A & P by John Updike

A & P
John Updike

In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits. I'm in the third check-out slot, with my
back to the door, so I don't see them until they're over by the bread. The one that caught my eye
first was the one in the plaid green two-piece. She was a chunky kid, with a good tan and a sweet
broad soft-looking can with those two crescents of white just under it, where the sun never seems
to hit, at the top of the backs of her legs. I stood there with my hand on a box of HiHo crackers
trying to remember if I rang it up or not. I ring it up again and the customer starts giving me hell.
She's one of these cash-register-watchers, a witch about fifty with rouge on her cheekbones and no
eyebrows, and I knowit made her day to trip me up. She'd been watching cash registers forty years
and probably never seen a mistake before.
By the time I got her feathers smoothed and her goodies into a bag -- she gives me alittle snort in
passing, if she'd been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem -- by the
time I get her on her way the girls had circled around the bread and were coming back, without a
pushcart, back my way along the counters, in the aisle between the check-outs and the Special bins.
They didn't even have shoes on. There was this chunky one, with the two-piece -- it was bright
green and the seams on the bra were still sharp and her belly was still pretty pale so I guessed she
just got it (the suit) -- there was this one, with one of those chubby berry-faces, the lips all bunched
together under her nose, this one, and a tall one, with black hair that hadn't quite frizzed right, and
one of these sunburns right across under the eyes, and a chin that was too long -- you know, the
kind of girl other girls think is very "striking" and "attractive" but never quite makes it, as they very
well know, which is why they like her so much -- and then the third one, that wasn't quite so tall.
She was the queen. She kind of led them, the other two peeking around and making their
shoulders round. She didn't look around, not this queen, she just walked straight on slowly, on
these long white prima donna legs. She came down a little hard on her heels, as if she didn't walk
in her bare feet that much, putting down her heels and then letting the weight move along to her
toes as if she was testing the floor with every step, putting a little deliberate extra action into it.
You never know for sure how girls' minds work (do you really think it's a mind in there or just a
little buzz like a bee in a glassjar?) but you got the idea she had talked the other two into coming in
here with her, and now she was showing them how to do it, walk slow and hold yourself straight.
She had on a kind of dirty-pink - - beige maybe, I don't know -- bathing suit with a little nubble
all over it and, what got me, the straps were down. They were off her shoulders looped loose
around the cool tops of her arms, and I guess as a result the suit had slipped a little on her, so all
around the top of the cloth there was this shining rim. If it hadn't been there you wouldn't have
known there could have been anything whiter than those shoulders. With the straps pushed off,
there was nothing between the top of the suit and the top of her head except just her, this clean
bare plane of the top of her chest down from the shoulder bones like a dented sheet of metal
tilted in the light. I mean, it was more than pretty.
She had sort of oaky hair that the sun and salt had bleached, done up in a bun that was
unravelling, and a kind of prim face. Walking into the A & P with your straps down, I suppose it's
the only kind of face you can have. She held her head so high her neck, coming up out o fthose
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white shoulders, looked kind of stretched, but I didn't mind. The longer her neck was, the more of
her there was.
She must have felt in the corner of her eye me and over my shoulder Stokesie in the second slot
watching, but she didn't tip. Not this queen. She kept her eyes moving across the racks, and
stopped, and turned so slow it made my stomach rub the inside of my apron, and buzzed to the
other two, who kind of huddled against her for relief, and they all three of them went up the catand-
dog-food-breakfast-cereal-macaroni-ri ce-raisins-seasonings-spreads-spaghetti-soft drinks- rackersand-
cookies aisle. From the third slot I look straight up this aisle to the meat counter, and I
watched them all the way. The fat one with the tan sort of fumbled with the cookies, but on
second thought she put the packages back. The sheep pushing their carts down the aisle -- the girls
were walking against the usual traffic (not that we have one-way signs or anything) -- were pretty
hilarious. You could see them, when Queenie's white shoulders dawned on them, kind of jerk, or
hop, or hiccup, but their eyes snapped back to their own baskets and on they pushed. I bet you
could set off dynamite in an A & P and the people would by and large keep reaching and checking
oatmeal off their lists and muttering "Let me see, there was a third thing, began with A, asparagus,
no, ah, yes, applesauce!" or whatever it is they do mutter. But there was no doubt, this jiggled them.
A few house-slaves in pin curlers even looked around after pushing their carts past to make sure
what they had seen was correct.
You know, it's one thing to have a girl in a bathing suit down on the beach, where what with
the glare nobody can look at each other much anyway, and another thing in the cool of the A & P,
under the fluorescent lights, against all those stacked packages, with her feet paddling along naked
over our checkerboard green-and-cream rubber-tile floor.
"Oh Daddy," Stokesie said beside me. "I feel so faint."
"Darling," I said. "Hold me tight." Stokesie's married, with two babies chalked up on his fuselage
already, but as far as I can tell that's the only difference. He's twenty-two, and I was nineteen this
April.
"Is it done?" he asks, the responsible married man finding his voice. I forgot to say he thinks he's
going to be manager some sunny day, maybe in 1990 when it's called the Great Alexandrov and
Petrooshki Tea Company or something.
What he meant was, our town is five miles from a beach, with a big summer colony out on the
Point, but we're right in the middle of town, and the women generally put on a shirt or shorts or
something before they get out of the car into the street. And anyway these are usually women
with six children and varicose veins mapping their legs and nobody, including them, could care
less. As I say, we're right in the middle of town, and if you stand at our front doors you can see
two banks and the Congregational church and the newspaper store and three real-estate offices and
about twenty-seven old free-loaders tearing up Central Street because the sewer broke again. It's not
as if we're on the Cape; we're north of Boston and there's people in this town haven't seen the
ocean for twenty years.
The girls had reached the meat counter and were asking McMahon something. He pointed, they
pointed, and they shuffled out of sight behind a pyramid of Diet Delight peaches. All that was left
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for us to see was old McMahon patting his mouth and looking after them sizing up their joints.
Poor kids, I began to feel sorry for them, they couldn't help it.
Now here comes the sad part of the story, at:least my family says it's sad but I don't think it's sad
myself. The store's pretty empty, it being Thursday afternoon, so there was nothing much to do
except lean on the register and wait for the girls to show up again. The whole store was like a
pinball machine and I didn't know which tunnel they'd come out of. After a while they come
around out of the far aisle, around the light bulbs, records at discount of the Caribbean Six or
Tony Martin Sings or some such gunk you wonder they waste the wax on, sixpacks of candy bars,
and plastic toys done up in cellophane that faIl apart when a kid looks at them anyway. Around
they come, Queenie still leading the way, and holding a little gray jar in her hand. Slots Three
through Seven are unmanned and I could see her wondering between Stokes and me, but Stokesie
with his usual luck draws an old party in baggy gray pants who stumbles up with four giant cans
of pineapple juice (what do these bums do with all that pineapple juice' I've often asked myself) so
the girls come to me. Queenie puts down the jar and I take it into my fingers icy cold. Kingfish
Fancy Herring Snacks in Pure Sour Cream: 49¢. Now her hands are empty, not a ring or a bracelet,
bare as God made them, and I wonder where the money's coming from. Still with that prim look
she lifts a folded dollar bill out of the hollow at the center of her nubbled pink top. The jar went
heavy in my hand. Really, I thought that was so cute.
Then everybody's luck begins to run out. Lengel comes in from haggling with a truck full of
cabbages on the lot and is about to scuttle into that door marked MANAGER behind which he
hides all day when the girls touch his eye. Lengel's pretty dreary, teaches Sunday school and the
rest, but he doesn't miss that much. He comes over and says, "Girls, this isn't the beach."
Queenie blushes, though maybe it's just a brush of sunburn I was noticing for the first time,
now that she was so close. "My mother asked me to pick up a jar of herring snacks." Her voice kind
of startled me, the way voices do when you see the people first, coming out so flat and dumb yet
kind of tony, too, the way it ticked over "pick up" and "snacks." All of a sudden I slid right down
her voice into her living room. Her father and the other men were standing around in ice-cream
coats and bow ties and the women were in sandals picking up herring snacks on toothpicks off a
big plate and they were all holding drinks the color of water with olives and sprigs of mint in
them. When my parents have somebody over they get lemonade and if it's a real racy affair Schlitz
in tall glasses with "They'll Do It Every Time" cartoons stencilled on.
"That's all right," Lengel said. "But this isn't the beach." His repeating this struck me as funny, as if
it hadjust occurred to him, and he had been thinking all these years the A & P was a great big dune
and he was the head lifeguard. He didn't like my smiling -- -as I say he doesn't miss much -- but he
concentrates on giving the girls that sad Sunday- school-superintendent stare.
Queenie's blush is no sunburn now, and the plump one in plaid, that I liked better from the
back -- a really sweet can -- pipes up, "We weren't doing any shopping. We just came in for the one
thing."
"That makes no difference," Lengel tells her, and I could see from the way his eyes went that he
hadn't noticed she was wearing a two-piece before. "We want you decently dressed when you come
in here."
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"We are decent," Queenie says suddenly, her lower lip pushing, getting sore now that she
remembers her place, a place from which the crowd that runs the A & P must look pretty
crummy. Fancy Herring Snacks flashed in her very blue eyes.
"Girls, I don't want to argue with you. After this come in here with your shoulders covered. It's
our policy." He turns his back. That's policy for you. Policy is what the kingpins want. What the
others want is juvenile delinquency.
All this while, the customers had been showing up with their carts but, you know, sheep, seeing
a scene, they had all bunched up on Stokesie, who shook open a paper bag as gently as peeling a
peach, not wanting to miss a word. I could feel in the silence everybody getting nervous, most of
all Lengel, who asks me, "Sammy, have you rung up this purchase?"
I thought and said "No" but it wasn't about that I was thinking. I go through the punches, 4, 9,
GROC, TOT -- it's more complicated than you think, and after you do it often enough, it begins to
make a lttle song, that you hear words to, in my case "Hello (bing) there, you (gung) hap-py pee-pul
(splat)"-the splat being the drawer flying out. I uncrease the bill, tenderly as you may imagine, it just
having come from between the two smoothest scoops of vanilla I had ever known were there, and
pass a half and a penny into her narrow pink palm, and nestle the herrings in a bag and twist its
neck and hand it over, all the time thinking.
The girls, and who'd blame them, are in a hurry to get out, so I say "I quit" to Lengel quick
enough for them to hear, hoping they'll stop and watch me, their unsuspected hero. They keep
right on going, into the electric eye; the door flies open and they flicker across the lot to their car,
Queenie and Plaid and Big Tall Goony-Goony (not that as raw material she was so bad), leaving me
with Lengel and a kink in his eyebrow.
"Did you say something, Sammy?"
"I said I quit."
"I thought you did."
"You didn't have to embarrass them."
"It was they who were embarrassing us."
I started to say something that came out "Fiddle-de-doo." It's a saying of my grand- mother's, and I
know she would have been pleased.
"I don't think you know what you're saying," Lengel said.
"I know you don't," I said. "But I do." I pull the bow at the back of my apron and start shrugging it
off my shoulders. A couple customers that had been heading for my slot begin to knock against
each other, like scared pigs in a chute.
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Lengel sighs and begins to look very patient and old and gray. He's been a friend of my parents
for years. "Sammy, you don't want to do this to your Mom and Dad," he tells me. It's true, I don't.
But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it. I fold the
apron, "Sammy" stitched in red on the pocket, and put it on the counter, and drop the bow tie on
top of it. The bow tie is theirs, if you've ever wondered. "You'll feel this for the rest of your life,"
Lengel says, and I know that's true, too, but remembering how he made that pretty girl blush
makes me so scrunchy inside I punch the No Sale tab and the machine whirs "pee-pul" and the
drawer splats out. One advantage to this scene taking place in summer, I can follow this up with a
clean exit, there's no fumbling around getting your coat and galoshes, I just saunter into the
electric eye in my white shirt that my mother ironed the night before, and the door heaves itself
open, and outside the sunshine is skating around on the asphalt.
I look around for my girls, but they're gone, of course. There wasn't anybody but some young
married screaming with her children about some candy they didn't get by the door of a powderblue
Falcon station wagon. Looking back in the big windows, over the bags of peat moss and
aluminum lawn furniture stacked on the pavement, I could see Lengel in my place in the slot,
checking the sheep through. His face was dark gray and his back stiff, as if he'd just had an
injection of iron, and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me
hereafter.

