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Helen Waldo Mitchell

335 Embarcadero Road
Palo Alto, California

M^^^

^ff/

Gift of

J. Pearce Mitchell

STANFORD

UNIVERSITY

LIBRARIES

THE THOROUGHBRED

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■1 i:- ■.:

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e^z^^^

coftrioht 1917
The Bobbs-Meulux Comf^avt

wnnm or

•RAUNWORTH A OO.

BOOK MANUFAOTURCNB

MI0OKI.VN. N. V.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I On Edge 1

II The Insult 91

III The Mornino After 47

IV Exploration . . > 73

V The New World 95

VI When He Came Home 134

VII Interlude 145

VIII Germination 168

IX Alfred, Meanwhile 178

X Intervention 211

XI In THE Dare 238

XII The Eleventh Hour 94,9

THE
THOROUGHBRED

CHAPTER I

ON EDGE

WHEN Celia heard his latch-key, she sang
out from her room, the open door of which
was at the head of the stairs :

"You'll have to fly, Fred. It's a quarter to seven
and they're coming at half past."

A minute later, realizing that he had not an-
swered, that there had indeed been no sound at all
since the click of the closing door, she called:

"It's you, isn't it?"

^TTes, it's me," she heard him say. And then
came the swish of his evening papers and the clat-
ter of the big buttons on his overcoat as he dumped

COPTKIOHT I91T
Trwm BoBBS'BfEEUlX CoMPAXT

THE. THOROUGHBRED

it carelessly on the oak settle at the foot of the
stairs.

But there was another silence after that. What-
ever was he doing down there? She even arrested
the movement of her lamb's-wool so that she could
listen better. Then, with a frown (not an ill-
tempered frown; a rueful one of exasperated pa-
tience, which one saw pretty often in her face when
she was talking to, or about, her husband) she
started toward the door to investigate. But before
she had taken more than a step or two in that direc-
tion she heard him lumbering up and went back to
her dressing-table.

The glimpse of the doorway that she got in her
mirror showed her that he had stopj>ed there, but
even without that, she could have felt him looking
at her. So, without turning, she greeted him with
a good-humored "Hello," and added, "You heard
what I said, didn't you? It's nearly seven and
they're coming at half past."

"Are there people coming to dinner? All right."

His voice was stiff with preoccupation — hardly

ON EDGE

articulate. He might have been talking in his
sleep.

She shot a glance at him over her shoulder.
"You don't mean to say you'd forgotten all about
the dinner, Fred!"

In that same level voice, with neither surprise
nor contrition in it, he admitted that he had. ^^But
it's all right," he repeated. "There's plenty of
time."

"Not if you want to shave in the guest's bath-
room," she warned him. "You'll have to be out of
there with all your lathery things, and clear up
after yourself, before a quarter past, because the
Colliers are driving out from town and they may be
a little early. And I can't spare Marie to pick up
after you, because I'm going to use her myself."

He said "All right" again, in that same dull,
half -conscious sort of way, so that she whipped
round upon him energetically.

"For heaven's sake, Fred, wake up and be hu-
man! Go down-stairs and get yourself a drink.
That sleep-walking way of yours is growing on you

THE THOROUGHBRED

and you've no idea how maddening it is!" She
made as if to turn back to her dressing-table, but
faltered. "Nothing's — ^happened, I suppose," she
'said.

He answered, "No. Nothing's happened." And
added below his breath, "That's it."

She didn't hear the last two words and would
hardly have understood them if she had. But the
look and the tone were unmistakable.

"Oh, I know, you poor old dear !" she said. She
meant her voice to sound sympathetic, but in spite
of herself, the words came out petulantly, and a
realization of this made her add, "You know, don't
you, Fred, that I wouldn't keep you going like this
if I didn't think it was really good for you to buck
up and forget your worries for a while? You do
slump so when we're just together and there's noth-
ing to do. And I know that doesn't help you, and
it's deadly for me. Don't you think you're better
in the morning if you've forgotten to worry for a
while at night? You don't think I'm just a selfish
beast, do you?"

ON EDGE

He said, "No. It's all right. I'll buck up and
enjoy your party." But instead of going out of
the room, he came into it ; came up close behind her
and took her bare arms in his hands. "There's
time enough to give a chap a kiss, isn't there?"

She recognized his attempt to make the request
sound good-humored and casual; as if what he
asked for were nothing but the affectionate symbol
good manners entitled him to. But even without
the tell-tale evidence afforded by the edge in his
voice and the look of his eyes in the mirror, just
on the basis of long experience with him, she'd have
known better. There seemed always to be some-
thing very inviting about her for him at just this
stage of her toilet; it was the contrast, perhaps,
between what was so completely finished and what
was not yet begun, that added piquancy to her
other charms ; between the highly professional "do"
on her hair — (it was reddish brown, but you needed
a strong light to be made aware of the downright
red there was in it. Under a milder illumination
its brown looked merdj warm. She had a lot of it

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^^ W^ M ^ ^ «** *^ ** stepped back.

ON EDGE

Indeed the Impact of a good muscular push would
have been no more effective of her purpose. She
added in a tone of fretful apology, "There isn't
time to fool, Fred, really. It's seven o'clock. Do
run along."

She knew quite well that it was not because he
smelled smoky, nor because there wasn't time for
the embrace he wanted, that she had turned him out
like that. If she'd been more indifferent and less
in love with him, she wouldn't have minded.

It was a very old instinct in her, as old as any-
thing about herself that she could remember — as
old as the first starched frock of her childhood, to
hate being rumpled. She knew that. But she did
not at all realize the first-class importance of it.
Her whole development during more than a score of
years had been profoundly modified by it. It is in-
teresting to speculate whether the instinct worked
from within out, or from without in. Was it, td be-
gin with, just a sensuous, tactile delight in smooth
surfaces of fine texture that kept her aloof, in her
play, from all that clasped tight, gripped hard —

THE THOROUGHBRED

and left marks and creases? And had the thing
gradually worked in to her soul? Or was the child-
ish impulse to keep everything at arm's length and
finger's tip, the outer sign, merely, of something
that lay, from the beginning, at the very core of
her? It matters very little. The important thing
is that the two surfaces of her, the outer and the
inner, corresponded — ^whichever it was that had
shaped the other — and that they both were only
surfaces.

It had not been, in her childhood, that she lacked
energy to play, didn't want to play; and it occa-
sionally happened that the energy bottled up
reached a pressiure and the want an urgency that
carried her off, had her crumpled, panting before
she knew it. When that happened, she ran wild
for a while. Well, no more was it, now she was
grown, that she was incapable of strong emotions.
Nor was it the emotions themselves that she re-
sented ; it was their power to tumble and ruffle that
smooth, fine-grained surface of hers. She hated
being made to cry, or blush, or tremble^ hated the

ON EDGE

drum of ihe ptdse in her throat and ears. So, when
she could, she held at arm's length experiences she
suspected of the power to produce these effects.

Like most radical instincts, it seldom obtruded
on her consciousness. She'd have denied, quite sin-
cerely, that it had anything to do with the major
decisions of her life ; with, to take the supreme case,
her marriage with Alfred Blair. But it did have a
lot to do with it. It also explained the slight sensa-
tion of surprise that ran around her circle of friends
when her engagement to him was announced.

He was perfectly eligible, of course. Only not
just the man they'd have expected Celia French,
with her exaggerated fastidiousness, to select.

Alfred Blair was a man of whom every one spoke
well. But, in speaking well of him, they were
likely to use rather uninviting adjectives — self-
made, steady, industrious.

He was steady and industrious, and the adjective
self-made was, perhaps, justified by the fact that
though he was a licensed architect, and a skilful
engineer, he was ornamented by no college degrees.

THE THOROUGHBRED

He'd finished up his formal education in one of
Chicago's technical high schools, got a job at nine-
teen with a firm of contracting engineers that spe-
cialized in grain-elevators and certain other forms
of warehouses, factories and markets. At twenty-
five, when his big opportunity came, he had the
audacity to grasp it; borrowed every cent of his
mother's little fortune, and launched himself in a
similar business of his own. His first big contract,
which had given him his opportunity, had enabled
him to pay back his mother's loan with a consider-
able increment as her share of the profits (he had
insisted upon this) and left him established. At
thirty-five, when he and Celia were married, he had
ten successful years behind him and the assured
sense of power that success brings.

A man of more exuberant manners, on the
strength of a record like that, would have been
called brilliant. Blair's quiet, steady, unoma-
mental way made the adjective impossible; caused
him to be siunmed up, by casual acquaintances at

ON EDGE

least, In a set of terms which didn't account for him
at all.

The thing that made it all the easier for persons
who had mastered a social skill to patronize him,
was that he was much too open-minded to despise
the things he knew he lacked and too simple to
pretend to a mild contempt of them. He wasn't
ashamed to show an almost wistful admiration of
and desire for the graces and refinements of life.
Which accounted amply, of course, for his falling
in love with Celia French.

But what attraction had he for Celia? The less
affectionate of her acquaintances had, of course, an
explanation ready to hand. The Frenches had
never been so well-to-do as they tried to look. Celia
had never had a proper dress allowance and had
had to do a lot of contriving even to go through
the motions of paying off her social obligations.
Here was a decently presentable man with plenty of
money. It was as simple as two and two.

Her real friends resented this imputation hotly.

THE THOROUGHBRED

When you got to know Alfred Blair, you found
him singularly attractive. He had such a straight
way of looking, and speaking, and doing things.
He had a pleasantly modulated voice. He had, ac-
cording to one or two enthusiasts, real tact and
charm. The question whether she'd have married
him, had he not' been prosperous, was a perfectly
barren one. Alfred Blair would never have asked
her to.

But not even her most intimate friends hit upon
the one decisive quality about him that had seen the
girl, happily and without misgiving, through a
three-months' engagement and the beginnings of
their married life. This was a touch of timidity
about him, almost reverent, that kept him from com-
ing too close too soon.

Celia was twenty-six when she met him, and had
had experience enough with her own amatory emo-
tions to believe she understood them. She h^d been
engaged once and half -engaged another time, to
say nothing of an indefinite number of yoimg men
— ^three or four, anyway — ^who had come up to

ON EDGE

fhe point where she had had to take a line with
them. She probably would have engaged herself to
marry the second man, had not her break with the
first made her wary.

That experience with her first lover had been a
shock. Her promise to marry him had transformed
him unbelievably into a stranger, and her feeling
for him, which she had confidently diagnosed as
true love, had curdled overnight into an active
aversion. The thing that led to her dismissal of
the second man was a lack of confidence in herself,
rather than in him. She'd thought a good deal and
asked a few questions, and profound and disquiet-
ing misgivings were the result.

And then came Alfred Blair, who put the mis-
givings to flight. The thing he'd given her first
was an unfathomable sense of security. All the
facts about him fitted in, of course; that he was
older, that he was self-disciplined, and, it can not
be denied, that he was prosperous. She tested him,
cautiously at first, then with growing confidence.
The little privileges she gave him, she freely am-
id

THE THOROUGHBRED

plified when she found he never tried to amplify
them for himself. These restraints never led her
to doubt the genuineness of his passion for her.
That was plain enough for the blind to see. But
the will that reined it in was supreme.

Her new engagement and her marriage were
wonderful restoratives to her confidence. She felt
her attitude to her two former lovers, which had
caused her more doubts and unhappiness than she
was willing to admit, triumphantly justified. Her
instincts had not been wrong after all. Happiness
didn't necessarily hurt nor deface. For a while she
was utterly content, and her contentment was spiced
by a mild pity for pretty much all the rest of the
world, and especially for the girls who had married
those two former lovers of hers.

It was from an unexpected quarter that her
Nemesis began creeping up on her — the unruly,
Irrepressible growth within herself of a passion for
her husband. She found the fine silken fabric of
their life imperiled by impulses of her own that ter-
rified her. Jealousy was one of them — ^utterly

ON EDGE

without foundation in fact, she knew, which made
it all the more terrifying.

There was little Nora Brice, for example, some-
where about twenty, whose people had lost all their
money, and who, as much from inclination as from
necessity, gave dancing lessons. The Blairs and
two or three couples of their friends had her in,
occasionally, to keep them up to the minute, and
she and Alfred had taken an innocently shameless
fancy to each other. She laughed at him — treated
him like a boy, proved to him, to his intense aston-
ishment, that he could dance as well as anybody,
and, under the stimulus of the phonograph, pol-
ished off a facet of him that nobody had dreamed
existed.

Celia's line, of course, was good-humored amuse-
ment, and she would, she felt, have been irretriev-
ably shamed had any one discovered, especially had
her husband discovered, the true emotions her
manner masked. But she could no more help feel-
ing those sharp stabs of pain than she could have
resisted the neuralgic twinges of a bad tooth. Jeal-

THE THOROUGHBRED

OU8J was not the only feeling, either, that shook
and gripped and dismayed her.

So, from whatever motive you like to name it
(she tried hard not to name it cowardice), she clung
to the thing that had once not been a mask — ^the
cool aloofness, the fastidiousness, the kindly af-
fectionate superiority; went on pointing out, with
humorous tolerance, his little mistakes; maintained
the position which he had once so eagerly acqui-
esced in and had never tried to change, that her
duty toward him was to refine and civilize him;
induce him to appreciate the value of the orna-
mental and frivolous aspects of life ; get him sup-
pler — ^more, as she used to say, human.

There had come within the last few months, and
within a year of their marriage, a change in him
which made this attitude of hers all the harder to
maintain. Something seemed to be undermining
that quiet confidence in himself which, when she had
first met him, had been his most distinguishing
characteristic. She knew, of course, that he had
business worries, due to the conditions created by

ON EDGE

fhe outibreak of fhe war. But then, the war had
affected everybody. All their friends groaned and
joked about their poverty ; affected an extravagant
ignorance as to where their next meal was coming
from. But they all went on living, as far as she
could see, in just about the same old way.

There was no reason to suppose that Fred was
any harder hit than the others. Indeed, he talked
very much less about hard times than the other men
did. He had, two or three times lately, looked
pretty solemn over bills, to be sure ; hflul asked, with
no jocular undertone, how much she'd paid for that
rose-colored evening frock, and had made a queer
noise like an audible shudder, over an offhand re-
mark of hers about the possibility of trading in
their car for a this year's modeL

Tliat she had not taken any of these signs more
seriously was due to the fact that she supposed all
husbands m€Mle themselves unpleasant on the sub-
ject of domestic expenditure. Her married friends
of longer standing seemed to accept this convention
quite light-heartedly, and burlesqued a lively terror

THE THOROUGHBRED

over the effect of all of their more ornamental pur-
chases on their respective husbands. Besides, Celia
knew she wasn't extravagant, really. It couldn't
be that that plunged her husband into the brooding
melancholy that seemed to envelop him whenever
circumstances gave it a chance.

But this belief, quite honestly achieved, didn't
help her much; because the melancholy was there.
Many a time she'd surprised a haggard look, al-
most a despairing look, in his eyes, that all but
brought the tears to her own. And the impulse
that came to get her arms around him tight, to
demand to be told what the trouble was — ^all about
it clear down to the bottom, would be almost irre-
sistible. But the fear of losing her own self-
control, going to pieces, crying, making a damp,
unpleasant little fool of herself, always restrained
her — ^had up to to-night at any rate. She'd always
stiffened against it. In order not to go soft, she'd
become brusk — ^bullied him a little, urged him to
cheer up, dragged him off to the theater or a four
of bridge with the Calvins around the comer.

ON EDGE

Like all situations between Intimates, this be-
tween them was a product of a thousand small ac-
cretions. Had he come home six months ago with
the look she'd seen In his face to-night, her wall of
resistance would have been shattered. The troubled
flood of compassion pent up within her would have
engulfed him. But he wasn't so very different to-
night from what he had been this morning, or a
week ago; not so different but that she could turn
back to the face In the mirror, after telling him to
run along, and go on with the minor Improvements
In It, just as she had been doing when she heard his
latch-key.

Only she eyed that mirrored face now with a
hard alertness, as an old sergeant-major might
watch a recruit turning blue under fire, daring the
eyes to brim, or the lips to tremble. Her hands
began trembling and she gripped them together
fiercely, then slackened their clasp and set them to
work again.

When Marie, the maid, came up-stairs to hook
up the rose-colored gown, the voice In which Cella

THE THOROUGHBRED

questioned her as to the state of preparedness in
the dining-room sounded remote and small to her
own ears, though to Marie herself, so far as one
could tell, it sounded natural enough.

She stirred sharply — ^a movement like anger —
when she heard her husband come out of his room
and walk steadily down the stairs, without pausing
at her now closed door for a word. It was not the
omission that made her angry, but the sharp con-
traction of her own heart that it caused — ^the lump
that it brought in her throat.

CHAPTER n

THS INSULT

IT was eleven o'clock that night before she saw
him again, except in the presence of their guests.
And during all those hours, whenever her gaze
rested upon her husband's face, and whenever his
voice came clearly to her ears in a lull of the voices
of the others, heart and throat felt that same clutch
followed by the same dull sense of outrage that this
should be so. And all the while her voice went on
sounding small and far away, and her smile felt
stiff.

As a matter of objective fact, she knew that she
was in good form. Howard Collier, at her right,
being a comparative stranger, did not offer, per-
haps, a fair test of her powers. He'd probably
have been more or less impressed anyway. But that
Carter Worthing, on her left — Carter, the town

THE THOROUGHBRED

bachelor, who, on coming into his inheritance fifteen
years ago, had quit work and devoted himself to
the graceful evasion of matrimony — ^that he should
betray an uneasy preoccupation with what she was
saying to Howard Collier, while Martha Walters,
at his left, was trying her prettiest to flirt with him,
and should fairly snatch at the smallest straw of an
opportunity to turn back to her, was an indication
worth paying attention to.

But the recognition of this fact brought her
none of the mild cool elation sheM naturally have
felt. It hardened, excited — ^almost exasperated her.
It was, perhaps, responsible for the attitude she
took when the topic they were all discussing these
days came up, the Grahams' divorce. Perhaps, too,
it led her to put edge enough into her voice so that
all the table stopped to listen, and presently
joined in.

"Oh, I'm not on his side," she said. "I never
liked George Graham very well, and hardly knew
him at all, anyway. But I don't see what there
is to get so excited about. Three years ago, when

THE INSULT

he married her, Dora Graham was a raving beauty.
Look at her now! I don't think it's so very sur-
prising, what he did."

Two or three voices took issue with her simul-
taneously. What was the "for better, for worse*'
clause in the marriage service for, if not to cover
such a case? Did she seriously mean to say (this
rather solemnly from Carter) that a wife's loss of
her beauty justified her husband in being unfaith-
ful to her?

Celia said no, she didn't mean that, of course.
"But Dora — ^why Dora was her looks, and her looks
were Dora. Thaf s what George Graham married.
Everybody knew it. Dora knew it. She wasn't
like an ordinary pretty girl. She was a profes-
sional beauty, really. She never pretended to know
anjrthing. She never tried to amuse people. She
knew she needn't bother to. She might have been
a picture on the wall. Well, I don't say it's her
fault that she's lost all that. But certainly it isn't
his. And she just isn't the person he married, that's
alL'»

THE THOROUGHBRED

It was an outrageous line to take, she knew.
She'd seized upon it to satisfy a need in her, which
she didn't understand, for something hard and cold
and metallic like that. And what she said wouldn't
have mattered, had it been engulfed, as she'd ex-
pected it to be, in the confusion of dinner-table
chatter.

Instead of that, to her consternation, her words
were followed, and pointed, somehow, by a moment
of dead silence in which they veritably seemed to
echo. Something inexplicably kept her from look-
ing across at her husband. And the panicky reali-
zation — ^inexplicably, also — seized her, that if she
didn't look out, she'd cry, right there, before them
all — make a scene. She, of all people !

She flashed round on Carter Worthing. "Oh,
don't be so solemn^** she commanded under her
breath. "Say something silly. It's your turn."

She couldn't have told afterward whether he had
obeyed her or not. But from some quarter or other
the talk started again. She got her breath once
more. The momentary panic passed. But she felt

ai4

THE INSXJLT

curiously limp all the rest of the evening, and not
once did she meet Fred's eye.

It was with a mixture of relief and dread that
she saw her party beginning to break up. The
relief was the stronger, until the front door had
closed for the last time. But when it did, she had
a wild impulse to rush out and call back that last
pair of guests.

When Fred came back into the drawing-room,
And she tried to speak to him, her teeth were chat-
tering. What she said was quite casual, though,
and her voice matched it.

**Did Howard CoUier tell you," she asked, *Hhat
they're thinking of coming out here for a year, if
they can get a house that's what they want?"

He said, ^^I don't know. Yes, I think he did."

His own voice was absent — ^level — ^lifeless again,
just as it had been before she sent him away to
dress, and he turned from her and leaned an elbow
on the mantelpiece.

A frantic exasperation took her, but it hid, for
a mcnnent, behind a patient sigh and the statement

THE THOROUGHBRED

timt f ince the was yery tired she thougbt she would
go to bed. But, against her will, almost — certainly
against her judgment, she added as she moved to-
ward the door, ^I just can't stand that dead-alive
voice and way of yours any more, Fred. Fm sorry,
but I can't I can't ttofnd it !"

At that he rounded upon her. ^^ou'U have to
for a while, I guess," he said, and to her horror,
she saw his lips were trembling. His hands he
plunged bruskly into his pockets.

''Sit down," he commanded^ ''Fve got some
things to tell you."

The power of habit is a wonderful thing.
Neither her voice, nor its inflection, nor the words
she chose, afforded any indication of what was
boiling within her.

She said evenly, "Oh, not to-night, Fred. You're
tired and blue, and Fm all edges, somehow. There's
no telling what might happen. And it's no good
having a scene, when we might be getting a good
night's sleep instead."

'A good night's sleep !" he repeated. "I wonder

THE INSULT

when I had one last. I've forgotten. Well — I'm
through P'

She sat down more suddenly than was her wont
in making such movements, gripped the arm of her
chair, and gazed at him with an uncomprehending
stare.

"Through!'* she echoed. "Through with what?"

He jerked his hands from his pockets and flung
them out in a frantic gesture.

"I'm through with this," he shouted. **With
everything ! With this danmed hell I've been living
in !" And then instantly, "I'm sorry. I beg your
pardon. You're quite right not to like scenes. I'll
try to do better. Here's the fact that concerns you.
I'm broke — completely broke. I'm at the end of
my string — ^the end, that's all."

She dropped back limply in her chair. ^TTou
mean your business is going to fail?" she said
shakily. Her eyes filled with tears. "Fm — ^I'm
terribly sorry, old man."

The words, especially the last phrase, hadn't
quite the right ring. That was inevitable. Be-

THE THOROUGHBRED

cause, the terrible pang that had gripped her when
he shouted that he was through, had been the belief
that he meant he was through with her — couldn't
endure her any longer — ^had fallen in love with
some one else. It was not a reasonable belief. Just
something that hurt intolerably.

On the other hand, business failures were phe-
nomena that were likely to happen to anybody.
She didn't precisely understand the nature of them,
nor, to tell the truth, why they were taken so seri-
ously. People went on somehow. Not quite the
same for a while, but not so very differentiy. They
gave up going south in the winter, perhaps. The
women went about in cabs, instead of having a
limousine of their own, and if one had a good
memory, one remembered their frocks.

It would seem harder to face, no doubt, after
that horrible alternative she had for a moment con-
templated, was forgotten. But the thing to do with
him just now was to get him quieted down; get
him to realize that, after all, the pillars of the
world hadn't fallen.

THE INSULT

But the passion that had caused his outbreak
seemed ahready to have subsided. He went to the
smoking^table, picked out a cigar — ^a big expensive
cigar, at which he smiled in wry fashion — and
lighted it.

<^Do you care anything about details?" he asked.
^^Or will you just take the situation in a lump as it
stands?"

^Td like to hear about it, of course," she said,
**unless — ^unless, for to-night, you'd rather just
forget about it."

He echoed the word forget with a shiver, but
immediately began with a good appearance of com-
posiure, telling her his story.

"I can't see that it's been my fault. There's
nothing, now I think back over it, that I could have
done differently, unless I'd actually known how
things were coming out. I haven't taken any risks
that weren't the legitimate risks of my business.
At least, not since I asked you to marry me. I did
blow in fifteen thousand the year before that, on a
regular wild-cat — one of those inventions that's

THE THOROUGHBRED

perfectly sure to make your everlasting fortune
and never does. But I could afford to lose it then,
and I figured the lesson I learned was cheap at the
price.

^^But that hasn't anything to do with the situa-
tion Fm in now. The thing that's really crippled
me happened just after the war. I was half-way
through that big Waters-Macdonald contract, when
they went into bankruptcy as dry and clean as a
lot of old bones. They'd have been on thin ice, I
suppose, even without the war, but nobody sus-
pected that. When that was cleaned up, I was out
about a hundred thousand dollars, and there wasn't
any other business to get it back with. There was
nothing doing in our line of work, of course, for
months. The whole business was paralyzed — dead.
But we all thought it was going to pick up soon
and the thing to do seemed to be what everybody
was doing, sit tight and wait for the squall to blow
over. It meant paying out money all the time, of
course, for no return at all, just the advantage of

THE INSULT

being there, ready to do business at the old stand
when there should be some business to do.

"I got together all the money I could, mort-
gaged this house for what it would stand — you
knew about that — ^and waited. Well, that's what
Fve been doing ever since. I've had a few good
prospects to tease me along, but nothing — ^not one
thing, do you understand, has ever come through.
Over and over again, I've been the low bidder of
half a dozen normal bids, and lost the job because
somebody had made a mistake — gone wild, bid
twenty or thirty per cent, too low.

"I suppose it's just my luck evening up. I used
not to believe in luck. That was because mine was
all good. When I saw men go to smash, I used to
think that, somehow or other, it must be their own
doing. Well, I know better now. Though I sup-
pose there'll be plenty of people who'll have a rea-
son for what happened to me, when they know
about it. However — ^"

It rose to her lips to ask what the reason was,

THE THOROUGHBRED

but she hesitated over the question. It couldn't be
anything to do with her — could it?

At last he broke the silence. '^There's nothing
more to tell, really. I stood the siege as long as I
could. It's a relief to have got to the end of it. I
said I'd hang on to the very last day, and I have.
This was it. It's been — ^hell, the waiting, the —
hoping. Because, of course, every time the post-
man came in, every time the phone rang, it might
be something. Only, it never was. I've been — ^half
crazy lately. That accounts for the — ^manner you
objected to. Well, it's over, thank Grod. Pve got
to the end."

"But — ^but," she stammered, **things don't end,
Fred. They have to keep going somehow. You
can't just — ^stop." Her face whitened then, and
her mouth dropped open with blank horror, over
the realization that there was a way by which a
man could just stop. Was that what he meant?

She tried to hide her terror. "It can't be so bad
as it looks to-night, Fred. There must be some-
thing you can do."

"Well, it's all over, thank God"

THE INSULT

^^Gret some more money somewhere, do you mean,
to tide me over?*'

She assented with a nod. "There must be ways.'*

'^There's a way," he said, "My mother's little
bit is all in my hands. I could take that, and if the
luck changed within the next few months she need
never know of it.*' He eyed her with a ferocious
intentness as he made that suggestion.

She colored. "I meant possible ways," she said.

At that he turned away and begged her pardon.
"There might be possible ways," he said, "one or
two just possible." His voice dropped and dulled
a little. "And I suppose if I wanted to take them,
I would. But I don't. I've had all I can stand."

