Classic Audiobook Collection - The Dancing Girls by Edna Ferber ~ Full Audiobook [drama]

Episode Date: December 21, 2022

The Dancing Girls by Edna Ferber audiobook. Genre: drama In The Dancing Girls, Edna Ferber gathers four sharp, warmhearted stories about ordinary people pushed to their limits by class, family obligation, and war. In the title tale, Chippewa, Wisconsin, is split cleanly by money and by the railroad tracks. Floyd 'Chug' Scaritt, a talented young garage owner and irresistible dance partner, knows exactly where he stands - until a late-night accident and the sudden demands of World War I briefly scramble the town's social rules. As uniforms, dances, and patriotic committees bring unlikely people together, Chug discovers a different kind of girl - and a different kind of future - than the one his old crowd expects. In 'Old Lady Mandle,' a proud Chicago matriarch reigns over her devoted son until a new wife threatens the balance of power. 'Long Distance' follows a wounded American soldier in an English rehabilitation hospital, where love letters and memory wage a quiet battle. And in 'One Hundred Per Cent,' the indomitable Emma McChesney Buck returns to work and travel, determined to put every ounce of herself into the home-front effort. Together, these stories blend humor, tenderness, and unsparing social observation. For ad-free listening try our premium subscription Chapters (Approximate) (00:00:00) Chapter 1 (00:49:44) Chapter 2 (01:41:21) Chapter 3 (01:53:39) Chapter 4 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Dancing Girls by Edna Ferber When, on opening a magazine, you see a picture of a young man in uniform with the background of assorted star-shells in full flower, a young man in uniform gazing into the eyes of a young lady in uniform, a young man in uniform crouching in a trench dug out or shell-hole, this happens. You skip lightly past the story of the young man in uniform, you jump hurriedly over the picture. and you plunge into the next story noting that it is called the crimsoned emerald and that judging from the pictures all the characters in it wear evening clothes all the time chug scarrett took his dose of war with the best of them but this is of chug before and after taking if inadvertently there should sound a faintly martial note it shall be stifled at once with a series of those stylish dots indicative of what the early victorian writers conveniently called a drawn veil nothing could be fairer than that chug scarritt was and is the proprietor and sole owner of the alight garage and he pronounced it with a long eye automobile parties touring wisconsin used to mistake him for a handyman about the place and would call to him hey boy come here and take a look at this engine she ain't hidden when chug finished with her she She was hitting all right, a medium-sized young fellow in the early twenties with a serious mouth, laughing eyes, and a muscular grace pretty well concealed by the grease-grimed

grotesquery of overalls. Out of the overalls and in his tight-fitting belted green suit and long-visored green cap and flat russed shoes, he looked too young and insouciant to be the sole owner, much less the proprietor of anything so successful and established as the Elight Garage. In a town like Chippewa, Wisconsin, or in any other sort of town for that manner, a prosperous garage knows more about the scandals of the community than does a barbershop, a dressmaker by the day, or a pool-room habituary. It conceals more skeletons than the catacombs.

Chugg's scarrett, had he cared to open his lips and speak, might have poured forth such chronicles as to make Spoon River sound a peon of sweetness and light. He knew how much old Manhattan's chauffeur knocked down on gas and repairs. He knew just how much the Tlotsons had gone into debt for their twin six. And why Emil Soder drove to uscash so often on business, and who supplied the flowers for Mrs. McGurney's electric? Chug didn't encourage gossip in his garage. Whenever possible, he put his foot down on its ugly head in a vain attempt to crush it. But there was something about the very atmosphere of the place that caused it to thrive and flourish.

It was like a combination newspaper office and Pullman car smoker. Chug tried to keep the thing down, but there might generally be seen lounging about the doorway or perched on the running board of an idle car, a little group of slum. slim, flat-heeled, low-voiced young men in farm-fitting, high-waisted suits of that peculiarly virulent shade of green which makes its wearer look as if he had been picked before he was ripe. They were a lean, slim-flanked crew with a feline sort of grace about them, ters of speech, quick-of-eye, engine-wise, and generally nursing a boil just above the collar of their soft shirt, not vicious, not even tough.

rather bored, though they didn't know it, in their boredom resorting to the only sort of solace afforded boys of their class in a town of Chippewa size, cheap amusements, cheap girls, cheap talk. This last, unless the topic chanced to be of games or of things mechanical, baseball, or a sweet running engine brought out the best that was in them. At their worst, perhaps, they stood well back in the dim, cool shade of the garage doorway to watch how, when the girls went by in their thin summer dresses, the strong sunlight made a transparency of their skirts. At suppertime they would growl to their surprised sisters.

Put on some petticoats, you. Way you girls run around it's enough to make a person sick." Chugg Scarratt escaped being one of these by a double margin. There was his business responsibility on one side, his very early history on the other. Once you learn the derivation of Chugg's nickname, you have that history from the age of five to twenty-five inclusive. Chug had been christened Floyd, she had got it out of a book, but it was an appendix rather than an appellation.

