CHAPTER V

ET TU, BRUTE!

My first waking thought the next morning had nothing on earth to do with the dilemma of the day before. I stretched my arms lazily, then a little shrinkingly, as I remembered what the daily grind would be. There was to be a Flag Day celebration of the Daughters of the American Revolution--and I was to report Major Coleman's speech. That's why I shrank. I am not a society woman.

"D. A. R.," I grumbled, jumping out of bed and going across to the window to see what kind of day we were going to have.--"_D-a-r-n!_"

Anyway, the day was all right, and after waving a welcome to the sun--whose devout worshiper I am--I rubbed a circle of dust off the mirror and looked at myself. Every woman has distinctly pretty days--and distinctly homely ones; and usually the homely ones come to the front viciously when you're booked for something extraordinary. However, this proved to be one of my good-looking periods, and out of sheer gratitude I polished off the whole expanse of the mirror. Incidentally, I am not an absolutely dustless housekeeper, in spite of my craze for simplicity. I consider that there are only two things that need be kept passionately clean in this life--the human skin and the refrigerator.

"Are you going to dress for the fête--before you go to the office?" mother inquired rebelliously, as she saw me arranging my hair with that look of masculine expectation later on in the morning. "Why don't you get your other work off, then come back home and dress?"

"Well--because," I answered indifferently.

"But the _Sons_ of the Revolution are going to meet with the Daughters!" she warned.

"I know that."

As if to demonstrate my possession of this knowledge I turned away from the mirror and displayed my festive charms. A light gray coat-suit had been converted into the deception of a gala garment by the addition of Irish lace; and mother, looking it over contemptuously, went into her own bedroom for a moment, and came back carrying her diamond-studded D. A. R. pin. She held it out toward me--with the air of a martyr.

"But--aren't you going to wear it yourself?" I asked, with a little feeling of awe at the lengths of mother-love. She had been regent of her chapter--and loved the organization well enough to go to Washington every year.

"No."

"Then--then do you mean to say that you're not going to Mrs. Walker's to-day?"

She shook her head.

"Why--mother!"

I turned to her and saw that a tear had dropped down upon the last golden bar bridging the wisp of red, white and blue. There were ten bars in all, each one engraved for an ancestor--and when I wore the thing I felt like a foreign diplomat sitting for his picture.

"What's the matter, honey?" I asked. She had always been my little girl, and I felt at times as if I were unduly severe in my discipline of her.

"Grace, you don't know how I feel!"

The words came jerkily--and I knew that I was in for it.

"Does your head ache?" I asked hastily. "You'd better get on the car and ride out into the--"

"My head _doesn't_ ache!" she denied stoutly. "It's my h-heart!--To see you--Grace Chalmers Christie--racing around to such things as this in a coat-suit! You ought, by right of birth and charm, be the chief ornament of such affairs as this--the chief ornament, I say--yet you go carrying a _'hunk o' copy paper_!'"

"In my bag," I modified.

"And you get up and leave places before you get a bite of food--and race back to that office, like a wild thing, to _'turn it in_!'"

This contemptuous use of my own jargon caused me to laugh.

"And do you think that the wearing of this heavy pin will prove so exhausting that I'll have to stay at Mrs. Walker's to-day for a bite of food?" I asked.

She looked at me in helpless reproach.

"I want you to go to this thing as a D. A. R.," she explained, "not as a _Herald_ reporter."

"Then I'll wear it," I promised, kissing her soothingly. "But you must go, too."

She shook her head again.

"I can't--I really can't!" she said. "I've got nothing fine enough to wear. This is going to be a magnificent thing, every one tells me--with all the local Sons--and this wonderful Major Coleman to lecture on flags."

She looked at me suspiciously as she uttered her plaint about the Sons being present, and in answer, I thrust forward one gray suede pump.

"But I'm ready for any Son on earth--Oldburgh earth," I protested. "Don't you _see_ my exquisite lace collar--and the pink satin rose in my chapeau--and this silken and buskskin footgear? Surely no true Son would ever pause to suspect the 'hunk o' copy paper' which lieth beneath all this glory!"