She pressed her knuckles against her lips as if
that could still their trembling, and tried to gulp
down the lump in her throat. The tears were brim-
ming out of her eyes and trickling down her cheeks,
but she thought nothing of that. After a while
she managed to say:

**But — but what are you going to do, Fred?"

"I sold the car to-day," he informed her, "for

THE THOROUGHBRED

enough to pay the couple of people I have kept at
the office, and the rent I owed down there, and the
telephone bill. They came to-day to take it out. I
paid up, but told them to go ahead and take it. So
there's the end of that."

"But you! What are you going to do?"

The words were a cry of undisguised terror that
brought him around. He stood for a moment look-
ing into her face.

"Oh, not that," he said. "Not what you're
afraid of. I've treated you badly enough already,
without that. It's bad enough at the best, of
course, for you, but there'll be something. There's
the house. The equity in that is worth something,
if you can realize on it, and the furniture and so
on. Perhaps — ^" He shook his head as if per-
plexed by some memory he couldn't quite get hold
of. "Perhaps you could rent it furnished for
enough to pay you. And your jewelry might help
tide you over until — ^"

"Tide me over !" She squeezed the tears out of
her eyes and stared at him. "Why are you talking

THE INSULT

about me? And — ^and what do you mean about
having treated me badly already? Tell me that
first."

"Oh, that's plain enough," he said. "It ought
to be plain enough to you. False pretenses — ^not
up to specifications. It's just as you were saying
at dinner to-night. The man you married amounted
to something — a comfortable, prosperous, solid and
reliable sort of chap. Well, as you say, Fm not
that man. That man's finished. He's gone, and
I can't play his game. It's no use. I haven't the
nerve for it. I haven't the >sand. I'm good for
twenty-five dollars a week, perhaps — ^thirty at most,
over a drafting-table in some other chap's office,
and that lets me out. It's rotten luck for you. I'm
sorry about it. That's why I was trying to figure
out some way to make it easier. Fll do anything
I can — ^anything you want me to do. And you
could rely on me not to do anything that would
make it harder. You understand, don't you?"

He was not looking at her while he spoke, but
she, to make it impossible for him to do so, pulled

THE THOROUGHBRED

her chair around so that she could lean both dbows
on her spinet writmg-desk.

**Ye8," she said in a stifled voice, "I ^ess I do.
Fm beginning to get the idea, 1 think." Her eyes
were dry now and her cheeks were burning. "The
idea was that the man I married was able to give
me a house like this and all the clothes I wanted,
and a motor, and so on. That was a part of the
marriage service that the minister didn't read. But
it was understood just tlie same.

"And because that was your contract, you
wouldn't tell me how things were going with you,
or ask me to economize. Because you never did--^
never, never — ^never once, so that I understood that
you meant anything by it. Why, you didn't even
joke about being poor now on account of the war,
the way the others did. That was your way of liv-
ing up to — specifications, I suppose you'd say.
You just let me go right up to the very last day
— ^the day when they came to take the telephone.
Oh! And then you tell me it's over.

THE INSULT

'And now, if I understand what you've been
saying, you're showing me how I can pick up
what's left out of the wreckage and scuttle back
home to father and mother and — ^and — ^this was
what you meant about doing anything I wanted —
that I should get a divorce from you on some pre-
text that you'd furnish me with, and — ^and try my
luck again. And — and the jewelry would tide me
over until I could find somebody else who'd meet the
requirements."

There was a silence of minutes after that. He
stirred two or three times as if he meant to speak,
but gave it up. Her way of putting the thing
made it impossible for him to admit that she had
taken his meaning correctly, but the essential truth
of what she had said prevented his denying it.

Presently she began to cry, put her head down
on her arms and sobbed and shook. He sat frozen
in his chair at the other end of the room. He didn't
dare come near her. He couldn't think of a word
to say. After a while — ^a period of time that

THE THOROUGHBRED

seemed endless to him — she sat erect again, dried
her wet face and began getting control of her
breathing.

The first thing she managed to say was, ^^Fm
sorry to be such a mess. If anything's silly to do,
it's to cry. But — but an insult like that makes you
so sick you can't help yourself."

He cried out at that. '^Celia, I didn't mean it
for an insult."

She choked down another miserable sob and an-
swered. "I know it. That's what makes it so per-
fectly unendurable. If you'd said it because you
were — ^angry with me and w-wanted to hurt me just
as hard as you possibly c-could, it wouldn't be so
bad. But you really m-mean it. That's what you
th-think I am. That's what you've thought ever
since you married me. I suppose I ought to be
glad I found out at last."

He got out of his chair and there was another
long silence while he walked slowly back and forth
the length of the room, sometimes with his hands
in his pockets, sometimes getting them out and

THE INSULT

squeezing them together, sometimes pausing to look
at her where she sat with her back to him, drooping
over the little spinet desk (making a wonderfully
appealing picture with her rose-colored frock of the
new old-fashioned cut, her gay colors and her wo-
begone air) and then moving on again. Any one
watching him could have seen that a momentous
question was struggling within him trying to get
itself asked. It is possible that Celia, without look-
ing at him at all, was aware of this.

It broke through at last. He said unevenly,
^^Celia, do you mean that you're still fond of me
without — ^without any of the things that were a
part of me when we were married? And that you
won't mind coming down to twenty-five dollars a
week with me? Is that what you jnean?"

She flushed, straightened, whipped round on him
in a gale of wrath. **Mind !" she said. **0f course
I mind. I mind horribly. I hate it. Poverty's not
romantic, and it's not a lark, and there's nothing
nice about it, and the virtuous, superior way people
act about it makes me tired — ^pretending they like

THE THOROUGHBRED

it, pretending they wouldn't change things if they
could. I notice they do change pretty quickly
when they can." ^

She went on to say a good deal more than that
of the same import. She talked about the horror
of three-room flats "out on the West Side some-
where!'* She dwelt upon the terrors of makeshift
home-made furniture with cretonne tacked on
around it, the dismal results of fifty-cent-a-day
cookery out of the back pages of domestic maga-
zines. She brought out the fact that these trials
were much less unbearable in the cases of certain of
her friends who had at least assumed them with
their eyes open. But to be asked if she'd "mind"
going and living like that, as the result of an
ignominious smash which she, ludicrously and in-
tolerably, hadn't seen until it was about her ears — !
In short, in her tempest of anger, she whipped and
cut him where and how she could, and had him
looking pretty white and si^k before she got
through.

He might have drawn a favorable augury from

THE INSULT

all this, but it isn't wonderful that he did not. He
failed to remark, in the first place, that she had
left the first half of his question unanswered — the
question whether or not she really was in love with
him, himself, rather than with the contented and
prosperous citizen he had ceased to be. And, while
he saw that she was trying frantically to hurt him,
to draw blood wherever she could, snatching at any
stinging phrase that would serve her purpose, he
was unable to make the simple deduction from this
fact that imless she were in love with him — ^very
much in love with him — ^the exercise would have
afforded her no satisfaction. She'd have been con-
cerned with her own feelings, not his.

Her words stumbled at last over a big sob and
she pulled up short, visibly got herself in hand, and
said very deliberately:

- **What you said was, wasn't it, that you'd do
anything you could — anything I wanted you to?
I mean, as far as I was concerned?"

He nodded, but, as she wasn't looking at him, he
had to speak. It took a struggle to get the words

THE THOROUGHBRED

out of his stiff throat, but he finally managed, ^^es,
that's what I said."

"And you mean it?" she asked. 'TTou'Il do it?
That's a serious promise?"

"Yes," he said. "What is it that you want me
to do?"

She told him to wait a minute, she wanted to
think. It was with a question that she began, and
the nature of it startled him into a staring speech-
lessness, so that she had to ask it two or three
times.

"Can you really get that job you were talking
about, twenty-five dollars a week or so — at a draft-
ing-table, I think you said? I mean, can you
count on it, as much as that a week?"

Finally he roused himself enough to say, **Yes, I
guess so."

She hesitated over her next question, drew herself
up a little more defiantly erect, and made sure she
had command of a steady glance and a coldly re-
mote tone before she asked.

*^If a man and his wife were going to live on

THE INSULT

that, how much rent could they afford to pay for a.
flat? They'd live in a flat, wouldn't they? It
would be cheaper than a boarding-house? If she
did all the work herself — of course?"

"Celia !" he cried. "You mean — ?"

"Answer my question," she commanded furi-
ously. She was furious because she had to look
away from him after all. *T¥ould they have a
small flat, I mean, instead of a boarding-house?"

"Yes," he said raggedly, "they would. And they
could pay about twenty-five dollars a month for it."
Then he came up behind her, not touching her, but
leaning close, one hand on the chair-back, the other
on the desk beside her. Even so she could feel that
he was trembling, and she had a giddy, irrational,
terrifying impulse to fling her arms around him—
around whatever of him was within reach, and press
her face against him and cry.

"Do you mean — ?" he asked. "Celia, do you
mean that you're going to do it? Groing to see it
through with me in spite of everything?"

She flashed from the chair to her feet and backed

THE THOROUGHBRED

away from him. She couldn't see him for the in-
f uriating tears that kept welling over and spilling
down her cheeks.

"Of course I mean it," she said. **What else is
there that I can do? It's — ^it's not because I'm
f-fond of you. It's because I want to show you
what an — ^what an insufferable insult that was."

As he gazed at her now, the blood began to come
back into his cheeks, his breathing quickened, he
clenched his hands. He realized now that part of
his question had not been answered.

"But if you weren't fond of me — ^" he stam-
mered. "You are, aren't you, even if I am no
good?"

"I was," she flung at him furiously, **I was —
p-perfectly idiotic about you, until I found to-
night how you'd been thinking about me all the
time — ^what sort of a person you thought I was.
TouVe been hating me, thinking it was all my
fault, and feeling very noble because you never
complained. Well, Pm going to show you. You
won't like it. You'll wish Fd gone scuttling back

THE INSULT

to mother and lived on my jewelry, and left you
free to think what a — ^what a vampire I was. Well,
Fm not going to let you do it.

**You've promised to do whatever I wanted, and
that's it. You go and get your job, while I'm find-
ing a flat. Then well see."

This spirited rear-guard action sufSced to cover
her retreat. She eyed him steadily. There was no
longer about his look the suggestion that in an-
other second he might laugh and cry all at once,
and hug her up in his arms and demolish her. He
was harmless now, for half a minute at least — ^the
half -minute she needed.

**I think if you don't mind, PU go to bed," she
announced politely, and left him.

Probably she needn't have locked her door, but
she did, with a good defiant click she hoped he
heard. Then she went over to her glass and took
a look at herself. The tumbled, tear-wet, panting
object she saw there was another creature from the
last Celia she'd seen. That fine, smooth, unruffled
surface she'd always guarded so carefully, was a

THE THOROUGHBRED

rag — a mop. Celia allowed herself to laugh at it
— a dangerous thing to do, because the laugh
choked in mid-career; the tears came up again.
She shot a last look of defiance into the mirror —
she did not care — ^and let go. She laid her face
down on her bare arms and cried to her heart's
content.

CHAPTER m

THE MORNING AFTE&

AFT]BR five or six hours of the soUdest sleep he
k. had enjoyed in weeks, Alfred Blair came wide
awake all at once and set himself to wrestling with
the new factors in his situation, those that Celia's
unexpected attitude and unprecedented display of
emotion last night had forced upon him.

He realized that the things women say in mo-
ments of emotional stress do not always represent
their considered opinions. Celia's avowal, for ex-
ample, that she had been fond of him — ^'^perfectly
idiotic about him" — ^up to the moment of what she
had spoken of as his insult last night, might have
been snatched merely as an effective background
to set off the insult itself in more lurid colors.

But there could be no doubt that she felt strongly
about the matter. She was not indifferent to him.
Chivalrously as he had meant it, he could see now

THE THOROUGHBRED

that his suggestion of a willingness to furnish her
^th a pretext for getting rid of him altogether,
right on the heels of his confession of his financial
downfall, had been inconsiderate — even brutal. It
occurred to him that a clever, unscrupulous man,
who wanted to goad his wife into the acceptance of
his fallen fortimes with him could hardly have
adopted more skilful tactics ; granted, that is, that
he had the unmerited luck to be married to a little
thoroughbred like Celia.

He felt terribly contrite about it. His memories
of the evening convicted him of about all the crimes
in the husband's calendar. He had sworn at her,
bellowed at her, made her cry, for the first time, so
far as he knew, since they had been married. He
had infuriated her into the resolution to share his
poverty on a putative twenty-five dollars a week;
into binding herself to it by means of that promise
of his that he would assent to any plan for their
future which she might propose.

Well, it was now up to him to get her out of
that. ' Tact was called for, clearly — self-control.

.. ^UMdMHiAM^

THE MORNING AFTER

He must let her see that his happiness was bound
up in hers; that for her to go back to her father
and mother and to what comfort and independence
might be derived from the salvage of his shattered
fortune involved no disloyalty to him ; would be an
act, indeed, of the deepest consideration for him.
And, if she wanted to wait for him, there might
arrive a day when he could come back to her, bring-
ing, as it were, his sheaves with him — ^a new, per-
haps ampler, crop of sheaves.

He talked it all out with her three or four times,
trying out different lines of reasoning. And, inas-
much as he provided her half of the conversation
as well as his own, they all came out satisfactorily.

Over the breakfast table, naturally enough, it
was a different story. Celia ruined his opening by
being already seated behind the percolator when
he came into the dining-room; by being dressed,
unprecedentedly, in a very businesslike looking
skirt and blouse; by having obliterated from her
looks and. air every trace of the ravages wrought
by last night's tempest. She was further fortified

THE THOROUGHBRED

with a quantity of crisp directions for the maid
which, while they did not keep her constantly in the
dining-room during the first ten minutes after he
came down, kept her imminent, so that there was
no chance to say anything.

And then, suddenly, with a "That's all'' to the
maid, Celia took the game into her own hands.

"The Colliers really want a house," she said,
'^and they acted last night as if they liked this. So,
if you think the best thing to do with it is to rent
it furnished, we'd better try to get them — ^hadn't
we — ^to-day?"

It is always terribly hard to go on across a
breakfast table from where one left off the night
before. There is something so intensely prosaic
and matter-of-fact about the meal and its surround-
ings that drastic decisions — ^any projects which
contemplate a break in the daily routine, are likely
to appear fantastic.

He managed something, not meeting her eye,
about sticking it out another month.

But her reply came cleanly back. "Not a minute

THE MORNING AFTER

after we can get away. Eyen if you could stand
it, I couldnt''

She was so clearly right about this that he
yielded at once. He knew he couldn't stand it
either. And this initial victory of hers gave her
command of the situation. He never had a chance
after that. He owned that the Colliers presented
an opportunity not to be thrown away. A forced
sale always meant a terrible sacrifice. The rental,
at any sort of reasonable figure, would meet the
interest charges on the mortgage, the taxes and so
on; would pay off in the course of a few months
their local bills, and would provide, after these de-
mands had been satisfied, a steady little income,
which would come in handy, he concluded, in any
case.

^^In any case** was meant as an entering wedge
— a way of saying that a part, at least, of the
program he had suggested last night, was still open
to her. She could go back to her father and mother
and wait for him.

But the very intent look which the phrase drew

THE THOROUGHBRED

from her, though it invited an explanation of what
he meant by that, paralyzed his resolution. She
so very clearly was waiting with an ax for that idea
to thrust out its head.

He looked out the window and said he'd try to
see Collier some time to-day.

** Would you mind leaving that to me?** she
asked. Though in all but form, the request was
a command. ^^I can see Ruth this morning and I
think I can make a better bargain with her than
you could with Howard." Then she flushed up a
little and added, "That isn't the real reason. I
want to tell her my own story about why we're
doing it.

"I'm going to tell her," she went on, with a rush,
*H;hat you're all worn out, on the edge of a bad
breakdown, and that I'm going to take you away
west somewhere — and that'll be true, because the
West Side's west, and I shan't tell her how far
— ^before it gets any worse."

"Is it your idea," he asked stiffly, for the thing
hurt him dreadfully, "that we can disappear under

5»

THE MORNING AFTER

cover of a story like that, and that no one will find
out about the — disgrace that happened to us? If
it is, I can tell you now that it won't work. There
are a hundred ways for the facts to get out, even
supposing I could slink about the streets down-
town without encountering anybody."

^7 don't expect it not to come out," she said.
**But the story I was going to tell Ruth would
give me a chance to get away before they knew — "

"The disgraceful truth," he put in.

She flung the phrase back at him. "Exactly.
The disgraceful truth that I never knew, never sus-
pected a thing, until the actual moment of the
smash. That shows such a ghastly lot. Well, I
want to get away before they can put two and two
together. And I want to do it in such a way that
they'll understand I don't want to be followed up
and dropped in on and taken for charity rides in
their motor-cars. I want it fixed so that if they do
see me, they'll have to pretend they don't." And
then, most unfairly, she stepped on the buzzer and
summoned the maid.

THE THOROUGHBRED

Between that act and the opening of the service-
door, she got herself in hand again, recovered her
tottering poise, and was able to say in parenthesis,
between two factitious directions to Marie, ''Of
course you can go to Howard yourself, if you'd
rather I didn't see Ruth."

He said into his coffee-cup, ''No, that's all
right."

He'd have said right then, if interrogated, that
she had hurt and angered and humiliated him as
far as she could. The maneuver of summoning the
maid, the way she had phrased and timed her offer
not to go to Ruth at all, in such a manner as to
remind him that he had promised the night before
to assent to anything she wanted; and to make it

impossible for him to reply except by a categorical
Yes or No, was, he'd have said, the last arrow in
her quiver. It proved, however, that she had one
more.

She rose from the table when he did, and he saw
that she had a package in her hand — ^must have had
it in her lap during the whole of the meal, a pack-

THE MORNING AFTER

age whose solidly rectangular form was but indif-
ferently disguised by the bunglesome job she had
made of wrapping it up.

He looked hastily away from it after one glance^
and said:

"I can't promise to get that job to-day, of
course. But I'll do my best."

**You might call me up this afternoon, if you
have any luck," she suggested. "Then I can tell
you how Fve come out with Ruth about renting the
house. You and Howard will have to settle up the
details, of course."

He said he supposed so, and with a nod of fare-
well, which, in his state of mind was the only leave-
taking he dared attempt, he turned to leave the
room.

She called him back. "Here's something, Fred,"
she said in a tight little voicQ^ '^for you." She held
the package out to him.

He knew what it contained well enough, as the
dark flush that came up into his face, and the ab-
surdly overacted casualness of his manner of say-

THE THOROUGHBRED

ing, ^Oh, what is it?'' made evident, no doubt, to
her. Also, he backed away a little as he spoke, and,
further to secure his hands from the necessity of
taking the package from her, he put them in his
pockets.

She reddened, too, and said, ^^It's the pearls and
the other things, everything — ^practically. What
you were telling me last night I could live on
— while I was waiting for somebody else to
turn up."

Thereupon ensued what I can only characterize
as a row — a rowdy row at that, concerning the
details of which I feel it my duty, as a self-respect-
ing chronicler, to maintain a decent reticence. The
major tctctics of the battle, however, may be indi-
cated.

He announced very forcibly that he would have
nothing to do with her jewels beyond acting as her
agent for the disposal of them. If she chose, in
spite of her avowed belief in his business incom-
petence, to entrust the job of selling them to him,

THE MORNING AFTER

he would make the best bargain he could, and have
the jeweler mail the check direct to her; She an-
nounced a passionate indifference as to what he did
with them, provided only that she should never be
asked to look at thejp again, or accept, or hear any-
thing about, the proceeds of their sale. It is per-
haps not fair to say that she flung the package on
the floor. She propelled it vigorously in his direc-
tion, and he declined to accept it, the law of gravi-
tation operating in the usual manner. He sug-
gested the ash-barrel as a proper receptacle, and
she, by implication, agreed with him.

When they parted, she for her room, and he for
the seven-fifty-three train, about the most one can
say for them is that he hadn't actually shaken her,
nor she literally slapped him. Short of that,
neither of them had left anything undone to pro-
voke and justify the fury of the other.

The wrath of a kindly, slow-tempered man, once
it is heated up to the point of incandescence, is a
much hotter thing than any emotion that a quicks

THE THOROUGHBRED

tempered man or woman can experience. Celia her-
self would have been horrified could she have known
the temperature of her husband's.

All the way to town in the train, behind the shel-
ter of his newspaper, he seethed like molten steel.
The last look of helpless fury he had seen in Celia's
face, and the tears that stained it, were his only
source of satisfaction. He had given as good as
he got in that last five minutes, anyway. He
wished he had begun sooner. He was sorry, on the
whole, he hadn't shaken her.

But the episode of the jewelry was more or less
satisfactory. The injury, which acted as a blow-
pipe to keep his wrath from cooling, was the thing
that had happened before that — her avowal of the
story she meant to tell Ruth Collier about his nerv-
ous breakdown and her intention to take him ^Svest
somewhere" ; her admission that she felt herself dis-
graced by his failure, to the point where nothing
but their severance of all ties connecting with the
old life, their total disappearance like a pair of
absconding criminals, would satisfy her. That

THE MORNING AFTER

rankled frightfully. He didn't know whether it
was more maddening to believe that she really
meant it, or that she had said it merely in the hope
of wounding him as deeply as possible. He tried
out each of these theories, with the idea of discov-
ering which infuriated him the worse, and at last,
although they were mutually contradictory, com-
promised by adopting them both.

It was not until the train pulled into the ter-
minal station and imposed on him the necessity of
deciding what he'd do next that he regretfully
clamped down the lid upon this pot and, as it were,
took it off the fire."^ A real rage like that was an
unaccustomed luxury to Alfred Blair.

But he must now turn his mind to more prac-
tical matters. He had come to town to look for a
joby and he must find one before he again con-
fronted Celia. The notion of going back to her
to-night and by confessing the failure of his quest,
give her a chance to drop the acid of pity into his
wounds, was intolerable.

He realized now that he ought to have spent

THE THOROUGHBRED

those waking hours before he came down to break-
fast to better advantage than in sentimental maun-
derings about his wife. He ought to have laid out
a plan of campaign. When he had said, last night,
that all he was good for now was twenty-five dollars
a week or so over a drafting-board, he'd expressed
an emotion rather than a thought-out plan. And
even when she'd pressed him as to whether he could
get a job at that, he'd answered, "Yes, I guess so,"
with only half his mind. Surely any one of his
former competitors would see that he was worth
that. But now that it was no longer a case for
emotions or oratory, simply a question of picking
out one of those former competitors, going to him
and asking for a job, it wasn't so easy.

It hAd been one thing to tell Celia, last night,
that he was at the end of his rope ; that he had lost
his nerve, and that all he was good for was a routine
job. It would be another thing to go into the office
of a man who still, regarded him as a potentially
formidable rival and say so.

This unexpected flare-up of pride, of pride

THE MORNING AFTER

hardly to be differentiated from Celiacs own, discon-
certed him frightfully. It was with an indescrib-
able wrench that he realized how much easier it
would be to apply to a stranger who knew nothing
of his business history and need be told nothing of
it, for any sort of job — street-sweeping, coal-
shoveling — ^than to submit himself to the half-
kindly contempt of an inhabitant of his own world.
He tried to charge this feeling up to Celia's ac-
count and make himself believe that he would not
have felt that way had she not expressed a similar
feeling, but he couldn't manage it.

It was without any objective at all that he finally
walked out of the station and turned up the street.
His dread of going with his story to any one who
knew him became absolutely inhibitory the moment
he fixed on any one in particular, and the reflection
came to him as a real relief at last, that such an
errand wouldn't do any good anyway.

What would have been his own attitude, a year
ago, to such, a request? Supposing, for example,
that John Abercrombie had come to him like that,

THE THOROUGHBRED

said he was down and out and wanted a twenty-five-
dollar job? He'd have said to himself, "Here! If
this man is really down and out, he's dear at any
price. He won't be much good at first, and he'll get
steadily worse, and I'll be saddled with him. But if,
as is more likely, he comes back, then he'll leave me
and go in for himself again at the end of six months
or so, with all the inside dope of my office at his
finger-tips, twice as dangerous a competitor as be-
fore.''

No, he knew what he'd say to Abercrombie in these
circumstances. He'd say, in the most optimistic
manner he could manage, along with a clap on the
shoulder, and the offer of a cigar, **Look here, old
man. You're tired out, and you've got a touch of
liver. You forget your troubles for a while and
take a good rest. Gro down to French Lick or some-
where, and boil out. You will be back again in
three months, fit to give any of us a run for our
money. But this twenty-five-dollar-a-week stuff —
forget it." And that, as sure as to-morrow's sun-

THE MORNING AFTER

rise, was what Abercrombie would say to him to-
day.

He'd been wandering aimlessly along all the,
while, stopping every now and then to stare down
into a building excavation, or to watch an automo-
bile with a balky motor trying to start. Now his
eye was caught by a spectacle almost as familiar
to Chicagoans — ^the long file of men waiting out-
side one of the afternoon newspaper offices for the
first edition, in order that they might be the first
applicants for the jobs advertised in its "Want"
columns. The length of that file is a pretty good
barometer to business conditions, but, good times or
bad, it is always there. And Alfred Blair, without
any reflection at all, just because there it was, and
here he was, dropped into place at the tail of it.

Four hours or so later, a torn-out bit of news-
paper ready for reference in his overcoat pocket, he
was conducted by an office boy through the inde-
scribable confusion of a big, dirty, resonant room,
with a lot of drafting^tables in it, many of them

THE THOROUGHBRED

unoccupied, to a desk in the comer, where sat a
lank, oily-looking man in his shirt-sleeves.

To him, Alfred Blair said, «I am answering your
advertisement for a draftsman."

The oily man was just back from lunch, and still,
with the aid of a. tooth-pick, ruminant over it. He
was modeling his manners, as well as he could, on
those of the head of the firm, who had just cashed
in on his loyalty to the new city administration,
with a fat municipal contract.

The superintendent had been having his troubles,
it must be owned. There were many other loyal
souls coming around to be taken care of. Biit a
few men had to be found somewhere who knew their
business. It was this fact that had led to the in-
sertion of the advertisement.

The superintendent took two minutes, perhaps,
for a searching and hostile stare at this surprising
applicant. What business had a man in his situa-
tion to wear clothes like that?

He asked at last, out of one side of his mouth,
"What experience have you had?"

"I am answering your advertisement for a draffsn

THE MORNING AFTER

**I'm a competent draftsman," Blair said "I
can do anything you want me to/'

"Where'd you work last?*'

Blair said, deliberately, "I don't care to give any
references."

The superintendent smiled — ^a sneering sort of
smile that expressed, however, real pleasure. The
admission restored him to a sense of his own su-
periority.

"I suppose you're a booze-fighter," he said be-
hind a yawn, '%ut that makes no odds to me, if you
can deliver the goods. There's about six weeks'
or two months' work. Take off your coat and sit
down over there. If you're any good, you've got
a job. Twenty a week."

**rve got to have twenty-five," Blair said.

The superintendent waved his hand. "Nothing
doing." But, as Blair turned away, he said,
**Twenty-two fifty."

**A11 right," Celia's husband agreed.

It was not until half past five that he had an
opportunity to telephone Celia from a nickel phone

THE THOROUGHBRED

in a down-town drug-store. In a more observant
mood he might have noted that his ring was an-
swered almost instantly, and by Celia herself, as if
she had been waiting there at her desk for it.

Also, his ear might have detected a change in the
quality of her voice between her first "Hello ! What
is it?'? and when sh(e spoke after he'd laconically
told her he'd got a job. ,

"It's only twenty-two fifty a week, I'm sorry to
say," he added, "instead of the twenty-five I agreed
to get."

