CHAPTER III

Somehow or other he did "put the office business through"; but the persuading of Mrs. Payton was a job of many days. So far as opinions went, he had to concede almost everything; of course Freddy's project was "absurd"; of course "girls didn't do such things" when Mrs. Payton was a young lady;—still, why not let Fred find out by experience how foolish her scheme of self-support was?

"It mortifies me to death," Mrs. Payton moaned.

"I don't like it myself," he admitted.

"What does Mr. Maitland say to it?"

"She says he says it's 'corking,'" Arthur Weston quoted; "I wish they would talk English! The smallness of their vocabulary is dreadfully stupid. They think it is smart to be laconic, but it's only boring. Do you think Fred cares about Maitland?"

"I wish she did, but she isn't—human! Rather different from my girlhood days! Then, a girl liked to have beaux. One of my cousins had a set of spoons—she bought one whenever she had a proposal. I don't think Freddy has had a single offer. I tell her it's because she cheapens herself by being so familiar with the young men. Not an offer! But I don't believe she's at all mortified. Well,[Pg 34] it's just part of the 'newness' of things. I dislike everything that is new! I wish Freddy would get married."...

"Why," Mr. Weston pondered, as, having wrung a reluctant consent from Mrs. Payton, he closed the door of No. 15 behind him, "why do we consider marriage the universal panacea?" But whether he knew why or not, he believed it was a panacea, and even plotted awkwardly to administer it to Frederica. Maitland was just the man for her; a good fellow, straight and clean, and with money behind him. The worst of it was that he could not be counted on to discourage Fred's folly; indeed, he seemed immensely taken by all her schemes; the more preposterous she was, the more, apparently, he admired her. He was as full of half-baked ideas as Fred herself! But there was this difference between them: Howard did not give you the sense of being abnormal; he was only asinine. And every first-rate boy has to be an ass before he amounts to anything as a man.

But Fred was not normal.

A week later, "F. Payton" had been painted on the index of the Sturtevant Building, and Arthur Weston, pausing as he got out of the elevator, glanced at the gilt letters with ironical eyes. He was about to let the panels of the revolving door push him into the street when Mr. William Childs entered and hooked an umbrella on his arm.

"Hey! Weston! Most interesting thing: do you recall the twenty-third Sonnet? You don't? Begins:
"'As an imperfect actor on the stage';

I've made a most interesting discovery!"

[Pg 35]

His prisoner, saying despairingly, "Really?" looked for a way of escape—but the crook of the umbrella held him.

"In a hurry? Hey? What? Well, I'll tell you some other time." Then the umbrella was reversed and pointed to the index. "Perfec' nonsense! What?"

"Girls are very energetic nowadays," Mr. Weston murmured, rubbing his arm.

"She'd better put her energy into housekeeping!"

"Then Mrs. Payton would have nothing to do."

"Well, then let her get married, and keep house for herself,—instead of laying down the law to her elders! She instructed me who I should vote for, if you please! Smith is her man, because he believes in woman suffrage. What do you think of that?"

"I think she's a good deal like you or me, when we want a thing put through."

"No such thing! Smith is the worst boss this state ever had. I told her so, and—Hey, there! Stop—I'm going up!" he called, wildly; and skipped into the elevator. "Tell her to get married!" he called down to Arthur Weston, who watched his ascending spats, and then let the revolving door urge him into the street. "There it is again," he ruminated, "'get married.' But girls don't marry for homes nowadays, my dear William. There are no more 'Clinging Vines.' Mrs. Payton is one of the last of them, and, Lord! what a blasted oak she clung to!" He had an unopened letter from Mrs. Payton in his pocket, and as he sauntered along he wondered whether, if it remained unopened for another hour or two, he could[Pg 36] lie truthfully to her and say he had not received it "in time" to come and talk over Freddy. "For that's what she wants, of course," he thought, dolefully; "it's a nice point of conscience. I'll go and sit in the park and think it out. By the time I decide, it will be too late to go—and then I'll open the letter! Why do women who have nothing to say, always write long letters?"—he touched the envelope with an appraising thumb and finger—"eight pages, all full of Freddy's sins!"

Rambling toward the park in the warm November afternoon Arthur Weston wondered just what was the matter with Fred. When, ten years before, he had gone abroad to represent the Payton interests in France (and, incidentally, to cure a heart which had been very roughly handled by a lady whose vocation was the collecting of hearts), Frederica had been a plain, boring, long-legged youngster, who disconcerted him by her silent and persistent stare. She was then apparently like any other fourteen-year-old girl—gawky, dull, and, to a blighted being of thirty-six, entirely uninteresting. When he came home, nine years later (heart-whole), to render an account of his Payton stewardship, it was to find with dismay that "old Andy," just deceased, had expressed his appreciation of services rendered by naming him one of the executors of the Payton estate, and to find, also, that the grubby, silent girl he had left when he went to Europe had shot up into a tall, rather angular woman, no longer silent, and most provokingly interesting. She was still plain, but she had one of those primitive faces which, while sometimes actually ugly, are, under the stress of certain[Pg 37] emotions, extraordinarily handsome. She was never pretty; there was too much thought in the jutting lines of her brow and chin, and her cheeks, smudged sometimes with red, sometimes rigidly pale, had no dimpling suggestion of a smile. Her gray, unhumorous eyes still held one by their nakedly direct gaze, even while a bludgeon-like truthfulness of speech made her hearers wince away from her.

