Jeannette, on her way to Cohasset Beach, let her Sunday newspaper drift indifferently into her lap, and turned her attention to the October landscape through the car window. The train was filled with Sunday visitors like herself, bound for friends and relatives in the suburbs. They would enjoy a hearty meal around a crowded table at one o’clock, would inspect the local country club for a view of the links or the golfers in their “sports” clothes, indulge, perhaps, in a motor trip to gain further aspects of the autumnal foliage, or, complaining of having over-eaten and demurring at any effort, establish themselves at the card table to while away the rest of the afternoon at bridge. At five o’clock the swarm that had filtered into the country all morning through the Pennsylvania Station would decide with one accord to return to the city, the cars would be jammed and every seat taken long before the westbound trains reached Cohasset Beach. It was always a noisy crowd with crying, tired babies wriggling in parents’ laps, golfers arguing about their scores and the adjustment of their bets, silly girls convulsed at one another’s confidences or lifting shrill pipes of mirth at the hoarse whispered comments from slouching male escorts, returning ball teams of youthful enthusiasts who banged each other over the head and vented their high spirits in rough jibes or horse-play.
Sunday travel was a bore, thought Jeannette in mild vexation. Even the outbound trains during the morning, which were never more than comfortably filled, stopped at every station along the line, no matter how insignificant. It took ten minutes longer to get to Cohasset Beach on Sundays than on any other day of the week; the express trains that left the city late in the afternoons from Monday to Saturday landed Roy home in nineteen minutes. It used to take a weary forty-five, Jeannette remembered, when the East River had first to be crossed by ferry and the rest of the way travelled in the old racketing, shabby, plush-seated, puffing steam trains from Long Island City.
She fell to musing as she idly watched the country flying past. She recalled the time when she and Martin had paid their first visit to Cohasset Beach as guests of the Herbert Gibbses and had gone picnicking on the shore at the Family Yacht Club. The Gibbses owned a handsome home on the Point to-day, and the little Yacht Club had been merged into the Cohasset Beach Yacht Club, which, since the fire that had laid it in ashy ruins, was now housed in a large, imposing edifice of brick and stone. The town itself,—then hardly more than a summer resort for “rich New Yorkers,” a few hundred houses scattered carelessly over some wooded hills,—had grown within the last dozen years into a flourishing community with banks, brick business blocks, and fireproof schools, with paved streets, and rows upon rows of white painted houses with green shutters and fan-shaped transoms above panelled colonial doorways. The woods were gone; the sycamores and gnarled old apple trees had given place to spindling elms set at orderly intervals on either side the carefully graded streets and to formal little gardens and close-cropped patches of lawn. The dilapidated wooden station had been supplanted by a substantial concrete affair, surrounded with cement pavements, and provided with comfortable, steam-heated waiting-rooms. The whirring electric trains swept on to other thriving villages further down the Island, and paused, coming or going, but a minute or two at the older town which had once been the terminal. There were now blocks and blocks of these trimly-built, neatly-equipped houses at Cohasset Beach, each with its garden, its curving cement walks and contiguous garage, and Messrs. Adolph Kuntz and Stephen Teschemacher had built stone mansions for themselves in the center of Cohasset Beach Park, to-day the “court” end of town.
Alice and Roy lived in humbler quarters: the old frame house Fritz Wiggens and his paralytic mother had once occupied. It was yellow and gabled, rusty and blistered, and spread itself out in ungainly fashion over a none-too-large bit of ground. It had, by no means, been a poor investment, although the building had needed a steady stream of repairs since the Beardsleys acquired it. Roy had been offered three times what he paid for it on account of its desirable location overlooking the waters of the Sound. Every now and then he and Alice discussed selling the place but invariably reached the same conclusion: Rents were prohibitive and no other house half as satisfactory could be purchased for the money without assuming a mortgage, an additional financial burden not to be considered; their problem was to devise ways of reducing expenses rather than increasing them.
Jeannette had decided to walk to her sister’s house, but on the platform as she descended from the train she unexpectedly encountered Zeb Kline and his wife, awaiting the arrival of Sunday guests. Zeb had married Nick Birdsell’s daughter and gone into partnership with his father-in-law; Birdsell & Kline, General Contractors, had built most of the new houses in Cohasset Beach, and now Zeb had a fine stucco one of his own, and his wife drove about in her limousine and kept a chauffeur.