No one ever dreamed of addressing him by that misnomer, unless you accept his schoolteachers. Once or twice the boys had tried to use his name as a weapon, shrieking in a shrill falsetto and making two syllables of it. He put a stop to that soon enough with his fists and feet. His virility could have triumphed over a name twice as Puroil. For that matter, I once knew a young husky named Fayette, who, but that's another story. The Scarrots lived the other side of the tracks. If you know Chippewa, or its equivalent, you get the significance of that.

Nobody's. Not only did they live the other side of the track. They lived so close to them that the rush and rumble of the passing trains shook the two-story frame cottage and Rattle the crockery on the pantry shelves. The first intelligible sound the bar made was a chesty chuk-chuk-chug, an imitation of a panting engine tugging its freight load up the incline toward the junction. When Chug ran away, which was on an average of twice daily, he was invariably to be found at the switchman's or roaming about the freight yards. It got so that Stumpy Gans, the one-legged switchman, would hoist a signal to let

Mr. Scarrant know that Chug was safe. He took his first mechanical toy apart, piece by piece. Wait till your pa comes home, his mother had said with terrible significance. Chug, deep in the toy's wreckage, seemed undismayed. So Mrs. Scarrick gave him a light promissory slap and went on about her housework. that night before supper lynn scarrett addressed his son with a sternness quite at variance with his easy-going nature come here to me now then what's this about your smashing up good toys huh what do you mean christmas not two days back and here you go smashing the culprit trotted over to a corner and returned with a red-painted tin thing in his hand it was as good as new there may even have been some barely noticeable improvement in its local commotive powers.

Chug had merely taken it apart in order to put it together again, and he had been too absorbed to pause long enough to tell his mother so. After that, nothing that bore wheels, internally or externally, was safe from his investigating fingers. It was his first philosophied that really gave him his name. As he rode up and down, his short legs working like piston rods gone mad, pedestrians was scattered in terror. His onrush was as relentless as that of an engine on a track, and his horse, Chug-Chug-Dring,

as he bore down upon a passerby, caused that one to sidestep precipitously into the gutter, and none too soon. Chug earned his first real bicycle, carrying a paper route for the Chippewa Eagle. It took him two years. By the time he had acquired it, he knew so much about bicycles, from ball-bearings to handlebar, that its possession roused very little thrill in him. It was as when a lover has had to wait over long for his bride, as Chug whizzed about Chippewa Street's ringing an unnecessarily insistent bell.

You sensed that a motorcycle was already looming large in his mechanism-loving mind. By the time he was seventeen, Chug's motorcycle was spitting its way venomously down Elm Street, And the sequence of the seasons was not more inevitable than that an automobile should follow the motorcycle. True, he practically built it himself. Out of what appeared to be an old washer boiler, some wire and an engine made up of parts that embraced every known car from Ford to Fiat. He painted it an undeniable red, hooded it like a demon racer, and shifted to first. The thing went.

He was a natural mechanic. He couldn't spend a day with a piece of mechanism without having speeded it up or in some way done something to its belts, gears, wheels, motor. He was almost never separated from a monkey wrench or pliers, and he was always turning a nut or bolt or screw in his grease-grimed fingers. Right here, it should be understood that Chug never became a Steinmetz or a right, he remained just average plus to the end, with something more than a knack at things mechanical, a good deal of grease beneath his nails, and generally a smudge under one eye,

or a swipe of black across a cheek that gave him a misleadingly sinister and piratical look. There's nothing very magnificent, surely, in being the proprietor of a garage, even if it is the best-paying garage in Chippewa, where six out of ten families own a car, and summer tourists are as locusts turned beneficent. Sometime between Chugg's motorcycle and the home-mate automobile, Lynn Scarrett died. The loss to the household was social, more than economic. Lynn had been one of those good-natured, voluble, walrus-moustached men who make such poor providers. A carpenter by trade, he had always been a a spasmodic worker and a steady talker. His high hollow voice went on endlessly above the fusillade

of hammers at work and the clatter of dishes at home. Politics, unions, world events, local happenings, neighborhood gossip, all fed the endless stream of his loquacity. Well, now look at here. Take, for instance, one of these here big concerns. After he had gone, Mrs. Scarrett used to find herself listening to the silence. His ceaseless talk had often rasped her nerves to the point of hysteria, but now she missed it as we miss a dull ache, to which we have grown accustomed. Chug was in his second year at the Chippewa High School. He had always earned some money afternoons and Saturdays. Now he quit to go to work in earnest. His mother took it hard. I wanted you to have an education, she said, not just schooling, an education.

Minnie Scarrid had always had ambition and a fierce sort of pride. She had needed them to combat Lynn's shiftlessness and slack good nature. They had kept her two-story, frame cottage, painted and tidy, had her pride and ambition. They had managed a Sunday suit, always for chug, money for the contribution box, pork roast on Sundays, and a six. sitting-room, chill but elegant, with its plump pyramids of pillows embroidered with impossible daisies and carnations and violets, filling every corner. Mr. Scarrot had had to fight for Chugg's two years of high school.

He don't need no high school? Lynn Scarratt had argued in one of the rare quarrels between the two. I never had none. The retort to this was so obvious that his wife refrained from uttering it. Lynn continued, he don't go with none of my money. His age I was working, and had been for three years and more. You'll be fixing to send him to college next. Well, if I do, then what? Then you're crazy, said Lynn without heat, as one would state a self-evident fact.