A White Heron Sarah Orne Jewett

A White Heron 
Sarah Orne Jewett
I.
The woods were already filled with shadows one June evening, just before eight o'clock, though a bright sunset
still glimmered faintly among the trunks of the trees. A little girl was driving home her cow, a plodding, dilatory,
provoking creature in her behavior, but a valued companion for all that. They were going away from whatever
light there was, and striking deep into the woods, but their feet were familiar with the path, and it was no matter
whether their eyes could see it or not.
There was hardly a night the summer through when the old cow could be found waiting at the pasture bars; on the
contrary, it was her greatest pleasure to hide herself away among the huckleberry bushes, and though she wore a
loud bell she had made the discovery that if one stood perfectly still it would not ring. So Sylvia had to hunt for
her until she found her, and call Co' ! Co' ! with never an answering Moo, until her childish patience was quite
spent. If the creature had not given good milk and plenty of it, the case would have seemed very different to her
owners. Besides, Sylvia had all the time there was, and very little use to make of it. Sometimes in pleasant
weather it was a consolation to look upon the cow's pranks as an intelligent attempt to play hide and seek, and as
the child had no playmates she lent herself to this amusement with a good deal of zest. Though this chase had
been so long that the wary animal herself had given an unusual signal of her whereabouts, Sylvia had only
laughed when she came upon Mistress Moolly at the swamp−side, and urged her affectionately homeward with a
twig of birch leaves. The old cow was not inclined to wander farther, she even turned in the right direction for
once as they left the pasture, and stepped along the road at a good pace. She was quite ready to be milked now,
and seldom stopped to browse. Sylvia wondered what her grandmother would say because they were so late. It
was a great while since she had left home at half−past five o'clock, but everybody knew the difficulty of making
this errand a short one. Mrs. Tilley had chased the hornéd torment too many summer evenings herself to blame
any one else for lingering, and was only thankful as she waited that she had Sylvia, nowadays, to give such
valuable assistance. The good woman suspected that Sylvia loitered occasionally on her own account; there never
was such a child for straying about out−of−doors since the world was made! Everybody said that it was a good
change for a little maid who had tried to grow for eight years in a crowded manufacturing town, but, as for Sylvia
herself, it seemed as if she never had been alive at all before she came to live at the farm. She thought often with
wistful compassion of a wretched geranium that belonged to a town neighbor.
A White Heron and Other Stories 1

