxieties.

"I'm getting up a hatred for our Russell boy that's pretty homicidal,Ann."

"I don't hate him. I just----Oh, he just merely makes me get sick on thehearth-rug. I'm a prisoner."

"You're no more of a prisoner than I am, my lamb--I'm caught by you. Me,that used to think I could always love 'em and leave 'em. Me, that oncethought myself such a man of the world, such a man's man--His Honor,Judge Bernard Dow Dolphin--Barney, that has fallen as completely in lovewith a wench as any young Romeo; come here and sit on the floor and putyour chin on my knee and try to look intelligent. And----We can't keepthis up! We've got to elope. Pride may as well begin to get used tobelonging to irregular parents, right now, at her early age. Let's go!"

They might have gone. They were near breaking. Then the investigationcame, and he could not, or thought he could not, "resign under fire,"still less run away under fire. If it was a banal and merely traditionalreason, it still seemed to them real beyond question.

But daily they met--romantic lovers, not very young; crunching shreddedwheat in a terrible little dining-room with imitation exposed beams andlatticed windows that opened on a brick airshaft three feet wide,instead of sipping Lachrymæ Christi in a moony loggia.

They seemed to drift circling in a backwater. Nothing would happenagain; forever Pride would be slowly coming, but never come; foreverRussell would be prattling at her, and Keast would, withvinegar-dripping long nose, be watching in hope that Ann would have togive up her work; and at his home Mona be coolly disgusted by hiscommonness.

Then he exploded.

When she came into this dingy borrowed place that was their only home,he shouted, "I've done it! I ditched it! Last night, apropos of nothingat all--in fact, she was unusually polite and had put out whisky and asiphon for me--I said to Mona, 'I don't think you're enjoying this.Would you like to get a divorce? I'll give you grounds. Don't worryabout hurting my position. That's in the fire-sale already.'"

"And----"

"Oh, it wasn't too good. She said, 'I shall never divorce you--muchthough I should like to be free of you and your vulgar politicalfriends--because of the family, and because of our religion, and becauseI am still waiting, as I have all these years, loyally andsingle-mindedly, for the day when you are tired of your mistresses andget ready to appreciate the purity of my affection.' God! She was like acrystal chandelier talking. So!"

"Have you many girl friends?"

"Since I met you? None. Not one. Believe me?"

"Yes."

"I'm glad you do. It happens to be the truth, in this case. Still, Idon't recommend it as a precedent in general. Darling!"

"You know, don't you, Barney, if we three ever do go off together, itdoesn't make the slightest difference to me whether we are married ornot? Mona is welcome to the lines, as long as I have the man.... I'venever spoken of it: I do know that you're a good Catholic, or would beif you could, and I do know what anxiety you went through before youwere willing to divorce and remarry."

"Oh! You noticed that!"

"And as for Pride, she can jolly well take what her father and motherhave. Oh, she'll probably either turn out a lady, like Mona, or areligious political fanatic, like Pearl McKaig, and in either case,she'll disapprove of her old man and old lady. We'll probably wind upsitting on the steps of the poorhouse, smoking our pipes together, whileour Pride slides past in a Rolls-Royce!"

"Well, that might not be so bad. I swear there's better talk and betterpinochle in a poorhouse than in a Rolls-Royce, and less trouble dressingfor dinner----Oh, Lord, I can't even be joky, like dear Russell! It'sall so damn absurd. You and I that were born to go trampingtogether--with Pride following us, carrying a little rucksack!...Russell, Mona! How in hell did we manage to get ourselves shackled tothose complete strangers? My dear, whatever grafting I may have done hasbeen ethical compared with my sin (to her and to myself and now to youand tomorrow to Pride) in thinking I was in love with Mona, and bullyingher into marrying me. I had the lowest of motives--cowardice. You see, Iwas ambitious. I expected to be Governor, Senator, and I knew that I hada certain energy, unfortunately combined with affection for vulgarityand dissipation. I thought that with anyone so passionless and correctand reserved as Mona, I'd have to become a cautious and exemplary lad.Tried to escape from my innate recklessness by marrying into a nunnery.Of course it failed. I deserved it. But the other victims didn't deserveit. Oh, Lord, I'm getting moral! Love often takes one that way, I'mtold."

* * * * *

It did not add to Barney's cheerfulness that the securities in which foryears he had cannily invested were fast losing value. He had never beena gambler in his investments, however much he had enjoyed those friendlypoker games by which the privy councilors of Tammany rest themselves andsettle the political fates of a few million people. He had never boughton margin, but had invested in stocks safe as Gibraltar--rails, steel,motors--and then Gibraltar had quietly slid into the ocean. "I'd havehad a lot more fun and made just as sound an investment if I'd had senseenough to change all my money into silver dollars and sit on a pier andthrow 'em one by one into the East River," he said.

The Great Depression had been on for a year. It had the one blessingthat, since dinner-parties talked of nothing else, at least they nolonger talked about Prohibition, which topic had occupied the greatintellects of the United States now for ten years. A few people, evenpresidents and bankers, were beginning to stop saying "We have turnedthe corner and are on the up-grade; the Depression will be over in threemonths." A few were beginning to wonder whether such prosperity asAmerica had known from 1890 to 1929 would ever return; and a rathersmaller number to consider whether it might not profit our great land tolose the theory that a family which does not have a radio, at least twoautomobiles, a bedroom and a bathroom for every member of the family,and a membership in a country club, is a spiritual failure and a moralmenace and in general an offense to the Lord God.

The Great Depression did not depress Ann. It strangely exhilarated her.She saw poverty again accepted as natural and non-mortal. She felt thatif ever Barney and she should somehow, somewhere, be poor together, theywould be part of a new, taut, lean spirit creeping into the swollenland.

* * * * *

Pearl McKaig, the Communist prophetess, called on Ann at the IndustrialHome.

"I want to talk privately to you, Ann," she said, in the tone of aschool-principal.

"All right, Feldermaus, outside!" said Ann to her little secretary.

The door had not closed before Pearl demanded, "Do you let her call you'Vickers'?"

"I do not!"

"Then why should you call her 'Feldermaus'?"

"Because she adores me."

"So you take advantage of her?"

"Certainly--just as you are taking advantage of my notorious good-natureto bring me your message of bad cheer, whatever it may be. Shoot!"

"It isn't exactly a message but----Ann, I had great hopes of you, once.I thought you were one of us, the Workers, the uncompromising Reds. Andjust for a handful of silver you left us, just for a ribbon to stick inyour coat. You have never denounced the Mayor or the Governor. You seemto serve under them quite contentedly. And now I hear that you arecarrying on with a rich political grafter."

"Oh, leave my personal sins out of it!"

"You can't, these days. We're in the crisis of history. A revolutionistmust have character, and he has no time for the pleasant little sins.There's such terrific things happening. The whole coal-mining situation,especially West Virginia and Kentucky, is simply a war----"

"My dear girl, I know something about Southern industry myself. When Iwas in Copperhead Gap----"

"Yes. All the rest of your life you'll talk about having been there,once; about having fought, once; and you'll be so smugly pleased.You think that you're still a proletarian and a revolutionarypenologist. That's how Liberals always fool themselves. Pretty soonyou'll be perfectly satisfied with the prisons, and all the rest of theCapitalist system, and you won't even know it--you'll make speeches, andrefer to yourself as a Radical, and you'll be more useful to the BigBeast than any open and avowed reactionary!"

"Um. I'll tell you, Pearl. I'll run my grafting lover right out of town,tonight. And I'll open the prison doors and let all the girlsleave--presenting each of 'em with a tract by Lenin as she goes out.Will that satisfy you? Well, I'm grateful to you for saving my soulagain. And now--I'm busy. Fel-der-maus! Come in and take dictation."

But it did bother her, just the same, and she said to herself, "There'smore than a little in what Pearl says--there's a terrific lot in it."But in the immanence of Pride and Barney, she forgot it.

January came in, and time for her to take leave from the office andawait the baby. She felt radiantly well and normal, but she was bulky;her step, which had always been eager, was slow and graceless; and atlittle pangs of pain she was frightened. If it would only begin! If shecould only get it over!

It was infuriating to be a human mollusk, scarcely able to waddlethrough the flat.

Chapter 42

Everyone had told her that the labor pains, when they came to warn her,would be just an hour apart--that is, everyone save the doctor, who hadsaid, "Good Lord, I don't know how far apart they'll be! But don'tworry. You'll recognize 'em when they come, all right! Your room isready at the hospital. You can be there in twenty minutes, and I'll bethere in half an hour."

Ann was asleep, at three in the morning, when she was shocked awake by apain like a dynamite explosion in her belly. She had never known therecould be such pain. Beside it, toothache, earache, the torture of a legshe had broken in girlhood, were only mild twinges. She was drowned andchoking in pain, powerless in its flood.

And she was glad. "It's come! Pride is coming! And I'll be a human beingagain, not a feather bolster!"

Now, inconceivably more than ever, she needed Barney and could notendure it that Russell should be with her, should have the apparentright to touch her. (Even in her pain, she took out a second to marvel,"Husband--lover! How insanely we use words! If ever a woman had ahusband, Barney is mine; and Russell is a lover that I took in a momentof indecent weakness and have been too weak to throw out.") But forPride she must endure even this sacrilege of Russell's bustling presencein her holy hour. She must call him--must get up--must get tohospital--quick----No. The pain was gone; she was in fresh breeze afterfog; she had an hour yet of surcease before she need call him. And asshe feebly pawed for her watch and looked at it, just seven minutesafter the first pain exploded the second.

She sat up and yelped, "Russell!" with no more fantasy about it.

He galloped in, a large ball of putty in the faded pea-green flannelettepajamas which he loved on winter nights; and he was so swift, so kind,so unplayful, that she liked him. ("Curse the man, if he would only bemore consistently objectionable, how much simpler life would be!") Hehad the hospital, Dr. Wormser, and the night watchman of the apartmenthouse, who was to fetch a taxicab, on the telephone apparently all atonce, while she lay back, feeling secure enough to give herself up tothe agony of the pains, which were coming regularly now, seven minutesapart. All sense of dignity passed from her in the compulsion ofsuffering. She writhed, she tore at the sheets, she shook the side-boardof her bed in her feverish grasping, and she heard her own voice in afrightened keening.

She was too blind with the paroxysms, and too damply feeble and relaxedbetween them, to know much of what was going on. She had a notionafterwards that Russell and the maid had raised her, got her intodressing-gown and top coat and slippers, with a shawl round hershoulders, supported her down the corridor to the elevator, into thetaxicab, up the hospital steps. She was a little puzzled at seeingMalvina Wormser magically there.

Then the pains were coming three minutes apart, and she was holding thehand of a stalwart nurse, wringing it till it must have ached, andpresently she was so anesthetized by the pain itself that she realizedit only as a ceaseless hurricane in which she was lost with no sense ofseparate pangs.

