Part 4

"And please remember that enlightened people cannot possibly point the way without courage, and--a certain amount of pioneering experiment."

Mr. Mysinger had mercifully withdrawn himself around the corner of Third Street. There his assistant would turn, too, parting from her friend; and really, that appeared to be just as well. Forgetting his mask, the young man was beginning to betray signs of exasperation. No more than Mysinger, of course, had he ever been deceived by the delicate girlishness of Mary's face; but the positions she seemed to be taking now passed anything he had ever thought of her addiction to the New. Was this mere argument for argument's sake?--or did she seriously imagine that the regeneration of society was to be accomplished by the antics of a few wild female Egoists--lawless Egoettes?

"That's true, to a point, of course," he said, with control. "Yet don't you suspect people who talk about their Duty to the Race, while overlooking entirely their duty to that part of the race which should be nearest and dearest to them?"

"I'd suspect even more people who daren't call their souls their own, for fear they might be criticized by somebody who knows nothing about the facts."

And then she exclaimed suddenly. "Oh, why don't you say at once that you've been talking at poor Flora Trevenna for three blocks!"

He was considerably taken aback, but spoke calmly: "Not at all--or at least only in a general way. One of the problems of the day, as we say at the Redmantle Club."

It was on the tip of his tongue to say then, man to man, as it were: "Miss Mary, you have a great work ahead of you, in a special field. Isn't it a pity to confuse your good cause with one that perhaps is not so good?" But, of course, you hardly gave advice of that sort to Mary Wing.

"But since you seem to invite my opinion," he continued, "I will say that I do think there is a logical connection between Hodger's kind of talk and Miss Trevenna's--ah--pioneering experiment."

"Of course there is! Who denied it?" said she, with a forthrightness that increased his wonder at her.

And then, as they came to a standstill at the corner, she added, after a grave speculative stare:--

"If it'll do you the slightest good, Mr. Garrott, I'll tell you exactly what finally decided Flora to forget her duty to her sisters, aunts, uncles, and so on, as you consider. Prepare yourself. It was a sentence in a book."

"_A sentence in a book!_"

Miss Wing nodded, several times. "As she's a reserved girl, and I appear to be her only friend now, of course this is a confidence."

"I can name the book!" cried Charles; and he did.

"However," he resumed, with bitter urbanity, "if she'd happened to read a few pages further, she might have noticed that the Lady in Sweden took every bit of it back."

To his surprise, Mary Wing laughed.

"Do you know, that's just what I told her, in almost those very words? And what do you suppose she said? 'Well, I'm glad I didn't read as far as that.'"

Continuing to look at him and continuing to laugh, the annoying young woman added: "I'm afraid you don't begin to understand women as yet, Mr. Garrott! No, you don't begin to. _Au revoir!_"

It was noted that Charles's bow was characterized by a certain stiffness.

He went on his way alone, to Berringer's, and the good solid man-talk. The strongest thought in his mind now was that the end of these things was not yet. And here, at least, he was by no means deceived.

The next day was Saturday. At two o'clock on that day, each week, Charles took train and went down to his mother's place in the country, there to remain till early Monday morning. This was an invasion of his writer's time, with which he let nothing interfere. Returning to town, and finding "Bondwomen" not yet heard from, he became absorbed in a short story--for the "line" of his new novel could not be laid in a day or a week, of course--and went suddenly upon his emergency schedule, as Judge Blenso had named it. This schedule called for the omission of all exercise, other than as tutoring necessitated, and a general withdrawal from the world of living women. But he couldn't get away from their Unrest, even so.

Late Thursday afternoon, as he was working out the last pages of the time-killing fiction, the door of the Studio opened without a knock, and Donald Manford walked in. Donald certainly continued to make himself very much at home here.

"Get out," said Charles, tired and cross. "What do you think this is, a Wheelman's Rest?"

The tall engineer said that he was passing and thought he'd drop in. But with the aid of an eyebrow he made known, over Judge Blenso's snowy head, that he desired private converse in the bedroom.