At the time Jeannette and Martin separated, the former had been aware that the sympathy of the community was with her genial, amusing, good-looking husband. The townsfolk considered she had treated him “shamefully”; only Edith French and the Doc were acquainted with the true facts of the case and had defended her, but the Doc and his wife had moved away within a year after Jeannette returned to work, and she had lost touch with them. Word reached her that they had settled in St. Louis, that the Doc had had his right hand amputated as the result of an infection from an operation, and that he was running a drug store there. Later Jeannette heard that Edith had left him and married an actor.
Suspecting a hostile attitude among these friends and acquaintances of her married years, Jeannette had kept herself carefully aloof from all of them when Roy and Alice selected Cohasset Beach for their home. She would avert her eyes when passing any of them on the street, or would bow with but a brief, unsmiling inclination of the head when forced to acknowledge recognition.
Now, as she came face to face with Zeb Kline and his wife, Zeb, a trifle flustered, lifted his cap and greeted her by name, and Jeannette, also taken unawares, responded with more cordiality than she felt. She was somewhat perturbed by the incident and was conscious of Kitty Birdsell Kline’s appraising eye following her as she made her way across the station platform.
It was this trifling occurrence that induced her to alter her intention and ride to Alice’s. Mrs. Kline might be admiring her,—her clothes and carriage,—or she might be sneering. In either case, the scrutiny was unwelcome, and, straightening her shoulders, Jeannette directed her steps toward one of the shabby, waiting Fords, and climbed in. She had no intention of letting the Klines sweep by her in their limousine while she trudged along the sidewalk.
Established in her taxi and rattling over the familiar route to her sister’s home, a pleasant thought of Zeb came to her. After all, he was the best of that rough and common group; he had always been polite to her, honest and straightforward; she remembered how kind he had been about the construction of the screens for the bungalow’s windows, hurrying their making and charging her practically no more than they had cost. She wondered if he had been to Philadelphia recently or had heard anything more of Martin. If she should chance to meet Zeb in the street some day, she debated whether or not she should ask him for news.
Baby Roy, clad in his Sunday corduroy “knickers” and a white shirt, which Jeannette knew well had been put upon him clean that morning, was sprawled on the cement steps of the Beardsleys’ home as her vehicle stopped before it. The cleanly appearance had departed from Baby Roy’s shirt, the trousers had become divorced from it, his collar was rumpled, and the bow tie, which his aunt suspected Etta’s hurried fingers had tied before church, was bedraggled and askew over one shoulder. He lay on his back, his head upon the hard stone, his fair hair in tousled confusion, gazing straight upward into the sky, his arms waving aimlessly above him. He made no move at the sound of the motor-car and only stirred when Jeannette reached the steps.
“Hello, Aunt Jan,” he drawled in his curious, indolent voice.
“Well, I declare,” said Jeannette, surveying him with puzzled amusement, “will you kindly tell me what you’re doing there? What are you looking at? What do you think you see?”
Baby Roy smiled foolishly, and with open mouth, twisted his jaw slowly from side to side.
“Aw,—I was just thinking,” he answered in awkward embarrassment. He got to his feet and put his arms around his aunt’s neck as she stooped to kiss him.
His cheek was soft and warm, and he smelled of dirt and sunburn.
“You’re a sight,” she told him; “your mother will be wild. Why don’t you try to keep yourself clean one day a week at least?”
“Ma won’t care,” the youngster observed, “and Et won’t say nothin’.”
“Pronounce your ‘g’s, Baby Roy,—say ‘noth-ing.’ Why will Etta say nothing?”
“’Cause she’s got her feller.”
“Who? That pimply-faced Eckles boy?”
The child nodded and then irrelevantly added:
“Nettie’s got appendicitis.”
“Good gracious!” exclaimed Jeannette. “Where did she get that?”
Further information was not forthcoming. The woman’s mind flew to the possible complications such a calamity would precipitate as she opened her bag and felt among its contents for the nickel package of lemon drops she had purchased at the Pennsylvania Station while waiting for her train. She shook three of the candies out into Baby Roy’s dirt-streaked palm, and was admonishing the recipient that they were to be eaten one by one, when there was a clatter of hard shoes on the porch and a boy of thirteen catapulted out of the house.
