Howard Maitland's departure in January for the Philippines surprised several people.
"Why should he take such a long journey?" Miss Mary Graham said to Miss Eliza—"unless it is that he discovered that Miss Payton is not the sort of girl to make any man happy, and simply left the country."
"I wager he carried a mitten with him!" Miss Eliza said.
"What! You think she refused him? Maria Spencer says she's only too anxious to get him. Meeting him in empty apartments! Perhaps that disgusted him. A gentleman does not like to be pursued."...
"Why has he gone away?" Mrs. Childs asked Laura, mildly interested.
"Because he wants to hunt for shells."
"But I thought he was so attentive to Freddy?"
"Maybe she turned him down."
"She'll get a crooked stick at last, if she doesn't look out," her father said, over the top of his newspaper.
Laura came and sat on the arm of his chair. "Fred doesn't need a stick, Billy-boy; she can walk alone."
"Every one of you needs a stick," Mr. William Childs assured her; "and I don't know that I would confine it[Pg 117] to the thickness of my thumb, either, as the English law does." He reached up a plump hand and pulled her ear. Afterward he told his wife that Lolly was down by the head: "What's the matter with her, Mother?" he said. His two sons might have failed in their various businesses, or taken to their beds with mumps or measles, and he would not have looked as anxious as he did when he heard the little flat note in Laura's voice. "Is she off her feed because I won't let her walk in that circus parade of Fred's?"
"Well, she's disappointed."
"I won't have a girl of mine tramping through the mud—"
"Perhaps it won't be muddy."
"It will! It always is. Anyway, I hope it will be. But if she is upset about it, I'll take her to St. Louis with me that week, so she won't feel she's backed out. Mother, you don't suppose she's missing that Maitland chap, do you? Hey? What?"
"Oh, dear me, no! Why, Mr. Maitland has been paying attention to Freddy for the last year."
"Why doesn't she take him, and stop all her nonsense? I hear she told those poor, silly strikers in Dean's rubber-factory to support Smith, the 'Woman's Candidate'! Much 'supporting' they can do! And the joke of it is, Smith himself owns the controlling stock. She had better be at home, darning her stockings."
"Oh, now, Father, you must remember it isn't as if Ellen didn't have plenty of servants to do things like that."
[Pg 118]
"I hear she's signed that petition to have certain kinds of diseases registered. I don't know what the world's coming to, that girls know about such things!"
"Well, of course, girls are more intelligent than they used to be."
"If she's so intelligent, I'll give her a book on Bacon-Shakespeare that will exercise her brains,—and she can stop concerning herself with matters that decent women know nothing about. Thank Heaven, our Laura is as ignorant as a baby! Or, if Fred is so bent on reforming things, let her have a Sunday-school class," said Mr. Childs, puffing and scowling. "Look here, Mother, if you have any influence over her, try and get her to take young Maitland. I should sleep more easily in my bed if I thought she had a man to keep her in order."
"But he has gone away," Mrs. Childs objected.
"That's because she has turned him down. Maybe he'll never think of her again; I wouldn't, if I were a young fellow! I'd want a woman, not a man in petticoats. But if he does get on her track again, tell her to take him; tell her I say she'll get a crooked stick if she waits too long. You're sure Laura isn't blue about him?"
"Now, Father! You are the most foolish man about that child!..."
"Why has Maitland gone on that expedition, Fred?" said Mr. Weston.
"You can search me," said Miss Payton.
Arthur Weston's hands, concealed in his pockets, tightened. "She has refused him!" he said to himself. (Alas![Pg 119] shooting ducks on the marshes had not helped him!) He had dropped in at 15 Payton Street, and Fred had taken him up to the flounced and flowery sitting-room.
"Mother'll be in pretty soon," she said; "so let's talk business, quick!" She was apparently absorbed in "business," which, as the winter thawed and drizzled into spring, flagged very much. "And the office rent goes right along, just the same," she told her trustee, ruefully. "I think, if I could have a little car to run around and look at places—"
"Maitland put that idea in your head!"
Frederica did not defend her absent adorer. Instead, she wailed over the rapacity of her landlord.
"You ought to have made your rent contingent on your customers," Mr. Weston teased her; and roared when she took it seriously and said she wished she had thought of it. "Give me some tea, Fred," he said; "these questions of high finance exhaust me." Then he asked the usual question, and Fred gave the usual answer. "But what do you hear from him?" Weston persisted. "I suppose you write to him occasionally? You mustn't be too cruel."
"Well, I don't hear much," she said. She took a letter out of her pocket and handed it to him.
