CHAPTER III

NIP AND TUCK

When I reached home late that afternoon I was in that state of spring-time restlessness which clamors for immediate activity--when the home-keeping instinct tries to make you believe that you'll be content if you spend a little money for garden seeds--but a reckless demon of extravagance notifies you that nothing short of salary sacrificed for railroad fare is going to avail.

Grandfather and Uncle Lancelot, of course, came in with their gratuitous advice, the one suggesting nasturtium beds with geraniums along the borders--the other slyly whispering that a boat trip from Savannah to Boston was no more than I deserved.

Then, reaching home in this frame of mind, I was confronted with two very perplexing and unusual conditions. _Mignon_ was being played with great violence in the front parlor--and all over the house was the scent of burnt yarn.

"What's up?" I demanded of mother, as she met me at the door--dressed in blue. "Everything seems mysterious and topsyturvy to-day! I believe if I were to go out to the cemetery I'd find the tombstones nodding and whispering to one another."

"Come in here!" she begged in a Santa Claus voice.

I went into the parlor, then gave a little shriek.

"Mother!"

I have neglected to state, earlier in the narrative, that the one desire of my heart which doesn't begin with H was a player-piano! It was there in the parlor, at that moment, shining, and singing its wordless song about the citron-flower land.

"It's the very one we've been _watching_ through the windows up-town," she said in a delighted whisper.

"But did you get it as a prize?" I inquired, walking into the dusky room and shaking hands with my betrothed, who rose from the instrument and made way for me to take possession. "How came it here?"

"I had it sent out--on--on approval," she elucidated. That is, her words took the form of an explanation, but her voice was as appealing as a Salvation Army dinner-bell, just before Christmas.

"On approval? But why, please?"

"Because I want you to get used to having the things you want, darling!"

Then, to keep from laughing--or crying--I ran toward the door.

"What _is_ that burning?" I asked, sniffing suspiciously.

It was a vaguely familiar scent--scorching dress-goods--and suggestive of the awful feeling which comes to you when you've stood too close to the fire in your best coat-suit--or the comfortable sensation on a cold night, when you're preparing to wrap up your feet in a red-hot flannel petticoat.

"What is it? Tell the truth, mother!"

But she wouldn't.

"It's your brown tweed skirt, Grace," Guilford finally explained, as my eyes begged the secret of them both. They frequently had secrets from me.

"My brown tweed skirt?"

"It was as baggy at the knees as if you'd done nothing all winter but _pray_ in it!" mother whimpered in a frightened voice. "I've--I've burned it up!"

For a moment I was silent.

"But what shall I tramp in?" I finally asked severely. "What can I walk out the Waverley Pike in?"

Then mother took fresh courage.

"You're not going to walk!" she answered triumphantly. "You're going to ride--in your very--own--electric--coupé! Here's the catalogue."

She scrambled about for a book on a table near at hand--and I began to see daylight.

"Oh, a player-piano, and an electric coupé--all in one day! I see! My fairy godmother--who was old Aunt Patricia, and she looked exactly like one--has turned the pumpkin into a gold coach! You two plotters have been putting your heads together to have me get rich quick and gracefully!"

"We understand that this stroke of fortune is going to make a great change in your life, Grace," Guilford said gravely. He was always grave--and old. The only way you could tell his demeanor from that of a septuagenarian was that he didn't drag his feet as he walked.

"'Stroke of fortune?'" I repeated.

"The Coburn--" mother began.

"Colt--" he re-enforced, then they both hesitated, and looked at me meaningly.

I gave a hysterical laugh.

"You and mother have counted your Coburn-Colts before they were hatched!" I exclaimed wickedly, sitting down and looking over the music rolls. I did want that player-piano tremendously--although I had about as much use for an electric coupé, under my present conditions in life, as I had for a perambulator.

"Grace, you're--indelicate!" mother said, her voice trembling. "Guilford's a man!"

"A man's a man--especially a Kentuckian!" I answered. "You're not shocked at my mention of colts and--and things, are you, Guilford?"

My betrothed sat down and lifted from the bridge of his nose that badge of civilization--a pair of rimless glasses. He polished them with a dazzling handkerchief, then replaced the handkerchief into the pocket of the most faultless coat ever seen. He smoothed his already well-disciplined hair, and brushed away a speck of dust from the toe of his shoe. From head to foot he fairly bristled with signs of civic improvement.

"I am shocked at your reception of your mother's kind thoughtfulness," he said.

He waited a little while before saying it, for hesitation was his way of showing disapproval. Yet you must not get the impression from this that Guilford was a bad sort! Why, no woman could ride in an elevator with him for half a minute without realizing that he was the flower-of-chivalry sort of man! He always had a little way of standing back from a woman, as if she were too sacred to be approached, and in her presence he had a habit of holding his hat clasped firmly against the buttons of his coat. You can forgive a good deal in a man if he keeps his hat off all the time he's talking to you!

