"My _dear_ child! What _is_ it?"

Jane stood looking down at her for an instant before she stooped and gathered her into a hearty hug. "It's nothing to be frightened about.

It's just this, Aunt Lyddy; I do want to write, and I don't want to marry Martin Wetherby!"

In the difficult days which followed she found Sarah Farraday the most rebellious. Miss Vail had a little creed or philosophy which was as plump and comfortable as she was herself, and which had helped to make her, Jane considered, the world's most satisfactory maiden aunt, and after a few tears and those briskly winked away, she was able to be sure that her dear girl knew best what was best for herself, _much_ as she would miss her, _empty_ as the house would be without her. Nannie Slade Hunter, though she disapproved, was too deeply engulfed in the real business of life to be much concerned over the vagaries of a just-about-to-be-engaged girl, and Martin Wetherby, coached, Jane knew, by the sapient father of the Teddy-bear, was presently able to translate her exodus into something very soothing to his own piece of mind. Jane could watch his mental processes as easily as she could watch the activities of a goldfish in a gla.s.s globe; he was concluding that it was the regular old startled fawn stuff ... he _had_ been rushing her pretty hard ... better let her have a little time ... play around with this writing game. He'd be a.s.st. Cashier (that was the way he visualized it) the first of the year, and that would be a great time to get things settled.

But Sarah, in the burlapped studio, between piano pupils, was aghast and bitter. "'Going to seek your fortune!' I never heard anything so absurd, Jane! You've got more than most girls right now,--a hundred dollars a month of your very own to do just what you like with, and when your Aunt Lydia--is taken from you, you'll have that adorable old house, jammed full of rosewood and mahogany and willow pattern ware!" Wrath rose and throve in her. "I've sometimes--I'm ashamed to admit it, but it's the truth--I've sometimes envied you your advantages, Jane,--going away to that wonderful school, and six months in Europe after you graduated--but if the result has been to make you dissatisfied with your own home and your own friends"--she was crying now--"why, then I'm thankful I've always stayed here, and never known or wanted anything different!"

Jane crossed over to her and put penitent arms about her, and at the touch Sarah began to cry in earnest.

"Oh, _Jane_! I can't stand it! I can't have you go away! Jane,--for you to _go away_----"

"Oh, Sally dear," said Jane, patting her, "it isn't really going away,--geography doesn't matter! It's just--going _on_, Sally! That's it,--I'm just going on. _And_ on, I hope! And I'll write you miles of letters."

"Letters!" her friend sniffed. "What are letters?"

"Mine are something rather special, I've been told. I'll write you everything, Sally,--letters like diaries, letters like stories, letters like books. Think of all the marvelous things I'll have to write about!

Why, Rodney Harrison thinks my letters from Wetherby Ridge, with nothing----"

Sarah Farraday jerked away from her, her cheeks suddenly hot, her eyes accusing. "So, that's it! That's the reason! It's the man you met on the boat!" She said it with hyphens--"The-man-you-met-on-the-boat!" She knew his name quite well, but she always spoke of him thus descriptively; it was her little way of keeping him in his place, which was well outside of the sacred circle of Wetherby Ridge.

Jane laughed. "Goose! Of course, he's part of the picture, and a very pleasant part, and it will be very nice to have him meet me and drive me opulently to Hetty Hills' sedate boarding-house. Aunt Lyddy is so rejoiced to have me there with some one from the village that I couldn't refuse, but I suspect it will be a section of the Old People's Home."

"Poor Marty!" said Sarah. "Poor old Marty! After all his years of devotion----"

"But don't you think he got large chunks of enjoyment out of them?" Her best friend's earnestness made her flippant, and it was a curious fact that good old Sally, a predestinate spinster herself, settled on her moated grange of music teaching, always took a most militant part in other people's love affairs. In every lovers' quarrel in the village, in the rare divorces, she had stood fiercely, hot dabs of color on her cheekbones, for the swain or the husband. "I still contend," she would say, "that with all his faults, and I'm not denying that he has faults, a different sort of a woman could have saved him and made something of him!"

Sarah came to stay the night with her before she was to leave in the morning, and cried herself to sleep with a thin drizzle of tears which Jane found at once flattering and touching and irritating, and when at last the weeper was drawing long and peaceful breaths she slipped out of bed and flung on her orange-colored kimono and knelt down before the open window, her shining hair, so darkly brown that it was almost black, hanging gypsylike about her shoulders. (The greater portion of Sarah's hair was at rest upon the rosewood bureau top, coiled like a pale snake, and the remainder was done up on curlers in Topsy twists.)

Over in the east there was the first graying advance of the dawn. (There had been a "little gathering of the young folks" and then Jane had finished packing and they had talked for two hours.) Jane felt a little guilty, and a little foolish--leaping thus into the village spotlight, sallying forth into the wide world--and a little gay and thrilled. The morning was coming steadily up the sky; the daily miracle was going on.