And all the while it was something different from suffering. She hadn'tthe feeling of waste and futility that other anguish had given her. Itseemed to have sense, because she was producing life. If her body hurtdreadfully, so that she howled like a child, her spirit was triumphant.This was martyrdom not for a cranky Cause but for Life; to create themiracle of miracles. She heard Malvina gently repeating, "Beardown--try--keep awake--I'll give you a little anesthetic when the timecomes--bear down--try!" and obediently, worshipping Malvina, she strove,till the glorious moment when Malvina said affably, "We can take her innow."

She believed that she was singing aloud. She believed that Barney wasthere, and that she was lifting her heavy hand to wave to him. But allthe attendants saw in the corridor, all that a weeping and yearningRussell saw, was a pale, draggle-haired, blanket-covered woman,motionless and silent on a wheeled stretcher.

* * * * *

She came out of fog and the gray thickets and the floating shadows offaces, Oscar Klebs and Glenn Hargis and Lil Hezekiah and EleanorCrevecoeur and Barney Dolphin. She seemed to be on a bed in a blankwhite room, with a woman in white apron and stiff blue gingham dresssitting by her. She was puzzled. She had to think this all over. Shewould, right away, but she must rest first. She came out of the fogagain and instantly, a little proud of herself for being so astute, knewthat she was in a hospital room. Her mouth felt parched. She tried toraise one of her hands, folded on her belly, to rub her lips, andrealized, startled into full wakefulness, that she was no longer a fullhot-water bottle, but miraculously slim again and solid--and then, thenonly, that she must have given birth to Pride.

"Oh! Oh, tell me, nurse! How----"

"Splendid! Everything perfect."

"My daughter----"

"You have just the loveliest little baby boy!"

"Nonsense!"

They brought in her baby.

They told her he was a fine big boy, eight and a quarter pounds, but shewas afraid to touch him, so absurdly fragile were his minikin arms andhands and kobold blob of a nose. He wasn't unduly red and wrinkled,though he certainly was no cream and roseleaf fairy child. Over hisruddy skull was a flush of pale fine hair which, she was certain, wouldbe a red thatch. "Oh, you young Fenian! You shanty Irish! You darling!"was her greeting.

There was nothing fragile about the way in which the son of BarneyDolphin seized upon her breast and demanded his rights.

Within two days she would have called anyone who hinted that she hadbeen expecting a daughter a fool.

Within four days she was planning his course in Columbia, Berlin, andthe Sorbonne.

But as she had never thought of any name save Pride, she was in naminghim a little less co*cksure and loftily maternal.

When Russell came in, beaming, late that first afternoon--the baby hadarrived at eleven, and ever since then he had been receivingcongratulations by telephone, and buying speakeasy champagne for veryimportant men in the hotel and charity businesses--he caroled, "Well, itwent just fine! You had surprisingly little pain."

"Oh, I did, did I!"

"Well, anyway--you know what I mean. I've been in and seen him. I thinkhe looks a lot like me." (And Russell was as dark as the baby was red.)"Now the great question comes, now that we have this grand boy, whatshall we call him? I'll let you have first say, though. What had youthought of?"

"Oh, I, uh, I hadn't really decided."

"Now, listen--I just suggest it, and you don't need to take it seriouslyif you don't want to--but how about naming him after his Daddy--RussellSpaulding, Jr.?"

She was too furious to speak. She lay looking pensive--she hoped. Sherealized that Russell was beginning to believe the baby was his own;that in a few months he would believe it completely; that legally thebaby actually was spawn of the Spaulding; and that no one could be morestubborn than a weak-gutted man like this, once he was challenged. Soquite civilly, where she wanted to curse, she said:

"I never cared so much for Junior names. So confusing. And the child isalways in danger, unless he's simply miraculous, of being overshadowedby his father."

"Yes, perhaps that's true. Well what do you think of this: Henry WardBeecher Spaulding. I think that name has a lot of class, and he couldcall himself either 'Ward' or 'Beecher,' both nice high-grade names, ifhe didn't care for the 'Henry,' and it would be a nice thoughtful thingto do to commemorate a great man like that. He's in danger of beingforgotten in this day of cheap sensationalism and publicity-seeking inso many pulpits. Of course, I'm an agnostic, as you know, but still, Ido respect the fine old stalwart spirituality of our forefathers."

"But, Russell," feebly, "I thought from Captain Hibben's life ofBeecher----He made Beecher a good deal of a charlatan; not the kind ofleader that--" she gulped, but she got it out bravely, pale in her hardlittle bed--"that, uh, Liberals like us would want to honor."

"That's all a bunch of hooey! Hibben didn't know what he was talkingabout! The fact is, I'm distantly related to Beecher--kind of a fourthcousin of my mother's--and so I know he was one of the really great,fearless, forward-looking thinkers of his day. Yes. Henry Ward BeecherSpaulding. That would be a dandy name."

"I'll think it over. I'm terribly all in, dear. Perhaps you'd better letme rest now."

"You bet. Well, I'll come in again just before ten this evening. Mustn'tneglect the Little Girl now she has given us a handsome son!... WardBeecher.... I think he ought to go to a Middle-Western StateUniversity and get the sense of democracy that's so lacking in thesedamn snobbish Eastern colleges! I'm glad I was an Iowa man myself, letme tell you!"

* * * * *

She made secret Jesuitical arrangements with her night nurse that whenRussell came in before ten the nurse was to look agitated and throw himout with speed.

She did.

When he had fled before that sternness which is common to Americantraffic policemen, secretaries to British cabinet ministers, and nursesuniversally, Ann gave her son--her son!--his late supper (her breaststrembled as though they were stroked by a lover's hands), then wriggledinto a position for exhausted sleep, and did not sleep. She missedsomething. She tried to keep from admitting that it was Barney, but shecaught herself speculating whether, before Nature's last sardonic trickon women, she would have time to bear Barney another child.

She was looking at the door, saw it hitch slowly open, as if by itself,and Barney was there, smiling. He came swiftly to her, sat on the edgeof her bed, raised her--while she held her arms out to him and struggledto sit up--and kissed her, with no word. When he had laid her head onthe pillow again and stroked her cheek, she felt utterly healed.

"It's the Saints themselves have watched you!" he said. "I've been onthe phone to Malvina Wormser all day. I knew about the boy ten minutesafter he came. And I've been standing in a doorway across the streettill Spaulding (that louse!) was gone and I was sure he wouldn't comeback. But I'm not going to do any more sneaking like this!"

"How did you get in, after hours?"

"Bribed two people, bullied two more, and made love to twoothers--exactly the right mixture. And I have a letter from Malvina inmy pocket, in reserve, if I need it."

"Have you seen our boy?"

"I certainly have!"

"Approve of him?"

"Enormously."

"You agreed with me you wanted a girl. D'you mind?"

"I lied. I wanted a boy, like the devil. My only son! And listen to me.I'm not going to give him up to any damned Russell-laddie----"

("But he's so touching!")

"--and I'm not going to give you up to Russell any longer. I don't knowhow but----We'll go into that later, when you're stronger.... I loveyou!"

"Darling, what shall we name him?"

"Matthew. After my father. (No, he wasn't the saloon-keeper; that washis father; my old man was worse--he was a contractor, with a heavyfist, a great sense of humor, and no ethics--a West Street Lincoln.)Besides, Mat is an honest, decent nickname for a kid to have."

"Yes! Mat Dolphin, my son--I'm already scared of him! Mat! What acome-down! When I was a girl, I thought that if I ever had a son I'dcall him something nice and romantic--a Lady Novelist's name--Peter orRaoul or Noël (especially if born in summer!) or Geoffrey or Denis. ThenMat! And I love it--and you! What a gorgeous brown suit! I've never seenit before. English?"

"Made here. Heather, from Isle of Mull. Smell nice? Sniff."

"Lovely. A man invited me to tramp through the Scotch highlands once."

"Yes, Lindsay is very fond of them, or says he is. But I warn you thathe never actually tramps more than five miles a day."

"Beast! You always know too much. If I were married to you, I wouldn'tget away with seeing lovers in my bedroom after ten o'clock."

"You would not! I saw your friend Lindsay the other day."

"That's nice. Keep him. I'm in love with a wild Fenian, and I want norespectable men about me. '----that sleep o' nights!' Lindsay? I don'tremember the name. I remember no names----" She yawned, immensely."Remember no names in the world except Barney and Mat."

"You're to go to sleep now."

"Sit by my bed a minute. Pull that chair over and sit by my bed. Just aminute. And hold my hand."

Safe now, guarded and warmed by his hand, she was instantly asleep. Itmay have been an hour later, it may have been two hours, when she wasawakened by the nurse's coming in and clucking with professional horrorand personal sentimentality. Her hand was still in his, unmoving, and inthe subdued light she could see him sitting stiffly, chewing anunlighted cigar. His arm, she wailed, must ache abominably. "You poordarling, you go and rest now!"

His good-night was to kiss her drowsily closing eyes, unspeaking.

"And I used to think, in Feminist days," she brooded, as she floatedinto sleep, "that the whole physical side of love--kisses, caresses,little pattings--was vulgar, and suited only to high-school boys,milkmaids, soppy spinsters, people who sing about Moon and June andSpoon. Holding hands? Banal! I was going to have a high spiritualromance. Sit across from the well-beloved and discuss the funding ofmunicipal gas works, I suppose! I have a high spiritual romance! AndBarney's hand seems to me, this particular day, like the sheltering handof God!"

Chapter 43

The nurse-governess was excellent--Miss Gretzerel, a lively young womanfrom Switzerland, with a Swiss passion for languages, cleanliness, andchildren. The nursery was excellent--it was arranged for Mat himself,and not for the amusem*nt of Mat's parent; it was free of all furnituresave the crib and a bureau of small garments and two straight chairs;the walls were innocent of yellow ducks and tender mottoes and could bescrubbed ruthlessly. To them Ann had given rather more excitement andplanning than the average jobless young mother with duties in the way ofbridge and dancing.

Ten times a day she wanted to telephone from the Industrial Home to MissGretzerel, and didn't. No matter how seamed her mind was with thedetails and worries of work when she left the office, they were smoothedaway as she realized, taking the subway, that she would see Mat now. Asshe reached the apartment, she invariably began to fear that somethingmight have happened, and throwing her hat down in the hall anywhere, shetiptoed into the nursery as desperately as though it were the crisis ofan illness.

She saw, immediately, that Mat was certainly the most beautiful, thestrongest-backed, and the most precociously intelligent infant in theworld. She tried not to tell people about it at dinner-parties, but shehugged to her heart the knowledge that this extraordinary child couldfold its feet together like a kitten folding its paws, that at the ageof three months he certainly recognized her, that his miniature nailswere of a perfect almond shape, and that he never cried except for areason.

Her one grief was that she could not nurse him after two months. Withthis she had to pay for being what the world quaintly considered a "freewoman."

