Nalbro Bartley

“ To rub elbows with untruthful mischief-makers, coarse-mouthed foremen, impossible young fools who wish to flirt with you and whom you do not dare to rebuke too sharply; to take your hurried noon hour with little food and less fresh air and come back to the daily grind; to walk home or hang on to the tag end of a street-car strap and finally get to your room or your home so tired in body and mind that you wish you had no soul, protesting faintly against girls and women having to be in business? ”

“ Thurley asked, feeling the simple girl from Birge’s Corners again, a de luxe Topsy!
“The wind, the death cry of a warrior and a woman’s sobs,” he answered so quickly she knew it had been clear to him for a long time. “No one will ever write the sonata, so words must do their best. At least, I choose to whom they shall be said. For it is as if you were looking into the very soul of me, as a mother does when she first sees her newborn child, the instant when the mysterious bond between them is formed for all time, despite all happenings.” ”

“ Steve was not expected to go to the cemetery so he trudged back through the same slush to the street car. A fish-market doorway proved a haven during a long wait. He lounged idly against the doorway as if he were an unemployed person casting about for new fields of endeavour instead of the rushed young Midas whose office phone was ringing incessantly.
He was thinking about Mary Faithful’s pleasant manner, the atmosphere of the old-fashioned house, where there was no effort to be smart or gorgeous or to conceal its shabbiness. He hoped Mary would return to the office within the next few days. ”

“ The drawing-room had the intimate charm of a French salon with its old ivory and dull blue brocaded hangings. The furniture was painted peacock blue and covered with rose taffeta with a silver sheen and a solemn, stuffed parrot on a gaily painted stand looked at her in cynical amusement.
All about the room, which was oppressively perfumed as well, were numerous photographs of Lissa taken at various ages and of handsome men, young, old, middle-aged and all of them autographed with superlative sentiments to, “Lissa Dearest” or “Dear Girl Lissa” or “Adorable Madame Dagmar”! ”

“ Then he called himself several kinds of a fool and dashed out to order an armful of flowers sent to her apartment. He had his supper in a grill room, to give him a necessary interlude before he went home. He walked round and round a city square watching the queer, shuffling old men with their trays of needles and pins, wrinkled-faced women with fortune-telling parrots, and silly young things prancing up and down, bent on mischief. Something about human beings bored him; he regretted exceedingly that he was one himself; and at the same tune he wished he might countermand the florist’s order. ”

“ Lorraine answered fearlessly. “You knew I always loved you. If Thurley would not marry you and you asked me in her stead, I felt that you would better be married. You might have done some ugly, cheap things, Dan, if you had not been engaged to me. I love you enough to make myself—content, by keeping your house and having your name. I know I’m not Thurley,” she smiled wistfully, “but I’ll always be Lorraine. Some day you may come to care a little more.” ”

“ So Gaylord travelled his own peculiar gait, with his married sister occasionally sending him checks; as busy as a kitten with a ball of yarn in making everyone tolerate though loathing him. When he visited Steve’s office in the first flush of Steve’s success, to ask the thousandth favour from him, and spied Trudy Burrows in all her lemon-kid booted, pink-chiffon waisted, red-haired loveliness––as virile and bewitching as any one Gaylord’s pale little mind could picture––he proved himself a “true democrat,” as he boasted at the club, and offered her his hand in marriage in short order. ”

“ After Polly halfway promised that she would find the shortest, most forceful method of requesting marriage to a blind hero who could become a sublime poet in deathless stone and bronze, Ernestine departed to find Caleb in a changed, softened mood in which he admitted that when a chap witnessed such a tragedy—and such rose-colored clouds encircling it, who saw what Thurley had done, forgetting herself and her career, and the men at the Fincherie quietly getting used to themselves and ‘life as usual’ all about, it made him realize what a smashing story could be written about such real people. ”

