CHAPTER XV

Except for the Lakeville ladies, so looked down upon by Flora, Fred had very few visitors that summer. Even Laura did not come very often, though Lakeville was only five miles from Laketon. Perhaps she was afraid of being asked questions. In September both girls were invited by a school friend to come to the seashore for two or three weeks, but Laura waited to know that Fred had declined the invitation ("I can't fool with Society. I'm on my job!" said Fred) before she, Laura, accepted it.

There was, however, one formal call which gave Frederica great joy; her grandmother and Miss Eliza Graham came over from the Laurels to see her—and she never behaved more outrageously! She told Mr. Weston afterward that she had had the time of her life joshing Mrs. Holmes. He assured her that she was an imp, but that he would gladly have paid the price of admission if he had only known that the circus was going to take place. He asked his cousin about it afterward, but her description of the scene was not so funny as Fred's. Indeed, it was rather pathetic—poor Freddy, fighting her grandmother, while Miss Eliza stood outside the ring, so to speak, and watched, pityingly.

"For there's nothing one can do for her, Arthur," Miss[Pg 173] Eliza told him; "she's got to get some very hard knocks before she'll give up advising the Creator how to manage His world."

She and Mr. Weston had found a deserted spot on the veranda at the Laurels, and she told him what she thought of Freddy. "It's a sort of violent righteousness that possesses the child," she said. "Where does she come from, Arthur? That mother! That grandmother! She must be a foundling."

"Her father had power. His righteousness was not very violent, but his temper was."

"She must make her mother very unhappy."

"Yeast makes dough uncomfortable, I suppose," he admitted.

"She's an unscrupulous truth-teller," Miss Graham said, and repeated some of the impertinently accurate things that Frederica, sitting in her ugly little living-room, with the Japanese fans on the walls, and yellow "Votes for Women" pennons over the doors, had flung at Mrs. Holmes. "Her grandmother said the 'women of to-day cheapened themselves'; to which she replied that 'the women of yesterday were dear at any price'!"

"She told me she had merely been truthful," Mr. Weston said. "Justifying herself on the ground of Truth is Fred's form of repentance. But the girl suffers, Cousin Eliza!"

"She'll have to suffer a good deal before she'll amount to anything," Miss Eliza said, dryly; "I wanted to shake her! Arthur, if you had any missionary spirit, you would marry her."

[Pg 174]

"But Cousin Mary says she is 'not a young woman who is calculated'—"

They both laughed. "Nonsense! If she gets a master, she'll make him happy. A good-natured boy won't do. The gray mare would be the better horse. Marry her and beat her."

"Maitland will have to do the beating," he said. But he could not evade her.

"Don't be a fool. Take her! I know you want her."

"I do," he confessed. "But the little matter of her not wanting me seems to be an obstacle."

Miss Eliza, her old eagle head silhouetted against the dazzle of the lake, meditated; then she said, "Is she engaged to Mr. Maitland?"

"No, but she's going to be. Besides, dear lady, I am forty-seven and she is twenty-six. Youth calls to Youth! Please don't suggest that she might prefer to be an 'old man's darling.'"

"You're not an old man. But the average young man—if he fell in love with her—would be under her thumb."

"Why do you say 'if'? Maitland has fallen in love with her, head over heels! He can't stop talking about her brains for five minutes at a time!"

Miss Eliza gave him a keen look. "Well, perhaps human nature has changed since my time. Then, a boy didn't fall in love with a girl's brains, though a grown man sometimes did. Cleverness in a girl is like playfulness in a kitten; it amuses a middle-aged man. The next thing he knows, he's in love!"

"Amuses!" Arthur Weston broke in, cynically; "to[Pg 175] 'amuse' a middle-aged man doesn't seem a very satisfying occupation for a girl. Don't you think she'd rather have a boy's ridiculously solemn devotion?"

"But don't I tell you?—Love comes next! And I know you are in love, because you are so foolish. Arthur, I'm ashamed of you! Do have some spunk. Get her! Get her! I don't believe she's in love with that boy."

He gave a rather hopeless laugh. "Oh, yes, she is. I haven't the ghost of a chance; besides—" he paused, took off his glasses, and put them on again, with deliberation—"besides, if I had a chance, I'd be a cur to take it. As you know, I had a blow below the belt. A man never quite gets his wind again, after a little affair like mine. It would be great luck for me to have Fred, but what sort of luck would it be for her to spend her life 'amusing' me?"

"Nonsense! I won't listen to such—" she paused, while three girls, romping along, arm in arm, swept past them, down the veranda. "Pretty things, aren't they?" she said, looking after them with tender old eyes; "how lovely Youth is!—even when it does its best to be ugly as to clothes and manners, like two of those youngsters. They didn't even see us, they were so absorbed in being young, bless their hearts! The outside one who bowed is a Wharton girl. She is a charming child, charming! And doing wonderfully at college. But those others—!"

"Awful," he agreed. "Cousin Eliza, what's the matter with women, nowadays?"

"Perfectly simple. They are drunk!"

"Drunk?"