Russell was, apparently, as devoted to Mat as she was, and frequentlyshe wished to Heaven he would be less devoted--as from time to time shehad wished that he would be a little less everything. He brought inpreposterous toys which the baby couldn't even see: lovely woolly lambsand puppies and puss*es with their fluff filled with streptococci; funnylittle wooden bears, with which the baby banged his own forehead, to hisbelligerent and noisy astonishment. And Russell talked baby-talk--hegushed, "Izzums the littely, ittely, bittely?" and tickled the baby'sfeet. The fact that frequently the brat enjoyed this cuteness thoroughlyand screamed with pleasure made it all the worse, and gave Ann her onlymoments of questioning whether Mat really was a Voltaire, and whether hereally was Barney's child.

Finally, Russell, when not checked by public violence, tried to show thebaby to visitors, after it had gone to sleep.

It was Miss Gretzerel who put a stop to this sacrilege. But it was Annwho had devised the plot against the fond ex-officio father.

The fascination of the baby's tininess, the adventure of watching himgrow, the old avowal that he should make none of her mistakes and becramped by none of her ignorances, the sweet, simple belief that he wasmuch handsomer than any of the kodak pictures of other babies which herfriends showed her, these emotions, plus her work, plus the increasingdanger in seeing Barney, so absorbed her that she was only a littleannoyed and worried by Russell's growing determination that he would beher lover again.

It had been part of Russell's general evasion of life not to admit,except by fumbling hands in the darkness, that there was such a thing aslove's embraces. But now, in his irritation, he grew verbal and specificenough. He reminded Ann that he had been very generous in taking herback and giving his name to a child who might not be his own. He hintedthat she was thinking about her lover and possibly even sleeping withhim. As all of this was absolutely true, it was hard for Ann, who didhave a certain equity of mind, to work up indignation in answering him.

She wanted to jam a suitcase full, take Mat under her arm, and go offforever.

She couldn't, not with Mat.

And just now of all times, she could not go to Barney. Aside from hisposition, his danger from investigators, he was busy marrying off hisolder daughter. She was "doing well for herself": marrying a boy who wasgoing into the diplomatic service, the son of a corporation counsel withan estate on Long Island.

In the "society sections" of the New York Sunday newspapers there wereportraits of "Miss Sylvia Dolphin--a lovely March bride."

Ann showed these to the highly interested Matthew (when Russell and MissGretzerel were safely out of hearing) and pointed out, "That is yourhalf-sister, Mat. Do you recognize her in her new Lelong?"

Mat belched.

A horrible, perhaps childish fascination drew Ann to the wedding.Anything related to Barney was so important. She stood as far back asshe could in the crowd alongside the awning at St. Patrick's Cathedral,behind an old Irishwoman shaped like the back of a taxicab, and saw theprocession come out.

Sylvia looked----

"Well, she looks like a bride. I don't think I ever did," thought Ann.

Her new husband----

"And he looks like a college man; let's see; just how am I related tohim?"

Then Barney came, to sub-Tammany cheers. She hadn't realized that he wasreasonably tall. Or was it just the burnished top-hat, the morning-coat,sleek as a snakeskin, the pale gloves, the spats as worn by the peerage,the gold-headed stick? Ann gazed on him with fond, foolish adoration."That's my man, there!" She longed to tell the bus-bottomed Irishwomanabout it.

But her lodestar was Mona, Mrs. Dolphin, the blameless innocent who toAnn had become "that damned woman, that leech."

Yes--twisting a little, risking a little, Ann could, for the first time,see Mona now, on the other side of Barney.

Well, and she was as cool and proud as she had been in the portrait onthe turn of the stairs, and she wore superbly a long sable coat with aflaring high collar. Crystal--yes. But there was no inner light there,as the portrait-painter had feigned. She looked bleak. And her nose wassharper, her mouth thinner, than in the picture, and she was beginningto have altogether more of a mummy aspect.

"Graceful and dead, and Barney, the wild Fenian, has to live with her!"thought Ann.

On her way up in the subway--before she was restored to importance andGreat Womanness by the adoration of Miss Feldermaus, the jealousy ofMrs. Keast, the demands of prisoners to see her and have their livesstraightened up--in the stale subway air, crowded among people whoflopped against her as the train took curves, a strap pulling her armout of its socket, Ann saw the picture of the matter as it might havebeen described: The rich and powerful Judge Dolphin, with his beautifulwife, well-to-do in her own right, both of them fairly acceptable inthat sound and beautiful society which could buy viscounts fordaughters; these important people attending the marriage of theirdaughter to one who would presently be permitted to mix co*cktails forthird secretaries of Portuguese legations; and in the crowd, watchingthe proud procession, a working woman who was Barney's despisedmistress....

"But it isn't like that, Barney, is it? What would I do if it were, ifBarney didn't love me? I think I would die. I think not even Mat wouldkeep me living."

She worried it. Miss Feldermaus was surprised (though philosophical) ather crossness in the matter of the canned string beans.

At four, Barney telephoned in one of his rôles, the Hebrew ProtectiveHome for Delinquent Girls, hoping that Dr. Vickers would be able to lookin at five and talk with one of their more difficult girls. "We havesomething interesting to show you," said the message.

The Hebrew Protective Home proved to be a speakeasy on Eighty-fourthStreet, and though there were plenty of delinquent girls around, theywere being treated only with co*cktails.

Barney solemnly rose as Ann came in, assumed his top-hat with a stagypat on its top, and turned round and round.

"Am I beautiful?" he demanded. "Do I look like the Duke of Westminster?You may never see me like this again."

"But why the splendor?"

"Don't you remember? I told you. Sylvia married today."

"Of course. I remember now. I'd like to have been there."

"Really? (Mike! Two side-cars!) I'd have seen you got an invitation ifI'd ever supposed----I thought perhaps you'd rather not meet Mona. Youwouldn't like her! At least, I don't! But I am so sorry----"

"It doesn't matter. Probably I'd have leapt up, once I saw you asbeautiful as this, and have tried to drag you from her."

"Come and do it, the next wedding! My other girl's engaged. Looking atyou, my dear!"

That was the only time, even by inference, she had ever lied to BarneyDolphin.

Two aching people trying, in a sleazy illegal café, to be light and veryhumorous.

* * * * *

With Barney more nearly free, his daughter safely auctioned off, Annbegan to be obsessed by the thought of fleeing to him from Russell'sincreasingly damp pawing. Russell became--oh, she was sorry, not angryat him; she knew that it was her own exasperating refusal that maddenedhim--but he became a lecherous hobbledehoy. He bolted into her bathroomwhen she was in the tub. He made feeble, embarrassing, smutty jokes. He(she was sure) deliberately punctured a hot-water bottle so that itflooded his bed, and made it an excuse for wanting to share her couchthat night, and was not unreasonably tart when she suggested thedavenport in the living-room "because she was so sleepy--justtonight--if you don't mind."

She did not defend herself.

"I sadly perceive," she thought, "that this much lauded business ofpreserving one's chastity can be much nastier and meaner thanprostitution. I'm horrible to that poor man, and he's been as decent asever he could be, and maybe just a little decenter. I must get out. Howcan I, with Mat? I must. Cottage in the suburbs; Gretzerel and Mat andI, with a five-dollar-a-week girl in to help get dinner and wash thedishes. I can afford that."

It was a rather jarring coincidence that the next evening, after anumber of other pointed moral remarks, Russell wound up a spiritedsermon with:

"And another thing. You think you're such a damned good mother. Saysyou! I've listened to you. Confiding to the other old hens that you justlove taking care of Mat (and I still don't like that name; 'Ward'would have been ever so much smarter and more original)--how you prefertaking care of him to bossing prisoners and addressing the UniversalMeddlers' and Uplifters' Association! Sure! Your self-sacrificingdevotion consists in paying Miss Gretzerel to do all the dirty work! Forone thing, of course, if you had the slightest consideration for thegood of our child, and not just for your own convenience and self-glory,we'd be planning to get a house in the suburbs, where he could havefresh air and quiet and build up decent nerves, instead of thisstinking, noisy city!"

"But, Russell, when we were first married I wanted to get a houseoutside the city, and you insisted we needed the stimulus of theintellectuals----"

"Heh! 'Intellectuals!' You know one difference between you and me? I cangrow. I discard worn-out ideas. There was a time when I thought businessmen were the bunk, a lot of nit-wits, and these 'intellectuals' had acorner on ideas. Well, I've learned different, and I tell you, I wantMat to be surrounded, as he grows up, with a lot of keen, practical,efficient people that do things, stock-brokers and dentists andadvertising men and so on, like you'll get say in Mount Vernon or CosCob, and not by a lot of bums and radicals and mere theorists. Now Iwant you to listen to me--if you can for one moment forget how importantyou are! Next Sunday we're going to hire a car and drive up Westchesterway and see what we might be able to do in the way of renting a suburbanhouse."

"It will make it harder to see Barney, to live there," she was thinking,the while she said meekly, "I should be glad to."

* * * * *

Russell made a good deal of the fact that, purely on behalf of her andof his son Mat, he was paying twenty-five cents a mile for the limousinein which they had driven out to find among the higher-class suburbs ofNew York their Isle of Innisfree.

It was one year and two weeks since she had driven all the hours ofdarkness beside Barney Dolphin to the Valley of Virginia.

Russell talked about the Depression, train service from Mount Vernon,the amount of cod-liver oil Mat ought to have, the future of theDepression, and Pelham real estate as an investment. Ann sat boltupright on the dove-gray upholstery and smoked too many cigarettes toorapidly.

They looked at a dozen respectable houses with two-car garages and thequietude that is afforded by nearness to a through highway. The housescost from twenty thousand to thirty-five. None of them had more thantwelve hundred square feet of lawn and a handsome pair of trees.

Now Russell, Ann knew, had saved ten thousand dollars; she (daughter ofWaubanakee), for all her small salary and the enthusiasm with whichreformed ex-prisoners borrowed, had by cheerful meannesses managed topile up three thousand. That was all they had between them, she pointedout.

"But, good Lord, we don't have to pay the whole price down. Pay maybefive thousand, and take ten years to pay the rest."

She fell into such a panic as squeezes a first offender when he hearsthe judge say, "Ten years hard labor." Was she going to be caught? CouldRussell by some magic, by that sticky strength of the weak, trick herinto this, so that for ten years she would have to stay with him, andhelp him pay, lest she be "letting him down after he had gone to workand taken the house just for her and her child"?

She could not see the trap. She could smell its wintry steel.

They did come, through a mistake in the card-listing of an otherwisereputable dealer, to one house she liked, near Scarsdale. Forlorn andshabby among the mansions, stucco and brick and hollow tile, TudorGeorgian and California Spanish and Evanston Colonial and ConnecticutSwiss, there stood abashedly a farmer's cottage built in 1860, in anirregular, ragged, weedy lot, a quarter mile from any thoroughfare. Theasking price was $5,000. The timbers were sound. It had a largeliving-room, a kitchen, no dining-room, running water but no bathroom,two large bedrooms, one small bedroom, and a Main Street porch lookingdown a valley filled with dogwood.

It was called Pirate's Head Cottage. When Ann asked for the story behindthe name, the agent explained, "Oh. Well, that's what they've alwayscalled it, see?"

