Margaret wondered whether, if Jennie succeeded in warning Daniel of her coming, he would again contrive to prevent Catherine's seeing her.
"Wouldn't it make a good Movie! I might have it copyrighted!" she shrugged.
But she told the chauffeur to hurry, hoping that she might, even yet, get to the office before Daniel got there.
"If I don't, and if he tries to keep Catherine from coming down to me—well, if I didn't look such a sight, I would go right up into the office!"
When, however, the taxicab drew up before the building of which the second floor was occupied by Daniel's law offices, and she leaned for an instant out of the cab window, she saw her husband coming down the street. Jennie, then, had been too early for him. Margaret looked about hastily for Catherine, but she saw nothing of her. She shrank far back, then, in the cab to prevent Daniel's seeing her, for he was now close by.
She saw him hesitate at the door of the building and glance inquiringly at the cab; then, curiosity moving him, for Daniel had the petty curiosity of an unoccupied woman, he came over to the curb and looked into the window of the cab.
Margaret met his glance calmly. All she cared about was that he should not prevent her meeting Catherine.
"Why, Margaret! You out of doors! What for? You came for me? Is anything wrong?"
"I came out for some fresh air."
"But to come out on the street!" he protested, scandalized.
"I'm not exposed to view."
"But the chauffeur has seen you!" whispered Daniel, actually colouring with embarrassment.
"He doesn't mind it nearly as much as you do, Daniel. I think he'll recover; he looks robust."
"But what have you come down to my office for?"
As Margaret at this moment saw Catherine coming out of the building, she promptly answered, "To see Miss Hamilton and clear matters up with her. Here she is now."
Daniel turned about sharply, and Catherine, nodding a cheerful good-morning to him, stepped into the cab and bent over Margaret to kiss her.
"But, Miss Hamilton," cried Daniel as his clerk settled Herself comfortably beside his wife, "why are you not at your desk?"
"I left a note on your desk, Mr. Leitzel, asking you to excuse me for an hour. I shall be back before ten," she replied, drawing the cab door shut and speaking to him through the open window.
"To the park," Margaret ordered the chauffeur. "Good-bye, Daniel."
"Miss Hamilton," faltered Daniel, but before he could collect his wits to decide how he ought to meet so unprecedented a situation, the car started and whirled down the street.
Slowly and thoughtfully he turned into his office building. Never before in all his life had his will been so frustrated as by this young wife of his hearth and home upon whom he showered every comfort, every luxury and indulgence. That any one whom he supported should disobey, defy, and thwart him! It was beyond belief. How did she dare to do it?
"But what's a man to do with a wife who doesn't care for his displeasure any more than if he were an old cat!" he raged. "Oh, well," he tried to console himself, "it won't be long, now, until the baby comes, and then surely she'll be different. She'll have to be! I'll find some means of teaching her that my wishes can't be disregarded!"
Miss Hamilton's note which he found on his desk stated succinctly that she had an imperative engagement this morning which would make her an hour late.
Daniel, sinking limply into his desk-chair, crushed the note in his long, thin fingers and tossed it into his waste-basket, with the murderous wish that it was his clerk's head he was smashing.
"What will they be when they get the vote?" he groaned. "Women," he said spitefully but epigrammatically, "are the pest of men's lives!"
Margaret, meantime, without once directly referring to her husband and his sisters, had managed to convey to Catherine an explanation of the silence and desolation that had existed between them during the past two weeks; and she was now making a compact with her which she felt must insure them both against any future misunderstanding.
"Tell me first, Catherine, that our friendship means more to you than—than any petty considerations! Please, Catherine, tell me that it does! For I just must have you, you know! You are more to me than I can possibly be to you, for you have your mother, while I——"
She hesitated and Catherine said, "And you, Margaret, will soon have your child. Will that make you need me any less? I don't believe it will, dear. And my other dear ones can't in the least fill your place in my life. I can't give you up any more than you can spare me. Nothing," she said with decision, "shall separate us."
"Then," said Margaret, pressing Catherine's hand, "hereafter, when you come to see me, ring the bell four times by twos, and I, knowing about the hour to look for you, will be on hand to let you in myself."
"All right. I will."
"Catherine! You are large-minded!"
"My dear!" protested Catherine, "'large-minded' to be indifferent to the eccentricities of—well," she closed her lips on the rest of her sentence, "two illiterate, vulgar old women," was what she had nearly said; but she left it to Margaret's imagination to finish her remark.
"While you are ill in bed, I suppose I shan't be able to get near you," she ventured. "It will be dreadful if I have to wait nearly a month before I can see that baby! It's going to be awfully dear to me, Margaret! Next thing to having one of my own."
"I couldn't wait a whole month to show it to you. I'll ask the doctor to bring you to me."
"We'll manage somehow," affirmed Catherine.
Margaret, looking rather pale, did not answer, and Catherine suddenly put her arms about her and kissed her.
"You poor child!" she said tenderly.
"I'm not a good fighter," Margaret sadly shook her head. "And there are so many, many adjustments to be made, I——"
She stopped short and bit her lips to keep back the tears that sprang to her eyes.
"At least," said Catherine encouragingly, "you seem to be coming to your ordeal, dear, with plenty of courage; and that's the main thing just now."