Chinua Achebe. Civil Peace

Chinua Achebe.
Civil Peace
Jonathan Iwegbu counted himself extra-ordinarily lucky. 'Happy survival!' meant so much more to him than just a current fashion of greeting old friends in the first hazy days of peace. It went deep to his heart. He had come out of the war with five inestimable blessings--his head, his wife Maria's head and the heads of three out of their four children. As a bonus he also had his old bicycle--a miracle too but naturally not to be compared to the safety of five human heads.
The bicycle had a little history of its own. One day at the height of the war it was commandeered 'for urgent military action'. Hard as its loss would have been to him he would still have let it go without a thought had he not had some doubts about the genuineness of the officer. It wasn't his disreputable rags, nor the toes peeping out of one blue and one brown canvas shoes, nor yet the two stars of his rank done obviously in a hurry in biro, that troubled Jonathan; many good and heroic soldiers looked the same or worse. It was rather a certain lack of grip and firmness in his manner. So Jonathan, suspecting he might be amenable to influence, rummaged in his raffia bag and produced the two pounds with which he had been going to buy firewood which his wife, Maria, retailed to camp officials for extra stock-fish and corn meal, and got his bicycle back. That night he buried it in the little clearing in the bush where the dead of the camp, including his own youngest son, were buried. When he dug it up again a year later after the surrender all it needed was a little palm-oil greasing. 'Nothing puzzles God,' he said in wonder.
He put it to immediate use as a taxi and accumulated a small pile of Biafran money ferrying camp officials and their families across the four-mile stretch to the nearest tarred road. His standard charge per trip was six pounds and those who had the money were only glad to be rid of some of it in this way. At the end of a fortnight he had made a small fortune of one hundred and fifteen pounds.
Then he made the journey to Enugu and found another miracle waiting for him. It was unbelievable. He rubbed his eyes and looked again and it was still standing there before him. But, needless to say, even that monumental blessing must be accounted also totally inferior to the five heads in the family. This newest miracle was his little house in Ogui Overside. Indeed nothing puzzles God! Only two houses away a huge concrete edifice some wealthy contractor had put up just before the war was a mountain of rubble. And here was Jonathan's little zinc house of no regrets built with mud blocks quite intact! Of course the doors and windows were missing and five sheets off the roof.
But what was that? And anyhow he had returned to Enugu early enough to pick up bits of old zinc and wood and soggy sheets of cardboard lying around the neighbourhood before thousands more came out of their forest holes looking for the same things. He got a destitute carpenter with one old hammer, a blunt plane and a few bent and rusty nails in his tool bag to turn this assortment of wood, paper and metal into door and window shutters for five Nigerian shillings or fifty Biafran pounds. He paid the pounds, and moved in with his overjoyed family carrying five heads on their shoulders.
His children picked mangoes near the military cemetery and sold them to soldiers' wives for a few pennies--real pennies this time--and his wife started making breakfast
akara balls for neighbours in a hurry to start life again. With his family earnings he took his bicycle to the villages around and bought fresh palm-wine which he mixed generously in his rooms with the water which had recently started running again in the public tap down the road, and opened up a bar for soldiers and other lucky people with good money.
At first he went daily, then every other day and finally once a week, to the offices of the Coal Corporation where he used to be a miner, to find out what was what. The only thing he did find out in the end was that that little house of his was even a greater blessing than he had thought. Some of his fellow ex-miners who had nowhere to return at the end of the day's waiting just slept outside the doors of the offices and cooked what meal they could scrounge together in Bournvita tins. As the weeks lengthened and still nobody could say what was what Jonathan discontinued his weekly visits altogether and faced his palm-wine bar.
But nothing puzzles God. Came the day of the windfall when after five days of endless scuffles in queues and counter-queues in the sun outside the Treasury he had twenty pounds counted into his palms as exgratia award for the rebel money he had turned in. It was like Christmas for him and for many others like him when the payments began. They called it (since few could manage its proper official name) _egg-rasher_.
As soon as the pound notes were placed in his palm Jonathan simply closed it tight over them and buried fist and money inside his trouser pocket. He had to be extra careful because he had seen a man a couple of days earlier collapse into near-madness in an instant before that oceanic crowd because no sooner had he got his twenty pounds than some heartless ruffian picked it off him. Though it was not right that a man in such an extremity of agony should be blamed yet many in the queues that day were able to remark quietly on the victim's carelessness, especially after he pulled out the innards of his pocket and revealed a hole in it big enough to pass a thief's head. But of course he had insisted that the money had been in the other pocket, pulling it out too to show its comparative wholeness. So one had to be careful.
Jonathan soon transferred the money to his left hand and pocket so as to leave his right free for shaking hands should the need arise, though by fixing his gaze at such an elevation as to miss all approaching human faces he made sure that the need did not arise, until he got home.
He was normally a heavy sleeper but that night he heard all the neighbourhood noises die down one after another. Even the night watchman who knocked the hour on some metal somewhere in the distance had fallen silent after knocking one o'clock. That must have been the last thought in Jonathan's mind before he was finally carried away himself. He couldn't have been gone for long, though, when he was violently awakened again.
'Who is knocking?' whispered his wife lying beside him on the floor.
'I don't know,' he whispered back breathlessly.
The second time the knocking came it was so loud and imperious that the rickety old door could have fallen down.
'Who is knocking?' he asked then, his voice parched and trembling.
'Na tief-man and him people,' came the cool reply. 'Make you hopen de door.' This was followed by the heaviest knocking of all.
Maria was the first to raise the alarm, then he followed and all their children.
_'Police-o! Thieves-o! Neighbours-o! Police-o! We are lost! We are dead! Neighbours, are you asleep? Wake up! Police-o!'_
This went on for a long time and then stopped suddenly. Perhaps they had scared the thief away. There was total silence. But only for a short while.
'You done finish?' asked the voice outside. 'Make we help you small. Oya, everybody!'
_'Police-o! Tief-man-o! Neighbours-o! we done loss-o! Police-o!...'_
There were at least five other voices besides the leader's.
Jonathan and his family were now completely paralysed by terror. Maria and the children sobbed inaudibly like lost souls. Jonathan groaned continuously.
The silence that followed the thieves' alarm vibrated horribly. Jonathan all but begged their leader to speak again and be done with it.
'My frien,' said he at long last, 'we don try our best for call dem but I tink say dem all done sleep-o... So wetin we go do now? Sometaim you wan call soja? Or you wan make we call dem for you? Soja better pass police. No be so?'
'Na so!' replied his men. Jonathan thought he heard even more voices now than before and groaned heavily. His legs were sagging under him and his throat felt like sand-paper.
'My frien, why you no de talk again. I de ask you say you wan make we call soja?'
'No'.
'Awrighto. Now make we talk business. We no be bad tief. We no like for make trouble. Trouble done finish. War done finish and all the katakata wey de for inside. No Civil War again. This time na Civil Peace. No be so?'
'Na so!' answered the horrible chorus.
'What do you want from me? I am a poor man. Everything I had went with this war. Why do you come to me? You know people who have money. We...'
'Awright! We know say you no get plenty money. But we sef no get even anini. So derefore make you open dis window and give us one hundred pound and we go commot. Orderwise we de come for inside now to show you guitar-boy like dis...'
A volley of automatic fire rang through the sky. Maria and the children began to weep aloud again.
'Ah, missisi de cry again. No need for dat. We done talk say we na good tief. We just take our small money and go nwayorly. No molest. Abi we de molest?'
'At all!' sang the chorus.
'My friends,' began Jonathan hoarsely. 'I hear what you say and I thank you. If I had one hundred pounds...'
'Lookia my frien, no be play we come play for your house. If we make mistake and step for inside you no go like am-o. So derefore...'
'To God who made me; if you come inside and find one hundred pounds, take it and shoot me and shoot my wife and children. I swear to God. The only money I have in this life is this twenty-pounds _egg-rasher_ they gave me today...'
'OK. Time de go. Make you open dis window and bring the twenty pound. We go manage am like dat.'
There were now loud murmurs of dissent among the chorus: 'Na lie de man de lie; e get plenty money... Make we go inside and search properly well... Wetin be twenty pound?...'
'Shurrup!' rang the leader's voice like a lone shot in the sky and silenced the murmuring at once. 'Are you dere? Bring the money quick!'
'I am coming,' said Jonathan fumbling in the darkness with the key of the small wooden box he kept by his side on the mat.
At the first sign of light as neighbours and others assembled to commiserate with him he was already strapping his five-gallon demijohn to his bicycle carrier and his wife, sweating in the open fire, was turning over akara balls in a wide clay bowl of boiling oil. In the corner his eldest son was rinsing out dregs of yesterday's palm wine from old beer bottles.
'I count it as nothing,' he told his sympathizers, his eyes on the rope he was tying. 'What is _egg-rasher_? Did I depend on it last week? Or is it greater than other things that went with the war? I say, let _egg-rasher_ perish in the flames! Let it go where everything else has gone. Nothing puzzles God.'