The public talk between the two young men, continuing, was that Donald wanted to borrow a white waistcoat from Charles, which Charles was rather reluctant to lend him. Thus, gradually, they faded from the Studio, much to the annoyance of the Judge, who had ceased typing on purpose to listen, while ostensibly merely engaged in picking lint from his types with a brass pin.

When the door of the bedroom was shut, Donald Manford said, in low hurried tones:--

"Have you heard all this talk about Mary? I tell you the town's buzzing with it!"

Charles had heard no talk; he was disturbed, if scarcely surprised. But when it became clear that the purpose of Donald's visit was to get him, Charles, to "drop a hint to Mary," he refused at once, point-blank.

The engineer was pained and astonished.

"You don't understand the situation," said he, stewing. "I tell you Mary's gone to work to make a heroine of that woman! Recommending her for good jobs, with her morning, noon, and night, having people in to meet her at _tea_! Now, of course, she just doesn't understand what she's doing. She's too innocent; she's ignorant of the practical meaning of this business. And it's my duty to protect her from her ignorance...."

Charles sat down on one of the parallel white beds--the Judge's. And little as he sympathized with Miss Trevenna's Blow for Freedom, he seemed to sympathize even less with his young friend's proprietary absurdities.

Whatever this stalwart youth was, Mary Wing had made him. An orphan and poor, he had been taken to the bosom of the kindly Wings; and Mary, a girl of twenty then, had been from the start his second mother. She had fed and clothed Donald, helped pay his bills at college; she had trained him, taught him, filled him with her own ambition. She had got him his first opening, pulled wires for him, hewed out his ascending steps. Fine and confident as Donald stood there, Mary Wing had made him. And now to see him, as to her, clutching on the toga of the primitive male, to hear him, the ignorant, ridiculously claiming overlordship in a field which should have been supremely woman's.

"Go ahead," said Charles dryly. "Protect her all you want."

But Donald angrily told him not to be an ass. It was a delicate matter--for him--he declared; besides, Mary wouldn't listen to him. He wasn't _advanced_.

"But you're another matter. You've got some influence with Mary, and--"

"Stop right there! I've got more influence with the Weather Department than I have with Mary Wing."

Glowering at him over the foot of the bed, the engineer demanded reasons for his strange unpractical behavior. Charles offered a few simple selections from his complex feelings.

"First, your cousin's personal behavior is none of my business. Second, I'd have no respect for her if she gave up her principles because you asked me to ask her to. Third, I despise a person who's scared out of his wits by fear of what the neighbors'll think."

Donald appeared momentarily speechless. Perceiving this, the author fitted a cigarette into a holder Mary Wing had given him on his birthday, and resumed his few remarks:--

"Of course your mistake is in supposing that Miss Mary is acting through ignorance. She's acting from principle, as I say, and doing a plucky thing, too. For she doesn't think that because a poor silly girl has once made a mistake, the thing to do--"

But Manford recovered his voice with a bound.

"_Mistake!_ I'm surprised at you, Garrott! I did you the justice to think that all this advanced rot of yours was just talk. Come!--say right out you think it's a mighty plucky thing for a girl to go off and live with a married man!"

Charles smiled, and then hesitated. It was odd how instantly Donald Manford modernized him, killing all reactions: But what was the use of arguing with a fellow who honestly believed that a woman had but one "virtue," who spoke of her frankly as "the sex," allowed her no honor but "woman's honor," had but one question to ask about her "character"? This youth had not budged since the fifth century.

"The only way to punish this is by the disgrace of it, I tell you!" he was arguing. "There's no punishment at all when you make a heroine of the woman."

"There'll be enough to punish, don't fret, without Mary Wing's taking a hand."

"Now look here, Charlie," said Donald, encouraged. "Just look at the matter in a sensible way. You can feel sorry for her and all that. But it isn't right, by George, it isn't decent and moral, to stand up and practically say you admire a notorious bad woman! Just think of the effect on other women! They'll argue, 'Well, if that's the way people feel about it, there's no use being good any more.' And think, Charlie!--what'll become of Society if all the girls get to skipping off and living with married men!"

