CHAPTER XII

Spring had sauntered very slowly up the Ohio Valley that year. During a cold and slushy April, Frederica paid her advertising bills, and was assured that the Misses Graham would want her to engage an apartment for them in the autumn. Also, she found a flat for a lady with strikingly golden hair, who later departed without paying her rent. This created a disgruntled landlord and instructed the real-estate agent in the range of adjectives disgruntled landlords can use. In May she was almost busy in finding houses on the lake and in the mountains for summer residents; but her traveling expenses to and from the various localities were so large that she had to apply to her man of business for an advance from her allowance.

"Look here, Fred," he said, "you can't live on your future commission from Cousin Eliza. Don't you think you've had about enough of this kind of thing?"

"I do not!" she said. "You can sponge my head between rounds, but you can't stop the mill. I don't pull off the gloves till I see it through. And I'm twenty-two dollars ahead of last month!"

She had induced him to go with her and Zip to see the tiny furnished cottage she had hired for the summer[Pg 136] in Lakeville—the cheerfully vulgar suburb of Laketon where persons of her own sort played at farming. Lakeville was only a handful of flimsy frame houses scattered along under the trees close to the sedgy edge of the lake. Wooden piers ran out into deep water, and, when the season opened, collected joggling fleets of skiffs and canoes about their slimy piles. As yet, the houses were unoccupied, but the spirit of previous tenants, as indicated by names painted above the doors—"Bide-a-Wee," and "Herestoyou"—had been very social. Sentimental minds were confessed in "Rippling Waves," and "Sweet Homes." Fred's "bungalow," its shingled sides weathered to an inoffensive gray, was labeled, over its tiny piazza, "Sunrise Cottage."

"I think that's why I took it," she told Mr. Weston, when, having inspected its shoddy interior and paused on the porch to look at the far-off church spire of Laketon, they wandered down to a ledge of rock that jutted out into the lake; "women are going to raise the sun of freedom!"

"I hope they won't, accidentally, raise Cain," he murmured. "Fred, the lamp on your center-table almost put my eyes out! Do the Lakevillians really think that kind of junk beautiful?"

"They do. But don't be cocky; we thought it beautiful ourselves not so very long ago—if it was only expensive enough! Look at the parlor in Payton Street."

"That magenta shade with the autumn leaves on it is the most horrible thing I ever saw," he said, shuddering.

[Pg 137]

"I shall have lots of candles and a student's lamp to mitigate it," she comforted him.

They had settled down on the rock, Zip dozing against Fred's knee. It was an exquisite May afternoon. Everything was very still; once a bird fluted in the distance, and once, on the piazza of a boarded-up cottage, a chipmunk scurried through the drift of last year's leaves. A haze of heat lay on the water that crinkled sometimes under a cat's-paw of wind, and then lapped faintly in the sedges. The woods, crowding close to the shore, were showing the furry grayness of young oak leaves, and here and there a maple smoldered into flame. Frederica, absently poking a twig under patches of lichen and flaking them off into the water, was saying to herself that in about six months Howard Maitland would be at home.

"Lakeville is so unnecessarily hideous," Mr. Weston meditated; "I can't see why you should like it."

"Because my friends come here—people who work! I'm going to start a suffrage club for them."

"How grateful they will be!" he said. His amiability when he was bored was very marked.

"But I had to cave," Fred said, "about having Flora here when I stay all night. The Childs family felt they would be compromised if people in Laketon knew that Billy-boy's niece flocked by herself in Lakeville. The Childses are personages in Laketon! Aunt Bessie is the treasurer of the antis, and runs a gambling-den on Thursday afternoons—she calls it her Bridge Club. And Billy-boy has a Baconian Club, Saturday nights. My, how useful they are! As my unconventionality would injure[Pg 138] their value to society, I said I would hold Flora's hand. How much use do you suppose Flora would be if thieves broke in to steal?"

"She would be another scream. And you'll like to have her wash the dishes for you."