“Dibs on the funny paper!” he yelled.
Jeannette eyed him with assumed disapproval.
“There’s no necessity for such a racket, Frank; it’s Sunday, remember, and your sister’s sick and everything.”
She proceeded at once, however, to unfold her newspaper and to hand him the comic section.
“I brought you one out of the American, too.” Frank seized the papers and grunted his thanks.
“How is Nettie?” inquired his aunt.
She had to repeat her question for the boy’s attention was already absorbed by the colored pictures.
“Oh, she’s all right, I guess,” he answered carelessly.
“Is she really sick?”
“I dunno.”
Reproof was on Jeannette’s lips but she checked herself. Frank was her favorite among her sister’s children; he was the only one of them, she was at pains to declare frequently, who had any “gumption.” The rest were like their easy-going, amiable parents. Frank had some of her own energy; he was like her in many ways. It was clear he was destined to be the mainstay of his father’s and mother’s old age. He was sure to get on, make money, be successful no matter in what direction he turned his energies. A fine, clever boy, she considered him, with some “get-up-and-get” in his composition.
She left the two brothers seated side by side on the steps, poring over the “comics.” Their voices followed her as she entered the house.
“Go on, read it to me;—go on, read it to me. Don’t be a dirty stinker.”
“Aw, shut up, can’t yer? Wait till I get through first.”
Jeannette met Alice in the hallway and her first question was of the sick child. Alice kissed her with affection and hugged her warmly.
“I don’t think anything’s the matter,” she said reassuringly. “Nothing in the world but an old-fashioned stomach-ache; something she’s eaten,—that’s all. I thought it wiser to keep her in bed for to-day,—give her insides a good rest.”
“Why, Baby Roy said it was appendicitis!”
“Oh, nonsense! The child isn’t any more sick than I am!”
“Well, it gave me quite a turn.”
“Of course!” agreed Alice.
Jeannette eyed her sister a moment in suspicion. Allie’s vehement rejection of the idea that anything might be seriously the matter suggested Christian Science. Jeannette had heard Mrs. Eddy’s teachings discussed more or less frequently of late by her sister and brother-in-law. She suspected they both leaned toward that faith but lacked courage to come out openly and declare themselves. She wondered how far these idiotic principles had laid hold of them, and now, with a searching glance, she asked:
“Has error crept in?”
Alice blushed readily and laughed.
“I don’t know anything about that. If she’s any worse to-morrow, I’ll send for the doctor.
“I should hope so,” Jeannette approved warmly.
“Etta’s delighted with her dress,” Alice said with an abruptness that suggested a desire to change the subject. “You were a dear to help her out.”
“It was nothing at all,—less than five dollars. It seemed a shame not to get something that was becoming, and there’s real value in that garment.”
“Oh, yes, indeed. I could see that.”
Great thumping, banging and scraping were going on somewhere down below.
“Roy and Ralph are cleaning the furnace,” explained Alice in answer to her sister’s puzzled look. “It hasn’t been fired,—oh, I don’t think since last March.... Come upstairs and lay your things on Etta’s bed. I’ve got Nettie in mine; it’s so much pleasanter in our room.”
The two women mounted the creaking stairs. In the front room a little girl was propped up in bed with several pillows; she was cutting out pictures from magazines and the bed clothes and carpet were littered with scraps and slips of paper; a thin, plaid shawl was about her shoulders, fastened clumsily across her chest with a large safety-pin. She was not a particularly pretty child; her face was too long and too pale, but her hair, soft and rippling, had the warm brown color that had distinguished her mother’s, and her eyes were of the same hue.
“Look, Moth’, I put a new hat on this lady and she looks a lot nicer.” The child held up a wavering silhouette for inspection. “Oh, hello, Aunt Janny,” she cried as her aunt appeared in her mother’s wake; “was that you in the taxi?”
There was a note of real pleasure, Jeannette felt, in the little girl’s greeting, and she put some feeling into her kiss as she bent down to embrace her.
“I brought you some lemon drops, Nettie, but since you’re upset perhaps you’d better not have them.”
“Oh, I’m quite all right,” said the little girl brightly. “I’m not the least bit sick.”
Here was the cloven hoof of Christian Science again, thought her aunt darkly; the child had been coached, no doubt! It was a great pity if that rigmarole was going to be taken up by Alice and Roy to make them all miserable!