Charles laughed and rose. "Of course I'd not dream of speaking to Miss Mary about this."

The young engineer exploded. But presently he gave it up.

"Then I'll have to speak to her myself," he declared, and looked as if he expected the hazardous audacity of such an enterprise to touch his friend's heart, even then. "And you remember this," he added, angrily, "when Mary's friends are all dropping her!"

"Nobody who drops her for this was ever her friend."

"More New Thought! And what about Mysinger? Suppose your idea is that this plucky business will boost Mary's standing in the schools like the devil?"

"My dear fellow, you're seeing things! You never heard of politics, I suppose? Nothing can shake us in the schools. 'Cause why? We own the Board by two votes."

Donald regarded him with the strongest disapproval. "Do you know you make me sick?"

"By the way," said Charles, pleasantly, "didn't I see you go by here with Miss Flower the other day? Where did you--"

"Absolutely sick, and I've--"

"Meet up with her, old fellow? Isn't she a--"

"Sick!" roared Donald, and banged the door.

He was a hopeless ignoramus, and Charles was the peer of the greatest authorities, living or dead. But the subject, beyond doubt, was the most complex and baffling in the whole field of Womanology. And Charles, standing and staring at that shut door, was possessed with the odd feeling that Donald had got the best of the argument, after all.

Why must Mary _always_ be as independent as the Declaration, and more militant than a Prussian?

V

The emergency schedule withdrew Charles from the streets; he lunched in twenty minutes at Mrs. Herman's and spent the hour gained at his writing-table. With the completion of the short fiction, he resumed his walks to Berringer's. And now on Washington Street, the principal scene of his social life since he became a regular author, he saw again Miss Angela Flower. In five days, suddenly, he saw Miss Angela three times.

Twice, as it happened, the two passed on opposite sides of the street, moving in contrary directions. But the third time he fairly overtook her, not a dozen steps from the door of the rich little Deming boys, to whom he taught the Elements all morning.

He was pleased with the agreeable coincidence. He greeted Mary's so different cousin with a genuine warmth, springing spontaneously from his personal sense of a bond between them. And Miss Angela, it seemed, was not less glad to see him.

"You don't know how nice it is," she laughed, a tinge of color in her smooth cheeks, "to see a familiar face, after blocks and blocks of strangers. And you're almost the only person I know, too!"

Suiting his long stride to hers, he assured her that this state of affairs would pass quickly.

"I got only a glimpse of you yesterday," he pursued. "Do you take your constitutionals at this time, too?"

But she said, elusively, that she took them at all sorts of times.

"It's my chief form of recreation at present, you see! But--I thought I might meet father up here--it's his time for coming home to lunch from the college. Only I seem just to miss him every day."

He and the Womanly Woman walked a good half-mile together that day, and the authority enjoyed himself thoroughly. It was in the course of this walk that he evolved another phrase of scientific justification, viz.: "The Business of Supplying Beauty and Supplying Charm."

The talk turned naturally upon the girl herself. Having failed to get any biography from the embattled Miss Wing, Charles proceeded to the source. Under his agreeable, yet artful promptings, Miss Angela sketched with a charming simplicity the story of a commonplace family life: how she and her brothers had grown up at Hunter's Run, a crossroads post-office four miles from Mitchellton; how they had moved into Mitchellton, which had seemed like heaven at first, but had palled after seven years; how all the boys of Mitchellton grew up and went away, one by one, to make their marks in the world (though there was one exception, it seemed, a Mr. Dan Jenney, who was still in Mitchellton--Aha! thought Charles); how lonely she was after Tommy, her older brother, had thus gone away; how her father had had quite a large practice in Mitchellton, but didn't seem much interested in getting patients here; and so on. Tommy, it was learned, had married money in Pittsburg, but appeared to be happy all the same. As for the younger brother, Wallie, his ambition was to go to college and be an electro-chemist, and he was now at work downtown, gathering funds for that purpose. Mary Wing had got him a position, it seemed.

