Part 2

The stepmother looked at Patsy’s lovely rebellious little head. Then she looked at the ridiculous scrap of a frock she was making. “I suppose he thought of the Angel,” she murmured.

“And why?” Instantly Patsy sat bolt upright. “The Angel’s my child, of course--every bit as much as he is Warren’s--but why I shouldn’t slide down the banisters when I want to, just because I happen to have a baby--one might think it was my grandchild!” The disgust that tilted the small impudent nose made the stepmother bite her under lip hard. “Anyway, it’s all over now. I’ve left Warren for good, and when he gets back from Washington and finds nobody in the house he’ll realize that I’m sufficiently capable of action, though I can’t talk like a Macaulay essay. When he finds not only me but the Angel gone----” she listened suddenly--a faint cry came down from some place upstairs.

“I expect the house will seem still and--and strange.” The stepmother’s soft voice had a little ache in it as she listened too.

Patsy got up and walked to the window of the bright morning-room with a defiant shrug that was meant also to be quite indifferent. “He deserves it,” she defended. “Every bit of it. He behaved like a brute--a perfectly gentlemanly good-form Prince Albert brute; and when he has to go to Congress and give dinners and things without any wife, he’ll be sorry he was so abominable. He’ll remember that I could be grown-up and dignified when I want to. As for me, I can toddle on my own----”

“H’m?” The stepmother looked up inquiringly.

“Get along by myself, I mean, and take care of the Angel quite--quite as well as though I had a husband. I dare say Timothy won’t mind my staying here for a bit?” Patsy’s hauteur melted into an appealing wistfulness.

“Of course he won’t mind,” returned the stepmother, warmly. “He has some news----”

“And then,” went on Patsy, unheeding, “I can take--steps.” The vague importance of the decision seemed to reassure her; for she came back to her old place on the sofa and plumped down into the cushions almost cheerfully.

“I--before you take--er--steps,” suggested the stepmother, tentatively, “why not consult Timothy?”

“Consult _Timothy_?” Timothy’s sister faced about amazed. “W-what on earth could Timothy know about it--about leaving one’s husband? He’s the dearest boy in the world--a ripping good sport and all that--but, after all, Claire, he’s only a writer. He doesn’t know anything about things that _happen_.”

The stepmother sewed for a few minutes in silence. Then, “Nobody else knows that--that it’s happened yet, do they?” she asked, rather anxiously.

“No,” said Patsy, shortly. “I told the maids I was coming over to stay a few days with my brother, that’s all. Of course, Laura Hastings was spending the week-end with me when we had the scene--when Warren and his mother came in from Boston, I mean, and found me--_Patricia_---- Oh, yes,” with a wry face, “she calls me that, Warren’s mother! As I was saying, Laura was there, sliding down too, as it happened, and you know, Claire, Laura’s the worst gossip in New York. She has told it all over, I suppose, that Warren simply _ordered_ me to get down--anybody might know such a good-looking man would be a tyrant!--but she can’t say a word about me, for I was the sweetest thing possible all the time she was there. I wouldn’t condescend to quarrel, you may be sure, even afterward, when only Warren and his mother were there.”

“They went on to Washington that same night, you said----” the stepmother creased a tuck thoughtfully.

“Yes--Warren had some business. His mother”--Patsy’s scorn pelted her words out--“went to a convention of the Women Militant, if you know what that is. Warren’s coming back to-day. Well”--she straightened her collar belligerently--“he’ll find a note on the pincushion that will explain a few things.”

“Ahem!” The stepmother coughed deprecatingly. “He’s been taking some rather tiresome trips lately, Warren, hasn’t he?”

“Oh, of course he has--but what difference does that make?” Patsy’s guilty compassion stirred itself to impatience. “Nobody wanted him to go to Congress except his mother--though of course I was glad he got the election,” she admitted, grudgingly. “But it’s meant running back and forth from New York to Boston and from Boston to Washington all the fall. This last Sunday simply capped the climax of everybody’s endurance. Why the goodness his mother had to come down with him, just that time when he was going to find me on the banisters----” She shook her pretty head despairingly.

“Hello!” whistled somebody. “So the Plain Little Sister has come to congratulate me--what? Didn’t I see a--er--perambulator-rocking-chair-crib, folded compactly as in the advertisement, out there in the hall?”

“Yes.” Patsy kissed her brother with characteristic vehemence. “It is the Angel’s. We’ve come to stay.”