That afternoon, Mr. Scarrot went down to the office of the Eagle and inserted a neat ad. Lace curtains done up like new, twenty-five cents a pair. Mr. Scarrant, 639 Out of Gammy Street. For years afterward, you never passed the Scarrett Place without seeing the long, skeleton frames of wooden curtain stretchers propped up against the back porch in the sun. Mr. Scarrett became famous for her curtains, as an artist is known for his middle distances, his woodland green or his flesh tones. In time, even the Hattons, who had always heretofore sent their fine curtains to Milwaukee to be

cleaned, trusted their lacy treasures to Mrs. Scarrett's expert hands. Chug went to high school on those lace curtains. He used to call for and deliver them. He rigged up a shelf-like device on his bicycle handlebars. On this the freshly laundered curtains reposed in their neat paper wrappings, as unwrinkled as when they had come from the stretching frame. At 17, he went to work at the Alight Garage. He hadn't been there a month before the owner was saying,

Say, Chug, take a look at this here, boss, will you? She don't run right, but I can't find out what's got into her. Chug would put his ear to the heart of the car and tap its vitals, and count its pulse beats as a doctor sounds you with his stethoscope. The look on his face was that of a violinist who tries his G-string. For the rest, he filled gas tanks, changed and pumped up tires, tested batteries, oiled tappets. But the thing that fascinated him was the engine. An oily blue-eyed boy in spattered overalls. He was always just emerging from beneath the car or crawling under

it. When a new car came in, on route, a proud glittering affair, he always managed to get a chance at it somehow, though the owner or chauffeur guarded it ever so jealously. The only thing on wheels that he really despised was an electric brogham. Chippewa's well-paved streets made these vehicles possible. Your true garage man's feelings for electrics is unprintable. Police that they call him was juice boxes. At home, Chug was forever rigging up labor-saving devices for his mother. The scarratt's window shades always rolled. Their doorbell always rang with a satisfying zing. The suction pump never stuck. By the time he was, he was a was twenty chug was manager of the garage and his mother was saying you're around that garage sixteen hours a day when you're home you're everlastingly reading those engineering papers and things your pa at your age had a girl for every night in the week and two on sundays

another year or so and i can buy out old binkie and own the place soon as i do i'm going to come home in the speediest boat in the barn and i'm going to bust up those curtain frames in to kindlein wood over my knee, and pile them in the backyard and make a bonfire out of them. They've been pretty good friends to his chug, those curtain frames. Hmm. He glanced at her par-borrowed fingers, just the same. It'll be nicks with the lace curtains for you. Glancing back on what has been told of Chug, he sounds somehow so much like a modern

rollo with a dash of Alger that unless something is told of his social side, he may be misunderstood. Chug was a natural-born dancer. There are young men who, after the music has struck up, can start out incredibly enough by saying, what is this anyway, while Sir Foxtrot? This was inconceivable to Chug. He had never had a dancing lesson in his life, but he had a sense of rhythm that was infallible. He could no more have danced out of time than he could have started a car on high, or confused the fliver with a twelve. He didn't look particularly swan-like as he danced, having large, sensible feet, but they were expert at not being where someone else's feet happened to be, and he could time a beat

to the fraction of a second. When you have practically spent your entire day sprawled under a bulky car, with a piece of dirty mat between you and the cement floor, your view limited to crank-case, transmission, universal, flywheel, differential, pan and brake rods, you can do with a bit of color in the evening, and just here was where Chippewa failed Chug. He had a grave problem confronting him in his search for an evening's amusement. Chippewa, Wisconsin was proud of its paved streets, its 30,000 population, its lighting system, and the Greek temple that was the new First National Bank.

It boasted of its interurban lines, its neat houses set well back along old elms, its paper mills, its plow works, and its prosperity. If you had told Chippewa that it was criminally ignoring Chug's crying need, it would have put you down as mad. Boiled down, Chug Scarratt's crying need was girls. At 22 or 3, you must have girls in your life if you're normal. Chug was, but Chippewa wasn't. It had too many millionaires at one end and too many laborers at the other for a town of

thirty thousand. Its millionaires had their golf club, their high-powered cars, their smart social functions. They were always running down to Chicago to hear Ghali Kuchy, and when it came to costume, diamond bracelet, daring decoage, large feather fans, and brilliant buckled slippers. You couldn't tell their women from the city-beckery. dwellers. There is much money in paper mills and plow works. The mill hands and their families were well-paid, thrifty, clannish Swedes, most of them, with a liberal sprinkling of Belgians and Slavs. They belonged to all sorts of societies and lodges, to which they paid

infinitesimal dues and swore lifelong allegiance. Chugg's Scarratt and bars of his kind were left high and dry. So then when Chug went out with the girl, it was likely to be by way of someone's kitchen or with one of those who worked in the rag room at the paper and pulp mill. They were the very girls who switched up and down in front of the garage evenings and Saturday afternoons. Many of them had been farm girls in Michigan or northern Wisconsin or even Minnesota. In Chippewa they did housework.

