Play the Game!

by Ruth Comfort Mitch.e.l.l.

CHAPTER I

There was no denying the fact that Honor Carmody liked the boys. No one ever attempted to deny it, least of all Honor herself.

When she finished grammar school her mother and her gay young stepfather told her they had decided to send her to Marlborough rather than to the Los Angeles High School.

The child looked utterly aghast. "Oh," she said, "I wouldn't like that at all. I don't believe I _could_. I couldn't _bear_ it!"

"My dear," her mother chided, "don't be silly! It's a quite wonderful school, known all over the country. Girls are sent there from Chicago and New York, and even Boston. You'll be with the best girls, the very nicest----"

"That's just it," Honor interrupted, forlornly.

"What do you mean?"

"_Girls._ Just girls. Oodles and oodles of nothing but girls. Honestly, Muzzie, I don't think I could _stand_ it." She was a large, substantial young creature with a broad brow and hearty coloring and candid eyes.

Her stepfather was sure she would never have her mother's beauty, but he was almost equally sure that she would never need it. He studied her closely and her actions and reactions intrigued him. He laughed, now, and his wife turned mildly shocked eyes on him.

"Stephen, dear! Don't encourage her in being queer. I don't like her to be queer." Mrs. Lorimer was not in the least queer herself, unless, indeed, it was queer to be startlingly lovely and girlish and appealing at forty-one, with a second husband and six children. She was not an especially motherly person except in moments of reproof and then she always spoke in a remote third person. "Honor, Mother wants you to be more with girls." Then, as if to make it clear that she was not merely advancing a personal whim,--"You need to be more with girls."

"Why?"

"Why--why because Mother says you do." Mrs. Lorimer did not like to argue. She always got out of breath and warm-looking.

Her daughter dropped on the floor at her feet. Mrs. Lorimer had small, happy-looking, lily-of-the-field hands and Honor took one of them between her hard brown paws and squeezed it. "I know, but--_why_ do you say so? I don't know anything about girls. Why should I, when I've had eight boy cousins and five boy brothers and"--she gave Stephen Lorimer a brief, friendly grin--"and two boy fathers!" Her stepfather was not really younger than his wife but he was incurably boyish. The girl grew earnest. "Please, _pretty-please_, let me go to L. A. High! I've counted on it so! And"--she was as intent and free from self-consciousness as a terrier at a rat hole--"all the boys I know are going to L. A. High! And _Jimsy's_ going, and he'll _need_ me!"

Her stepfather laughed again and lighted a cigarette. "She has you there, Mildred. He will need her."

"Of course he will." Honor turned a grateful face to him. "I'll have to do all his English and Latin for him, so he can get signed up every week and play football!"

Mrs. Lorimer did not see why her daughter's finishing need be curtailed by young James King's athletic activities and she started in to say so with vigor and emphasis, but her husband held up his long beautifully modeled hand rather in the manner of a traffic policeman and stopped her.

"Look here, Mildred," he said, "suppose you and I convene in special session and consider this thing from all angles and then let her know what it comes to,--shall we? Run along, Top Step!"

"All right, Stepper," said the child, relievedly. "_You_ explain it to her." She went contentedly away and a moment later they heard her robust young voice lifted on the lawn next door,--"Jim-_zee_! Oh, Jimsy!

Come-mawn-_out_!"

"You see?" Mrs. Lorimer wanted rather inaccurately to know. "That's what we've got to stop, Stephen."

He smiled. "But--as your eldest offspring just now inquired--why?"

"_Why?_" She lifted her hands and let them fall into her lap again, palm upward, and regarded him in gentle exasperation. "Stephen, you know, really, sometimes I feel that you are not a bit of help to me with the children."

"Sometimes you do, I daresay," he granted her, serenely, "but most of the time you must be simply starry-eyed with grat.i.tude over the brilliant way I manage them. Come along over here and we'll talk it over!" He patted the place beside him on the couch.

"You mean," said his wife a little sulkily, going, nevertheless, "that you'll talk me over!"

"That is my secret hope," said Stephen Lorimer.

It was all quite true. He did manage her children and their children--there were three of each--with astonishing ease and success.

They amused him, and adored him. He understood them utterly. Honor was seven when her own father died and nine when her mother married again.

Stephen Lorimer would never forget her first inspection of him.

