 25 Before the twelve-storey Bendingo apartments, Carl scanned the rows of windows which pierced the wall like bank-swallows' nests on a bold cliff. One group of those windows was home, to Roloman, in memories, Gertie's faith and understanding. It was she who had always understood him. In anticipation he loitered through the big marble and stucco, rug and rubber-tree, nigger-haul-boy and Jew-tenant hallway. What would the Cowleses be like now? Gertie met him in the coat-smelling private hall of the Cowles' apartment, greeted him with both hands, clasping his, and her voice catching on. Oh, Carl, it's so good to see you. Behind Gertie was a swishing, stiff-backed Mrs. Cowles, piping in a high-worn voice. Mr. Erickson, a friend from home, such a famous friend, Gertie drew him into the living-room. He looked at her. He found not a girl, but a woman, of thirty, of solid, with the tiniest wrinkles of past unhappiness or anoui at the corners of her mouth, but her eyes radiant with sweetness, and her hair appealingly soft and brown above her wide, calm forehead. She was gowned in lavender crepe de chenille, with paniers of satin elaborately sprinkled, with little bunches of futurist flowers, long jet-air-rings, a locate neck that hinted of a comfortable bosom, eyes shining hands firm on his arm, voice ringing, she was unaffectedly glad to see him, her childhood plain-meet, whom she had not beheld for seven years. Mrs. Cowles was waiting for them to finish their greetings. Carl was startled to find Mrs. Cowles smaller than he had remembered. Her hair nearly white and not perfectly matched her face, crisscrossed with wrinkles deeper than her age justified. But her old disapproval of Carl, son of a carpenter and cousin of a hired girl, was gone. She even laughed mildly like a kitten sneezing, and from a room somewhere beyond, ray-shotted. You're right there in a second, old man. Crazy to have a look at you. Carl did not really see the living-room, their background. Indeed, he never really saw it. There was nothing to see. Chairs and a table and pictures of meadows and roses. It was comfortable, however, and had conveniences, a folding card-table of cribbage-board, scorepads for wist and five hundred, a humidor of cigars, a large Morris chair, and an ugly but well-patted couch of green tufted velveteen. They sat about in chairs talking. Ray came in, slapped Carl on the back, roared. Well, here's the stranger. Holy Mike, have you got a mustache, too? Better shave it off before Gertie starts kidding you about it. Have a cigar. Carl felt at home for the first time in a year. For the first time, talked easily. Say, Gertie, tell me about my folks in Boone Stillman. Well, I saw your father just before we left, Carl. You know, he still does quite a little business. We got your mother to join the Nautilus Club. She doesn't go very often, but she had a nice paper about Java and its products, and she helps us a lot with the restroom. I haven't seen Mr. Stillman for a long time. Ray? What has... Ray? I think old Boone's often some expedition or other. Fellow told me Boone was kind of a forest ranger or mine-inspector, or some darn thing up in the big woods. He must be pretty well along towards 70 now at that. Carl. So dad's getting along well? His letters aren't very committal. Oh, say, Gertie. Whatever became of Ben Rusk, I've lost track of him entirely. Gertie. Why, didn't you know? He went to Rush Medical College. They say he did splendidly there. He stood awfully well in his class, and now he's in practice with his father at home. Carl. Rush? Gertie. Yes. You know, in Chicago. Carl. Oh, yes, sure, in Chicago, sure. I remember. Now, I saw it when I was there one time. Why, that's the school his father went to, wasn't it? Ray. Yes. That's the one. The point seems settled. Carl. Well, well, so Ben did study medicine after. Oh, say, how's Adelaide Benner? Gertie. Why, you'll see her. She's coming to New York in just a couple of weeks to stay with us till she gets settled. Just think, she used to have a whole year here studying domestic science, and then she used to have a perfectly dandy position teaching in the Fargo High School. I'm not supposed to tell. He mustn't breathe a word of it. Mrs. Cowell's interrupting. Adelaide is a good girl. Ray, don't tilt your chair. Gertie. Yes, isn't she, Mama? Well, I was just saying, between you and me, Carl, she is to have the position in Fargo, already in waiting for her. Though, of course, they can't announce it publicly with all the cats that would like to get it and all. Isn't that fine, Carl? Certainly is. Remember the time we had the May party at Adelaide's and all I could get for my basket was rag babies and May flowers? Gee, but I've felt out of it. Gertie, we did have some good parties, didn't we? Ray, don't call that much of a good party for Carl. Ring off, Gert. You got the wrong number that time, all right. Gertie, flushing. Oh, I didn't mean... But we did have some good times. Oh, Carl, will you ever forget the time you and I ran away when we were just babies? Carl, I'll never forget. Mrs. Cowell's. I'll never forget that time my lands I thought I should die on was so frightened. Carl, you have forgiven me now, though, haven't you? Mrs. Cowell's. My dear boy, of course I have. She wiped away a few tears with a gentlewoman handkerchief of lace and thin linen. Carl crossed the room and kissed her pale veins silverly old hand. Abashed, he subsided on the couch and, trying to look as though he hadn't done it. Carl. Oh, uh, say, what did become of... Oh, I can't think of his name. You know, I know his name well as I know my own, but it slipped me just for the moment. You know, he ran the billiard parlor, the son of the... From Mrs. Cowell's, a small disapproving sound from Ray, a grin of knowing naughtiness and a violent head shake. Gertie gently. Yes, he has left Gerolamin. Climby mean. Carl hastily wondering what Eddie Clemmit done. Oh, I see. Have there been many changes in Gerolamin? Mrs. Cowell's. Do you write to your father and mother, Carl? You ought to. Carl. Oh, yes, I write to them quite often now, though, for a time I didn't. Mrs. Cowell's. I'm glad, my boy, it's pretty good, after all, to have some folks that you can depend on, isn't it? When I first went to Gerolamin, I thought it was a little pokey, but now I'm older and I've been there so long and all that I'm almost afraid of New York and I declare. I do get real lonely for home sometimes. I'd be glad to see Dr. Rusk, Benfather. I mean the old doctor driving by. Though, of course, you know I lived in Minneapolis a great many years and I do feel I ought to take advantage of the opportunities here, and I've thought quite seriously about taking up French again. It's so long since I've studied it. You ought to study it. You will find it cultivates the mind. You must be sure to write often. To your mother there's nothing you can depend on like a mother's love of my boy. Hey, look here, Carl. I want to hear something about all this aviation. How does it feel to fly, anyway? I'd be scared to death. It's funny, I can't look off the top of a skyscraper without feeling as though I wanted to jump. Gosh, I...girdy. Now you just let Carl tell us when he gets ready, you big bad brother. Carl wants to hear all about home first. All these years. You were asking about the changes? There haven't been so many. You know, it's a little slow there. Of course, I almost forgot. Why, you haven't been in Jerome since they built up what they used to be...Tubbs pasture. Carl. Not the old pasture by the lake. Well, well, is that a fact? Gee, I used to snare gulfers there. Girdy. Oh, yes. Why, you simply wouldn't know it. Carl, it's so much changed. There must be a dozen houses on it now. Why, there's a cement walk and everything, and Mr. Uppam has a house there, a real nice one with a screened-in porch and everything. Of course, you know they've put in us the sewer now, and there's lots of modern bathrooms and almost everybody has a Ford. We would have bought one, but planning to come away so soon. Oh, yes. And they've added a fire escape to the schoolhouse. Carl. Well, well. We'll say Ray. How was Howard Griffin getting along? Ray. Why, Howard's graduated from Chicago Law School, and he's practicing in Denver. Doing pretty well, I guess. Settled down and got quite some real estate holdings. Have another question, Carl, man. Say, speaking of Plano, of course you know they ousted old S. Alcott Woodsky, far from the present, see? For hearsay, something about baptism, and the dean succeeded him. Poor ol' cuss. He wasn't as mean as the dean, anyway. Say, Carl, I've always thought they gave you a pretty raw deal there. Girdy interrupting. Perfectly, dreadful, Ray. Don't put your feet on the couch. I brushed it thoroughly just this morning. It was simply terrible, Carl. I've always said if Plato couldn't appreciate her greatest son. Mrs. Collins, sleepily. Oh, Regis, don't put your feet on the chair, Ray. Ray. Oh, leave my feet alone. Everybody knew you were dead right in standing up for prof-frasier. You remember how I roasted all the fellows in Omega Chai when they said you were nutty to boost him? And when you stood up in chapel? Lord, that was nervy. Girdy. Indeed, you were right. And now you've got so famous, I guess. Carl. I ain't so. Mrs. Collins. I was simply amazed, children, if you don't mind. I'm afraid I must leave you. Mr. Erickson, I am so ashamed to be so sleepy or so early. When we lived in Minneapolis before Mr. Collins passed away, it was a regular night-hawk, and we used to sit, sit, yawn, sit up all hours. But tonight, Girdy. Oh, must you go so soon? I was just going to make Carl a rarebit. Carl has never seen one of my rarebits. Mrs. Collins. I make him one by all means, my dear, and you young people sit up and enjoy yourselves just as long as you like. Good night, all. Ray, will you please be sure to see that that window is fastened before you go to bed? I think it's so nervous when— Mr. Erickson, I am very proud to think that one of our Girolamma boys should have done so well. Sometimes I wonder if the Lord ever meant men to fly. What was so many accidents? And you know aviators often get killed and all? I was reading the other day, such a large percentage. But we have been so proud that you should lead them all. I was saying to a lady on the train that we had a friend who was a famous aviator. She was so interested to find that we knew you. Good night. They had the wealth for ever. With beer and Carl helped to make it. Gertie summoned him into the scarred kitchen, saying with a beautiful casualness, as she tied her apron about him. We can't afford a hired girl, I suppose I should say a maid, because Mama has put so much of our money into Ray's business. You know, you mustn't expect anything so very grand. But you'll like to help, wouldn't you? You're to chop the cheese. Cut it in weeny cubes. Carl did like to help. He boasted that he was the champion cheesechopper of Harlem, and the Bronx, one thirty-three ringside. While Gertie was toasting crackers and Ray was buying bottles of beer in the newspaper, it all made Carl feel more than ever at home. It was good to be with people of such divine understanding that they knew what he meant when he said, I suppose there have been worse teachers than Prof. Larson. When the rare but lay pale in death the saddening debacle of hardened cheese, and they sat with their elbows on the modified mission dining table, Gertie exclaimed, Oh, Ray, you must do that new stunt of yours for Carl. It's scrimmingly funny, Carl. Ray Rose had his collar untie off in two joking jerks, buttened his collar on a backward. Cheerfully turned his waistcoat backside foremost, lengthened his face to an expression of uncutacious sanctimonious, and turned about, transformed in one minute, to a fair imitation of a strange curate. With his hands folded, Carl droned, Now, sister, it behoboth us here at St. Timothy's Church. While Carl pounded the table in his delight at seeing Ray, the broad-shouldered, the lady-killer, the capable businessman, drop his eyes and yearn. Now, you must do a stunt, shrieked Ray, and Gertie and Carl hesitantly sang, what do we remember that Forrest Hablin's fully song? I went up and up a loon so big the people on the earth looked like a pig, like a mice, like a Katie did, like