“Winter Dreams” by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1922)

“Winter Dreams”

by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1922)

I

SOME OF THE CADDIES were poor as sin and lived in one-room houses

with a neurasthenic cow in the front yard, but Dexter Green's father

owned the second best grocery-store in Black Bear--the best one was

"The Hub," patronized by the wealthy people from Sherry Island--and

Dexter caddied only for pocket-money.

In the fall when the days became crisp and gray, and the long Minnesota

winter shut down like the white lid of a box, Dexter's skis moved over the

snow that hid the fairways of the golf course. At these times the country

gave him a feeling of profound melancholy--it offended him that the

links should lie in enforced fallowness, haunted by ragged sparrows for

the long season. It was dreary, too, that on the tees where the gay colors

fluttered in summer there were now only the desolate sand-boxes kneedeep

in crusted ice. When he crossed the hills the wind blew cold as

misery, and if the sun was out he tramped with his eyes squinted up

against the hard dimensionless glare.

In April the winter ceased abruptly. The snow ran down into Black Bear

Lake scarcely tarrying for the early golfers to brave the season with red

and black balls. Without elation, without an interval of moist glory, the

cold was gone.

Dexter knew that there was something dismal about this Northern spring,

just as he knew there was something gorgeous about the fall. Fall made

him clinch his hands and tremble and repeat idiotic sentences to himself,

and make brisk abrupt gestures of command to imaginary audiences and

armies. October filled him with hope which November raised to a sort of

ecstatic triumph, and in this mood the fleeting brilliant impressions of

the summer at Sherry Island were ready grist to his mill. He became a golf

champion and defeated Mr. T. A. Hedrick in a marvellous match played a

hundred times over the fairways of his imagination, a match each detail

of which he changed about untiringly--sometimes he won with almost

laughable ease, sometimes he came up magnificently from behind. Again,

stepping from a Pierce-Arrow automobile, like Mr. Mortimer Jones, he

strolled frigidly into the lounge of the Sherry Island Golf Club-- or

perhaps, surrounded by an admiring crowd, he gave an exhibition of

fancy diving from the spring-board of the club raft. . . . Among those

who watched him in open-mouthed wonder was Mr. Mortimer Jones.

And one day it came to pass that Mr. Jones--himself and not his ghost--

came up to Dexter with tears in his eyes and said that Dexter was the---

-best caddy in the club, and wouldn't he decide not to quit if Mr. Jones

made it worth his while, because every other caddy in the club lost one

ball a hole for him-- regularly----

"No, sir," said Dexter decisively, "I don't want to caddy any more." Then,

after a pause: "I'm too old."

"You're not more than fourteen. Why the devil did you decide just this

morning that you wanted to quit? You promised that next week you'd go

over to the State tournament with me."

"I decided I was too old."

Dexter handed in his "A Class" badge, collected what money was due him

from the caddy master, and walked home to Black Bear Village.

"The best----caddy I ever saw," shouted Mr. Mortimer Jones over a drink

that afternoon. "Never lost a ball! Willing! Intelligent! Quiet! Honest!

Grateful!"

The little girl who had done this was eleven--beautifully ugly as little

girls are apt to be who are destined after a few years to be inexpressibly

lovely and bring no end of misery to a great number of men. The spark,

however, was perceptible. There was a general ungodliness in the way her

lips twisted ,down at the corners when she smiled, and in the--Heaven

help us!--in the almost passionate quality of her eyes. Vitality is born

early in such women. It was utterly in evidence now, shining through her

thin frame in a sort of glow.

She had come eagerly out on to the course at nine o'clock with a white

linen nurse and five small new golf-clubs in a white canvas bag which the

nurse was carrying. When Dexter first saw her she was standing by the

caddy house, rather ill at ease and trying to conceal the fact by engaging

her nurse in an obviously unnatural conversation graced by startling and

irrelevant grimaces from herself.

"Well, it's certainly a nice day, Hilda," Dexter heard her say. She drew

down the corners of her mouth, smiled, and glanced furtively around, her

eyes in transit falling for an instant on Dexter.

Then to the nurse:

"Well, I guess there aren't very many people out here this morning, are

there?"

The smile again--radiant, blatantly artificial--convincing.

"I don't know what we're supposed to do now," said the nurse, looking

nowhere in particular.

"Oh, that's all right. I'll fix it up.

Dexter stood perfectly still, his mouth slightly ajar. He knew that if he

moved forward a step his stare would be in her line of vision--if he

moved backward he would lose his full view of her face. For a moment he

had not realized how young she was. Now he remembered having seen

her several times the year before in bloomers.

Suddenly, involuntarily, he laughed, a short abrupt laugh-- then, startled

by himself, he turned and began to walk quickly away.

"Boy!"

Dexter stopped.

"Boy----"

Beyond question he was addressed. Not only that, but he was treated to

that absurd smile, that preposterous smile--the memory of which at least

a dozen men were to carry into middle age.

"Boy, do you know where the golf teacher is?"

"He's giving a lesson."

"Well, do you know where the caddy-master is?"

"He isn't here yet this morning."

"Oh." For a moment this baffled her. She stood alternately on her right

and left foot.

"We'd like to get a caddy," said the nurse. "Mrs. Mortimer Jones sent us

out to play golf, and we don't know how without we get a caddy."

Here she was stopped by an ominous glance from Miss Jones, followed

immediately by the smile.

"There aren't any caddies here except me," said Dexter to the nurse, "and

I got to stay here in charge until the caddy-master gets here."

"Oh."

Miss Jones and her retinue now withdrew, and at a proper distance from

Dexter became involved in a heated conversation, which was concluded

by Miss Jones taking one of the clubs and hitting it on the ground with

violence. For further emphasis she raised it again and was about to bring

it down smartly upon the nurse's bosom, when the nurse seized the club

and twisted it from her hands.

"You damn little mean old thing!" cried Miss Jones wildly.

Another argument ensued. Realizing that the elements of the comedy

were implied in the scene, Dexter several times began to laugh, but each

time restrained the laugh before it reached audibility. He could not resist

the monstrous conviction that the little girl was justified in beating the

nurse.

The situation was resolved by the fortuitous appearance of the

caddymaster, who was appealed to immediately by the nurse.

"Miss Jones is to have a little caddy, and this one says he can't go."

"Mr. McKenna said I was to wait here till you came," said Dexter quickly.

"Well, he's here now." Miss Jones smiled cheerfully at the caddy-master.

Then she dropped her bag and set off at a haughty mince toward the first

tee.

"Well?" The caddy-master turned to Dexter. "What you standing there like

a dummy for? Go pick up the young lady's clubs."

"I don't think I'll go out to-day," said Dexter.

"You don't----"

"I think I'll quit."

The enormity of his decision frightened him. He was a favorite caddy, and

the thirty dollars a month he earned through the summer were not to be

made elsewhere around the lake. But he had received a strong emotional

shock, and his perturbation required a violent and immediate outlet.

It is not so simple as that, either. As so frequently would be the case in

the future, Dexter was unconsciously dictated to by his winter dreams.

II

NOW, OF COURSE, the quality and the seasonability of these winter

dreams varied, but the stuff of them remained. They persuaded Dexter

several years later to pass up a business course at the State university--

his father, prospering now, would have paid his way--for the precarious

advantage of attending an older and more famous university in the East,

where he was bothered by his scanty funds. But do not get the

impression, because his winter dreams happened to be concerned at first

with musings on the rich, that there was anything merely snobbish in the

boy. He wanted not association with glittering things and glittering

people--he wanted the glittering things themselves. Often he reached

out for the best without knowing why he wanted it--and sometimes he

ran up against the mysterious denials and prohibitions in which life

indulges. It is with one of those denials and not with his career as a whole

that this story deals.

He made money. It was rather amazing. After college he went to the city

from which Black Bear Lake draws its wealthy patrons. When he was only

twenty-three and had been there not quite two years, there were already

people who liked to say: "Now there's a boy--" All about him rich men's

sons were peddling bonds precariously, or investing patrimonies

precariously, or plodding through the two dozen volumes of the "George

Washington Commercial Course," but Dexter borrowed a thousand dollars

on his college degree and his confident mouth, and bought a partnership

in a laundry.