"Isn't Guilford going with you?" she called after me as I left the house a few minutes later. "Will he meet you at the office?"

"No--thank heaven--it's an awful thing to have to listen to two men talk at the same time--especially when you're taking one down in shorthand--and Guilford is mercifully busy this afternoon."

I had a bunch of pink roses, gathered fresh that morning from our strip of garden, and I stopped in the office of the owner and publisher when I had reached the _Herald_ building. Just because he's old, and drank out of the same canteen with my grandfather I made a habit of keeping fresh flowers in his gray Rookwood vase. This spot of color, together with the occasional twinkle from his eyes, made the only break in the dusty newspapery monotony of the room. He looked up from his desk, and his face brightened as he saw my holiday attire.

"Well, Grace?"

He started up, big and shaggy--and wistful--like a St. Bernard. I like old men to look like St. Bernards--and young ones to look like greyhounds.

"Don't get up--nor clear off a chair for me," I warned, catching up the vase and starting toward the water-cooler. "I can't stay a minute."

He collapsed into his squeaky revolving chair. When he was a lad a Yankee minnie ball had implanted a kiss upon his left shoulder-blade, and he still carried that side with a jaunty little hike--a most flirtatious little hike, which, however, caused the distinguished rest of him to appear unduly severe.

"Ah! But you must explain the 'dolled-up' aspect," he begged.

I laughed at the schoolgirl slang.

"Why, this is Flag Day!" I told him. "How can you have forgotten?--There will be a gigantic celebration at Mrs. Hiram Walker's--and all the pedigreed world will be there."

He smiled--slowly.

"And you're writing it up?"

"Just Major Coleman's lecture! They say he is quite the most learned man in the world on the subject of flags. He knows them and loves them. He carries them about with him on these lecture tours in felt-lined steel cases."

"Cases?" he smiled.

"Certainly," I answered. "Whatever a man esteems most precious--or useful--he has cases for! The commercial man has his sample cases--the medical man his instrument cases--the artistic man, his--"

"Divorce cases," he interrupted dryly.

"Alas, yes!" I sighed, my thoughts traveling back.

He wheeled slowly, giving me a glance which finally tapered off with the pink rosebuds in my hands.

"Then," he asked kindly, "if you're going to a very great affair this afternoon, why don't you keep these flowers and wear them yourself?"

I shook my head.

"But I'm a newspaper woman!" I said with dignity. "I might as well wear a vanity-bag as to wear flowers."

"Bosh! You're not a newspaper woman, Grace," he denied, still looking at me half sadly. "And yet--well, sometimes it is--just such women as you who do the amazing things."

"Mother thinks so, certainly!" I laughed. "But you meant in what way, for instance?"

He hesitated, studying me for a moment, while I held still and let him, for there's always a satisfaction in being studied when there's a satin rose in your hat.

"Oh--nothing," he finally answered, with a look of regret upon his face.

"But it is something!" I persisted, "and, even if I am in a big hurry, I shan't budge until you tell me!"

"Well, since you insist--I only meant to say that I'd been doing a little thinking on my own account lately--as owner and publisher of this paper, with its interests at heart--and I've wondered just how much a woman might accomplish, after a man had failed."

"A woman?"

"By the ill use of her eyes, I mean," he confessed, his own eyes twinkling a little. "Women can gain by the ill use of their eyes what men fail to accomplish by their straightforward methods."

"But that's what men hate so in women!" I said.

He nodded.

"Ye-es--maybe! That is, they make a great pretense of hating a woman when she uses her eyes to any end save one--charming them for their own dear sakes!"

"They naturally grudge her the spoils she gains by the ill use of those important members," I answered defensively.

"Oh," he put in quickly, "I wasn't going to suggest that you do any such thing--unless you wanted to! I was merely thinking--that was all!"

"And besides," I kept on, "all the men who have ever done anything worth being interviewed for--nearly all of them, I mean--are so old that--"

He interrupted me wrathfully.

"Old men are not necessarily blind men, Miss Christie," he explained. "But we'll change the subject, if you please!"