fleasies, and like fleas, and... Then without solicitation, Gertie decided to dance, gather the golden sheaves which she had learned at the school of memen, Valesh Kalka, late though not very late, of the Russian ballet. She explained her work outlined the theory of sensuous and aesthetic dancing, mentioned the backgrounds of Bach's and the glories of Nijinsky, told her ambition to teach the new dancing to children. Carl listened with awe, and with awe did he gaze as Gertie gathered the golden sheaves, purely hypothetical sheaves in a field occupying most of the living-room. After the stunts, Ray delicately vanished. It was not so much that he's datedly went off to bed or at that, presently he was not there. Gertie and Carl were snuggly alone, and at last he talked to Forrest Hablin and Tony Bean of flying and falling, of excited crowds, and the fog-filled airlines. In turn she told of her ambition to do something modern and urban. She had hesitated between dancing and making exotic jewelry. She was glad she had chosen the former. It was so human. It put one in touch with people. She had recently gone to dinner with real bohemians, spirits of fire, splendidly in contrast with the dull plotters of gerolamen. The dinner had been at a marvellous place on West Tenth Street, very foreign. Everyone drinking wine and eating spaghetti and little red herrings, and the women fearlessly smoking cigarettes. Some of them. He had gone with a girl from Madame Vashkoska's school, a glorious creature from London, Nebraska, who lived with the most fascinating girls at the Three Arts Club. They had met an artist with black hair and languishing eyes, who had a Yankee name but sang Italian songs divinely, upon the slightest pretext so bubbling was he, with Joyce Devere. Carl was alarmed. Gosh, he protested. I hope you aren't going to have much to do with the long-haired bunch. I have invented a name for them. It's the bohemians. Oh, no. I don't take them seriously at all. I was just glad to go once. Of course some of them are clever. Oh, yes, aren't they clever. But I don't think they last very well. Oh, no, I'm sure they don't last well. Oh, no, Carl. I'm too old and fat to be a bohemian. A hobo bohemian. I mean, so. Nonsense. You look so, oh, thunder. I don't know just how to express it. Well, so real. It's wonderfully comfortable to be with you all again. I don't mean you're just so good to her mother's sort, you understand? But I mean you're dependable as well as artistic. Oh, indeed. I won't take them too seriously besides. I suppose lots of the people that go to bohemian restaurants are really artists at all. They just go to see the artists. They're just as romantic as can be. Don't you hate bromides? Of course, I want to see some of that part of life. But I think, oh, don't you think those artists in all are dreadfully careless about morals? Well, yes, she breathed reflectively. No, I keep up with my church in all, indeed I do. Oh, Carl, you must come to my church, St. Orgel's. It's too sweet for anything. It's just two blocks from here. And it isn't so far up there. You know, not with the subway, not like commuting. It has the loveliest chapel and the most wonderful radios. And the subways are and the services are so inspiring and high church, not like that horrid St. Timothy's at home. I do think a church service ought to be beautiful. Don't you? It isn't as though it were like a lot of poor people who have their have their souls saved in a mission. What church do you attend? You will come to St. Orgel's sometime, won't you? Be glad to. Won't say gritty before I forget it. What is Semina doing now? Is she married? Apropos of the subject, Gertie let it be known that she herself was not betrothed. Carl had not considered that question. But when he was back in his room, he was glad to know that Gertie was free. At Omega Child Delta Club, Carl lunched with Ray Cowles. Two nights later, Ray and Gertie took Carl and Gertie's friend, the glorious creature from London, Nebraska, to the opera. Carl did not know much about opera. In other words, being a normal young American who had been waterproofed with college culture, he knew absolutely nothing about it. But he gratefully listened to Gertie's clear explanation of why Menom Vahashkoska preferred Wagner to Verne. He had, in the meantime, received a formal invitation for a party to occur at Gertie's for the coming Friday evening. Thursday evening, Gertie coached him in a new dance, the turkey trot. She also gave him a lesson in the Boston with a new dip invented by Menom Vahashkoska, which was certain to sweep the country because, of course, Vahashkoska was the only genuinely qualified artiste they dance in America. It was a beautiful evening home. Ray came in and the three of them had coffee and thin sandwiches at Gertie's suggestion. Ray again turned his collar around and performed his clergyman stunt. While the impersonation did not, perhaps, seem so humorous as before, Carl was amused. And he consented to sing the I Went Up in a Balloon so big song so that Ray might learn it and sing it at the office. It was captivating to have Gertie say quietly as he left. I hope you'll be able to come to the party a little early tomorrow, Carl. You know, we count on you to help us. The party was on at the Cowles Flat. People came. They all set to it, having a party, being lively and gay whether they wanted to or not. They all talked at once and had delicious shocks over the girl from London, Nebraska, who having moved to Washington Place, just a block or two from ever so many artists, was now smoking a cigarette and wearing a gown that was black and clean. It was no news to her that men tended to become interested in her ankles, but she still went to church and was accepted by quite the nicest of the St. Ogle set to whom Gertie had introduced her. She and Gertie were the only thoroughly qualified representatives of art, but beauty and gallantry and wit were common. The conspirators and holding a party were on the male side. An insurance adjuster who was a frat brother to Carl and Ray. Though he came from Metchallon College, a young lawyer ever so jolly with a banjo, a banting clergyman who was spoken of with the masculine approval because he smoked a pipe and he said charmingly naughty things. Johnson of the Holmes and Long Island Real Estate Company and his brother of the Marnhurst Development Company. Four older men, ranging from thin hair to very bald, who had come with their wives and secretly looked at their watches while they talked brightly with one another's wives. Five young men whom Carl could not tell apart as they all had smooth hair and eye glasses and smart dress shirts and obliging smiles and complimentary references to his aviating. He gave up trying to remember which was which. It was equally hard to remember which of the women Gertie knew as a result of her girlhood visit to New York, which from their membership in St. Ogle's Church, which from the relation into Minnesota, they all sat in rows on couches and chairs and called him, You wicked man! For reason none too clear to him. He finally fled from them and joined the group of young men who showed an ill bread and disapproved tendency to sneak off into Ray's room for a smoke. He did not, however, escape one young woman who stood out from the Malay. A young woman with a personality almost as remarkable as that of the glorious creature from London, Nebraska. This was the more or less married young woman named Dorothy, and affectionately called Toddikins by all the St. Ogle's group. She was the kind who looked at men appraisingly and expect them to come up, be unduly familiar, and be crushed. She had seven distinct methods of getting men to say indiscreet things, and three variations of reply of which the favorite was to remark with well-bred calmness. I'm afraid you have made a slight error, Mr. Ah. I didn't quite catch your name. Perhaps they failed to tell you that I attended St. Ogle's every Sunday, and have a husband and child. And I'm not at all really, you know. I hope that there has been nothing I said that has given you the idea that I've been looking for a flirtation. A thin small female with bobbed hair was Toddikins, who kept her large husband and her fat white grub of an infant, somewhere in the back blocks. She fingered a long gold religious chain with her square, stubby hand, while she gazed into men's eyes with what she privately termed, daring frankness. Toddikins' Affair. Toddikins the Modern. Toddikins who had read three weeks and nearly all the wicked novel in French and wore a long gold cross. Toddikins, who worked so hard in her little flat, that she had to rest all of every afternoon and morning. Toddikins, the advanced and liberal, yet without any of the extremes of socialists and artists and vegetarians and other ill-conditioned persons who do not attend St. Ogle's. Toddikins, the firmly domestic whose husband grew more worried every year, Toddikins, the intensely cultured and inquisitive about life, the primitively free and perversely original, who announced in public places that she wanted to live like the spirit of the dancing poquinette, statue, but had the assistant rector of St. Ogle's in for coffee every fourth Monday evening. Toddikins beckoned Carl to a corner and said with her manner of amused, condescension. Now you sit right down here, Hawke Erickson, and tell me all about aviation. Carl was not vastly sensitive. He had not disliked the nice young men with eyeglasses. Not till now did he realize how Toddikins shrill references to the dancing poquinette and the poquinetting of her mud-colored dutch-fashioned hair had poured him. On we was not, of course, an excuse. But it was the explanation of why he answered in this wise, very sweetly looking Toddikins in the eye and patting her hand with a brother-like and altogether maddening condescension. No, no, that isn't the way, Dorothy. It's quite passe to ask me to tell you all about aviation. That isn't done, not in 1912. Oh, Dorothy. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. First you should ask me if I'm afraid when I'm flying. Oh, always begin that way. Then you say that there's a curious fact about you. When you're on a high building and just look down once, then you get so dizzy that you want to jump. Then after you said that, let's see. You're a church member, aren't you? Well, then next you'd say, just how does it feel to be up in an airplane? Or if you don't say that, then you simply got to say. Just how does it feel to fly anyway? But if you're just terribly interested, Dorothy, you might ask about biplanes versus monoplanes, and do I think they'll ever be a flight across the Atlantic? But whatever you do, Dorothy, don't fail to ask me if I'll give you a free ride when I start flying again. And we'll fly and fly like birds, you know. Or like the dancing backerette. That's the way to talk about aviation. And now you tell me all about babies. Really, I'm afraid babies is a rather big subject to tell all about, at a party. Really, you know. That was the only time Carl was not bored at the party. And even then he had spiritual indigestion from having been rude. For the rest of the time. Everyone knew everybody else and took Carl aside to tell him that everybody was the most conscientious man in our office, Erickson, why the boss would trust him with anything. It's saddened Carl to hear the insurance suggestor boom. Oh, you toddykins, across the room at ten minute intervals like a human foghorn on the Sea of Unway. They were also uniformly polite, so neat-minded and church-going and dull. Nearly all the girls did their hair in co-cateries one exactly like another. Carl is not to be pitied. He had the pleasure of martyrdom when he heard the younger Johnson tell of Martin Hearst the Suburb Beautiful. He believed that he had reached the nadir of boredom. But he was mistaken. After simple and pleasing refreshments of the wooden plate and paper napkin school, Gertie announced, now we're going to have some stunts. And you're each to give one. I know you all can and if anybody tries to beg off, my what will happen? My brother has a new one. For the third time that month Carl saw Ray turn his call around to become clerical, while everyone rustled with delight, including the jolly, panting clergyman. And for the fourth