"All right. I won't pay more than twenty a
month for the flat." She added, "I've rented the
house to the Colliers for two hundred. Pm to call
Ruth up again and tell her if you say it's all right."

"It's quite all right as far as I'm concerned, of
course," he said. "That matter's in your hands."

He didn't know whether the unclassifiable sound
he heard just then came from Celia or was inserted
in the conversation by the telephone company. She
asked clearly enough the next moment, if he were
coming home to dinner.

THE MORNING AFTER

"No," he said. "I shall be at the office until late
— ^my old office — ^packing up.''

At that she said abruptly, "Grood-by."

It had been a ghastly day for Celia. Months
afterward, when she could look back on the episode
as a whole, she sometimes tried, idly, to decide
which of those nightmare days was the worse — ^this,
or its successor. Oftenest she concluded that this
one was. The thing that gave it its peculiar hor-
ror was the fact that, on the surface, it was so like
an ordinary day ; the maids coming to her for their
routine instructions, the housework going on, peo-
ple calling her up and asking her to do amusing
things, just as though she were still the secure,
imperturbable, unruffled Celia she had been yester-
day, and that she had still to seem to-day.

She called up Ruth Collier as early as was decent
in the morning, and told her, as she had declared
to Fred she would, that they'd decided overnight
to go away. He was frightfully tired, hadn't been
sleeping, was on the edge of a bad smash, and be-
fore it came, they were going to bolt.

THE THOROUGHBRED

**0h, we don't know where. Disappear some-
where for a good long while — a year, maybe. And
— ^this is why I'm telling you about it — ^we want
you to take our house. You really are looking for
one, aren't you? Well, then, come out to-day and
look at this with that idea. About noon? Oh, then
you will stop for lunch. That'll be fine. Just the
two of us."

She could make ber voice sound all right, any-
how, that was one comfort. She was sure from
the way Ruth talked she had suspected nothing
over the phone. But whether the resources of her
toilet-table were going to prove sufficient to obliter-
ate from her face the traces of last night's and this
morning's tempests, she wasn't so sure. She went
to work, deliberately and methodically, to produce
this result.

All the while, she nursed her wrath against her
husband, as one nurses a dying fire. It was her
one defense against him — ^the one thing that would
enable her to see the day through. If ever she got
to feeling sorry for him, to thinking about that

THE MORNING AFTER

haggard beaten look she had seen in his face last
night, she knew she was lost. She'd carried her
jewel-box, still in its cumbersome wrapper, to her
room, and whenever necessary, she glanced at it. It
always worked.

Half an hour before Ruth's expected arrival the
cook brought in word that a man was at the kitchen
door asking permission to do any sort of odd job
for a meal. It was a common sort of occurrence.
But to-day it stabbed her with an almost intolerable
pang — ^the thought that her husband was to-day,
at this very moment, perhaps, doing the same thing,
knocking at strange inhospitable doors, asking for
work.

Anger flared up again, though, and saved her.
It wasn't her fault, was it, that he had assumed
that her interest in him was wholly mercenary, and
had gone on keeping her in ignorance of the true
state of affairs until it had come to this? It was
not. So, though she toppled for an instant on the
verge of an emotional abyss, she managed to keep
her balance. She managed to maintain it, too, with-

THE THOROUGHBRED

out a break, during the two hours and a half that
her guest and prospective tenant stayed.

While she could do the talking herself it was
comparatively easy — ^phrases just cool enough, in-
different enough, frivolously humorous enough,
came readily to her lips, even while she went
through the mockery of speculating about what she
and Fred would do with their year's vacation, chat-
ting about California and Honolulu. But while
Ruth talked, she couldn't keep her mind on the
things her guest was saying. It would bolt freak-
ishly in unexpected directions, flash terrifying pos-
sibilities before her eyes, stab her with memories,
and she would frantically summon her anger to the
rescue and repel these assaults.

After Ruth had gone, she tried to pack. There
was an immense lot of work to do, of course, get-
ting things out of the way and putting the house
in shape for the reception of its new occupants.
But she didn't make much headway — couldn't give
her mind to it. It was focused on the telephone,
and that focus kept getting sharper and sharper

THE MORNING AFTER

all the time. He'd said he'd call up in the after-
noon to let her know what luck he'd had. Evi-
dently he hadn't got his job jet. Suppose, in his
discouragement and despair, he decided that it
wasn't worth trying to get. By half past five,
when he did call up, she was about at the end of
her endurance.

But his way of telling her just the bare facts
and nothing more, his infuriating apology for hav-

ing accepted twenty-two fifty, when he'd told her
he'd get twenty-five, and the way he'd washed his
hands of her bargain with the Colliers, toned her
up once more — ^gave her a good warm glow of

anger to go to work on. She was glad he wasn't
coming home to dinner. She wouldn't see him
again, if it were possible. She'd have no communi-
cation with him, except what was absolutely indis-
pensable, until she could confront him in the new
home his contemptuous disbelief in her had reduced
ihem to.

He disconcerted her a little, though she didn't
admit it to herself, by apparently wanting the same

THE THOROUGHBRED

thing she did — making no effort, at any rate, to
see her. He made her heart jump by pausing an
instant outside her door — it wasn't locked — ^when
he came home very late that night, but he went on,
without a word, to his own room. He'd already
left for town when she came down-stairs the next
morning, and this program was repeated for two
days more. They communicated with each other
by leaving notes about — politely laconic notes,
which they fancied Marie wouldn't see anything
wrong with. Though why Marie should matter, it
would be hard to say, since she, along with the
cook, had had her notice and her two weeks' pay,
and was leaving Saturday morning when the Col-
liers were coming in.

CHAPTER IV

EXPLOBATION

IT was on Wednesday that Alfred got his job,
and that Ruth Collier came out to lunch and
agreed to take the house. On Thursday morning —
not more than an hour after her husband's depart-
ure, Celia herself set out, on a very inadequate
breakfast, and in very inadequate shoes, to find a
flat that could be rented for not more than twenty
dollars a month.

She had been vague as to what methods she
should pursue toward this result, until, coming
down-stairs to get her coffee, she had happened upon
Marie carrying off the last jiight's paper that
Alfred had brought home. She had never made use
of classified advertising; had always thought of it
merely as something that added an irritating bulk
to the newspapers she occasionally read* But a

THE THOROUGHBRED

memory of the legend — ^Flats to rent — ^at the head
of interminable columns of fine print, came up sud-
denly in her mind, and she impounded the rumpled
and disordered sheets Marie was carrying out. A
cursory glance at them as she sipped her coffee
made her quest look easy. There were millions of
fiats for rent, apparently, and they were arranged
according to neighborhood — ^West Side flats to-
gether by themselves, two or three columns of th^i.

She tore this part out of the sheet, and after
satisfying herself that it listed plenty of places at
twenty dollars, and less, she crumpled it into her
wrist-bag and went on with her breakfast, that is
to say, with her coffee. These had, for many years,
been synonymous terms to Celia. How Alfred could
eat things like liver and sausage, or even eggs, at
this time of the day, she had never been able to
understand.

Her idea was, when, in the train, she got out her
list and looked at it, that she would select a place at
the price she wanted, go out to it, and rent it. She
wasn't looking for luxury. She hoped — or thought

EXPLORATION

she hoped, sitting there comfortably enough in the
train, that it would prove as uncomfortable, and
cramped and mean as possible. The meaner it was,
and the more destitute of comforts the life they had
to live in it, the more triumphantly could she dem-
onstrate to Alfred that he had misjudged her — ^the
more completely avenge his insulting belief that
now he was poor, she would abandon him and begin
a bright lookout for somebody else.

So she picked out, more or less at random, some-
thing she thought would do, . and dismissed the
matter from her mind. It dicjn't occur to her, until
after she got off the train in the terminal, that she
hadn't the least idea where the address was, or how
to get to it. Then, under the spur of necessity, she
went to the information desk and asked the man.

He wasn't looking at her, and his answer was a
gesture toward a tattered — a vilely dirty — ^voliune
on the shelf at her elbow, which she made out to be
a City Directory.

It is fair to say that Celia's first step into her
new world began at that moment. She had never,

;

THE THOROUGHBRED

in her life, been compelled to submit to contact with
anything as repulsively filthy as that volume.

She opened it and stared at it helplessly.

"But,*' she said, "I don't want to know what
street and number any one lives in. I want to know
where a certain address is."

"Street Index,*' he said. Then, with a look at
her, relented. "Here ! FU find it for you.'*

But the search was a rather complicated one and
he was interrupted three or four times before he
got to the end of it, by impatient train-catchers,
and the directions he finally gave her were not very
enlightening — involved questioning conductors as
to where to take transfers and asking a policeman,
when she finally got in the general neighborhood,
which way to walk.

The morning was half gone when she finally
found the place. She'd walked what seemed miles ;
her feet ached excruciatingly, she felt worse than
dirty — contaminated by the last street-car she'd
ridden in, and she couldn't be sure she'd got a
cinder out of her eye.

EXPLORATION

But the place she found had at least the meijt
of making her forget these minor troubles.

The terrifying thing about it was that it was
not so bad. She was escorted through it by the
tenant of the flat below, who had charge of the
key, and this lady praised it with genuine enthu-
siasm. She pointed out that the floors weren't
badly worn at all, and had recently been coated
with shellac; she indicated the soundness of the
plaster. Nothing would come f aUing down on your
head here, even if the tenants of the topmost flat
of all should rouse round a bit. There was a radi-
ator in each of the four rooms, and the heat was
ample. They, down below, frequently had to open
a window somewhere for a while. It actually got
too hot. The front room had two windows looking
on the street, the kitchen, at the back, got the
benefit not only of its own back yard, but of the
vacant lot behind it on the next street, while the
two middle rooms, thanks to the fact that the ad-
joining, building ran up only two stories, were at
the top of the light-well, and were almost as good

THE THOROUGHBRED

as outside rcxHns. She was sure it was a bargain
at the money, and Celia, with a sinking heart, was
forced to conclude that it was.

Because it came over her, in a wave^ that she
couldn't stand it. There was a soul-blighting ugli-
ness in everything about it — ^the shape of each of
the four cramped, mean little rooms, the mean little
doors by which they opened out, one after another,
on a mean little four-foot corridoif that strung them
together, the artificial oak graining of the wood-
work, the fanciful hideousness of the gas-fixtures
in the front room, and the water-mottled oak man-
tel. Celia's cicerone admitted freely that the fire-
place this mantel enclosed was not practicable, but
pointed out that fires were a nuisance anyway, and
that in this fiat, with an abundance of the hottest
kind of steam-heat, they were, happily, unneces-
sary. In the dead of winter, a little cotton tucked
into the two west windows made everything as
snug and tight as one could desire.

Celia escaped from it in a good deal of panic^
like a fiy out of a web, with the allegation of the

EXPLORATION

fictitious necessity of bringing her husband for a
look at it before she decided anything. Her new
friend understood the necessity, but regretted it.
A bargain like this was likely to be snapped up at
any minute. * What Celia said to herself, when she
stood panting on the sidewalk, was that she could
stand a sliun, but she couldn't stand that.

The fact was, of course, that a slum was simply
a literary expression to her, an idea made up of
descriptions from two or three "realistic" novels,
and the stage-sets of three or four lugubrious
plays. But this flat she had been looking at was
not realistic. It was real. And it brought down
upon her an ominous sickening realization of what
married life on a salary of twenty-two dollars and
fifty cents a week might mean; not as the subject
of an acrimonious scene between her and Alfred in
the interval between an excellent dinner and their
retirement to two comfortable beds, but as a thing
to be endured for months — years — forever, per-
haps.

She began walking slowly in the direction of the

THE THOROUGHBRED
nearest car line, and as she walked the idea insin-

uated itself into her mind that, if she couldn't stand
it, she needn't. There was that comfortable home
she had lived in for years before her marriage,
where, with any excuse at all, or indeed with none,
they'd be glad to welcome her. There was her
room; there was her place at the table. And
wouldn't it be better to go back to it? Wouldn't
she be an unnecessary drag on Fred if she insisted
on taking him out to a place like that flat? Twen-
ty-two dollars and a half a week, to a man with
no domestic responsibilities, would be comfortable
enough. He'd suggested that himself.

She got as far as that, but no further, for a
wave of good honest wrath came surging over her
again. That's what he'd expected her to think!
That was the incredibly, cowardly, mercenary
wretch he'd believed her! And he'd been nearer
right than she knew. Well, he should never
know it.

The tears came smarting into her eyes so that
she had to stop, there in the middle of uie sidewalk,

EXPLORATION

with two or three curious idlers staring at her, and
get out her handkerchief and mop before she could
see to go on. She'd show him ! She'd find a place
somewhere — ^to-day ! v

At four o'clock, more tired than she had ever
been before in her life, thoroughly discouraged,
but still determined not to go home until she'd
found a place where she and Alfred could go on
living together, giddy with hunger, though she
realized very imperfectly how much hunger had to
do with her exhaustion, she turned into a little
lunch room.

She wanted food for its own sake. But more
than that, she wanted it as an excuse for sitting
down. She must have a little rest before she could
walk another step. She was down to bedrock for
the first time in her life.

If the uncounted apartments she'd looked at since
that first one hadn't by themselves affected her so
strongly as that first one had, they had at least
rubbed that feeling in. She'd wasted a good deal of
energy climbing flights of stairs to places that had

THE THOROUGHBRED

cost more than her maximum, going up a bit at a
time, without realizing what she was doing, until she
caught herself on the edge of taking a place that
cost thirty-five dollars a month. When she dropped
back from this, the twenty-dollar places looked
worse than ever. All her fine sensibilities had been
scraped and rasped by the sound of voices she had
been hearing — ^the intonations of speech — ^the way
people wore their clothes. She was more than blue.
She was black and blue.

That was the color of the world when she sat

down in the little lunch room. She'd have thought

J-

that it was impossible that she could ever smile
again. But she did within half a minute.

Her opening of the street door had rung a little
bell, and she had heard through the plain white
board partition that cut the place transversely half-
way back, a groan and a sort of grunting yawn.
A door in this partition had opened almost imme-
diately and she'd caught a glimpse of a man with-
out a coat or collar, in the act of finishing the

EXPLORATION

stretch the yawn had been preliminary to. But
the door had closed again instantly, leaving the
man on the other side.

But within half a minute, as I said, he appeared
again, this time most dedorously clad in a white
jacket with a military collar. He had, too, rather
a military air of standing at attention — of, indeed,
always having stood at attention, absurdly at vari-
ance with his appearance of the moment before.
But there was a bright engaging twinkle in his eye
that candidly confessed the absurdity.

Involuntarily Celia smiled at him. He'd evi-
dently had red hair once, but it was now a dusty
gray, and his clean-shaven sanguine face was finely
netted all over with wrinkles. And if he wasn't
Irish, then there isn't an Irishman in County Clare.
When he asked, "What can I do for you. Miss?'*
she said, rather to her own surprise, "I'm afraid I
interrupted your nap."

**Well, an' that's true, too," he admitted. "I've
no key for that door, and I keep the place open

THE THOROUGHBRED

day and night. And, as we haven't many demands
for afternoon tea in these parts, I generally indulge
myself as you have discovered."

Just the sound of his mellow, pleasantly modu-
lated voice, with the slight enrichment of its con-
sonants that suggested a brogue without actually
constituting it, was indescribably friendly and
soothing to her worn nerves.

"I hadn't thought of tea," she said. It woidd
be impossible to address him in any other tone than
the one she would use for a social equal. "You see,
I forgot all about lunch. I suppose it's too late
for that, though."

He professed himself ready to prepare her as
elaborate a meal as she wanted, but pointed out that
the elaboration would take time. If instant relief
was called for, he'd suggest a pot of tea and a
fried-egg sandwich.

This was a viand that, as it happened, she had
never heard of, and the notion of it visibly amused
her. But she was a little dubious about the tea.
Not that she didn't like tea, but —

EXPLORATION

^TTou needn't fear my brew," he assured her.
"Tea's a tipple I thoroughly understand,''

Five minutes later, with a contented sigh more
eloquent than words, she acknowledged the justice
of this boast. She had kind words, too, for the
sandwich.

He deprecated her praise while visibly basking
in it, but admitted that there was a considerable
degree of art involved in the proper frying of an

egg.

Her eyes widened a little as she said, half imder

her breath, "I wonder if I could fry one at all."

**Well, there's great folly," he said, "in knowing
too many things. Take myself, for example. I'm
a bit of a cook, carpenter, ladies' maid, farrier,
plumber and gas-fitter and infant's nurse, to men-
tion a few accomplishments that 'come to mind —
and here I ani !"

"How in the world — ?" she gasped.
"Fourteen years in the army, ma'am. That's
the explanation. Too good an officer's striker ever
to be anything else."

THE THOROUGHBRED

She didn't know quite what to say to this, since
in spite of the hamoroas melancholy of his Toice,
condolence seemed not to be asked for. So she
nmnched her fried-egg sandwich in sflence for a
minute or two, and finaUy remarked:

'^ou didn't say you're a real-estate agent,
though, and that's what I need. Fm looking for a
place out here — a flat, I suppose, where two people
with hardly any .money at all can live."

"WeD," he said, **there are plenty of places out
here where people with hardly any money at all do
live, and more perhaps where they could. But Fd
be better able to help you if I knew just how much
money you meant by ^hardly any at alL' "

**! mean twenty-two dollars and fifty cents a
week," she said with such imexpected promptness
and precision, and with a tinge of defiance thrown
in, that she made him smile.

**Well, there's nothing easier than that," he told
her. *^ know of a fine little place just around the
comer that you can get for twelve dollars a month.
They could live there as snugly as you please.

EXPLORATION

Three rooms and bath, and one of them a fine large
one."

"Twelve dollars a month!" she echoed "And
I've been looking at places all day about twenty,
and they were horrible !"

He shot a keen look at her. "Well, I wouldn't
say," he admitted, "that it's a place you'd be carin'
to live in yourself. And it's possible, too, since it's
been on my hands three months — ever since my
brother-in-law^s second wife married again and
moved away to Kansas City, that I exaggerate the
good points of it. But you might find it worth a
look, and if you don't mind waiting till my daugh-
ter comes back from school, which will be any min-
ute now, to look after this place, I'll take you up
there and show you around."

In the five minutes or so that intervened late that
night between the time when Celia got into bed and
the time when she fell asleep the conviction estab-
lished itself in her mind that, if Mr. Lawrence
Doyle had not actually hypnotized her, it had at
least been the glamour of his personal charms and

THE THOROUGHBRED

not the desirability of the twelYe-doUar apartment
he had shown her round, that had led her to take it
not only promptly but with enthusiasm.

It did indeed comprise, as he had said, three
rooms and a bath (though the 'l)ath'' required a
qualifying foot-note), and it was also true that the
largest of the three rooms was, in actual feet and
inches, commodious and pleasantly proportioned.
Even for the combined functions of eating and ^^v-
ing** it would be ample.

What shook Celia's confidence in her judg-
ment was the recollection of her enthusiasm over
the absence of the steam heat and the presence
instead of a ^TMuse-bumer" which Doyle would
be glad of a chance to sell her for six dollars
and seventy-five cents. There was nothing like a
good old-fashioned coal fire for comfort. This
steam heat, now; always too much or not enough,
and nothing to do about it but pound the radiator
with a poker. A good coal-stove you ran to suit
yourself — or rather, it ran itself to suit you. Also
she was able to recall a sensation of genuine delight

EXPLORATION

over a gas-pipe In the kitchen, which would not only
reduce culinary labors to next to nothing, by mak-
ing it possible to cook with gas, but, for a trifling
additional investment in a small boiler and heater,
one could have hot water whenever one wanted it.
day or night. Celia, who had all her life taken hot
water for granted, exactly as she had taken air to
breathe, was quite thrilled over this.

She had taken an inexplicable pleasure, too, in
the fact that their bedroom — ^it was really nothing
but an alcove off the big room, capable of being
shut off by curtains, and just about big enough to
contain a double bed — ^was up two steepish steps
from the main floor-level^ — ^a concession to the ne-
cessity for getting the stairs up from the entry
below. Most unreasonable of all was her delight in
the obvious fact that the bathroom had clearly not
been designed by the architect to serve that pur-
pose. It had three doors, to begin with, all glazed ;
one into the big room, one into the kitchen and one
which let you out on the back porch — quite an ex-
tensive back porch, formed by flooring over and

THE THOROUGHBRED

railing In a one-story extension at the back of the
building. The door into the kitchen had been ren-
dered impr€u;ticable by the installation of the tub
— a large, circular, galvanized iron tub — ^which Mr.
Doyle pointed to with pride as a demonstration
of his prowess as a plumber, for he had done this
job himself and knew it was good. The pipes came
simply and naively through a hole in the kitchen
wall.

Celia had been aware, even when striking her
bargain with Mr. Doyle, that these unique advan-
tages were not, perhaps, the sort that would appeal
instantly to every mind, and that the place required
to be seen with an eye. Given time to reflect, she
might have come to the conclusion that she liked
it all just for the same unreasonable reason that
had made her hate the dozens of modem, mean, ma-
chine-made places she had been looking at all day.
This place would make poverty picturesque.

She hadn't any leisure for reflection, though, be-
cause of a remark Mr. Doyle made just after the
bargain had been struck. He said that if she'd

EXPLORATION

let him hire a man to go to cleaning first thing in
the morning, her friends could move their furniture
in the next afternoon. And the word furniture had
brought her up with a jerk. Her mind had been
running on a single track and it hadn't got to the
furniture yet.

She told Mr. Doyle to go ahead and get the
cleaner, left him on a promise to turn up some time
the next day, and settled down in a street-car,
homeward bound, to wrestle with this new problem.

She couldn't use any of their own furniture.
The Colliers would want every stick of it. Every-
thing must be bought new. She had, at first, only
a vague idea of how much this operation would cost.
But presently, out of nowhere, an advertisement
that had once adorned the bill-boards came up into
her memory.

**We will feather your nest,'' it had read, "for
one hundred dollars." She was grateful for the
figure, though she meant to do her own feathering.
But where was she going to get the hundred dol-
lars?

THOROUGHBRED

Well, there was the first mcmth's rent cm their
own house — two hundred dollars payable in ad-
yanoe. The sensible easy thing to do would be to
go ahead and get what she wanted, at once, of one
of the big department stores where they had a
diarge account, and let the Colliers' check cover
it. But this didn't satisfy her. That two hundred
a month rent was sacred to the payment of old bills.
For other purposes it should be treated as if it
didn't exist. If ever she began dipping into that,
where would her vengeance on Alfred be — her tri-
umphant demonstration that he'd misjudged her?

The next possibility she thought of was of buy-
ing it on the instalment plan. She could ask Fred
to appropriate so much a week out of his salary
to pay it off. But this would involve taking her
husband in on it, and she didn't like the idea. She
wanted something to hurl at him complete. If she
were to go to him with the problem he'd be entitled
to a say as to what she bought. It would give him
another opportunity to act generously and feel ag-
grievedy which, she told herself passionately, she

EXPLORATION

never meant to give him again. No, somehow she
must find that hundred dollars herself.

Well, then she thought of her jewelry. It woulid
be no trick at all to sell one of her good rings for
a hundred dollars.

But she rejected this idea with violence. She'd
done the only thing self-respect would allow her to
do, ajfter that maddening insult of his, in giving
all that jewelry back to him. The fact that he had
refused to accept it didn't alter the essentials of
the case. The stuff was his, every scrap of it.
The box, still in its paper wrapping, must be kept
intact ; slipped unobtrusively in among his belong-
ings, perhaps, after they had got settled in the flat
— ^at all events, demonstrably untouched.

But where was she going to get her hundred
dollars? She thought for a while that she'd ex-
hausted all the possibilities, and her mind slipped
off on a new tack.

Specifically, just what articles of furniture would
the flat need? Her mind's eye dwelt once more
upon its three rooms and bath, and it occurred to

THE THOROUGHBRED

her then that there wasn't a closet in the place.
What In the world would she do with all her clothes?
At that she drew in a little gasp of excitement
and let out a sigh of relief. She knew now where
she could get her hundred dollars. It was a perfect
solution. Fred wouldn't have a leg to stand on.

CHAPTER V

THE NEW WORLD

CELIA began operations Friday moming< —
early Friday morning, be it said, before Al-
fred had finished breakfast — ^and he had to take the
seven-eighteen these days, in order to get down to
his job on time — ^with a very careful and deliberate
toilet. It was the first time she had paid any at-
tention to her looks since she had donned her armor
for Ruth Collier's visit on Wednesday.

At a quarter to eight, just sifter Marie had
brought up her coffee and toast, the door-bell rang.

"Oh, that's — P' Celia began, then checked her-
self. "Go down and see who it is," she directed.

She took a last swift reassuring look into her
mirror as the maid descended the stairs, then rather
carefully arranged herself in the big chair behind
the slim little table where Marie had deposited her
tray. She broke off a bit of toast, but didn't eat

rit

THE THOROUGHBRED

it; sat listening to what was happening at the now
open door. A man with a brusk colloquial idiom,
and a strongly Oriental accent^ was trying to con-
vince Marie that he had important business with her
mistress. Marie, it seemed, was not trying to con-
ceal her misgivings about him, which were of the
darkest sort. But eventually she let him in and
came up to Celia with a card.

Celia dropped a negligent glance upon the not
immaculate face of it, and said, ^h, yes. He
wants to buy some clothes of mine. Bring him up.
And, Marie," she added as the girl turned away,
"don't leave the room till he does." Then, with a
fine exterior calm, she took the first sip of her coffee.

It is not to be denied that she was a little fright-
ened. And yet there w£is something pleasurable
about her excitement, too. A new combination of
emotions for Celia French. She had never been an
adventurer.

But then, everything about her present situation
w£is new. It was a new thing to need — ^absolutely
to need — a hundred dollars. It was a new thing

THE NEW WORLD

to be thrown, definitely and unescapably, upon her
own resources for getting it. Consequently the
thrilling excitement attendant upon her discovery
of a way to get it w£is also new.

After her first gasp of relief when it occurred to
her that she could get that hundred dollars by sell-
ing her clothes, she had, for a few minutes, fdt
pretty sick. She'd seen herself lugging a great
bundle from one second-hand store to another, bat-
tered — discouraged. She had wept a few tears,
there in the street-car, of pure self-pity, and then
had dried them with a sudden flame of self -con-
tempt. Why shouldn't she play the game as well
as she could, instead of as badly? If any bullying
was to be done, why not do it herself?

The entertainment of that idea began an epoch
with Celia — ^really dianged the texture of life for
her. She had sat down at the telephone as soon
as she reached the house, called up, out of the clas-
sified directory, a dealer who €tdvertised a most lib-
eral disposition toward the purchase of used gewns,
and told him curtly that if he cared to come to her

THOROUGHBRED

house before eight o'clock to-moirow mommg, she
would do business with him. She was very busy
and would be engaged later.

There had been an enormous satisfaction in feel-
ing that she had got just the right intimidating
ring into her voice. There had even been a satis-
faction in recognizing tibat the man at the other
telephone was playing the same game — didn't know
whether he could come or not ; doubted whether the
things she had to show him would be worth the
trouble. The ring at the bell at a quarter to eight
this morning meant that she'd won this first skir-
mish. She'd played the game better than he had.

Now, as she waited, she was keen to follow up
this victory. A feeling she did not even note the
absence of was shame — ^humiliation. She didn't
a bit mind letting Marie know the nature of the
transaction, and W£is quite IndiiFerent as to what
the maid might think, or whom she might confide
her speculations about It to. It was the sort of
secret she'd have guarded with her life a week ago.

