Clarence Louis Cullen

“ Her sense of humor was embryonic, and Laura's laughter and words, obviously meant merely in mitigation, jarred upon her. "And a remark is none the less true for being repeated, is it?" she went on in her plaintive monotone. "I do wish Louise had been born a boy. You would, too, if you were in my place. You know you would."
"But, dear Tony, it is such a futile, such a dreadfully childish wish," said Laura, striving to erase the smile from her face. "It is like wishing for the fairy prince, or the magic carpet, or the end of the rainbow. Worry makes wrinkles, dear. ”

“ And I can't leave her as long as there is a chance to do that."
"But your own life, dear?" interposed Laura. "You must consider that, you know. You are a very young woman. There is no reason why you should be dragged down."
"I shall not be," replied Louise. "And, if my mother is to be dragged down, if she is to continue in this way, of what use would my life ever be to me? I never could be happy with her in such surroundings, could I? There is only one thing for me to do, dear; stay with her until she sees it all. I know that she will understand sooner or later. She can't help it. ”

“ This old McKeever starts around the course as if he's doing a sleep-walking stunt. The boy gives him the goad and the bat, but it's no good. McKeever sticks to his caterpillar gait, and his owner leans against the rail with a watch in his mitt and mumbles unholy things about the skate. There's a laugh among the stable boys and the rail birds as McKeever goes gallumphing around. Then a stable lad that's got a bit of Indian in him leans over the rail just as McKeever's coming down, and lets out a whoop that can be heard across the Potomac. McKeever gives a jump, and away he goes like the wind. ”

“ He is a man—a real man. He knows and gauges the world. More and better than that, he knows himself. I should have difficulty in recalling the name of any man who knows his mind better than John Blythe does his."
"I know that, Laura," said Louise. "But his unselfishness is too fine a thing to be taken advantage of. He has made his way unaided. He has had a long fight. He will never cease to mount. Why should I hamper him?"
"Hamper him!" exclaimed Laura. "Child, how can the woman a man loves hamper him?"
"Your partiality causes you to generalize, dear," said Louise. ”

“ When the bugle sounded and the horses emerged from the paddock, the bookmaker, with his glasses in his hand, was leaning against the rail, and he looked up with a grin to catch Kelley's eye as the jockey rode by on Gloster. He caught Kelley's eye, but there was no responsive grin. There was, instead, a dirty sneer on Kelley's drawn, pale mug, and, as he caught sight of the leering bookie he drew Gloster up for just an instant and spat viciously in the direction of the man who had treated him with such ingratitude. ”

“ Louise sighed wearily and held up a pleading hand.
"Don't ask me such a question—please, mother," she entreated. "You don't know how the subject revolts me."
"But, my dear," her mother persisted, "what is it that you have against Mr. Jesse? I am entitled to know."
"I am not sufficiently interested in the man to have anything against him," replied Louise. "Is it not enough that I loathe him?"
"No, Louise, it is not enough," pronounced her mother, plainly ready for argument on the subject. "You are too young a woman to be forming prejudices or leaping to conclusions. ”

“ If he is playing with a friend, and the friend is a winner from the go-off, as we say over here, all well and good. The American voyager who is up to snuff puts his friend's initial winnings down to the chances of the game. But when he gets into a game with a stranger, and the stranger simply shoves money from the outset over to his side of the table—well, do you know what the American of to-day does under those circumstances? He simply awaits the moment when the luck begins to change, and then he has an imperative appointment with his wife in the cabin. ”

“ Jesse sat at the table and gnawed angrily at his unlighted cigar for a long time after Judd had gone; it was characteristic of him that his compunction was all for himself. He had been found out and pilloried. That was what cut him. He never gave a thought to the young woman whose life he had destroyed.
Jesse had been instantly struck by the beauty of Louise Treharne. He surmised that it was through no complaisance on her part, but purely because she had been helpless in the matter, that she had found herself living with her ostracised mother in the house on the Drive. ”