time he saw Gertie dance gather the golden sheaves. She appeared shy and serious and bloomers and flat dancing shoes, which made her ample calves bulge the more. She started at sight of the Harvest Moon, and, well, she may have been astonished if she did indeed see a Harvest Moon there above the gilded buffalo horns on the unit bookcase. Rose to her toes flapped her arms and began to gather the sheaves to her breast, with enough plump and panting energy to enable her to gather at least a quarter section of them before the whistle blew. It was not only aesthetic, but close to the soil. Then, to banjo accompaniment, the insurance adjuster sighed for his old Kentucky home, which Carl judged to have been located in Brooklyn. The whole crowd joined in the chorus and, suddenly with a shock that made him despise himself for the cynical superiority which he had been enjoying, Carl remembered that Forrest Havlin, Tony Bean, Hank O'Dell, even Sirly Jack Ryan and the alien Carnot had sung. My old Kentucky home on their last night at the Bagby School. He felt their beloved presences in the room. He had to fight against tears as he too joined in the chorus. Then weep no more, my lady. He was beside a California poppy field. The blossom slumbered beneath the moon and on his shoulder was the hand of Forrest Havlin. He had repented. He became part of the group. He spoke kindly to Tottikens, but presently Tottikens' proposter well advertised return to her husband and baby, and gave a ten-minute dramatic recital from Byron. And the younger Johnson sang a Swiss mountaineer song with yodels. Gertie looked specter to the et Carl twice during this offering. He knew that the gods were plotting an abominable thing. She was going to call on him for the stunt, which had been inescapably identified with him, the song. I went up in a balloon so big. He met the crisis heroically. He said loudly as the shaky strains of the Swiss ballad died on the midnight mountaineer of the 157th Street, while the older men concealed Johns and applauded, and the family in the adjoining flat wrapped on the radiator. I'm sorry my throat's so sore tonight, otherwise I'd sing a song I learned from a fellow in California. Balloons big. Gertie stared at him dumbfoundedly, but passed to a kitten-faced girl from Minnesota, who was quite ready to give an imitation of a child whose doll has been broken. Her stunt was greeted with, oh, how cunning. Please do it again. She prepared to do it again. Carl made hasty motions of departure, pathetically holding his throat. He did not begin to get restless till he had reached 96th Street and had given up his seat in the subway to a woman who resembled Tottikens. He wondered if he had not been at the old home long enough. At 72nd Street, on an inspiration that came as the train was entering the station, he changed to a local and went down to 59th Street, found an all-night garage, hired a racing car, and at dawn he was driving furiously through Long Island, a hundred miles from New York, on a roadway perilously slippery, with falling snow. Trail of the Hawk by Sinclair Lewis, Chapter 27 Carl wased that Adelaide Banner had never come from Jirolemann to study domestic science. He felt that he was a sullen brute. But he could not master his helpless irritation as he walked with Adelaide and Gertie Cowles through Central Park on a snowy Sunday afternoon of December. Adelaide assumed that one remained in the state of mind called Jirolemann all one's life. That however famous he might be, the son of Oscar Erickson, was not sufficiently refined from his Cowles of the big house on the hill, though he might improve under Cowles' influences. He was still a person who had run away from Plato. But that assumption was far less irritating than one into which Adelaide threw all of her fated yearning that Gertie and he were in love. Adelaide kept repeating with Coish Linus, Isn't it too bad you two have me in the way? And don't mind poor me, and he will turn her back any time you want her to. And Gertie merely blushed murmuring, Don't be a silly. At 18th Street Adelaide announced, Now I must leave you children. I am going over to the Metropolitan Museum of Art I do love to see art pictures. I've always wanted to. Not be as good as you can, you two. Gertie was mechanical about replying. Oh, don't run away, Addie dear. Oh, yes, you two will miss an old maid like me terribly. And Adelaide was off, a small, sturdy, undistinguished figure, with an underlying loyalty to Gertie and to the idea of marriage. Carl looked at her bobbing back with wrinkles in her cloth jacket over the shoulders, as she melted into the cloud of glossy fur-trim New Yorkers. He comprehended her goodness, her devotion. He sighed, If she'd only stop this hinting about Gertie and me. He was repentant of his irritation and said to Gertie, who was intimately cuddling her arm into his. Adelaide's an awful good kid. Sorry she had to go. Gertie jerked her arm away, averted her profile, graded, If you miss her so much, perhaps you'd better run after her. Really, I wouldn't interfere. Not for worlds. Why, hello, Gertie. What seems to be the matter? Don't I detect a chill in the atmosphere? So sorry you've gotten refined on me, which is going to suggest some low-brow amusement like tea at the casino. Well, you ought to know a lady doesn't. Oh, now, Gertie, dear, not lady. I don't think you're a bit nice, Carl Erickson. I don't to be making fun of me when I'm serious. Why haven't you been up to see us? Mama and Ray have spoken of it, and you've only been up once since my party. And then you were— Oh, please, let's not start anything. Sorry I haven't been able to get up oftener, but I've been taking work home. You know how it is. You know, when you get busy with your dancing school? Oh, I meant to tell you. I'm through. Just through with Vashka Vaska. And her horrid old school. She's a cat, and I don't believe she ever had anything to do with the Russian ballet, either. What do you think she had the infantry to tell me? She said I wasn't practicing and really trying to learn anything. And I've been working myself into— Really, my nerves were in such a shape. I would have been in danger of a nervous breakdown if I had kept on. Tadikin's told me she had a nervous breakdown, and had me see her doctor. Such a tear, Dr. Sinclair. So refined and sympathetic. And he told me I was right in suspecting that nobody takes Vashka Vaska seriously any more. And besides, I don't think much of all this symbolic dancing anyway. And at last, I found what I really want to do. Oh, Carl, it's so wonderful. I'm studying ceramics with Miss Dietz. She's so wonderful in temperamental, and she has the dearest studio in Grimacy Park. Of course, I haven't made anything yet, but I know I'm going to like it so much. And Miss Dietz says I have a natural taste for vases. And— Huh? Oh yes, vases, I get you. Don't pee vulgar. I'm going to go down to her studio and work every other day. And she doesn't think you have to work like a scrub woman to succeed, like that horrid Vashka did. Miss Dietz has a temperament herself. And, oh Carl, she says that Gertrude isn't suited to me and Gertie certainly isn't. And she calls me El Turda. Don't you think that's a sweet name? Would you like to call me El Turda sometimes? Look here, Gertie. I don't want to butt in, but I'm guessing that it looks to me as though one of these artistic grafters was working on you. What do you know about this Dietz person? Has she done anything worthwhile? And honestly, Gertie, by the way, I don't want to be brutal, but I don't think I could stand El Turda. It sounds like toddykins. Not really, Carl. Wait a second. How do you know you've got what you call temperament? Go to it and good luck, if you can get away with it. But how do you know it isn't simply living in a flat and not having any work to do except developing a temperament? Why don't you try working with Ray in his office? He's a mighty good businessman. This is just to suggest... Now, really, this is... Look here, Gertie. The thing I've always admired about you is your wholesomeness and... Wholesome? Oh, what a word, as Miss Dietz was saying just the other day. It's as bad. But you are wholesome, Gertie. That is, if you don't let New York turn your head, and if you'd use your ability on a real job like helping Ray or teaching, yes, you're really sticking to your ceramics or dancing and leave the temperament business to those who can get away with it. No, wait. I know I'm budding in. I know that people won't go and change their natures because I asked them to. But did you see you and Ray and Adelaide? You are the friends I depend on, and I just so hate to see. Oh, Carl, dear. You might let me talk, said Gertie, in tones of maddening sweetness. As I think it over, I don't seem to recall that you've been an authority on temperament for so very long. I seem to remember that you weren't so terribly wonderful on Jerome. I'm glad to be the first to honour what you've done in aviation, but I don't know that it gives you the right to. Never said it did, Carl insisted, with fictitious good humour. Sum that you are an authority on temperament, Nard. I'm afraid that your head has been just a little turned by. Oh, hell, I'm sorry. That just slipped. It shouldn't have slipped, you know. I'm afraid it can't be passed over so easily. Gertie might have been a bustling Jerome school teacher, pleasantly bidding the dirty rakeson boy. Now go and march the little hands. Carl said nothing. He was bored. He wished that he had not become entangled in their vague discussion of temperament. Even more brightly, Gertie announced. I'm afraid you're not in a very good humour this afternoon. I'm sorry that my plans don't interest you. Of course. I should be very temperamental if I expected you to apologise for cursing and swearing. So I think I'll just leave you here and, when you feel better. She was infuringly cheerful. I should be pleased to have you call me up. Goodbye, Carl. And I hope that your walk will do you good. She turned into a footpath, left him muttering in tones of youthful injury. Jiminy, I'm done it now. He was in Giroleman. A Victoria drove by with a dowager who did not seem to be humbly courting the best set in Giroleman. A grin lightened Carl's face, he chuckled. By golly, Gertie handled it splendidly. I'm to call up and be humble and then bing. The least I can do is to propose and be led to the altar and teach a Sunday school class at St. Orgel's for the rest of my life. Come hither, Hawk Erickson. Let us hold counsel. Here's the way Gertie will dope it out, I guess. El Truda. I'll dine in solitary regret for saying hell. No. First I'm to walk downtown alone and busy repenting and then I'll feed alone, and by eight o'clock I'll be so tired of myself that I'll call up and beg pretty. Rats. It's rotten mean to dope it out like that. But just the same. Me, that have done what I've done, worried to death over one accidental hell. Hey there, you taxi. Grantly he rode through the park, and in an unrepentant manner, bowed to every pretty woman he saw, to the disapproval of their silk-headed escorts. He forgot the existence of Gertie Carl's and the old home folks. But he really could not afford a taxi cab and he had to make up for it by economy. At seven-thirty, a gloomily entered Megalidan's Restaurant on 42nd Street, the least unbearable of the popular prices, tables for ladies, dens, and slumped down at a table near the window. There were few diners. Carl was much as stranger as the morning when he had first invaded New York to find work with an automobile company. And he had passed this same restaurant. Still, was he a segregated stranger, despite the fact that two blocks away in the Aero Club, two famous aviators were agreeing that there had never been a more consistently excellent flight in America than Hawke Erickson's race from Chicago to New York? Carl considered the delights of the Coles Flant, Ray's story about Plato and business and the sentimental things Gertie played on the guitar. He's suddenly determined to go off someplace and fly an airplane, as suddenly knew that he was not yet ready to return to the game. He read the evening telegram and chairlessly peered out of the window at the gray snow veil which shrouded the 42nd Street. As he finished his dessert and sturdy