It was a small laundry when he went into it but Dexter made a specialty of

learning how the English washed fine woollen golf-stockings without

shrinking them, and within a year he was catering to the trade that wore

knickerbockers. Men were insisting that their Shetland hose and sweaters

go to his laundry just as they had insisted on a caddy who could find

golfballs. A little later he was doing their wives' lingerie as well--and

running five branches in different parts of the city. Before he was twentyseven

he owned the largest string of laundries in his section of the

country. It was then that he sold out and went to New York. But the part

of his story that concerns us goes back to the days when he was making

his first big success.

When he was twenty-three Mr. Hart--one of the gray-haired men who

like to say "Now there's a boy"--gave him a guest card to the Sherry

Island Golf Club for a week-end. So he signed his name one day on the

register, and that afternoon played golf in a foursome with Mr. Hart and

Mr. Sandwood and Mr. T. A. Hedrick. He did not consider it necessary to

remark that he had once carried Mr. Hart's bag over this same links, and

that he knew every trap and gully with his eyes shut--but he found

himself glancing at the four caddies who trailed them, trying to catch a

gleam or gesture that would remind him of himself, that would lessen the

gap which lay between his present and his past.

It was a curious day, slashed abruptly with fleeting, familiar impressions.

One minute he had the sense of being a trespasser--in the next he was

impressed by the tremendous superiority he felt toward Mr. T. A. Hedrick,

who was a bore and not even a good golfer any more.

Then, because of a ball Mr. Hart lost near the fifteenth green, an

enormous thing happened. While they were searching the stiff grasses of

the rough there was a clear call of "Fore!" from behind a hill in their rear.

And as they all turned abruptly from their search a bright new ball sliced

abruptly over the hill and caught Mr. T. A. Hedrick in the abdomen.

"By Gad!" cried Mr. T. A. Hedrick, "they ought to put some of these crazy

women off the course. It's getting to be outrageous."

A head and a voice came up together over the hill:

"Do you mind if we go through?"

"You hit me in the stomach!" declared Mr. Hedrick wildly.

"Did I?" The girl approached the group of men. "I'm sorry. I yelled 'Fore !'"

Her glance fell casually on each of the men--then scanned the fairway for

her ball.

"Did I bounce into the rough?"

It was impossible to determine whether this question was ingenuous or

malicious. In a moment, however, she left no doubt, for as her partner

came up over the hill she called cheerfully:

"Here I am! I'd have gone on the green except that I hit something."

As she took her stance for a short mashie shot, Dexter looked at her

closely. She wore a blue gingham dress, rimmed at throat and shoulders

with a white edging that accentuated her tan. The quality of

exaggeration, of thinness, which had made her passionate eyes and

down-turning mouth absurd at eleven, was gone now. She was

arrestingly beautiful. The color in her cheeks was centered like the color

in a picture--it was not a "high" color, but a sort of fluctuating and

feverish warmth, so shaded that it seemed at any moment it would

recede and disappear. This color and the mobility of her mouth gave a

continual impression of flux, of intense life, of passionate vitality--

balanced only partially by the sad luxury of her eyes.

She swung her mashie impatiently and without interest, pitching the ball

into a sand-pit on the other side of the green. With a quick, insincere

smile and a careless "Thank you!" she went on after it.

"That Judy Jones!" remarked Mr. Hedrick on the next tee, as they waited--

some moments--for her to play on ahead. "All she needs is to be turned

up and spanked for six months and then to be married off to an

oldfashioned cavalry captain."

"My God, she's good-looking!" said Mr. Sandwood, who was just over

thirty.

"Good-looking!" cried Mr. Hedrick contemptuously, "she always looks as

if she wanted to be kissed! Turning those big cow-eyes on every calf in

town!"

It was doubtful if Mr. Hedrick intended a reference to the maternal

instinct.

"She'd play pretty good golf if she'd try," said Mr. Sandwood.

"She has no form," said Mr. Hedrick solemnly.

"She has a nice figure," said Mr. Sandwood.

"Better thank the Lord she doesn't drive a swifter ball," said Mr. Hart,

winking at Dexter.

Later in the afternoon the sun went down with a riotous swirl of gold and

varying blues and scarlets, and left the dry, rustling night of Western

summer. Dexter watched from the veranda of the Golf Club, watched the

even overlap of the waters in the little wind, silver molasses under the

harvest-moon. Then the moon held a finger to her lips and the lake

became a clear pool, pale and quiet. Dexter put on his bathing-suit and

swam out to the farthest raft, where he stretched dripping on the wet

canvas of the springboard.

There was a fish jumping and a star shining and the lights around the

lake were gleaming. Over on a dark peninsula a piano was playing the

songs of last summer and of summers before that-- songs from "Chin-

Chin" and "The Count of Luxemburg" and "The Chocolate Soldier"--and

because the sound of a piano over a stretch of water had always seemed

beautiful to Dexter he lay perfectly quiet and listened.

The tune the piano was playing at that moment had been gay and new

five years before when Dexter was a sophomore at college. They had

played it at a prom once when he could not afford the luxury of proms,

and he had stood outside the gymnasium and listened. The sound of the

tune precipitated in him a sort of ecstasy and it was with that ecstasy he

viewed what happened to him now. It was a mood of intense

appreciation, a sense that, for once, he was magnificently attune to life

and that everything about him was radiating a brightness and a glamour

he might never know again.

A low, pale oblong detached itself suddenly from the darkness of the

Island, spitting forth the reverberate sound of a racing motor-boat. Two

white streamers of cleft water rolled themselves out behind it and almost

immediately the boat was beside him, drowning out the hot tinkle of the

piano in the drone of its spray. Dexter raising himself on his arms was

aware of a figure standing at the wheel, of two dark eyes regarding him

over the lengthening space of water--then the boat had gone by and was

sweeping in an immense and purposeless circle of spray round and round

in the middle of the lake. With equal eccentricity one of the circles

flattened out and headed back toward the raft.

"Who's that?" she called, shutting off her motor. She was so near now that

Dexter could see her bathing-suit, which consisted apparently of pink

rompers.

The nose of the boat bumped the raft, and as the latter tilted rakishly he

was precipitated toward her. With different degrees of interest they

recognized each other.

"Aren't you one of those men we played through this afternoon?" she

demanded.

He was.

"Well, do you know how to drive a motor-boat? Because if you do I wish

you'd drive this one so I can ride on the surf-board behind. My name is

Judy Jones"--she favored him with an absurd smirk--rather, what tried to

be a smirk, for, twist her mouth as she might, it was not grotesque, it

was merely beautiful--"and I live in a house over there on the Island, and

in that house there is a man waiting for me. When he drove up at the

door I drove out of the dock because he says I'm his ideal."

There was a fish jumping and a star shining and the lights around the

lake were gleaming. Dexter sat beside Judy Jones and she explained how

her boat was driven. Then she was in the water, swimming to the floating

surfboard with a sinuous crawl. Watching her was without effort to the

eye, watching a branch waving or a sea-gull flying. Her arms, burned to

butternut, moved sinuously among the dull platinum ripples, elbow

appearing first, casting the forearm back with a cadence of falling water,

then reaching out and down, stabbing a path ahead.

They moved out into the lake; turning, Dexter saw that she was kneeling

on the low rear of the now uptilted surf-board.

"Go faster," she called, "fast as it'll go."

Obediently he jammed the lever forward and the white spray mounted at

the bow. When he looked around again the girl was standing up on the

rushing board, her arms spread wide, her eyes lifted toward the moon.

"It's awful cold," she shouted. "What's your name?"

He told her.

"Well, why don't you come to dinner to-morrow night?"

His heart turned over like the fly-wheel of the boat, and, for the second

time, her casual whim gave a new direction to his life.