Now, except for her rather tiresome slang, she never bored Arthur Weston; she merely bothered him—because he was so powerless to help her. He found himself constantly wondering about her; but his wonder was always good-natured; it had none of the bitterness which marked the bewilderment of her elderly relatives, or the very freely expressed contempt of her masculine cousins. Her man of business felt only amusement, and a pity which made him, at moments, ready to abet her maddest notions, just to give the wild young creature a little comfort. Yet he never forgot Mrs. Payton's pain; for, no matter whether she was reasonable or not, he knew that Freddy's mother suffered.

"I'd like to shake Fred!" he said; "confound it, I run with the hare and hunt with the hounds!"

In the park, in his discouragement at the whole situation, he sat down on one of the concrete benches by the lake, and looked at the children and nursery-maids, and at two swans, snow-white on the dark water. He wished he could feel that Fred was all right or her mother all wrong; but both were right, and both were wrong. Nevertheless, he realized that Fred's suffering moved him more than[Pg 38] Mrs. Payton's. Think of having the "veiled intellect" in the ell, "shuffling round" all the time! "But that's life," he reminded himself. Duty handcuffs all of us to our relations. Look at the historic Aunt Adelaide, who wouldn't take any of her beaux—there were more of them every time Mrs. Payton talked of Fred's shortcomings! Aunt Adelaide had turned her beaux down because of this thing called Duty, a word which apparently conveyed nothing whatever to the mind of her grandniece Miss Frederica Payton, who, however, had her own word—Truth. A word which had once caused her to describe Aunt Adelaide's self-immolation as "damned silly."

Mr. Weston, looking idly at the swans curving their necks and thrusting their bills down into the black water, felt that though Fred's taste was vile, her judgment was sound—it was silly for Aunt Adelaide to sacrifice herself on the altar of a being absolutely useless to society. Then he thought, uneasily, of the possible value to Aunt Adelaide's character of self-sacrifice. "No," he decided, "self-sacrifice which denies common sense isn't virtue; it's spiritual dissipation!"

Then his mind drifted to Laura Childs; Laura was not so hideously truthful as Fred, and her conceit was not quite so obvious; yet she, too, was of the present—full of preposterous theories for reforming the universe! Her activities overflowed the narrow boundaries of domesticity, just as Fred's did; she went to the School of Design, and perpetrated smudgy charcoal-sketches; she had her committees, and her clubs, every other darned, tiresome thing that a tired man, coming home from business, shrinks from[Pg 39] hearing discussed, as he would shrink from the noises of his shop or factory. "'The new wine's foaming flow'!—I should think Billy-boy would spank her," Weston thought, sympathetically. Furthermore, Laura detected, with affectionate contempt, the weak places in her elder's armor of pompous authority. He had heard her take off her father's "perfec' nonsense"! Her comments upon her mother's lazy plumpness were as accurate as they were disrespectful. Imagine girls back in the '70's, or even the '80's, doing such things! Yet Laura differed, somehow, from Fred; she was—he couldn't formulate it. He looked absently at the babies, and the nursery-maids, and then the dim idea took shape: you could think of Laura and babies together, but a baby in Frederica's arms was an anomaly. Why? After all, she was a female thing; you ought to be able to picture her with a baby. But you couldn't. "I wish," Arthur Weston began;—but before he could decide exactly what he wished, out of the brown haze across the park came young Maitland, swinging along, as attractive a chap as you would see in a day's work. He hailed the older man joyously, and, standing up before him with his hands in his pockets, began to josh him unmercifully.

"Is She late? I bet She's jealous of all these dames with white caps on! You should choose a more secluded spot."

"She is very late, Howard, and she will be later. She has got to have little curls in the back of her neck, and be afraid of sitting here without a chaperon. And she must have rubbers on, because there is no surer way of taking[Pg 40] cold than by having damp feet. And she must do all that all her great-aunts have done. I won't accept her on any other terms. So you see, I shall have to wait some time for her. In fact, I have given her up. Sit down. I want to talk to you."

Maitland sat down, and said he thought one of those hoop-skirted, ringleted damsels would be a good deal of a peach. "You see the photographs of 'em in old albums, and they certainly were pretty things."

"Howard, Freddy Payton's going into business. Did you know it?"

"Yes; she's a wonder!"

"She is," the other man agreed, dryly.