Nursemaids had done their worst on the subject of stepfathers; fairy tales had presented the pattern. He knew exactly what was going on in her mind, and--quite as earnestly beneath his persiflage as he had set himself to woo the widow--he set himself to win her daughter. It was a matter of moments only before he saw the color coming back into her square little face and the horror seeping out of her eyes. It was a matter of days only until she sought him out and told him, in her mother's presence, that she believed she liked him better than her first father.

"Honor, _dear_! You--you mustn't, really----" Mildred Lorimer insisted with herself on being shocked.

"Don't _you_, Muzzie? Don't you like him better?" the child wanted persistently to know. "He was very nice, of course; I did like him awfully. But he was always 'way off Down Town ... at The Office. We didn't have any fun with him. Stepper's always home. I'm glad we married a newspaper one this time."

"Stephen, that dreadful name.... What will people think?"

Her new husband didn't in the least care. He and Honor had gravely considered on that first day what they should call each other. It seemed to Stephen Lorimer that it was hardly fair to the gentleman who had stayed so largely at The Office to have his big little daughter and his tiny sons calling his successor Father or Dad, and _Papa_ with all its shades and shifts of accent left him cold. "Let's see, Honor.

'Stepfather' as a salutation sounds rather accusing, doesn't it?

'Step-pa,' now, is less austere, but----"

"Oh, Stephen, _dear_!" They were not consulting Mrs. Lorimer at all.

"I've got it! It's an inspiration! 'Stepper!' Neat, crisp, brisk. Means, if any one should ask you, 'Step-pa' and also, literally, stepper; a stepper; one who steps--into another's place."

"_Stephen_----"

"Well, haven't I, my dear?" He considered the three young Carmodys, nine, seven, and five. "Steps yourselves, aren't you? Honor's the top step and----"

"Oh, Stepper, call me Top Step! I like that."

"Right. And Billy's Bottom Step and Ted's the Tweeny! Now we're all set!"

"Yes," said Honor, contentedly. She herded her little brothers out of the room and came back alone. "But--what'll I tell people you _are_?"

"Why, I think," he considered, "you're young enough and trusting enough to call me A Writer."

"I mean, are you Muzzie's step-husband, too?"

It was the first time she had seen the lightness leave his eyes. "No.

_No._ I am your moth--I am her husband. There is no step there." He got up and walked over to where his wife was sitting and towered over her.

He was a tall man and he looked especially tall at that moment. "Her plain--husband. Extremely plain, as it happens"--he was himself again for an instant--"but--_her husband_." It seemed to the child that he had forgotten which one of them had asked him the question and was addressing himself to her mother by mistake. He seemed at once angry and demanding and anxious, and she had never seen her mother so pink.

However, her question had been answered and she had affairs of her own.

She went away without a backward glance so she did not see her stepfather drop to his knees beside the chair and gather the quiet woman roughly into his arms, nor hear his insistent voice. "Her husband. The _first--husband--she--ever had. Say it, Mildred. Say it._"

And now Honor was thirteen and a half, and tardily ready for High School, and there were three little Lorimers, twins and a six months'

old single. Stephen Lorimer, who had been a singularly footloose world rover, had settled down securely in the old Carmody house on South Figueroa Street. He was intensely proud of his paternity, personal and vicarious, and took it not seriously but joyously. He was dramatic critic and special writer for the leading newspaper of Los Angeles, and theoretically he worked by night and slept by day, but as a matter of puzzling fact he did not sleep at all, unless one counted his brief morning naps. His eyes, in consequence, seemed never to be quite open, but nothing, nevertheless, escaped them.

An outsider, looking in on them now, the erect, hot-cheeked, imperious woman, a little insolent always of her beauty, and the lolling, lounging man with the drooping lids, would have placed his odds unhesitatingly on her winning of any point she might have in mind. Even Mildred Lorimer herself, after four years and a half of being married to him, thought she would win out over him this time. Honor was the only daughter she had, the only daughter she would ever have, for she had definitely decided, at forty-one, to cease her dealings with the long-legged bird who had flapped six times to her roof, and it seemed intolerable to her that--with five boys--her one girl should be so robustly ungirlish.

"Now, then, let's have it. You want Honor to go to Marlborough. As she herself asked and I myself repeated,--why?"