coffee, he stared into a streetcar stalled in a line of traffic outside. Within the car, seen through the snow mist, was a girl of twenty-two or three with satiny slim features and ash-blonde hair. She was radiant and white fox furs, Carl creamed to watch. He thought of the girl who, asking a direction before the floor to lunchroom in Chicago, had inspired him to become a chauffeur. The girl in the streetcar was listening to her companion who was a dark-haired girl with humor and excitement about life in her face, well set up, not tall, in a smartly tailored coat of brown ponyskin, and a small hat that was all lines and no trimming. Both of them seemed amused, possibly by the lofty melancholy of a traffic policeman beside the car, who raised his hand as though he had high ideals and a slight stomach ache. The dark-haired girl tapped around knees with the joy of being alive. The streetcar started. Carl was already losing in the city jungle with two acquaintances whom he had just made. The car stopped again, still blocked. Carl seized his coat, dropped a fifty-cent piece on the cashier's desk, did not wait for his ten-cent change, ran across the street, barely escaping a taxi-camp, galloped around the end of the car, swung up on the platform. As he took a seat opposite the two girls, he asked himself just what he expected to do now. The girls were unaware of his existence. And why had he hurried? The car had not started again. But he studied his unconscious conquest from behind his newspaper. Vastly content. In the unnatural quiet of the stalled car, the girls were irreverently discussing George. He heard enough to know that they were of the rather smart, rather cultured class known as New Yorkers. They might be Russian-American princesses or social workers or ill-paid governesses or actresses or merely persons with one motor car and a useful papa in the family. But in any case, they were not the kind he could pick up. The tall girl of the ash-blonde hair seemed to be named Olive. Being quite un-Olive and taint, while her livelier companion was apparently christened Ruth. Carl worried of Olive's changeless beauty as quickly as he did of her silver-handled umbrella. She merely knew how to listen. But the less spectacular, less beautiful, less langorious, dark-haired Ruth was born a good comrade. Her laughter marked her as one of the women whom earthquake and flood and childbearing cannot rob of a sense of humor. She would have the inside view, the sophisticated understanding, everything. The car was at last free of the traffic. It turned a corner and started northward. Carl studied the girls. Ruth was twenty-four perhaps, or twenty-five. Not tall, slight enough to nestle, but strong and self-reliant. She had quantities of dark brown hair, crisp and glinty, though not sleek, with eyebrows noticeably dark and heavy. Her smile was made irresistible by her splendidly shining teeth, fairly large but close set in white. And not only the corners of her eyes joined into her smile, but even her nose, her delicate, yes, pigment nose, which could quiver like a dears. When she laughed, Carl noted Ruth had a trick of lifting her heavy lids quickly and surprising one with a glint of blue lids, where brown were expected. Her smooth, healthy, cream-coloured skin was rosy with winter, and looked as though in summer it would tan evenly without freckles. Her chin was soft, but without a dimple and her jaws had a clean, boyish leanness. Her smooth neck and delicious shoulders were curved, not fatty, but with youth and happiness. They were square, capable shoulders, with no mid-Victorian droop about them. Her waist was slender naturally, not from stays, her short but not fat fingers, were the ideal instruments for the piano. Slim were across feet and her unwrinkled pumps. Foolish foot gear for a snowy evening seemed eager to dance. There was no hint of the coquette about her. Physical appeal this Ruth hand, but it was the allure of sunlight and meadows of tennis and mebote, with bright, candid sails, not of bourgeois or garden-dizzy scented with jasmine. She was young and clean, sweet without being sprinkled with pink sugar, too young to know much about the world's furious struggle, too happy to have realised its inevitable soreness. Yet born a woman who would not always wish to be protected, and round whom all her circle of life would centre. So Carl inarticulately mused, with the intentness which one gives to strangers in a quiet car, till he laughed. I feel as if I know her like a book. The Century's greatest problem was whether he would finally prefer her to Ollie if he knew them. If he could speak to them. But that was, in New York, more difficult than beating up policemen or getting acquainted with the mayor. He would lose them. Already they were brising, going out. He couldn't let them be lost. He glanced out of the window, sprang up with an elaborate pretense that he had come to his own street. He followed them out, still conning headlines in the paper. He gave absorption, said, plain that it all might behold, that he was a respectable citizen to whom it would never occur to pursue strange young women. His new friends had been close to him in the illuminated car, but they were alien, unapproachable, when they stood on an unfamiliar street crossing snow-dimmed and silent with night. He stared at a street sign and found that he was on Madison Avenue, up in the fifties. As they turned east on Fifty Blanketh Street, he stopped under the street light, took an envelope from his pocket, and found on it the address of that dear old friend living on Fifty Blanketh, on whom he was going to call. This was to convince the policeman of the perfect purity of his intentions. The fact that there was no policeman nearer than the man on fixed post a block away did not lessen Carl's pleasure in the make-believe. He industriously inspected the house numbers as he followed the quickly moving girls, and frequently took out his watch. Nothing should make him late in calling on that dear old friend. Not since Adam, glowered at the intruder Eve, has a man been so darkly uninterested in two charmers. He stared clear through them, he looked over their heads, he observed objects on the other side of the street, indignantly told the imaginary policeman who stopped him that he hadn't even seen the girls till this moment, that he was the victim of a plot. The block through which the cavalcade was passing was lined with shabby, gentile brownstone houses, with high stoops and haughty dark doors, and dressmakers placards or doctor's cards in the windows. Carl was puzzled. The girls seemed rather too cheerful to belong in this decade and gloomy block, which in the days when horsehair, furniture, and blankets had mattered, had seemed imposing, but the girls ascended the steps of a house which was typical of the row, except that five motor-cars stood before it. Carl passing went up the steps of the next house and rang the bell. What a funny place, he heard one of the girls he judged that was Ruth, remarked from the neighbouring stoop. Looks exactly like Aunt Emma when she wears an Alexandria bang. Do we go right up, oughtn't we to ring? You ought to be the craziest party, anarchists. A party ain't thought Carl. Hot to ring, I suppose, but... Yes, there's sure to be all sorts of strange people at Mrs. Hallott's, said the voice of the other girl when the door closed upon both of them. And an unabashed Carl realised that a maid had opened the door of the house at which he himself had rung, and was glaring at him as he craned over to view the next door stoop. Well, where... Does Dr. Brown live here? He stuttered. No, he don't. The maid snapped, closing the door. Carl groaned. He don't. Dear old Brown, not leave it, huh? What shall I do? In remarkably good spirits he moved over in front of the house into which Ruth and Olive had gone. People were coming to the party in twos and threes. Yes, the men were in evening clothes. He had his information, swinging his stick up at a level with his shoulder at each stride. He raced to 59th Street and the nearest taxi stand. He was whirled to his room. He literally threw his clothes off. He shaved hastily, singing, Will you come to the ball from the Quaker girl, and slipped into evening clothes in his suavist dress shirt. Seizing things all at once, top hat, muffler, gloves, pocket book, handkerchief, cigarette keys, and hanging them about him as he fled down the decorous stairs, he skipped to a taxicab, and started again for 50 Blanketh Street. At the house of the party he stopped to find on the letterbox in the entry of the name Mrs. Hallett, mentioned by Olive. There was no such name. He tried the inner door it opened. He chairly began to mount steep stairs which kept on for miles climbing among slate-colored walls past empty wall niches with toeless plaster structures. The hallways dim and high and snobbish and the dark old double doors scowled at him. He boldly returned the scowl. He could hear the increasing din of a talk-party coming from above. When he reached the top floor he found a door open on a big room crowded in shrily chattering people in floored clothes. There was a hint of brassware and paintings in silken Turkish rugs, but no sight of Ruth or Olive. A maid was bobbing to him and breathing. That way, please, at the end of the hall. He went meekly. He did not dare to search the clamorous crowd for the girls as yet. He obediently added his hat and coat and stick to an uncomfortable-looking pile of wraps writhing on a bed in a small room that had a complete print of Sergeant's Prophets, a calendar, and an unimportant white rocker. It was time to go out and face the party, but he had stage fright. While climbing the stairs he had believed that he was in touch with the two girls, but now he was separated from them by a crowd, further from them than when he had followed them down the unfriendly street, and not till now did he quite grasp the fact that the hostess might not welcome him. His glowing game was becoming very dull-toned. He lighted a cigarette and listened to the beating surf of the talk in the other room. Another man came in. Like all the rest he gave up the brilliant idea of trying to find an unpreempted place for his precious newly iron silk hat, and resigningly dumped it on the bed. He was a passable man with a gentlemanly mustache and good pumps. Carl knew that fact because he was comparing his own clothes and deciding that he had none the worst of it. But he was relieved when the waxed mustache moved a couple of times in its owner's said in a friendly way. Basically, jam! May I trouble you for a match? Carl followed him out to the hostess, a small busy woman who made a business of being vivacious and letting the light catch the fringes of her gold hair, as she nodded. Carl, nonchalantly, shook hands with her, bubbling, so afraid couldn't get here, my play, but at last. He was in a panic. But the hostess, instead of calling for the police, gushed, oh, so glad you could come, combining a kittenish mechanical smile for him with a glance over his shoulder at the temporary butler. I want you to meet Miss Moller, Mr, uh, Mr. I knew you'd forget it, Carl was brotherly in protecting in his manner. Erickson, Oscar Erickson. Oh, of course, how stupid of me, Miss Moller. Want you to meet Mr. Oscar Erickson, you know? So happy to meet you, Miss, hmm, said Carl, tremendously well bred in manner. Can we possibly go over here and be clever in a corner, do you think? He had heard Colonel Hamlin say this, but his manner gave it in no quotation marks. Presumably he talked to Miss Moller about something usual, the snow or the party or Owen Johnson's novels. Presumably Miss Moller had eyes to look into and banalities to look away from. Presumably there was something in the room besides people and talk and rugs hung over the bookcases. But Carl never knew. He was looking for Ruth, did not see her. Within ten minutes he had maneuvered himself free of Miss Moller and was searching for Ruth, his nerves quivering amazingly with the fear that she might already have gone. How would he ever find her? He could scarce ask the hostess, say, where's Ruth? She was nowhere in the fog of people in the big room if he could even find Olive. Strolling, nodding to perfectly strange people who agreeably nodded back under the