“ The steamship company, you understand, is not the regulator of the habits of its steamers' passengers. If the passengers don't know any better than to play cards with sharpers, that is their own lookout. And a steamship company cannot decline to sell passage to a man because it claims he is a short-card player. It devolves upon the company to prove that the man is a card sharper, and the steamship people know that this is practically impossible, for no man who is done at cards by one of these men on an ocean steamship is going to rise in his seat and make announcement of the fact to the world. ”

“ She paused and gazed about the room wearily. "If to be a prude," she resumed, "is to be conscious of the desire and the intention to be an honest woman, then, mother, I am a prude," her voice breaking a little. "And if one must be a prude to recoil from the hideous advances of a man like Langdon Jesse, then again I am a prude."
She had been unfairly placed on the defensive. She had not meant to wound. But, while her words cut her mother like the impact of thongs, they did not arouse within her a sense of the humiliation of her position. ”

“ There were plenty of men in that card-room who knew that the Indian was a short-carder, but men out that way aren't garrulous, and they pay a heap of attention to the job of minding their own business. The youth from Chicago was the merest mutt in the hands of the Indian, and he lost from the jump. He would stand pat on a full house, and the buck, drawing three cards, would still beat him after sky-scraping betting. A number of onlookers at the game may have seen the little side-plays of the Indian, but they only grinned at each other over the hopeless imbecility of the young man from Chicago. ”

“ I know that I should if I were he."
"Why, Laura?" asked Louise with such genuine wide-eyed innocence that Laura laughed outright.
"Why?" she repeated in Louise's tone. "Well, I haven't the least doubt that I should be a great deal more selfish about it than he will be. Just because a man has to be such a horridly legal, dry-as-dust creature as a guardian, is that any particular reason why he should become incapable of experiencing the entirely human misery called lonesomeness?"
Louise had no reply for that except a little gesture of deprecation that quite failed to convince. ”

“ What sort of a place is this as a home for Louise? I am speaking to you as an old friend. I am in a fiendish predicament. Of course you see that. And I can't see the first step of a way out of it. Can you?"
"For one thing," said Laura, mischievously and with eyes a-twinkle, "you might permanently disperse your zoo."
Mrs. Treharne laughed harshly.
"One must know somebody," she said, deftly applying the rouge rabbit's-foot. "One can't live in a cave. My own sort banished me. I am declassée. Shall I sit and twiddle my thumbs? At least the people of my 'zoo,' as you call it, are clever. ”

“ In the lives of most men and women there are days—usually unanticipated days—so encompassed, aureoled, by a memorable happiness that, ever afterward, in hours of retrospection, they mark the beginning or denote the closing of the eventful periods.
This was such a day for Blythe and Louise and Laura. They rambled through miles of field and forest, chattering and laughing like children a-berrying; the women's hair blowing free or tumbling down altogether, their skirts caught by brambles, their deadliest fears aroused by the inevitable ruminative cow. ”

“ Louise, however, was scarcely in a mood of mirth.
"I knocked, my dear, but you were too much absorbed," said Mrs. Treharne, offering her daughter her cheek. "You were in a veritable trance. Did you get enough sleep, child? Was Heloise in a scolding humor? She makes my life a misery to me with her tongue. What beautiful hair you have! And what a perfect skin! A powder puff would mar that wonderful pallor. Yet you are not too white. It becomes you, with your hair. Appreciate these things while you have them, dear; look at your mother, a hag, a witch, at thirty-nine! ”

“ They would say that he had married a girl whose mother had been openly maintained by a man—a man in the public eye—whose wife was living. They would go farther and say—which of course is the simple truth—that I had lived for a time under the roof maintained by that man. And, with such things to go upon, how could the world possibly reach any other conclusion—granting, as you must, the knack the world has for leaping at conclusions—than that John Blythe, a growing man, a man destined for distinction, had made a tremendous mistake in his marriage? ”