"I was talking to Laura Childs about her last night, and she told me how tough it was for her at home,—you know?"

Mr. Weston nodded.

"And her mother is an anti!" Howard said, sympathetically. "I've only seen Mrs. Payton once or twice, but it struck me she was the anti type. Not very exciting to live with."

"She does show considerable cerebral quietude," Weston admitted, chuckling.

"Did you ever make a call in the Payton house, and see old Andy Payton's silk hat on the hat-rack?"

"I have. But I'm not afraid of it;—there are no brains in it now."

"Well, I told Laura I thought she was the finest woman I knew," Maitland said, earnestly.

"Who? Lolly?"

[Pg 41]

"Heavens, no! Fred. She's no Victorian miss, I tell you what!"

"The Victorians would send her to bed on bread and water."

"I heard her make a speech to those striking garment-women," Fred's defender said; "she told 'em to get the vote, and their wages would go up. It was fine."

"Whether it was true is immaterial?"

Howard did not go into that. "And then, about morals; she talks to you just like another man. There's none of this business of pretending she doesn't know things. She knows as much about life as you or I."

"Oh, I don't pretend to know as much as you," Arthur Weston deprecated, lifting a humorously modest eyebrow.

"She talks well, too, doesn't she?" Howard rambled on; "I don't know what she's talking about sometimes, she's so confoundedly cultivated. The other day I said something about that nasty uplift play that they tried to pull off at the Penn Street Theater; and then I jerked myself up, and sort of apologized. And Freddy said, 'Go ahead; what's eating you?' And I said, 'Oh, well, I didn't know whether I ought to speak of that sort of thing.' And she said, 'Only the truth shall make us free.' That's out of the Bible, I believe."

Mr. Weston nodded. "I know the book. I've even read it, which is probably more than either you or Fred have done. I don't think it says the truth shall make you free—and easy; does it?"

Howard laughed, and got on his feet. "I'm going to beat up business for her. I took her round in my car to[Pg 42] look up apartments for those relations of yours. Why doesn't Mrs. Payton have a car? Haven't they money enough?"

"Oh, yes. But that poor creature, the brother, has to go out in a carriage. An auto would excite him, I suppose."

"I see. I told Fred she ought to have a little motor of her own, just as a matter of business."

"Hold on!" Frederica's trustee remonstrated, in alarm. "Take her in your car, if you want to, but please don't suggest one for her. She'd have to put a mortgage on her office furniture to pay for a week's gasoline! Look here, Howard—don't stand there like the Colossus of Rhodes, looking down at me as if I only weighed as much as one of your legs—tell me this: don't you see that this business of Fred's earning her living is perfectly artificial? She has a little income, and she can live on it; and when her mother dies, she'll have all the Payton money. So it is entirely unnecessary for her to go to work, to say nothing of the fact that she won't earn enough to buy her shoe-strings."

"Oh, but," the young man burst out, "look at the principle involved! If you live on inherited money, you're a parasite. I know I do it myself," he confessed, frankly, "but I'm going to work as soon as I can get a job. I'm going in for shells. And I believe in work for a woman just as much as for a man. The trouble is that when a girl has money, there isn't any real work for her, so she has to manufacture an occupation—like this social-service stunt at the hospitals they're so hot on nowadays. Joe[Pg 43] Gould—he's an interne—he told me the most of 'em were nuisances. But, oh, how they enjoy it! They just lap it up. It makes me a little fatigued to hear 'em talk about it," he said, yawning. "Laura Childs doesn't talk much, but Gould says the patients like to have her come round, because she's good to look at. But with most girls it isn't real. And if a girl doesn't do real things, if she just amuses herself, she'll go stale, just like a fellow. Fred put that up to me," he explained, modestly. "I wouldn't have thought of it myself."

"I bet you wouldn't!" Arthur Weston said; "but don't you see? Fred's own occupation isn't real."

"She's rather down on me because I'm not in politics," Howard said, drolly; "did you ever notice that reformers don't take other people's stunts very seriously? Fred has no use for shells. Laura thinks my collection is great. But Fred says that it's only an amusement."

"You might do worse," the older man told him; "but never mind that. What I want to know is, why don't some of you fellows brace up and ask Freddy to marry you?"

"She wouldn't look at any of us. I don't know any man who could keep up with her mentally! You ought to hear her talk."

Mr. Weston raised a protesting hand. "Please! I've heard her."

Maitland laughed and strode off into the dusk, leaving Arthur Weston to sit and look at the swans. The nursery-maids and perambulators had gone; the Chinese pagoda on the artificial island showed a sudden spark of light, and[Pg 44] the arc-lamps across the park sputtered into the evening haze like lurching moons. The chill of the water and the night made him shiver. That youngster was so big and up-standing and satisfied with life! And certainly he was in love with Fred.

"Then she'll be off my hands," Fred's man of business said; "what a relief!"

And life looked as bleak and uninteresting as the cold dusk of the deserted park.