"'Shocked?'" I repeated.

"Your mother always plans for your happiness, Grace."

"Of course! Don't you suppose I know that?" I immediately asked in an injured tone. It is always safe to assume an injured air when you're arguing with a man, for it gives him quite as much pleasure to comfort you as it does to hurt you.

"I didn't--mean anything!" he hastened to assure me.

"Guilford merely jumped at the chance of your freeing yourself of this newspaper slavery," mother interceded. "You know what a humiliation it is to him--just as it is to me and to every member of the--Christie family."

My betrothed nodded so violently in acquiescence that his glasses flew off in space.

"You know that I am a Kentuckian in my way of regarding women, Grace," he plead. "I can't bear to see them step down from the pedestal that nature ordained for them!"

I turned and looked him over--from the crown of his intensely aristocratic fair head to the tip of his aristocratic slim foot.

"A Kentuckian?"

"Certainly!"

"A Kentuckian?" I repeated reminiscently. "Why, Guilford Blake, you ought to be olive-skinned--and black-eyed--and your shoes ought to turn up at the toes--and your head ought to be covered by a red fez--and you ought to sit smoking through a water-bottle of an evening, in front of your--your--"

"Grace!" stormed mother, rising suddenly to her feet. "I will not have you say such things!"

"What things?" I asked, drawing back in hurt surprise.

"H-harems!" she uttered in a blushing whisper, but Guilford caught the word and squared his shoulders importantly.

"But, I say, Grace," he interrupted, his face showing that mixture of anger and pleased vanity which a man always shows when you tell him that he's a dangerous tyrant, or a bold Don Juan--or both. "You don't think I'm a Turk--do you?"

"I do."

He sighed wistfully.

"If I were," he said, shaking his head, "I'd have caught you--and _veiled_ you--long before this."

I looked at him intently.

"You mean--"

"That I shouldn't have let you delay our marriage this way! Why should you, pray, when my financial affairs have changed so in the last year?"

I rose from my place beside the new piano, breaking gently into his plea.

"It isn't that!" I attempted to explain, but my voice failed drearily. "You ought to know that--finances hadn't anything to do with it. I haven't kept from marrying you all these years because we were both so poor--then, last year when you inherited your money--I didn't keep from marrying you because you were so rich!"

"Then, what is it?" he asked gravely, and mother looked on as eagerly for my answer as he did. This is one advantage about a life-long betrothal. It gets to be a family institution. Or is that a disadvantage?

"I--don't know," I confessed, settling back weakly.

"I don't think you do!" mother observed with considerable dryness.

"Well, this business of your getting to be a famous compiler of literature may help you get your bearings," Guilford kept on, after an awkward little pause. "You have always said that you wished to exercise your own wings a little before we married, and I have given in to you--although I don't know that it's right to humor a woman in these days and times. Really, I don't know that it is."

"Oh, you don't?"

"No--I don't. But we're not discussing that now, Grace! What I'm trying to get at is that this offer means a good deal to you. Of course, it is only the beginning of your career--for these fellows will think up other things for you to do--and it will give you a way of earning money that won't take you up a flight of dirty office stairs every day. Understand, I mean for just a short while--as long as you insist upon earning your own living."

"And the honor!" mother added. "You could have your pictures in good magazines!"

I stifled a yawn, for, to tell the truth, the conflict had made me nervous and weary.

"At all events, I must decide!" I exclaimed, starting again to my feet. "Somehow, the office atmosphere isn't exactly conducive to deep thought--and I've had so little time since morning to get away by myself and thresh matters out."

Mother looked at me incredulously.

"Will you please tell me just what you mean, Grace?" she asked.

"I mean that I must get away--I've imagined that I ought to take some serious thought, weigh the matter well, so to speak--before I write to the Coburn-Colt Publishing Company. In other words, I have to decide."

"Decide?" mother repeated, her face filled with piteous amazement. "_Decide?_"

"Decide?" Guilford said, taking up the strain complainingly.

"If you'll excuse me!" I answered, starting toward the door, then turning with an effort at nonchalance, for their sakes, to wave them a little adieu. "Suppose you keep on playing 'Knowest thou the land where the citron-flower blooms,' Guilford--for I am filled with _wanderlust_ right now, and this music will help out Uncle Lancelot's presentation of the matter considerably!"

"What?"

"I'm going to listen to the voices," I explained. "All day long grandfather and Uncle Lancelot have been busy making the fur fly in my conscience!"

Mother darted across the room and caught my hand.

"You don't mean to say that you have scruples--_scruples_--Grace Christie?"

She couldn't have hated smallpox worse--in me.