"Oh, Catherine, I'm willing to go through a lot for the sake of holding a baby of my own to my heart!"
"Then you think, Margaret, that motherhood is going to be all that it's cracked up to be?"
"Under ideal conditions," said Margaret, "I can see nothing greater to be desired."
"But do the ideal conditions ever exist?"
"I suppose they seldom do."
"Sometimes I've had my doubts," said Catherine. "The male poets and painters exalt the beauty, the holiness of motherhood, and the women bear the burden and pain of it."
"But when women whose lives have had the largest horizon—women like Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Margaret Fuller—have declared that their motherhood was the crown and climax of all their experiences of life, I suppose the poets and painters are not very wrong about it, Catherine."
"I hope they are not, since all my instincts about it are entirely primitive and I feel that nothing in the world will compensate me if I've got to go through life childless."
"There would be one compensation," said Margaret earnestly.
"What?"
"Sometimes, since I've known I was going to have a child, the responsibility, the almost crushing responsibility, has seemed more than I could bear. That's what I meant when I spoke of ideal conditions."
Catherine held back her mental reply to this, which was, "Yes, we should be careful whom we marry, and why did you tie up with a little rat like Danny Leitzel?"
What she did say was: "You didn't feel this crushing sense of responsibility until after you found yourself pregnant?"
"No. Before that I thought only of my own happiness in having a baby to cherish. But, Catherine, when we look about us and see what life can do to us, I wonder how we ever dare, under any conditions, to bring a child into this awful world!"
"We can't question the foundations of the universe, however."
"No, but we can question modern civilization, which produces a huge population of criminals, lunatics, degenerates, and incapables."
"Think of pleasant things, my dear!"
"I try to. To tell you the truth, in spite of my heavy sense of responsibility, I can hardly wait, Catherine, until I have my baby! I want to show you the lovely little embroidered dress Harriet sent me. Will you come in to see it and me this afternoon after four o'clock?"
"Yes."
"I'll be on the watch."
"All right," Catherine nodded.
"The baby received another present, the other day, which touched me very much," added Margaret. "A cunning pair of socks from its grandmother which she knit herself."
"Its grandmother? But——"
"I mean Mr. Leitzel's step-mother."
"Oh!"
"Did you ever happen to see her, Catherine?"
"Once. She came to the office once to see Mr. Leitzel."
Catherine's tone of withdrawal, as though she feared to be questioned, piqued Margaret's interest.
"What was your impression of her?"
"Margaret, your husband's mother has an unforgettable face! There's a benediction in it, such sweetness, refinement, and simplicity shine in her countenance. When she had talked to me for a while, I felt as a good Catholic must who has been blessed by the Pope. Just the sort of person (with a heart too tender to hurt a fly) to be herself easily victimized by the human vultures that prey upon the too confiding."
"Has anybody victimized her?" Margaret casually inquired.
Catherine hesitated an instant before she answered: "Righteousness is sometimes a breastplate to protect the otherwise defenceless. It is that dear old woman's extraordinary conscientiousness that has saved her from being entirely devoured by the vultures, though she has certainly been gnawed at pretty hard. I can't explain to you, now, just what I mean. Some day, perhaps."
"Oh, do tell me, Catherine."
Again Catherine hesitated before she replied: "She made a certain promise to her husband on his deathbed which her conscience has never allowed her to break, though she has always believed that she was acting against her own interests in keeping it. But it's her loyalty to her promise that's been her breastplate; that has saved her from the vultures."
Margaret considered in silence this suggestive bit of information. It was rather more lucid to her than Catherine suspected. But she was impressed with the sudden realization she had of her friend's intimate knowledge of Daniel's affairs and it flashed upon her that perhaps his seemingly unreasonable objections to their intimacy might have quite another explanation than that he had given it.
In this, however, she was mistaken. Daniel entirely trusted the discretion of his clerk. Not so much because he believed her bound in honour to keep his secrets as because it was the part of a first-class clerk (which she was) to be discreetly silent as to her employer's business operations.
"And now, my dear," Catherine broke in on her thoughts, "since we've threshed things out and have made a compact that we will not again misunderstand each other, I think I'd better get back to my 'job.'"
Margaret gave the order to the chauffeur; and when a little while later, alone in the taxicab on her way home, she found her heart overflowing with a sense of the fulness, the richness of life, and considered how strenuously Daniel and his sisters tried to take from her the comfort, the happiness, of companionship with Catherine and how impossible it would be to make them see what that companionship meant to her, she felt greatly strengthened in her resolve to resist, steadily and persistently, their aggressions upon her personal liberty.
At her own door, as she opened her purse to pay for the cab, she found she had remaining of her monthly allowance only two dollars and the chauffeur's price was three dollars. She hesitated an instant, then telling the man to charge the cab to Mr. Leitzel, she got out hastily and went indoors.
"Rather hard on Daniel to make him pay the costs of my plots gotten up to circumvent his plots! He won't like it. Ah, I've a bright idea! I'll tell him to deduct the three dollars from my next 'allowance.' That will appease him."
But on second thoughts she realized that that same bright idea would surely occur to Daniel without any suggestion from her.