You see money — ^the need of money — ^had always

THE NEW WORLD

been the skeleton in the Frenches' closet. The as-
sumption current in that family from the time of
Celia's earliest memories had been that all people —
all people of the sort one met — were providentially
provided with ample incomes. Any fact which
threatened to give the lie to this presumption was
ipso facto scandalous — unmentionable — indecent.
And while, of course, there were other topics simi-
larly tabooed, this was the only one of them that
did not easily acquiesce in being ignored.

The Frenches were always managing, doing
without, stretching the not very elastic band of
their income to make the ends of it meet around
their necessities, and they had developed, not only
for use before the world, but even in the intimacies
of their domestic circle, a whole vocabulary of
euphemistic paraphrase and circumlocution. You
can make any subject indecent by avoiding it like
that.

A year of married life with Alfred Blair had
reduced Celia's sensitiveness to the topic, but had
not changed her ideas about it. It had still seemed

THE THOROUGHBRED

to her, up to the night of that disastrous dinner,
a little indelicate to ask the price of anything she
meant to buy. Or, if not that, at least to let it
appear that price was the determining factor
whether she bought it or not* It still seemed intol-
erable to her to try to drive a bargain — ^get any-
thing cheaper than the price it was offered at. The
mere thought of trying to sell anything of her own
made her shiver. It always made her blue when
women book agents came to the house and began
reeling off the merits of some set of voliunes, Maun-
tain Peaks of Literature, and so on, that they
wanted her to subscribe to. She used to wonder,
in a kind of nightmare, what she'd do if she were
ever thrust into a situation where that W£is the only
means open to her for keeping herself alive. And
she decided, quite seriously, that if it ever came to
that she'd kill herself with morphine or chloral
instead.

But a gyroscope, if its gyrations are rapid
enough, will do unexpected and surprising things.

100

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It is capable even of driving a hard bargain with
the law of gravity. If you will assume a living,
highly conscious, self-critical gyroscope, which had
never really revolved at all, had always leaned up
in a comer for support, not fancying the notion
of tumbling over and scratching itself, and then
will imagine this gyroscope, through no volition of
its own, suddenly set whirling at ten thousand rev-
olutions a minute, you will gei^a pretty good notion
of the new Celia.

She'd have said, if questioned, that the force
which had speeded her up and transformed her into
so new and astonishing a person was her furious
anger with her husband — a purely retaliatory de-
sire to demonstrate to him how injurious and un-
founded his opinion of her had been.

But she hadn't time to concern herself much with
whys and wherefores. It wasn't with any conscious
reference to Alfred at all that she braced herself
for the arrival of the second-hand clothes man and
prepared to get as much of his money as she could
for what she had to sell him.

101

THE THOROUGHBRED

She sipped her coffee daintfly, and told Marie
what things to bring out from the closet.

Her first glance at her opponent gave her the
mistaken idea that it was going to be easy. He
wasn't much to look at; in most respects, a dis-
tinctly inferior specimen. His manner, in the shock
of their first encounter, was weak and servile. Even
his oily black hair hatl a meek look, and the un-
healthy pallor of his face accentuated it.

But when Marie had brought out, one after an-
other, all the pretty frocks the closet contained —
evening gowns, house dresses, a smart Httle after-
noon suit, and her two opera cloaks — and he, after
an appraising glance at each, and the notation of
a figure on a greasy bit of paper with the well-
licked stub of a pencil, offered her, with a quite
coolly indifferent air of utter finality, thirty-two
dollars and seventy-five cents for the lot, the blow
almost finished her. She felt a lump coming in
her throat. For a sickening moment she actually
believed that that was all the things were worth.
Even after her reason had come to the rescue she

102

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went on beUevlng, for another minute, that that
was all he thought they were worth and the utmost
that he would ever pay.

But anger — one of the best and most necessary
of all our passions, never forget that — came to the
rescue. That servile, oily little rat standing there,
pawing over her pretty clothes, had mecmt her to
feel sick like that. He had shot her a look out of
his bright beady little eyes and no doubt noted the
effect of the blow, and was gloating now, inside,
over the prospect of getting those lovely clothes
for so near nothing.

Her finely penciled eyebrows flattened, and her
blue eyes darkened beneath them.

"Show him the way out, Marie," she commanded
crisply. **I have too much to do this morning to
waste time listening to vulgar jokes."

The man began protesting volubly, but Celia cut
him short.

"You don't speak English very Well," she ob-
served. *Terhaps you didn't say what you meant.
If you meant a hundred and thirty-two dollars and

108

THE THOROUGHBRED

seventy-five cents, you may stay'* — she glanced
over at her boudoir-clock — ^^'fifteen minutes and
well talk about it. I can't give you any more time
than that."

His eyes rolled in his head. He appealed to the
high gods. The lady was beside herself — ^lunatic
These were not the expressions he used.

"I'm not crazy at all," said Celia warmly. *Tm
extremely annoyed at having to listen, when I'm
busy, to childish nonsense. I know what those
clothes are worth, and so do you, and unless you're
willing to pay at least half that much I simply
won't bother with you."

He came up, with a wrench, to fifty; with a
groan, to seventy-five — ^to eighty. He looked the
clothes all over again, minutely, and delivered an
impressive ultimatum — eighty-two dollars and
twenty cents.

Celia got up and went over to her dressing-table ;
sat down in front of it with her back to him, took
an unimportant little gold pin out of her negligee,
and, holding it between her lips, as though she had

104

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already begun the operation of dressing for the
street, said:

"Take him away, Marie.''

It was an admirable bit of stage-management,
and it worked.

"All right," the man said. **I'll give you a hun-
dred for the lot."

Celia took her pin out of her mouth.

Now you are to note this. A hundred dollars was
what she had to have. She had won — ^barely won
— ^her victory. She didn't need any more. But
the thrill of the game had got into her blood. For
the game's own sake, and for nothing else in the
world, she said:

^TTou can have them for a hundred and twenty-
five." •

She got, eventually, one hundred and eighteen
dollars. And the satisfaction she took in the su-
perfluous eighteen, counted painfully out, in fright-
fully shabby one- and two-dollar bills, was, it is
the unexaggerated truth, one of the very keenest
pleasures she had ever enjoyed.

106

THE THOROUGHBRED

Well, by then it was half past eight, and it was
Friday morning. By six o'clock Saturday night,
if Alfred were to be crushed in a convincing and
finished manner, she must have his new home ready
for him, furnished — settled — dinner cooking on the
stove. She had the flat. She had the hundred and
eighteen dollars, and she had the better part of
two days.

In the buoyant mood of her departure from the
house, fifteen minutes or so after that of the cha-
stened clothing dealer, the allowance, in respect
both of time and money, seemed ample.

The place wouldn't need much furniture — a table
and three or four chairs, a bed, kitchen things. It
occurred to her, as she rode in on the train, that
it wouldn't do to allow her possession of a large
sum like a hundred and eighteen dollars to lead her
to luxurious extremes in her purchases. The place
must look Spartan, or half the moral effect would
be lost. If she could tuck away thirty or forty
dollars in — she smiled over this — a stocking or a
teapot, it would be all the better.

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She wouldn't waste time over it, either. She'd
go to one of the big department stores on the cheap
side of State Street, march through her purchases
without any shilly-shally about making up her
mind, then go out to the flat and assist the cleaner
whom Larry Doyle had, presimiably, put to work.
This would leave Saturday free for putting things
in place and getting settled.

This program determined upon, she settled her-
self in the train to the contemplation of her living-
room as she wanted it to look.

The first thing she saw was a big rag rug. They
looked homely, and were really rather smart. A
bright blue would go well with the smoky gray of
the walls, she thought. It would be better, per-
haps, not to go to the wrong side of State Street
for that. They kept them, she knew, in all the big
stores on her own side of that thoroughfare. And
then two comfortable, but unpretentious, chairs —
a big one for Fred and a smaller one, for herself,
one on each side of the stove. And a plain old-
fashioned table, with leaves that folded down.

107

THE THOROUGHBRED

She must, at this point, have slipfSed off into a
day-dream, since, with her waking mind, she knew
better than to suppose she could accomplish an old-
fashioned high-boy and a New England pre-Revo-
lutionary side-table with her hundred and eighteen
dollars.

They went agreeably into the picture, though,
and she went on adding to it with growing pleas-
ure, until she saw herself, not in her own small
chair, but on the arm of Alfred's big one, her own
arm tu(;ked cozily round his neck, his nice, still
thick, just a little bit wavy and altogether adorable
hair where she could comfortably put her cheek
down on it.

At this point, properly scandalized with herself
for such even imagined inconstancy to her fixed
determination, she shook herself awake again, and
reverted to more practical considerations. She'd
have the blue rug, though.

She went straight to Shield's and bought it for
twenty-four dollars. Really for six, you see, be-
cause she still had ninety-four left out of her hun-

108

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dred. Then, with the reflection that things here,
after all, cost no more than the same things would
across the street, and that she would save time,
precious time, too, by not adventuring in unfamiliar
ways, she went up to the household utilities depart-
ment, intent on furnishing her kitchen.

She felt very virtuously practical over beginning
with the kitchen, instead of leaving it to the last.

"I want,'' she said to the young man who came
up, courteously concerned to know wherein he could
serve her, "I want to get everything one needs for
a kitchen — ^a little kitchen, for only two people.''

She caught her breath there, and turned away
with a blush and a blink. The thing sounded so
absurdly sentimental and honeymoonish — so ironi-
cally at variance with the grim reality — ^the total
smash — ^the totally hopeless smash that had over-
taken her and Alfred. As she went on, her voice
had the cold ring of disillusioned practicality. ,

*^1 want to get it all as cheaply as possible," she
said.

This injunction didn't discourage the young man

109

THE THOROUGHBRED

at all. What spoke louder than words to him was
the cut of her skirt, the look of her hat, the condi-
tion of her gloves. Indeed, the very quality of the
voice that pronounced the words.

He remarked easily that cheapness was a desid-
eratum, of course, but that cheap things were not
really cheap. This was to say, that you got more
service for your money, which was the real test,
of course, by not being too sparing about your
initial outlay.

"We'll begin with refrigerators," he said.
"That's one of the most important things, really."

Celia started slightly. She'd forgotten about a
refrigerator. Their house had had one built in.
But of course they'd have to have one.

She spent an agreeable quarter of an hour among
the refrigerators, and at last tentatively agreed
upon one. Then they moved over to the kitchen
cabinets.

At this point a cloud, the size of a man's hand,
appeared on Celia's horizon.

The young man — ^he was a very tactful young

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man — apparently became aware of it. Gently, but
irresistibly, he convinced her that such a cabinet was
indispensable. The saving it effected in such staples
as sugar, flour, coffee, and so on, by keeping them
in properly devised air-tight containers, was enor-
mous — ^incalculable. Here was a charming little
affair, not unnecessarily elaborate, done in a mod-
est gray enamel. Not so showy as white, but more
practical. Being constructed entirely of steel, it
was impervious to vermin and easily kept in per-
fectly sanitary condition. He couldn't conscien-
tiously recommend anything inferior.

It, tentatively too, went down on the list.

But the cloud was getting bigger. The young
man, aware of this perhaps, relaxed his severity
in the matter of fireless cookers. There was really
no need of going to great expense here. This one
at sixteen dollars was as good as one really needed.
An exceptional value this week — ^a special. Had
been twenty, and would be again.

When it came to utensils, though, the young
man was adamant. There was really only one ma-

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THE THOROUGHBRED

terial for pots, pans, skillets, kettles and so <«.
This was cast olununum. Not the cheap stamped
stuflF. The solid article. The finest, the most ex-
pensive enamel in the world would crack and flake,
if it were allowed to bum — and such accidents
would happen in spite of the housewife's most rig-
orous attention.

He led her up, unresisting — dazed a little, if Wd
known the tmth — to the Suniptuous silvery array:
colTee-pots, tea-kettles, stew-pans of assorted sizes,
frying-pans, griddles.

"Now, I'd suggest — " he said capably, and be-
gan making a list.

"Speaking of fireless cookers," said Celia pres-
ently, in the midst of this — and the troubled quality
of her voice distracted him from the labor he was
proceeding with, obviously con omore— ''speaking
of fireless cookers, bow mudi does a stove cost — a
gas stove?"

"We don't carry them," he said, "though we
could get you one, of course. But you could get
a pretty good one, I should say, for thirty-five or

dollars."

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**And how much," she asked, "are the things you
have ahready put down on that list? Not these
cooking dishes — ^the others?"

The refrigerator, the fireless cooker and the
kitchen cabinet, it seemed, came to eighty-four dol-
lars and twenty-five cents.

Celia turned away from him, bit her lip hard,
and clenched her hands until the fingers in her neat
gloves felt numb. For a matter of twenty seconds
she experienced violently the sensation one has when
an elevator starts going down too fast.

Here's where the difference came in. The old
Celia would have managed a tolerably indifferent
nod and a phrase about coming back a little later,
or looking a little farther, together with, perhaps,
a glance at her watch to account for the suddenness
of her departure. And she'd have gone away —
sick — humiliated.

The new Celia, after just that twenty seconds
for getting control of the elevator, turned back to
the young man, and with a candidly rueful smile
met his eye.

**Pm awfully sorry to have wasted your time,**

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she said, '^bat the sort of things we've been looking
at are simply out of the question. You see, I've
only got a hundred dollars — ^ninety-four dollars,
that is, to furnish the whole flat. It's just a little
three-room place out on the West Side. I suppose
it can be done somehow. It's going to be. But
not with things I could buy here P'

Are you waiting to be told that on hearing this
avowal the young man looked superior and annoyed
and said something disagreeable about our house
of course not handling that class of goods? If so,
you will wait in vain. But I doubt if you even
expected that. Certainly not if you have any ade-
quate conception of how Celia looked and how her
voice sounded when she said it; with heightened
color and bright eyes, wide with a look of adventure
in them like a child's ; or of the hint of breathless-
ness about her speech, revealing how much she had
surprised herself by giving away this confidence.

What the young man did was to blush to the
hair, smile rather idiotically, he decided afterward,
and experience a momentary twinge of the liveliest

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envy of the unknown man who was going to share
the little three-room apartment and its ninety-four-
dollar furnishings with her.

"I'll tell you something," he said very unofficially
— confidentially almost. In fact, he had ceased al-
together to be the perfect salesman, and had become
instead a man and a brother. **I never can get
my mother to buy any of her kitchen things up
here. She gets them all — pots and pans and such,
you know, at the five- and ten-cent store. She says
the things wear out, of course, but that when they
do you can always afford to buy new ones because
you paid so little in the first place."

"Why, that's wonderful," said Celia. **I never
thought of that. I'm very, very much obliged."

She felt like shaking hands with him, and so,
indeed, did he with her. But good manners re-
strained them both.

When she turned away, though, he fell in beside
her and strolled along in the direction of the ele-
vators. It seemed he had something more to say.

**About stoves now — ^"

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THE THOROUGHBRED

Celia stopped short and faced him again. You
certainly couldn't get a stove at the ten-cent store*

**0f course, if you're going to serve elaborate
meals, or do a lot of baking, you need a big stove
with a couple of ovens and a plate warmer and
all the rest. But if you aren't, why don't you
just get a flat stove without any oven — ^the kind
that stands on a table — or a box? You could buy
that kind for three or four dollars."

Celia drew in a long breath. "You simply
haven't any idea how kind you've been," she said.
^TTou've just — saved the situation."

And, after he'd stammered, "Not at all," and said
how glad he was, she went on :

"And if I save all that, I suppose I could buy
a really good refrigerator. Here, you know."

The young man blushed again. What he'd done
already was bad enough, from the point of view
of the head of the department. But what was com-
ing next was rank treason, nothing less. No won-
der he hung fire for a second. But it got blurted
out at last.

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*T; tell you what I'd do," he said. "You know
these big storage warehouses? There are some out
on the West Side. Well, they're always selling
things that have been stored and not paid for, you
know — ^all kinds of household things. You could
probably get a really good refrigerator — ^as good
as you'd want, for eight or nine dollars."

This time Celia did shake hands, and blurted
out a secret at the same time.

"If ever I get rich again," she said, "I'll come up
here and buy everything in sight."

She left an excellent salesman completely demor-
alized for the day.

As for Celia, she went her way to her flat to see
how the cleaning was coming on, and then to Larry
Doyle's lunch room to find out from him where the
best storage warehouse for buying second-hand
furniture was, buoyant with — ^well, no, it wouldn't
be fair to her numerous and conscientious moral
preceptors to call it a new discovery. They must
have told her all about nettle grasping. Very likely
some one of them had told her about gyroscopes,

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THE THOROUGHBRED

too — ^perhaps even had demonstrated that if one
were rotating, vigorously enough upon its proper
axis, it would decline to topple over at the first
push. They had expatiated, too, I am sure, on
the importance of having an aim in life, and pursu-
ing it energetically, and promised her ample re-
wards in the consciousness of duty well done.

But Celia, hot on the trail of a seven-dollar re-
frigerator and a three-dollar stove, was indulging
in none of these smug generalities. All she was
aware of was that life had suddenly become a very
eager, thrilling, glowing sort of business, and that
she was running it herself, making it happen dif-
ferently from the way it had set out to happen.
She had made it happen differently to other people.
She even made it happen differently to herself.

That man who bought her clothes this morning
— ^he hadn't meant to pay her a hundred and eight-
een dollars for them. He hadn't meant to pay half
of that. But she, Celia, all by herself, had made
him do it. And then, up there at Shield's, with
that thoroughly correct and highly superior young

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salesman. She'd gone on with him for three-quar-
ters of an hour, feeling wretched and ashamed, and
a little hopeless, because she knew, without acknowl-
edging it to herself, that she couldn't afford to buy
the things he was showing to her. But when, at
last, for a penance really, because she was ashamed
of herself for being ashamed, she'd made herself,
who hadn't meant to in the least, tell him the actual
literal truth in dollars and cents, she had found
herself perfectly at ease at once.

What hurt, she reflected, wasn't having people
know things about you. It was having them sus-
pect things that you were trying to hide. Well,
that was easy. She need never be ashamed of any-
thing again.

With a little leisure for reflection she might have
made some further discoveries just as surprising,
or even more so. But you won't need to be told that
she had none. She had two tasks on her hands:
one to get the new flat ready for herself and Fred,
the other to get their house ready for the Colliers.
Either one of them was enough to fill to bursting

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THE THOROUGHBRED

the time at her disposal, and that she actually ac-
compKshed both may be taken as a triiunphant dem-
onstration that a body can occupy two different
spaces at the same time.

Part of the credit for this must go to Larry
Doyle, for it was he who organized Celia's activi-
ties, showed her the importance of doing certain
things first. It was nearly eleven o'clock Friday
morning when she confronted him across his lunch-
eon bar, and she plunged into the midst of things
without the waste of a minute. '

"It isn't any friends of mine that I took the place
for,'' she began. "It's my husband and me. He's
lost all his money, and he's got a job at twenty-two
dollars and a half a week. I told him he could leave
'the flat to me and that I'd have it ready to live
in to-morrow when he comes home from work. I'll
bring sheets and blankets and towels and table linen
from home. Those things don't go with a fur-
nished house, do they? And I've got a silly blue
rug that I paid twenty-four dollars for for the
big room, and I've got ninety-four dollars to buy

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THE NEW WOULD

everything else with. ^Oh, six of it goes for your
stove. That leaves eighty-eight. So I want ycm to
tell me "v^here there's a storage warehouse, or a sec-
ond-hand shop, where I can get everything cheap."

It's no wonder she rather took Larry Doyle's
breath, with her bright cheeks — ^the March wind
was sharp this moAing^and her eager voice, and
her half -scared adventurous way of making friends
with him.

While he was making up his mind what to say
first, she ran on:

"It will be possible, won't it — ^to have everything
ready for him, running, you know, by six o'clock
to-morrow night? Oh, but it's got to be!"

"Sure, it's possible," he said. "But you don't
want to be bothering with your second-hand furni-
ture yet a while. 60 straight to the gas office now
— it's not far — and get your stove and tell them
you must have it connected up with a meter to-day.
To-morrow's a half -day, being Saturday, and you
won't get a hand's turn of work out of those boys.
So, if you don't want to be left till Monday—"

THE THOROUGHBRED

^T. see,'* she broke in, champing to be off. ^TTell
me where it is.**

He did, and added the warning that they'd very
likely tell her, to begin with, that it was impossible
for them to put the job through this week.

"But I'm thinking," he added, "that you'll know
what to say to them better than I could tell you."

She nodded and smiled, partly in anticipation,
partly in amused remembrance of a Celia who had
ceased to exist some time during the past week, who
had always said, with a touch of unconscious pride,
that she couldn't beg for things. .

"On your way back from there," Larry called
after her, "stop in at the coal office and have them
send up a hundred-pound sack of range for your
stove. It won't do for you to be sitting around in
those cold rooms."

She might have tossed that caution off with airy
impatience but for a phrase the Irishman sent after
her.

"There are them that can afford to be sick," he
said, "and there are them that can't."

THE NEW WORLD

She was inclined to disrelish that idea as she
walked away with it — ^the notion that her health
was an asset her husband was entitled to count
upon. But she adopted it instantly, and presently
found a certain satisfaction in that point of view,
partly, perhaps, because she felt that Alfred's chiv-
alrousness would be shocked by it.

She found them, at the gas office, quite as diffi-
cult as she had been warned they would be, and
it took a half -hour's intensive bombardment with
all her feminine artillery to reduce the man she
finally got herself taken to to a weakly acquiescent
state, in which the promise she wanted could be
wrung out of him. Then she paid for her stove —
a three-burner affair — and departed in triumph.

Her activities from then on were too complex
and multifarious to be followed in detail. She
stalked elusive bargains from one likely lair to an-
other, slowly, it seemed to her, but really with re-
markable expedition, accumulating the articles she
needed.

She had her ups and downs. There were ex-

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ultant moments, just after finding something that
was exactly what she wanted, and buying it for less
than she had believed possible, when she thought
she was going to have more money than she needed
and revived the notion of a nest-egg hoard in a
stocking. There were moments of despair when
some necessity she had completely overlooked reared
its head and stared at her.

She wound up at the nearest ten-cent store at
half past four in the afternoon; purchased — ^very
much at haphazard, because she was too tired to
think — ^a quantity of kitchen dishes, and lugged
them, in two vast irregular bundles, from which
the strings were constantly threatening to slip, back
to the flat.

She experienced a very keen pleasure in finding
Larry Doyle there making a fire in the big base-
burner. Not only because a fire was very much
needed, the place being cold as a stone and damp
into the bargain from the cleaning it had got, but
because Larry was, by this time, such a very old

124

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and dear friend, and it warmed and rested one's
heart to see him.

He reported that the gas stove had come and that
the man with the meter had already come in and
connected it up; probably a world's record for
promptness, he thought, and an extraordinary
tribute to Celia's powers of persuasion. Also, a
large roUed-up package had come from Shield's
that must be the rug she had spoken of. Should
he open it? t

He did, and they spread it down on the floor and
discussed its appearance. It would probably look
pretty funny, Celia thought, along with the junk
she had been buying this afternoon.

Her voice was flat with fatigue, and he com^
mented upon it.

"You'd better call it a day, now, and go home
to bed," he advised. He must be leaving, himself,
since another busy hour of the lunch room was com-
ing on.

"There are two reasons why I must stay," she

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said. ^^One of them being that I am too tired to
stir until I have sat here for a while." She was
on the only seat in the place, the step leading up
to their alcove bedroom. "And the other that the
expressman who's bringing the things from the
storage warehouse will be along in a few minutes,
and I've got to be here to let him in. Oh, he won't
be long, and as soon as he comes I'll go."

Before he left he pulled up a comer of the rug
over the step to make it a little softer, and told her
how to shut off the stove for the night.

She heard the door close behind him, and almost
instantly thereafter, she thought, a violent knock-
ing on it, which seemed, impossibly, to have been
going on some time. Also the room was now quite
dark, except as it was lighted by the glow through
the isinglass door of the stove. It was very bewil-
dering, until she understood that she must have
fallen asleep, sitting on that step.

It was then seven o'clock ; a very alcoholic flavor
about the two men who had brought her load of fur-
niture accounting, perhaps, for their delay in ar-

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riving with it ; and it was a quarter to eight before
the last article was stowed away and Celia could
turn the key on the place.

An even twelve hours ago she had received the
second-hand clothing dealer for the purpose of sell-
ing him her clothes. It had been a day sure enough.
An ampler day, not only in the matter of material
activities, but in its emotional content, than any
she could remember. The people she'd encountered
had seemed more real and alive and human than
those her old paths had brought her into casual
contact with.

When had any of her conventionally made ac-
quaintances evoked that warm spontaneous glow of
friendliness from her that she'd felt when she found
Larry Doyle building a fire in her stove, or when
the salesman up at Shield's had told her where his
mother bought her kitchen things?

The emotions hadn't all been rosy, though, by
any means. There had been an instant of cold ter-
ror just at the end of the day, when, confronted
by that gin-reeking expressman, she had read in

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his look that she was desirable, and alone. She had
moved briskly over and thrown open a window upon
the busy street, and with that protection had felt
safe enough. But the mere breath of that kind of
peril had never blown upon her before. Oh, it had
been a day.

She was so tired, as she made her way to the
comer drug-store to call up the house and tell Fred
where she was and that she was on her way home,
that the mere exertion of walking almost brought
tears. But even fatigue couldn't lessen the trium-
phant sense of achieved adventure.

None of that, naturally, got over the telephone
to her husband, and his own tone of poignant anxi-
ety — ^he had been waiting hours for her to come
home and indulging in all sorts of terrors about
her — sounded merely querulous to her. He had
called up her mother's house two or three times,
but they had no word from her. Was that where
she was now?

This supposition, naturally again, annoyed Celia.
Why should she be at her mother's? She told him,

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without explanation, where she was, and that she
was coming straight home now; would get in about
nine.

^TTou can't come home alone from a place like
that at this time of night!*' And then, quite ab-
surdly, he told her to wait there imtil he could come
in and get her.

This, of course, she flatly declined to do. A
street-car that would take her to the station ran
right past the door. "I hope you've got your
things all packed up," she said by way of a counter-
attack. "If you haven't, you'd better get at it
now, because everything has got to be out of your
closet and your bureau drawers by to-morrow morn-
ing. You can pack a tnmk with what you'll want
to take with you to the flat, and put the rest of the
stuff in another trunk that Ruth says we can leave
in the attic. I shan't have a minute to do it to-
morrow."

She needn't have made that last remark, she
knew, and she didn't blame him a bit for slamming
the hook down suddenly, the way he did, by way of

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THE THOROUGHBRED

concluding the conversation. Only, the ridiculous*
ness of the notion that, after the things she'd been
doing to-day, and been through to-day, she should
finish up, like a Jane Austin heroine, by waiting
an hour and a half as a concession to the propri-
eties — because there was, of course, no real danger
— so that her husbcuid could escort her home, net-
tled her a little.

Their meeting, when she got home, at half past
nine or so, didn't work much better.

He flung the door open for her as she came up
the steps and greeted her with a, **Wherever in the
world have you been?"

She gave a limp little laugh and said, **Where
haven't I been ! My, but I'm tired !"

"Celia," he said, standing in front of her to keep
her from walking off, as she showed a disposition
to do, *Ve've got to have a talk."

"AU right," she said, **but come on out into the
kitchen and talk while I eat. I had a lunch about
three at Larry Doyle's, but that's all since coffee
this morning. I'm starved!"