"Flora is too much in love to wash dishes well," Fred said. "Besides, I don't mind washing 'em, and I do it well. The idea that women who think can't do things like that is silly. We do housework, or any other work, infinitely better than slaves."

"'Slaves' being your mothers and grandmothers?"

Frederica nodded, prying up a piece of moss and snapping the twig off short.

"Oh, Fred, you are very funny!"

"Glad I amuse you. Pitch me that little stick under your foot."

He handed it to her, and she began to dig industriously into the cracks and crevices of the old gray rock. "The idea of calling Mrs. Holmes a slave is delightful," he said.

"She is a slave to her environment! Do you think she would have dared to do the things I do?"

"She wouldn't have wanted to."

"You evade. Well, I suppose you belong to another generation." Arthur Weston winced. "Don't you think it's queer," she ruminated, "that a man like Howard Maitland is satisfied to fool around with shells?" Whenever she spoke of Howard, a dancing sense of happiness rose like a wave in her breast. "Why doesn't he get into politics, and do something!" she said. Her voice was disapproving, but her eyes smiled.

[Pg 139]

"Perhaps he likes to keep his hands clean."

"Oh," she said, vehemently, "that's what I hate about men. The good ones, the decent ones, are so afraid of getting a speck of dirt on themselves! That's where women—not Grandmother's kind—are going to save the world. They won't mind being smirched to save the race!"

"Frederica," her listener said, calmly, "when that time comes, may God have mercy on the race. Your grandmother (I speak generically) thought she saved the race by keeping clean."

"And letting men be—" she paused to find a sufficiently vehement word. "It's the double standard that has landed us where we are; it has made men vile and kept women weak. We'll go to smash unless we have one standard."

"Which one?" he asked; "yours or ours?"

"You know perfectly well," she said, for once affronted.

"I only asked for information. There's no denying that there are members of your sex who rather incline to our poor way of doing things. Oh, not that we are not a bad lot; only, to be our equals, it isn't necessary to sit in the gutter with us. Continue to be our sup—"

"Let's cut out bromides," she said. "You (I, also, speak generically)—"

"Thanks so much!"

"—have pulled enough of your 'superiors' down to share your gutter. It's time now for men to get out of the gutter and come up to us."

"You breathe such rarefied air," he objected. He really wished that on a day of such limpid loveliness she would[Pg 140] stop undressing life. He liked to be amused, but once in a while Frederica was just a little too amusing, and he was in the faintest degree bored, as one is bored by a delightful and obstreperous child. He gazed dreamily into the spring haze, watched a ripple spread over the lake, and noted a leaning willow dip its flowing fingers into the water.

"Did you see that fish jump?" he asked.

Frederica gave a disgusted grunt. "Men are all alike. You talk common sense to them and they go to sleep!"
DID YOU SEE THAT FISH JUMP

"DID YOU SEE THAT FISH JUMP?" HE ASKED. FREDERICA
GAVE A DISGUSTED GRUNT

"My dear Freddy," he confessed, "you have enunciated a deep truth. The average poor devil of a male creature, toiling and slaving and digging into common sense to make a living, isn't very keen on having it crammed down his throat on his afternoon out. Not that I am that kind of person. I find your 'common sense' very diverting."

A little patch of red burned in her cheeks. "That's what has kept women slaves—'diverting' men! I believe you prefer fools, every one of you."

"We like our own kind," he teased her.

"Oh," she said, with sudden passion, "I am in earnest, and you won't be serious! This is a real thing to me, this emancipation of women. It means—a new world!"