Ann calculated rapidly: a bedroom for Mat and the Gretzerel, one forherself, and a tiny co-op for Barney--whether or not he used it allnight was no one's business.

"This is such a sweet funny old place," she said.

"Why, you're crazy; aside from its being a wreck, not half enough room,"said Russell.

The whole way home he talked approvingly of the most machine-made housethey had seen. It cost twenty-five thousand, but they could pay for itin eight years. Ann listened with the cold sweat of a man being taken toSing Sing, to the death-house.

* * * * *

She was, she told herself, "up against it." She must no longer muddlealong.

She could flee to Europe and the golden exile with Barney. He still hadmoney enough, despite the Depression, and almost daily he proposedflight. But they were too old ever to become part of any Europeancommunity. "We should have met and thought of this when I was ten andBarney twenty-four. Careless!" They would be permanent tourists,pointless as eagles in a zoo. And Mat would never strike roots anywhere;he would become a dilettante, a shadow among feeble shadows, movingamong American countesses, and women whose one purpose in life was tosuck as much money as possible from the ex-husbands whom they haddivorced for the sake of alimony and the ease of an existence withoutduty or pride or honor, among imitation writers of imitation free verse,mysterious colonels and doctors and marquises who had never quitesoldiered or practised medicine or been recognized by the peerage, amongwaiters and riding-masters and gigolos, quiet dipsomania and more thansuspected cocaine--a world that was in Europe yet never for a secondEuropean, a world of loafers without grace, of gangsters withoutcourage, of orchids faded brown. No! Better for Matthew even Russell'sbouncing moralities than this life of red-velvet curtains gonethreadbare and greasy.

Or she could definitely settle down to being Russell's wife and lover bycultivating deafness and frigidity. But would it be good for Mat to havesuch a mother, bitter with sacrifice?

Or on her own, with Mat, she could face the loneliness of independence,with Barney as lover if he would stick it. But would he not weary ofthis hole-and-corner business? It was curious that, for all hispolitical bargaining, his doubtful favors to acquaintances, his one-timefingering love-affairs, Barney was no intriguer, no amateur of blandsecrecy. He had never hidden what he was. He was friend or foe outright.And how would this irregular alliance seem to Mat when he came to an agewhere he was conscious of his schoolmates' snickering gossip?

"In other words," said Ann, "whatever I do will be wrong, so why worry?And isn't it a bit naïve of you to assume that you can decide whatyou'll do? Of course you'll just drift on, and nothing willhappen--nothing will ever happen."

On Friday, April 3, 1931, everything began to happen, all at once.

Chapter 44

At 3 P. M. on Friday, April 3, Prisoner 3921, who was in the IndustrialHome on charges of blackmail and selling drugs, and whom Ann sweetlybelieved to be cured now of heroin-using, was released with a receptionin the office, during which Number 3921 (Sallie Swenson, Sarah Cohen,and Sue Smith were among her other names) drank tea and wept andgratefully received ten dollars, and said that Dr. Vickers was herbenefactress, her inspiration, and, to all intents and purposes, herprivate saint.

At midnight, the same Friday, Sallie was arrested for assaulting thebouncer of a respectable, law-abiding speakeasy while in a great stateof liquor, and on her way to the station-house in the patrol-wagon shesmote a policeman with a rock mysteriously concealed in her bosom, andsang "Mademoiselle from Armentières" in the original version.

As there was no particular news in New York just then, a police-courtreporter thought Number 3921 might make a good story, and talked to her.Sallie, Number 3921, had the jitters and a terrible case of remorse. Shesaid that the whole trouble was that instead of being disciplined intogoodness at the Industrial Home, whence she had just been released, shehad been treated with such cowardly laxity that she had become rather ofa naughty girl. Finding the reporter strangely interested and being fondof the male attention she had recently lacked, Sallie added that whenshe had been sent up, just for a little blackmail, she had been aninnocent country girl who knew not the taste of alcohol or nicotine, tosay nothing of drugs, and that she had learned to drink and smoke fromthe pampered women in prison.

The newspaper made a second-page spread of the story on Saturdaymorning, just in time to furnish meat for two worried though celebratedManhattan preachers, neither of whom had, before reading the paper, anynotion of what Message he was going to give the hungry congregation nextday. But they had already announced the titles of their sermons, so thaton Sunday morning, under the separate labels of "Gangsters and theGospel" and "When Will the Judgment Day Be?" the two prophets deliveredalmost the same sermon, to the effect that the reason for the crimewave, as shown by the testimony of Miss Sallie Swenson, was that prisonshad become such dens of luxury and indolence that criminals were nolonger deterred from their nasty tricks by fear. One of the reverendexperts on mercy advocated the resumption of lashing; the other broughtout, as a new device, silent and solitary imprisonment for years, withnothing for the prisoners to do but read the Bible and think of theirwickedness.

Ann laughed, reading these thunders on Monday morning. No one could takeseriously these doctrines which had been so fetching in the year 1800.

That afternoon she received an anonymous telegram:

See sermons revs ingold and snow today papers at last folksgetting on you wolf in sheeps clothes.

That morning there were nineteen abusive letters on her desk at theIndustrial Home, three of them anonymous. The newspapers were trying totelephone to her even before she had reached the office. She was touchy,ready for a fight, but she decided--unwisely, no doubt--that the tactfulthing would be to avoid the reporters, to avoid publicity. She took theday off, spent it with Pat Bramble in Connecticut, and did not returntill midnight.

When she got the papers Tuesday morning she went insane right in themidst of the corn-flakes and cream. One somewhat sensational paper, theBanner, had given an entire page to the case of poor Sallie vs. theIndustrial Home, and headed it, "Do Palace Prisons Tempt to Vice andCrime?" Several other preachers had rushed in to save the nation. Onesaid in an interview that he had authoritative information that in a"certain reformatory for women criminals" the head of the institutionsmoked cigarettes with the prisoners and was afraid to discipline them.A Flatbush organization of women which had for months been unable to getinto the publicity, no matter how many resolutions against Russia,whisky, atheism, and mixed bathing it might pass, tried again, with aresolution condemning Ann and asking for an inquiry into the IndustrialHome by a committee to be appointed by the Governor. This time theypulled it off. Their resolution was printed in a box, surrounded withfemale portraits so blurred that the ladies might as well have beenwomen ambulance drivers, the inner circle of Sappho, or members of theNo. 3 Company of "They Do It in France." But they were asserted to be"prominent society women of Flatbush who protest against degeneracy ofpenal system."

Investigation by committee appointed by the Governor! Now, raged Ann,she really knew how Barney felt.

The kernel of the whole page was an interview with Ann's assistant, thegood Sister Keast.

In the absence of Dr. Vickers, mysteriously summoned out of town, Mrs.Keast had admitted, said the reporter, that possibly they had been tooeasy on Miss Sallie Swenson. They were trying the experiment of lovingthe girls into goodness. Mrs. Keast herself did not agree with thismethod, having had an experience perhaps more diversified than mostpenologists. But her chief, Dr. Vickers, and the other members of thestaff were such lovely people that she was willing to submerge her ownpractical experience and help them test their theories.

The dullest reader could see from the interview that if Mrs. Keast hadher rights and were superintendent, she would put an end to all thisnonsense, stop coddling these fiends, and make angels of them by suchnovel means as the dark cell, the cat, bread and water.

Ann went up the front steps of the Industrial Home like a cyclone. Shewas pushing Miss Feldermaus's button, and holding it down, before shetook off her hat. "Send Keast in--quick!" Then, to the fish-mouthedassistant superintendent, "Keast, did you give out that interview in theBanner?"

"Oh, wasn't it dreadful! Of course I didn't give it! They sent areporter here, and I told him I didn't care to talk to him, and all Isaid was that we were glad to experiment with new methods, and then hewent and made all that out of it!"

"Keast, I was to go to Philadelphia today and speak at a women's clubluncheon. I'll have you go for me, and you better start right now, thisminute. You won't be able to get back till late this evening, so youneedn't report till tomorrow morning. Here's the memo--the chairman'sname and place of luncheon, and here's your ticket. You better skip,quick, and make the ten o'clock train. I'll phone 'em you're coming.Feldermaus! Get me this Philadelphia number here, quick! 'Bye, Keast."

Mrs. Keast out of the way, Ann was telephoning to a Banner reporterwhom she knew as a devotee of Malvina. He asked someone who askedsomeone who asked someone else, and in fifteen minutes he telephoned Annthe information that Mrs. Keast herself had written the interview in theBanner. The reporter had added only a lead and two paragraphs ofdescription.

Ann was in the prison, that day, for fourteen hours, from nine in themorning till eleven at night, and most of the time she spent at herdesk.

When Miss Feldermaus dragged exhaustedly home at midnight, she informedthe family, "Gee, what a day we got! But fun? Listen! I ain't see theBig Chief enjoying anything so much for months! She's been looking kindof down in the mouth, but today, baby, she was ole Mis' Dynamo herself,and did she eat up the fight--say, she was throwing somebody out of thetwelfth story one per minute, and laughing all the time. Some day--andsome boss! Gosh, I'd like to see that kid of hers! I'll bet he couldtake on Gene Tunney and Max Schmeling together, right now!"

And indeed all that day Ann was saying to herself, "Trying to decide!What idiocy! Of course it's been decided for me, as I knew it would be.Lone Ann and lone Mat together. And the Job, always. No husbands....But I hope Barney will come sometimes and not hate me too much for beingAnn Vickers again!"

She took out the dossier that she had been making on Mrs. Keast, pastedthe Banner interview and annotations in it, and telephoned to theGovernor, who had always been friendly to her, disposed to back her inany reform.

"I hear you are getting a little pounding today," said the Governor."That's splendid! That puts you right in line for being Governoryourself some day."

"Heaven forbid! The prisoners have to stay and hear my speeches,Governor, but audiences might walk out on me. I want to read you a fewfacts about my assistant--and enemy--Mrs. Keast, who wants my job, andwhose interview, which she wrote herself (I have the proof), will beused as the base of all attacks on me.... This Mrs. Keast is a cousinof Mick Denver, the Democratic ward leader; she is a sister-in-law ofWalton Pybeck, the upstate Republican leader; they pooled and got her inhere before I came. She was dropped at the end of her second year in aChenango County high school for gross failure in examinations, and she'shad no scholarly training of any kind since. She was in that horribleFairlea Cottage Reformatory for Women, in the Northwest, when they hadthe awful riot, and was accused of grafting on food and of hanging uprecalcitrants to a beam, with just their toes touching the floor, sothat one died; but they hushed it up and didn't try her--just let herout, and she came back East." There were a dozen more items in thedossier, then: "I've let her stay here, watching her every second, soshe could do no harm, because it kept the politicians' hands off mysheepfold and let me go ahead. Now I'm going to fire her. If she balks,I'll make these charges. She doesn't know how much I know, I'm sure.What I want is, will you back me up?"

"You're sure of all your items? You can prove them?"