“Oh,” said Timothy, curling his spare shortness into a huge chair, “how disappointing! I mean, that is, I thought you had come to congratulate me, you know.”

“Congratulate you?” Patsy flew at him. “On what?”

“Why, on Doromea, of course. I’ve got her to marry me.”

Patsy regarded the stepmother reproachfully. “And you never told me a word,” she said, with an air of deep injury. “I’ve been here two hours!”

“There was a good deal to talk about,” demurred the stepmother, soberly. “You were telling me, you know.”

“Yes--yes, of course.” Patsy’s injury transferred its object to the primary interest. “Timothy, I’ve left Warren.”

“That was nice of you,” commented Timothy. “Stay as long as you can.” He looked at his sister’s pretty hair contentedly; it curled over the ears like Doromea’s.

“But you don’t understand----” Patsy was seldom impatient with Timothy; she tried to remember that he was a writer. Then, too, they had been chums together always. “You don’t understand. I’ve left him forever. I’m not going to Washington with him. He--he insulted me; he called me a----”

Timothy uncurled himself in his interest. “Yes,” he encouraged. “What did he call you?”

“A--a t-tomboy!” Patsy’s lips quivered past control. “And his mother was there and Laura Hastings, a girl who was staying with me--and a perfectly horrid gossip, Timothy! Oh, he was a beast, that’s all. I’m sure,” tearfully, “I can’t think what you all ever let me marry him for!”

Timothy glanced over the auburn head at the stepmother. The stepmother glanced at Timothy. But neither of them smiled.

“I have never had anything against marriage,” said Timothy, mildly. “I have even persuaded one person to get over her prejudice against it. Perhaps I am wrong--if so, you can win the eternal credit of convincing me. And meanwhile, why not come with me to select an engagement present? We can argue as we go along, you know.”

It was not an unattractive proposition. Patsy brightened. “You must wait for me to change,” she warned, jumping up. “This frock’s a wreck. But I brought five trunks. I thought,” doubtfully, “that as long as I was leaving for good, I had better take everything with me.”

“A sound precaution,” commended Timothy, going over to the window.

“And you’ll look after the Angel?” Patsy stopped by the stepmother’s chair. “It may divert me to go out for a bit,” she added, plaintively. “Of course the poor boy--Timmie--can’t understand all I’m going through. He’s a regular brick, but in love, poor thing; and then how could he understand? He’s only a writer.”

“Only a writer,” repeated the stepmother, with an odd little smile. “A writer about Plain People and their Problems. Yes, dear, run along. As you say, it may divert you. If the Angel cries I’ll--I’ll give it smelling-salts. I dare say I sha’n’t kill it.”

“Oh, no,” Patsy called back, pleasantly. “You couldn’t. It has Warren’s obstinacy. But it’s a darling, just the same.” She flew up-stairs as a lusty squall blew down to them.

“She hasn’t congratulated you yet,” murmured the stepmother, gazing at Timothy with quite an unstepmotherly gaze.

“No--but she will to-morrow,” prophesied Timothy, with only a writer’s intuition.

* * * * *

The two short, blue-coated figures moved off briskly down the street toward the Avenue. From the window, the stepmother smiled at the identical cut of their shoulders, the boyish, easy swing of their same stride; it seemed such a very little while since she had watched them start off every day to school together--the blue coats had lengthened such a little bit--and now---- Timothy engaged, and Patsy married--married and half divorced; the stepmother’s nose wrinkled in a funny smile. Ah, well! There are poignant foolish heartaches for stepmothers as well as other people, but--just then the Angel cried. The stepmother caught up the frilly frock and hurried upstairs; where there is an angel----!

“For the Angel’s sake, I mean to have only a separation,” Patsy was explaining to Timothy. “Besides, it--it will serve Warren Adams only right not to be able to--t-to marry again. A Congressman without a wife! Imagine it!”

“There have been instances”--Timothy was knocking leaves with his stick--“isolated instances, I grant you,” he added, hastily, catching his sister’s eye. “I think myself such Congressmen are to be felt for. I suppose”--reflectively--“when Warren is sworn in, there will be nobody there except his mother.”

“I suppose not,” returned Patsy, shortly; and ramming her stout-gloved little hands into her mannish pockets, she began to whistle.

Timothy poked more leaves. They were scarcely at the corner of Madison Avenue. “When one can whistle like that,” he observed to a silent sparrow on the curb, “there is some point in letting the world know about it.”