mistaken impression that they were glad to see him, he systematically checked up all the groups. Ruth was not among the punch-table devotees who were being humorous and amorous over cigarettes, not among the caustic wits exclusively assembled in a corner, not among the shy sisters aligned on the Davenport and wondering why they had come, not in the general mouth-storm in the center of the room. He stopped calmly to greet the hostess again, remarking. He looked so beautifully sophisticated to-night and listened suavely to her fluttering remarks. He was the picture of the cynical city-man, who has to be nowhere at no special time. But he was not cynical. He had to find Ruth. He escaped and between the main room and the dining-room penetrated a small din filled with woody young men, old stories, cigarette smoke, and siphons. Then he charged into the dining-room, where there were candles and plate, much like silver, and Ruth and Olive at the farther end. By Sinclair Lewis Chapter 28 He wanted to run forward, take their hands, cry, at last. He seemed to hear his voice wording it, but, not glancing at them again, he established himself on a chair by the doorway between the two rooms. It was safe to watch the two girls in this babble, where words swarmed and battled everywhere in the air. Ruth was in a brown velvet frock, whose golden tones harmonized with her brown hair. She was being enthusiastically talked at by a man to whom she listened with a courteously amused curiosity. Carl could fancy her nudging Olive, who sat beside her on the Jacobian sati, and was attended by another talking man. Carl, told Ruth, though he did not know that he was telling her, that she had no right to be so blasted New Yorkishly, superior in condescending. But he admitted that she was scarcely to blame for the man, made kindergarten gestures and emitted conversation like air from an exploded tire. The important thing was that he heard the man call her Miss Winslow. Great. Got her name, Ruth Winslow. Watching the man's lips occasionally trying to find an excuse for eavesdropping and giving up the quest because there was no excuse, he discovered that Ruth was being honored with a thrilling account of aviation. The talking man, it appeared, knew a great deal about the subject. Carl heard through a rift in the cloud of words that the man had once actually flown as a passenger with Henry Odell. For five minutes on end, judging by the motions with which he steered a monoplane through perilous abysses, the reckless spirit kept flying as a passenger. Ruth Winslow was obviously getting bored and the man showed no signs of bullplaining as yet. Olive's man departed and Olive was also listening to the parlor aviator, who was unable to see that a terrific fight was being waged by the hands of the two girls in the space between them. It was won by Ruth's hand, which got a death grip on Olive's thumb and held it to Olive's agony while both girls sat up straight and beamed propriety. Carl walked over and smoothly ignoring the pocket entertainer said, So glad to see you, Miss Winslow! I think this is my dance? Yes, from Miss Winslow, while the entertainer drifted off into the flotsam of the party. Olive went to join a group about the hostess, who had just come in to stir up in birth and jockened merriment in the dining room, as it had settled down into a lower state of exhilaration than the cannons of talk-parties require. Said Carl to Ruth, Not that there's any dancing, but I felt you'd get dizzy if you climbed any higher in that airplane. Ruth tried to look haughty, but her dark lashes went up and her unexpected blue eyes grinned at him boishly. Gee, she's clever, Carl was thinking. Since to date her only remark had been, yes, yes, he may have been premature. That was a fully stranglehold now you got on Miss Olive's hand, Miss Winslow. You saw her hands? Perhaps. Tell me a good way to express how superior you and I are to this fool-party and its noise. Isn't it a fool-party? I'm afraid it really is. What's the purpose of it, anyway? Do the people have to come here to inbreath this air? I wonder. I ask several people that, and I'm afraid they think I'm crazy. But you are here. Do you come to Miss Salesbury's often? Never been before. Never seen a person here in my life before, except you and Miss Olive. Came on a bet. Chapped bet I wouldn't dare come without being invited. I came. Bout to the hostess and told her I was so sorry my play rehearsals made me late, and she was so glad I could come, after all. You know, she's never seen me in her life. Or are you a dramatist? I was in the other room, but I was a doctor in the hall, and a sculptor on the stairs, so I'm getting sort of confused myself. As confused as you are trying to remember who I am, Miss Winslow. You already don't remember me at all. T it, wasn't it at Vanderbilt or the Plaza? Oh yes, it must have been. I was trying to remember. Carl Grind. The chap who introduced me to you called me Mr. M-M-M, because he didn't remember my name either. So you've never heard it. It happens to be Erickson. I'm on a mission. Serious one. I'm planning to go out and buy a medium-sized bomb and blow up this bunch. I suspect there's poets around. I do too, side-ruth. I understand that Mrs. Salisbury always has seven lawyers and nineteen advertising men and a dentist and a poet and an explorer at her affairs. Are you the poet or the explorer? I'm the dentist, I think. You don't happen to have done any... authoring, do you? Well, nothing except an epic poem on Jonah and the Whale, which I wrote at the age of seven. Most of it consisted of a conversation between them, while Jonah was in the Whale stomach, which I think showed agility on the part of the wheel. Then maybe it's safe to say what I think of authors, and more or less of poets and painters and so on. One time I was in charge of some mechanical investigations, and a lot of writers used to come around looking for what they called copy. That's where I first got my grouch on them, and I've never really got over it. And coming here tonight and hearing the literary talk, I've been thinking how those authors have a sort of an admiration trust. They make authors the heroes of their stories and so on, and so they make people think that writing is sacred. I'm so sick of reading novels about how young Bill, as had a pure white soul, came to New York, and had an horrible time till his great novel was accepted. Authors seem to think they're the only ones that have ideals. Now, I'm in the automobile business, and I helped to make people get out into the country. Better lot more of them get out because of motoring than because of reading poetry about spring. But if I claimed a temperament because I introduced the motorist soul into the daisy, everyone would die laughing. But don't you think that art is the object of civilization and that sort of thing? I do not. Honestly, Ms. Winslow, I think it would be a good stunt to get along without any art at all for a generation. And see what we miss. We probably need dance music, but I doubt if we need opera. Funny how the world always praises its opera singer so much and pays him so well. And then starves as shoemakers. And yet it needs good shoes so much more than it needs opera. Or war or fiction. I'd like to see all the shoemakers get together and refuse to make any more shoes till people promise to write reviews about them. Like all those book reviews. Then just as soon as people's shoes begin to wear out, and they'd come right around. And you'd read about the new masterpiece of Mr. Regal. And Mr. Walkover. And Mr. Stetson. Yes, I can imagine it. This lace boot is one of the most vital and gripping and wholesome shoes of the season. And probably all the young shoemakers would sit around, cafes, looking quizzical and artistic. But don't you think their theory is dangerous, Mr. Erickson? You give me an excuse for being content with being a commonplace Upper West Sider. And aren't authors better than commonplaces? We're so serious that I almost suspect you of having started to be an author yourself. Really not as a matter of fact. I am the kitty in patched overalls you used to play with when you kept house at the Willows. Of course, in the forest of Ardennes. And you had a toad that you traded for my hair-rimmon. And we ate bread and milk out of blue bowls. Oh yes, she agreed, blue bowls with bunny rabbits painted on them. And giants in six-cylinder castle. With warders and dungeons deep and jack, the giant killer, but certainly bunnies. Do you really like bunnies? Her voice caressed the word. I like them so much that when I think of them I know that there's one thing worse than having a cut-rate literary salon. And that's to be too respectable, too Upper West Side. To dare to eat bread and milk out of blue bowls. Yes, I think I shall have to admit you to the blue bowl league, Mr. Erickson. Speaking of which, tell me, who did introduce us? You and me. I feel so apologetic and for not remembering. And I have a mystery, Miss Woodensoe. At least as long as I have this new shirt, which you observed with some approval while I was drooling on about authors. It makes me look like a count. You must admit. Or maybe like a knight of the order of the bunny rabbit. Please, let me be a mystery still. Yes, you may. Life has no mysteries left except Olive's Coffiture and your beautiful shirt. Does one talk about shirts at a second meeting? Apparently one does. Yes, tonight I must have a mystery. Do you swear as a man of honor that you are at this party dishonorably uninvited? I do, Princess. Well, so am I. Olive was invited to come with a man, but he was called away and she dragged me here, promising me I should see. Anarchist? Yes. And the only nice lovable crank I found except you with your vulgar prejudice against the whole race of authors is a dark-eyed female who sits on a couch out in the big room, like a Mrs. St. Simon stylist, in a tight skirt and drags you in by her clittering eye, looking as though she was going to speak about theosophy, and then ask you if you think a highball would help her cold. I think I know the one you mean. When I saw her she was talking to a man who's beating whiskers dash high on a stern and rock-bound face. Thank you. I like that fairly well, too, but unfortunately I stole it from a chap named Haveland. My own idea of what he conversation is. Some car you got. What's your magneto? Look, Olive Dunlevy seems to stress the number of questions I shall have to answer about you. Well, Olive and I felt very low in our minds today. We decided that we were tired of select associations and we should seek the primitive, and maybe even life in the raw. Olive knows a woman, Mountain Climber, who always says she longs to go back to the wilds, so we went down to her flat. We expected to have raw meat sandwiches, at the very least, but the savage woman gave us such long and double chicken sandwiches and pink cakes and Nabisco's, and told us how well her son was doing in his old French course at Columbia. So we got lower and lower in our minds, and we decided we had to go down to Chinatown for dinner. We went, too. I've done a little settlement work. Dear me, I'm telling you much about myself. Oh, man of mystery. It isn't quite done, I'm afraid. Please, Miss Winslow, in the name of the—what is it—order of the blue bowl. He was making a mental note that Olive's name was Dunlevy. Well, I've done some settlement work. Did you ever do any by chance? I once converted a Chinaman to Lutheranism. I think it was my nearest approach and—said Carl. My work was the kind where you go and look at three dirty children and teach them that they'll be happy if they're good. When you know perfectly well that their only chance to be happy is to be bad as anything and sneak off and go swimming in the East River. But it kept me from being much afraid of the Bowery. We went down on the surface cars. But Olive was scared beautifully. There was the dearest, most inoffensive old man and most perfect state of intoxication sitting next to us in the car, and when Olive moved away from him he winked over at me and said, Honor your shroubles, ma'am, for very good form. I think Olive ought to be going to murderous. She was sure he was the wild, dying remnant of a noble race or something. But even she was disappointed in Chinatown. We