"Honest Injun, I don't know!" I admitted. "Of course, it does seem absurd to ponder over what a family row might be raised in the Seventh Circle of Nirvana by the publication of these old love-letters, but--"

"James Mackenzie Christie died in 1849," she declared vehemently. "Absurd! It is _insane_!"

"That's what the Uncle Lancelot part of my intelligence keeps telling me," I laughed. "But--good heavens! you just ought to hear the grandfather argument."

"What does he--what does that silly _Salem_ conscience of yours say against the publication of the letters?" she asked grudgingly.

I sat down again.

"Shall I tell you?" I began good-naturedly, for I saw that mother was at the melting point--melting into tears, however, not assent. "Whenever I want to do anything I'm not exactly _sure_ of, these two provoking old gentlemen come into the room--the council-chamber of my heart--and begin their post-mortem warfare. Grandfather is white-bearded and serene, while Uncle Lancelot looks exactly as an Italian tenor _ought_ to look--and never does."

"And you look exactly like him," mother snapped viciously. "Nothing about you resembles your grandfather except your brow and eyes."

"I know that," I answered resignedly. "Hasn't some one said that the upper part of my face is as lofty as a Byronic thought--and the lower as devilish as a Byronic _deed_?"

Neither of them smiled, but Guilford stirred a little.

"Go on with your argument, Grace," he urged patiently. He was always patient.

"I'm going!" I answered. "All day grandfather has been telling me what I already know--that the Coburn-Colt Company doesn't want those letters of James Christie's because they are literary, or beautiful, or historical, but simply and solely because they are _bad_! They'll make a good-seller because they're the thing the public demands right now. Lady Frances Webb was a _married_ woman!"

"Nonsense," mother interrupted, with a blush. "The public doesn't demand bad things! There is merely a craze for intimate, biographical matter--told in the first person."

"I know," I admitted humbly. "This is what distinguishes a human from an inhuman document."

"The craze demands a simple straightforward narrative--" Guilford began, then hesitated.

"In literature this is the period of the great '_I Am_,'" I broke in. "People want the secrets of a writer's soul, rather than the tricks of his vocabulary, I know."

"Well, good lord--you wouldn't be giving the twentieth century any more of these people's souls than they themselves gave to the early nineteenth," he argued scornfully. "She put his portrait into every book she ever wrote--and he annexed her face in the figure of every saint--and sinner--he painted!"

"Well, that was because they couldn't _see_ any other faces," I defended.

"Bosh!"

"But Lady Frances Webb was a good woman," mother insisted weakly. "She had pre-Victorian ideas! She sent her lover across seas, because she felt that she must! Why, the publication of these letters would do _good_, not harm."

"They would shame the present-day idea of 'affinity' right," said Guilford.

I nodded my head, for this was the same theory that Uncle Lancelot had been whispering in my ears since the postman blew his whistle that morning. And yet--

"Maybe you two--don't exactly understand the import of those letters as I do," I suggested, sorry and ashamed before the gaze of their practical eyes. "But to me they mean so much! I have always _loved_ James Christie and--his Unattainable. I can feel for them, and--"

"And you mean to say that you are going to give way to an absurd fancy now--a ridiculous, far-fetched, namby-pamby, quixotic fancy?" mother asked, in a tone of horror.

"I--I'm--afraid so!" I stammered.

"And miss this chance--for all the things you want most? The very things you're toiling day and night to get?"

"And put off the prospect of our marriage?" Guilford demanded. "I had hoped that this business transaction would satisfy the unaccountable desire you seem to have for independence--that after you had circled about a little in the realm of emancipated women and their strained notions of what constitutes freedom, you'd see the absurdity of it all and--come to me."

"I am awfully sorry, Guilford," I answered, dropping my eyes, for I knew that "freedom," "independence" and "emancipation" had nothing on earth to do with my delayed marriage--and I knew that I was doing wrong not to say so. "I am _awfully_ sorry to disappoint you."

"Then you have decided finally?" mother asked in a suspicious voice.

"I believe I have," I answered. "Oh, please don't look at me that way--and please don't cry! I can't help it!"

"It is preposterous," Guilford said shortly.

"But you don't--understand!" I cried, turning to him pleadingly. "You don't know what it is to feel as I feel about those lovers--those people who had no happiness in this world--and are haunted and tormented by curiosity in their very graves!--don't you suppose I want to do the thing you and mother want me to do? Of course, I do! I want this--this new piano--and another brown tweed skirt that doesn't bag at the knees--and I want--so many things!"

"Then why in the name of----" he began.

"Because I _won't_!" I told him flatly. "Call it conscience--fancy, or what you will!--I have those two people in my power--their secrets are right here in my hands! And I'm not going to _give them away_!"

"Grace, you a-maze me!" mother sobbed.

But Guilford rose tranquilly and reached for his hat.

"Any woman who has a conscience like that ought to cauterize it--with a curling-iron--and get rid of it," he observed dryly.