“Well, I think I wouldn’t eat candy till to-morrow,” advised Jeannette. “What I think you need is a good dose of castor-oil,” she added firmly with a glance at her sister. “But here,—I have something here, I know you’ll like much better,” she went on, searching in her bag. She brought to light a gold-colored, metal pencil about three inches long with a tiny ring at one end, and gave it to the child.
“Oh, thank you, Aunt Janny,—thank you awfully,” cried the invalid, immediately beginning to experiment with the cap which, in turning, shortened or lengthened the lead.
“Where’s Etta?”
“Gone to church,” Alice replied.
“Heavens! ... What for?” Jeannette turned inquiring eyes upon the girl’s mother. It was not that she lacked sympathy with any religious observance on her niece’s part, but church-going for Etta was unusual. The younger children were sent dutifully to Sunday school but the rest of the family were rather casual about attending divine services. Alice smiled significantly in answer to the query, elevated a shoulder, and indulged in a slight head-shake.
“I suppose that means a boy again,” Jeannette said, interpreting the look and gesture. “Doesn’t she see enough of them afternoons and evenings? I declare, Alice, I don’t know what you’re going to do with that girl. Yesterday afternoon, all she could talk about was the movies, and she even stopped me in front of a photographer’s show-case to ask me if I didn’t think a man in it was perfectly stunning! ... He was old enough to be her father!”
“Well, all the girls are like that nowadays.”
“It was decidedly different when we were that age.”
“Oh, indeed it was,” agreed Etta’s mother. “I was thinking only yesterday how we used——”
“You made a great mistake,” interrupted Jeannette, “in letting her bob her hair. It’s affected her whole character. She was never quite so frivolous before.”
“That was her father’s doing,” said Alice mildly.
“Oh, well,—he’d let her do anything she wanted! She has but to ask! ... What do you intend to do with her? Let her run round this way indefinitely? I’d make her take up sewing or cooking or learn some language.”
“Etta can sew quite nicely,” said her mother loyally, “and she’s a good cook. She wants to go to work,—you know that. She thinks you’d have no difficulty in getting her a position at the office.”
“Well, perhaps I would, and perhaps I wouldn’t. But I don’t approve of the idea! She’d much better go to Columbia or Hunter College.”
“But, Janny dear, we’ve been all over that, time and time again. That costs money. It would take several hundred a year to send Etta to college, and we haven’t got it. Roy thinks it’s much more important that Ralph should follow up his engineering at some university.”
Jeannette tapped her pursed lips with a meditative finger.
“When’s he ready?”
“This is his last year in High School.”
“It would be wiser to send him to business college.”
“Roy’s heart is set on Princeton, but if we can’t afford that,—and I don’t see how we possibly can!—then Columbia. He could commute, you know.”
Voices and the sound of feet on the porch announced arrivals. Jeannette drew aside a limp window curtain and gazed down at the front steps.
“It’s that pimply Eckles youth,” she announced.
“His dog has nine puppies and he’s promised one to me,” came from the bed.
“I hope Etta doesn’t ask him to stay to dinner,” Alice remarked, “it’ll make Kate furious.”
“No, he’s going.... I must take off my things.”
Etta running upstairs a moment or two later found her aunt before the mirror in her room, powdering her nose.
“Oh, darling!” The girl rushed at her and flung her arms about her enthusiastically.
“Careful,—careful, dearie,—I’ve just fixed myself.” Jeannette held Etta’s arms to the girl’s sides and implanted a brief kiss on her forehead. The enthusiasm of her niece was in nowise crushed.
“Didn’t we have fun yesterday, Aunt Jan? Oh, I just love going shopping with you! You know everything!”
Jeannette smiled complacently. She was a dear child, this! So responsive and appreciative!
Suddenly she glanced at her sharply, whipped a handkerchief from the bureau, and before unsuspecting Etta could guess what she was about, gave the girl’s lip a quick rub. There was a tell-tale smudge of red on the white linen. Jeannette held forth the evidence accusingly and her niece began to laugh, hanging her head like a little girl half her years.
“I tell you, Etta, it doesn’t become you! Your lips are red enough without putting any of that Jap paste on them! When you rouge them, it makes you look cheap and common.... I don’t care what the other girls do!”