Miss Angela's conversation, as has been noted, was not remarkable as conversation. But what mattered that? Into an atmosphere too heated by the Trevennas of this Unrestful world, her girlish unsophistications blew like a primrose zephyr. Moreover, she had her moments, you may be sure; her vivacities as honest as wit. She said that Mitchellton was like a town in war-time.

"That's the way a man described it to me once, a surveyor from the North, when he'd only been there three hours! He declared he hadn't seen a male between the ages of fifteen and sixty-five. They'd all gone off, you see--"

"And then the surveyor went off, too?"

"He did!--exactly! Hopped on a funny little calico pony he had, the minute he said that, and trotted off down Main Street. We never saw him again."

Charles, laughing, looked down at her. She wore a plain blue suit and a simple hat with a yellow quill, obviously inexpensive both, and not new. She was characterized, sartorially, only by that unobtrusive yet exquisite neatness whose practice some women bring to a fine art. Pretty and sweet she looked, none the less; feminine, too, without a doubt.

And, quite unconsciously, she was giving by piecemeal an answer to that fundamental question of her Modern critics, How do you spend your time? A considerable part of Miss Angela's time went, it seemed, to the actual care of the house. With her leisure she really had little to do as yet, because of her lack of acquaintance. Even the table of bridge with Cousin Mary had not developed so far. She walked a great deal, usually alone, but mentioned having met Mr. Manford the other day; the impression was left that she and Donald hadn't specially taken to each other. She kept her mother company; she often went into the shops, "just looking"; once or twice she and Wallie had been to the moving-picture shows. She read also, it seemed, for she had just finished "Marna"--a gift to her, this was--a certain late New Woman novel which Charles himself meant to give an hour to some day. Her account of her domestic business the old-fashioned girl concluded thus:--

"I don't know very much about housekeeping yet, but I do the best I can. I think mother enjoys the rest."

And whatever criticism narrow utilitarians might have brought against her management of her fifteen hours a day seemed to be morally destroyed by that unconscious stroke. _Mother enjoys the rest._ Imagine Miss Hodger, for instance,--to come no nearer home,--casually mentioning: "I don't want to do this, but I will. I want to go there, but I won't." "Why, Miss Hodger?" you would ask her. "Why must you mutilate your Ego thus?" "Well,"--you are to fancy Miss Hodger saying,--"you see, I think mother'd enjoy the rest!"

But the girl herself remained delightfully unconscious of the reactions she set in motion.

"Mr. Garrott," she said suddenly,--"I hope you don't mind my asking, but--when are you going to have some stories coming out? I'm crazy to read one of them!"

"Oh!" laughed Mr. Garrott. "Well!--I can't say definitely, at the moment. I'm trying," he said, modestly, "to write books, you know, and it's a slow business, with the little free time I have. My first one, that I've just finished, took me four years."

"Four years! How wonderful! But isn't it going to come out soon?"

"I'm--ah--negotiating with a publisher now."

"It must be fascinating! I--I never knew an author before."

He warmed, expanding.

At the parting of their ways, these two paused, talking like old friends; and no parting took place here, after all. Angela said, with a charming hesitancy: "Mr. Garrott, if you really want to read that book,--'Marna', I mean,--I wish you'd let me lend it to you. We've finished with it--for good!--and if you have time to stop a minute--" And he, who never called, who had a special rule against borrowing things from ladies, restored his hat to his head at once, accepting with pleasure.

So they turned out of Washington Street toward Center, and she continued, with a laughing, sidelong glance:--

"Do you know who _Marna_ reminded me of? Quite a friend of yours!--somebody you admire a great deal!"

Knowing the nature of the book well from the reviews he was incessantly reading, the young man smiled: "I wonder if you can possibly be alluding to one of your most distinguished cousins."

"It did, just a little! At first, I mean--where Marna goes away to lead her own life, and everything.... Mr. Garrott, do you think she's really going to take the position in New York, Cousin Mary, I mean?"