"Yes, documents, and I have the names and addresses of witnesses."

"Then I'll back you. Good luck, Doctor."

"Thanks, Governor."

"I wish," reflected Ann, "that I could call him 'Your Excellency' andmake it sound right. But I'm afraid I'm not a goodExcellency-caller.... Feldermaus! Get me the Hudson and Inland RealtyCompany, Yonkers. Hustle!"

To the real estate agent who had accompanied Russell and herself throughWestchester, she murmured, "Dr. Vickers speaking--Stuyvesant IndustrialHome. You showed me some houses. Eh? Yes, if you insist, I am also Mrs.Russell Spaulding. You remember that small old house on the edge ofScarsdale--Pirate's Head Cottage? No, I don't want a larger house. ButI don't care a damn--pardon me, I mean--well, that's what I really domean, I don't care a damn about tiled baths, and gasgarbage-incinerators. You asked five thousand for Pirate's Head. What'sthe very lowest price the owner would take? Eh? Oh, nonsense!" (And shehad been so meek, that Sunday; such a Mrs. Russell Spaulding!) "I'llconsider paying thirty-six hundred--twenty-five hundred down, and theother eleven hundred in two years. Yes, you take it up with the ownersand tell them to make up their minds quick or I'll withdraw the offer.Eh? Oh, nonsense; nothing is selling now, with this Depression; they'relucky to get any offer."

She wanted to sing.

"I have a home for Mat and me! And maybe Barney will come sometimes on aSunday.... Let's see; when Malvina comes, I'll take the little roomand give her my big one. When Barney comes----Precisely!"

The Hebrew Protective Home for Delinquent Girls called up and said,surprisingly, "This press stuff bother you--anything I can do? Fine!"

The next telephone call, in a tired dragging voice, was, "Ann? This isPearl--Pearl McKaig. I take back what I said--some of it! I'm gladyou're getting pounded by the reactionaries. Maybe it'll bring you backto us, dear. Good luck, you darn old Liberal!"

While she was calling up the newspapers, all of them, speaking nowbrusquely, now with a quite false jollity, she was already planning therestoration of Pirate's Head; the lawn with daffodils scattered throughit for spring, and a small garden of zinnias and dahlias and hyacinthsedged with violas, and one bed devoted to the unfashionable flower shebest loved--the cat-faced loyal pansy. While she snapped at city editorsor cajoled them, she was adding to the cottage a bathroom (but only one,with white pine wainscoting and no vain tiles), and deciding onold-fashioned wallpaper for the living-room, and a whitemantelpiece.... "Let's see--that little shop in New Canaan--pick upan old mantel quite cheap----Hello, yes, yes. This is Dr. Vickers of theStuyvesant Industrial Home speaking, and I want to talk to the managingeditor, at once--Dr. Vickers."

She was inviting every newspaper in town to send a reporter (preferablyfemale, but she did not insist) to prowl through the Industrial Home, totalk with any inmate or guard, unsupervised, and to get the truth, inanswer to the sermons and the patriotic ladies of Flatbush.

They came. She received them not too effusively. She asked them only,"Do you prefer to go through by yourself or with a guard?"

When they had finished they assured her that they were her partisans,and when could she have lunch with them?

She breathed easy then, and had a moment to give to the question of oldrag-carpeting on the stairs of Pirate's Head.

The Hudson and Inland Realty Company telephoned back that she could havethe cottage on her own terms.

She telephoned to Flatbush and invited the executive committee of the"club of prominent society women" to tea.

She made notes on the not very promising possibility of getting JessieVan Tuyl, once felon and saint at Copperhead Gap, now conducting acollege for working women in Detroit, as her assistant superintendent.

The last of the reporters left the Industrial Home at eleven at night,and Ann kissed Miss Feldermaus, apologized, "I've driven you to deathtoday, you poor darling!" and went home herself, so happily that (aftershe had crept in for a glimpse of Mat, asleep with his fistsbelligerently clenched) she was very kind and jolly with Russell, withthe result that she had to lock her door and listen from behind it tofuries which, she admitted, were completely justified. She got up early,Wednesday morning, to enjoy the corrections about the Industrial Home inthe press, and the first headlines she saw were in the Recorder, firstpage, first column, top of column:

Ann had a notion that there were favorable accounts of the IndustrialHome in all the papers. She did not read them. She never did read them.

Chapter 45

With Malvina Wormser beside her, holding her hand and purring with sharplittle indignations, Ann sat through all four days of the People vs. B.D. Dolphin. She neglected her own fight. She rather wished that Mrs.Keast would attack her now. It would be a relief to have someone likethe Keast to slaughter.

The two women were supposed to be, they supposed themselves to be, goodfeminists, righteous citizens, honest members of the working class, andthey were choking with loyalty to a man who, as the trial went on inthat dreary and unaired courtroom, appeared to have been a complaisantcrook.

Not at first, not till she had noticed on one wall the stain shaped likea map of Africa, did Ann perceive that it was in this same courtroomthat she had seen Judge Bernard Dow Dolphin in silken robe nodding tothe people who rose in reverence at his entrance. Another judge, inanother silken robe, sat at the same high desk below the twin goldenfasces which symbolized the sanctity of the Law, and they all rose tohis entrance, they were all satisfied now with his inviolablewisdom.

For a second, when she had first entered, Ann had thought that the newjudge was Lindsay Atwell. He was not. But, "That's all it lacks of beingthe perfect irony," she raged.

She looked little at the judge. She saw the back of Barney's head as hesat, apparently indifferent, near the counsels' table; she saw the rigidprofile of Mona Dolphin, to one side in the front row, and thegum-chewing jaws of the jurymen, lords yesterday of groceries andgarages, lords today over a man's honor.

The case was dismayingly simple. The contractors for certain extensivesewers had let out a part of the work to sub-contractors, who had latersued for more payment. Barney, presiding in the case, had persistentlyruled for the prime contractors, and after it had been made a directorof the firm. At this time also he had deposited one hundred thousanddollars which he could not or would not explain.

It was a weary recital of figures, dull to listen to--altogether as dulland as fatal as cancer.

But Ann was neither dull nor weary on the second afternoon, when sheglanced back and found Russell Spaulding sitting in court, glaring. Shewhispered to Malvina, "Oh, God, there's Ignatz! Don't come out with me."She tried to look at once casual and wifely as she joined Russell at theclosing of court, sweetly murmuring, "Curious case. But I didn't knowyou were interested, Ignatz."

Russell merely grunted, and they moved into the marble corridor. He hadsaid only, "See here!" when Barney and Mona were suddenly on them, andBarney halted, checking his wife by seizing her arm. Mona stared,unsmiling; Russell stared, frowning; Ann guessed that she herself lookedlike a school girl caught with her sweetheart; only Barney seemedcheerful and unembarrassed.

"Oh, Mona, this is Dr. Vickers, head of the Stuyvesant Industrial Home,women's reformatory. She's a good customer for the ladies I send up...did send up. Dr. Vickers, my wife."

"And this is my husband, Russell Spaulding, Judge."

"I think we met once at Dr. Wormser's," said Barney.

"Did we? I don't recall it," said Russell, as offensively as possible.

Mona Dolphin stated condescendingly, in an imitation-Mayfair accent,"But I thought the Judge said your name was Dr. Vickers, Mrs.Spaulding."

"It is. I keep my maiden name in my work."

"Oh? Rully? Very interesting. How did you happen to leave medical work?"

"I'm not that kind of doctor."

"Oh. Are there other kinds? Very interesting. I really think we musthurry now, Bernard. Good-day. Charmed-metyou,msure."

* * * * *

And Russell and Ann were alone in the corridor. Ann had seen Malvinascuttling off, fleeing the typhoon.

Ann started toward the stairs.

"You wait!" snarled Russell. "There's a couple of things we're goingto get straight, and right now, this minute, before you have the chanceto think up any new lies! This crook Dolphin been your lover?"

"Why 'been'? Is!"

"Oh, so you're not going to lie, this time! Well, it's been, not is,now! I absolutely and finally forbid you to see him again, any time,anywhere, and that includes coming to any more of this disgusting trial,to yearn over your pet grafter and bribe-taker! Understand?"

"Oh, yes." Now Ann did sound weary. "Very well. I'll be out of your flatbefore midnight, I and Mat and the Gretzerel, and this time, of course,it's for keeps."

"But, Ann, Ann! I don't want you to, don't want you to go, andespecially I don't want Mat to go! I love Mat! No matter if possibly hemight not be my son--but he is!"

Russell was frankly weeping, regardless of a gaping police sergeant wholumbered past.

With Mat and the nurse, she was in a hotel before midnight.

* * * * *

Mona's daughters were with her on the last day of the trial. They wereas still and cold and hawk-nosed as their mother. "How they'll hate mewhen they know!" thought Ann. She shivered. But she made little of them;she was too intently studying the faces of the jury during theconcluding speeches of defense and prosecution, clutching Malvina's handin despair as she saw dull eyes, bored yawning, aching shoulders rubbingagainst the backs of the jurymen's chairs.

"They'll never see it--that Barney isn't like that--that at worst hejust played the game as his organization did--that he needed money forhis accursed crystal virgins, not for himself--that if he did anythingwrong, he never will again--oh, I could choke them--they'll neverunderstand him," agonized Ann... the feminist, the professionalsocial worker, the expert criminologist.

Feverishly she watched the foreman, a fat, contemptuous man who chewedsegments of a cigar.

When Barney's chief counsel, summing up Barney's own testimony, repeatedthat his client "could not reveal the source of the hundred thousandwhich he banked at the time of the suit between the contractors, becauseit would disclose an important and perfectly ethical real estate deal,and not only embarrass his partners in the deal but actually ruin them,so that this bold and determined silence on the part of Judge Dolphinreveals him not, as the prosecution has so causelessly hinted, as aplotter and taker of bribes, but as a man of such high honor that hewould suffer any obloquy, any unjust punishment, rather than betray hisassociates in negotiations of which the very essence was a perfectlyproper secrecy"--when the learned advocate had thus appealed to hisfriends the jurymen, with a brow of alabaster innocence and eyes of hurttenderness, Ann saw the foreman shake his head a little and, champingthe juicy cud of cigar, grunt cynically. When the prosecutor roared "themore competently Mister Dolphin's vast array of the highest legal talentdemonstrate the man's former learning, subtlety, and seeminglyunimpeachable position, the more inescapable do they make the conclusionthat there can be no temporizing with his present obvious guilt"--thenthe foreman nodded and spat.

The judge was brief, mild, generous, and generally damning. The case wasgiven to the jury at noon.

Ann tried to get herself to go away till they should return. This,Malvina assured her, would be very wise for both of them. So they stayedin the corridor, wearily, ambling up and down with sore feet, slippingout for a malted-milk-egg at a drug-store and, in panic, dashing backbefore the drink was finished.

Barney had come out with Mona and his daughters, still-faced and waitingas they; he had brightened at sight of Ann and Malvina and comeresolutely to them. "Don't worry. I know what the verdict is--being, youknow, a highly trained jurist. It will be 'guilty'!"