Big, robust girls they were, miraculously well-dressed in. good shoes and suits and hats. They had bad teeth, for the most part, with a scum over them, over fond of coffee, and were rather dull company, but they were good-natured and hearty and generous. The paper-mill girls were quite another type. Theirs was a grayish pallor, due to lungs dust choked from work in the rag-room. That same pallor promised ill for future generations in Chippewa, but they had a rather appealing wistful fragility their eyes generally looked too big for their faces they possessed though a certain vivacity and diabdiere that the big slower-witted swede girls lacked when chug felt the need of a dash of red in the evening he had little choice in the winter he often went up to woodman's hall the dances at woodman's hull were of the kind advertised that fifty cents a couple extra lady twenty-five cents Ladies Without Jents' 35 cents.

Bergstrom's two-piece orchestra. Chug usually went alone, but he escorted home one of the ladies without gents. It was not that he'd begrudged the fifty cents. Chug was free enough with his money. He went to these dances on a last-minute impulse, almost against his will, and out of sheer boredom. Once there, he danced every dance and all the encores. The girls fought for him. Their manner of dancing was cheek to cheek in wordless rhythm.

His arm about the ample waist of one of the sweetest girls, or clasping close the frail form of one of the mill-hands, Chug would dance on and on, indefatigably, until the music played Home Sweet Home. The conversation, if any, varied little. The music swell tonight, from the girl. Yeah, you're some little dancer, Chug, I'll say. Honest, I could dance with you forever.

this with a pressure of the girl's arm and spoken with a little accent whether swedish belgian or slavic they all say that crazy about yourself ain't you not as crazy as i am about you with tardy gallantry he was very little stirred really yeah you are i wish you was it makes no never mind's to you who you're dancing with so long as you're dancing this last came one evening as a variant in the usual formula it startled Chug a little so that he held the girl off the better to look at her. She was Wanda something or other, and anybody but Chug would have been alive to the fact that she had been stalking him for weeks with solid persistence. "'Dance with you three times tonight, haven't I?' he demanded. He was rather surprised to find that this was so. Wish it was thirty. That was Wanda. Her very eagerness foiled her. She cheapened herself. When Chug said, can I see you home?"

He knew the answer before he put the question. Too easy to get along with, Wanda. Always there ahead of time waiting when you made a date with her. Too ready to forgive you when you failed to show up. Telephone you when you were busy. Didn't give a fellow a chance to come half way, but went seven-eighths of it herself. An ignorant, kindly, dangerous girl with the physical development of a woman and the mind of a child.

There were dozens like her in Chippewa. If the girls of his own class noticed him at all, it was the more to ignore him as a rather grimy mechanic passing briefly before their vision down out of Gami Street on his way to and from dinner. He was shy of them. They had a middle-class primness which forbade their making advances, even had they been so inclined. Chug would no more have scraped acquaintance with them than he would have tried to flirt with Angie Hatton, old Manhattan's daughter, and the richest girl in Chippewa, so rich that she

drove her own car with the chauffeur stuck up behind. You didn't have to worry about Wanda and her kind. There they were. Take them or leave them. They expected you to squeeze their waist when you dance with them, and so you did. You didn't have to think about what you were going to say to them. Mrs. Scarritz suspected, in a vague sort of way, that Chug was running with the hired girl, The thought distressed her. She was too smart a woman to nag him about it. She tried diplomacy.

Why don't you bring some young folks home to eat, Chug? I'd like to fuss around for company. She was a wonderful cook, Mr. Scarratt, and liked to display her skill. Who is there to bring? The boys and girls you go around with. Who is it you're always fixing up for evenings? Nobody? Mr. Scarrick tried another tech. I suppose this house isn't good enough for him, is that it? Good enough. Chug laughed rather grimly. I'd like to know what's the matter with it. There was, as a matter of fact, nothing the matter with it.

It was as spick and span as paint and polish could make it. The curtain-stretching days were long past. There had even been talk of moving out of the house by the tracks, but at the last moment Mr. Scarrett had rebelled. I'll miss the sound of the trains. I'm used to em. It's got so. I can tell just where my right hand'll be when the seven-fifty-two.

goes by in the morning, and I've got used to putting on the potatoes when I hear the eleven forty. Let's stay, Chug. So they had stayed. Gradually they had added an improvement here, a convenience there, as Chug's prosperity grew, until now the cottage by the tracks was newly painted, bathroomed, electric lighted, with a cement walk front and back, and a porch with a wicker swing and flower baskets. Chug gave his mother more housekeeping money than she needed, though she in turn served him

meals that would have threatened the waistline of an older and less active man. There was a banana pie, for instance. It sounds sickish, but weight, which she baked in a deep pan, and over which she poured a golden-brown custard, all flecked with crusty melted sugar. You took a bite, and lo! It had vanished like a sweet dewdrop, leaving in your mouth. a taste as of nectar and clover honey and velvet cream. Mr. Scarrot used to gauge Chugg's plans for the evening by his ablutions.