When he had read it, he was silent for a while. ("If this is the sort of letter a blighted being writes," he reflected, "love has changed since my time.")
"Dear Fred," the letter ran, "I'm having the time of my life. Tell Laura Childs I saw a shell necklace that she'd be perfectly crazy about. The dredging ..."
[Pg 120]
Then followed two pages about shells, which Mr. Weston, raising a bored eyebrow, skipped.
"Those books you sent were bully. They look very interesting. I haven't had time to read them yet. Tell Laura they use boa-constrictors here instead of cats; and tell her that the flowers are perfectly wonderful."
Then came something about suffrage, ending with a ribald suggestion that the suffragists should get a Filipino candidate—"He wouldn't cost so much as the chief of bosses, Mr. Smith; a Moro will root for 'votes for women' if you promise him a bottle of whisky."
"He is not losing sleep over being rejected," Arthur Weston thought, as he handed the letter back to her.... He had lost some sleep himself, lately: "And there's no excuse for it," he told himself; "I didn't fall in love, I strayed in—in spite of sign-posts on every corner! And now I'm in, I can't get out. Damn it, I will get out!" But each day it seemed as if he 'strayed' farther in....
"Why has H. M. gone off?" Laura asked Frederica.
"Why, you know! Shells," Fred said, astonished at the question.
"Tell that to the marines. Freddy, you bounced him!"
"I did not."
"Well, then, if you didn't, what color are the bridesmaids' dresses to be?" Laura retorted.
"Get out!" said Frederica.
"Why has Mr. Maitland left town?" Mrs. Payton asked her daughter.
[Pg 121]
"Shells."
"Oh," Mrs. Payton said; "but I thought he—you—I mean, I supposed ... Freddy, he's a nice fellow. I wish—"
"Oh, nice enough," Fred admitted, carelessly.
"She's refused him," Mrs. Payton thought; and sighed.
Even Flora had to ask her question: "Mr. Maitland has gone away, they say, Miss Freddy?"
"So I hear."
"Men," said Flora, heavily, "is always going away! Why can't they stay in one place, same as ladies?"
"They are not so important as we are," Miss Freddy assured her.
"If they was all swep' out of the world, it would be just the same to me," said Flora, viciously.
Fred kept a severely straight face; all the household knew poor Flora had had another disappointment.
"Why?"—"Why?"—everybody asked. But Frederica only thought "why." Her first feeling when he went away had been a sort of blank astonishment. Of course, it was all right; there was no reason he shouldn't go, only—"Why?"
Every day, as she worked at her desk, or took a trolley-car to the suburbs to inspect some apartment, or sat in absorbed silence opposite her mother at the dinner-table, she was saying, why? She was certain that he was fond of her. "Did he go because he thought I was so deep in business that I wouldn't bother with him? Or because[Pg 122] he wanted to show me he could put in really serious licks of work? Or because he was afraid I'd turn him down? Of course, I am awfully matter-of-fact," she admitted; "but all the same, he's blind if he thinks that!"
Sometimes, when her mother commented vaguely on the weather, or on Flora's indelicacy in being so daft about men, or Miss Carter's perfectly unreasonable wish to go to the theater once a week, besides her regular evening out—"I don't go once a year," Mrs. Payton said—Frederica would start and say, "Beg your pardon? I didn't hear you." Nor would she hear her mother's dreary sigh.
"Freddy has nothing in common with me," Mrs. Payton used to think, and sigh again. It did not occur to her to say, "I have nothing in common with Freddy." Certainly, they had nothing of mutual interest to talk about.... Mrs. Payton was wondering dully whether she had not better take a grain of calomel; why they would not eat cold mutton in the kitchen; whether Flora wouldn't be a little more cheerful now, for Miss Carter said that the McKnights' chauffeur was making up to her.... Fred was wondering how soon her last letter would reach Howard Maitland; foreseeing his interest in its contents—the news that Smith had been beaten, but pledged to the support of suffrage in his next campaign; calculating as to the earliest possible date of his reply.... Mrs. Payton was right; they had nothing in common. By and by, as the weeks passed, the mother and daughter, together only at meals, lapsed into almost complete silence.
"I love both my children just the same, but Mortimore[Pg 123] is more of a companion than she is," Mrs. Payton thought, bitterly.