Mona and the daughters, twenty feet away, were staring at Ann throughimaginary lorgnons.

Ignoring Malvina, recklessly, Barney growled, "Oh, God, Ann, if I couldjust go off with you for one more week-end, I wouldn't mind the fiveyears they'll give me in Manawassett Penitentiary! I suppose I must getback to my family.... Ann!"

She watched Barney and his women drift off to some haunt downstairs.

Malvina said suddenly, "I suppose Barney is guilty?"

"Yes, I suppose so--technically."

"Well----"

That was the entire conversation on the ethics of the matter between Dr.Wormser and Dr. Vickers.

Ann looked at a clock. She was certain that an hour and a half hadpassed since the jury had gone out.

It had been exactly twenty-five minutes.

She might call on Lindsay--on Judge Atwell. Yes, she might do that. Be agood idea. Kill time. And be courteous. Yes, might do that.... Oh, byand by; not quite yet.

"We might walk around the park," said Malvina.

"Yes. Might."

They did not move toward the stairs.

They sat on a wide window ledge.

"I really ought to dash up-town and see a patient and come back," saidMalvina.

"Oh."

Malvina did not go.

Thirty-one minutes had passed.

When an hour had got itself by, and they had made a raid on thedrug-store and returned, Ann mumbled, "I'm just going to explore thisbuilding a few minutes. You wait here." She had to be alone. If she werealone, she would be able to think of something bright and helpful to do.

She didn't. She continued to feel as helpless in the express-train ofthe Law as Lil Hezekiah in the hands of Cap'n Waldo.

Then she saw Barney and his women. They were seated in an otherwiseempty courtroom, their backs to the half-open door. As Ann staredin--not quite realizing that she was eavesdropping, so much a part ofthis family did she feel herself--she heard Mona's high, even voicesaying, "The girls and I will do the real suffering--have to face thedisgrace you've brought on us, while you'll be safely hidden away. Butwe'll be waiting to take up our cross when you come out, and try to beas forgiving----"

"Yeah?" said Barney coarsely.

Ann fled.

* * * * *

The jury came in at seven minutes after four. The courtroom filled soquickly, so confusingly, that Ann was separated from the comfort ofMalvina and jammed in beside Mona, with Barney on Mona's other side.

"How say you, guilty or not guilty?" buzzed the clerk.

The foreman grunted, "Guilty."

Ann looked at Mona. Her lips were moving. She was praying. Ann looked atBarney. He was praying. But she little noticed it, for she herself waspraying.

As two deputies came from behind the rail, Barney rose, nodded to them,and walked forward to sit between them, a convicted felon.

The judge did not delay pronouncing sentence. He had apparently longbeen ready. He wound up his lofty sermon:

"... that you may repent and if possible obtain forgiveness, thatthinking on it day after day you may realize that never was a crimecommitted with so little justification, I sentence you to six years athard labor."

* * * * *

They were leading Barney through a back door. Ann had to run to him,to say good-bye. And she couldn't. In desperation, in agony, unconsciousof what she was doing, of everything save that this woman beside her wasalso a part of Barney and he of her, she grasped Mona's hand.

Mona snatched her hand free, sprang up, and stared down at Ann, moaning"Oh!" as though she had stepped on a rattlesnake. She pushed her way outof the courtroom, while Ann sat hunched, all pride, all dignity, allcourage gone from her.

Chapter 46

Dr. Ann Vickers was discharging (but she said "firing") her assistant,the good Mrs. Keast.

"I'm giving you a chance to resign--to put it as cowardly bosses alwaysdo, Keast. If you don't, I'll break you. You have plotted against meever since I came here. I don't think you have done any actual financialgrafting. You have merely tried to cut my throat. So if you'll just signthis--it's your resignation, and very well and modestly put, as I know,because I wrote it."

"You think you can get away with this, Miss Vickers! I have friends----"

"Yes, I know; you met State Senator O'Toolohan at eleven o'clock lastnight at his house. No, I haven't employed a private dick, but I havesome good friends among the city cops. I have, I guess, every detail ofyour plotting written down--and I don't keep the original dossier herein my office, either, so there's no use your going on trying to find thecombination to my private safe, evenings after I'm gone!"

"You----Now, you look here, Miss Vickers----"

"Dr. Vickers, please!"

"--I don't care a hang what you may think you've got on me. But whatI've got on you! Wouldn't you look just dandy, Doctor Vickers,Superintendent Vickers, Mrs. Spaulding, or whatever your name may be,if it were to come out that you were the mistress of a crooked judgethat's doing time in Manawassett? Go ahead! Have me up on charges, andsee what charges come out against you! Resign I won't!"

"Keast, that shows you never did understand. I don't care one damn whatyou charge me with. I don't care whether I lose my job here, so long asI get rid of a cancer germ like you. I wouldn't a bit mind going intobusiness and making money--as I can.... By the way, why was it theydidn't indict you for murder when the girl you hung up by the thumbs atFairlea Cottage Reformatory died? Do you happen to have been informedthat the attorney general that protected you died two months ago? Well,let's stop this squabbling. Sign here, and we'll be good friends and nobackbiting."

Mrs. Keast signed.

* * * * *

Ann was at her desk, drawing labyrinths on the blotter, and meditating,"Beastly! You, the melodramatic! Is that how you have to control yourstaff? Cheap melodrama!

"No! I won't apologize to myself! Melodrama does happen, these days.Hijackers murdering bootleggers. Premiers assassinated. Aviatorscrashing on cottages and burning up the old ladies in them. Babieskidnaped and murdered. Kings kicked out of their country and starving incheap hotels. Methodist bishops accused of stock-gambling and riggingelections. Billionaires committing suicide and proving to have beenforgers. Five-year-old boys in nice suburbs playing gangster and killingthree-year-old boys--and gangsters, fresh from taking people for a rideand shooting them, dashing home to take pansies to their dear oldmammies on their birthdays. A skinny little Hindu that drinks onlygoat's milk baffling the whole British Empire. Fourteen-year-old negroboys condemned to death for rape they didn't commit, and supreme courtjustices solemnly affirming the sentence. Submarines that won't come upand aëroplanes that won't stay up. Hundred-story buildings andfifteen-year-old boys driving gasoline locomotives on public highways atseventy miles an hour and some days actually not killing anybody. Anation of one hundred and twenty million people letting a few fanaticsturn it from beer to poison gin. Known murderers walking the streets,dining with judges. British peers going to prison for fraudulent companyreports. And I don't think I could quite last through this incrediblemelodrama of Barney's being in prison if I weren't a little melodramaticwith Keast.

"I wish she did dare attack me. I'd be proud to have the world know heis my lover!"

* * * * *

She visited Manawassett State Prison.

To her, the prison expert, there was nothing horrifying in the somberwalls that, like a tomb for the living dead, towered up to cut the rackof July thunderclouds; nothing intimidating in the guards outlined atopthe walls with rifles crooked in their arms; but little terror in thethought that Barney was penned there, a criminal, a convict. She hadknown too many convicts to consider most of them as in any way differentfrom her other friends. But the old perception of the utterly fat-headedfutility of the whole business came to her anew; the childish belief ofthat super-cry-baby, the state, that stone walls, steel-barred gates,bad food, and the supervision of guards too stupid to become trolleyconductors, were magically going to teach loyal gangsters like BarneyDow Dolphin to become sing-leaders in the Y. M. C. A.

She sent in her official card and was welcomed by the warden in hisoffice. On the way there, she did have one qualm of terror for Barney asshe looked down a cell corridor and caught the old stink ofdisinfectant, co*ckroaches, cheap food, and vomit, which in the decencyof the Industrial Home she had almost forgotten.

The warden was an acquaintance, and better than his prison. They hadstood together at prison conferences, fighting against capitalpunishment, fighting for more parole and better paid parole-officers andmore prison education. "This is a grand surprise, Dr. Vickers! Would youlike to see our shop?"

"Later I would, but----It's probably a little irregular, but I want totalk with Judge Dolphin, privately."

"Um. Yes. Against the rules. He's supposed to see visitors in thevisitors' room, but as you and I are fellow scrappers, I think I can fixit.... See him here.... I have to be away for half an hour,anyway. You won't be disturbed."

She wondered how much the warden knew, but she wondered it carelessly,without apprehension. Of only one thing in her life could she never beashamed--of her devotion to Barney.

The warden summoned Barney (and that was a gloomy enough moment for Ann,when he said to a guard, "Send in Number 37,896") and left her there,the door open on the outer office, where worked half a dozen prisonerclerks in dolorous baggy gray uniforms. Ann heard the outer door open,saw the clerks look up, heard them call out, "Why, it's the dear oldjudge, the bastard that sent me up, and now look at him!" and"Good-morning, Your Dishonor!" and "Oh, baby, you certainly don't looklike a jedge now; you look like a hijacker!" and, simply and sweetly,"You sanctimonious crook!" Barney hurried into the private office, hishead down, not seeing her. He too was in drab and shapeless gray; he wasunshaven; his hands were calloused and dirty. When he looked up, hegrunted with surprise. "Oh! They didn't tell me!" He closed the door,stood hesitating. Then her arms were round him, his head was heavy onher shoulder, and they were babbling in the terror of ecstasy.

* * * * *

"I'm going to wait for you, Barney, and teach Mat that you're comingback. I'm going to make all the money I can. I'm going to have Pirate'sHead ready--if you should want to come!"

"God knows I'll want to come, fast enough, but look here, Ann; you don'twant Mat to have a scoundrel for a father."

"But he already has that scoundrel for a father! And he isn't ascoundrel!"

"Oh, yes I am--I was good and plenty guilty, at least technically, and aman who is egotistical enough to be willing to take any high position,whether it's judge or senator or surgeon or bishop, has no right to makeeven technical errors. I deserve it. Look here!"

Barney sat opposite her. It hurt more than his ragged face, more thanthe smut on the plump suave hands of which he had once been proud, tosee how timidly he sat far forward in the chair. And he did not as ofold speak coolly, but too eagerly, like one who has thought it out insolitude and who longs to get in all the explanation he can before hisauditor becomes bored:

"I think I would have given the same decision in that sewer case even ifthey hadn't 'expressed their appreciation,' as they called it--I thinkI would. And I considered myself superior to a good many other judges.No one ever succeeded in bribing me to give a decision I thought waswrong--and you can't ever have any idea how often they tried, in thisblessed era of racketeering. No bootlegging combination ever got me tolet off a crook or a murderer, or to prevent the parole board fromsending a man that had broken parole and was going on racketeering backto stir.