Elaborate enough at any time, on dance nights they amounted to a right. In the old days, Chugg's father had always made a brief enough business of the process he called washing up. A hand-basin in the kitchen sink or on the back porch bench sufficed. The noises he made were all out of proportion. portion to the results obtained. His snufflings and snortings and splashings were like those of a grampus at play. When he emerged from them, you were surprised to find that he had merely washed his face. Chug had greased to fight. He had learned how, in his first days at the garage,

his teacher had been old Rudy and mechanic who had tinkered around automobiles since their kerosene days, and who knew more about them than their inventor. Soap and water alone. And, were powerless against the grease in carbon and dust that ground themselves into chug's skin. First he lathered himself with warm soapy water. Then, while arms, neck and face were still wet, he covered them with oil, preferably lubricating oil, medium. Finally he rubbed sawdust all over, great handfuls of it.

The grease rolled out then, magically, leaving his skin smooth and white. Rudy, while advocating this process, made little use of it. He dispatched the whole grimy business by the simple method of washing in gasoline, guaranteed to take the varnish off a car offender. It seemed to leave Rudy's tough hide undevestated. At twenty-four, Chug Scarrett was an upstanding, level-headed, and successful young man, who worked hard all day and found himself restless and almost irritable toward evening. could stay home and read or go back to the garage, though after eight things were very quiet.

For amusement there were the pool shack, the cheap dances, the street corner, the YMCA. This last had proved a boon. The swimming pool, the gym, the reading room had given Chug many happy, healthful hours, but after all there was something— Chug didn't know it was girls. you could talk to and be with and take around, but it was. After an hour at the pool or around the reading table or talking and smoking, he usually drifted out into the quiet street. He could go home, or there was Wanda. If he went home, he found himself snapping rather irritably

at his mother for no reason at all, ashamed of doing it, powerless somehow to stop. He took to driving in the evening, long drives along the country roads, his cap pulled low over his eyes, the wind blowing fresh in his face. He used to cover mile on mile, sitting slumped low on his spine, his eyes on the road, the engine running sweet and true. Sometimes he took Wanda along or one of the mill girls, but not often. They were disappointed if you didn't drive with one arm around them, he liked being alone. It soothed him. It was thus that he first met the Weld girl. The Weld girl was the plain daughter of the widow Weld. The widow Weld was a musical-comedy sort of widow in French-heeled, patent-leather slippers and girlish gowns. When you met her together with her

daughter Elizabeth, you were supposed to say, not mother and daughter, surely not, sisters, of course. Elizabeth was twenty-four and not a success. At the golf club dances on Saturday night, she would sit, unsought, against the wall, while her skiddish mother tripped it with the doggish bachelors. Sometimes a man would cross the floor toward her, and her heart would give a little leap, but he always asked the girl, seated two chairs away. Elizabeth danced much better than her mother, much better than most girls, for that matter, but she was small and dark and rather shy, and wore thick glasses, that disguised the

fineness of her black, lashed gray eyes. Now and then her mother, flushed and laughing, would come up and say, Is my little girl having a good time? The Wells had no money, but they belonged to Chippewa's fashionable set. There were those who lifted significant eyebrows at the mention of the widow Wells' name, and it was common knowledge that no maid would stay with her for any length of time because of the scanty provender. The widow, caouted shamelessly to the moneyed ones of Chippewa, flattering the women, flirting with the men. Elizabeth had no illusions about her mother, but she was stubbornly loyal to her.

Her manner toward her kittenish parent was rather sternly maternal, but she was the honest sort that congenitally hates sham and pretense she was often deliberately rude to the very people toward whom her mother was servile her strange friendship with angie hatton the lovely and millioned was the one thing in elizabeth's life of which her machiavellian mother approved betty you practically stuck out your tongue at mr oakley this after a dance at which elizabeth had been paired off as usual with the puffy and red-eyed old widower of that name i don't care his hands are fat and he creaks when he breathes next to hatton he's the richest man in chippewa and he likes you he'd better not she spat out and the gray eyes blazed behind the glasses i'd rather be plastered up against the wall all my life life than dance with him fat well my dear you're no beauty you know with cruel frankness i'm not much to look at replied elizabeth but i'm beautiful inside rot retorted the widow weld in elegantly had you lived in chepinot all this explanation would have been unnecessary in that terrifying way small towns have it was known that of all codfish aristocracy the widow weld was the Piscatorial Pinnacle. When Chugg Skarratt first met the Weld Girl, she was standing out in the middle of the country

road at ten-thirty-p.m., her arms outstretched, and the blood running down one cheek. He had been purring along the road toward home, drowsy and lulled by the motion in the April air. His thoughts had been drowsy, too, and disconnected. If I can rent Bergstrom's place next to-door when their lease is up, I'll knock down the partition and put in auto supplies. There's big money in them. Guess if it keeps on warm like this we can plant the garden next week. That was swell cake, my head for supper. What's that in the road? Jammed down the footbreak, jerked back the emergency. A girl standing in the road. A dark

mass in the ditch by the roadside. He was out of his car. He recognized her as the weld girl. Smatter. In the ditch, she's hurt. Quick. Who's car? Chug was scrambling down the Banks. Hatens! Angie Hatton's! Gosh! Over by the fence where she had been flung, Angie Hatton was found, sitting up, dizzily, and saying, Betty, Betty, in what she supposed was a loud cry, but which was really a whisper. I'm all right, dear, I'm all right. Oh, Angie, are you? She was cut and bruised, and her wrist had been broken. The two girls clung to each other, wordlessly. The thing was miraculous, in view of the car that lay perilously tipped on its fender.