And she was going on--_on_! Old Sally's scoldings didn't matter, nor Marty's smug confidence. She shivered a little but kept her eyes on the growing glory. She was--going--_on_!

A week later Sarah Farraday tore open the first letter with the New York postmark.

SALLY DEAR, the typed page began, I meant to write at once, but I've been settling down so busily! Of course Aunt Lyddy telephoned you of my safe arrival?--Safe, my dear?--It was positively regal. Visiting royalty effect. Rodney Harrison met me and I find I had quite forgotten how very easy to look at he is! He apologized for the taxi which seemed most opulent to me, because his own speedster was in the shop, he having "broken a record and some vital organ the night before, and the mater was using the limousine and the governor was out of town with the big bus." His pretty plan was for dinner and the theater and then supper and some dancing, but I thought there was just the least bit of the King and the Beggar Maid lavishness about that, so I discreetly revised it to tea.

We purred extravagantly up the Avenue, and how horrified Aunt Lyddy would be at the taximeter! It makes me think of when we used to play Hide-and-Seek, "_Twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five, forty, forty-five, fifty--ready or not you shall be caught_!"

He had brought me a corsage of orchids and lilies-of-the-valley, and I had to wear it at tea--and the price of that tea, my dear, would feed a first family in Wetherby Ridge for a day!--and when I came up here to my room I found three dozen red roses with stems like stilts and a three-story red satin box of chocolates. Hardly a thrifty person, this man-I-met-on-the-boat, as you persist in calling him, Sally, but the last word in Reception Committees! Just as I had forgotten his charms, so he seemed to have mislaid the memory of mine, and we really made a very pleasant fuss over each other. Rodney had several bright and beamish ideas for the next few days, but I reminded him that while he may be an Idle Rich, I'm a Laboring Cla.s.s, and I frugally accepted one invitation out of four. "A Country Mouse came to visit a Town Mouse--" But I can clearly see that he will greatly add to the livableness of life.

I have bought myself a second-hand, elderly, but still spry think-mobile with only a slight inclination to stutter, and a pompous-looking eraser with a little fringe of black whiskers on its chin, and I'm beginning to begin, Sally, dear!

It's going to be a marvelous place to work. Nice old Hetty Hills keeps a really super-boarding house, and the personnel isn't going to be in the least distracting,--staid, concert-going ladies, some teachers, a musician or two, a middle-aged bank clerk; only two other youngish people, both Settlement workers, a man and a woman. Her name is Emma Ellis and she's only about thirty, but she acts fifty--you know--shabby hair and dim fingernails and a righteously shining nose,--and I wish you could see her hat! It looks exactly like the lid to something. She doesn't like me at all, though I've been virtuously nice to her. The man is a big, lean Irishman, named Michael Daragh. Don't you like the sound of that, Sally? It makes me think of those Yeats and Synge things I was reading up on just before I left home. He's like a person in a book,--very tall and very thin and yet he seems like a perfect tower of strength, some way. His hair is ash blond and his eyes are gray and look straight through you and for miles beyond you, and he has splashes of good color in his thin, clear cheeks. He has a quaint, long, Irish, upper lip. I'd describe him as a large body of man entirely surrounded by conscience. (I'm describing him so fully to you because it's such good practice for me, and I know you don't mind.) His clothes are old, but not so much shabby as mellow, like old, good leather. And such a brogue, Sally!

It could be eaten with a spoon! He asked me at once what I meant to do (he can't conceive, of course, that one isn't a do-er!), and when I said that I meant to write, at least, to try, he said:

"'Tis the great gift, surely. When our like"--he looked at Emma Ellis--"are toiling with our two hands and wishing they were twenty, yourself can reach the wide world over with your pen." Miss Ellis didn't seem especially impressed with his figure, but he nodded gravely and went on. "'Tis a true word. You can span the aching world with a clean and healing pen." (Isn't that delicious, Sally?) I tried to explain that I was just starting, that I was afraid I hadn't anything of especial importance to say, and then he said, very sternly--and he has the eyes of a zealot and a fighter's jaw--"Let you be stepping over to the tenements with me and I'll show you tales you'll dip your pen in tears and blood to tell!"

He's going to be enormously interesting to study.--There--I've just this instant placed the resemblance that's been teasing me! He's like the St. Michael in my favorite Botticelli, the one of Tobias led by the archangels, carrying the fish to heal his father, Tobit, you know,--there's a tiny copy of it in my room at home. Next time you stop by to see Aunt Lyddy (you're a lamb to do it so often!) run up and look at it. I loved it better than any other picture in Florence; you can't get the lovely old tones from the little brown copy, but everything else is there--Tobias, carrying his fish in the funny little strap and handle, utter trust on his lifted face, the wonderful lines of drapery, the swaying lily, the absurd little dog with his ta.s.seled tail (I wonder if he was Botticelli's dog?) and at the side, guarding and guiding, with sword and symbol, stern St.

