CHAPTER V

The ridiculous part of Fred's dash for freedom was that she actually picked up a client or two! Of course, her commissions did not quite pay for the advertising that brought the clients—"But what difference does that make?" she demanded.

Arthur Weston, who had come up to the "office" on the tenth floor to check over a bill for her, said, "Oh, no difference, of course. You remind me of the old lady, Fred, who bought eggs for twenty-four cents a dozen and sold them for twenty-three cents. And when asked how she could afford to do that, said it was because she sold so many of them."

"I don't care," she said, doggedly; "when you begin you've got to put up something. I'm putting up my time. If I come out even—"

"You won't," he prophesied.

"Your old dames are coming to-morrow," she said. She had fastened Zip to the umbrella-rack and was sitting on her office table, showing a candid and very pretty leg in a thin silk stocking; she looked at him with the unselfconscious gaze of a child.

"They are to arrive at five, and I'm scared to death for fear that the walk to the Episcopal church is six feet short[Pg 57] of half a mile! I wish I had a motor to run around and look at places. Don't you think, as an investment, I could have a motor?"

"I do not!" he said. "Maitland made that alarming suggestion, and I told him not to put such ideas into your head."

"He's on the track of three Ohio girls who want five rooms and a bath, for light housekeeping, furnished. He's going to haul me round in his go-cart to look at some flats. Trouble is, I can't charge my full commission—they're poor. Students at the College of Elocution. Why do girls always want to elocute?"

"Why do they want to run real-estate offices? It's the same thing. Strikes me Howard hauls you round in his go-cart a good deal."

She shrieked with laughter. "Nothing doing! Nothing doing! I see your little hopeful thought. You've got me on your shoulders, like the aged Anchises, and you hoped that Howard might come to the rescue. Mr. Weston, I suppose your aunts, or cousins, or whatever they are, think I'm a freak?"

"Well, you are," he said; "I'll tell you what they think: they think (not having seen you) that you are a 'sweet girl who is doing something very kind for two old ladies.'"

"A 'sweet girl'! Me, a 'sweet girl'?"

"Don't worry. You're not."

"I suppose they think I am doing it to please you? Very likely they think I'm trying to catch you," she said, chuckling.

He looked at her drolly: "Well, you've caught me.[Pg 58] You are a perfect nuisance, Fred, but you do serve to kill time."

She slipped down from the table, her high-heeled, low-cut shoes clicking sharply on the floor, and, going over to the window, peered down into the ca?on of the street. Zip scrabbled up, leaped the length of his leash, jumped, pounced, then put his nose on the floor between his paws and wagged his hindquarters. "No, sir!" she told him, "not yet!" And he crouched down again, patiently curling a furtive tongue over the toe of her shoe. "Howard was to come round for me in his car at four," she said. "Zip! Stop licking my shine off! I hate unpunctual people." Coming back to her caller, she fumbled in the pocket of her coat for her cigarette-case. "Have one?"

He helped himself and approved the quality.

"I offered Mr. Tait one," she said, "and his hair began to curl!"

"My hair is perfectly straight."

"That's the beauty of you. Yet Tête-à-tête couldn't have given a reason for his horror, to save his life."

"I could."

She was plainly disappointed in him. "I thought better of you than that! There's no 'right' or 'wrong' about it."

"No, of course there isn't," he agreed; and she applauded him. "But there is a very excellent reason, all the same, why a girl shouldn't smoke."

"What?" she demanded.

"Makes her less agreeable to kiss."

"Well, I'll wait till somebody wants to kiss me," she said, gayly; "when they do, I'll give up cigarettes—and[Pg 59] take to a pipe!" She pulled down the top of her desk and slipped the loop of the puppy's leash on her wrist. "As for smoking," she confessed, "I'm not awfully keen on it. Sometimes I forget to open my cigarette-case for days! But I have just as much right to do it as you have."

The defiance made him laugh. "That's like your sex, insisting that, because we make fools of ourselves, you will make fools of yourselves. That's your principle in demanding an unlimited suffrage."