had expected opium fiends, like in the melodramas they used to have on 14th Street, before the movies came. But we had a disgustingly clean table with a mad, reckless picture worked in silk, showing two doves and a boiled lotus flower hanging nearest to intimidate us. The waiter was a Harvard graduate, I know, perhaps Oxford, and he said, May I suggest ladies, very nice Chinese dinner? He suggested chowmein. We thought it would be either bird's nest or rat's tails, and it was simply crisp noodles with the most innocuous sauce. And the people? They were all stupid tourists like herself, except for a jab, with his cunning Sunday tie, and his little trousers also politely pressed in his clean pocket-hanging, and he was reading the Presbyterian. Then we came up here, and doesn't seem to be so very primitive here, either. The most aggravating, it seems to me. I've been telling you an incredible lot about our silly adventures. You're probably the man who won the Indianapolis Motor Race or discovered electricity or something. Through her narrative her eyes had held his. But now she glanced about, noticed Olive, and seemed uneasy. I'm afraid I'm nothing so interesting, he said. But I have wanted to see new places and new things, and I've more or less seen them. When I got tired of one town I've simply up and beat it. And when I got there, wherever it was, I looked for a job. Well, I haven't lost anything by it. Have you really? That's the most wonderful thing to do in the world. My travellers have been cook's tours, with their own little Thomas Cook and son, right in the family. I've never had even the man-freedom of choosing between tour of the Irish bogs and the educational pilgrimage to the shrines of the celebrated brewers. My people have always chosen for me. But I've wanted—one doesn't merely go without having an objective, or an excuse for going, I suppose. I do, declared Carl. But may I be honest? Yes? Intipacy was about them. They were two travellers from far land, come together in the midst of strangers. I speak of myself as globe-pronting, said Carl. I've been, but for a good many weeks I have been here in New York, knowing scarcely anyone and restless, yet I haven't felt like hiking off, because I was sick for a time, and because a chap that was going to go to Brazil with me died suddenly. To Brazil? Exploring? Yes, just a stab at it, pure amateur. I'm not at all sure I'm just making believe when I speak of the blue bowls and so on. Tell me, in the West one could speak of seeing the girl's home. How would one say that gracefully in New Yorkese, so that I might have a chance to be Guile Miss Olive Don Levy and Miss Ruth Winslow into letting me see them home? Really, we're not the least but afraid to go home alone. I won't tease, but may I come to your house for cheese sometime? She hesitated. It came out in with a rush. Yes, do come up. Next Sunday, if you'd like. She bobbed her head to Olive and rose. In the address, he insisted. Blank, West 92nd Street. Good night. I have enjoyed the blue bowl. Carl made his descent to voice, to the hostess and tramped up town, through the flying snow, swinging a stick like an orchestra conductor and whistling a waltz. As he reached home, he thought again of his sword parting with Gertie in the park, years ago, that afternoon. But the thought had to wait in the antarum of his mind, while he rejoiced over the fact that he was to see his new playmate, the coming Sunday. What was she? Who, where? He pictured her as dwelling in everything from a millionaire's imitation chateau, with footmen and automatic elevators to a bachelor gal's flat on an old-fashioned red brick Harlem tenement. But more than that, what would she herself be like against that background? Monday he could think of nothing but the joy of having discovered a playmate. The secret popped out from behind everything he did. Tuesday he was worried by finding himself unable to remember rather Ruth's hair with black or dark brown. Yet he could visualize Olive's ash blonde. Why? Wednesday afternoon, when he was sleepy in the office after eating too much beef steak and kidney pie, drinking too much coffee, and smoking too many cigarettes at lunch with Mr. Van Zael, when he was tortured by the desire to lay his head on his arms and yield to drowsiness. He was suddenly invaded by a fear that Ruth was stovish. It seemed to him that he ought to do something about it immediately. The rest of the week he merely waited to see what sort of person the totally unknown Miss Ruth Winslow might be. His most active occupation outside the office was feeling guilty over not telephoning to Gertie. At 3.30 p.m. Sunday he was already encased in funeral-morning clothes and warning himself that he must not arrive at Miss Winslow's before five. His clothes were new, stiff as though they belonged to a waxed dummy. Their lines were straight and without individuality. He hitched his shoulders about and kept going to the mirror to inspect the fit of the collar. He repeatedly re-brushed his hair regarding the unclean state of his military brushes with disgust. About six times he went to the window to see if it had started to snow. At 10.04 p.m. he sternly jerked on his coat and walked far north of 92nd Street, then back. He arrived at a quarter to five. But persuaded himself that this was a smarter hour of arrival than five. Ruth Winslow's home proved to be a rather ordinary three-story and basement graystone dwelling, with heavy Russian net-curtains at the broad clear-glassed windows of the first floor, and an attempt to escape from the stern drabness of the older type of New York houses by introducing a boxed stoop and steps with a carved stone boss laid at the top of which perched a meek old lion of 1890, with battered ears and truly sensitive stone nose, a typical house of the very well-to-do yet not wealthy upper middle class, a house predicating one motor-car, three not expensive maids, brief European tours, and the best preparatory schools and colleges for the suns. A maid answered the door and took his card, a maid in a frilly apron and black uniform, neither a butler nor a slatinly biddy. In the hall, as the maid disappeared upstairs, Carl had an impression of furnace heat and respectability, rather shy, uncomfortable, anxious to be acceptable, warning himself that as a famous aviator he'd need not be in awe of anyone but finding that the warning did not completely take, he drew off his coat and gloves and, after a swift inspection of his tie, gazed about with more curiosity than he had ever given to any other house. For all the stone lion in front, this was quite the old-line English basement house, with the inevitable front and back partners. Though here they were modified into drying room and dining room, the walls of the hall were decked with elaborate, meaningless scrolls and plaster-based relief, echoed by raised circles on the ceiling just above the hanging chandelier, which was expensive and hideous, a clutter of brass and knobby red and blue glass. The floor was of hard wooden squares, dark and richly polished, highly self-respecting, a floor that assumed civic responsibility from a republican point of view and a sound conservative business established since 1875 or 1880. By the door was a huge Japanese face, convenient either for depositing umbrellas or falling over in the dark. Then a long mirror in a dull red mahogany frame and a table of mahogany so refined that no one would ever dream of using it for anything more useful than calling cards. It might have been the table by the king's bed, on which he leaves his crowns on a little purple cushioned at night, solid and ostentatious. The drawing room to the left was dark and still unsympathetic and expensive, a vista of rockade covered French yilt chairs and a marquite table and a table of Onyx top, on which was one book, bound in ooze cap and one vase, cream-colored heavy carpet and a crystal chandelier, fairly meticulous paintings of rocks and thatched cottages and ragged newsboys with faces like Daniel Webster, all of them in large gilt frames, protected by shadow boxes. In a corner was a cabinet of gilt and glass, filled with Dresden china figurines and toy tables and a carbon-swiss musical powder box. The fireplace was of smooth, chilly white marble, with a normal little clock on the mantelpiece, and a fire-screen painted with Watu shepherds and shepherdesses, making silken, unreal love and scantiously neglecting silky, unreal sheep. By the hearth were shiny fire irons which looked as though they had never been used. The whole room looked as though it had never been used, except during the formal calls of overdressed matrons with card cases and prejudices. The one human piece of furniture in the room, a couch soft and slightly worn, on which lovers might have sat and small boys bounced, was trying to appear useless, too, under its row of stiff satin cushions with gold cords, well-dusted chairs on which no one wished to sit, expensive fireplace that never shown, priced pictures with less imagination, than the engravings on a bond that drawing-room had the soul of a banker with side whiskers. Carl by no means catalogued all the details, but he did get the effect of ingroing prosperity. It was not certain that he thought the room had in bad taste. It is not certain that he had any artistic taste whatsoever, or that his attack upon the pretentiousness of authors had been based on anything more fundamental than a personal irritation due to having met blatant camp-followers of the arts. And it is certain that one of his reactions, as he surveyed the abject respectability of the room, was a slight awe to solidarity of social position which it represented, and which he consciously lacked. But rather from artistic instinct or from ignorance, he was sure that into the room ought to blow a sudden great wind, with the scent of forest and snow. He shook his head when the maid returned, and he followed her upstairs. Surely a girl reared here would never run away and play with him. He heard lively voices from the library above. He entered a room to be lived in, and be happy in with a jolly fire on the hearth and friendly people on a big brown Davenport. Ruth Winslow smiled at him from behind the colonial silver and thin cups on the tea-table. And as he saw her light-filled eyes, saw her cock her head slightly gaily unwelcome, he was again convinced that he had found a playmate. A sensation of being pleasantly accepted warmed him as she cried, so glad! And introduced him, gave him tea and a cake, with nuts in it. From a wing-chair Carl searched the room and the people. There were two paintings of pale night sea and an arching Japanese bridge under sliding rain, both imaginative and well done. There was a mahogany escheterre, which might have been stiff, but was made human by scattered papers on the great blotter and books crammed into the shelves. Other books were heaped on a table as though people had been reading them. Later he found how amazingly they were assorted. The latest novel of Robert Chambers Beside H. G. Wells First and Last Things, a dusty, expensive book on Italian sculpture near a cheap reprint of Dodo. The chairs were capricious, the piano workman-like upright, not dominating the room, but ready for music, and in front of the fire was an English setter, an aristocrat of a dog, with the light glittering on his slowly waving tail. The people fitted into the easy life of the room. They were New Yorkers and, unlike over half the population born there, considering New York a village where one knows everybody and remembers when 14th Street was the shopping center. Olive Dunlevy was shinily present, her ash-blonde hair in a new cofecture. She was arguing with a man of tight morning clothes and a high-bred face about the merits of Parsifil which Olive declared no one ever attended except as a matter of conscience. Now, Georgie, she said, I said, Georgie, you shall have your opera, and you shall jolly well have it alone too. Olive was vivid about it all, but Carl saw that she was watching him, and he was shy as he wondered what Ruth had told her. Olive's brother, Philip Dunlevy, a clear-faced, slender, well-bath boy of twenty-six, with too high forehead, with discontent in his face, and in his thin voice carelessly well-dressed in a soft gray suit, and an