"Take it! Why, of course she will, provided she can get it! It would be a remarkable thing for such a young woman, and a great opportunity besides."

This the girl seemed to understand. She remarked, however, that Cousin Mary and Mrs. Wing seemed so wrapped up in each other. Her extreme domesticity was peculiarly refreshing to Charles just now; nevertheless, he now took up the cudgels for Modernity, though in the gentlest way: Why should not daughters have the same right to leave home for work that the sons of Mitchellton had, for example? Daughters had always left homes for another reason. Suppose _Marna_ had married the first whippersnapper that came along, and he had carried her off to Australia, etc.

But Miss Angela seemed to feel that, for her part, she would look long at any lover who wished to separate her from her mother.

Center Street, at this point, was a place of car-tracks, cobblestones, and threatening small establishments of those personal sorts which are always first to appear in a waning "residence district." At the corner stood a Human Hair Goods Works. The Flower house was not intrinsically pretty. It was one of a block of six, all just alike and evidently built some time ago; rather dingy little brick houses, with weather-beaten small verandahs set only a step or two above the sidewalk, and scantily separated from it by grassless "lawns." However, Charles was not repelled by poverty, to which he had been well used.

Within, he had the pleasure of meeting Miss Angela's father, who was encountered in the hall, in the act of removing his overcoat. Angela left the two men together, while she tripped upstairs to get "Marna."

Charles found the medical father a decidedly queer individual. A very tall, thin, seedy man he was, with a neglected sandy mustache, and a long neck punctuated with a very large Adam's apple, which he jerked with a sort of nervous twitch as he talked. With his lusterless eye and spare, remote manner, he looked like a man who had let himself dry up from within. Yet, if Charles remembered aright, the Medical School had counted this gentleman a distinct acquisition.

He assured Dr. Flower that he had long desired this pleasure, and explained:--

"Your cousin, Miss Wing, is an old friend of mine."

"My wife's cousin," said the Doctor, seeming to make a distinction. "Quite so! Certainly!"

"I believe it was she who first brought the Medical School to your attention?"

"Ah, yes! I fancy it was. Quite so. Have a cigar, will you? However," continued the father, jerking his long neck, "you don't offer that as something to be urged against her, I assume?"

The young man, though surprised, smiled politely.

"Possibly you're no more enthusiastic about teaching than I am, say?"

"Ah, well!... It wants excitement, you maintain?--lacks the spice of brilliant variety? You find no romance in it, you suggest? Well--"

Dr. Flower fell silent, brushing his hat with the sleeve of his worn coat, while he stared cheerlessly at nothing. Charles wondered at him, with a certain sense of mild mystery. If he felt that way about teaching, why had he thrown over his practice and left Mitchellton?

"I believe," said he, with discretion, "your--that is, Mrs. Flower's cousin, Mary Wing, is the only teacher I ever knew who could really be called a 'fan.'"

"Quite so. You won't have a cigar, you said? But even in that case, it doesn't amount to a complete exhaustion of the energies, you would feel? You'd contend there's an unused store for other enterprises, even there?"

"Quite so," said Charles, considerably puzzled.

But then Miss Angela came skipping and smiling down the narrow stairs, book in hand, and slipped her arm through her father's. She said that Mr. Garrott could keep "Marna" as long as he liked, but that she would be _so_ interested to hear what he thought of it. The trio stood chatting a moment together.

Angela's last word, in her soft and pretty voice, was, "Don't forget, we're going to have that bridge game some night soon!"

So he took leave of her, not only with the book, but with the promise of a party shortly to come. And, curiously, that was the first thing this simple Nice Girl had ever said that the authority felt inclined to criticize somewhat: the use of the word "that," now. Skilled and wary he had grown since he became a regular writer, and he could not recall having agreed to give a valuable evening to playing bridge soon. The engagement had just developed along, it seemed.

But that was a trivial matter, early lost sight of. Continuing his walk to Berringer's and the good man-talk, Charles pondered upon the nature of a Home.