She surveyed the girl critically: a handsome child with a lovely mop of dark brown hair that clung in rich clusters of natural curls about her neck and ears; her eyes were unusually large and of a deep, velvety duskiness, though there was a perpetual merry light in them, and her mouth, too, had a ready smile; her teeth were glistening white, but her complexion was bad, given to eruptions and blotches.
“And I wish,” continued Jeannette, “you’d stop eating candy and ice-cream sodas, and leave cake and pastry alone. Your skin would clear out in no time. It’s a shame a girl as pretty as you has to spoil her looks by injudicious eating.”
“Isn’t it the limit?” agreed Etta. Her face clouded and she went close to the mirror to study her reflection narrowly.
“I never knew it to fail!” she said in disgust. “Wednesday night, Marjorie Bowen’s giving a bridge party, and she’s invited a boy I’m just dying to meet! And there’s a blossom coming right here on my chin! I always break out if there’s anything special doing!”
“Well, I tell you!” exclaimed her aunt. “You wouldn’t have those things if you’d diet with a little care. Massaging won’t help a bit; you’ve got to remember to stop eating sweets.... Who’s the new beau you’re ‘dying to meet’?”
“Oh, he’s a high-roller,—lives down on the Point,—drives a Stutz and everything! The girls are all mad about him. He’s been at Manlius for the last two or three years, and now he’s freshman at Yale.... Name’s Herbert Gibbs!”
“Goodness gracious!” ejaculated her aunt.
“What’s the matter?”
“Well, ... nothing....”
“Oh, tell me please, Aunt Jan!—Please tell me!”
“Don’t be foolish! I knew his father, that’s all, and I once saw your ‘high-roller’ in his crib when he was less than a year old.... Isn’t he rather expressionless and flat-headed?”
“No; I think he’s perfectly stunning. He wears the best-looking clothes and he’s an awful sport!”
“Well, you’d never expect it, if you’d known his father,” her aunt said dryly.
There was an ascending tramp of feet on the stairs, and Roy with his eldest son appeared, dishevelled and sooty.
“That was a dirty job, all right,” declared Roy after he had greeted his sister-in-law and kissed her with the tips of his lips for fear of contaminating her. “I don’t think she’s been cleaned for years. We shovelled out a ton of soot. Ralph did all the hard work.”
He seemed a little ridiculous, a little pathetic to Jeannette, as he stood before her with his smirched and blackened face, and his tight, wan smile, the upper lip drawn taut across his row of even teeth. His stuck-up hair was still unruly, and had begun to recede at the temples and to thin on top; his face was lined with tiny wrinkles and he wore spectacles with bifocal lenses and metal rims,—an insignificant man, industrious, conscientious, weighed down with the cares and responsibilities of a large family. Life had dealt harshly with him, and somehow, remembering the boy with the whimsical smile who had once made such earnest love to herself in the flush of youth, Jeannette could not but regard the result as tragic. She was fond of Roy, nevertheless; he was always amiable, always good-tempered and cheerful, but she wondered at this moment as she took stock of him what sort of a man he would have become if she, and not Alice, had married him. Different, no doubt, for she would have pushed him into material success; she would not have been as easy-going with him as Alice; he had wanted to write; well, if she had been his wife, he would probably have turned out to be a very successful author for he had ability.
Roy’s oldest son, Ralph, was in many ways like his father. He had the same sweet, obliging nature and was even gentler. His voice had the quality of Baby Roy’s: indolent, drawling, dragging, and he spoke with a leisureliness that was often irritating. He was slight of build, narrow-chested and stoop-shouldered, a student by disposition, forever burrowing into a book or frowning over a magazine article. Jeannette would have considered this highly commendable had Ralph ever shown any evidence of having gleaned something from his reading, or displayed any knowledge as a result of it. What he read seemed to pass through his mind like water through a sieve.
She had brought down an advanced copy of the forthcoming issue of Corey’s Commentary for him, and he accepted this now, with an appreciative word.