V

NEXT EVENING while he waited for her to come down-stairs, Dexter

peopled the soft deep summer room and the sun-porch that opened

from it with the men who had already loved Judy Jones. He knew the sort

of men they were--the men who when he first went to college had

entered from the great prep schools with graceful clothes and the deep

tan of healthy summers. He had seen that, in one sense, he was better

than these men. He was newer and stronger. Yet in acknowledging to

himself that he wished his children to be like them he was admitting that

he was but the rough, strong stuff from which they eternally sprang.

When the time had come for him to wear good clothes, he had known

who were the best tailors in America, and the best tailors in America had

made him the suit he wore this evening. He had acquired that particular

reserve peculiar to his university, that set it off from other universities.

He recognized the value to him of such a mannerism and he had adopted

it; he knew that to be careless in dress and manner required more

confidence than to be careful. But carelessness was for his children. His

mother's name had been Krimslich. She was a Bohemian of the peasant

class and she had talked broken English to the end of her days. Her son

must keep to the set patterns.

At a little after seven Judy Jones came down-stairs. She wore a blue silk

afternoon dress, and he was disappointed at first that she had not put on

something more elaborate. This feeling was accentuated when, after a

brief greeting, she went to the door of a butler's pantry and pushing it

open called: "You can serve dinner, Martha." He had rather expected that

a butler would announce dinner, that there would be a cocktail. Then he

put these thoughts behind him as they sat down side by side on a lounge

and looked at each other.

"Father and mother won't be here," she said thoughtfully.

He remembered the last time he had seen her father, and he was glad the

parents were not to be here to-night--they might wonder who he was.

He had been born in Keeble, a Minnesota village fifty miles farther north,

and he always gave Keeble as his home instead of Black Bear Village.

Country towns were well enough to come from if they weren't

inconveniently in sight and used as footstools by fashionable lakes.

They talked of his university, which she had visited frequently during the

past two years, and of the near-by city which supplied Sherry Island with

its patrons, and whither Dexter would return next day to his prospering

laundries.

During dinner she slipped into a moody depression which gave Dexter a

feeling of uneasiness. Whatever petulance she uttered in her throaty voice

worried him. Whatever she smiled at--at him, at a chicken liver, at

nothing--it disturbed him that her smile could have no root in mirth, or

even in amusement. When the scarlet corners of her lips curved down, it

was less a smile than an invitation to a kiss.

Then, after dinner, she led him out on the dark sun-porch and

deliberately changed the atmosphere.

"Do you mind if I weep a little?" she said.

"I'm afraid I'm boring you," he responded quickly.

"You're not. I like you. But I've just had a terrible afternoon. There was a

man I cared about, and this afternoon he told me out of a clear sky that

he was poor as a church-mouse. He'd never even hinted it before. Does

this sound horribly mundane?"

"Perhaps he was afraid to tell you."

"Suppose he was," she answered. "He didn't start right. You see, if I'd

thought of him as poor--well, I've been mad about loads of poor men,

and fully intended to marry them all. But in this case, I hadn't thought of

him that way, and my interest in him wasn't strong enough to survive the

shock. As if a girl calmly informed her fianc_ that she was a widow. He

might not object to widows, but----

"Let's start right," she interrupted herself suddenly. "Who are you,

anyhow?"

For a moment Dexter hesitated. Then:

"I'm nobody," he announced. "My career is largely a matter of futures."

"Are you poor?"

"No," he said frankly, "I'm probably making more money than any man my

age in the Northwest. I know that's an obnoxious remark, but you advised

me to start right."

There was a pause. Then she smiled and the corners of her mouth

drooped and an almost imperceptible sway brought her closer to him,

looking up into his eyes. A lump rose in Dexter's throat, and he waited

breathless for the experiment, facing the unpredictable compound that

would form mysteriously from the elements of their lips. Then he saw--

she communicated her excitement to him, lavishly, deeply, with kisses

that were not a promise but a fulfillment. They aroused in him not hunger

demanding renewal but surfeit that would demand more surfeit . . .

kisses that were like charity, creating want by holding back nothing at all.

It did not take him many hours to decide that he had wanted Judy Jones

ever since he was a proud, desirous little boy.

IV

IT BEGAN like that--and continued, with varying shades of intensity, on

such a note right up to the d_nouement. Dexter surrendered a part of

himself to the most direct and unprincipled personality with which he had

ever come in contact. Whatever Judy wanted, she went after with the full

pressure of her charm. There was no divergence of method, no jockeying

for position or premeditation of effects--there was a very little mental

side to any of her affairs. She simply made men conscious to the highest

degree of her physical loveliness. Dexter had no desire to change her.

Her deficiencies were knit up with a passionate energy that transcended

and justified them.

When, as Judy's head lay against his shoulder that first night, she

whispered, "I don't know what's the matter with me. Last night I thought I

was in love with a man and to-night I think I'm in love with you----"--it

seemed to him a beautiful and romantic thing to say. It was the exquisite

excitability that for the moment he controlled and owned. But a week

later he was compelled to view this same quality in a different light. She

took him in her roadster to a picnic supper, and after supper she

disappeared, likewise in her roadster, with another man. Dexter became

enormously upset and was scarcely able to be decently civil to the other

people present. When she assured him that she had not kissed the other

man, he knew she was lying--yet he was glad that she had taken the

trouble to lie to him.

He was, as he found before the summer ended, one of a varying dozen

who circulated about her. Each of them had at one time been favored

above all others--about half of them still basked in the solace of

occasional sentimental revivals. Whenever one showed signs of dropping

out through long neglect, she granted him a brief honeyed hour, which

encouraged him to tag along for a year or so longer. Judy made these

forays upon the helpless and defeated without malice, indeed half

unconscious that there was anything mischievous in what she did.

When a new man came to town every one dropped out--dates were

automatically cancelled.

The helpless part of trying to do anything about it was that she did it all

herself. She was not a girl who could be "won" in the kinetic sense--she

was proof against cleverness, she was proof against charm; if any of

these assailed her too strongly she would immediately resolve the affair

to a physical basis, and under the magic of her physical splendor the

strong as well as the brilliant played her game and not their own. She was

entertained only by the gratification of her desires and by the direct

exercise of her own charm. Perhaps from so much youthful love, so many

youthful lovers, she had come, in self-defense, to nourish herself wholly

from within.

Succeeding Dexter's first exhilaration came restlessness and

dissatisfaction. The helpless ecstasy of losing himself in her was opiate

rather than tonic. It was fortunate for his work during the winter that

those moments of ecstasy came infrequently. Early in their acquaintance

it had seemed for a while that there was a deep and spontaneous mutual

attraction that first August, for example--three days of long evenings on

her dusky veranda, of strange wan kisses through the late afternoon, in

shadowy alcoves or behind the protecting trellises of the garden arbors,

of mornings when she was fresh as a dream and almost shy at meeting

him in the clarity of the rising day. There was all the ecstasy of an

engagement about it, sharpened by his realization that there was no

engagement. It was during those three days that, for the first time, he

had asked her to marry him. She said "maybe some day," she said "kiss

me," she said "I'd like to marry you," she said "I love you"--she said--

nothing.

The three days were interrupted by the arrival of a New York man who

visited at her house for half September. To Dexter's agony, rumor

engaged them. The man was the son of the president of a great trust

company. But at the end of a month it was reported that Judy was

yawning. At a dance one night she sat all evening in a motor-boat with a

local beau, while the New Yorker searched the club for her frantically. She

told the local beau that she was bored with her visitor, and two days later

he left. She was seen with him at the station, and it was reported that he

looked very mournful indeed.

On this note the summer ended. Dexter was twenty-four, and he found

himself increasingly in a position to do as he wished. He joined two clubs

in the city and lived at one of them. Though he was by no means an

integral part of the stag-lines at these clubs, he managed to be on hand

at dances where Judy Jones was likely to appear. He could have gone out

socially as much as he liked--he was an eligible young man, now, and

popular with down-town fathers. His confessed devotion to Judy Jones

had rather solidified his position. But he had no social aspirations and

rather despised the dancing men who were always on tap for the

Thursday or Saturday parties and who filled in at dinners with the

younger married set. Already he was playing with the idea of going East

to New York. He wanted to take Judy Jones with him. No disillusion as to

the world in which she had grown up could cure his illusion as to her

desirability.