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Her mapner both disconcerted and exasperated
him. He had been prepared to meet terrible emo-
tional stresses — ^tragedy. He felt pretty tragic
himself. But nothing of that should be allowed
to appear. From now on his deaHngs with Celia
should be marked by gentleness and serenity. And,
if she'd been the grief -stricken bewildered object
he'd got himself keyed up for, she would have found
him exactly that. But, as it was, he cried out:

"Who the deuce is Larry Doyle? And where—
where have you been — all these hours?"

She frowned, a little puzzled over his violence,
but said : "I've been all over the West Side. And
Larry Doyle is a dear. Wait till you've seen him P'

He said, "Celia, I can't do it — ^treat the thing
in that manner, I mean. Here we are at the end
of everything, and you're acting as if it was plans
for a week-end visit to the coimtry. This is our
last chance to decide anything, and — and I want
to talk about it seriously. You aren't so angry
with me now as you were, and I think I can make
you see that I didn't mean what you thought the

181

■i

THE THOROUGHBRED

other night. At least, not in that ofFensive way.
I want you to consider going back to your father
and mother. Not to get rid of me, but to wait.
Oh, can't you sit down and listen P'

All the time he talked she had been eating away
steadily, and his last exclamation was provoked by
her getting up for a raid on the cake-box.

**I*m listening," she said, with her mouth full,
it must be admitted. Then, with an effort, and a
little bit more clearly : **But it isn't any use, Fred.
You agreed to the flat, didn't you?"

"You won't be able to find one that you'd be
willing to live in, for any rent I can afford to pay.
You've no idea what it would mean; the things
you'd have to put up with, the neighbors you'd
have, the hardships."

"I don't suppose I do know them all," she ad-
mitted, "but I've found a flat and rented it for
twelve dollars a month. It's off North Avenue, right
near Humboldt Park." She recited the street and
number to him. "You'd better write it down," she

138

THE NEW WORLD

added, because it's where you live. I've been buy-
ing furniture all the afternoon."

Then, at his look of perfectly blank amazement,
**Why — didn't you think I meant anything I said
that night? What do you think Fve been doing all
the afternoon? Glooming around like the heroine
of East Lynnet Do write that address down,
Fred, because your dinner — some sort of a dinner
— ^is going to be ready there to-morrow night, at
half past six, and I don't want you wandering all
over the West Side, not knowing where you live."

She recited the address once more, and stood
watching, while he, like an automaton, wrote it
down. Then, before he could get his wits together
— ^and she had plenty of time, for they were very
thoroughly scattered — she added:

**Fm simply so dead tired and sleepy I can feel
my brains slipping around inside my head. I'm
going up to bed. Grood night."

CaSLAPTER VI

WHSN HE CAME HOME

IT wasn't quite the real thing, this manner of
hers. There was a dash of play-acting in it.
But she wasn't conscious, to-ni^t — she was too
tired, poor child, to be accurately conscious of any-
thing — of the motive that led her to assume it. In
the background of her mind, of Qourse, she knew
that she had mislaid her rage against her husband.
More than that, had tossed it overboard long ago.
She knew that the motive, quite sincerely avowed on
the night of the dinner-party — the desire to demon-
strate, to his repentance and shame, how outra-
geously he had misjudged her — ^had been wearing
thinner and thinner every hour, and that it would
collapse almost at the first touch. But she didn't
want the collapse to happen until she got him fairly
into their new home.

There were a multitude of last things to be done

1S4

WHEN HE CAME HOME

at the house, of course, the next morning, and she
didn't get started on them as early as she might,
since she slept fathoms deep till eight o'clock, and
only by luck waked up then. So it was near noon
before she reached the flat. Six hours and a little
more left, and an amount to do that might well
have swamped her with dismay.

A description of how the place looked would be
lugubrious, and, since I am sure you can imagine
it, unnecessary. But Celia was not dismayed, and
there was a good reason why. Down below the
mere surface of her mind, which was, of course,
completely engaged from the moment of her ar-
rival, she was preoccupied with what was going to
happen at half past six, and from then on. Marie
had brought her a note from Alfred with her break-
fast — ^he, of course, had had to go to town long be-
fore she waked up — ^a note which merely said that
he would come at the hour she had given him. All
the afternoon, this one fact was vividly in focus.
She rehearsed the event a score of different ways.
He'd be surprised, no doubt, with what he found,

136

THE THOROUGHBRED

curious as to how she had accomplished it, and he'd
surely be repentant; especially after he'd found
out how completely she had deprived his grievance
of any standing ground at all; that she had not,
for instance, either gone in debt for the furniture,
or used a single bone of what may be called their
skeleton of contention — ^namely, the jewelry — for
the purchase of it. Certainly he couldn't object to
her having sold her clothes. Tljat was so brilliantly
reasonable a thing to have done.

She wouldn't, of course, try to rub her own
grievance into him. It wouldn't be necessary. The
mere outstanding facts of the situation would cry
aloud how he had misjudged her. No, there must
be nothing tragic or aggrieved about her manner ;
nothing virtuous or injured or martyrlike. She
must be good-humored and cool. She must act in

the manner of one who expects all she has done to
be taken for granted — accepted as a matter of
course.

All this, until he had acknowledged, in some way
or other, how wildly in error he had been in his

136

WHEN HE CAME HOME

opinion of her, and had, by implication at least,
asked her forgiveness. After that — ?

Always, when she reached this point in the
drama, she found her hands getting shaky, and a
stiffness coming into her throat, and with a sort of
panicky haste she would ring down the curtain and
begin another rehearsal at the point where she
heard him coming up the stairs.

But all the resolution at her conmiand wasn't
enough to prevent fancies and memories, especially
memories, from springing at her ; little momentary
glimpses of her husband, their context often quite
forgotten, just how he'd looked, or how his voice
had sounded at one time or another. And when
this happened, she'd go very shaky for a minute,
and have to wipe her eyes on the sleeve of her big
gingham apron, in order to see what she was doing.

At two o'clock, when she went to Larry Doyle's
for lunch, it seemed to her that she had made little
headway. But he came back with her for an hour,
his noon rush being over, and between them they
accomplished miracles.

18T

THE THOROUGHBRED

There was plenty to do, of course, even after
that. At five o'clock she locked up the flat and set
out, with her last three dollars, to buy food for
their evening meal, and — she nearly forgot this —
for over Sunday.

She had a surprise up her sleeve here for Alfred.
She was, really, despite the misgiving she had coor
fided to Larry Doyle, not a half-bad cook. Years
ago, when that first man she had got engaged to
was in the ascendent, she had played, in quite a
serious manner, at domestic science, and had really
discovered a latent talent for cooking. Her dra-
matic break-up, however, with the man who had
inspired these labors, had swept her into other
channels, and she'd never gone back. Alfred sus-
pected nothing of this, and it had been part of her
program to complete his annihilation, if {Possible,
with a pretty good dinner. The fact that she had
to buy enough for five meals, with her three dollars,
gave her an excuse, which she was rather glad of,
for giving up this project.

At si:^ o'clock, with the table set, the potatoes

138

WHEN HE CAME HOME

boiling vigorously in their jackets, the slice of ham
ready to light the fire under when the moment ar-
rived, she was seized with a panic because there
appeared to be nothing to do but wait, and she
simply knew she couldn't — ^not without going all
to pieces. Already she could feel the tears com-
ing up and a lump in her throat. It would be in-
furiating to have everything spoUed now, just in
the hour of her triumph, by having him find wait-
ing for him, instead of the good-humored, self-
possessed young person she'd been counting on all
afternoon, a sob-shaken, semi-liquid, tear-streaked,
grimy —

Well, anyway, she could wash her face. That
was something to do. And, in the bathroom, she
scrubbed away vigorously for five minutes. After
that, providentially, she remembered that she had
forgotten to slice the bread, and with hands that
strangely refused to take a proper hold on any-
thing, she managed to get it done.

Then she decided that the potatoes had boiled
long enough, and began peeling them.

139

THi; THOROUGHBRED

And then, half-way through her second {>otato,
she heard a step on the stairs. It wasn't Alfred.
It couldn't be. It wasn't his time — ^not for fifteen

"<r

minutes. But it was he ! Didn't she know his step ?
He was coming up heavily — slowly, as though he
was tired.

She dropped her knife and the fork that empaled
the potato, and put her face down in the orook of
her arm. She was so limp she was sure she couldn't
stand up. But when she heard the door open she
did, and from the doorway of the kitchen she saw
him standing in the other.

She saw his gaze travel, dazedly, with a strange,
unrealizing wistfulness, from one object to another
about the room — from the bright stove with its
glowing doors, to the big hollow easy chair, and the
little spring rocker with its fringe trimmings op-
posite it, to the table with the lamp in the middle,
and the red checked table-cloth. It was coming
around to her now. But before it reached her she
saw his eyes fill up with tears.

That was the last thing she saw. She heard him

140

WHEN HE CAME HOME

saying her name, just as her voice broke over his,
and then, somehow, they were in each other's arms.
"Tighter !" she said.

They had their talk, to be sure, but it wasn't
until a good deal later. You can compute roughly
how much later, from the fact that the potatoes
were absolutely stone cold, and had to be warmed
up in the frying-pan before they could begin their
supper ; that they ate at last, in the inconstant and
preoccupied manner of honeymoon lovers, and that
they washed up the dishes in the same way.

But after all that, and after they had rectified,
temporarily, Celia's total omission to provide cur-
tains or shades, with a sheet pinned up over each
of the two f roflt windows, they got down to a bath-
robe and bedroom-slipper basis, settled together in
the big hollow chair, and told each other all about
everything; what they'd really meant by things
they'd said and done and omitted to do, and what
each had thought the other meant, and what a pair
of sillies they had been. And Celia wound it up by

141

THE THOROUGHBRED

narrating, though not just as I have done here,
how she'd spent the time since Thursday morning.

At last, blissfully content, and a little drowsy,
she began asking him questions ; if he was glad that
it had all happened just as it had, down to the very
least particular. She was, she said. There was
nothing, not the smallest thing, that she would want
changed.

She couldn't get him to go as (ar aa that.
**There were things I said to you that night," he
insisted, "and things I — ^I couldn't quite deny I
meant, that Fd give a good deal to wipe off the
slate."

^'Oh, but that," she said, sitting up suddenly, "is
the very best part of it. That's what's done it all,
don't you see? We might have gone on for years
and never — ^never really been married at all, if we
hadn't, in our rage, turned in and torn the — ^tHe
husks off each other, so that we could see what we
really were. You were right about me, you know,
horribly right. That was what made me so furi-
ous. And it was true that you weren't the man I

142

"Tighter!" she said

WHEN HE CAME HOME

married. Oh, but it's all right, silly, don't you see?
Because I'm not the giri you married, either."

He protested at this. She was the same Celia,
^nly now, for the first time, he saw her with open
eyes.

But she, quite dispassionately, stuck to her point.
**Surely I ought to know," she insisted, sitting up
straight and rubbing her sleepy eyes. "I remember
that girl well. I remember how annoyed and
shocked she was when she found the new girl — ^the
new me, you know — falling in love with you, in —
in a new way which she didn't think quite ladylike.
And the new one was rather scared and easily im-
posed upon, and she might never have got away at
all, if you hadn't come along — ^the new you, re-
member; not prosperous and self-contained, and —
don't mind — noble at all, but just raw and real and
htunan, and fighting mad, and turned her loose."

He still wanted to laugh her out of this fancy,
but she was very much in earnest about it.

^TTou must believe it," she insisted. "And you
must never forget it. You mustn't treat me like the

143

THE THOROUGHBRED

old Celia. The old one never liked to be — next to
things, or people, but I do. I love it." She paused
to illustrate. "I've just come alive, don't you see,
and found out what a wonderful thing it is.
P — ^please say that you're new too, and that this,
to-night, is the beginning of everything."

**The beginning of everything," he echoed.

For the former things were passed away.

So ends the first chapter of this episode in the
life of the Alfred Alairs.

CHAPTER Vn

INTERLUDE

WE will sing," the preacher says, *Hhe first
and third stanza, omitting the second.^
There are three chapters in this fragment of

Celiacs and Alfred's story ; but we, at the conclu-
sion of the first, are going to proceed directly to
the third. Blessed is the nation which has no his-
tory. And blessed, for the same reason, is the
family which doesn't give the novelist a chance.

The three months which followed Celia's finding
and renting and furnishing of the flat make up this
second chapter. To Alfred and Celia it remains,
the outstanding one, and when they are old, I fancy
they'll still talk to each other about it. As they
see it retrospectively, it is their period of pure ro-
mance — ^three golden honeymoons strung on a silver
wire.

Please don't take me as saying that I consider

146

THE THOROUGHBRED

poverty a romantic lark, or even the perilously close
approach to poverty that is spelled by an income,
for two people, of twenty-two and a half dollars a
week.

But the Blairs were not really so poor as they
made out. They had, for the present, plenty of
good serviceable clothes ; they had in certain pros-
pect, though they carefully avoided looking at it,
the income from their house. And, too, down in the
bottom of the mind of each, though neither ever ad-
mitted it, was the consciousness that this state of
things was transitory, and really terminable at wHl.

There is no denying that this consciousness
changed the quality of their adventure a little,
spiced it faintly with the flavor of make-believe.
It was easier, for example, to make a joke of it,
when a mistake in the budget reduced them, for
four whole days, to a famine ration; or to smile,
as they stood together outside an enticing motion-
picture theater around on North Avenue, and had,
forlornly, to admit that they had exhausted their
amusement appropriation for this week.

146

INTERLUDE

I don't mean that they enjoyed these experiences.
They honestly went hungry. They endured a gen-
uine disappointment over not seeing Charlie Chap-
lin in his burlesque of Greraldine Farrar. But these
pangs could be looked at as isolated phenomena, not
as the omens of a dreary futiure; which made an
enormous difference.

The most delicious thing about their new mode
of life was, perhaps, its intimacy. They had never
lived intimately before, and this fact had a deeper-
lying cause than Celia's — ^the old Celia's — ^aloofness
or her husband's shyness ; this was the spirit of the
social group of which they formed a part. No
group in the whole social system is so enslaved by
its own conventions as this prosperous, rising, sub-
urban class. It is the determination to rise, of
course, that does it. The smaller group, just above,
which has reached what it considers the summit,
can afford to relax a little ; can even, within rigor-
ous limits, of course, make a feature of its indif-
ference to what other people think of its actions.

But Celia and her friends and their husbands,

147

THE THOROUGHBRED

with a summit in sight just ahead, had to keep in
the procession. The number and variety of their
entertainments were regimented with ahnost mili-
tary precision. They gave one another more or less
the same dinners and lunches ; they followed one an-
other, sheephke, into the same recreations, the same
charities; read the same books, discussed the same
ideas. And, since their lives, in a sharply bounded
suburban community, were very visible to one an-
other, they conformed pretty much to the same
domestic code — subscribed to the same standards.

Well, and intimacy was distinctly not good form
among them. The notion sprang, perhaps, from
novels about the English aristocracy. Anyhow,
between husbands and wives, the proper manner was
one of rather hostile indifference. The sort of
things they were to say to each other when others
were about were sharp little witticisms.

And this attitude carried Itself over into their
private life, an imposition guaranteed by their serv-
ants, who were hired from one house to another,
and who formed almost as close a society as they

148

INTERLUDE

did. That a husband and wife should have sepa-
rate rooms to dress and sleep in was a matter of ele^
mentary decency.

The three-room flat, of course, put an end to all
that in more senses than one. Their one bedroom
was just an alcove, really, separable by curtains —
as yet unprovided — from their living-room. VSThen
they turned the key in the door at the head of the
stairs, they were as secure against intrusion as a
pair of pioneer settlers on a prairie. And they
reverted, in many respects, to the simplicity of
peasants.

But the astonishing discovery that they made was
that this material intimacy flowered out into a spir-
itual intimacy that neither of them had dreamed of
before. You couldn't pretend much at close quar-
ters like that. You couldn't nurse a grievance be-
hind a politely intangible manner, or a noble, long-
suffering dignity. There was no standard, not
their own, that they must be always acting with
deference to. And the consequence was that things
got said out, that they came to know not only each

149

THE THOROUGHBRED

otber's minds, but their ofwn. They had occasional
sharp little quarrels, like the explosion of fire-
crackers, during which they said and did things to
eadi other whidi would inexpressibly have shocked
their respectable friends. But these encounters left
no after-effects ; no virtuous, self -pitying sulks.

They began, now that they had stopped trying
to live up to anything, to have real fun — a rather
rowdy, rough-and-tumble sort of fun, a good deal
of it due perhaps to their extensive patronage of
the movies. This was their theory of it, anyway.

The movies, of course, weren't their only form
of entertainment. They took extraordinary street-
car rides. It's amazing, you know, how amusing
a street-car ride can be to a jovially minded, rather
outrageously behaved pair, snuggled together on
one of the back seats and guessing, in whispers,
most grotesquely and injuriously sometimes, about
the condition and business of other passengers. It
is possible to work a variant on the game, too, by
getting on separately, at different comers, and then

160

INTERLUDE

elaborately making each other's acquaintance, tp
the scandal of the car, and getting off together.

Celia was really shocked, though, one night,
when Alfred suggested that they go to a dance-
hall. Certain friends of Celiacs, in her former in-
carnation, made it almost their one business in life
to crush out the dance-hall evil ; or if not to crush
it out, at least to step sharply and disconcertingly
on its toes, and as a result of their reports concern-
ing their slumming investigations, Celia had got
the idea that all dance-halls were sinks of unbridled
iniquity.

Alfred confessed he didn't know much about it
himself, but he passed on the remark of a friend
of his — a man who knew the brightly lighted world
very well: "The majority of people in any of those
places are decent. Or, at least, they're acting de-
cently at any given moment." He said that was
what made all these stage and moving-picture pro-
ductions of fast restaurants and tough dances so
ridiculously unreal. They probably weren't, Al-

161

r|T

THOROUGHBRED

f red ooodnded, so bkck as tfaey were painted.
Anyhow f he and Cdia could try and see.

The place tfaey hit apon was, to tfae eyes of tlieir
innocence at least, perfectly harmless — tfaey never
stayed very late, it's true — and they enjoyed oc-
casional evenings tfaere prodigiously. It was rather
an extravagance, of course.

The best amosemait of all came a little later,
when the fine spring weather really set in. Alfred
came home, guiltily, one ni^t, with two pairs of
roller-skates. Neither of them had attempted this
amusement since childhood, but, after one experi-
mental and rather painful evening, they got on
very well. The park near by afforded an admirable
place for it. Sometimes they swung along arm in
arm, rhythmicaDy— romantically. Sometimes, in a
scandalous fashion, they mixed themselves up in a
miscellaneous game of tag that one was pretty sure
to find going on in one of the larger squares. AH
told, there is no doubt that their standard of civili^
zation deteriorated very much. It was surprising
how much younger they got.

162

INTERLUDE

This change in her husband was an astonishing
thing to Celia.

^^The man I married,'' she confided to him one
night, leaning her elbows on the back of his chair,
and getting both hands, with a good tight grip,
into his hair — ^he was like a big dog in enjoying
the rougher and more unceremonious sort of ca-
resses — ^*the man I married, you know, was middle-
aged, safe and sane, and awfully dignified; 'always
wholly serious,' the way Mrs. Humphrey Ward
wanted her uncle Matthew to be. But you, you're
just a big schoolboy — ^a rather outrageous sort of
schoolboy, too." And, indeed, it was true that the
way he had been acting all the evening, ever since
he'd come home from work, warranted the indict-
ment.

He puzzled her, though, by turning rather grave
and reflective about it. She leaned down for a bet-
ter look at him, then came round and curled up in
his lap.

"Silly," she said, **don't try to pretend you dont
know how I love to have you like that !"

163

THE THOROUGHBRED

He pulled her up In a voluminous embrace that
was still a little absent-minded.

"No, it wfiusn't that,'* he said. "I was thinking
of something. Your speaking of a schoolboy re-
minded me of it. You know, Fve been trying, off
and on, ever since this happened — ever since that
Saturday night when I found you here, to think
what it was hke. It was like something that had
happened once before, I knew, but I couldnH get
hold of it. Now I have.

*^It was when I was in fifth grade — about ten
years old, I must have been — ^and I had a teacher
that couldn't stand me. I don't know that I blame
her so very much, after all. I was pretty slow and
grubby, much as you'd expect me to have been, and
I didn't get on at all. My special nightmare was
arithmetic, which is queer, considering." The con-
sideration was, though he didn't explain this to
Celia, that he had, really, an uncanny talent for
mathematics. "I've made up my mind since, that it
wasn't the mathematical part of the problems I
couldn't understand, but the English they were ex-

154

INTERLUDE

pressed in. However, that wcus no help to me at
the time. I was the teacher's horrible example.
She used to say, over some uncommon piece of stu-
pidity by some one else, *Why, even Alfred Blair
wouldn't have done that.' "

Celia made a little shudder of disgust. ^^How
you must have hated her!" she said. Then, sus-
piciously, ^^That teacher isn't going to turn out to
be me, is she?"

He answered the second question with a **Wait
and see," but to the first, he replied more thought-
fully. "No, I hadn't the satisfaction of hating her.
If I could have taken her personally, that would
have been easy. But she wasn't personal at all.
She was — ^teacher — you see? Destiny. All I could
do was just despair.

"Well, it got worse and worse, and one morning,
on the way to school, with a hopeless lesson ahead
of me that I hadn't even tried to get, I made up
my mind to quit. Fd have to do some desperate
deed first, to get myself expelled from school, be-
cause otherwise I'd be made to go back. Then Fd

156

THE THOROUGHBRED

go and be a newsboy. I remember standing still,
in the middle of the sidewalk, and^solenmly swear-
ing to myself — ^I think I said *Grod danm' — ^that Td
do it. Then I walked on, trying to make up my
tnind what I'd do.

"I considered pretty nearly everything, up to the
actual assassination of the teacher, but the particu-
lar crime wasn't really picked out when I got to the
school.

**Well — there's the point at last — ^when -I got
there, there was a card on the door. There'd been
a case of smallpox and the school was closed until
further notice.

"I'll never forget that walk home from school.
There'd been a miracle that had changed the whole
look of the world. You can Imagine changing in
ten minutes from a prospective criminal who'd got
to get himself expelled from school, in order to go
and be a newsboy, to a kid on his way home on
the first morning of an uncharted vacation. A
prospector striking pay-ore is nothing to that, any-
way. And to me — Well, there you are. That's

156

INTERLUDE

the nearest approach to how Pve felt since — since
this happened.'*

She squeezed up a little closer to him. ''I expect
I was the teacher, though,** she said.

He gave a laugh at that. "No, you lamb,** he
said. 'TTou were the smallpox notice.'*

Celia pondered a good deal upon this parable
during the following days. It illuminated many
things. A schoolboy, reveling in an unforeseen
holiday ! That gave her the clue, not only to his
present statie of mind, but to what his state of mind
must have been during the months that preceded the
crfiush. Indeed, ever since their marriage — ^their
engagement — ^before that, perhaps.

That serious, sober, responsible way of hia wasn*t
all her doing, of course. He had never, for one
thing, enjoyed the four years of sunlit irresponsi-
bility, which is what most men manage to get out
of their term at college. He'd been shouldering
heavy burdens through all that time. He was in the
way of taking burdens for granted. That was why
he hadn't revolted at the burden his marriage had

167

THE THOROUGHBRED

been. Perhaps if he had come to her contidentlj
expecting the simple satisfactions he craved, she
might have given them to him. It made her sick
now to think how she'd starved him witii her chilly
superiorities and restraints, her little lectures and
her ladjlikeness — the smooth, finely laundered gar-
ment of unrumpled conventionality she had always
worn before him.

His still incredulous delight in her new ways with
him, with the commentary it carried on what their
old life had meant to him, was poignant to her
almost to the point of tears. She wai tlie school-
teacher in that allegory, althou^ the smallpox card
as well, and the playground of his holiday.

Well, he deserved a holiday, poor dear, and she
meant to make it last as long as she could.

But it's the essence of holidays, that they come
to an end — a point she'd thought of, but not
pressed, when he told her the parable. One had to

INTERLUDE

she meant, if possible, to keep him from finding out,
was that their new life was not a letting-out of
school for her ; was, on the contrary, the beginning
of school — ^the first real school she'd ever gone to.
That he didn't, apparently, even suspect it was due
to the fact that school-hours ended for her with
his return from the oflice. From then on, whether
at a movie-show, or dance-hall, or roller-skating in
the park, she was as gay and irresponsible as he.
In the morning, too, for that matter, when the
alarm-clock routed them sleepily out of bed, and
they dressed and got breakfast simultaneously, all
over the place.

But from seven-thirty, when he started down-
town, until the hour of his return, life to Celia was
an intensely serious business. It was a business
that could easily have been hatefully dull and dis-
agreeable. Under her old system of dealing with
nettles, stroking them just gingerly enough to get
the maximum sting with the minimum effect upon
the nettle, she could, in a week, have come to regard
herself as a dismally abused martyr.

159

THE THOROUGHBRED

Cooking wasn't so bad, though it was exasperat-
ing to discover that every ingredient that made
things taste good was expensive. But washing
dishes! The new Celia shared the opinion of the
old — ^that the nastiest substance in the world was
greasy dish-water. She hated the way it was spoil-
ing her hands. Her feet and ankles were getting
spoiled, too. They would spread and thicken to
appalling proportions, if this life kept up long
enough. She was pretty soft, of course, all over,
and during the first fortnight she was discovering
new muscles all the time that she had never known
existed until they began to ache.

Her spirit ached, too, sometimes, more excruciat-
ingly than her muscles. Determination and dash
didn't always win you a victory. And when you
were defeated, you did feel such a fool. To cite a
single instance: there was a disastrous day when
she tackled the wash. She'd blithely sent it out to
the nearest laundry the first week, and, since it
hadn't occurred to either of them that it was pos-
sible to economize in this direction, the hole this

160

INTERLUDE

made in their free assets for the week was shocking.
There were holes, too, in other things. This laun-
dry evidently didn't understand the nature of silk
pajamas. So, with an undaunted air, but feeling
very hollow inside, Celia told herself that of course
it was ridiculous for a woman in her position not to
do her own washing.

Her direst forebodings were more than borne out
by the event. There was, it appeared, a technique
in this business which her own experience — ^limited
to the washing-out of sheer little blouses and hand-
kerchiefs, had not provided her with. And the hor-
rible fatigue of it! Before she had even finished
the washing part, her back ached as if she had
broken it.

And when it came to the ironing! Well, if you're
curious, just try to iron a pair of double bed-sheets
by hand yourself. Before she got through with
them, those two sheets represented a vast, illimitable
acreage — enough for a country estate. Then, Al-
fred had a horrible predilection for the very thin-
nest kind of gauzy woolen underwear and socks,

161

THE THOROUGHBRED

wbi<di had to be bathed as tenderly as a young
baby.

She told him, when he came home that night,
with a hysterical attempt at jocularity, that he'd
have to wash those things for himself thereafter.
Perhaps they'd let him go in swhrnning with them
on, in the public bathhouse in the park. They
could dry on him then and perhaps not shrink.

The problem was solved by a compromise. They
learned to be less reckless about using things that
had to be washed, and the flat things were sent out
to the laundry.

But Vm not going into the details of Celia's
schooling. They'd be voluminous. Literally, what
she didn't know when she took on the job of being
a wage-earner's wife would fill a book. Anyway,
that isn't the story.

But her spiritual attitude toward those hard les-
Bons is a part of the story. That she kept herself

INTERLUDE

the consciousness that she was — ^puttmg it over
with Alfred, to an extent she hadn't dreamed of
when she made the threat the night of the dinner-
party.