Patsy stopped whistling at once. “I always want to whistle when Warren’s mother is about--even when it’s only in conversation. See here, Timmie,” the small hand clutched her brother’s arm confidentially, “don’t you--haven’t you always thought Warren’s mother was a bit of a muff?”

Timothy paused, over his glasses. “Muff?” he repeated--stupidly, Patsy thought. “Muff--that was a pretty one she sent the Angel, wasn’t it? All white and soft and fuzzy. She----”

“Oh, never mind, then,” Patsy cut him off impatiently. “If you’re not going to agree with me, where’s the use of arguing? _I_ couldn’t help it if she did send the Angel a muff--anyway, he sha’n’t carry it!” she added, vindictively, under her breath. “Convention, tradition, what people will say--booh! How sick I am of it all--wish I could make every one of those words waltz themselves out of the big dic. forever!”

“Ah--about this present for Doromea----” When Timothy said that name, Patsy looked up quickly; there was no earthly reason why a lump should rise in her throat, but--“Doromea,” Timothy repeated, as though for very spite. “It must be a very nice present, you know.”

“Then we’ll go to ----,” said Patsy, swallowing emphatically. “Everybody goes there; my--my ring came from there, and Claire’s, and all our family have always bought things there. It’s a sort of----”

“Habit?” supplied Timothy, kindly.

“Yes, habit.” Patsy gave a sigh of relief. If Timothy should have guessed that she had _almost_ said tradition! “Certainly, habit--and, well, we’re right there now, Timothy. It must be a ring, I suppose?”

Timothy’s gray eyes darkened to absorption. “I should say a ring might do,” he deliberated.

“Sure thing!” Patsy was standing near a person who looked like Warren’s mother, so she repeated, “Sure thing!” loudly and cheerfully. The person started. “Diamonds--eh, Timmie? But”--to the clerk--“not a solitaire. Solitaires”--feeling her own, under the heavy glove--“are so ordinary!”

“I rather fancy a solitaire,” protested Timothy, mildly. “Let’s see yours, Pats!”

With a sublime indifference Patsy took off her glove. “It _is_ rather a good solitaire,” she admitted, negligently.

“Would you take it off a minute, madam? I should like to compare----”

“Oh, no--that is, I mean”--Patsy blushed furiously--“I have never taken that ring off--I--but I suppose I might just as well, now,” she concluded, defiantly.

“Why not?” agreed Timothy--who was only a writer.

“I prefer not to take that ring off here,” said Patsy, with a colossal dignity. “I--we will look at what you have in circlets.”

“Certainly, madam.” The clerk’s sandy head sank into a blue plush show-drawer.

“There’s Laura Hastings!” cried Patsy, suddenly, “with a man--looking at rings. And she never even hinted----! Do wait, Timothy. I must speak to her a minute. Just like a gossipy person--never to tell one thing about themselves!”

“Yes,” coming back breathlessly. “It’s true. They’re engaged. Laura said”--Patsy’s breezy voice grew somewhat dry--“it was seeing me so happy in my lovely home that really decided her--of course on top of that I could hardly tell her--umm!” as the clerk reappeared. “Perhaps, after all, a solitaire would be better--Laura’s getting one, and people might say----” the minute the words were out, Patsy glanced fearfully at Timothy; but Timothy was deep in settings. “Her friends might think,” amended Patsy, “that you ought to have given Doromea one. Is Doromea as pretty as she used to be?” she added, irrelevantly.

“She may sometime have been as pretty as she is now,” Timothy meditated, “but it seems hardly probable. As a Plain Person--she wants you to show her about things next winter,” he branched off. “The house and that, you know. Anne and Michael are going to stay on in the country, so----”

“But I shall be in Washington,” blurted Patsy. “Oh, no--of course, I forgot.” The blue shoulders sagged a bit forlornly as they turned again to solitaires. “I shall be very glad to help Dorry all I can,” finished Patsy, stiffly. “What do you think of this platinum one, Timothy?”

Timothy straightened his glasses to a critical focus. “Very nice--the claws are so thin and fine--like those in the pin Warren gave you when the Angel was born. I was always fond of that pin.” Timothy was talking mostly to himself as he squinted closer at the solitaire. “I remember Warren’s face when he went in to give it to you--‘’Tisn’t half good enough,’ he said. And it didn’t seem to me then that it was, either.”