Remember that--for only in the light of it can what he did for her be

understood.

Eighteen months after he first met Judy Jones he became engaged to

another girl. Her name was Irene Scheerer, and her father was one of the

men who had always believed in Dexter. Irene was light-haired and sweet

and honorable, and a little stout, and she had two suitors whom she

pleasantly relinquished when Dexter formally asked her to marry him.

Summer, fall, winter, spring, another summer, another fall-- so much he

had given of his active life to the incorrigible lips of Judy Jones. She had

treated him with interest, with encouragement, with malice, with

indifference, with contempt. She had inflicted on him the innumerable

little slights and indignities possible in such a case--as if in revenge for

having ever cared for him at all. She had beckoned him and yawned at

him and beckoned him again and he had responded often with bitterness

and narrowed eyes. She had brought him ecstatic happiness and

intolerable agony of spirit. She had caused him untold inconvenience and

not a little trouble. She had insulted him, and she had ridden over him,

and she had played his interest in her against his interest in his work--

for fun. She had done everything to him except to criticise him--this she

had not done-- it seemed to him only because it might have sullied the

utter indifference she manifested and sincerely felt toward him.

When autumn had come and gone again it occurred to him that he could

not have Judy Jones. He had to beat this into his mind but he convinced

himself at last. He lay awake at night for a while and argued it over. He

told himself the trouble and the pain she had caused him, he enumerated

her glaring deficiencies as a wife. Then he said to himself that he loved

her, and after a while he fell asleep. For a week, lest he imagined her

husky voice over the telephone or her eyes opposite him at lunch, he

worked hard and late, and at night he went to his office and plotted out

his years.

At the end of a week he went to a dance and cut in on her once. For

almost the first time since they had met he did not ask her to sit out with

him or tell her that she was lovely. It hurt him that she did not miss these

things--that was all. He was not jealous when he saw that there was a

new man to-night. He had been hardened against jealousy long before.

He stayed late at the dance. He sat for an hour with Irene Scheerer and

talked about books and about music. He knew very little about either. But

he was beginning to be master of his own time now, and he had a rather

priggish notion that he--the young and already fabulously successful

Dexter Green--should know more about such things.

That was in October, when he was twenty-five. In January, Dexter and

Irene became engaged. It was to be announced in June, and they were to

be married three months later.

The Minnesota winter prolonged itself interminably, and it was almost

May when the winds came soft and the snow ran down into Black Bear

Lake at last. For the first time in over a year Dexter was enjoying a certain

tranquility of spirit. Judy Jones had been in Florida, and afterward in Hot

Springs, and somewhere she had been engaged, and somewhere she had

broken it off. At first, when Dexter had definitely given her up, it had

made him sad that people still linked them together and asked for news

of her, but when he began to be placed at dinner next to Irene Scheerer

people didn't ask him about her any more--they told him about her. He

ceased to be an authority on her.

May at last. Dexter walked the streets at night when the darkness was

damp as rain, wondering that so soon, with so little done, so much of

ecstasy had gone from him. May one year back had been marked by

Judy's poignant, unforgivable, yet forgiven turbulence--it had been one

of those rare times when he fancied she had grown to care for him. That

old penny's worth of happiness he had spent for this bushel of content.

He knew that Irene would be no more than a curtain spread behind him, a

hand moving among gleaming tea-cups, a voice calling to children . . .

fire and loveliness were gone, the magic of nights and the wonder of the

varying hours and seasons . . . slender lips, down-turning, dropping to

his lips and bearing him up into a heaven of eyes. . . . The thing was deep

in him. He was too strong and alive for it to die lightly.

In the middle of May when the weather balanced for a few days on the

thin bridge that led to deep summer he turned in one night at Irene's

house. Their engagement was to be announced in a week now--no one

would be surprised at it. And to-night they would sit together on the

lounge at the University Club and look on for an hour at the dancers. It

gave him a sense of solidity to go with her--she was so sturdily popular,

so intensely "great."

He mounted the steps of the brownstone house and stepped inside.

"Irene," he called.

Mrs. Scheerer came out of the living-room to meet him.

"Dexter," she said, "Irene's gone up-stairs with a splitting headache. She

wanted to go with you but I made her go to bed."

"Nothing serious, I----"

"Oh, no. She's going to play golf with you in the morning. You can spare

her for just one night, can't you, Dexter?"

Her smile was kind. She and Dexter liked each other. In the living-room

he talked for a moment before he said good-night.

Returning to the University Club, where he had rooms, he stood in the

doorway for a moment and watched the dancers. He leaned against the

door-post, nodded at a man or two--yawned.

"Hello, darling."

The familiar voice at his elbow startled him. Judy Jones had left a man

and crossed the room to him--Judy Jones, a slender enamelled doll in

cloth of gold: gold in a band at her head, gold in two slipper points at her

dress's hem. The fragile glow of her face seemed to blossom as she

smiled at him. A breeze of warmth and light blew through the room. His

hands in the pockets of his dinner-jacket tightened spasmodically. He

was filled with a sudden excitement.

"When did you get back?" he asked casually.

"Come here and I'll tell you about it."

She turned and he followed her. She had been away--he could have wept

at the wonder of her return. She had passed through enchanted streets,

doing things that were like provocative music. All mysterious happenings,

all fresh and quickening hopes, had gone away with her, come back with

her now.

She turned in the doorway.

"Have you a car here? If you haven't, I have."

"I have a coup_."

In then, with a rustle of golden cloth. He slammed the door. Into so many

cars she had stepped--like this--like that-- her back against the leather,

so--her elbow resting on the door-- waiting. She would have been soiled

long since had there been anything to soil her--except herself--but this

was her own self outpouring.

With an effort he forced himself to start the car and back into the street.

This was nothing, he must remember. She had done this before, and he

had put her behind him, as he would have crossed a bad account from

his books.

He drove slowly down-town and, affecting abstraction, traversed the

deserted streets of the business section, peopled here and there where a

movie was giving out its crowd or where consumptive or pugilistic youth

lounged in front of pool halls. The clink of glasses and the slap of hands

on the bars issued from saloons, cloisters of glazed glass and dirty yellow

light.

She was watching him closely and the silence was embarrassing, yet in

this crisis he could find no casual word with which to profane the hour. At

a convenient turning he began to zigzag back toward the University Club.

"Have you missed me?" she asked suddenly.

"Everybody missed you."

He wondered if she knew of Irene Scheerer. She had been back only a

day--her absence had been almost contemporaneous with his

engagement.

"What a remark!" Judy laughed sadly--without sadness. She looked at him

searchingly. He became absorbed in the dashboard.

"You're handsomer than you used to be," she said thoughtfully. "Dexter,

you have the most rememberable eyes."

He could have laughed at this, but he did not laugh. It was the sort of

thing that was said to sophomores. Yet it stabbed at him.

"I'm awfully tired of everything, darling." She called every one darling,

endowing the endearment with careless, individual comraderie. "I wish

you'd marry me."

The directness of this confused him. He should have told her now that he

was going to marry another girl, but he could not tell her. He could as

easily have sworn that he had never loved her.

"I think we'd get along," she continued, on the same note, "unless

probably you've forgotten me and fallen in love with another girl."

Her confidence was obviously enormous. She had said, in effect, that she

found such a thing impossible to believe, that if it were true he had

merely committed a childish indiscretion-- and probably to show off. She

would forgive him, because it was not a matter of any moment but rather

something to be brushed aside lightly.

"Of course you could never love anybody but me," she continued. "I like

the way you love me. Oh, Dexter, have you forgotten last year?"

"No, I haven't forgotten."

"Neither have I! "

Was she sincerely moved--or was she carried along by the wave of her

own acting?