But Fred was not listening. "I'm afraid you must clear out," she said; "Howard must be on hand by this time."

"I wonder when you'll earn the cost of that desk?" he mused, and looked about the office, with its one big window that muffled the roar of the city ten stories below, and framed, black against a lowering sky, the far-off circle of the hills. It was a gaunt little room, with its desk and straight chairs, and its walls hung with real-estate maps. A vision of Mrs. Payton's fire-lit upholstery flashed into his mind, and made him smile. What a contrast! "But this interests Fred," he thought; "and the petticoated easy-chairs don't. And the only thing that makes life endurable is an interest." He wondered, vaguely, what interests he had himself. Certainly his trustee accounts were not very vital interests! It occurred to him, watching Fred thrust some long and vicious pins through a very rakish hat, that when she settled down and married Maitland he would lose a distinct interest. "I'll have to transfer it to her infants," he thought, cynically; "I suppose I'll be godfather to the lot of 'em, and she and Howard, in[Pg 60] the privacy of connubial bliss, will speculate as to how much I'll leave 'em— Damned if I leave them anything!" he ended, with a flare of temper.

"Come on," said Fred.

They went down-stairs together, and waited in the cold for five minutes until Howard came, brakes on, against the curb, in a great hurry, but not in the least apologetic.

"I stopped to look at some shells at Beasley's," he vouchsafed as Fred was climbing into the car; then opened his throttle, and Mr. Weston, standing on the corner, watched them leap away down the crowded street.

"Look at him trying to cut in ahead of everybody!" he reflected; "but she thinks he's perfect."

If Fred believed her cavalier perfect, that did not keep her from criticizing his driving. Howard, too, was entirely frank, and told her her nose was red. After that they talked about the Ohio girls, and when they reached South G Street, leaving Zip on guard in the auto, he went all over the flat with her, and said the kitchenette was a slick place, but the bath-room was small—"and dark," he objected, following her in, and peering about at the plumbing. Then they decided that they had just time to whiz around to the apartment she had arranged for Arthur Weston's cousins. "They are to come to-morrow," she said.

If Mrs. Payton had seen her Freddy that afternoon, she would hardly have known her. No girl of Mrs. Payton's youth could have been more efficient as to dust; and certainly few young ladies of that golden time would have[Pg 61] made better arrangements for storing away the kindling, nor would they have trampled a negligent plumber more completely underfoot than did Frederica Payton. She had sent Howard flying in his car to bring the man, and she stood over him until he finished his job; then packed him and his kit out of the apartment and washed his horrid finger-marks off the white paint. In the parlor, she sat down on the sofa, drawing up her feet and snuggling back against the cushions.

"This is mighty nice," she said, looking around with a satisfaction as old as the cave-dweller's who hung skins on dripping walls and spread rushes over stone floors.

Howard, sprawling luxuriously in an arm-chair, regarded her with admiration. "It's funny that you can do this sort of thing," he waved an appreciative hand at the details of curtains and table-covers.

She shrugged her shoulders. "I'm in it for loot. If I'd thought they'd wanted a silk hat in the hall, I would have got it for 'em."

Howard roared. "That's where a woman's instinct comes in. I couldn't have fussed."

"Cut out woman's instinct," she commanded; "there's no such thing. To try to please a customer is only common sense. As for me, I hate all this domestic drool of tidies." And they both believed that she did!

They sat there—or, at least, Maitland sat, and Frederica reclined, for nearly an hour; the empty flat, the wintry dusk, the innumerable cigarettes, all fitted into their talk....

At first Howard told her about the shells he had seen[Pg 62] at Beasley's. "I bought a gloria-matis," he said; "cost like the devil!"

Frederica frowned. "I don't see how you can bother with shells when the world is just buzzing with real things! For instance, Smith has come out for votes for women. Isn't that splendid?"