There was, however, one moment, in April, when Frederica did talk.... Mrs. Holmes had come in to dinner, and somehow things started badly. Mrs. Payton had said, sighing, that she was pretty tired; "I really haven't got over the Christmas rush, yet," she complained. And Frederica, with a shrug, said that the Christmas debauch was getting worse each year. Then the suffrage parade was discussed. It had taken place the day before, in brilliant sunshine, and on perfectly dry streets, which greatly provoked Mrs. Holmes, who had prayed for rain. Naturally, she made vicious thrusts at the women who took their dry-shod part in it. She was thankful, she said, that William Childs had locked Laura up; anyhow, she hadn't disgraced the family!
"Do you call taking her to St. Louis 'locking her up'?" Fred inquired. "Laura gave in to Billy-boy, which was rather sandless in her. She is a dear, but she hasn't much sand."
"She has decency, which is better. To show yourselves off to a lot of coarse men—"
"Mr. Weston watched the procession."
"Only coarse women would do such a thing! And Arthur Weston might have had something better to do!"
Frederica held on to herself; she even refrained from quoting Mr. Weston's comment on the parade: "No doubt there were women in the procession who liked to be conspicuous; but there were others who marched with the consecration of martyrs and patriots!" But of course it[Pg 124] needed only a word to bring an explosion. The word was innocent enough:
"That Maitland boy," said Mrs. Holmes—"I've dropped my napkin, Flora; pick it up—why did he suddenly leave everything and go off?"
"Freddy says he's gone to dig shells," said Mrs. Payton.
"Dig what?" said Mrs. Holmes; "people mumble so nowadays, nobody can understand them! Oh, shells? Yes. Funny thing to do, but I believe it's quite the thing for rich young men to amuse themselves in some scientific way. I suppose it doesn't need brains, as business does."
"It isn't amusement," Frederica said; "it's work."
Upon which her grandmother retorted, shrewdly: "Anything you do because you want to, not because you have to, is an amusement, my dear. Like your real-estate business."
Frederica's lip hardened.
"However," Mrs. Holmes conceded, "to make his way in the world, a rich man, fortunately, doesn't need to be intelligent, any more than a pretty girl needs to be clever"—she gave her granddaughter a malicious glance; "all the same, young Maitland had better settle down and get married, and spend some of the Maitland money. (There goes my napkin again, Flora!)"
"I'd have no respect for him, if he did," Fred said. "He would be too much like this family—living on dead brains."
Her grandmother turned angry eyes on Mrs. Payton. "You may know what your daughter means, Ellen; I'm sure I don't!"
[Pg 125]
"I'll tell you what I mean," Frederica said, "you and Mother simply live on the money your husbands made and left you when they died. Since you were a girl, when you had to work because you were poor, you have never done a hand's turn to earn your living. Mother has never done anything. You are both parasites. Well, I am, too; but there's this difference between us: I am ashamed, and you are not. I am trying to do something for myself. But the only thing you two will do for yourselves will be to die." She looked at her speechless grandmother, appraisingly. "Yes, death will be a real thing to you, Grandmother. You can't get anybody else to do your dying for you."
"Ellen! Really!" Mrs. Holmes gasped out.
"Freddy, stop!" her mother said, hysterically.
"Well, what have either of you ever done to earn what you are at this moment eating?" Fred inquired, calmly.
Mrs. Payton was speechless with displeasure, but Mrs. Holmes, shivering from the chill of that word Fred had used, helped herself wildly from a dish Flora had been holding, unnoticed, at her elbow. "Ellen, I simply will not come here, if you allow that girl to speak in this way—before a servant, too!" she added, as Flora retreated to the pantry.
"I merely told the truth," Fred said, with a bored look.
"Well," said her grandmother, "then I will tell you the truth! You are a very unpleasant girl. And I don't wonder you are not married—no man would be such a fool as to ask you! A girl who cheapens herself by locking herself up in empty flats with any young man she[Pg 126] happens to meet, and signs indecent petitions, and rants in the public streets to a lot of strikers—why, you are not a lady! You are as plain as a pike-staff; and you have no manners, and no sense, and no heart—you've nothing but cleverness, which is about as attractive to a man as a hair shirt! Maria Spencer told me she expected you would be ruined; but I said I would think better of you if you were capable of being ruined, or if anybody wanted to ruin you. You are not a woman; you are a suffragist! That's why you haven't any charm; not a particle!"
"Thank Heaven!" Frederica murmured.
"Well, unless men have changed since my day," Mrs. Holmes said, shrilly, "a man wants charm in a woman, more than he wants brains."
"It is a matter of indifference to me what men want," Fred commented.
Her grandmother did not notice the interruption—"Though when we were young, some of us had brains and charm, too! There! That's the truth, and how do you like it? Ellen, why do you have your napkins starched so stiffly—they won't stay on your lap a minute!"