"With the sudden sense of freedom. My dear boy,[Pg 176] reflect: When you were born—no, you're too young"—he waved a deprecating hand, but he liked the phrase—"when I was born—that's seventy-three years ago—women were dependent upon your delightful sex; so, of course, they were cowards and you were bullies. Oh, yes; there were exceptions! There were courageous women, and henpecked men. And, of course, cowardice didn't always know it was cowardly, and bullying was often nothing but kindness. But you can say what you please, women were not free! They had to do what their men wanted—or quarrel with their families, and strike out for themselves! And what was there for them to do to earn their living? Outside of domestic service, nothing but teaching, sewing, and Sairey Gamp nursing! When I was a girl I did not know enough to teach and I hated sewing. So, if I had wanted to do anything my father and mother didn't approve of, I couldn't have kicked up my heels and said, 'I'll support myself!' Besides, I shouldn't have dared. The Fifth Commandment was still in existence when I was young. But now," she ended, "that's all changed. Girls can kick up their heels whenever they feel like it!"

He laughed, and said that Fred Payton had kicked entirely over the traces.

"She's not the only one," Miss Graham said; "those three girls who passed us have done it. That nice Wharton child is going to study law, if you please! Yes, Freedom! It's gone to their heads; it's champagne on empty stomachs. Empty only for the last two generations—before that there were endless occupations to fill our stomachs.[Pg 177] (My metaphors are a little mixed!) When I was a girl, the daughters of a house, even when people were as well off as Father, always had things to do—'Duties,' we called them. But nowadays there's not enough housework to go round; so if girls are rich, they play at work in—in anything, just to kill time! Like your Miss Freddy."

"Fred is making a success of her real-estate business," he said; "I hadn't a particle of faith in it, but she's making it go."

"It doesn't matter whether you have faith or not; the change has come: she had to have something to do! That's the secret of the situation, and there's no use kicking against it. You men have just got to accept the fact of the change. All you can do is to fall back on the thing that hasn't changed, and never can change, and never will change. Give girls that and they will get sober!"

He looked puzzled.

"My dear boy, let them be women, be wives, be mothers! Then being suffragists, or real-estate agents, or anything else, won't do them the slightest harm. Marry them, Arthur, marry them!"

"All of them?" he protested, in alarm.

She laughed, but held her own. "I always tell Mary that all that nice, bad child, your Freddy Payton, needs, is a husband. Which Mary thinks is very indelicate in me. But it's true. As for suffrage that the women are all cackling about, I don't care a—a—"

"Damn?" he suggested.

"Copper," she reproved him. "I don't care a copper about it! I've always called myself an anti, but I never[Pg 178] really gave it much thought, one way or the other, until I went to an anti-suffrage meeting last year; that made me a suffragist! I declare, the foolishness of some of their arguments against voting went a long ways toward proving that perhaps they really haven't the brains to vote! Somebody said—Bessie Childs, I believe it was—that the ballot would take woman out of the Home. I reflected that Bridge took Bessie out of her home, for three or four hours once a week, and voting would take her out for three or four minutes, once a year. But I kept quiet until somebody intimated that the 'hand that rocks the cradle' is not competent, if you please, to deposit a ballot! Then I stood right up in meeting, and said, 'I'm only a poor old maid, but to my way of thinking, if the hand is as incompetent as that, it is far more dangerous to trust a cradle to it than a ballot!'"

"What did they say to that?"

"They said a cradle was every woman's first duty. 'But it would be most improper in me to have a cradle!' I said. I know they thought me coarse."

"So you are a suffragist?"

"Indeed I'm not! I went to a suffrage meeting, and really, Arthur, I was ashamed of my sex; such violence! such conceit! such shallowness! such impropriety! One of them said that any married woman whose husband did not believe in suffrage should leave him or else have branded on her forehead a word—I cannot repeat to you the word she used. And another of them said that all the antis were 'idiotic droolers.' I thought of my dear sister, and I just couldn't stand that! I said, 'Well, ladies, if[Pg 179] the women who don't want the vote are idiots, is it wise to thrust it upon them? Will idiots make good voters?'"

"You had 'em there."

"No; they just said 'the vote would educate women.' And as for women not wanting it—'why, we'll cram it down their throats,' one of them said. Nice idea of democracy, wasn't it? She explained that some slaves hadn't wanted freedom, but that was no reason for not abolishing slavery! And, of course, she was right. The suffragists have brains, you know, Arthur. Well, as a result of a dose of each party, I'm nothing at all—very much."

"You're agin' 'em both?" he suggested.

"Oh, I still call myself an anti, because the antis are, at least, harmless; but I really don't care much, one way or the other. No; the thing that troubles me isn't suffrage or non-suffrage; it's the fact that somehow women seem to be fighting Nature. That worries me. I know that Nature can be depended upon to spank them into common sense when she gets hold of them, but, unfortunately, men won't help Nature out. They don't like girls like Miss Payton—I mean, the young men don't. They don't like girls who are cleverer than they are; but no girl is cleverer than you! Do 'come out of the West, Lochinvar, come out of the West'!"

He laughed and shook his head. "My dear cousin, I am dead in love with you, so don't try to turn my affections in another direction. Besides, Howard Maitland is coming home the end of November."