"He'd come out for votes for Judas Iscariot if it would put him in office," he said, sharply; "and let me tell you, Fred, research work, in any department of science, helps the world, finally, a blamed-sight more than most of this hot air that the reformers turn on. It isn't so showy, but one single man like Pasteur is of more permanent value than all the Smiths in our very corrupt legislature, boiled down!"

"Peeved?" she said, good-naturedly. "Why don't you say 'one single woman like Madame Curie'? Well, buy your old shells, if you want to!"

"I will," he said, grinning. "How's business?"

When she announced some small success, he said, wonderingly, "You are the limit!" And added what he thought of her pluck and her intelligence: "I never knew a woman like you!"

"All women are like me—when you let 'em out."

"No, they're not!" he contradicted, with admiring rudeness.

The rudeness pleased her, as, no doubt, the male cave-dweller's candor of fist or foot pleased the female cave-dweller. His praise and wonder were like wine to her. She wanted more of it. Curled up on the sofa, she grew more and more daring in her talk; her face, flushing with[Pg 63] excitement, was vividly handsome, and her mind was as vivid as her face; he could hardly keep up with her mind! She was an Intelligence to him, rather than a woman; and that was why he was totally unaware of anything unusual in the situation—the darkness and the solitude. There was absolutely no self-consciousness in him.

With her it was different—she was acutely self-conscious. Once a woman, bred in the tepid reticences of propriety, takes the plunge into free talk, the very tingle and exhilaration of the shock makes her strike out into still deeper water.... She talked about herself; of her life at home; of Mortimore—"He ought to have been killed when he was born," she said; "but, of course, he ought never to have been born."

"Of course," Howard said, gravely.

"It all came from ignorance on the part of women," she explained. "In Mother's day, people confused innocence with ignorance—and as a result, Mortimores were born. What do you think? The day Mother was married, her father said to her (she told me this herself!), 'Remember, Ellen, your husband's past life is none of your business.' Think of that! And poor Mother didn't know enough to know that it was the one thing that was her business!"

Her hearer concealed his embarrassed knowledge of that "past life" by nodding and frowning.

"From Mother's point of view," Frederica went on, contemptuously, "every vital thing is indelicate—I mean indecent," she corrected herself, with the satisfaction of finding a more striking word; "according to people like[Pg 64] Mother, a really refined baby would think it improper to be born!"

He laughed uproariously; he wished he could repeat that to Laura Childs, but of course he couldn't. However, the fellows would appreciate it. "As for babies," Fred said, with a shrug, "there's going to be lots of reform along that line. To merely rear children is a pretty poor job for an intellectual being. Did I tell you what I pulled off in a speech at our club?... 'The child is the jailer that has kept woman in prison.' Don't you think that's pretty well put?"

"Bully," he said.

Then she told him that she had found a bungalow out on the north side of the lake—"the unfashionable side; that place they call Lakeville; all camps. You know? It's just beyond Laketon, where the nice, useless rich people go." She was going to hire it for the summer, she said, and take occasional days off from business, and get up a rattling good speech on woman suffrage—"and sex-slavery. The abolishment of that is what we're really working for, and it will come when we face Truth! Until now, women have been fed up on lies." She would live by herself: "I don't mean to have even a maid; I'm going to be on my own bat. I suppose Grandmother will throw a fit; she'll say, 'It isn't done!' That's Grandmother's climax of horror. She'd have said it to every Reformer who ever lived."

"You don't mean to say you'll stay there at night, all alone?" he said, astonished.

"Of course. Why not?"

[Pg 65]

"Won't you be frightened?"

"Frightened? What of? Would you be frightened?"

When he was obliged to admit that he would not be what you'd call frightened, "but a girl—"

"Rot! Why should a girl be frightened? I shall take a revolver."

After that, naturally, Feminism became the engrossing theme, bringing with it, as usual, those shallow generalizations that so often belittle this vital and terrible subject, even as creeds sometimes belittle Religion. To Fred's mind, as to many serious minds, Feminism had a religious significance; but she did not know—arrogance never does know!—the stigma her conceit put upon her cause.