He'd been dangerously near right in the opinion
of her he'd unconsciously expressed that night.
The old Celia, if she hadn't been burnt to ashes in
the fire of the new Celia's wrath, might easily
enough have done just what her husband had ex-
pected she would.

But you couldn't make Alfred believe that now
— ^not on the oath of the Recording Angel. He was
still in the depths of contrition, as far as so happy
a man could be, over the injustice he'd done her.
And a contrite husband, aware that he has never,
until now, appreciated you, is a much more stimu-
lating companion to live with than an aggrieved
but nobly forgiving one. It was a wonderful stim-
ulus, living up to his new and still wondering opin-
ion of her.

There was another, which she was less conscious
of. This new life of hers had, extraordinarily, the

16S

riT

THE THOROUGHBRED

quality of being alive. It was reaL It took hold
The things she did were effectual Tliey made
things come out differently f rcnn the way they'd
otherwise have come out.

Take the matter of economy. There was so
much money — real money, not an impalpable bank-
balance — ^to meet their current necessities through
the week. The amount of that which she had left
on Saturday night was what they could have fun
with through the next week. There was always
a vivid emotion of triumph, or of chagrin, when
it came to displaying that residuum to her husband.

This same quality of vividness characterized, in-
deed, pretty much everything about her new life.
The experiences of that interminable, wonderful
day, when she had sold her clothes and bought the
furniture had been true omens.

She had expected to be lonely ; and, in the social
sense, of course, she was. For none of their sub-
urban friends had been given a corrected version of
the story of a flight out west somewhere, that had
been made up for Ruth Collier. But, to her aston-

164)

INTERLUDE

ishment, she found herself tasting the joys of real
comp€knionship as she had never known them be-
fore. I don't mean with Alfred, but during the
daytime, while h^ was at the office — casual people
who sold her things in the little shops, people she
met day after day during her afternoon breath-
taking in the park. Foremost of these, an old
Garibaldian gardener. Then there was the librarian
at the substation of the public library, and the
cadaverous-looking Russian boy who brought them
a loaf of whole-wheat bread every other afternoon,
and who she discovered to be an absolutely au-
thentic Nihilist. And, first and always, Larry
Doyle with his idolized youngest daughter, who
went to business college, and the son, who was a
trouble-man in the employ of the telephone com-
pany. They all came closer, somehow — gave her
more and took more from her, than people in the
old life, whom she'd called by their first names for
years.

Figuratively, she and those old acquaintances
had always felt one another through gloves. Well,

165

THE THOROUGHBRED

now, imagine the sensations of a person who has
always worn gloves, whose hands have never known
contact with anything except the inside of his
gloves. Imagine his sensations when he first took
them off; how sharp and exciting they would be
— painful, sometimes, but worth the pain. That
will give you a notion of CeUa. She had just come
alive. There it is in two words.

Coming aUve, she began experiencing a strong
emotional interest in Uve things— growing things ;
the vegetation of the young spring, so tenderly
nourished by the old gardener in the park. He so
old, but getting a fresh vicarious life out of his
plants.

She experienced In herself a longing to make
things grow. Window-boxes In the flat, that was
her first idea, which expanded to a day-dream of
an acre, not too far from town for Alfred, where,
while he was away at work, she could have fiowers
and garden vegetables — chickens.

But that was only the fringe of the Idea. The
core of it she didn't reach till a little later. She

166

INTERLUDE

came upon it, one afternoon, in the park, and
stopped with a sob too sudden to be repressed. She
knew now what the growing thing was she really
wanted. Before her eyes was a common enough
sight, a mother — ^Italian, she looked — sitting on
one of the benches nursing a baby.

CHAPTER Vm

GESMINATION

IT was this discovery of hers, reaUy, that marked
the end of the second chapter — for Celia, any-
way. The growing strength of her new desire car-
ried her along like the current of a river. The grati-
fication of it would mean an end to her husband's
holiday. They couldn't have a baby in a place like
this. He must have space, and clean sweet air and
sunshine ; that acre, if possible, and a cow.

She dwelt on the details of the dream lovingly.
But she hesitated over telling her husband about it,
partly from a new shyness which made it sweet to
keep the wonder of it to herself for a while, partly
from the very clear realization of what the accom-
plishment of it would require from her husband.
Often, during the first few weeks of their life here,
he had spoken to her of the wonderful relief it was
having merely routine work to do — ^no responsibil-

168

GERMINATION

ity beyond the mere carrying out of his instruc-
tions, after all those months of maddening worry.

The undertaking of a baby would mean, of
course, the end of all that; would involve the ex-
ercise of more imaginative and better-paid powers.
She shrank from asking him to begin looking about
for a more responsible job, even for the reason she
would have to ojffer. She wouldn't want to name
this new mysterious desire of hers in that connec-
tion at all. Of course, she might not have to. He
might see the necessity for himself. But, equally,
he might not. Men were ignorant about such mat-
ters. It might not strike him that they couldn't
have a baby right here, in this teeming neighbor-
hood, with scarlet fever, whooping cough and mea-
sles lurking in every street-car and along the
benches in the park. And perhaps pretty soon
he'd end his holiday of his own accord.

She'd noticed something a little different about
him lately-unexplained preoccupations, the cessa-
tion of casual chat about the deeds of his fellow
draftsmen and the routine of his office work. So,

169

THE THOROUGHBRED

for a while, with a patience that was new to her,
she waited. Then this happened.

One hot Saturday night, after they'd virtuously
decided to do up the dishes in order to leave their
holiday to-morrow as free as possible, but still hung
lazily over the supper-table while they summoned
resolution enough to put the disagreeable job
through, Alfred said:

**I had a funny encounter in the street to-day;
ran into Major March." But he didn't go on from
there, as he might have been expected to, so she
said:

"I don't believe I ever heard of the major. Who
is he?"

"Not the major," he corrected. "Major. It's
his &st name. He's a queer genius of an in-
ventor. I had an idea I'd told you about him. You
know, I think a man ought to be able to get heavy
damages from his parents for naming him Major
when his last name was going to be March. Some
people seem to go out of their way to make people
ridiculous with the names they give them.'

170

GERMINATION

**Was he the inventor," Celia asked, *Sfho was
going to make your everlasting fortune and didn't
— ^the one you gave the fifteen thousand dollars
toP'

He shot a look at her, and said, with a laugh,
"Yes, that's the man. But I didn't realize I'd told
you about my having gone in with him. I thought
I'd kept that pretty dark."

"You told me about it," she explained, "the night
of that last dinner-party, when you told me such
a lot of things." She went on, after a moment's
silence. **What did he say to-day? Did he tell you
that his great invention was coming out right, after
afl?"

Once more he looked at her in that rather odd
way — surprised, but rather more than that — ^almost
startled. But then he laughed.

"Not exactly. It was the old story. He needed
just two thousand dollars more. That was all that
stood between him and untold wealth. He'd got his
big people interested. He'd got the thing right
beyond the shadow of a doubt. But he had to dem-

171

THE THOKOUGHBRED

onstrate it to tbem vith some rather elaborate lab-
oratory tests. The two thoiuand was to be for
that. Then all his trouble's over."

*'Do you suppose it's true?" she asked.

*'0h, therms no doubt he thinks so. The poor
little cuss is the soul of honor. And lord! He
may be right about it. Very likely he is. He
sounded quite couTincing."

There was a little pause, then he went on, with
a smile. "I'd never admit that, if there were the
slightest poBs^ihty of my giving him the money.
Pre had my lesson, and I don't need to be taught
it twice. But as long as the possibility doesn't ex-
ist — " He broke off there, thinking she meant to
speak, hut if she had she'd changed her mind
about it.

"Come along," he said. "Let's get through the
dishes."

But she detained him with an outstrettjied hand.

GERMINATION

funds to cover the next week's expenditures. But
to-night, upon her asking for it, his face went sud-
denly blank. Then:

"Gk)od gracious !*' he said. "I forgot to tell you.
They've given me another raise. Thirty a week
now. What do you think of that?"

"Oh, that's great !" she cried. "Let's see it."

"I haven't got it," he said. "I expect they mean
to pay me by check from now on. Thirty a week
counts as salary instead of wages."

Her face paled a little, and she had to swallow
the lump in her throat before she could speak.

"That's true, isn't it, Fred?" she asked. "You
— ^you aren't trying to spare me something? You
haven't — ^lost your job?"

He came around the table quickly and took her
in his arms. "No, I haven't lost my job," he said.
**I give you my word for that. Were you really
frightened?"

She pulled in a long breath and let it out explo-
sively. That answered him.

"But look here, Fred," she said earnestly,

178

THE THOROUGHBRED

**Woiildn't they be willing to go on giving it to
you in the same way — ^in real money, in an envelope,
every Saturday night? That's the basis of every-
thing, you see — ^knowing what we've got and what
we've got to do without."

He admitted she was right and said he'd get them
to do it that way. He was sure they wouldn't mind.

She dismissed, vigorously and contemptuously,
from her mind a thought that popped into it, of
the contrast between the manner in which he had
made this announcement to-night and that with
which he had told her of his former rise from
the original twenty-two fifty to twenty-five. He'd
shouted his news to her from the doorway that
other time, and waved his envelope at her — extracted
and displayed, in all their glory, the five, flat, new,
five-dollar bills. And they'd spent that evening
calculating, with the most minute exactitude, how
they'd spend that surplus two dollars and fifty cents
in a riotous celebration the next day. Certainly
things hadn't gone like that to-night, and the

174

GERMINATION

change might well be thought significant of some*
thing.

But it was easier to refrain from speculating
about it because her mind was so well occupied by
something else — ^a fascinating breath-taking possi-
bility, which wouldn't consent to be dismissed as
absurd; that came back, at all events, every time
she did dismiss it that way, with more assurance
about itself, more the air of a serious plan. It
kept her awake a long time that night. It, and the
necessity for lying very rigorously still, in order
not to disturb Fred. When at last she did move,
she found he'd been awake all the time.

He said, without preface, **Celia, are you getting
lired of it?"

She asked, "Of what?" though somehow she
knew.

"Of living like this. Of the flat, and cookings
and washing dishes. Are you beginning to hate
it?"

"Why, I love it," she cried, with a little catch

176

THE THOROUGHBRED

in her voice. **Siirely you know that. Pve never
been so happy. Life's never meant so much.
Only — ^^ Her voice faded out there and there was
a long silence — ^minutes, it seemed.

Then, as if out of a stiff throat, he asked, "Only
what?''

With a little sob she wound her arms around him
and nestled close. "Nothing — ^yet," she said.

With that answer he seemed content.

She was content, too, and soon fell happily
asleep. Because now her mind was made up. The
fascinating possibility had become a resolution.

On Monday morning, about half past eight,
after the breakfast things were out of the way,
she drew out of the bottom of Alfred's trunk, where
it had Iain hidden beneath some things he hadn't
happened to want, a package whose solidly rectan-
gular form was still indifferently disguised by the
clumsy wrappings it had worn when it had lain on
the floor between a furiously angry husband and
wife, who had, respectively, refused in the most

176

GERMINATION

passionate manner to avail themselves of the oppor-
tunities it offered.

Celia looked at it with a rueful smih'ng memory
of the row it had precipitated. It was stiU entitled
to be called the skeleton in their closet, since it had
never been mentioned by either of them since that
morning.

She dressed as well as she could, then set off
down-town with the package under her arm. There
were only two questions in her mind now. Could
she sell it, this jewelry of hers, for two thousand
dollars? And if she could not, would that inventor
be able to get on with a little less?

CHAPTER IX

AliFBED, MEANWHILE

CELIA might well have given more weight than
she did to that new preoccupied manner of her
husband's, and she might have taken more seriously
than she did the contrast between \ his ofFhand way
of announcing that his pay had been raised from
twenty-five to thirty dollars a week, and his previous
excitement over the announcement that it had been
raised to twenty-five. She would have done so, no
doubt, but for that preoccupation of her own about
which I have told you. But even if she had allowed
speculation to run riot — gone to her inferential
limit, she'd hardly have come abreast of the facts.
For a month, indeed, after Alfred Blair had
taken his new job, he had, just as he told her, rev-
eled in the irresponsibility of it. He had sat over
his table from eight to twelve, and from one to five,
doing the work before him with an almost contemp-

178

ALFRED, MEANWHILE

tuous ease, exercising a set of faculties that a long
and early training had ahnost transmuted into in*
stincts, while the inner man of him rejoiced in long-
drawn breaths and the delicious relaxation of racked
nerves. He was like a man washed ashore from a
wreck, exhausted by the struggle with tempestuous
seas, content to lie for a while on the sun-warmed
sands, incurious as to what his new island domain
might have in store for him.

The first stirrings of curiosity he repressed se-
verely. Each time he caught his mind reaching out
to grasp the essentials of the work he was doing,
criticizing the engineering of his superiors, decidr
ing how the thing really ought to be done, he
checked the impulse vigorously. It was none of
his business whether the job was done right or
wrong, economically or extravagantly. Had he
ever been as happy in his life before as he was right
now? Well then, why spoil a good thing? Hadn't
he had enough worry and trouble in the past year
and a half to last him — a while longer, anyway?
He had. A3 a means of further reassuring him-

179

THE THOROUGHBRED

self on this point, he had talked to Celia about the
pleasure he was taking in the routine nature of his
, work.

But he couldnH keep this up indefinitely. To
the trained athlete it is unendurable not to ezerdse.
Heart, lungs and muscles cry aloud for the tests
thej are accustomed to. And tbe man who has
made trained athletes of his judgment and imag-
ination can't leave them out of his reckoning in-
df&iitely. They'll begin taking hold some day, in
spite of him. They won't be satisfied, either, by
the mere acknowledgment on his part, of the possi-
bility or the rightness of the things they have
pointed out to him. They'll never let him alone
until he has harnessed all his energy to tbe task
of making the possibilities they have pointed out
come true.

Do you remember — Vm sure you will if you'rfe
old enough — ^the classical story of the young prin-

ALFRED, MEANWHILE

enjoyed the complete confidence of the princess, the
secret being that his diet was confined to milk and
biscuits. But one day, in a fit of affection, he be-
gan licking the princess's hand, and his rough
tongue presently wore through the skin, so that he
tasted blood. Whereupon, without remorse, he pro-
ceeded to eat up the princess.

I don't claim perfection for my analogy, since
the princess of my tale is the oily, toothpick-chew-
ing foreman of the drafting-room, whom I intro-
duced to you in the act of hiring Alfred Blair.
The parallel would be closer, too, if the tiger in the
legend were not an innocent cub, but a reformed
man-eater, who had gone upon a milk diet voluntar-
ily. Apart from these defects, however, the thing
works out pretty well, since it was a purely good-
natured impulse to help his manifestly incompetent
superior by showing him how a certain detail really
ought to be managed, that led Alfred to take his
first taste of blood ; that is, of responsibility*

I don't know whether the tiger was surprised or
not when he discovered that he had eaten the prin-

181

THE THOROUGHBRED

cess. I do know that Alfred was genuinely aston-
ished over the discovery that he had, inadvertently,
eaten the foronan. He got, that is to say, this
unfortunate gentleman's job.

That* s what happened, however — quite inevita-
bly, if one stops to think about it — ^within a fort-
night from the time when he ventured to correct
that first detaiL

I don't know whether you will consider the other
first step he took that day to have been inevitable
also. I'm afraid not, without some explanation*
The step was — and it proved quite as important
as the other — ^that he refrained from telling Celia
about his promotion when he got home the evening
of the day it happened.

I won't attempt to deny that he ought to have
told her ; that it was cowardly and evasive of him ;
and, I'm afraid I must add, decidedly masculine,
not to tell. He got adequately punished for it in
the event, as you are to be told. But while you are
waiting for that to happen to him let me try to
show you how it looked and felt to himu

182

ALFRED, MEANWHILE

In the first place, he was informed of his pro-
mc^ion the moment he arrived in the office one morn-
ing. If they'd told him the last thing before he
left for home the night before, I haven't a doubt
he'd have gone straight to Celia with it. As it
happened, he had a day to look his new job over
before he went home, and it made him pretty sick.

He'd suspected the truth about this big mu-
nicipal contract from the day he was hired. And
he'd been getting little fragmentary glimpses of it
from day to day at his own drafting-board. But
from his more elevated position as superintendent
of the drafting-room, with only one engineer be-
tween himself and the contractor, he now saw the
thing in all its naked effrontery. It was the famil-
iar formula for municipal work: fifty per cent,
graft, fifty per cent, incompetence.

The maddening thing about it was, too, that,
but for the incompetence, the graft would mot be
necessary. A man of decent ability, with that con-
tract in his pocket, could deliver the city an honest
job and make as much legitimate profit out of it

18S

THE THOROUGHBRED

as this shifty numb-witted grafter could hope to
steaL

The position Alfred's incautious display of tal-
ent had got him into was the proverbially uncom-
fortable one between the upper and the nether mill-
stones. He could no longer absolve himsdf , as he
had done at his drafting-board, from all responsi-
bility for the job. They'd picked him up and made
him responsible. Yet they hadn't given him au-
thority to change a thing that really mattered.

If you win imagine Hercules, with a tin bucket
and a scrubbing-brush, getting his first sight and
whiff of the Augean stables, you will have some no-
tion of Alfred Blair's state of mind.

It's important to remember that he was Hercules
— ^was in the habit, anyhow, of dealing with things
in a Herculean way, turning the course of rivers
through them, if necessary. What I mean is that
he really was, down inside, despite the temporary
eclipse of the past few months, the successful, au-
dacious, highly energized big-caliber man that Celia
married; a man accustomed to carrying heavy loads

184

ALFRED, MEANWHILE

of responsibility upon his capacious shoulders; to
the exercise of a trenchant and unquestioned au-
thority ; to the accomplishment of big things in big
ways.

Yesterday a private in the ranks, he had been
able — ^though barely — to keep alive the pretense
that the big man Celia had married was, as he had
told her the night of the dinner-party, done for,
never to come back. To-day, with a sergeant's
chevron on his sleeve, the pretense was demolished.
He knew to-day that he had come back — that his
old powers had come back. And the knowledge dis-
turbed him painfully.

All the way out to the little flat that evening
he fretted over the situation. He wouldn't be able
to stand the new job very long. It would be really
maddening. Eventually — likely enough within the
next few days — ^he'd find himself locking horns with
the chief engineer, telling him to go to hell; put-
ting on his coat and walking out. Well, and then
what could he do? Try for another routine job
at twenty-five a week?

186

THE THOROUGHBRED

He wouldn't let himself admit that this was not
a real alternative. Down inside he knew so well
that it was not, that he told himself it was with most
unnecessary emphasis. Put it all in a word and
say that he was in a stew — & stew that kept getting
hotter as the packed elevated train jolted and
creaked around its curves.

At his station he squeezed his way out automati-
cally and started at a rapid walk for home. The
little street thisy lived in was still radiating the heat
of an unseasonably early summer's day. It radi-
ated noise, too, from a hurdy-gurdy and a ball
game, and from some long-distance visiting that
was going on back and forth across the street.

Usually Alfred liked this; refleca::g, perhaps,
Celia's warm delight in it. But to-night he strode
through it all unheeding, except as perhaps the
heat and the confusion added a few degrees to the
temperature of his interior stew. He walked fast
because, when he got to a certain door — ^the door
his latch-key fitted, a miracle T7as going to happen.
It happened every night, and yet it remained none

186

ALFRED, MEANWHILE

the less a miracle. He never missed a moment of
exquisite fear just before he opened the door, lest
to-night it wouldn't happen. The miracle was,
quite simply, that after he'd opened that door and
stepped inside, he was in a place called home — a,
place unique in all the world — ^a place of ineffable
security against all possible assaults of the world.
To-night, more than ever, he was hungry and imr
patient for it.

It didn't always happen in exactly the same way.
Sometimes Celia was cooking something noisy in
the kitchen so that she didn't hear him until his
latch-key clicked in the door at the head of the
stairs. But other times she heard him at the outer
door and had the inner one open for him before he
was half-way up.

This was what happened to-night, and he got
his first hug out on the landing. They squeezed
through the narrow doorway in one lump. Then
she held him off for a look.

"You're tired to-night," she said. "Almost wor-
ried. Right up there." The spot she indicated

' 187

THE THOROUGHBRED

with her lips was between his eyebrows. **Noth-
ing's — gone wrong to-day, has it?**

"Never less in the world," he assured her. And,
if she'd waited a second, he might have gone on
and said the thing right out. But she went straight
on and supplied an' explanation for herself.

**It's just the heat, of course. That made you
want to smoke, and the smoker was packed — ^^

He pushed her away a little. *^I must be a pretty
loathsome object, and no mistake — sweaty and
dirty, with a little more beard than usual on ac-
count of the heat, and then that smoking-car was
the Umit! I ought to have freshened up a bit be-
fore I let you come close.''

Her answer was to give a contented little laugh,
hug him up as tight as she could, and cuddle her
face down against his chest. "Do you suppose I
mind?" she said. "Do you mind me the way / am?"

She wore, as she usually did at this time of day,
a big all-over apron with short sleeves, instead of
a dress, and a little cap that she could tuck all of
her hair into.

188

ALFRED, MEANWHILE

His answer didn't require any words, but his
memory gave him a lightning flash of a contrasting
situation between them — the time he'd come home
on the eve of that last dinner-party of theirs, come
home to tell her that he was through with the life
they'd been living; that he'd endured it up to the
last day, and that this was it. He'd f ound^ her
half-dressed before her toilet-table, with all her
sensuously alluring paraphernalia about her — ^the
rose-colored stockings and slippers which matched
the gown which lay across the foot of the bed —
the perfume of her powder subtly pervading the
air as he came close and asked her for a kiss. She
had drawn sharply away from him, charged him
with having ridden out in the smoker, and wondered
what unspeakable tobacco men smoked in such
places. Then she had urged him to hurry along
and dress, because there wasn't time to fool, really.

That girl, against whom his resentment had
flared almost to the temperature of hatred, had been
— ^well, not his same Celia, but she had had his
Celia locked up inside her, waiting to break out

189

THE THOROUGHBRED

when the shock of their disaster should give her a
chance.

The pungent odor of the gingham, or whatever
it was that her big apron was made of, gave him a
thrill that none of the perfumes of the old days
had been capable of giving, and there was a soft
contented warmth in her voice. There clutched at
his heart a passionate fear, .and a passionate 're-
solve — ^the fear lest the new prosperity which
loomed ahead of him should carry them back into
that old artificial life where they lived, not together,
but in two separate shells; the resolve that at all
costs, this thing should not be allowed to happen.

He'd say nothing of the promotion to Celia for
— ^well, three or four days or a week. The situation
at the office would probably have taken definite
shape by the end of a fortnight, anyway.

He went on to tell himself, virtuously, how much
kinder it was to Celia not to tease her with the story
of a promotion which so easily might prove illu-
sory. Of course, if the thing worked out all right,
or showed even an inclination to do so, he'd tell her

190

ALFRED MEANWHILE

at once. He angrily cast off the insinuation which
sneaked into his mind from somewhere that it might
be a good thing to keep CeKa seriously in the dark
for any length of time as to his improved fortunes.
What was he making all the fuss about, anyhow?
It wasn't an important decision he'd just taken.
What did it matter whether he told her to-night
or three nights from now? Perhaps he would tell
her to-night, after all. But he didn't.

For a week the state of things in the drafting-
room remained as chaotic and hand-to-mouth as It
had looked the first day. And then a new factor
entered Into the situation — ^well, not new, but one
that Alfred hadn't counted on — ^politics — ^a sharp
bitter fight between the administration (that's the
mayor and his appointees, chief of police, corpora-
tion counsel, and so on) and the board of alder-
men.

The mayor of Chicago has a lot of power, and
he can exercise it, up to a certain point, quite irre-
sponsibly. But if he is overtaken by illusions of
grandeur and neglects to conciliate at least an ef-

191

THE THOROUGHBRED

f ective minority of the aldermanic body, that body
can make him wish he had never been bom.

Well, this contract that Alfred was concerned
with had been one of the most attractive displays
in the mayor's pre-election show-window — ^a senti-

mental, half -practical, half-baked project for a
municipal market which should loosen the rapacious
clutch of the commission man upon the throat of
the ultimate consumer. And it is quite consistent
with our American impatience of thorough study
and expert advice, and our eagerness to do material
things — ^to do something, it doesn't matter much
what — ^that this great project should have boiled
down, almost at once, to the letting of a contract
for the first unit of a vast acreage of buildings;
in short, to a fat job for some loyal liegeman of
the mayor.

And you will see, I think, how naturally it came
about that when the desire arose to make the mayor
uncomfortable, this job should have been picked
out as the target. It was so picked out, and a com-
mittee of perspicacious and able-minded reformers

192

ALFRED, MEANWHILE

(the use of the word reformer is not necessarily
derogatory) was appointed to investigate.

The mere announcement of the appointment of
this committee, before ever it fired a shot, brought
the contractor down to his office in a foaming rage.

The grafting politician, in stories and on the
stage, is presented as formidable, wielding vast un-
questioned powers ; giving orders (with a cigar in
his mouth) to respectful subordinates who rush to
do his bidding; anything from murder down. He
is inhumanly i^droit as well as grim. Already he
has made his millions, and he is on his way to make
millions more. He frequently gets "crushed,** to
be sure, in the last act or the last chapter, but never
until he has had a long and, some might think,
compensatory run for his money.

But the real grafter, I venture to say, seldom
enjoys an experience like that, even before he is
forced to his knees by the superior adroitness of
the young hero. For your real grafter is always
grafted upon. Let me attempt a definition that
will make this clear. Graft is a cash valuation upon

193

' 7 *^

T3m-

1 *' 'tjaw*

^^T

^ ^

-» — >

>±

s---: nic

i^icr

THE THOROUGHBRED

gratitude. The man who has just cashed in on
somebody's gratitude to him, Alfred's contractor
for example, with his fat job from the mayor, must
, in turn honor drafts upon his own gratitude. If
he were to let these drafts go to protest, try to
get his own work done on a basis of ruthless effi-
ciency, the vengeance upon him would be instanta-
neous and terrible. So he's the worst-serred man
in the world.

A man of first-class ability, to be sure, might
compromise his way out of the difficulty — feed his
flock of lame ducks sufficiently with jobs where they
couldn't do much harm, and still pay competent
people to do the real work. But the grafter never
IS a man of first-rate ability. If he isn't stupid, he
isn't a grafter, since the rewards of playing the
game within the rules are, to the man of exceptional
ability, immensely greater than any conceivable re-
ward for the grafter.

So if the case of this particular grafter had been
sorrowful before, it was really desperate after the
appointment of that subcommittee.

194

ALFRED, MEANWHILE

Alfred witnessed the tragedy — ^not completely,
as one sees a performance in the theater from the
fourth row, but in vivid intimate glimpses as one
sees It from the wings — outbursts and explosions
that came through the glass door of the private
office, asides which he was supposed, ludicrously,
not to understand when he'd been summoned into
the presence for instructions as to this, or explana-
tions as to that. The contractor had flown to the
mayor, it seemed, and had got small comfort from
him, His Honor having evidently made it clear that
he had troubles enough of his own. The engineer
talked of resigning.

Finally there came a morning when Alfred Blair
turned, with a shrug, from a sheet of figures he
had been poring over, stretched his arms, grinned,
got up and wfdked, unsununoned, into the private
office. The contractop rasped out a **What do you
want?" and resumed, gloomily, the contemplation
of a sheet of figures of his own. There was still
the suggestion of a smile on Alfred's face.

