"People are talking about you, Danny. You won't mind if I tell you?"

Her blue eyes, greatly troubled, looked into mine, then away, and her hand slipped into my hand and held it tightly. "Sometimes I hate people! They are so mean, so nasty!"

"What are they saying?" I straightened the slender fingers curled about mine and stroked them. "Only dead people aren't talked about.

What is being said about me?"

"Horrid things--not to me, of course. They'd better not be! But--Mrs.

Herbert came to see me yesterday afternoon. She wasn't at the luncheon and Grace got the first rap, but most of her hatefulness she took out on you. She's worse than a germ disease. I always feel I ought to be disinfected after I see her. If she were a leper she wouldn't be allowed at large, and she's much more deadly. People like that ought to be locked up."

"What did she tell you about me?" I smiled in Kitty's flushed face, smiled also at the remembrance of Alice Herbert's would-be cut some time ago, but I did not mention it. "You oughtn't to be so hard on her. She's crazy."

"But crazy people are dangerous. A mosquito can kill a king, and a king has to be careful about mosquitoes. I'm more afraid of people than I am of insects. If you could only label them--"

"People label themselves. What did Alice Herbert say about me?"

"First, of course, how strange it was that you should care to live in Scarborough Square, especially as you were a person who held yourself so aloof from--"

"People like her. I do. What else did she say?"

"That you met all sorts of people, had all sorts to come and see you.

A trained nurse who is with a sick friend of her aunt's told her she'd heard you let a--let a bad woman come in your house." Kitty's voice trailed huskily. "She said it would ruin you if things like that got out. I told her it was a lie--it wasn't so."

"It was so." I held Kitty's eyes, horror-filled and unbelieving. "She stayed with Mrs. Mundy a week. Yesterday she went away to the mountains--to die."

For a moment longer Kitty stared at me, and in her face crept deep and crimson color. "You mean--that you let a--a woman like that come in your house and stay a week? Mean--"

For a long time we sat by the fire in Kitty's sitting-room with its rose-colored hangings, its mellow furnishings, its soft burning logs on their bra.s.s andirons, its elusive fragrance of fresh flowers, and unsparingly I told her what all women should know. In the twilight that of which I talked made pictures come and go that gave her understanding never glimpsed before, and, slipping on her knees, she buried her face, shudderingly, in my lap.

"Is it I, Danny? Is it women like me who could do something and don't?" she said, after a long, long while. "Oh, Danny, is it I?"

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Is it I, Danny? Is it women like me who could do something and don't?"]

"It is all of us." My fingers smoothed the beautiful brown hair.

"Every woman of to-day who thinks there's a halo on her head ought to take it off and look at it. She wouldn't see much. We like halos. We imagine we deserve them. And we like the pretty speeches which have spoiled us. What we need is plain truth, Kitty. We need to see without confusion. Sometimes I wonder if we are not the colossal failure of life--we women who have hardly begun to use the power G.o.d put in our hands when He made us the mothers of sons and daughters--"

"But we've only been educated such a little while--most of us aren't educated yet. I'm not." Her arms on my knees, Kitty looked up in my face, in hers the dawning light of vision long delayed. "Men haven't wanted us to think. They want to think for us."

"But ours is the first chance at starting men to thinking right.

Through babyhood and boyhood they are ours. If all women could understand--"

"All women haven't got anything to understand with even if they wanted to understand. Some who have sense don't want responsibility." Kitty bit her lip. "I haven't wanted it. It's so much easier not--not to have it. And now--now you've put it on me."

"When women know, they will not shirk. So many of us are children yet.

We've got to grow up." Stooping, I kissed her. "In Scarborough Square I've learned to see it's a pretty wasteful world I've lived in. And life is short, Kitty. There's not a moment of it to be wasted."

CHAPTER XVIII

Mrs. Mundy cannot find Etta Blake. She went this morning to the house just opposite the box-factory, but no one is living there. A "For Rent" sign is on it. After trying, without success, to find from the families who live in the neighborhood where the people who once occupied the house have gone, she went to the agent, but from him also she could learn nothing.

"They were named Banch. A man and his wife and three children lived in the house, but where they've moved n.o.body could tell me, or give me a thing to go on. They went away between sun-up and sun-down and no one knows where." Mrs. Mundy, who had come to my sitting-room to make report, before taking off her coat and hat, sat down in a chair near the desk at which I had been writing, and smoothed the fingers of her gloves with careful precision. She was disappointed and distressed that she had so little to tell me.

"I couldn't find a soul who'd ever heard of a girl named Etta Blake.

Poor people are generally sociable and know everybody in the neighborhood, but didn't anybody know her. Mr. Parke, the agent, said the man paid his rent regular and he was sorry to lose him as a tenant, but he didn't know where he'd gone. If his wife took boarders he didn't know anything about it. The girl might have rented a room--" Mrs. Mundy hesitated, looked at me uncertainly.

"Shall I ask Mr. Crimm to--to help me find her? If she's in town he'd soon know where."

Something in her voice sent the blood to my face. "You mean--oh no, you cannot, do not mean--"

"I don't know. It's usually the end. The only one they have to come to when a man like Mr. Thorne's brother makes a girl lose her head about him. After he tires of her, or when he's afraid there may be trouble, there's apt to be a row and he quits. When he's gone the girl generally ends--down there." Mrs. Mundy's hand made movement over her shoulder. "Respectable people don't want to have anything to do with girls like that, and it's hard for them to get work.