"Look at the unrest of women, everywhere. I don't mean the agitation for suffrage;—that is just a symptom of it. It is yeast," she said, with passion; "yeast! We can't help it; something is fermenting; something is pushing us. All kinds of women feel it. I know, because I go round to the factories and talk to the girls at their noon hour, trying to get them to organize—that's the only way we can get the men to do what we want. Organization! Women have got to get together! I've made a door-to-door canvass for our league, and I came up against this—this, I don't know what to call it! this stirring, among women. Every woman (except fat old dames whose minds stopped growing when they had their first baby) is stirred, somehow. Twenty years from now the women who are girls to-day won't be putting picture puzzles together for want of something better to do." The contempt in her voice revealed nothing to Howard[Pg 66] Maitland, who scarcely knew the poor, dull lady in the sitting-room on Payton Street; but he wondered why Fred's face suddenly reddened. "No; girls are doing things! When they get to middle age their brains won't be chubby. Look at the factories, and shops, and offices—all full of women! Girls don't have to knuckle down any more, and 'obey'; they can say 'Thank you for nothing!' and break away, and support themselves. I tell you what! this life servitude that men have imposed upon women of looking after the home, is done, done, for good and all! That sweet creature, 'the devoted wife,' is being labeled 'kept woman,'—but the ballot is the key to her prison door!"

"Bully simile," he said.

"But isn't it all queer—the change in things?" she said, her voice suddenly vague and wondering; "it's a sort of race movement, with Truth as the motive power. It's bigger than just—people. Even our parlor-maid, Flora, feels it! She wants to do something; she doesn't know what. (I wish she'd put her energies into laundering the centerpieces better, but I regret to say she has a soul above laundry.) Yes, things are stirring! It's yeast."

Such talk was new to Howard. Until now, his young Chivalry had concerned itself only with women's demand for suffrage—which, as Frederica Payton had very truly said, is only a symptom, alarming, or amusing, or divine, as you may happen to look at it—of the world-unrest which she called "feminism." He was keenly interested.

"Gosh, Fred," he said, soberly, as she ended with the assertion that Feminism was the most interesting thing[Pg 67] that had come into the Race Conscienceness since humanity began to stand on its hind legs—"gosh, I take off my hat to you!" His admiration was not so much for the thing she was trying to do, as for the fact that she was trying! She was doing something—anything!—instead of sitting around, like most people, in observant and disapproving idleness. He forgot her snub about his shells; his eyes were ardent with admiring assent to everything she said. "You are the limit!" he said, earnestly.

And she, speaking passionately her poor, bare, ugly facts—all true, but verging on lies, because no one of them was the whole Truth—going deeper into her adventure of candor, felt, suddenly, a quickening of the blood. She had an impulse to put out her hand and touch him—the big, sprawling, handsome fellow! His voice, agreeing to all she said, made her quiver into momentary silence, as a harp-string quivers under a twanging and muting thumb. That his assents, which gave her such acute satisfaction, were merely her own convictions, thrown back to her by the sounding-board of his good nature, she did not realize. The intellectual attraction she felt in him was hers. The other attraction, which was his, she did not analyze. She realized only that something seemed to swell in her throat and her breathing quickened. The newness of the sensation threw her off the track of her argument, which was to prove that women would save society by facing facts—"facts" being, apparently, the single one of sex.

"When I marry," Fred said, "nobody's going to pull that devilish bromide on me, that the man's past isn't my business. There'll be no Mortimores in mine! I[Pg 68] mean to have children who will push the race along to perfection!"

"I bet they will!" he said.

She sat up on the sofa, cross-legged, clasping an ankle with each hand, her eyes glowing in the dusk. "You've given me a brace!" she said.

"You've given me one! I'd rather talk to you than any man I know."

She put out her hand impulsively, and he gripped it until the seal ring on her little finger cut into the flesh and made her wince with pain and break away; but with the pain there was a curious pang of pleasure. She got on her feet with a spring, and, rubbing her bruised finger, gave a last look about the apartment.

