Kate Langley Bosher

“ I had told Selwyn I had come that I might see from its vantage-ground the sort of person I was and what I was doing with life; but it was also in the secret hope that he, too, might see the kindred of all men to men, the need of each for each, that I had come. If together we could stand between those of high and low degree, between the rich and the poor, the strong and the weak, with hands outstretched to both, and so standing bring about, perhaps, a better understanding of each other, then my coming would have been worth while. ”

“ I have never told him I loved him, never promised to marry him. To live in his high-walled house with its conventional customs, its age-dimmed portraits, its stiff furnishings, and shut-out sunshine, would stifle every cell in brain and lungs, and to marry him would be to marry his house. I hate his house, hate the aloofness, the lack of sympathy it represents. Its proud past I can appreciate, but not its useless present. Save his brother Harrie, it is the one thing of his old life left Selwyn. At the death of his father he bought Harrie's interest and it is all his now. ”

“ She must once have been a pretty woman, but her hair and eyes were now a dusty black, her skin the color of putty, and her mouth a drooping curve that gave to her face the expression of one who was about to cry. Life had apparently for some time been more than she was equal to, and, incapable of battling further with it, she radiated a helplessness that was pitiable and yet irritating. ”

“ Selwyn's tone was irritable. "My business dealings with them have not inspired desire for a closer acquaintance. To get as much money as possible from the men who employ them and give in return as little work as they can, is the creed of most of them. You can do nothing with people like that. I know them better than you will ever know them."
"As a corporation attorney, yes. As a division of the human race, as working people, you know them. As beings much more like yourself than you imagine, you don't." ”

“ Selwyn has been reared in a school honest in its belief that a woman is too fine and fair a thing to face life frankly; that personal knowledge and understanding on her part of certain verities, certain actualities, did the world no good and woman harm. But the woman of whom he thought was the sheltered, cultured, cared-for woman of his world. Protection of her was a man's privilege and obligation. Of the woman who has to do her own protecting, fight her way through, meet the demands of those dependent on her, he personally knew little. ”

“ I knew more of Harrie than Selwyn knew I knew, but because he was the one person I did know with whom I had no measure of patience, I rarely mentioned his name. Harrie is Selwyn's weakness, and to his faults and failings the latter is, outwardly, at least, most inexplicably blind. He is as handsome as he is unprincipled and irresponsible, and his power to fascinate is seemingly limited only by his desire to exercise it. ”

“ It is Selwyn's indifference to life, to its problems and struggles and many-sidedness, that makes me at times impatient with him beyond restraint. In his profession he is successful. His ambition makes him work, but a weariness of things, of the unworthwhileness of human effort, the futility of striving, the emptiness of achievement, possesses him frequently, and in his dark days he pays the penalty of his points of view. ”

“ They cannot say, however, even my most protesting friends, that I am not living in a perfectly proper neighborhood. The front of my house faces, beyond the discouraged little park, a strata of streets which unfold from lessening degrees of dreariness and dinginess to ever-increasing expensiveness and unashamed architectural extravaganzas, to the summit of residential striving, called, for impressiveness, the Avenue, but behind it is a section of the city of which I am as ignorant as if it were in the depths of the sea or the wilds of primeval forest. ”

“ In the twilight that of which I talked made pictures come and go that gave her understanding never glimpsed before, and, slipping on her knees, she buried her face, shudderingly, in my lap.
"Is it I, Danny? Is it women like me who could do something and don't?" she said, after a long, long while. "Oh, Danny, is it I?"
[Illustration: "Is it I, Danny? Is it women like me who could do something and don't?"]
"It is all of us." My fingers smoothed the beautiful brown hair. "Every woman of to-day who thinks there's a halo on her head ought to take it off and look at it. ”

“ An arm on the back of the buggy, Selwyn looked at me, and in his eyes was that which made me understand he was right. We might as well have it out. "For three years you have refused to marry me, and now you say you are more alone than I. We've been beating the air, been evading something; refusing to face the thing that is keeping us apart. What is it? You know my love for you. But yours for me— You have never told me that you loved me. Look at me, Danny." ”

“ Beating the air doesn't interest me. Most people seem to forget the processes of nature; seem to imagine that certain things can be brought to pass quickly which can only be accomplished slowly. From the first struggle of the human race to stand upright, to articulate, to find food, to strike fire, to paddle in water, to wear covering, to forage, explore— What is the matter?"
"Nothing." I leaned back in the corner of the sofa, my hands, palms upward, in my lap, my eyes on them that he might not see their smiling. ”

“ I kissed Kitty good-by, but I did not try to make her understand. I no longer try to make people understand things. Many of them can't. Kitty is a dear child, adorably blue-eyed and pink-cheeked, and possessed of an amount of worldly wisdom that is always amazing and at times distressing, but much that interests me has, so far, never interested her. Refusing to study, she has little education, but she has traveled a good deal, speaks excellent French, dances perfectly, dresses admirably, and has charming manners when she wishes. ”

“ The sense of comfort that his coming means is beyond analysis or definition. Only once or twice in a lifetime does one meet a man of David Guard's sort, and whatever my mistakes, whatever my impulses and lack of judgment may lead me to do, he will never be impatient with me. We have had several long and frank and friendly talks since the day he brought Lillie in to Mrs. Mundy, and if Scarborough Square did no more for me than to give me his friendship I should be forever in its debt. ”

