"But she excites me," said Eleanor doggedly. "She makes me want to smash windows and scream."

"Why, Nellie!" Miss Enid's mournful eyes filled with tears. Instantly Eleanor was all contrition.

"I'm sorry!" she said, with a real kiss this time. "I'll behave. Give you my word I will!" And, with an affectionate squeeze of the hand that clasped hers, she ran up the steps.

The upper hall, like the rest of the house, was pervaded by an air of gloomy grandeur. Everything was dreary, formal, fixed. Not an ornament or a picture had been changed since Eleanor could remember. She was the only young thing about the place, and it always seemed to her as if the house and its occupants were conspiring to make her old and staid and stupid, like themselves.

At the door of her grandmother's room she paused. As far back as she could remember, her quarrels with her grandmother had been the most terrifying events of her life. Repet.i.tion never robbed them of their horror, and no amount of spoiling between times could make up to her for the violence of the moment. It took all the courage she had to turn the k.n.o.b of the door and enter.

A brigadier-general planning an important campaign would have presented no more commanding presence than did the formidable old lady who sat at a flat-top desk, issuing orders in a loud, decisive tone to a small meek-looking man who stood before her. The most arresting feature about Madam Bartlett was a towering white pompadour that began where most pompadours end, and soared to a surprising height above her large, handsome, masculine face. The fact that her hair line had gradually receded from her forehead to the top of her head affected no change whatever in the arrangement of her coiffure. Neither in regard to her hair nor to her figure had she yielded one iota to the whims of Nature.

Her body was still confined in the stiffest of stays, and in spite of her seventy years was as straight as an arrow. At Eleanor's entrance she motioned her peremptorily to a chair and proceeded with the business in hand.

"You go back and tell Mr. Bangs," she was saying to the meek-looking person, "that I want him to send somebody up here who knows more than you do. Do you understand?"

The meek one evidently understood, for he reached nervously for his cap.

"Wait!" commanded Madam peremptorily. "Don't start off like that, while I am talking to you! Tell Mr. Bangs this is the third time I've asked him to send me the report of Bartlett & Bangs' export business for the past year. I want it immediately. I am not in my dotage yet. I still have some say-so in the firm. Well, what are you waiting for?"

"I was waiting to know if there was anything more, ma'am."

"If there had been I would have said so. Tell Hannah to come in as you go out."

Eleanor looked at her grandmother expectantly, but there was no answering glance. The old lady was evidently in one of her truculent moods that brooked no interference.

"Has the plumber come?" she demanded of the elderly colored maid who appeared at the door.

"No, ma'am. He can't get here till to-morrow."

"Tell him I won't wait. If he can't come within an hour he needn't come at all. Where is Tom?"

Hannah's eyes shifted uneasily. "Tom? Why, Tom, he thought you discharged him."

"So I did. But he's not to go until I get another butler. Send him up here at once."

"But he ain't here," persisted Hannah fearfully, "He's went for good this time."

Eleanor, sitting demurely by the door, had a moment of unholy exultation.

Old black Tom, the butler, had been Madam's chief domestic prop for a quarter of a century. He had been the patient buffer between her and the other servants, taking her domineering with unfailing meekness, and even venturing her defense when mutiny threatened below stairs. "You-all don't understand old Miss," he would say loyally. "She's all right, only she's jes' nachully mean, dat's all."

In the turning of this humble worm, Eleanor felt in some vague way a justification of her own rebellion.

His departure, however, did not tend to clear the domestic atmosphere. By the time Madam had settled the plumbing question and expressed her opinion of Tom and all his race, she was in no mood to deal leniently with the shortcomings of a headstrong young granddaughter.

"Well," she said, addressing her at last, "why didn't you make it midnight?"

"It's only a little after five." Eleanor knew she was putting up a feeble defense, and her hands grew cold.

"It is nearly six, and it is dark. Couldn't you have withdrawn the sunshine of your presence from the hospital half an hour sooner?"

