CHAPTER III

It was a submissive enough little figure that they had hustled home through the crowded streets, up the front stoop and into the brick house on Wabash Avenue. Crushed and rumpled.

The crudest edge of the things they said to her was mercifully dulled by the time it penetrated her numbed consciousness. She hardly seemed to hear them. At intervals she sobbed. It was more than a sob. It was a dry paroxysm that shook her whole body and jarred her head. Her handkerchief, a wet gray ball, she opened, and began to stare at its neatly hemstitched border, turning it corner for corner, round and round.

Who was he? Who was he?

She told them.

At each fresh accusation she seemed to shrink into smaller compass; to occupy less space within the circle of her outstanding hoop-skirts, until finally she was just a pair of hunted eyes in a tangle of ringlets, handkerchief, and crinoline. She caught fragments of what they were saying ... ruined her life ... brought down disgrace ... entire family ... never hold head up ... common lout like a Dick ... Dick!... Dick!...

Once Charlotte raised her head and launched a feeble something that sounded like "... Hendrik Hudson," but it was lost in the torrent of talk. It appeared that she had not only ruined herself and brought lifelong disgrace upon her parents' hitherto unsullied name, but she had made improbable any future matrimonial prospects for her sister Carrie--then aged eight.

That, unfortunately, struck Charlotte as being humorous. Racked though she was, one remote corner of her mind's eye pictured the waspish little Carrie, in pinafore and strapped slippers, languishing for love, all forlorn--Carrie, who still stuck her tongue out by way of repartee. Charlotte giggled suddenly, quite without meaning to. Hysteria, probably. At this fresh exhibition of shamelessness her parents were aghast.

"Well! And you can laugh!" shouted Isaac Thrift through the soft and unheeded susurrus of his wife's Sh-sh-sh! "As if I hadn't enough trouble, with this war"--it sounded like a private personal grievance--"and business what it is, and real estate practically worth----"

"Sh-sh-sh! Carrie will hear you. The child mustn't know of this."

"Know! Everyone in town knows by now. My daughter running after a common soldier in the streets--a beggar--worse than a beggar--and kissing him like a--like a----"

Mrs. Thrift interrupted with mournful hastiness. "We must send her away. East. For a little visit. That would be best, for a few months."

At that Isaac Thrift laughed a rather terrible laugh. "Away! That _would_ give them a fine chance to talk. Away indeed, madam! A few months, h'm? Ha!"

Mrs. Thrift threw out her palms as though warding off a blow. "Isaac! You don't mean they'd think--Isaac!"

Charlotte regarded them both with wide, uncomprehending eyes.

Her mother looked at her. Charlotte raised her own tear-drenched face that was so mutely miserable, so stricken, so dumbly questioning. Marred as it was, and grief-ravaged, Mrs. Thrift seemed still to find there something that relieved her. She said more gently, perhaps, than in any previous questioning:

"Why did you do it, Charlotte?"

"I couldn't help it. I couldn't help it."

Isaac Thrift snorted impatiently. Hetty Thrift compressed her lips a little and sighed. "Yes, but why did you do it, Charlotte? Why? You have been brought up so carefully. How could you do it?"

Now, the answer that lay ready in Charlotte's mind was one that could have explained everything. And yet it would have explained nothing; at least nothing to Hetty and Isaac Thrift. The natural reply on Charlotte's tongue was simply, "Because I love him." But the Thrifts did not speak of love. It was not a ladylike word. There were certain words which delicacy forbade. "Love" was one of them. From the manner in which they shunned it--shrank from the very mention of it--you might almost have thought it an obscenity.

Mrs. Thrift put a final question. She had to. "Had you ever kissed him before?"

"Oh, no!" cried Charlotte so earnestly that they could not but believe. Then, quiveringly, as one bereaved, cheated, "Oh, no! No! Never! Not once.... Not once."

The glance that Mrs. Thrift shot at her husband then was a mingling of triumph and relief.

Isaac Thrift and his wife did not mean to be hard and cruel. They had sprung from stern stock. Theirs was the narrow middle-class outlook of members of a small respectable community. According to the standards of that community Charlotte Thrift had done an outrageous thing. War, in that day, was a grimmer, though less bloody and wholesale, business than it is to-day. An army whose marching song is Where Do We Go From Here? attaches small significance to the passing kiss of an hysterical flapper, whether the object of the kiss be buck private or general. But an army that finds vocal expression in The Battle Cry of Freedom and John Brown's Body is likely to take its bussing seriously. The publicly kissed soldier on his way to battle was the publicly proclaimed property of the kissee. And there in front of the Court House steps, in full sight of her world--the Addison Canes, the Thomas Holcombs, the Lewis Fullers, the Clapps--Charlotte Thrift, daughter of Isaac Thrift, had run after, had thrown her arms about, and had kissed a young man so obscure, so undesirable, so altogether an unfitting object for a gently-bred maiden's kisses (public or private) as to render valueless her kisses in future.

Of Charlotte's impulsive act her father and mother made something repulsive and sinister. She was made to go everywhere, but was duennaed like a naughty Spanish princess. Her every act was remarked. Did she pine she was berated and told to rouse herself; did she laugh she was frowned down. Her neat little escritoire frequently betrayed traces of an overhauling by suspicious alien fingers. There was little need of that after the first few days. The news of Jesse Dick's death at Donelson went almost unnoticed but for two Chicago households--one out Hardscrabble way, one on Wabash Avenue. It was otherwise as unimportant as an uprooted tree in the path of an avalanche that destroys a village. At Donelson had fallen many sons of Chicago's pioneer families; young men who were to have carried on the future business of the city; boys who had squired its daughters to sleigh-rides, to dances, to church sociables and horseback parties; who had drilled with Ellsworth's famous Zouaves. A Dick of Hardscrabble could pass unnoticed in this company.

There came to Charlotte a desperate and quite natural desire to go to his people; to see his mother; to talk with his father. But she never