You're a lucky bunch, said Chug. Who was driving? I was, said Angie Hatton. It wasn't her fault, the well girl put in quickly. We were coming from Winnebago. She's a wonderful driver. We met a farm wagon coming toward us. One of those big ones?

The middle of the road. Perhaps he was asleep. He didn't turn out. We thought, of course, he would. At the last minute we had to try for the ditch. It was too steep. Anyway, you're nervy kids, both of you. I'll have you home in twenty minutes.

We'll have to leave five thousand dollars worth of car in the road till morning. It'll be all right. He did get them home in twenty minutes, and the five thousand dollars worth of car was still lying repentantly in the ditch when morning came. Old Manhattan himself came into the garage to thank Chug the following day. Chug met him in overalls, smudged as he was. Old Manhattan put out his hand.

Chug grinned and looked at his own grease-grimed paw. "'That's all right,' said old Manhattan, and grasped it firmly. "'Want to thank you.' "'That's all right,' said Chug. "'Didn't do a thing.' "'No business driving alone that hour of the night. Girls nowadays—' He looked around the garage.

"'Work here, I suppose?' "'Yes, sir.' "'Is there anything I can do for you, over at the mill?' "'Guess not,' said Chug. "'Treat you right here, do they?' "'Fine. Let's see. Who owns this place?' "'I do.' Old Manhattan's face broke into a sunburst of laugh wrinkles.

He threw back his head and went the scale from roar to chuckle. "'One on me. Pretty good. Have to tell Angie that one.' Chug walked to the street with him. "'Your daughter, she has got a lot of nerve all right. And that girl with her—well, say, not a whimper out of her and the blood running down her face. Is she all right? cut her head a little they're both all right and she wouldn't even stay in bed well as i say if there's anything chug flushed a little tell you what mr hatton i'm working on a thing that'll take the wine out of the dacker old manhattan owned the dacker motor plant among other things the dacker is the best car for the money in the world not much for looks but everything in the engine and everyone who has ever owned one knows that its only fault is the way its engine moans.

Dacker owners hate that moan. When you're going right, it sounds a pass between a peanut roaster and a banshee with bronchitis. Every engineer in the Dacker plant had worked over it. Can't be done, said old Manhattan. Another three months, and I'll show you. Hope you do, son, hope you do. But in another three months, Chugg's scarrett was one of a million bow. destined to take off a pink striped shirt, a knobby-belted suit, and a long visored cap to

don a rather bob-tailed brown outfit. It was some eighteen months later before he resumed the chromatic clothes, with an order all out of proportion to their style and cut. But in the interval between doffing pink-striped shirt and donning pink-striped shirt—no need to describe Camp Sibley. two miles outside Chippewa and the way he grew miraculously overnight into a khaki city. No going into detail concerning the effective combination formed by Chug and a machine gun. These things were important and interesting, but perhaps not more interesting than the seemingly unimportant fact than in July following that April Chug was dancing blithely and rhythmically with Elizabeth Weld in saying,

And she hatton's a smooth little dancer all right, but she isn't in it with you. For Chippewa somehow had fused. Chippewa had forgotten sets, sections, cliques, factions, and parties, and formed a community. It had, figuratively wiped out the railroad tracks, together with all artificial social boundaries. Chug Scarratt in uniform must be kept happy. He must be furnished with wholesome recreation, funnation, fun and amusement, entertainment. There sprang up, seemingly overnight, a great wooden hall in Elm Street, on what had

been a vacant lot, and there, by day or by night, were to be had music and dancing, and hot cakes and magazines, and hot coffee, and ice cream, and girls. Girls! Girls who were straight and slim and young, and bright-eyed and companionable. Girls like Angie Hatton. like Betty Weld. Betty Weld, who no longer sat against the wall at the golf club dances and prayed in her heart, that fat old Oakley wasn't coming to ask her to dance.

Betty Weld was so popular now that the hostess used to have to say to her in a tactful aside, my dear, you've danced three times this evening with the scarlet boy. You know that's against the rules. Betty knew it. So did Chug. Betty danced so lightly that Chug could hardly feel her in his arms. He told her that she ran sweet and true like the engine of a high-powered car, and with as little apparent effort. She liked that, and understood.

It was wonderful how she understood. Chug had never known that girls could understand like that. She talked to you, straight, looked at you straight, was interested in the things that interested you. No waist squeezing here. No cheap banter. You even forgot she wore glasses. I'm going to try to get over. Say, you don't want to do that. I certainly do. Why not? You're—why, you're too young. You're a girl. You're—I'm as old as you are almost. They're sending heaps of girls over to work in the canteens and entertain the boys. If they'll take me, I'll have to lie six months on my age.

was in charge of the garage now. That part of it's all right, Chug confided to the well-girl. Only thing that worries me is Ma. She hasn't peeped hardly, but I can see she's pretty glum all right. I don't know your mother, said the well-girl. That's so, absent-mindedly from Chug. I'd like to. Chug woke up.