"Yet this world," he began—the world before them, with its blue serenity of a gentle sky, its vitality of bursting buds and warm mists and cool, lapping water; the world of a woman's soul and body—was not this enough for any one? Why struggle for change? Why try to upset the existing order? And Frederica, speaking of such ugly things, was so very upsetting! As she spoke[Pg 141] she looked at him with the naked innocence which marks the mind of the reformer—that noble and ridiculous mind which, seeing but one thing, loses so completely its sense of proportion. The facts she flung at him he would have hidden from the eyes of girls. Yet he knew that they were facts.... He had protested that women should trust the chivalry of men, and she had burst out: "Thank you, I prefer to trust the ballot! 'Chivalry,' and women working twelve hours a day in laundries! 'Chivalry,' and women cleaning spittoons in beer-saloons! 'Chivalry,' and prostitution! No, sir! unless his personal interests are concerned, man's 'chivalry' is a pretty rotten reed for women to lean on!"

The crude words in which she swept away his comfortable evasions made him cringe, but he could not deny their accuracy, nor avoid the deduction that one of the reasons there continued to be "ugly" things in the world was that until now the eyes of women had been holden that they should not see them. Men had done this. Men had created a code which made it a point of honor and decency to hide the truth from women; to shield them, not from the effect of facts, but from the knowledge of facts!

Frederica's knowledge was dismaying to Arthur Weston, both from tenderness for her and from his own esthetic sensitiveness; it was all so unlovely!

"How do other men take this sort of talk?" he asked; "the Childs boys, for instance?"

"Bobby and Payton? I would as soon talk to Zip as to them! They are like their father; they have chubby[Pg 142] minds. Laura is the only intelligent person in that family. She gave in to Billy-boy about the parade," Fred said, regretfully, "but she did go with me last week when I talked suffrage to the garment-workers. I tell you what—it took sand for Laura to do that! Uncle William was hopping—not at her, of course, but at wicked Freddy; and Bobby and Payton cursed me out for leading Laura into temptation."

"How about Maitland?" he asked. He had taken Frederica's hand and was examining her seal ring. She let her fingers lie in his as lightly as though his hand had been Zip's head, and he found himself wishing that she were less amiable.

"Howard?"—her eyes brimmed suddenly with sunshine; "oh, Howard doesn't belong on the same bench with the chubby Childses! He thinks,—and he entirely agrees with me."

"Which proves that he thinks?"

She saw the malice of his question, and rather sharply drew her hand from his.

"When is he coming home?" Weston asked.

"November," she said, shortly, and gave a flake of lichen a vicious jab that tossed it out into the water.

"How's he getting along with his shells?"

"All right, I guess. I don't hear from him very often. He's left the region of mails. I've sent him a good many pamphlets and an abstract of a paper I'm writing for the annual meeting of the league. One of these days he'll stop puddling round with shells and do something, I hope. I won't let up on him till he does."

[Pg 143]

"Merely being a fairly decent fellow isn't enough for you?"

"Not nearly enough!"

"Oh, Fred, how young you are!" he sighed; then pulled Zip's tail and was snapped at.

Suddenly he looked her straight in the face. "Are you engaged to him?" he demanded, harshly.

"Heavens, no!" she said, laughing.

His hands tightened around his knees; he opened his lips, then closed them hard. "I almost made a fool of myself," he told himself, afterward. However, his possibilities for folly were not visible to Frederica, who continued to lay down the law as to the work a man ought to do in the world. "When we get the vote," she said, "we'll show you what a citizen's responsibilities are."

"Thanks so much," he murmured. "You are going to do all the things we do, I suppose?"

"Of course," she said, joyfully; "everything—and a lot you don't do because you are too lazy!"

"I suppose you will leave us the right to propose?"

"I'll share it with you," she said, and they both laughed.

"Oh, my dear Fred," he said, "I must come back to the chestnut: you are our superiors, and we like you to be. I suppose that's because we are born hunters and are keen for the unattainable. We won't bag the game if it roosts on our fists."

"Well," s he reassured him, springing to her feet, "I'm not going to roost on your fist; don't be afraid!"

"Try me," he said, under his breath. But she did not hear him.

[Pg 144]

"Come, Zippy, we must go home," she said, and extended a careless hand to Arthur Weston, as if to help him rise. He pretended not to see it.

("The next thing will be a wheeled chair!" he told himself, hotly.)