'1 came iii to suggest," he ttoA, "ttal mie

THE THOROUGHBRED

to lunch with me to-daj at one o*clock at the Union
League Club. I have a proposition to make to
you." I

The contractor started, stared, made a paasion-
ate prediction as to his state in a future world, and
demanded to be told what his subordinate meant.
His amazement was driven home a little deeper by
a realization he couldn't have explained, that tiie
man who stood there the other side of the desk was
a subordinate no longer.

Exteriorly he looked just the same, was in his
shirt-sleeves, his waistcoat unbuttoned, his hands
in his trousers pockets ; but bis air was, inexplica-
bly, one of authority.

"I mean just that," be said. "I have a propo-
sition to make to you. Lunch is a good time to talk.
The club's just across tiie street."

"Are you a member of that club ?" asked the con-
tractor.

ALFRED, MEANWHILE

of pure luck that Alfred had not ^resigned from that
club. HeM paid his dues for the year not more
than a fortnight before the crash. He hadn't con-
sidered it luck at the time;* but there he was mis-
taken. The effect of Alfred's annoupcement on the
contractor was cheap at a hundred dollars. It
made a perf ^ dramatic preparation for the thing
Alfred was going to suggest. The suggestion was
the sort that wanted preparing, too.

The contractor said he didn't object to the club.

"You'll come then," said Alfred, not inflecting
it like a question.

The contractor said, yes, he'd come, but wanted
explanations. What was the idea?

"I'll wait till lunch to explain, if you don't
mind," Alfred told him coolly, and went back to
his desk.

These tactics, a^lroit as they were, were not pre-
calculated at all. They were just a symptom that
Alfred's mind was once more fully on the job. His
employer's curiosity, if imsatisfied, would be work-
ing for him steadily till lunch-time. And the sort

197

THE THOROUGHBRED

of lunch he would give him — the atmosphere with
which the club would surround the lunch — ^would
work for him, too.

He gave all these influences time to do their work
— plenty of time. Then, after the Hghting with
one match of two admirable cigars, he made a fal-
con Bwoop straight to the heart of the business.

"My proposition is," he said, without preface
or explanation, "that I guarantee you a profit of
twenty thousand dollars on this contract in consid-
eration of a half-interest in whatever the profits
turn out to be ; also in consideration of your putting
complete authority over everything concerned in the
contract into my hands."

Alfred was himself again, no mistake. There
TBS the old touch about these tactics. The obvious
method of going about the business would have been
to begin by dwelling upon the contractor's plight
— ^the gristly prospect ahead of him if things went

ALFRED, MEANWHILE

Alfred's omission to say a word about this star-
ing fact only made its stare the more sinister.

"Your guarantee would be worth a hell of a
lot, wouldn't it?" said the contractor, with the best
imitation he could manage of jovial scorn.

*HDf course," said Alfred, "the only guarantee
that would bo of any value would be the cash itself
put up with a bank pending the completion of the
contract."

"Look here!" demanded the contractor. **Who
in blazes are you, anyway?"

^TTou ought to know," Alfred said. He didn't
answer further, and when the contractor asked,
"Are you A. C. Blair?" he merely nodded.

The contractor blew up at this point and spoke
at length and at large, the upshot of his harangue
being a demand to know his competitor's motive in
spying around his office.

"Not spying," Alfred said quietly. "You'll see
that for yourself in a minute. If I'd been a spy,
instead of coming to you now, Fd be going aroimd

199

THE

to the oounciTs suboommittee and gettmg a job as
their expert. I am an expert. I know that line of
work as well as anybody in the United States. But
I havenH done that. Tve come to you and off ere d
you an absolutely fair proposition.^

"What did you oome for, then?** persisted the
contractor. "Did you have a tip that those fool
aldermen were going to butt in?^

Blair hesitated for a second, then told the simple
truth.

"No,^ he said. "I needed a job and I answered
a blind ad. in 7^ Nerti.**

"Down and out, eh?" conmiented the contractor.
He didn't believe a word of Alfred's story. Then,
with a pounce, "Where did you get this twenty
thousand dollars?"

"I haven't it," said Alfred. "If you take up my
proposition, I'll have to go and borrow it some-
where."

The contractor, stared blankly across the table.
"Say!" he demanded roughly. **What's the idea,
bringing me here and kidding me along with a pipe

200

"What's the idea bringing me here and kidding n

ALFRED, MEANWHILE

like that, when you haven't got a cent? What do
you think it'll get you?"

**You don't need to worry about that," Alfred
said. **You aren't out anything for listening, even
if it is a pipe. All you have to do is make up your
mind whether you will accept it or not, in case I can
come across. That's the next step — ^yes or no
from you. If it's yes, I'll try to borrow the money.
But Fve got to have a proposition to borrow it on."

**You've got no more chance to get that
money — " the contractor murmured, and then let
the sentence slump away while he gazed moodily at
the table-cloth and the pattern he was drawing on
it with his thumb-nail. **What will you dp," he
asked at last, "if I tell you there's nothing doing?"

«I don't know," said Alfred. "I'll cross that
bridge when I come to it."

It would have been almost a relief to the con-
tractor if Alfred had threatened him with going to
the subcommittee and getting appointed as their
expert. That would have given him something to
get fighting mad about, and his temper craved a

SOI

THE

fig^ The tiireat was there an rig^ tlMiiig)! it
wasn't expressed.

Alfred drew a f dded paper from his pocket and
handed it across, without comment, to the con-
tractor. It was a memorandmn of the bargain he
had proposed, stated ahnost as simply as he had
stated it a few moments before. There was (me
more paragraph in it, stating that the agreement
was of no effect unless BUur put up the money
within forty-eight hours of their signing H.

The contractor pondered it a while longer with-
out speaking. At last :

^^Oh, it's all dcunned foolishness," he said.
**YouTl never get the money."

**Don't count on that," said Alfred, "or you're
likely to get fooled. Here, do you want a pen?"

Fifteen minutes later, with the signed memoran-
dum in his pocket, he walked into his bank and sat
down in the president's office. An hour later, he
walked out again with the money.

He was not in the least surprised that it had
come out this way. The opportunity was so lumi-

202

ALFRED, MEANWHILE

nously clear to him, and his confidence in Yob own
ability to make the most of it so clearly based on
expert knowledge and tried ability, that he could
hardly have failed to get the help he needed. It
was just a question of making everytlung trans-
parently clear.

His personal credit, it should be pointed out, was
excellent. The way he'd poured his own money into
the cleaning up of the Waters-Macdonald mesa, was
a thing no banker would be likely to forgeL

He went straight back to the office and spent the
rest of the afternoon nailing down all four comers
of his agreement with the contractor. He meant
to leave no unstopped rat-holes in that document.
For heaven knew there were rats enough!

The contractor lost his temper a good many times,
climbed up on his dignity, appealed to the high
gods. His new partner was trying to convert him
into a m&ci figurehead.

•'Exactly," said Alfred coolly. "That's the es-
sence of this bargain. My authority's not to be
questioned, and everyihing else is. I'll do all the
SOS

hnmf^ mmA all tite fcaig.
TWtrfrt ewvJbti from

Tut ClQiCBKU JOHl 0B1 uWfli

U^mt. Bui vluit rd do, if I woe yoo, livold be to
tdke ntf wife joid go to die
Md A0i cone kia^ tin die job's

Tbe cpnfnMior writfacd jokI strngg^kd — vould
h«re got swaj if he eoukL Bui die HBBcnli on
fbftt AtA. htpt Um fucnuitcdL

At fire e^doA it was all orer. Etoi as he had
eaten the foreman a wcd^ or so ago, Alfred Blair
had now eaten the c >•!. ctor.

And it waA not until this deed was follj acoom-
p]jAh/;d — until he had put on his hat and coat and
tfif)(}4l TftB/Ay to walk out of the office, that the
thr/ij^ht of Celia came into his mind at all, or of
what the ncrw situation was goin^ to mean to them.

Of cr/ursc it wouldn't be accurate to say that he'd
M±f*A this morning, and subsequently, without any
prcTfieditation at all. He had meditated. He had,
more or less, figured the whole thing out, but as a

204

ALFRED, MEANWHILE

fanciful project purely — as something he wasn't
going to do. His imagination had to be at some-
thing, and it had constructed, he looking on with
indulgent amusement all the time, this project.;
had developed it indeed, down to some of its quite
small details — ^but always, as I said, fancifully.
What led him to get up that morning and walk into
the contractor's office and begin to carry the thing
out, was impulse, motivated not by any wish to pro-
vide an ampler life for Celia or to rehabilitate him-
self ; springing rather from a pure impatience to
get the job done. The muffing and fumbling that
had gone under his eyes, had irritated him to the
point where he couldn't stand it any longer. So he
got up and took on the job himself. That was all
there was to it.

It wasn't all there was to it, though. He realized
this the first time he thought about Celia. She
couldn't be expected — ^it wouldn't be human to ex-
pect that she'd want to go on living as they were,
now that he was getting a salary of a hundred dol-
\ lars a week (this was what he and the contractor

206

THE THOROUGHBRED

had agreed upon) and a half share' in tiie profits
besides.

Of course there mi^tn't be any profits — at least
not for Alfred To the eye of cold reason, that
possibility would appear to be worth taking seri-
ously. He didn't take it very seriously^to be sure, but
then he knew his eye wasn't coldly reasonable. He
knew he was going to succeed. Still, one never lost
any chickens by refraining from counting them till
they were hatched. And from Celia's point of view,
mightn't it, perhaps, be a kindness not to tease her
with hopes which she cotdd see plainly enough
might turn out groundless? Wotddn't she be hap-
pier if he waited till the job was done and paid for,
and then presented her with the results, in, as it
were, a package? To balance that evening when he
told her of his failure?

But, contemplated, this scene didn't alBTord him
any whole-souled satisfaction. He couldn't see
Celia rushing delightedly into his arms at the end
of the recital. The heroines of the screen would,

all right — ^but Celia —

•♦

206

/
ALFRED, MEANWHILE

Then there was another angle on the thing.
She'd been a perfectly corking sport about the
whole business — ever since that night when he*d
told her of the smash. There hadn't been a whim-
per — a reproach. But that was because of her un-
questioning belief that the come-down was neces-
sary. And wouldn't that belief be shaken, if he
were to go to her now and tell her that he'd bor-
rowed twenty thousand dollars, and made himself a
partner in the enterprise? If he could get twenty
thousand dollars as easily as that — ^just by going
and asking for it, why hadn't he done it three
months ago? He'd had just a touch of that feeling
himself as he came away from the bank. The whole
effect of the day's doings upon him, was to make
that routine work of his over a drafting-board, at
twenty-two fifty a week seem a little unreal — ^like
playing a part. Wouldn't she feel that even more
strongly — feel that she'd been sacrificed, not to ne-
cessity, but to a mere vagary of his own tempera-
ment? Perhaps if he waited a while before he told
her — ^not until the job was finished, of course, but

207

THE THOROUGHBRED

for — say another couple of months, and then per-
haps broke it gradually, promoted himself by easy
stages —

He didn't like that notion any too well, either.
Anyhow, the thing wanted thinking over. He could
take time for that — a few days — ^what would they
matter one way or another? — ^to come to the right
conclusion. Of course he*d tell her. It would be
outrageously imf air to try to keep her in the dark.
The only question was just how he'd do it, and
when.

There is an insidious and diabolical subtlety
about the sin of procrastination, which lies in the
fact that while its effects go on remorselessly piling
up, the sin itself diminishes in geometrical progres-
sion. The difference between making a confession
on the eighth day, instead of on the seventh, is very
much less than the difference between making it on
the second instead of on the first; while the differ-
ence between making it on the thirty-first or on the
thirtieth is almost negligible:

This was what made it possible to go on not tell-

208

ALFRED, MEANWHILE

ing Cella of the change in his fortunes. It would
be an outrage to deceive her ; he admitted that. She
had earned, if any human being ever cotdd earn, his
completest confidence. Well, and didn't he mean to
give it to her? Of course he did. Only — ^not to-
night. To-morrow, perhaps — or Sunday, when
there'd be time for a good long talk about it. But
Sunday they'd devoted to a picnic up the shore.
Why spoil a perfect thing like that with a lot of
worries about the future? Celia was happy, wasn't
she, with things as they were? Obviously happier,
healthier, altogether more alive than she'd ever been
before in her life.

So he went along, except for an oc<;asional
twinge, rather easily, until the night when his in-
cautious reference to little Major March, and his
equally incautious neglect to bring home a pay-en-
velope, brought him up standing against a fact and
on the threshold of a surmise. The fact was that his
pretended willingness to tell Celia, his pretended in-
tention to tell her when the occasion should arise, was
completely false. She'd given him the occasion,

S09

THE THOROUGHBRED

and instead of taking it, he had, in a panic, delib-
erately lied to her — made up a hasty excuse about
having had his salary raised, so obviously flimsy
and extemporaneous, that it was a wonder she
hadn't seen throu^ it.

And the surmise was that Celia was not so happy
— ^not, at least, so contented with their present way
of living — as he'd supposed. The way her mind
had played with the possibility that the inventor
might make their fortune after aU— as if, for some
reason, a fortune were a desirable thing — had kept
him awake for hours that night. And when at last,
discovering that she was awake too, he had nerved
himself to ask her, point-blank, if she was getting
tired of the way they lived — of the hardships and
deprivations of it all, and she had told him eagerly
that she was not — she had begun to say something
that would qualify her answer, and then stopped.
"Only — " It had taken all his resolution to ask her
to go on. "Only what?" And she'd said, "Nothing

—yet."

Yet. There was an immense lot to think about
behind that one small word.

CHAPTER X

INTERVENTION

BARRING one bad moment just after she en-
tered the store, when the floor-walker came
up and asked, rather mechanically, what he could
do for her, Celia found no difficulty in carrying out
the first item of her program — ^namely, the sale of
her jewels.

Old Colonel Forsythe, the senior partner of the
firm, had known her father for years, and her since
she was a little girl, and from the moment she was
shown into his office, everything was easy for her.
He had, probably, a bad moment of his own after
she'd told him her errand, which she did complete,
in one sentence, as she held out her parcel to him.

**I want to sell these things for two thousand
dollars," she said. She added, over the look of
acute unhappiness she saw come into his face, ^^I
mean I hope they're worth that much.''

211

ww^

THE THOR0CGHBRED

He exf^aiDcdy vbik he was cottiiig tiie fkanf^
and openiiig die package, wli j it was that tfae
aa io unt tiimgs had eost was not a tmstworUiy
goide to what thej migfat be worth when one wanted
to fell them. '^We can't sdl 8Ccoad-hand jeweliy, ^
joa know, and all we can paj for is the onset slooes
and the bollion ralae of the setting."

His face cleared instantly, thongh, when he saw
the contents of her treasure-box. Alfred's taste,
luckily, had been primitiTe. It hadnt run to en-
crusted b u tt er flies and things like that — had con-
fined itself to what a gambler or a prof essional base-
ball-player would speak of as rocks.

^^These things are worth considerably more than
two thousand dollars," said the jeweler.

"Oh, that's nice," said Celia comfortably. "But
it's just two thousand that I want. So if you'll
pick out what comes to that, FU take the rest back."

The thing could be done on that basis, but not, it
seemed, so instantaneously as Celia had supposed.
To his offer to mail her a check during the day, and
send the residuum back to her by special messenger,

212

INTERVENTION

she demurred. She'd like to wait for the money, if
she might, and take it away in cash.

To her surprise, he hesitated over this request,
frowned, drummed his fingers on the desk — seemed
on the point of making some sort of protest, and
then instead, said something that struck her, for a
moment, as utterly irrelevant, about the wild uncer-
tainties of the stock-market.

The course she and Alfred had been taking in
the movies during the past three months, supplied
her suddenly with an explanation, and she laughed.

"Oh, I*m not going to speculate with it,'' she told
him, and his face cleared at once.

"If only you knew how many of them do that be-
hind their husbands' backs — ^women who ought to
know better — ^and put me in a position of having to
choose between being an officious meddler, and a
particeps crvmvim — **

"Do they, really?" said Celia, properly scandal-
ized. "But how silly of them ! They always lose,
don't they?" The movies, as I say, had made this
perfectly clear to her,

SIS

THE THOROUGHBRED

She was quite honest about this. The word spec-
ulation had a definite meaning to her. It consisted
in taking your money to a room with a ticker in it,
giving it to a man, who immediately rushed out to
the floor of the Stock Exchange with it, and made
wild gestures, while his victim stayed by the ticker
and watched the tape : at first with extdtation — be-
cause you always won at first — and later with de-
spair. Because, inevitably, you lost in the end.
That the word speculation cotdd be applied to the
act she contemplated; namely, giving her money-
all her money, practically — ^to an inventor, for the
purpose of financing the tests of his invention,
didn't occur to her.

His doubts removed by the unquestionable can-
dor of Celiacs attitude, Colonel Forsythe promptly
thought of a way to avoid keeping her waiting.

'*I can give you two thousand dollars now,'* he
said, "and then, when these things are precisely val-
ued, which involves examining and weighing them
very closely, you can come in and select, to keep,

INTERVENTION

whatever will leave us the two thousand dollars'
worth we have bought." He also persuaded her to
take a check mstead of the twenty hundred-dollar
bills she wanted. She hadn't thought of pick-
pockets.

Major March's address — ^ascertained from the
telephone-book, down in the lower twenties some-
where, just off Wabash Avenue, involving a ride in
a crowded street-car — ^made the colonel's sugges-
tion seem worth taking.

A momentary fright she had on the way down
would have been a good deal more serious if she had
had those twenty hundred-dollar bills in her wrist-
bag. The adventure began just a block after she
had taken the street-car, when a man got on and
sat down beside her. The car wasn't empty enough
to make this action of his really marked. He'd
have had to sit down beside somebody. Still there
were plenty of other places where he might have
sat, and he had chosen her seat rather abruptly —
plumped down in it without that customary moment

S16

THE THOROUGHBBED

of heflitatkm to ghre her a diuiee to mawe over a
little, and quite imrohmtarfly she glmcpJ anxniil
at hiiiL

The glance reaMored her. He seemed oompletdy
preoccupied — unaware of her as anytlung but a
lump that took up so mudi space in the seat. He
had a big manila envelope in his hands, whidi were
pale and nervousl j precise in their moyements. The
moment he was settled in his seat, he put on a pair
of tortoise-shell spectacles, undid the patent
fastener of the envelope, and drew out a quantity of
typewritten sheets, whose pristine freshness pro-
claimed that the J were just out of the machine — a
manuscript, evidently, that he was just fetching
away from the typist who'd copied it for him. An
author, probably. That would account for the
vague oddity there was about everything he did.
His sheets were spread out so candidly under her
eye, that she had definitely to turn away and look
out the window, in order to avoid reading them.

Just before they reached the street where she was
to get off, she pressed the motorman's signal and

S16

INTERVENTION

stood up. The action seemed to startle her com-
panion rather unnecessarily, for he snatched off his
spectacles, crammed his pages together anyhow,
and himself rose to let her go by.

She said: "Oh, I'm sorry P* and "Thank you,*' in
a tone which her faint amusement over him made a
little less mechanically impersonal than the one
she'd ordinarily have used.

Even so, one would hardly have thought he heard
anything more than common civility in it, and she
was a good deal surprised when, obviously without
premeditation, he followed her down the aisle and
got off the car just behind her. It was still more
disconcerting when she'd crossed the street and
turned east, to observe that he was coming along
that way, too.

She was not really alarmed about him, of course,
and but for the forlomness of the neighborhood,
with its negro tenenlents, boarded-up residences,
and rusty little stores with windows long unwashed,
she'd hardly have given him two thoughts. As it
was, when she saw the number she wanted, painted

817

rr»

THE THOROUGHBRED

dimly on a transom, she had an impulse to keep
right on going as briskl j as possible to the nearest
car line. She conquered it, of course, and went up
the three ricket j steps to the door above which the
number was painted. It was an unkempt little
wooden building one story high, that had once been
a retail shop. But its show-window — ^not plate
glass but conunon panes — had been painted white^
as also the light in the door had been, to baffle the
curiosity of the passer-by.

She tried the door and f oiHid it locked ; knocked
smartly on it, and got no answer, and was turning
away, baffled, when she saw that her pursuer from
the street-car had halted at the foot of the steps
and seemed, indecisively, to be waiting for her to
come down. That was when she got her momentary
fright.

She turned back to the door and rattled it.
Whereupon the young man came up the steps. At
that she rounded upon him.

"What do you want?" she d ;manded fiercely.

218

INTERVENTION

^^I wanted to ^t in," he said, and then she saw
he had a key in his hand.

She stared at him a second, then understood. The
explanation was so simple that nothing but the ex-
traordinary nature of the coincidence had kept her
from seeing it sooner. In his absorption over his
papers, he'd have ridden by his comer, if her get-
ting up hadn't aroused him. She said:

"Oh, then you're Major March?" Then she re-
alized that she'd called this total stranger by his
first name. To cover this slip, she hurried on : "I'm
Celia Blair — ^Alfred Blair's wife." And, in the next
breath, before he'd at all got his, she added, "Pve
come to bring you that two thousand dollars."

At that he stared back at her. The look in his
eyes wasn't tax from panic. Vaguely he put his
key back in his pocket, crumpled his carefully cher-
ished envelope in both hands, turned very white,
beaded out all over his forehead with sweat, and sat
down limply on the top step.

She rescued his envelope and said: "If you'll

819

THE THOROUGHBRED

give me your key, I'll go in and get you a drink of
water."

He said, ^^ Just a minute," and before the expira-
tion of that time, got to his feet again, unlocked the
door, and with a ceremony pathetically out of place
in the circumstances, ushered her in ahead of him.

The little shop was pretty well filled up witli
bulky objects which she classified loosely as ma-
chinery, but there were two chairs — one with a
cushion in it, in front of an old black walnUt table.
In order to get him to sit down she promptly took
the other one.

^^his is made out to me," she said, taking the
check from her wrist-bag, "so I'll have to endorse
it." She reached over and helped herself to a pen.
"Shall I say, *Pay to the order of Major March?' '*

"Yes," he said blankly, "that's all right."

When she pushed it over to him, he picked it up,
but almost instantly laid it down again and drew
a trembling hand across his forehead. Then, with
an astonishing intensity, his eyes fairly burning
into her, he demanded, "There's nothing funny

2^0

"This is no joke? That's a good check? I can get the money?"

INTERVENTION

about this, is there? This is no joke? That's a
good check? I can get the money?'*

"Joke !" she gasped. iThen, very simply, **It's a
good check. They're the biggest firm of jewelers
in the city. It's quite all right."

He offered no apology for his questions ; just sat
there drawing in one long breath after another.
After a moment he pulled the papers out of the
envelope he'd brought in with him, and once more,
unconsciously, began crumpling them.

"Oh, please don't do that!" Celia cried, and
would have rescued them from him. But he chucked
them bodily into a waste-paper basket.

"They're no good now," he said. "That check's
the answer to them. It was a fool appeal I was go-
ing to send out — ^hopeless, I knew, all the while."

Then he got up and said, "I suppose you'd like
to see about the place a little," and taking her as-
sent for granted, began to point things out to her
— ^a hydrogen generator, an electrical furnace —
other things whose names were too unfamiliar to
stick in her mind.

221

THE THOROUGHBRED

But suddenly he stopped In full career, and said,
as if it were what he had been talking about all the
while, '^ou see, when a man really doubts himself,
that's about the end of him. That's why my talk
with Alfred Blair Saturday just about finished
me. He's not one of these ordinary rich numskulls.
He's a man of imagination — a big man. And he
believed in me once. He was the only person who
did. It's been, as much as anything else, the feel-
ing that Fve got to justify that belief that's kept
me going. I have kept going, and Fve got the
things right that were wrong before.

"But he didn't believe that when I told him so the
other day. He was kind — ^he'd always be that —
and encouraging. But it was quite plain that I'd
become to him just one of those freak fool inventors
that they make jokes about in the comic supple-
ments — somebody to be sorry for and lend fifty dol-
lars to and get rid of.

"Well, it's pretty hard to believe a man is wrong
when you see him surrounded with the evidence of
his rightness about other things — see him making

S2»

INTERVENTION

decisions, crisp and cool, and other people taking
them without a moment's question. So I came away
wondering if he wasn't right about me. That's
why I went to pieces like that when you came' and
told me he'd changed his mind."

"But you didn't understand!" said Celia. "He
didn't disbelieve in you. He told me that night
that he thought probably you were right about it.
But we're poor. Didn't he tell you that? We lost
all our money. We're living in a little twelve-doUar-
a~month flat out -near Humboldt Park. He's work-
ing for twenty-five dollars a week — oh, but thirty !
He got a raise Saturday. So you see, it wasn't that
he didn't believe in you."

It had been a certain tense incredulity in his gaze
at her, which had kept her piling up these confirma-
tory details — ^a vaguely disquieting look. She was
glad when he turned away.

"But then, the two thousand dollars?" he asked
suddenly, turning back again after a silence.
"Where did that come from?"

"Oh, that," she said, "was something that he in-

S23

THE THOROUGHBRED

sisted was mine and wouldn't touch. It was mine,
in a way, of course. So when he said he thought
you were right about it, I went and got the money,
without telling him, you see, and brought it to you.
And I don't want you to tell him, either. Just
write him a note that you've got the money for
the test, and that you'll let him know how it comes
out."

*^Sit down for another minute," he said, and led
the way back to the black walnut table, where the
check lay, just as she'd pushed it over to him. *^
think I ought to tell you," he went on, **that any
sensible man of business experience, if he knew
about this transaction, would warn you very
earnestly, not to go through with it. He'd beg you
to pick up that check, if he were standing here, and
put it back in your pocket. If he did, I shouldn't
have a word to say, except to thank you for your
kindness. That's wl^at I'll do if you pick it up and
put it back in your purse now. I don't urge you to
do it myself, because I absolutely believe that it's
a safe, immensely profitable investment. But I'm

INTERVENTION

the only person in the world who believes that.
Don't you want to take it back?"

"No," said Celia. «I believe it, too."

He picked up the check, folded it very deliber-
ately, and put it in his pocketbook. Visibly he was
thinking his way through the silence to something
else. At last he said, "I'll do as you like about
your husband, of course — ^tell him simply that Fve
got the money to complete the tests; also, I'll tell
him when they're successful. But, since you're a
partner in this business, I'd like to notify you, too.
Do you mind letting me have your address?"

**Why," said Celia, "why — of course not. I —
we'd be glad if you'd come and see us. And — ^and
of course you may let me know as well as Alfred, if
you like."

He took the card she wrote for him and put it,
too, in his pocketbook, with an air, somehow, of con-
cluding the business between them as he did so.

She got up and held out her hand to him. "Gk>od-
by," she said, "and good luck ! And I hope you'll
come out and see us."

225

THE THOROUGHBRED

She hadn't the kmit idea thmt he would. Sbe
gare him the biTitation in an tmeasy attempt to
obliterate the reason be had aTowed for ■iHng for
her address. So that he ooold notify her as well as
her husband of the snooess of his tests! (A, it waa
natural enough that he should want to do that —
especially considering how queer he was — a sort of
sentimental recogniticm of her as a partner in the
enterprise. If he'd just said something like that —

It was his silence — his faflure to make that ob-
vious little explanation, that made it seem queer.
But even his queemess could hardly go to the
length of a fear that her husband wouldn't tell her
if the thing succeeded.

He did run away with strange notions, though.
His account of his scene with Alfred was so widely
at variance with her husband's report of the casual
encounter that had taken place between them.