Under her sharp glance there was a curious protective tenderness, the savage concern of a lioness for her whelp; but Eleanor saw only the scoffing expression in the keen eyes, and heard the note of irony in all she said.

"Your going out to the hospital is all foolishness, anyhow," the old lady continued, sorting her papers with efficiency. "Contagious diseases, germs, and what not. But some women would be willing to go to Hades if they could tie a becoming rag around their heads. Why didn't you dress yourself properly before you came in here?"

"I wanted to, but Aunt----"

"Aunt Enid, I suppose! If it was left to her she'd have you trailing around in a Greek tunic and sandals, with a laurel wreath on your head."

There was an ominous pause, during which Madam's wrinkled, bony hands, flashing with diamonds, searched rapidly among the papers.

"You are all ready to start on Monday? Your clothes are in good condition, I presume?"

Eleanor brought her gaze from a detached contemplation of the ceiling to a critical inspection of her finger-nails.

"I suppose Aunt Isobel has attended to them," she said indifferently.

"Aunt Isobel, indeed!" snarled Madam. "You'd lean on a broken reed if you depended on Isobel. And Enid is no better. _I_ attended to your clothes.

I got you everything you need, even down to a new set of furs."

"Silver fox?" asked Eleanor, brightening visibly.

"No, mink. I can't abide fox. Ah! here's what I am looking for. Your ticket and berth reservation. Train leaves at ten-thirty Monday morning."

"Grandmother," ventured Eleanor, summing up courage to lead a forlorn hope, "you are just wasting money sending me back to Baltimore."

"It's my money," said the old lady grimly.

"It's your money, but it is my life," Eleanor urged, with a quiver in her voice. "If you are going to send me away, why not send me to New York and let me do the one thing in the world I want to do?"

That Madam should be willing to furnish unlimited funds for finishing schools, music lessons, painting lessons, and every "extra" that the curriculum offered, and yet refuse to cultivate her one real talent, seemed to Eleanor the most unreasonable autocracy. She had no way of knowing that Madam's indomitable pride, still quivering with the memory of her oldest son's marriage to an unknown young actress, recoiled instinctively from the theatrical rock on which so many of her old hopes had been wrecked.

Eleanor's persistence in recurring to this most distasteful of subjects roused her to fury. A purple flush suffused her face, and her cheeks puffed in and out as she breathed.

"I suppose Claude Martel has it all mapped out," she said. "He and that fool Harold Phipps have stirred you up to a pretty pitch. What do you see in that silly c.o.xcomb, anyhow?"

"If you mean Captain Phipps," Eleanor said with dignity, "I see a great deal. He is one of the most cultivated men I ever met."

"Fiddlesticks! He smells like a soap-counter! When I see an affected man I see a fool. He has airs enough to fill a music-box. But that's neither here nor there. You understand definitely that I do not wish you to see him again?"

Eleanor's silence did not satisfy Madam. She insisted upon a verbal a.s.surance, which Eleanor was loath to give.

"I tell you once for all, young lady," said Madam, by this time roused to fury, "that you have _got_ to do what I say for another year. After that you will be twenty-one, and you can go to the devil, if you want to."

"Grandmother!" cried Eleanor, shrinking as if from a physical blow. Then, remembering her promise to her Aunt Enid, she bit her lip and struggled to keep back the tears. As she started to leave the room, Madam called her back.

"Here, take this," she said gruffly, thrusting a small morocco box into her hand. "Isobel and Enid never had decent necks to hang 'em on. See that you don't lose them." And without more ado she thrust Eleanor out of the room and shut the door in her face.

Eleanor fled down the hall to her own room, and after locking the door flung herself on the bed. It was always like that, she told herself pa.s.sionately; they nagged at her and tormented her and wore her out with their care and anxiety, and then suffocated her with their affection. She did not want their presents. She wanted freedom, the right to live her own life, think her own thoughts, make her own decisions. She did not mean to be ungrateful, but she couldn't please them all! The family expectations of her were too high, too different from what she wanted.

Other girls with half her talents for the stage had succeeded, and just because she was a Bartlett----