"I wish we could be like that again," she said, and he forced himself to

answer:

"I don't think we can."

"I suppose not. . . . I hear you're giving Irene Scheerer a violent rush."

There was not the faintest emphasis on the name, yet Dexter was

suddenly ashamed.

"Oh, take me home," cried Judy suddenly; "I don't want to go back to that

idiotic dance--with those children."

Then, as he turned up the street that led to the residence district, Judy

began to cry quietly to herself. He had never seen her cry before.

The dark street lightened, the dwellings of the rich loomed up around

them, he stopped his coup_ in front of the great white bulk of the

Mortimer Joneses house, somnolent, gorgeous, drenched with the

splendor of the damp moonlight. Its solidity startled him. The strong

walls, the steel of the girders, the breadth and beam and pomp of it were

there only to bring out the contrast with the young beauty beside him. It

was sturdy to accentuate her slightness--as if to show what a breeze

could be generated by a butterfly's wing.

He sat perfectly quiet, his nerves in wild clamor, afraid that if he moved

he would find her irresistibly in his arms. Two tears had rolled down her

wet face and trembled on her upper lip.

"I'm more beautiful than anybody else," she said brokenly, "why can't I be

happy?" Her moist eyes tore at his stability--her mouth turned slowly

downward with an exquisite sadness: "I'd like to marry you if you'll have

me, Dexter. I suppose you think I'm not worth having, but I'll be so

beautiful for you, Dexter."

A million phrases of anger, pride, passion, hatred, tenderness fought on

his lips. Then a perfect wave of emotion washed over him, carrying off

with it a sediment of wisdom, of convention, of doubt, of honor. This was

his girl who was speaking, his own, his beautiful, his pride.

"Won't you come in?" He heard her draw in her breath sharply.

Waiting.

"All right," his voice was trembling, "I'll come in.

V

IT WAS STRANGE that neither when it was over nor a long time afterward

did he regret that night. Looking at it from the perspective of ten years,

the fact that Judy's flare for him endured just one month seemed of little

importance. Nor did it matter that by his yielding he subjected himself to

a deeper agony in the end and gave serious hurt to Irene Scheerer and to

Irene's parents, who had befriended him. There was nothing sufficiently

pictorial about Irene's grief to stamp itself on his mind.

Dexter was at bottom hard-minded. The attitude of the city on his action

was of no importance to him, not because he was going to leave the city,

but because any outside attitude on the situation seemed superficial. He

was completely indifferent to popular opinion. Nor, when he had seen

that it was no use, that he did not possess in himself the power to move

fundamentally or to hold Judy Jones, did he bear any malice toward her.

He loved her, and he would love her until the day he was too old for

loving--but he could not have her. So he tasted the deep pain that is

reserved only for the strong, just as he had tasted for a little while the

deep happiness.

Even the ultimate falsity of the grounds upon which Judy terminated the

engagement that she did not want to "take him away" from Irene--Judy,

who had wanted nothing else--did not revolt him. He was beyond any

revulsion or any amusement.

He went East in February with the intention of selling out his laundries

and settling in New York--but the war came to America in March and

changed his plans. He returned to the West, handed over the

management of the business to his partner, and went into the first

officers' training-camp in late April. He was one of those young

thousands who greeted the war with a certain amount of relief,

welcoming the liberation from webs of tangled emotion.

VI

THIS STORY is not his biography, remember, although things creep into it

which have nothing to do with those dreams he had when he was young.

We are almost done with them and with him now. There is only one more

incident to be related here, and it happens seven years farther on.

It took place in New York, where he had done well--so well that there

were no barriers too high for him. He was thirty-two years old, and,

except for one flying trip immediately after the war, he had not been West

in seven years. A man named Devlin from Detroit came into his office to

see him in a business way, and then and there this incident occurred, and

closed out, so to speak, this particular side of his life.

"So you're from the Middle West," said the man Devlin with careless

curiosity. "That's funny--I thought men like you were probably born and

raised on Wall Street. You know--wife of one of my best friends in Detroit

came from your city. I was an usher at the wedding."

Dexter waited with no apprehension of what was coming.

"Judy Simms," said Devlin with no particular interest; "Judy Jones she was

once."

"Yes, I knew her." A dull impatience spread over him. He had heard, of

course, that she was married--perhaps deliberately he had heard no

more.

"Awfully nice girl," brooded Devlin meaninglessly, "I'm sort of sorry for

her."

"Why?" Something in Dexter was alert, receptive, at once.

"Oh, Lud Simms has gone to pieces in a way. I don't mean he ill-uses her,

but he drinks and runs around "

"Doesn't she run around?"

"No. Stays at home with her kids."

"Oh."

"She's a little too old for him," said Devlin.

"Too old!" cried Dexter. "Why, man, she's only twenty-seven."

He was possessed with a wild notion of rushing out into the streets and

taking a train to Detroit. He rose to his feet spasmodically.

"I guess you're busy," Devlin apologized quickly. "I didn't realize----"

"No, I'm not busy," said Dexter, steadying his voice. "I'm not busy at all.

Not busy at all. Did you say she was-- twenty-seven? No, I said she was

twenty-seven."

"Yes, you did," agreed Devlin dryly.

"Go on, then. Go on."

"What do you mean?"

"About Judy Jones."

Devlin looked at him helplessly.

"Well, that's, I told you all there is to it. He treats her like the devil. Oh,

they're not going to get divorced or anything. When he's particularly

outrageous she forgives him. In fact, I'm inclined to think she loves him.

She was a pretty girl when she first came to Detroit."

A pretty girl! The phrase struck Dexter as ludicrous

"Isn't she--a pretty girl, any more?"

"Oh, she's all right."

"Look here," said Dexter, sitting down suddenly, "I don't understand. You

say she was a 'pretty girl' and now you say she's 'all right.' I don't

understand what you mean--Judy Jones wasn't a pretty girl, at all. She

was a great beauty. Why, I knew her, I knew her. She was----"

Devlin laughed pleasantly.

"I'm not trying to start a row," he said. "I think Judy's a nice girl and I like

her. I can't understand how a man like Lud Simms could fall madly in love

with her, but he did." Then he added: "Most of the women like her."

Dexter looked closely at Devlin, thinking wildly that there must be a

reason for this, some insensitivity in the man or some private malice.

"Lots of women fade just like that," Devlin snapped his fingers. "You must

have seen it happen. Perhaps I've forgotten how pretty she was at her

wedding. I've seen her so much since then, you see. She has nice eyes."

A sort of dulness settled down upon Dexter. For the first time in his life

he felt like getting very drunk. He knew that he was laughing loudly at

something Devlin had said, but he did not know what it was or why it was

funny. When, in a few minutes, Devlin went he lay down on his lounge

and looked out the window at the New York sky-line into which the sun

was sinking in dull lovely shades of pink and gold.

He had thought that having nothing else to lose he was invulnerable at

last--but he knew that he had just lost something more, as surely as if he

had married Judy Jones and seen her fade away before his eyes.

The dream was gone. Something had been taken from him. In a sort of

panic he pushed the palms of his hands into his eyes and tried to bring

up a picture of the waters lapping on Sherry Island and the moonlit

veranda, and gingham on the golf-links and the dry sun and the gold

color of her neck's soft down. And her mouth damp to his kisses and her

eyes plaintive with melancholy and her freshness like new fine linen in

the morning. Why, these things were no longer in the world! They had

existed and they existed no longer.

For the first time in years the tears were streaming down his face. But

they were for himself now. He did not care about mouth and eyes and

moving hands. He wanted to care, and he could not care. For he had gone

away and he could never go back any more. The gates were closed, the

sun was gone down, and there was no beauty but the gray beauty of steel

that withstands all time. Even the grief he could have borne was left

behind in the country of illusion, of youth, of the richness of life, where

his winter dreams had flourished.

"Long ago," he said, "long ago, there was something in me, but now that

thing is gone. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone. I cannot cry. I

cannot care. That thing will come back no more."