“ With unfailing faith and cheerful courage and a habit of seeing the humorous side of tragic catastrophes, she has done her work among the sick and forsaken, with no appeal to others save a certain few; and only those who have been steadied by her strong hands, and heartened by her buoyant spirit, and fed from her scant store, have knowledge or understanding of what she means to the section of the city where the poor and lowly live. ”

“ Mundy, the one human being she gives no thought to is herself, and will you please take care of her? She don't understand'"—
"Oh, I do understand!" My voice was wearily protesting. "The one thing men don't want women to do is to understand. They want us to be sweet and pretty—and not understand. Selwyn talks as if I were a child. I am perfectly able to take care of myself." ”

“ Moreover, a man can go where he pleases. A woman can't. No purity of purpose can overcome the tyranny of convention."
"Convention!" My hands made impatient gesture. "It's the drag-net of human effort, the shelter within which cowards run to cover. In its place it has purpose, but its place, for convenience sake, has been immensely magnified. And why is convention limited to women?"
It was childish—my outburst—and, ashamed of it, I started to go in, then turned and again looked at Selwyn. ”

“ That he is beginning to understand why you came to Scarborough Square; to grasp the necessity of human contact for human interpretation. He, too, is seeing himself, his life, his world, from the viewpoint of Scarborough Square, and what he sees gives neither peace nor pride nor satisfaction. He will never see so clearly as you, perhaps, but certain cynicisms, certain intolerances, certain indifferences and endurances will yield to keener perception of the necessity for new purposes in life. ”

“ I walked toward my bedroom. At its door I stopped. "I'm sorry, Selwyn, but I'll have to go. The woman is dying."
Selwyn's teeth came together sharply and in his eyes were disapproval and protest. For a half-minute he did not speak, then he faced me.
"If you insist, there's nothing to be said except that I am going with you. Where's your telephone? I'll get a cab."
"Oh no! You must not go." Back to the door, I leaned against it.
"You've never seen things of this kind. They're—they're—"
"No pleasanter for you than for me." ”

“ Some people ain't ever going to look at things they don't want to see, or to listen to what they don't want to hear, but there ain't as many people like that as you think. There's many a woman in this world to-day that God is proud of; in the Homes and places what they're the head of, and on their boards and things they are learning that all women are their kin, and after a while they'll make other women understand. I'll see Etta to-morrow, and if she will come I will bring her to see you. But until Mr. Harrie is gone she won't come—won't leave him. ”

“ Mundy had looked somewhat anxiously at me before going out. "If it's a home-looking place you're after, you've got it, but when you first come down to Scarborough Square it made me feel queer inside to think of your living here, really living. If you think you can be satisfied—"
"I am sure I can be satisfied. Why not?" I smiled and, going over to the window, straightened the curtain which had caught and twisted a fern-leaf growing in its box. "I am a perfectly unincumbered human being who—"
"But an unincumbered woman ain't much of a human being." ”

“ Into the girl's face came flush that spread slowly to the temples, and uncertainly she looked at me. Steadily my eyes held hers and after half a moment she turned and went out of the room. Coming back, she followed me into the hall and to the elevator, but, eyes on the gloves she was fastening, she said nothing until we reached the street. On the corner opposite us Tom Cressy was standing in the doorway of a cigar-shop, and as he saw the car dismissed, saw us cross the street and come toward him, into his honest, if not handsome, face came puzzled incredulity. ”

“ Kitty was looking at me speculatively. "How on earth are you going to live on a thousand dollars a year? Our servants cost us twice that. Billy says it's awful, but—"
"It is if you can't afford it. You can. I believe all people ought to spend every dollar they can afford, and not a cent they can't. That's what I do. Aunt Matilda thought I was impractical, but I'm fearfully prudent. I live within my income and I've deposited with a trust company, so I can't spend it, a sum of money quite large enough to care for me through a spell of illness in the greediest of hospitals, if I should be ill. ”

“ I never knew before how much company sunshine could be; how many different things it could do, until I came to Scarborough Square. This is a very interesting place, Kitty."
"It's fearful!" Kitty shuddered. "The sun shines much better on the Avenue, and you might as well be dead as live in this part of the town. When people ask me where you are I'm—"
"Ashamed to tell them?" I laughed. "Don't tell them, if the telling mortifies you. Those who object to visiting me in my new home will soon forget I'm living. Those to whom it does not matter where I live will find where I am without asking you. ”

“ I am that sort of person, and, having exercised said right, I am now living in Scarborough Square.
To my friends and relatives it is amazing, inexplicable, and beyond understanding that I should wish to live here. I do not try to make them understand; and therein lies grievance against me. Because of my failure to explain what they are pleased to call a peculiar decision on my part, I am at present the subject of heated criticism. It will soon stop. What a person does or doesn't do is of little importance to more than three or four people. ”

“ Men laugh at the laws men make, but we don't blame men like we blame women who let their men be bad and then smile on them, marry them, and pretend they do not know. They do not want to know. If you made men pay the price you make us pay, the world would be a safer place to live in. Men don't do what women won't stand for."
Kitty leaned forward, and Etta, with twisting hands, looked at her and then at Mrs. Mundy and then at me, and in her eyes was piteous appeal. "There's no chance for me, but I've got a little baby girl. ”