Patsy was staring at a case of watches--staring hard and with her back to Timothy. Surreptitiously she got out her handkerchief.

“Then you’ll lay that one aside,” she suggested, lightly, though still with her back turned. “And the flat one--Doromea might like that, it’s so--so awfully subtle, you know. And Dorry always----”

“But not now,” corrected Timothy, gently. “She has advanced to the infinite subtlety of forgetting that there is such a thing. I think we won’t consider the flat one. What are you looking at over there, Pats?”

“Rattles,” replied Patsy, in a strangled voice. “Warren promised to come in and get one with me for the Angel’s seventh birthday--seventh-month birthday, you know. We bought his six-months one--that’s next Sunday--three weeks ago!” The handkerchief went up to Patsy’s impudent little nose, and blew it hard. “If it only wasn’t for Warren’s mother--” she scolded, _sotto voce_, so that the clerk should not hear--“you know, Timothy, I--but there, what’s the use in telling you? You wouldn’t understand.”

“I might--though I do write things,” encouraged Timothy. “Why not try me? We can pretend to be comparing rings over by the window.”

“All right.” Patsy gave a deep sigh. “You see, this is the way it is. When--when I married Warren I was in love with him--I really was, Timothy.”

“I remember you were,” said Timothy, gravely.

“Yes. And of course I was awfully young--_awfully_ young; though, to be sure, I’m twenty-one now; I didn’t want to get married, you know----”

“No?” Timothy’s tone held only inquiry. He had the most tractable memory in the world.

“Certainly not. I was talked into it. Warren and Warren’s mother kept saying there was no sense in delaying the thing, and I supposed there wasn’t, as we’d have to get married some time, wouldn’t we, being in love and all?”

“Sometimes people don’t,” began Timothy. “In stories----”

“Oh, bother stories!” interrupted Patsy, rudely. “You promised to try to forget you were a writer. Quick, look at these silly rings--that woman’s listening. Well, so I married Warren, and for a while, you know, we didn’t get along so badly--the first year we were married we hadn’t but seven _serious_ quarrels; of course there were little things, but you know yourself, Timmie, we managed very nicely.”

“It always seemed so to me,” Timothy came in promptly on his cue.

“That,” Patsy triumphed, “was because Warren was in love with me. He didn’t care then how much slang I used or if I wore boys’ boots; I could climb trees all day long when we were up at camp, and ride bareback all over the place. But now,” the piquant little face grew tragic, “it’s that same old thing--the glamour’s wearing off, and”--Patsy’s voice sounded unpleasantly older than twenty-one--“my husband’s tired of me, the real me. Now he wants me made to his order, to his mother’s order; now”--a big tear splashed on her engagement ring--“I’m just the mother of his child. I’m expected to be old and dull and mouse about in corners with a book or some sewing. Sewing! When I can sail a boat better than any one on Barnegat, and play hockey, and ride even the Blue Devil, that all the Club’s afraid of! _Sewing!_”

“Claire sews,” Timothy reflected.

“Of course she does,” snapped Patsy. “Claire was born amiable and womanly and all the sweet normal things a woman ought to be. I wasn’t. I’ve never been anything but a harum-scarum r-r-rowdy, just as Warren called me, I----”

“You’ve been the mother of the Angel.” Timothy spoke softly, almost reverently. “Claire has only been allowed to be a stepmother.”

“That makes it just so much worse,” choked Patsy, flashing diamonds as though for her life. “I--can’t you see, I don’t deserve to--to be the Angel’s mother! Tha--that’s what Warren thinks.”

Timothy looked down at the trembling softened mouth, at the brimming tawny eyes of his Plain Little Sister. “Warren is going to Congress,” he said, letting Doromea’s ring slip on to his smallest finger. “I have heard that at such times--just before they go--they hardly know what they think. Everybody expects them to think something different, you see. I should not be surprised if they did not even know what they said--sometimes. There are stories----”

Patsy looked at him reproachfully. “You promised to leave out stories,” she murmured. “You were just beginning to be comforting.”

“Um-m! So I did--so I was, I mean. The fact is, I almost believe they forget what they have said, what they have thought, almost the minute they have said or thought it. They--they get tired, you see. They have to go off and make speeches, and their constituents keep dinning their importance at them, the importance of maintaining the dignity of their position, and that, you know; then they come home, a bit low and worn out with it, and--they’re just plain ordinary people, Congressmen--they lose their grip once in a while. They need----”

“Claire told you!” accused Patsy, though into her eyes had crept that same look as when she was singing the Angel to sleep. “You knew it was the day he came home from Boston, and went right away again.”