Why say, that'd be fine. Listen, why don't you come for Sunday dinner? I've got a hunch wheels shove off next week. and this'll be my last meal away from camp they haven't said so but i don't know maybe you wouldn't want to though maybe you-we lived the other side of the tracks i'd love to said the well girl if you think your mother would like to have me would she and cook say the widow weld made a frightful fuss she said that patriotism was all right but that there were limits betty put on her organdy and went It began with cream soup and ended with shortcake. Even Chug realized that his mother had outdone herself. After his second helping of shortcake, he leaned back and said,

Death, where is thy sting? But his mother refused to laugh at that. She couldn't resist telling Miss Weld that it was plain food, but that she hoped she'd enjoyed it. Elizabeth Weld leaned forward, Mrs. Scarratt, it's the best dinner I've ever eaten. Mr. Scarrot flushed a little, but protested politely. Oh, now, you folks up in the East End, not the Wells. Mother and I are as poor as can be.

Everybody knows that. We have lots of doilies and silver on the table, but very little to eat. We could never afford a meal like this. We're sort of crackers and tea codfish, really. Oh, now, Miss Weld? Chug's mother was aghast at such frankness. But Chug looked at the girl. She looked at him.

They smiled understandingly at each other. An hour or so later, after Elizabeth had admired the vegetable garden, the hanging flower baskets, the new parlor curtains, I used to do them up for folks in town, said Mrs. Scarrett, so's Chugg could go to high school. And, I know it, that's what I call splendid, from the girl. She went home escorted by Chug. Chug's hunch proved a good one.

In a week he was gone. Thirteen months passed before he saw Elizabeth Weld again. When he did, Chippewa had swung back to normal. The railroad tracks were once more boundary lines. Chugg's Garrett went to France to fight. Three months later, Elizabeth Weld went to France to dance. They worked hard at their jobs, these two. Perhaps Elizabeth's task was the more trying.

She danced indefatigably, tirelessly, magnanim. Missile, miles and miles and miles of dancing. She danced on rough plank floors with cracks and inch wide between the boards. She danced in hospitals, chateau, canteens, huts, at Bordeaux, Verdun, Tours, Paris. Five girls often to five hundred boys. Every two week she danced out a pair of shoes. Her feet, when she went to bed at night, were throbbing, burning, aching, swollen. No hot water.

You let them throb and burn, and ache and swell until you fell asleep. She danced with big blonde bucks and with little swarthy doughboys from New York's east side. She danced with privates, lieutenants, captains, and once with a general, but never a dance with Chug. Once or twice she remembered those far-away Chippewa Gulf Club dances. She was the girl who used to sit there against the wall. She used to look away with pretended indifference when a man crossed the floor toward her, her heart leaping a little.

He would always go to the girl next to her. She would sit there with a set smile on her face and the taste of ashes in her mouth. And those shoddy tulle evening dresses her mother had made her wear girlish, she had called them. A girl in thick-lensed glasses should not wear tulle evening frocks with a girlish note. Elizabeth had always felt comic in them. Yet there she had sat, shrinking lest the odious Oakley of the fat white fingers and the wheezy breath, should ask her to dance.

She reflected humorously that if the miles of dancing she had done in the past year were placed end to end, as they do it in the almanac's fascinating facts, they must surely reach to Mars and return. Whenever the hut door opened to admit a tall, graceful, lean, brown figure, her heart would give a little leap and a skip, as the door did this on an average. of a thousand times daily, her cardiac processes might be said to have been alarmingly accelerated. Sometimes, though they did not know it, she and Chug were within a half-hour's ride of each other, and all those months they never met once.

Elizabeth Weld came back to Chippewa in June. The first National Bank building seemed to have shrunk, and she thought her mother looked old in that youthful hat, but she was glad to be home and said so. "'It's been awful here,' said the widow weld. "'Nothing to do but so at the Red Cross shop and no sugar or white bread. "'It must have been,' agreed Elizabeth. "'They're giving a dance for you, a dinner, a week from Saturday, at the golf club, in your honor.' "'Dance?' Elizabeth closed her eyes faintly.

Then—' "'Who is?' "'Well, Mr. Oakley's really giving it—that is, it was his idea. But the club wanted to tender some fitting. I won't go.' Oh, yes, you will." Elizabeth did not argue the point. She had two questions to ask.

Had the boys come back? What boys? The boys? Some of them. You know about dear Henry Hatton, of course. Cauder. What have they done with the khaki club where they used to give the dances? Closed, long ago.

There was some talk of keeping it open for a community center or something, but it fell through. Now, Betty, you have to have a dress for. for Saturday night. I wonder if that old chiffon with a new— Chug Scarrot came home in September. The first National Bank building seemed somehow to have shrunk, and his mother hadn't had all that gray hair when he left. He put eager questions about the garage. Rudy had made out all right, hadn't he? Good old scout. The boys down at the garage are giving some kind of a party for you. Oh, Rudy was telling me about it. I've got a grand supper for you tonight, Chug. Where's this party? I don't want any party.

Woodman's Hall, I think they said. There was some girl called up yesterday. Wanda, her name sounded like. I couldn't. Don't they give dances anymore at the soldiers club down on Elm? Oh, that's closed, long. There was some talk of using it for what they call a community club. The Eagle was boosting for a big new place, what they called a community memorial center. but I don't know. It kind of fell through, I guess. I won't go, said Chug suddenly. Go where, Chug?