"But I know now that I was that worst of weaklings, a middle of theroader, a compromiser. I haven't turned moral; I've just turnedrealistic. I should either have been an out-and-out perfectionist, whowouldn't take as much as a five-cent cigar from anyone connected withany case, or else an out-and-out grafter, frankly saying that mostoccupations today, from selling toothpaste to preaching radio sermons,are just grafts, and a man is a fool that doesn't take all he can get. Iwasn't either. I was respectable... and played billiards with theknown mouthpieces for big shots and, like so many Pure Citizens, I hadfor bootlegger a known murderer. I wasn't either wolf or wolfhound.That's what makes me sick: the weakness and cautiousness of it. That'swhat I want to repair, when I get out. I want to be either a racketeeror a saint--so far as Old Man Mat Dolphin's son can be a saint. And ifyou really can wait for me (oh, God, I hope you will--but you mustn't,for your own sake--but I hope you will!) and if you do wait, I'll haveto take a shot at the sainthood. You have leanings that way yourself,except for your slight tendency to illegitimate children--you darling!"

"I'll wait! I'll be at the prison door! Try and lose me!"

"You know, I won't have much money left--this Depression and everything.I did make a trust fund that will take care of Mona and the girls.Needn't ever think of them again. But for us and Mat--not so good. I mayhave ten thousand saved out of the wreck. We could go West and get afarm or something, but the isles of Greece, the isles of Greece, whereburning Sappho loved and sung, I'm afraid we'll never see them."

"A lot I care! I want to see just one thing--you playing with Mat, evenif I am a Professional Woman--a prison-keeper! Oh, it gets me every daynow; it wrenches me, like labor pains, to think of myself as a keeper ofprisons and you as a prisoner!"

"There is one curious thing--going back to what I was saying about beingsuch a good judge. Now that I'm one of them and like 'em (even the dearlittle teases that ride me about having been a judge, and God knows Idon't blame 'em for it)--I see what decent fellows a good share of theconvicts are; and I realize that when I felt most severe and righteousand gave the stiffest sentences, then I was most vicious, perhaps, andwhen I was unethically sentimental and easy, perhaps I was nearest todealing out justice. I never thought I'd be a jailbird. I never thoughtI'd be desperately in love with an intelligent woman. I never thoughtI'd question the supreme power of judges to decide whether certaincirc*mstances demanded that a man should spend eight or ten or fifteenyears in a moldy hell. Apparently, I just never thought.... Oh, Ibabble on! I've been silent, in cells, these two months! Tell me moreabout Mat, more about you, more--more!"

* * * * *

"Your poor hands--they look so ragged. You ought to be in one of theoffices or in the library."

"No. I was offered both. I felt it was kind of a graft. I want to dopenance. I'm sewing gunny sacks. It doesn't help much! Penance! I usedto talk to people about that. Self-conscious, unnatural, priest-madeself-righteousness! Still, I don't want any favors. I can take whateverthey give me. In fact, the only graft I want now is to see you as oftenas I can. Quick! Somebody coming!"

One terrible kiss before the warden came in.

She saw him once a month, then, and each month was longer, and six yearsseemed hysterically intolerable, and in her hair the gray was thick.

Chapter 47

Ann was astonished to discover how much money she could make when, forthe first time in her life, she gave attention to this dull art. Sheconcluded that the chief quality of millionaires was not their orderlyplanning, their gift of selecting assistants, nor their imaginativeforecasting of the world's future needs in such fascinating matters asgasoline and pocket-flasks and oatmeal in red packages, but just theirbeing stupid enough to want to sacrifice living to money-making.

She was going to have a place for Barney, for Mat.

She lived now in an apartment larger than her old hotel suite, but lessfashionable and cheaper. Her sole luxuries were the nurse for Mat, andhis milk, his white woolly suits. She had bought Pirate's Head but(naturally) she had found that to furnish it and put in a bathroom andcomb the disorderly yard cost enormously more than she had expected.

She had been easy meat for club secretaries who wrote, "We do so long tohave you address us but just this year I am afraid our exchequer israther low and we shall not be able to pay you anything but expenses."Now she had a lecture agent with no illusions about the preferability ofcredit to cash, and two or three nights a week she was in forums orclubs or churches from Hartford to Baltimore, lecturing at from fifty toa hundred and fifty dollars a time, on practically all known subjectsconnected with criminals, feminism, education, and a vague mysticaltopic called "psychology."

Through Malvina Wormser she was offered the chance to write a syndicatednewspaper department called "Keeping Girls from Going Wrong." It madeher fairly sick. She was never quite able to determine whether Barney'sdecision in the sewer case or her syndicated gush was the more criminal,but on hot evenings late that summer, when Barney had been in prison forthree months, then on effervescent September Sunday mornings when shelonged to pick up Mat and flee to the hills of Westchester, then onwinter nights when the flat grew frigid after midnight and she satworking with a coat over her bathrobe and a flannel nightgown, shetoiled on answers (and sometimes, when the genuine crop was scanty, onboth questions and answers) to working girls, small-town girls, orfrightened women, who wanted to know how to love and be safe, whether asober lover was preferable to a drunken husband, how to become humanagain after having been dehumanized by a "reformatory," and whether silkstockings always led to the gallows.

There were in Ann's manner of writing no fines herbes, neithertarragon nor chervil. It was the honest corned-beef hash of literature.But she was so much in earnest, she labored so ceaselessly, that sheimpressed some scores of thousands from Bangor to San José, andcertainly she did win that sure proof of achievement, the disapproval ofher acquaintances.

Russell, calling up (in vain) to invite himself to her apartment, endeda rather tart colloquy with, "You know what gives me a laugh? The wayyou jumped me for being mercenary when I went into business, and thenyou turning out this wishy-washy rot for the newspapers!" Pearl McKaigtelephoned to say that Ann was by her articles in no way contributing tothe Five-Year Plan of the U. S. S. R. But Malvina, whose taste inliterature was that of a rabbit, said, "Grand stuff, darling, and oftenI think it probably means something." And Barney, whose taste wasexcellent (his favorite authors being Herman Melville, Samuel Butler,Saki, and P. G. Wodehouse)--Barney never saw the articles, never knew.

* * * * *

She developed a sneaking habit of going into tourist agencies, railroadoffices, land bureaus, to filch pamphlets advertising Western orchardsand ranches. They resembled a Pentecostal preacher's descriptions ofHeaven. Every day Ann saw herself with Barney and Mat in a cherryorchard in the Santa Clara Valley or an apple orchard on the ColumbiaRiver. She reveled in violently colored pictures of mountains and bridletrails, or bungalows deep in orange groves. But she was no great amateurof scenery for its own sake, and she saw it always as a background,brilliant and quiet and secure, for her man, her child.

* * * * *

With these tasks she had one other. She shopped constantly andunscrupulously for pardon for Barney. She pushed herself into membershipon a State Federation of Women's Clubs committee of prison inspection,which necessitated her seeing the Governor's advisers often, andcunningly (or so she hoped) she brought in the name and virtues ofBarney and what seemed to her the fact that just to be convicted wassufficient punishment for such a man.

On the committee she was aware that the Great Woman, Dr. Ann Vickers,was not quite so reputable a character as formerly. They respected herknowledge, but they watched her. She was aware that though she hadsilenced Mrs. Keast, there must be wandering rumors about her "moralcharacter." She, the Sunday school girl of Waubanakee, the Y. W. C. A.virgin of Point Royal, did not care a hang, providing she could keepsome semblance of virtue till Barney should be freed.

Hardest of all, hard almost as seeing Barney led out a prisoner, wasinterviewing Judge Lindsay Atwell for him.

She had encountered Lindsay three times in the four years since they hadbroken off, and always casually, at receptions or committee meetings;they had politely asked after each other's spouses and lied suitably inanswer and in general been damnably cordial.

She telephoned, and called at his office, a few feet from the place ofhorror where they had broken Barney... where Barney had broken somany others.

Lindsay was thinner and grayer and most worn, like an old greyhound.

"This is a great pleasure, Ann--if I may still call you that?"

"Of course, Lindsay. Always, I hope."

"You look extremely fit. And your husband is well?"

"You mean Russell?"

"Why--why----"

"Of course. Silly of me--absent-minded of me. Well, to be frank, I havebroken with Russell. Haven't even seen him for a good many weeks."

"Oh, I am sorry!"

"Don't be! I'm not at all sorry. We parted in quite a friendly way, youknow; just found we couldn't get along."

"Oh, yes. Yes. But your baby--I hear you have a baby--I was highlypleased, Ann, and, need I say, envious? I'm sorry to say I don't quiteremember whether it is a boy or a girl...."

* * * * *

But they had talked polite imbecilities for only ten minutes when sheblurted, "Lindsay, I want your influence for something that is veryimportant to me; very close to my heart, if you won't think I'm toosentimental. I want to get a pardon for Judge Bernard Dolphin."

Lindsay was rigid. "Dolphin? But why are you interested in him?"

"He's a great friend of--uh, of Malvina Wormser, and so, of course, ofmine."

"I should have thought his only friends, if he has any left--you mustpardon my cynicism, but you see I know him!--I should think they'd beonly ward politicians and bootleggers."

"But you can't know him! He had--or has--one great vice that was also agreat virtue: his loyalty to whatever group he happened to be in. Heplayed the game, as they say."

"And as they say, my dear Ann, it was a very bad game! I wonder if youcan understand how very much the honor of the Bench means to me? Youmustn't consider me too narrow or severe if I say that I regard Dolphinmuch as you used to regard that despicable warden, or whatever hewas--you used to call him 'Cap'n' something--at Copperhead Gap. I thinkyou know the depth of my esteem, and I will even say affection for you.In all humility I acknowledge that when we used to see each other--andit has been my timidity rather than my lack of desire that has preventedmy endeavoring to see more of you--but as I say, in those days it wasalways you who upheld a higher and more passionate standard of socialethics than I was capable of. But now----Absolutely no. I shall never doanything, in word or deed, to shorten the highly merited punishment ofthis man who sinned against the temple he was, by his very office,serving."

* * * * *

"Damn his purity! Damn his virtue! That man hasn't enough blood in hisveins to be tempted! And most specially and particularly damn hisrounded periods!" thought Ann in the subway.

But she was feeble and incompetent in her cursing, and she was takingrefuge in it only to conceal her dreary certainty that Barney would goon shut off from life, shutting her off from life, for all his sentence.

And the next month, which was April, two years since she had been withhim in the Valley of Virginia, eleven months since his conviction, shethought so often of suicide that only the presence of Mat, his funnygrins, his funny swift crawling, his chuckle of "Mama," kept her fromthat escape.

* * * * *

It was hot, for May, and that evening Ann's newspaper work seemedintolerable, her flat seemed intolerable. The flat was on 108th Street,not too far from Central Park for Mat to enjoy the luxury of grass andtrees and air; yet it was over toward the East River, in a district offire-escapes with crusted black paint, breweries, coal-and-ice dealersin swarthy basem*nts, kosher butchers, Hungarian coffee-rooms and, amongthe gaunt gray tenements, an occasional frame cottage left from ahundred years ago. It had not quite become a slum, but it wasdistinguished from slumhood mostly by the fact that it was lesscheerful. No shawled Jewish mothers sat on doorsteps chattering; thechildren who littered the streets, playing ball, falling under grumblingtrucks, were less gay than the starveling gipsies of the slums. But theywere loud enough, and on this hot evening, when all the windows wereopen, the children's shrieking was to Ann like an ache pounding insidethe top of her head. She stood on the flimsy fire-escape balcony,smelling the fried fish, the cabbage, the dampness from laundries.