Timothy peered suddenly through his glasses at some one who was coming into the store. “I did have an idea it was that day,” he confessed--“one of those days, that is.”

“And of course,” Patsy’s voice gathered injury, “of all days his mother had to choose that one to come along. And you know, Timmie, when Warren’s mother comes along, it isn’t any suit-case party. There are trunks to be checked and a maid to be hustled into the baggage-car, or wherever it is they put ’em; and there’s a dog to be fought about--Warren’s mother simply shrieks if they suggest putting _Toto_ in the baggage-car--and half a dozen smaller parcels to be lost and found a few times. Oh, I know!”--grimly. “I’ve had to play leading understudy in the scream; and there was Warren, tired to a frazzle--you know he _was_ tired, Timothy----”

“I dare say he was,” Timothy was now the party of admission, “probably very tired.”

“Coming into his own house---- Oh, well,” Patsy straightened her sturdy shoulders and dabbed at one eye after the other. “It’s all over now. I’ve left him, and where’s the good of talking about what might have been? It’s only in stories that what might have been ever _is_. In a story, now”--she arraigned the writer--“you’d have the hero and the hero’s mother appear out of nowhere and fall on the--er--pseudo-heroine’s neck, and offer a diamond necklace, while pseudo-heroine exchanged apologies; and the whole family would trip happily home on one another’s arms. Isn’t that so? Isn’t that just the sort of impossible thing you have happen in those Plain stories of yours?”

Timothy smiled, that same smile that had overcome Doromea’s prejudice against marriage. “If you were writing a Plain story, wouldn’t you have it end that way?” he asked, regarding diamonds unseeingly from behind his glasses.

“I--I never wrote a story,” began Patsy, fumbling with her veil.

Timothy looked at her. “You couldn’t help writing one,” he said, and his eyes were full of something that blinded Patsy’s. “At first, when there was just Claire and you and me, it was a story of adventure--of wild and thrilling dashes into the preserve-closet, and raids upon the neighbors’ cherry trees; then”--his voice softened--“it was a fairy-story, the story of a wonderful new world, all dazzling and radiant with tender possibilities. Wasn’t it?” he insisted, gently. “Wasn’t it for a while a fairy-story, Little Sister?”

“For--for a while, yes,” acknowledged Patsy, very low, “but----”

“But the castles had to fall,” went on Timothy, gazing wistfully at Doromea’s gleaming ring, “the castles had to fall, and the Fairy Prince had to become just a Plain Husband, or he would never have fitted this Plain, Plain World; and the story had to become a _real_ story--ten times more wonderful than a fairy-story, if one reads it with an eye to life’s permanent values. Do you know”--Timothy took off his glasses and looked at them meditatively--“we people who write things--that is, you and I and all the world--are simply pestered to death by false climaxes? Silly midget episodes jump up and insist that _they_--one after one--are the great Turning Point of all our Plot. Pats, my dear”--he regarded her seriously--“I make it a point not to believe ’em. I do really; I say to myself: here, if you, the Big You, can’t recognize your own theme and its outworking as you’ve planned it, as you want it, then you aren’t much of a writer, that’s all. If you want your story to end a certain way, and can’t make it end that way, just on account of the interference of some puny bit of an incident, I say, well, after all, Tim, you ought never to have been allowed to write. And so”--the gray eyes smiled deeper--“just out of self-respect I have to make the end right, you see.”

Patsy glanced at him suspiciously. “_That’s_ a story with a moral,” she asserted, though her voice was rather unsteady; “the most impossible kind of all.”

“It is,” confessed the writer, unabashed, “a story with a moral. But I refuse to admit it’s impossible. And if you will go back again to those rattles, I think you’ll refuse to admit it too. The----”

“Why”--Patsy had turned and walked a few steps back into the store--“why, it’s Warren! Warren, Timothy--and----”

“His mother is over looking at necklaces,” nodded Timothy, modestly. “Not diamond ones, but still----”

“She heard me say I wanted some pearls for my birthday,” Patsy murmured, guiltily. “She--she’s got her bag with her. They can’t have gone up to the house yet---- Timmie, Timmie dear--do you--do you suppose I might speak to Warren, just to tell him not to mind the pincushion note, you know--as long as he’s looking at rattles, Timmie----?”