impressionistic tie, was also inspecting Carl, while talking to a pretty commonplace finishing school finished girl. Carl instantly disliked Philip Dunlevy, and was afraid of his latent sarcasm. Indeed, Carl felt more and more that, beneath the friendliness with which he was greeted, there was no real welcome as yet, save possibly on the part of Ruth. He was taken on trial. He was a Mr. Erickson. Not any Mr. Erickson, in particular. Ruth, while she poured tea, was laughing with a man and a girl. Carl himself was part of a hash-group, an older woman who seemed to know Rome and Paris better than New York, and might be anything from a milliner to a modern-air, a keen-looking youngster with tortoise-shell spectacles. Finally, Ruth's elder brother, Mason J. Winslow, Jr., a tall, thin, solemn, intensely well-intoned man of thirty-seven, with a long, clean-shaven face, and a long narrow head whose growing baldness was always spoken of as a result of his hard work. Mason J. Winslow, Jr. spoke hesitantly, worried over everything, and stood for morality and good business. He was rather dull in conversation, rather kind in manner, and accomplished solid things by unimaginatively sticking at them. He didn't understand people who did not belong to a good club. Carl contributed a few careful platitudes to a frivolous discussion of whether it would not be advisable to solve the woman's suffrage question by taking the vote away from men and women both and conferring it on children. Mason Winslow ambled to a big table for a cigarette, and Carl pursued him. While they stood talking about the times are bad, Carl was spying upon Ruth, and the minute her current group wandered off to the Davenport, he made a dash for the tea-table, and got there before Olive's brother Philip Donlevy, who was obviously maneuvering like himself. Philip gave him a convert. Boyville! Glance took a cake, and retired. From his wicker chair facing Ruth, Carl said gloomily, it isn't done. Yes, said Ruth, I know it. But still, some very smart people are doing it this season. What do you think the woman that writes? What the man will wear in the theatre program would stand for it. Not gravely considered Ruth, if there were black stitching on the dress-glove. Yes, there is some authority for frilled shirts. You think it might be considered then? I will not come between you and your habidisher, Mr. Erickson. This is a foolish conversation. But since you think the better classes do it, gee, it's getting hard for me to keep up this kind of dolly dialogue. What I wanted to do was to request you to give me, concisely but fully, a sketch of who is Miss Ruth Winslow, and save me for making any pet particular breaks. And hereafter, I warn you, I am going to talk like my cousin, the carpet-slipper model. Name Ruth Winslow, age between 20 and 30. Father, Mason Winslow, manufacturing contractor for concrete. Brothers, Mason Winslow Jr., whose poor, dear head is getting somewhat bald, as you observe. And Bobby Winslow, nearer to well. Who is engaged in subverting discipline at medical school and who dances divinely? My mother died three years ago, I do nothing useful, but I play a good game of bridge and possess a voice that those who know pronounce passable. I have a speaking knowledge of French, a reading knowledge of German, and a singing knowledge of Italian. I am wearing an imported gown, for which the house of Winslow will probably never pay. I live in this house, I am an Episcopalian, not so much high church as highly infrequent church. I regard the drawing room downstairs as the worst example of late Victorian abominations in my knowledge, but I shall probably never persuade Father to change it, because Mason thinks it is sacred to the past. My ambition is life is to be catty to the Newport set after I have married an English diplomat with a divine mustache, never having met such a personage outside of Tatler and Vogue. I can't give you very many details regarding him. Oh yes, of course, you'll have to play a marvellous game of polo and have a chateau in province, and also a ranch in Texas where I shall wear riding-breaches and live next to nature and have a Chinese cook and blue silk. I think that's my whole story. Oh, I forgot. I play at the piano and am ignorant and completely immersed in the world's traditions of the wealthy mix of the Upper West Side. And I always pretend that I live here instead of on the Upper East Side, because the air is better. What is the Upper West Side is a state of mind. Indeed it is not. It is a state of pocketbook. The Upper West Side is composed entirely of people born in New York who want to be in society, whatever that is, and can't afford to live on Fifth Avenue. You know, everybody who went to school with everybody and played in the park with everybody, and mostly your papa is in wholesale trade and haughty about people in retail. You go to Europe one summer and to the Jersey Coast the next. All your clothes and parties and weddings and funerals might be described as elegant. That's Upper West Side. Now, the dread truth about you. Do you know under after the unscrupulous way in which you've followed up a mere chance introduction at a tea somewhere, I suspect you to be a well-behaved young man who leads an entirely blameless life, or else you'd never dare to jump the fence and come and play in my backyard when all the other boys politely knock at the front door and get sent home? Well, I'm a wage-slave of the Vansale Motor People. In charge of the Turricard Department, age twenty-eight, almost, habits all bad. No, I'll tell you, I'm one of those stern, silent men of granite you read about. And only my man knows the human side of me, because all the guys on Wall Street tremble in my presence. Yes, but then how can you belong to the blue bull-sodality? Yes, I've got it. You must have read novels in which the stern, silent man of granite has a secret tenderness in his heart, and he keeps the band of the first cigar he ever smoked in a little safe in the wall, and the first dollar he ever made in frame. That's me. Of course, the cigar was given him by his flaxen-haired sweetheart back in Jengson Corner, and in the last chapter he goes back and marries her. Not always, I hope. But what Carl was thinking is not recorded. Well, as a matter of fact, I've been a fairly industrious young man of granite the last few months, getting out the Turricard. What is the Turricard? It sounds like an island inhabited by cannibals, exports hemp and coconut, see pink dotted map, nor by northeast of Mogadar, Carl explained. I'm terribly interested, said Ruth. But she made it sound as though she really was. I think it's so wonderful. I want to go off trapping through the Berkshires. I'm so tired of going to the same old places. Sometime, when you're quite sure I'm an esteemable young YMCA man, I'm going to try to persuade you to come out for a real trap. She seemed to be considering the idea, not seriously, but... Philip Donnelly v. Inventured. For some time Philip had been showing signs of interest in Ruth and Carl. Now he sauntered to the table, begged for another cup of tea, said agreeable things in regard to putting orange marmalade in tea, and calmly established himself. Ruth turned toward him. Carl fancied that there was, for himself in Ruth's voice. Something more friendly in her infectious smile, something more intimate than she had given the others. But when she turned precisely the same cheery expression upon Philip, Carl seemed to have lost something which he had trustingly treasured for years. He was the more forlorn as Olive Donnelly joined them. And Ruth, Philip, and Olive discussed the engagement of one Mary Meldon. Olive recalled Miss Meldon as she had been in school days. At the convent of the Sacred Heart Philip told them for her flirtations at the Old Long Beach Hotel. The names of New York people whom they had always known, the names of country clubs, Baltasol and Meadowbrook in peace waters, the names of streets with the sharp differentiation between Seventy Fourth Street and Seventy Fifth Street, Durlin's Writing Academy, the rink of a Monday morning, and other souvenirs of a New York childhood, the score of the last American polo team and the coming dances, and these things shut Carl out as definitely as though he were a foreigner. He was lonely. He disliked Phil Donnelly's sarcastic references. He wanted to run away. Ruth seemed to realize that Carl was shut out. Said she to Phil Donnelly? I wish you could have seen Mr. Erickson save my life last Sunday. I had an experience. What was that? Asked the man whom Olive called Georgie, joining the tea table set. The whole room listened as Ruth recounted the trip to Chinatown, Mrs. Salesbridge Party, and the hero who had once been a passenger on an airplane. Throughout she kept turning toward Carl. It seemed to reunite him to the company. As she closed he said, the thing that amused me about the parlor aviator was his laying down the law about the Atlantic will be crossed before the end of 1913 and his assumptions that we'll all have airplanes in five years. I know from my own business, the automobile business, about how much such prophecies are worth. Don't you think the Atlantic will be crossed soon? Asked the keen-looking man with the tortoise shell spectacles. Phil Donnelly broke in with an air of amused sophistication. I think the parlor aviator was right. Really. You know, aviation is too difficult a subject for the layman to make any predictions about. Either what it can do or can't do. Oh, yes, admitted Carl, and the whole room breathed. Oh, yes. Donnelly went on in his thin, overbred, insolent voice. Now I have a don good authority, from a man who's a member of the Arrow Club, that next year will be the greatest year aviation has ever known, and that the rights have an airplane up their sleeve, which with they'll cross the Atlantic without a stop, during the spring of 1914 at the very latest. That's unfortunate, because the aviation game has gone up completely in this country, except for a hydro aeroplaning and military aviation, and possibly it never will come back, said Carl, a hint of pick in his voice. Well, is your authority for that? Phil turned a large, bizarre ring round on his slender, left-blood finger, and the whole room waited, testing this positive-spoken outsider. Well, Dr. Carl, I have fairly good authority. Walter McMonney's, for instance, and he is possibly the best flyer in the country to-day, except for Lincoln Beachy. Oh, yes, he's a good flyer, said Phil, contemptuously, with a shadowy smile for Ruth. Still, he's no better than Aaron Solomon's, and he isn't half so great a flyer as that chap with the same surname as your own, Hawke Erickson, whom I myself saw coming up the Jersey Coast when he won the big race to New York. You see, I've been following this aviation pretty close. Carl saw Ruth's head drop an inch, and her eyes closed to a slit as she inspected him with sudden surprise. He knew that it had just occurred to her who he was. Their eyes exchanged understanding. She does get things, he thought and said lightly. Well, I honestly hate to take the money, Mr. Donlevy, but I'm in a position to know that McMonney's is a better flyer to-day than Erickson is. Be... But see here! Because I happen to be Hawke Erickson. What a chump I am. Grown the man in tortoise shell spectacle. Of course, I remember your picture now! Phil was open mouth, Ruth laughed. The rest of the room gasped. Mason Winslow, long and bald, was worrying over the question of how to receive aviators at tea. And Carl was shy as a small boy caught stealing jam. End of Chapter 29 Chapter 30 of the Trail of the Hawk This lever box recording is in the public domain. Recording by Mike Vendetti, mikevendetti.com Trail of the Hawk, by Sinclair Lewis, Chapter 30 At home, early that evening, Carl's doctor landlord, giving the message that they missed Gertrude Cowles, had called him up, but had declined to leave a number. The landlord's look indicated that it was no fault of his if Carl had friends who were such fools that they didn't leave their numbers. Carl got even with him by going out to the corner drugstore to telephone Gertrude instead of giving him a chance to listen. "'Hello?' said Gertrude over the telephone. "'Oh, hello, Carl. I just called to tell you Adelaide is going to