In the long four years yet that Barney must stay in prison, even withtime off for good behavior, would her relationship to him become known,so that she would lose face, lose her job, have to take what work shecould, in this time of unemployment? For suddenly the precariousness ofjobs was terrifying hundreds of thousands of independent feminists whohad been able to say airily, "Oh, to thunder with my husband and myfather, yes, and the boss, too. After all, you know, I can always waiton table!" They could not wait on table, now. They could not be airy. Itwas a beautiful time for male bosses--except that they were likely tolose their own jobs.

Would Mat, fresh now and pink and undefiled, have to play down therewith the others, among the dust-heaps and torn papers and garbage cans?

She was conscious of a knocking at the outer door of her living-room.Her apartment house still kept up some claim to selectness by having ahall-man, but he wasn't much of a hall-man; neither rage nor tipping hadever persuaded him that he must telephone about visitors; and everymanner of peddler, beggar, solicitor for dubious charity, came knocking.She sighed, went in to her desk, and picked out on her typewriter,"... so girls who feel they must revolt against their parents mighttry reading that famous old play King Lear before they decide----"

The knock again, and her careless "Oh, come in." No apparent response.She looked up. Barney Dolphin was in her doorway.

She gaped. She sat panting, loose-lipped. Then life exploded, and sheknew that it was Barney, and she had run to him, wailing, had pulled himinto the apartment. She locked the door. He might be an escapedprisoner! She pushed him down into a chair and knelt by him, her armstwitching as she grasped his poor hands and kissed them.

"Yes. It's all right. Governor pardoned me today. I'm free. Not evenparole. Cheer up! Ann, my dear, my dear!" And laid his cheek against herhair and sobbed as she never could.

She tried to take care of him. She bustled to the kitchen to get awhisky-soda for him, but thrice before she even chopped the ice she hadto rush back to make sure he was there. He had hold of himself now andwas trying to look at ease, to sit erect in his chair, but he slumpedafter a moment.

His face was of that gray known only to prisons and hospitals. His lipswere tight--no longer easily humorous. His hair seemed to have beenhacked off with dull gardening scissors. His clothes were wrinkled. Butit was his eyes that hurt. They followed her, begging her to care forhim--no, begging her to let him stay here till he should catch hisbreath.

But she sang, "I'll make him well again--lips and eyes and hands!"

He gulped the highball wonderingly, muttering, "My God, the first I'vehad in a year! Listen----"

"Wait! Before you talk!" She ran to her bedroom, brought back a pair ofslippers, unlaced his shoes, put on the slippers.

"Why, they fit! How come----"

"I bought them a year ago, Barney. They've been waiting for you."

"Um. Service here better than in the pen!" He almost smiled.

She remembered in an instant of bright shame her one-time devotion alsoto the red slippers of Captain Lafayette Resnick. Life was all boundtogether--even by slippers. She forgot it as she cried, "What happened,Barney, what happened?"

"Well, I think your friend Judge Lindsay Atwell helped."

"Honestly? Oh, that's wonderful! I did misjudge him so."

"Yes. Quite. He headed a committee of lawyers that went to the Governorand got so righteous on him and tried so hard to bully him into keepingme in the pen for life, at least, that the Governor got irritated, Iguess. He pardoned me suddenly, without notice. The warden came into thetailor-shop this afternoon (I'm a pretty good coat-cutter now!). He wasgrinning, and I wanted to stab him with my scissors. But he said,'Judge, come into my office,' and there he told me, and had me changeclothes in his own house, and I was so dazed I was on the train before Iunderstood that I was--my God--free! I can walk down streets! I canspeak to strangers! I can go into a public library! I can buycigarettes! I can come to you! And I'm still dazed. I must lookterrible. But it didn't get me, not quite. I'll come around, if you'llhelp me... if you want me!"

She said what was to say.

He rubbed his eyes, put down his glass only a quarter empty. "I bettergo slow on that, I guess. Not used to it. No, I forgot, that wasn't all.The papers had gotten onto the news somehow--too late for the eveningpapers, though--and the reporters were waiting at both the back andfront gates of the pen. The warden smuggled me out in a jumper over myclothes, driving a laundry wagon--only useful thing I've ever done, Iguess, besides meeting you! So the reporters will be after me hotterthan ever, now. I suppose I'll have to go out to Long Island thisevening. But, Ann, my Ann, I did have to have a few minutes of paradisewith you before I faced them--and her."

"You are not going! You're going to stay here tonight. No! You're----"

She raced to the telephone, ten years younger, an era gayer. "O'SullivanHire Company? I want a limousine, at once, to go up to Scarsdale. Dr.Ann Vickers, superintendent Stuyvesant Industrial Home. At my flat,108th Street. Right away."

She knelt by him again, but she was not taut now, nor he.

"I've bought Pirate's Head, you remember? There's only three roomsactually furnished, but we're going up there tonight, on our realhoneymoon. I'll have to come down every day, but I'll hustle back, andyou stay till you want to see the reporters... and Mona and thegirls. Can do?"

"Yes!"

"Meantime have your lawyers arrange whatever is necessary and have themsee the reporters--tell them you've slipped away on a yacht torecuperate from your unjust imprisonment--any good honest hooey, dear."

"I know. I start my new moral life by lying?"

"Exactly. There's been enough martyrdom in this particular familylately, my love! And I haven't kissed you yet! And I've dreamed of itfor a year!" She sounded incredulous.

"Perhaps we've gone beyond the need of kissing."

"I trust not!"

"Well, I shouldn't wonder if we discover our animal natures haven't beentoo etherealized by penance. Oh, my God, Ann, I can't believe it--it'simpossible--I'm with you, free. I'm even allowed to talk too much!"

Before the car came for them, he tiptoed into the nursery and stood along time brooding on his son, sleeping so serenely, so unearthly fairand unspotted by life, in that low light. An absurd gray-flannel monkeywith a red cap lay at the foot of the crib. Barney kissed Mat, and creptaway, and now he was smiling. It was Ann who had to strive againsttears, for that smile was saddest of all.

The whole way to Scarsdale he held her hand tight, even when he leanedover to kiss her. But they talked dispassionately. They were realisticenough to go into finances. He would have eight or ten thousand leftand, she proudly told him, she had saved two, besides partly paying forPirate's Head.

"We can go West, where they don't know," she said, "and buy a farm andlive there till you're readmitted to the bar, or whatever it is."

"I can probably sell real estate meanwhile," he said. "I'm good at it."

"But first, let's have the fight out. Russell will divorce me fastenough. I think Mona may you, now--or do you want her to?"

"Of course!"

"Meantime, let's just go on placidly living together. Let the scandalstart! I'll be fired, but I'll have such a happy time showing up all thepoliticians, including a state senator that offered me ten thousanddollars to let a girl escape! It will be a grand last fight. And thenI'll be ready for another job. (I'll always have jobs--you may as wellget used to it--it makes me only the more stubborn a feminist, to be inlove!) And by the way, there may not be any scandal, if we welcome it.They'll think we have something up our sleeves. Sound good?"

"Glorious. I'd rest a month. But----Ann dear, I can't sit at home,poking around a garden, doing nothing else, while you face the fight andearn the living. If I could have a month, and then we went West, beganworking, right away, it would be fun. But to be a pensioner for month onmonth----I almost wish you hadn't bought Pirate's Head!"

"Oh. Well. I thought perhaps you'd feel that way. So I have aprovisional purchaser who'll take it off my hands at a small profit. ButI thought I wouldn't tell you till I found out just how you felt. Whatabout Oregon and apples and mountains and Mat and you and me?"

"Well, I never cared much for apples. They always seemed to me a chillyfruit. But I'd like a year of the mountains and then----" He dropped herhand a second, he scratched his chin, and said seriously, "Ann, I thinkI'll get busy and make a million dollars in real estate."

She did not believe it. The day of that sort of reasonless fortune waspossibly gone. But it delighted her that already, in two hours, thepleading beaten man had again turned into the ambitious and boasting boythat all sound males are at heart.

He fretted, presently, "You say you're not afraid of a scandal, butdon't you think it may be easier on you if you resign from your prison?"

"No. You wouldn't! I'm not conscious of doing anything for which Ishould resign. It's so right, to be with you! And it wouldn't help, toresign. They'd just think I was running away."

"What about the future effect of the scandal on Mat?"

"Listen! This is a new age. By the time Mat is sixteen he'll have tolook in a dictionary to find out what the word 'scandal' means. No! Mymotto comes from that good old pirate, the Duke of Wellington: 'Publishand be damned!'"

* * * * *

They came to Pirate's Head, and she loved him so very much that she evenspared him, for this evening, the duty of admiring her built-inbookcases, her linens, the painted furniture. Till the late moon rosethey sat outside, close clasped, and they were so sure of life that theycould be silent.

* * * * *

When she awoke, to daylight, he was gone from their upper room. She wasutterly terrified. Suppose he really had broken prison; come to her justfor a night? She ran to the window and stopped, laughing softly.

Barney was pacing the raw new garden below, in shirt-sleeves, smoking apipe. He stopped once and waved the pipe. She guessed that he wasplanning how the rose plot might be better laid out.

When she came down he had breakfast ready for her.

"But that was wonderful of you, Barney!"

"Is the coffee good? Is it really good? Is it?"

"Marvelous!" (And by coincidence it was.)

"Well, that's good. Ann!"

"Yes, milord."

"I think that soil where the rose-bushes are planted is wretched. Youought to put in enormous quantities of fertilizer."

"Yes----"

"And I wouldn't be in too much of a hurry to sell this place, even if wedo go West. We have--I should say you have, an excellent investment."

"Of course, I'll do what you think."

"And while I was in the pen, I read your paper on the relationship ofcrime and tuberculosis, in the Journal of Economics. I'd question yourfigures. Shall I check up on them?"

"Oh, would you? That would be terribly kind. Oh, Barney!" said in meekecstasy the Captive Woman, the Free Woman, the Great Woman, the FeministWoman, the Domestic Woman, the Passionate Woman, the Cosmopolitan Woman,the Village Woman--the Woman.

He paced the floor. In horror she saw that he was unconsciouslyfollowing a fixed pattern: nine feet up, two feet over, nine feet back,two feet over, nine feet up, unchanging, while he grumbled, "Though it'sthe most unholy nerve in me to criticize you in anything, my dear!"

She said, and she made it casual as she could, "Did you ever think,Barney, that we're both out of prison now, and that we ought to havesense enough to be glad?"

"But how are you----"

"You, you and Mat, have brought me out of the prison of RussellSpaulding, the prison of ambition, the prison of desire for praise, theprison of myself. We're out of prison!"

"Why! We are!" Again he paced the floor, but his path now was not ninefeet by two.

THE END

[End of Ann Vickers, by Sinclair Lewis]