"I hope the tabbies will like it. Heavens, Howard, do you think they'll smell cigarette-smoke? I suppose they'd have a fit if they discovered that the 'sweet girl' smoked cigarettes!"

"Do they call you a 'sweet girl'?" he said, and roared at the idea.

"Mr. Weston doesn't like me to smoke. It gave me quite a shock to find he was such a 'perfect lady.'"

"Oh, well, he's old. What can you expect? I like you to. You knock off your ashes like a kid boy."

"Open the window a second, will you?" Fred said; "that smoke does hang around.—Howard, I believe they'll think I'm trying to lasso Mr. Weston into marrying me! Poor old boy, you know when he was young, before the flood, some girl turned him down, and I understand he's never got over it. The cousins will think I'm trying to[Pg 69] catch him on the rebound! Funny, isn't it, how the elderly unmarried female is always trying to make other people get married? I think it's a form of envy; sort of getting what you want by proxy. Men don't do it."

"Men are not so altruistic," he said.

Frederica's face bloomed in the darkness, rose-red. They went out to the elevator, and dropped down to the entrance in silence. Howard, cranking his car, and getting a slap on the wrist that made him bite off a bad word between his teeth, thought to himself that Fred Payton was a stunner!

He said so that night to Laura Childs, when they were sitting out a dance at the Assembly. They had talked about his gloria-matis, and she had thrilled at its cost, and pleaded with him to show it to her. "I'm crazy to see it! Please!"

"Fred didn't care a copper about it," he told her, with some amusement. "She's sort of woozy on reforms."

Laura nodded. "Fred's great, perfectly great," she said, looking down at the toe of her slipper, poking out from her pink tulle skirt.

"She has a man's brain," he said.

"Now, why do men always say that sort of thing?" Laura objected, her eyes crinkling good-naturedly. "Brain has no more sex than liver."

Howard made haste to apologize: "'Course not! I only meant she's awfully clever, you know."

Laura agreed, a little wistfully: "I admire Fred awfully. Do you know, she talked to the girls in the rubber-factory out in Hazelton about the Minimum Wage? She wanted[Pg 70] me to go there with her, but I'd promised Jack McKnight to play tennis. Well, I'm afraid I wouldn't have gone, anyhow," she added, soberly; "those things bother Father, and it isn't as if I could accomplish anything, as Freddy can. If anybody asked me to make a speech, I should simply die. But Fred has no end of sand," Laura ended; her admiration was as honest as it was humble.

"Sand?" Howard said; "you bet she has sand! Why, she is going to take a bungalow out in Lakeville this summer, and live there all by herself. She wants to read and study, and all that sort of thing."

"By herself?" said Laura, really startled. "You don't mean without even a maid?"

"So she says."

"Aunt Nelly will never allow it! And, really, it wouldn't be safe. She ought to take Flora along, at least."

Upon which Howard boldly tried Fred's own argument: "Why shouldn't she be alone? She'll have a revolver."

"I wouldn't do it for a million dollars!" said Laura. "And, besides, nobody goes to Lakeville; it's awfully common."

"Fred is above that sort of thing," Howard said. For once the good-natured Laura was affronted.

"I don't pretend to be like Fred—" she began, but he interrupted her:

"You? Of course you're not like Fred! You couldn't do the things she does!"

Laura gave him a cool glance: "I promised this dance to Jack McKnight. Perhaps we'd better start in?"

[Pg 71]

"I'd like to wring his neck," Howard declared, rising reluctantly.

When she and Jack were half-way down the room she told him that there was a new engagement in the air. "The girl's perfectly fine, but the man makes me tired," said Lolly, lifting her pretty foot in the prettiest and daintiest kick imaginable.

"Tell us," Jack entreated, one hand holding hers, and the other spread over her young shoulder-blades.

"Oh, it isn't out yet," she said, "and I don't know that it's—really on—but I bet it—will be—pretty soon!"

And she tossed her head a little viciously.