be here this evening, and I thought perhaps you might like to come up if you have anything better to do.' Carl did have something better to do. He might have used the whole evening in being psychological about Ruth and Phil Donnelly and English basement houses with cream-colored drawing rooms, but he went up to Gertrude's. They were all there, Gertrude and Adelaide, Ray and his mother, and Ms. Green, an unidentified girl from Minneapolis, all playing Parcheese, explaining that they thought it not quite proper to play cards on Sunday, but that Parcheese was different. Ray winked at Carl as they said it. The general atmosphere was easy and livable. Carl found himself at home again. Adelaide told funny antecedents about her School of Domestic Science and the chief teacher who wore her hair and a walnut on top of her head and interrupted her lecture on dietetics to chase a cockroach with a ruler. As the others began to disappear, Gertrude said to Carl, "'Don't go till I read you a letter from Ben Rusk I got yesterday.' Lots of news from home. Joe Jordan is engaged.' They were left alone. Gertrude glanced at him immediately. He stiffened. He knew that Gertrude was honest, kindly, with enough sense of display to catch the tricks of a new environment. But to her, matrimony would be the inevitable sequence of a friendship. Which Ruth or Olive could take easily, pleasantly, for its own sake. And Carl, the young man just starting in business, was unheroically afraid of matrimony. Yet his stiffness of attitude disappeared when Gertrude had read the letter from Geroleman and mused, chin on hand, dreamily melancholy, I can just see them out slaying. Sometimes I wish I was out there, honest Carl, for all the sea and hills here. Don't you wish sometimes it were August, and you were out home camping on a wooden bluff over a lake?" Yes, he cried. I've been away so long that I don't ever feel homesick for any particular part of the country. But just the same, I would like to see the lakes, and I do miss the prairie sometimes. Oh, I was reading something the other day. A fellow was trying to define the different sorts of terrain. Here it is, cut out of the paper. He produced from among a bunch of pocket-worn envelopes and memorandums a clipping hack from a newspaper with a nail file, it read. The combat and mystery of the sea, the uplift of the hills and their promise of wonder beyond, the kindness of late afternoons, nestling in small fields, or in ample barns, where red clover tops and long grasses shine against the gray foundation stones and small boys seek for hidden entrances to this castle of the farm. The deep holiness of the forest, whose leaves are the stained glass of a cathedral, to grave saints of the open, all these I love. But nowhere do I find content, save on the midwestern prairie, where the light of sky and plain drug the senses, where the sound of metal arcs at dawn fulfills my desire for companionship, and the easy creak of the buggy as we top rise after rise, dispels me into an afternoon slumber which the nervous town shall never know. I cut the thing out because I was thinking that the prairies, stretching out the way they do, make me want to go on and on in an aeroplane or inial thing. Lord, Lord, I guess before long I'll have to be beating it again, like the guy in Kipling that always got sick of reading the same page, too long. Oh, but Carl, you don't mean to say you're going to give up your business when you're doing so well, and aviation shows what you can do if you stick to a thing, Carl, and not just wander around like you used to do. We do want to see you succeed. His reply was rather weak. Well, gee, I guess I'll succeed all right, but I don't see much use of succeeding if you have to be stuck down in a greasy city street all your life. That's very true, Carl, but do you appreciate the city? Have you ever been in the Metropolitan Museum of Art or gone to a single symphony concert at Carnegie Hall? Carl was convinced that Gertie was a highly superior person, that she was getting far more of the good of New York than he. He would take her to a concert, have her explain the significance of the music. It was never to occur sharply to him that, though Gertie referred frequently to concerts and pictures, she showed no vast amount of knowledge about them. She was a fixed fact in his mind, had been for twenty years. He could have a surface quarrel with her because he knew the fundamental things in her. And with these he was sure no one could quarrel. His thoughts of Ruth and Olive were delightful surprises. His impression of Gertie was stable as the Rockies. Carl wasn't sure whether Upper West Side young ladies could be persuaded to attend a theatre party upon short acquaintance. But he tried and arranged a party of Ruth and Olive and himself Walter McGwanies in town on his way from Africa to San Diego, Charlie Forbes of the Chronicle, and for Chaperone the cosmopolitan woman whom he had met at Ruth and who proved to be a Mrs. Turrell, a dismayingly smart dressmaker. When he called for Ruth he expected such a gay girl as headboard T. He was odd to find her a grand dame. In black velvet, more dignified, apparently inches taller, and in a vice-rigally bad temper. As they drove off, she declared, Sorry I am in such a vileness temper. I had in a single pair of decent white gloves and I tore some old black Spanish lace on the gown. I was going to wear in my entire family who, God, unquestionably sent to be a trial to test me, clustered about my door, while I was dressing in bald inquiries about laundry and other horribly vulgar things. Carl did not see much of the play. He was watching Ruth's eyes, listening to her whispered comments. She declared that she was odd by the presence of two aviators and a newspaper man. Actually, she was working, working at bringing out McGwanies, a shy, broad-shouldered, inarticulate youth who supposed that he never had to talk. Carl had planned to grow the rich for after-theater supper, but Ruth and Olive persuaded him to take them to the cafe of the Rectors of that time, where they said they had never been in a Broadway cafe and they wanted to see the famous actors with their make-ups off. At the table Carl carried Ruth off in talk, like a young lock-over out of the Middle West. Around them was the storm of high balls and brandy and club soda, theatrical talk, and a confused mass of cigar smoke, shirt fronts, white shoulders, and drab waders. Yet here was a quiet refuge for the eternal force of life. Carl was asking, would you rather be a perfect lady and have blue balls with bunnies on them for your very worst disposition, or be like your mountain-climbing woman and have anarchists for friends, one day and be off hiking through the clouds the next? Oh, I don't know. I know I'm terribly susceptible to the nice things of life, but I do get tired of being nice, especially when I have a bad temper, as I had tonight. I am not at all imprisoned in a harem, and as for social aspirations, I'm a nobody. But still I have been brought up to look at things that aren't like the home life of our dear queen, as impossible, and I'm quite sure that Father believes that poor people are poor because they are silly and don't try to be rich. But I've been reading, and I have made to you, it may seem silly, to call it a discovery. But to me it's the greatest discovery I've ever made, that people are just people, all of them, that the little mousey clerk may be a hero and the hero may be a nobody, that the motorman that lets his beastly car spatter mud on my nice new velvet skirt may be exactly the same sort of person as the swain who commiserates with me in his cunning Harvard accent. Do you think that? I know it. Most of my life I've been working with men with dirty fingernails and the only difference between them and the men with clean nails is a nail cleaner, and that costs just ten cents at the corner drug store. Seriously. I remember a cook I used to talk to on my way down to Panama once. Panama? How I'd like to go there. And he had as much culture as anybody I've ever met. Yes, but generally do you find very much courtesy and that sort of thing among mechanics as much as among what calls itself the better class? No, I don't. You don't? Why, I thought the way you spoke? Why, blessed, what in the world would be the use of their trying to climb if they already had all the rich have? You can't be as gracious as the man that's got nothing else to do when you're about to jump ahead of the steamroller every second. That's why they ought to take things. If I were a union man, I wouldn't trust all these writers and college men and so on that try to be sympathetic, not for one minute. They mean well but they can't get what it means to be a real workman to have to be up at five every winter morning with no heat in the furnished housekeeping room or to have to see his woman sick because he can't afford a doctor. So they talked, boy and girl, wondering together what the world really is like. I want to find out what we can do with life, she said. Surely it's something more than working to get tired and then resting to go back to work but I'm confused about things. She sighed. My settlement worked. I went into it because I was bored. But it did make me realize how many people are hungry and yet we just talk and talk and talk. Olive and I sit up half the night when she comes to my house and when we're not talking about the new negligets we're making and the gorgeous tea-gowns we're going to have when we're married, we rescue the poor and think we're dreadfully advanced, but does it do any good to just talk? Dear me, I split that poor infinity right down his middle. I don't know, but I do know. I don't want to be just stupidly satisfied and talking does keep me from that. Anyway, see here, Miss Winslow, suppose some time I suggested that we become nice and earnest and take up socialism and single tax in this. What is it? Oh, syndicationalism. And really studied them. Would you do it? Make each other study? Love to. Does Dunleavy think much? She raised her eyebrows a bit, but hesitated. Oh yes, no, I don't suppose he does. Or anyway, mostly about the violin he played a lot when he was in Yale. Thus was Carl encouraged to be fatuous and, he said in a manner which quite dismissed, filled Dunleavy. I don't believe he's very deep, rather light, I'd say. Her eyebrows had ascended further. Do you think so? I'm sorry. Why sorry? Oh, he's always been rather a friend of mine. I'll even fill and I rule her skated together at the age of eight. But, and I shall probably marry Phil some day before long. She turned abruptly to Charlie Forbes for the question. Lost. Already lost. Was the playmate a loss that disgusted him with life? He beat his spirit, cursed himself as a clumsy mechanic. He listened to Olive only by self-compulsion. It was minutes before he had the ability and the chance to say to Ruth. Forgive me. In the name of the Blue Bowl, Mr. Dunleavy was rather rude to me and I've been just as rude. And to you. And without his excuse. And he would naturally want to prevent you from a wild aviator from Lord Knows Where. You are forgiven, and Phil was rude. And you're not a Lord Knows Where, I'm sure. Almost brusquely. Carl demanded, come for a long cramp with me on the Palisades, next Sunday, if you can. And if it's a decent day, you said you'd like to run away? And we can be back before dinner if you like. Let me think it over. I would like to. I've always wanted to do just that. Think of it. The Palisades, just opposite. And I never see them except for a walk of half a mile or so when I stayed with a friend of mine, Laura Needham, at Winnigalhurst, up in the Palisades. My mother never approved of a wilder wilderness in Central Park in the habit. I have never been able to get Olive to explore. But it isn't conventional to go on long cramps with even the nicest new Johnny, is it? No, but I know. You'll say who makes the convention, and, of course, there's no answer, but they. But they are so all-present. They. Oh, yes, yes, yes, I will go. But you will let me be back by dinnertime, won't you? Will you call for me about two? And can you... I wonder if a hawk out of the windy skies can understand how daring a dove out of ninety-second street feels it going walking in the Palisades. End of chapter thirty.