“ Laura gathered up her skirts and raced for her hat, Louise after her.
"Stay here all night!" gasped Laura. "You are making a glorious beginning as a guardian, aren't you!"
It was past ten o'clock when Louise, in Laura's car, which had been waiting at the ferry, reached the house on the Drive, Laura having been dropped at her apartment. The sheer happiness of the day still absorbed her. Up to the moment when the car pulled up at the curb she had been going over and over, since parting with Blythe and Laura, the incidents of the day that had made it such an oasis of happiness. ”

“ Everything works out right in time. I venture to touch upon that which pains you, not because we are to have a mere legal relationship, but because I am hoping that you view me as a friend. Do you?"
"You must know that I do," said Louise, more moved than he could guess. The touch of his hand had strangely thrilled her. "If it were not for you and Laura—" She paused, turning her head.
"I know," said Blythe. "It is not a matter for volunteered advice. But perhaps you have thought of some way in which I—we—can help you; make the course smoother for you. Have you?"
"No," replied Louise, simply. ”

“ Her mother, generally in a state of feverish unrest that marked her strained incertitude over a situation which, in a way, was more intolerable to her than to her daughter because she was guiltily conscious that she was the maker of it, usually dropped into Louise's room for an hour's chat during the forenoon. She was alternately affectionate, stilted, indifferent and petulant in her attitude toward her daughter. She did not seek, in her brooding self-communings, to thrust aside the keen consciousness that she was utterly and hopelessly in the wrong ”

“ Jesse caught sight of Mutsu at the same instant that Louise did.
"What the devil are you doing here?" Jesse demanded of the valet. "Get out and stay out till this evening, do you hear?"
Mutsu first lowered his head, then shook it with a most decided negative. His lips were pulled back from his teeth; mutiny shone all over him.
"What you do?" he demanded of Jesse, falling into a pidgin vernacular which he rarely used except when excited. "She no like to be crushed in embrace? She is of an innocence. She is of an honorable. I saw that at Savoy Hotel when first I see her. Why you no let go?" ”

“ Laura admired Louise beyond words for her uncomplaining acceptance of her bitter bolus.
"I never saw such pluck," she told John Blythe time and again. "It is the pluck of a thoroughbred. I believe she thoroughly understands everything now, except that she is in Judd's debt for her education. Her loyalty to her mother is wonderful, beautiful; far greater than Antoinette really deserves. I don't remember ever meeting a girl or woman whom I admired so much as I do Louise Treharne." ”

“ As they stood side by side in the juxtaposition of a caress—they were friends from girlhood—the contrast between the two women was sufficiently striking. Laura Stedham, a woman of thirty-five, had the slender yet well-rounded structural sinuosities of a girl of twenty who passes all her days in the open air—minus the indubitable blowsiness which some open-air young women can't help but reveal to the dissecting eye. Unusually tall, she had the gliding grace of movement which so many women of uncommon stature lack. ”

“ Great heaven, am I not old enough as it is? I am Laura to you, dear; flatter me at least, by making me believe that you consider me young enough to be called by my christened name; the aged have so few compensations, you know," and Louise, not without initial difficulty, however—for Laura had always been a woman to her—called her Laura thenceforth and was pleased to imagine that the elder woman was her "big, grown-up" sister.
On the ride to the Riverside Drive house Louise, suddenly remembering, mentioned Blythe. ”

“ She had no sense of resentment against her mother; it was rather a feeling of regret that the curious aloofness between them, which she had no possible way of understanding, had ever risen. She hoped that perhaps, after all, her mother might really need her as sorely as she felt that she herself needed a mother and a home. She was returning to her mother with an open mind; no longer a child to be shunted and evaded, but a woman to be treated with frankness. There were some points in connection with her mother's affairs that she did not understand but as to which she had no undue curiosity. ”