She always made a point of bringing presents to her sister’s children whenever she visited them; she liked the reputation of never coming empty-handed. The gifts, themselves, might be trifling,—indeed she thought it becoming that they should be,—but she strove to make them sufficiently appropriate to indicate considerable thoughtfulness in their selection. She regarded herself as very generous where her nieces and nephews were concerned. Yesterday she had enabled Etta to buy a more expensive dress than was possible with the money her mother had given her, and last week she had sent Frank a fine sweater from a sale of boys’ sweaters she happened upon in a department store. Of all her sister’s children, Frank baffled her. He treated her casually, almost with indifference. While the other children swarmed about her with effusive gratitude and affection, whenever she gave them anything, Frank either grunted his thanks or failed to express them at all. She loved him by far the best, and was continually making him presents or defending him from criticism. Her partiality was so noticeable she was mildly teased about it by the rest of the family; but it drew no recognition from the boy. His aunt, eyeing him with great yearning in her heart, would often wonder how she could bribe him to put his stout, rough arms about her neck and kiss her once with warmth and tenderness. She was never able to stir him to the faintest betrayal of sentiment.
Her benevolence toward her sister’s family frequently went further than presents for the children. At Christmas-time she was munificent to them all, and she never forgot one of their birthdays. Once a year she took Nettie, Frank and Baby Roy to the Hippodrome, and on the occasional Saturdays that Alice or Etta came to the city, she always had them to lunch with her, accompanied them on their shopping trips, and contributed, here and there, to their small purchases. Not infrequently when she knew Alice was worrying unduly about some vexatious account, she would press a neatly folded bill into her hand. She liked the power that money gave her where they were concerned; she delighted in their gratitude and deference to her opinions; she was an important factor in their lives and she enjoyed the part.
At one o’clock dinner was announced. There was little ceremony about the Beardsleys’ meals; the important business was to be fed. Kate, the cook and waitress,—a big-bosomed, wide-hipped Irish woman, with the strength of a horse and the disposition of a bear,—had scant regard for the preferences of any one member of the family she served. Her attention was concentrated upon her work; indeed, it required a considerable amount of clear-thinking and planning to dispatch it at all, and she brooked no interference. Roy, Alice, and the children were frankly afraid of her; even Jeannette admitted a wholesome respect.
“Oh, Kate’s in an awful tantrum!” the whisper would go around the house and the family would deport itself with due regard to Kate’s mood.
She piled the food on the table, rattled the bell and departed kitchenward, leaving the Beardsleys to assemble as promptly or as tardily as they chose. There never were but two courses to a meal: meat and dessert. Kate had no time to bother with soup or salad. Her cooking was good, however, and there were always great dishes of potatoes and other vegetables as well as a large plate of muffins or some other kind of hot bread. Jeannette firmly asserted that Kate’s meat pie with its brown crisp crust could not be surpassed in any kitchen.
To-day there were but seven at table as Nettie remained upstairs in bed. She would have crackers and milk later, her mother announced.
“Milk toast,” Jeannette suggested. But Alice shook her head and made a motion in the direction of the kitchen.
“She doesn’t like anyone fussing out there,” she whispered, “and I don’t like to ask her to do it herself; it’s extra work no matter how trivial. The Graham crackers will do just as well; Nettie’s quite fond of them.”
It was a cheerful scene, this gathering at the table of Roy, his wife, and their children. Tongues wagged constantly; there was happy laughter and loud talk, much clatter of china and clinking of silverware. Roy stood up to carve and he served generously; plates were passed from hand to hand around the table to Alice who sat opposite him and she added heaping spoonfuls of creamed cauliflower or string beans, and mashed potatoes. The pile of food set down in front of each seemed, by its quantity, unappetizing to Jeannette, but the others evidently did not share her feeling, for they cleaned their plates, while Frank and Baby Roy almost always asked for more. The remarks that flew about the board had small relevancy, but she found them interesting, liked to lean back in her chair, with wrists folded one across the other in her lap, and listen comfortably.
“Mr. Kuntz tells me he’s sold the Carleton place; the Hirshstines bought it,” Roy might observe.
“Oh, golly,—those kikes!”
“Frank, you mustn’t speak that way; Mrs. Hirshstine’s a nice woman, and Abe Hirshstine’s very public-spirited.”
“They may be Jews all right, but I wouldn’t consider them ‘kikes’; there’s a lot of difference.” Ralph’s drawl often had that irritating quality his aunt disliked.
“Well, she’s certainly a dumb-bell, if there ever was one.” Jeannette would infer this was of the daughter.
“That’s because Buddy Eckles’s after her!”
Etta with curling lip would dismiss this wit