“ Besides, there is Luke to think about and care for until some other woman does it. I cannot endure this tangle; neither can I get you out of it. So I am going away. And I’ll keep on loving my ideal and find the old-lavender-and-star-dust sort of peace.”
“You are not going!” he repeated, sharply, taking her hand. “Do you hear? I love you. I have loved you enough to keep silent about it ever since that day. Does it mean nothing to you?”
“Don’t say it again––it is so hopeless, part of the tangle. You haven’t the faintest idea how hopeless it is; you are so involved you cannot judge. ”

“ Sometimes I think you’ll never grow old. We’ll be tottering graybeards and Ernestine and Thurley wrinkled dowagers, but you will still be Polly, brown-faced and boyish! Now, I say, why not give up your big dream for a bit, leave it for the next lifetime and will yourself to be born a long-haired Polish genius with opera scores fairly dripping off your brow—come on, Polly, be my secretary. I need one. Look at the young women who do Caleb’s stuff and Ernestine has that depressing, rubber tired young woman with a bumpy forehead and Thurley the Quinby monstrosity. I’m terribly behind. ”

“ Trudy giggled. “It’s the wedding in the air, and spring, and those diamonds! She never works, she never does anything but spend the money we make 11 for her. All she has is a good time, and what’s the use of living if you don’t have a good time? I’ll have it if I have to steal it. Oh, you needn’t look so horrified. Steve O’Valley almost stole his fortune just because he had to be a rich man before Constantine would let him marry his daughter. Anyway, I’d rather have a good time for a few years and then die than to live to be a hundred and never have an honest-to-goodness party. ”

“ Oftentimes Thurley felt she must stop playing a part—mischievous young person!—and say to these misguided rebel-dolls that they were fortunate in having just plain folks, to have any one really belonging to them—a vista of forbidden joys would open before her blue eyes as these “hysterical hikers,” as Bliss Hobart had named them, told her of how they had come away from the sordid, uninteresting atmosphere which strangled their inner selves and they were willing to go hungry—all the great ones had gone hungry—to deny the fleshpots if they might only achieve—might win the laurel! ”

“ Perhaps there would be a baby’s toy left somewhere along the stairway leading to the nursery. When one has the cool of a summer’s night, a porch screened with roses and a comfortable swing, what does it matter if there are unlikable persons and china-shop apartment houses?
Had Mary known what was taking place in the front parlour it would not have jarred her from her dreams. For Gaylord, resplendent in ice-cream flannels, and Trudy, wearing an unpaid-for black-satin dress with red collar and cuffs, were both busier than the proverbial beaver planning their wedding. ”

“ How rich a confession Caleb could wring out of us, if he were not so sluggish! We dream-play, fancy, create a world within a world. Bliss Hobart in a fit of cynicism—I noticed he began taking pepsin the following week—named it ‘the ooze’—and it became our trade name for it. The ooze, the unreal, really unimportant and absurd, yet ready to be lived with and yet to vanish, the state of mind which we people as we wish and live house-and-garden lives for as much as half an hour at a time! You may not give this credence, but it is quite as real as my piano or Collin’s brush. ”

“ Even the janitor’s feelings were appeased by a few kind words and a crossing of his palm with silver when Mary decided to houseclean before Steve’s return.
It is impossible for a business woman not to have feminine notions. They stray into her routine existence like blades of pale grass persistently shooting up between the cracks of paving blocks. Quite frilly curtains adorned Mary’s office windows, fresh flowers were kept in a fragile vase, a marble bust of Dante guarded the filing cabinet, and despite the general cleaning she used a special little silk duster for her own knicknacks. ”

“ Lorraine was engaged in making “over-drapes” for the spare room which was to be in pink. She was the sort who could smother a heartache in making over-drapes and planning color schemes as reflected in candle-shades, braided rugs and embroidered bed-shams.
“Tell you what, father?” she did not look at him.
“Is he happy?” the old man added, which surprised her for she thought he would have asked if she was happy.
“I hope so,” she told him, laying aside the over-drapes.
“You’re a good girl, Lorraine, and you are doing your part. If God sees fit, some day you will be happy, too.” ”