What had he meant by saying he had seen Alfred
with all the evidences of his rightness about other
things around him; making decisions that other
people accepted? It must have been a most casual

826

INTERVENTION

encounter, really. Hadn't Alfred said it took place
in the street? The inventor might have walked
along with him back to the office, of course.

She stopped short on the way over to the street-
car, from a sudden impulse to go back and ask the
inventor one question. Had Alfred offered him
fifty dollars? March hadn't said so in so many
words. Alfred had treated him, he said, as the kind
of inventor one offers fifty dollars to in order to get
rid of. Of course it was an absurd idea. Alfred
hadn't fifty dollars. She knew — didn't she? — ^al-
most exactly, within a couple of dollars, how much
he had on the last day before pay-day.

All the same, it was a minute or two that she
stood there fighting off that impulse to go back.
And the real reason down underneath, why she did
not go, was that she was afraid to.

CHAPTER XI

IN THE DAEK

THERE is a widely hdd idea that we arrive at
our convictions by piecing them together,
matching up bits that fit, the way we solve picture
puzzles. But in reality, convictions are live things,
and they grow. Sometimes they're plants we get
from the gardener and set out in a carefully se-
lected spot, with an artificially enriched soil about
their roots; sometimes they are weeds whose seed-
ing is a mystery to us and whose rank growth is
our despair. That is how a hateful conviction
about her husband began to grow in Celia's mind.

She could not have told, when first she saw it
sprouting up, exactly what it was going to turn out
to be. It was just a vague wonder, at first — some-
thing not to think about. Something shaped like
an interrogation point, which she had resolutely to
ignore whenever she tried to tell herself, as she did

828

IN THE DARE

more often every day, that she was completely in
her husband's confidence, and he in hers.

The thing had planted itself and begun to grow,
although she didn't know it, at some time before her
talk with March.

This was evident from the fact that the invent-
or's hints had found something in her that answered
them — ^met them half-way. If the thing had not
already seeded and sprouted in her, the notion
would not have occurred to her, even though labeled
preposterous, that Alfred might have offered Ma-
jor March fifty dollars.

And now that she loolped at it, she saw another
stalk growing beside it — ^the question whether Al-
fred's boss had really raised his wages last Satur-
day, to thirty dollars a week, and if so, why he had
forgotten to tell her. Forgotten ! And come home
on a Saturday night without his week's, pay in his
pocket! And looked so blank when she'd asked
him for it !

She scolded herself furiously — ^was indeed, sin-
cerely angry with herself — despised herself rather.

SS9

THE THOROUGHBRED

It was her miserable feminine pettiness and suspi-
cion and jealousy that were responsible. Women
were like that, she supposed, and they'd just have
to get over it, before the equality they were so fond
of proclaiming nowadays would have any basis in
fact. Love in them didn't breed a fine confidence in
the object of it. It made them willing — eager, to
impute the low-downest, meanest evasions and
tricks. She remembered, years ago, having heard
a boy say about a girl he'd quarreled with, that she
was no gentleman. Did she want to give Alfred the
right to say the same thing about her?

A thorough dressing-down like that did her
good. The first time she resorted to it, indeed, she
thought it had effected a cure. This was on the
afternoon of that very Monday when she took the
two thousand dollars to Major March. She waited
for her husband to come home that night, with noth-
ing in her heart but a pure longing to make up to
him in love and confidence, for the injurious mis-
givings she'd harbored against him.

But, just the same, when he, before she'd taken

230

IN THE DARK

her arms away from around his neck, pulled out of
his pocket a sealed envelope — a regular pay-en-
velope — and tore it open and produced three ten-
dollar bills, she sensed something a little unnatural
about it all. If he'd gone to the cashier to get the
money instead of the check as he'd promised, would
the cashier have taken the trouble to put the money
in an envelope? The pettiness of the doubt infuri-
ated her, and she retorted on herself with a counter-
attack. Wouldn't she have been just as suspicious,
unworthy little fool that she was, if he'd taken
three loose bills out of his pocket? Have wondered
why they weren't in an envelope?

She waited, breathlessly one might almost have
said, to see whether he'd tell her that he'd heard
from March ; assuring herself pretty often that of
course he would, and finding herself believing, in
between, that he wouldn't. She tried, off and on,
to convince herself that there was no reason why he
should. But this ground was untenable.

He did tell her on Tuesday night — ^the very day
he'd heard But not until quite late, after they'd

2S1

THE THOROUGHBRED

gone to bed. It hadn't been a very jolly evemngi
There was an uncomfortable sSent stretch after
supper, which he'd broken up by suggesting the
movies. They'd gone, and they hadn't been mudi
amused. He had been as bored as she, she was
sure. But it was he who had asked her what the
matter was — ^why she hadn't liked it.

"Oh," she exclaimed, **they're all so exactly alike,
those people on the screen. They lie so much and
believe each other so easily ! Somebody says some-
thing that isn't so at all, but no matter how un-
likely it is, the other person acts as if there weren't
any possibility of doubting it ; goes on and believes
it for years. I don't believe that people really can
lie very much, or deceive each other very long, there
are so many little ways of giving themselves away.
That wife to-night, if she hadn't been bom an
idiot, would have known."

Alfred had had nothing to contribute to this con-
versation at all, and they'd walked/ along home,
locked up, undressed and gone to bed in an almost
unbroken silence. It was then he said :

2S2

IN THE DARE

"Oh, by the way ! I heard from March. He got
his money.''

"His two thousand dollars?" It was curiously
easy for her to manage that tone of cool indiiffer-
ence. She despised herself, rather, for being able
to act so well. "I suppose," she went on, "that the
person who gave it to him must look pretty foolish
to you."

**0h, no," he said comforjtably, **not necessarily.
NO) not a bit. There's a chance that he's made a
perfectly corking investment. He probably got his
pound of flelBh for it, all right."

It occurred to Celia at this moment, that she'd
made no bargain, expressed or implied, with the in-
ventor; had simply given him the money. She
didn't believe that he had noticed the omission
either.

^TUs speculation of hers occupied a rather long
silence. Finally Alfred went on, jocularly — a little
too jocularly, her ear told her.

"So you see, we may make our everlasting for-
tunes after all. I've got an iron-clad contract with

233

THE THOROUGHBRED

him — not thai March would try to erade any sort
of contract, or eren an obligation — that gives me
half of whatever his invention brings in, cash, roy-
alties, or stocks Old lady, we may get to be millicm-
aires yet.**

The only appropriate response Celia coold think
of to this remark was a laugh of good-humored
skepticism, and as she did not dare attempt this
(feeling pretty sure it wouldn't sound as she meant
it to) she lay still and waited.

After another silence, he asked, '^o you wish
we were?*'

^^Millionaires? With a butler and a box at the
opera and six motors?"

"Oh," he said, "I didn't mean anjrthing fantastic.
I meant, were you wishing it might run to enough
to — put us back where we were — ^your old friends,
the old way of living? Shall you be looking for-
ward to it as something that would pull us out of
this? That's what I mean. Are you getting sick
of this?"

The words gave Celia a chance to tell him what

234

IN THE DARK

she really did want. She'd hesitated to tell him be-
fore, you will remember, that dream of hers about
the two or three acres somewhere, from a reluctance
to cut short his holiday. Well, whatever had come
to take its place, his holiday was over — ^had been,
now she came to think of it, for weeks. And this
bubble of hope which Major March's invention had
sent swimming before their eyes, was, no matter how
illusory it might prove to be, a thing one could use
for seeing all sorts of fanciful, roseate reflections
in. Well, why couldn't she say to him:

^^Darlingest, I wouldn't go back to that old way
of living for a million dollars, or a hundred miUion,
and you know it just as well as I do. It was a
nightmare to you when we lived like that, and it
wasn't to me. But it's grown to be a nightmare
to me now since I've learned what really being alive
means. But I do want to get away from here to
somewhere where Uve growing things— young Uve
things — ^will have a better chance ; more air and sun
and cleanness than they'd have here. I don't want
anything big — ^not too big for me to run myself

235

THE THOROUGHBRED

while you're in town — but room enough for flowers
and vegetables, and chickens, and a cow. And a
baby, Fred.'*

If she could have said that she'd have saved her-
self some bitterly unhappy weeks ; could have said
it aloud, that is. She did say it to herself almost
word for word as I have reported it. But she
couldn't say it to Alfred. And why? Well, she
knew why. Because she believed he wasn't telling
his true dreams and hopes to her.

What she did say, with the kind of yawn one
makes when he finds his teeth inclined to chatter,
was:

**0h, what's the use, Fred? You asked me that
just the other night. You don't need to worry
about me. It won't do any good in the first place,
and there's no need of it, in the second. Of course,
if this summer keeps on very hot, it won't be easy.
This place gets like an oven about three in the
afternoon, but I can go out in the park where it's
as cool as anywhere. You're the one to worry about

S36

IN THE DARE

really. You've looked awfully tired and pulled
down the last week or two. Is it dreadfully hot in
your oflSce?"

He said, rather gru£9y, that he was all right, and
she waited a good long while, lying very still, to
see if he'd say any more. But he didn't.

Well, then, the thing Celia had regarded, when
she first saw its sprouts appear, as a noxious weed
of suspicion, grew straight and tall and hard in
fiber, until it was a great tree — ^a veritable oak of
conviction. The conviction was that her husband,
by means unknown, had recovered his former pros-
perity, or at least a good part of it ; and that his
reason for concealing the fact from her was a fail-
ure to trust her — a fear that, given the chance,
she would go straight back to the hard, artificial,
pretentious life he had hated so.

The conviction was fed and watered by nothing
tangible enough to be called evidence. Indeed,
when bits of evidence or opportunity to collect bits
of evidence came her way she deliberately shut her

237

mid Humg^ hm biAM €i 9pttA, Ike

1i file iMid beat hwMtuwUlj f'y*^?^ m
mttf file fife wmdd lM:fe beat iapoHUe fo Ivr.

ht \mA oerer lMiierc4 m lier — dUbrt bdeie m Hie
iieir Cdia at ell; v^gnvkd bar noflf ee Hie old

eoe in meiqiienidk^ waitnig only for Hie dmiee to
tarn hedk to her true eolors. AD bar goennteee
of good f aitihf flie ftDcEng end fdmidmig of tiie
flaty the jojoof eeoeptance of hie porertj, the pee-
fionete rentmciation of her old self, had availed
nothing.

She did ride out to that logical terminus some-
times when she was alone, but the sound of his step
on the stairs always brought her back to two quite
simple facts: that she was in love with him and
that he was in love with her. No asbestos fabric
of mere ideas could withstand the white heat which

288

IN THE DARK

those two facts together generated. So, though
she was indignant — tormented — humiliated, she
was able, in some mysterious way, to snatch some
hours out of the twenty-four of pure happiness
with him.

She punished him in various small ways ; rubbed
the drudgery of her domestic routine into him in
subtle ways that concealed the intent behind them.
For example, one hot night when he came home he
found she hadn't cooked any supper.

**The stove before and the dish water after," she
8€ud, *Vas too much." If he didn't mind, they'd
go round to Larry Doyle's and get something.
**Out to a restaurant for dinner!" she mocked.
**What shall we have? Let's see. Sweet-breads,
saas cloche^ and hearts of lettuce with Thousand
Island dressing, and a peach MeJba. Doesn't that
sound good?"

He winced at that, then said: ^^All right. Come
along. We'll go to the Blackstone instead of to
Larry's, and we'll have exactly that.'*

S39

4 ; I -^ « ! I I I M : )

ra k M» One IB Mj flf He

flD dbjt irailiBg for Mndbodf te d%

JHB0U JUKI it DflODCBCO «0 DdK*

flM^d lof« to 09 to flie Hbdbbne. flhe
• k»k tbit %7 i-g»ay a»Uyt .ibnl ^ «.
iftlr irilit liif T both nccJrJ As f «r doditt. cf
eooTfe ben wcfe all ng^

So tibejr w«t aadlMid a llioimig^iljr goodfiiQe.
jUid wheii AUrtd paid flie hill Cdia pretended to
be looking another way. The entertaimnent cot no
figure in their weekly aocotmts, and where the
money it cost had come from was neither asked
nor explained. Celia went on keeping accounts, it
may be said^ but she no longer balanced them.

The thing that made it possible, of course, to
go on like this from day to day was that a crisis
was clearly coming. When Major March had com-
pleted his tests, and driven his bargain, and in-

240

IN THE DARE

formed her of the result of it,^ something would
have to happen. If the tests were successful, and
the bargam a good one, and Alfred didn't tell her
then — !

CHAPTER Xn

THIS EJJEVExrra houb.

JUST six weeks after Celia took bar two thoa-
sand dollars to Major March — six weeks and
one day, to be precise, bringing it upon a Tuesday,
along about eleven o'clock in the morning, right in
the midst of her week's ironing — she got the letter
he had promised her.

Her husband's manner for the past three or four
days had led her to believe it was about due. It
had been enigmatic — ^portentous of something —
anyhow, a manner of visibly suppressed excitement,
during the brief periods when she had seen him
awake. He had been staying down-town evenings,
and even on Sunday he had gone off about nine
o'clock, to clean up some extra work, he'd said.

She tore open the envelope in a tangle of contra-
dictory emotions, feeling that good news would have
so much bad in it, and bad news so much good, that

242

THE ELEVENTH HOUR

she hardly knew what to hope for. It contained
news at all events.

*T] haven't a doubt,'* March wrote (evidently he
could lie better on paper than viva voce)^ **that my
tidings, as tidings, are superfluous. But as con-
gratulations, you will accept them. The thing has
come out beyond my hopes. Not the tests, which
your faith made possible. They showed precisely
what I knew they wbuld. But the bargain we were
able to drive on the strength of them.

"That was all your husband's doing, of course.
The eagles would have made a meal of me and left
little but bones. But in Blair's office, seated about
his broad mahogany board, where we have been
rooted for the past four days, with important peo-
ple clamoring for audience with him on other af-
fairs, it has been easy to feign an Olympian In-
difference as to whether our capitalists accepted
our terms or left the opportunity to other and
wiser men. Even I managed not to gasp, at least
not so that It showed, when Alfred announced the
wiinininTTi which we would accept as a tradiilg basis.
There are still a few details to be ironed out, but
the essentials are all agreed upon*

«43

THE THOROUGHBRED

^nVe get fifty thousand doOars in cash — to be
divided equaUy, of course, between Alfred and me
— ^forty-eight per cent, of the stock in the com-
pany to be formed, and a royalty of five per cent.

^'I realized yesterday afternoon, for the first
time, that between you and me no bargain had
been struck* I shall, of course, return to you, as
soon as I receive my check — to-morrow, I hope —
the two thousand dollars on which the whole trans-
action pivoted. As to the further share which is
rightfully yours, I suggest that, since you are
probably a worse bargainer than I, we refer the
matter to Alfred. And I only wait your release
from the seal of confidence which you imposed upon
me to take it up with him.

*^I am, with a deeper and more whole-souled lat-
itude than it is possible for me to express,

"Yours most sincerely,

"Majoe March.**

The main purport of this extremely explicit let-
ter went by Celia almost uncomprehended. What
her mind fastened upon were two or three phrases
near the beginning that dealt with Alfred's already
attained prosperity. His "broad mahogany board"

244

THE ELEVENTH HOUR

in a private oflSce, where they'd all been rooted for
the past three or four days. The Important people
outside clamoring for audience with him and not
getting It, obsequious secretaries and stenographers
hovering about. He was sitting there like that
now — ^whlle she Ironed his shirts. He'd been there
yesterday — ^whlle she had washed them. It had
been a steaming hot day yesterday. For how many
weeks — ^months — ^had the farce been going on?
Had It ever been anything but a farce?

Well, yes, It had. She recalled with a hot fierce
relish the night of their talk after her dinner-party.
The agony there had been In his voice when he
told her he couldn't stand the hell he'd been living
In any longer. It was she who had pulled him
out of that hell and given him a taste of Paradise
Instead. It had been a Paradise. There could be
no doubt about that, either.

And this was how he had repaid her ! With dis-
trust, deceit — oh, downright lies. Making a fool
of her with his precious thirty dollars a week in
an envelope!

246

THE THOROUGHBRED

Well, she had him now, as the saying is, to
rights. She'd wait a little longer, until she was
sure he had received his twenty-five thousand dol-
lars. And then she'd ask him, casually, how the
great invention was coming along. And when he
said it wasn't coming, or that those things took a
long while, and one couldn't expect anything yet,
she'd show him Major March's check for her two
thousand and ask him how about that.

She went on embroidering this lugubrious fancy
for a while in the half-hearted belief that she found
a sort of satisfaction in it. But she gave up the
attempt at last and whole-heartedly wept.

What presently dried her tears and flushed her
cheeks with a new fury of exasperation was the
dazzling perception that the thing wouldn't come
out that way at all. The picture she had been
making up was as false as any movie she had ever
looked at. Alfred wouldn't lie to her in that whole-
cloth sort of way. He wouldn't be silly enough
to try to get away with that. He'd tell her the
truth, or as much of it as he thought expedient,

246

THE ELEVENTH HOUR

and use it as a blanket for his past deception. He'd
flaunt his check very likely before her eyes with a
"Here we are, old lady. We can get a fresh start
with this — set ourselves up in business. Cautiously,
of course, perhaps not making any very great
change in our way of living just yet."

There was something subtly infuriating about
that picture and it made Celia see red. But there
was a way to demolish it. And the time to demolish
it was now. She washed her face, dressed, and,
without wasting a move or a minute, unless you
can consider wasted the ironic glance she allowed
to rest upon the abandoned ironing-board, she went
down-town to her husband's oflSce.

She went with no definite idea of what she was
going to find, and with no plan at all as to what
she'd do when she found it. She knew where to go.
At least, where to go first. She'd been to the place
just once, and that visit was made within a fort-
night of the time Alfred answered the blind adver-
tisement in the News and got his job at twenty-two
dollars and a half a week. It wasn't a very pleas-

247

THE THOROUGHBRED

ant experience, since the foreman of the room, of
whom she'd had to inquire for him, had growled,
and indeed, had made it explicit that he didn't care
to have his employees' time frivolously broken in
upon. And Alfred's fellow draftsmen, who had
taken up the cry for him and sent it rolling down
the room, had acted like a lot of sophomores. Nat-
urally fi^e hadn't gone back.

She had used to lunch with him occasionally in
those early days, but their meetings were effected
by her stopping at the drug-store on the ground
floor of the building and telephoning up to him.
To-day, carried on by a current which cared noth-
ing for foremen or sophomoric young men at draft-
ing-tables, she boldly pushed open the never-for-
gotten door, and at a desk in a corner inquired of
a foreman (the desk was the same, but the foreman
was different) for Mr. Alfred Blair.

"A. C. Blair?" questioned the foreman. "You'll
find him down-stairs where the general offices are.
This is just the drafting-room up here. Same door
as this, one story down."

^48

THE ELEVENTH HOUR

She went down one flight and opened the corre-
sponding door she was directed to. She found her-
self in the railed-out space of a very big room —
it was a dignified mahogany fence, rather than a
rail. Inside it there were a great many desks and
a great many people. Some of them rather im-
pressive-looking people, too. But none of them,
she was able swiftly to assure herself, was Alfred.
There was a door, though, down at the end, marked
"A. C. Blair. Private."

"Who was it you wanted to see?" a languid voice
inquired.

Turning in the direction the voice came from,
Celia confronted a young lady at the telephone
switchboard.

"Pd like to speak to Mr. Blair, if you please,"
Celia said very politely indeed.

"He's in an important conference," said the
young lady, "and can't be disturbed."

"Very well," said CeUa. "Pll wait."

There was a hard mahogany bench outside the
rail where persons were, it appeared, at liberty to

249

IkoJog tiie bettor pot «f n iMir dttt Cda ait
flicre tibe imgnMinffif of bar bnbmdPs iwlaliwi
WM f nrtiiar icfodcd tn bcr. I44b «f P^op^ tried
to tfllk to bioi cpvcr ui0 tdipttMM^ oaly to be toned
9mvj m moet inrfiifrf wilb tibe eme f unnabi Ast
bad beea need for ber«

AnoUier fbiii|f Cdui hfrMHP swave of^ timngh
00I7 Tagudyy was fbat abe bcndtf waa an objeet
of eome eorioettf. A maa f nm one of tbe ded^a
down near tbe prirate door came oat and bad a
low-voiced colloquy with the telephone girl, and
then came over to her. Since Mr. Blair was busy,
could no one else attend to her business for her?
When Celia said it was Mr. Blair himself whom
she wished to see, he told her that if she wished
to give her name the girl would telephone it in.
But Celia said this wasn't necessary. She would
wait.

250

THE ELEVENTH HOUR

She didn't mind waiting, as a matter of fact.
She could afford to wait. Because when she did
see him, at all events when he saw her, her vengeance
would be instantaneous and terrible. He'd stand
there before her red-handed, as it were.

It was with a startling suddenness that the tele-
phone girl finally spoke to her. "There's Mr. Blair
coming out of his office now," she said. "He seems
to be going out. But you can speak to him if you
like. He'll come this way."

And then followed what were, I think, the most
eventful thirty seconds in Celia Blair's life. All
she did with them was to get up and walk swiftly
across the railed-out space to the telephone girl's
desk and stand there, leaning over the switchboard,
with her back to the little gate Alfred was coming
through, as well as to the door he was going out of.

Also, she said to the telephone girl, with a mirac-
ulous kind of^mile, "I'll wait till another time, I
think, when he isn't so busy."

Of course, the important thing was what she did
not do. She did not lay the irreparable ax to the

261

THE TH0^0^6HBBED

tfiee of tiicir mutual km and c onfl d f i ice and hap-
ptnesf.

I thinky in all VSuXboodf it waa tiiafc new sym-
pathy wHhy and kmgmg f ory and understaodnig of,
lite growing things whidi had spnmg vp wiUun
her with the apring of the year, that scfed her.
A oomprdiension of the fact that idnk joa eoold
heir maiUe, or pour iteel into forms pres^ibed by
logic of a hard geometry, you ooold not deal witti
living things like that. Things that were alive
co|ild be killed.

She' didn't think it out during those thirty sec-
onds. All she had was a brilliant vision of what
Alfred's face would look like when he saw her stand-
ing there confronting him. After that, until the
door into the corridor had closed behind him, she
merely prayed that he wouldn't think of some last
message to leave with the telephone girl and come
over and see her there.

She sat down again for two or three minutes^
after he'd gone, and then went home.

She found him there waiting for her. He'd

252

THE ELEVENTH HOUR

driven out, it seemed, in a taxi, and had had time
to get rather worried. Not because she was away
from home in the middle of the day, but because the
look of the place indicated that she'd abandoned it
in a hurry.

"It was pretty hot,'* she said. **I went out for
some air. But you — ! Home like this ? Nothing's
gone wrong, has it?"

"No," he said, " — right. I've got some things
to tell you."

She cried out. "You don't mean Major March?
Not the great invention?"

"Yes," he said, ^there's that. We cleaned it up
this morning. I've got a check for twenty-five
thousand dollars in my pocket. Thought perhaps
you'd like to have a look before I banked it. But
let's not get started on that yet. There's something
else."

From the burning intensity of the look in her
wide-open eyes he turned away — ^walked off to the
window. And there, with many baitings and stum-
blings, began telling her thie story you know al-

^53

THE THOROUGHBRED

ready : how his first promotion had seemed so inse-
cure that he'd put off telling her about it. How,
when the day came that he needed capital for buy-
ing into the business, the very ease with which he'd
got it made him seem rather a fool. Feel at least
that he'd look rather a fool to her, and would make
her suspect that the uprooting of their former life
had been less the necessity he'd painted it than a
sort of temperamental brainstorm on his own part.
How, finally, he'd loved it so — exactly as it was,
this new life of theirs — ^that he had, out of sheer
cowardice, put off telling from day to day the thing
that would make a change.

"I knew I had nothing to be afraid of, really
— that no material change, I mean, could alter the
essentials of this new thing of ours. I funked it,
really, as one does the dentist. I've paid for it
— I hope you'll believe that — exactly as one pays
for putting off the dentist. The longer I put it
off the worse it hurt, and the worse I knew it was
going to hurt. But — ^well, the tooth's out now!

g54

THE ELEVENTH HOUR

You will forgive me, won't you? Oh, I know you
wilir

He turned and looked at her then, and fairly
cried out, she had gone so white. Naturally enough
— only he couldn't understand — ^with the sense of
the dreadful nearness of the peril she had escaped.
But she came straight into his arms and he at-
tributed the whiteness to the heat.

"We've got to get out of this," he said, "that's
clear enough. But where we go, and how we live,
that's in your hands." He kissed them both, and
his voice broke. "In your hands, my dear."

Then, to get her quiet, he told her about the
car he'd bought. They'd promised it for to-day,
and he was furious because they'd failed him. But
to-morrow, they said, was sure. He'd abandon the
office for a week, and they'd take a little trip.
Where would she like to go?

"We might cruise around," suggested Celia,
"and look at places where we could live — ^not too
far away from town for you to come in, but far

265

• I f-^ I i i>\

fppomm — iamamfmid

A €oif # Asa ft DMDjr*

mU tiie jcudiy and ipnc Ae tw tihoonad doflns
to Major Matdk*

^^Olit Ifajor dUfart giwie jm cwsyf be aamed
hor* ^^Baty of eocme, what tlie tests tamt out tibe
wmj ibej did mad I saw whst we luidy I talked Um
where he^d got the money. How modi b^d had
to pay for it* Because, of course, what he had had
to pay ought to come out of my share as well as
out of his. His way of refusing to tell me was so
impressive — religious, you might ahnost call it —
that it would have given almost anybody a hunch.
And then, when he swore that the person who had
given him the money hadn't driven any bargam
for it at all, it struck me that there wasn't any-
body else — couldn't be anybody else who'd be — ^

256

THE ELEVENTH HOUR

"Fool enough," Celia put in contentedly.

"Oh, well," he said, "I don't care what name you
call it by."

He found out about her visit to the office, too.
No later than next day. "That stenographer of
mine," he said, "has got a queer bee in her bonnet.
She swears that you were in my office yesterday
morning, and that you waited there for an hour
to see me, and then went away."

"It must have been a lady, then, I suppose,"
mused Celia. "Somebody all dressed up, probably,
and terribly excited because they wouldn't let her
in. But what made her think it was me? She's

never seen me."

"Well, of course," said Alfred, "there are three
pictures of you on my desk." And then, meeting
her eyes, he cried out, "It was you !"

Well, the new car had arrived by then, and what
with the excitement of getting ready for their trip
and preparing the feast that Major March had
been invited to for that night, and the delirious
bliss of just dropping everything now and then and

257

THE THOROUGHBRED

looking at each other, I suppose it is no wonder
that they failed to treat that potential and so nar-
rowly averted tragedy as soberly as it deserved.
Indeed, beyond a guilty laugh from Celia, and a
wry grin and an exclamation from Alfred, they
didn't treat it at alL

Two or three nights later, though, out in the
coimtry and under a very fine yellow moon, in the
course of talking over the whole adventure, he
asked her why she let him off like that«

She said, with more meaning in her voice than
there was in the words, "Oh, what would be the use?
You may find me some time where you could smash
me flat, or I find you. But I don't believe there's
anything immoral about not paying off grudges,
do you ? There's something in the Bible about that.
And don't you think we're both much nicer this
way than we would be — crushed?"

He couldn't take it as lightly as that, but his
feelings wouldn't go into adequate words.

"You little thoroughbred," he said.

THE END

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3 6105 036 004 331

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