After a while they give up and go to what's the only place some of them have to go to. Would you mind if I ask Mr. Crimm?"

I shook my head. "No, I would not mind."

Going over to a window, I opened it, and as the sunshine fell upon my face it seemed impossible that such things as Mrs. Mundy feared were true. But I knew now they were true, and shiveringly I twisted my hands within my arms as if to warm my heart, which was cold with a nameless something it was difficult to define. On one side of me the little, elfish creature with her frightened eyes and short, curly hair seemed standing; on the other, the girl to whom Harrie was engaged. I could not help them. Could not help Selwyn. Could help no one! If David Guard--at thought of him the clutch at my throat lessened. David Guard could help them. He had promised to come whenever I sent for him, and to him I could talk as to no one else on earth.

"I will see Mr. Crimm to-night. It won't be new to him--the finding of a girl who's disappeared. He's found too many. I'll be careful what I tell him, and Mr. Thorne needn't worry." Mrs. Mundy got up.

"Didn't you say he was coming this afternoon?"

"He is coming to-night. I am going out this afternoon."

Mrs. Mundy walked slowly to the door. She would have enjoyed talking longer, but I could not talk. A sense of involvement with things that frightened and repelled, with things of which I had hitherto been irresponsibly ignorant, was bewildering me and I wanted to be alone. I knew I was a coward, but there was no special need of her knowing it.

I had been honest in thinking I wanted to know all sorts of people, to see myself, and women like me, from the viewpoint of those denied my opportunities, but it had not occurred to me as a possibility of Scarborough Square that I should come in contact with any of the women of Lillie Pierce's world. People like that had hardly seemed the human beings other people were. And now--

"Tell Mr. Crimm whatever you think best." My back was to Mrs. Mundy.

"The girl is in trouble. You must see her. Bring her here if you cannot go to her, and try and learn her side of the story. It's an old one, perhaps, but it isn't fair that--"

"She should be shoved into h.e.l.l and the lid shut down to keep her in, and the man let alone to go where he pleases. It isn't fair, but it's the world's way, and always will be lessen women learn some things they ought to know. They wouldn't stand for some of the things that go on if they understood them, but they don't understand.

They've been tongue-tied and hand-tied so long, they haven't taken in yet they've got to do their own untying."

"It's a pretty lonely job--and a pretty hard one." I turned from the window. Kitty's automobile had stopped in front of the house. I was to go in it to call on Mrs. and Miss Swink. Kitty had insisted that I use it.

I dressed quickly, putting on my best garments, but as I got into the car something of the old protest at having to do what I did not want to do, to go where I did not want to go, came over me, and I was conscious of childish irritability. I did not care to know the Swinks. Eternity wouldn't be long enough, and certainly time wasn't to waste on people like that, and yet because Selwyn had asked me to call I was doing it. All men are alike. When they don't know how to do a thing that's got to be done, they tell a woman to do it. It was not my business to tell this Swink person and her daughter that they should be careful concerning matrimonial alliances. I would agree with them that such intimation on my part was presumptuous and I had no intention of making it. What I was going to do I did not know, but it was necessary to see them, talk with them before any suggestions could be made to Selwyn as to a tactful handling of an embarra.s.sing situation; and in obedience to this primary requisite I was calling.

In their private parlor at the Melbourne, pompously furnished, and bare of all things that make a room reflective of personality, Mrs.

Swink and her daughter were awaiting me on my arrival, and the moment I met the former all the perversity of which I am possessed rose up within me, and for the latter I was conscious of sympathy, based on nothing save intuitive antipathy to her mother. Inwardly I warned myself to behave, but I wasn't sure I was going to do it.

"Oh, how do you do!" Mrs. Swink, a fat, florid, frizzy person, waddled toward me with out-stretched and bejeweled hands, and took mine in hers. "Mr. Thorne told us you would certainly call, and we've been waiting for you ever since he told us. Charmed to meet you! This is my daughter Madeleine. Where's Madeleine?" She turned her short, red neck, bound with velvet, and looked behind her. "Oh, here she is! Madeleine, this is Miss Wreath. You know all about Miss Wreath, who's gone to such a queer place to live. Harrie told us." Two sharp little eyes sunk in nests of embracing flesh winked confidentially at first me and then her daughter. "Yes, indeed, we know all about you. Sit down. Madeleine, push a chair up for Miss Wreath."

"Heath, mother!" The girl called Madeleine turned her pretty, dissatisfied face toward her mother and then looked at me. "She never gets names right. She just hits at them and says the first thing that comes to her mind." Pulling a large chair close to a table, on which was a vase of American Beauty roses, she waited for me to take it, then went over to the window and sat beside it.

"Well, everybody's got a mental weakness." Upright in a blue-brocaded chair, elbows on its gilt arms, mother Swink surveyed me with scrutinizing calculation, and as she appraised I appraised also. Full-bosomed of body and short of leg, she looked close kin to a frog in her tight-fitting purple gown with its iridescent tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs, and low-cut neck; and from her silver-buckled slippers to the crimped and russet-colored transformation on her head, which had slipped somewhat to one side, my eyes went up and then went down, and I knew if Harrie ever married her daughter his punishment would begin on earth.

"Yes, indeed, everybody's got a mental weakness, and I'm thankful mine's no worse than forgetting names. I ought to remember yours, though. It makes you think of funerals and weddings and things like that. I love names which--"

"Her name is Heath, mother! _Not_ Wreath."