"Anyway, it doesn't happen once in twenty years that a newspaper woman gets a scoop just because she's a woman," I continued, not being ready just then to change the subject even if he had demanded it.

"It does," he contradicted. "It's one of the most popular plots for magazine stories."

"Bah! Magazine stories and life are two different propositions, my dear Captain Macauley!" I explained with a blasé air. "I should like some better precedent before I started out on an assignment."

"Yet you are a most unprecedented young woman," he replied in a meaning tone. "I've suspected it before--but recent reports confirm my worst imaginings."

I glanced at him searchingly.

"You've been talking with mother?" I ventured.

For a moment he was inscrutable.

"Oh, I know you have!" I insisted. "She's told it to everybody who will listen."

"The story of the Coburn-Colt that wasn't hatched?"

His face was severe, but the little upward twist of his left shoulder was twitching as if with suppressed emotion.

"She told you with tears in her eyes, I know," I kept on. "All the old friends get the tearful accompaniment."

"Well, miss, doesn't that make you all the more ashamed of your foolishness?" he demanded.

"My foolishness?"

Something seemed to give way under me as he said this, for he was always on my side, and I had never found sympathy lacking before.

"I mean that--that Don Quixote carried to an extreme becomes Happy Hooligan," he pronounced.

I drew back in amazement.

"Why, Captain Horace Macauley--of Company A--18th Kentucky Infantry!"

He tried hard not to smile.

"You needn't go so far back--stay in the present century, if you please."

"But ever since then--even to this good day and in a newspaper office, where the atmosphere is so cold-blooded that a mosquito couldn't fly around without getting a congestive chill, you know your reputation! Why, you could give the Don horse spurs and armor, then arrive a full week ahead of him at a windmill!"

"Tommy-rot."

"Supererogation is a prettier word," I amended, but he shook his head.

"No! Six syllables are like six figures-they get you dizzy when you commence fooling with them! Besides, I was discussing _your_ right to commit foolish acts of self-sacrificing, Grace, not mine."

"But it didn't seem foolish to me," I tried to explain.

"When you're working in this rotten newspaper office, where no woman could possibly feel at home, for the vigorous sum of seventy-five dollars a month?--Then it doesn't seem idiotic?"

"No!"

"And your mother moping and pining for the things she ought to have?"

"No-o--not much!"

"And Guilford Blake standing by, waiting like a gentleman for this fever of emancipation to pass by and desquamation to take place?"

This interested me.

"What's 'desquamation?'" I asked. "I haven't time to get my dictionary now."

"You couldn't find it in any save a medical dictionary, likely," he explained, with a pretense at patience. "Anyway, it's the peeling off process which follows a high fever--especially such fevers as you girls of this restless, modern temperament so often experience!"

I shivered.

"Ugh! It doesn't sound pretty!" I commented.

"Nor is it pretty," he assured me, "but it's very wholesome. Once you've caught the fever, lived through it, peeled off and got a shiny new skin you're forever immune against its return. This, of course, is what Guilford is waiting so patiently for. He is one of the most estimable young fellows I know, Grace, and--"

I looked wounded.

"Don't you suppose I know that?" I asked. Then glancing quickly at the watch bracelet on my wrist, and seeing with a gasp of relief that the hands were pointing toward the dangerous hour of three, I turned toward the door.

"I must hurry!" I plead. "You've really no idea what an interesting occasion a Flag Day celebration is, Captain Macauley!"

"No?" he smiled, understanding my sudden determination to leave.

"Indeed, no! Why, for three hundred and sixty-four days in the year you may have a gentle Platonic affection for General Washington, Paul Revere and the rest, but on the other day--Flag Day--your flame is rekindled into a burning zeal! You can't afford to be late! You must hurry!--Especially if you have to go there on the street-car!"

"It's a deuced pity you can't get up a zeal for a devoted _living_ man," he called after me in a severe voice as I reached the door. "It's a pity you can't see the idiocy of this determination of yours--before that publishing company revokes its offer."

"Well, who knows?" I answered, waving him a gay good-by. "I hate street-cars above everything, and I'm sorry my coupé isn't waiting at the door right now!"