Michael _Captain-General of the Hosts of Heaven_. This Michael Daragh is really like him, name and all. Isn't it curious?

Write me soon and much, old dear. My best to every one, and I sent the Teddy-bear a bib from the proudest baby-shop on the avenue.

Devotedly,

JANE.

P.S. You might ring up Aunt Lyddy and ask her to send me that little Botticelli picture--my bare walls are rather bleak.

CHAPTER III

Jane settled jubilantly into the new life,--a brisk walk after breakfast, up the gay Avenue or down the gray streets below the Square, then three honest hours at the elderly typewriter, writing at top speed ... tearing up all she had written ... writing slowly, polishing a paragraph with pa.s.sionate care, salvaging perhaps a page, perhaps a sentence out of the morning's toil. Then she hooded her machine, lunched, and gave herself up to an afternoon of vivid living,--a Russian pianist, or an exhibition of vehemently modern pictures screaming their message from quiet walls in a Fifth Avenue Gallery, an hour at Hope House Settlement with Emma Ellis or Michael Daragh, tea and dancing with Rodney Harrison, or dinner and a play with him, or a little session of snug coziness with Mrs.

Hetty Hills, giving the exile news of the Vermont village,--nothing was dull or dutiful; the prosiest matters of every day were lined with rose.

She dramatized every waking moment. She was going to _work_, she wrote Sarah.

I have been just marking time before, but now I'm marching, Sally.

I was up at six-thirty, had a cold dip and a laborer's breakfast,--I'm afraid I haven't any temperament in my appet.i.te, you know--and sped off for atmosphere _and_ ozone, far below the Square, on a two-mile tramp, and now I'm about to write. Rodney Harrison, who knows everybody who _is_ anybody, has introduced me to some vaudeville-powers-that-be and I am encouraged to try my hand at what they call a sketch--a one-act play. It seems that they are in need of something a little less thin than the usual article they've been serving up to their patrons,--more of a playlet; something, I suppose, to edify the wife of the Tired Business Man after he has enjoyed the Tramp Juggler and the Trained Seals. Rodney Harrison has helped me no end,--trotted me about to all the best places and helped me to study and learn from them, and now I'm ready to begin.

And--heavens--how I adore it, Sally!

It's breaking my iron schedule to write a letter in business hours but I knew you'd love to picture me here, gleefully clicking off dollars and fame. Poor lamb! I wish you were on a job like this, instead of pegging away at your piano. I wish there could be as much fun in your work as mine. Of course, music is the most marvelous thing in the world, but isn't there something of deadly monotony in it?

But I fly to my toil!

Busily,

JANE.

_January Ninth_, 8.30 A.M.

It is just one week since I wrote you. I rend my garments, Sarah Farraday, and sit in the dust. That fatuous note I sent you was a thin crust of bluff over an abyss of fright. Who am I to write a one-act play? I have sat here for eight solid horrible days with a fine fat box of extra quality paper untouched and the keyboard leering at me, and not a line, not a word, have I written! The hideous period of beginning to begin! I imagine it's like the tense moment in a football game, just before the kickoff, only those lucky youths are pushed and prodded into action, w.i.l.l.ynilly. If only a whistle would blow or a pistol crack for me!

I have come to realize that the most dangerous thing for a writer to have is uninterrupted leisure. _Now_ I know how Harriet Beecher Stowe could write _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ with poverty and sickness and a debilitating climate and seven children. So could I. It's the awful quiet of this orderly room, the jeering taunt of Washington Square, looking in at my window to say, "What! here you are in my throbbing, thrilling midst at last, having left your sylvan home because it ceased to nourish you,--and you have nothing to say?"

I've simulated a mad business. I've answered every letter--some that I've owed for years; I've put my bureau and chiffonier and closet in sickening order; I've mended every sc.r.a.p of clothing I possess, reinforced all my b.u.t.tons and run in miles of ribbon; I've visited the sick and even been to the dentist. I really ought to die just before I start a new piece of work. At no other time is my house of life in such shining order.

Sally, didn't I say something nitwitted about music? Now, indeed, I pour ashes on my head. Lucky you, who need only sit down and spill out your soul in something thoughtfully arranged for that very purpose by Mr. Chopin or Mr. Tschaikovsky! While I--"out of senseless nothing to evoke"--I wish I did something definite and tangible like plain sewing! If I don't start soon I'll sell this think-mobile for junk and put out a sign--"Mending and Washing and Going Out by the Day Taken in Here."

Just now the painted ship upon the painted ocean is a bee-hive of activity compared to me.

JANE.