But instead of answering, Chug put his second question. Have you seen? Is that—I wonder if that welled girls back? My, yes, paper was full of it. Old Oakley gave her a big dance and all at the country club. They say— A week later, his arm about Wanda's big, yielding waist, he was dancing at Woodman's Hall.

There was about her a cheap, heavy scent. She had on a Georgette blouse and high-heel shoes. She clung to Chug and smiled up at him. Wanda had bad teeth, yellow with a sort of scum over them. I sure it was lonesome for you, Chug. You're some dancer, I'll say, honest, I could dance with you all night. A little pressure of her arm? Somewhere in the recesses of his brain a memory cell broke loose.

dimly he heard himself saying, Oh, they all tell me that. Crazy about yourself, ain't you? Not as crazy as I am about you, with tardy gallantry. Then suddenly Chug stopped dancing. He stopped and stepped back from Wanda's arms. Berkstrom's two-piece orchestra was in the throes of its jazziest fox-trot number. Chug stood there a moment in the center of the floor,

staring at Wanda's face that was staring back at him in vacuous surprise. He turned, without a word, and crossed the crowded floor, bumping couples blindly as he went, and so down the rickety wooden stairs, into the street, and out into the decent darkness of Chippewa's night. End of the Dancing Girls. Old Lady Mandel by Edna Ferber. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. Old Lady Mandel Old Lady Mandel was a queen.

Her domain, undisputed, was a six-room flat on South Park Avenue, Chicago. Her faithful servitress was Anna, an ancient person of Polish nativity, bad teeth, and a cunning-hand cookery. Not so cunning, however, but that Old Lady Mandel's was more artful still in such matters as meat soups, broad noodles, fish with egg-sauce and alike. As ladies-in-waiting, flattering yet jealous, admiring though resentful, she had Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Brunswick, and Mrs. Wormser, themselves, old ladies, and erstwhile queens, now deposed, and the crown jewel in Old Lady Mandel's diadem was my son Hugo.

Mrs. Mandel was not only a queen, but a spoiled old lady, and not only a spoiled old lady, but a confessedly spoiled old lady. Bridaling and wagging her white head, she admitted her pampered state. It was less an admission than a boast. Her son Hugo had spoiled her. This too she acknowledged. My son Hugo spoils me, she would say, and there was no proper humbleness in her voice.

Though he was her only son, she never spoke of him merely as Hugo or my son, but always as my son Hugo. she rolled the three words on her tongue as though they were delicious morsels from which she would extract all possible savour and sweetness and when she did this you could almost hear the click of the stiffening spines of mrs lamb mrs brunswick and mrs for they envied her her son hugo and resented him as only three old ladies could who were living tolerated and dependent with their married sons and their sons wives any pleasant summer afternoon at four o'clock you might have seen mrs mandel holding court the four old women sat a decent black silk row on a shady bench in washington park near the refractory and afternoon coffee three of them complained about their daughters-in-law one of them bragged about her son adjective crowding adjective pride in her voice majesty in her mean she bragged about my son hugo my son hugo my son hugo my son hugo Hugo had no wife. Not only that, Hugo Mandel, at Forty, had no thought of marrying.

Not that there was anything austere or saturnine about Hugo. He made you think somehow of a cherubic, jovial monk. It may have been his rosy rotundity, or perhaps the way in which his thinning hair vanished altogether at the top of his head, so as to form a tonsure. Hugo Mandel, kindly, generous, shrewd, spoiled, spoiled his old. mother in the way in which women of 70, whose middle life has been hard, liked to be spoiled. First of all, of course, she reigned unchecked over the South Park Avenue flat.

She quarreled wholesomely and regularly with Polish Anna. Ultimately, she threatened Anna with dismissal, and Anna threatened Ma Mandel with impending departure. This had been going on comfortably for fifteen years. Ma Mandel held a purse, and her son filled it. hugo paid everything from the rent to the ice man and this without once making his mother feel a beneficiary she possessed an infinitesimal income of her own left her out of the ruins of her dead husband's money but this hugo always waved aside did she essay to pay for her own movie ticket or an ice-cream soda now now none of that ma your money's no good to-night when he returned from a new york business trip he usually brought her two gifts one practical the other absurd she kissed him for the first and scolded him for the second but it was the absurdity fashioned of lace or silk or fragile stuff that she pridefully displayed to her friends look what my son hugo brought me i should wear a thing like that in my old days but it's beautiful anyway he's got taste my son hugo

In the cool of the evening you saw them taking a slow and solemn walk together, his hand on her arm. He surprised her with matinee tickets in pairs, telling her to treat one of her friends. On Anna's absent thirties he always offered to take dinner downtown. He bought her pound boxes of candy tied with sly loops and bands of gay satin ribbon, which she carefully rolled and tucked away in a drawer. He praised her cooking, and teased her with her. with elephentine playfulness, and told her that she looked like a chicken in that hat. Oh, yes, indeed.

Mrs. Mandel was a spoiled old lady. At half-past one she always prepared to take her nap in the quiet of her neat flat. She would select a plump after-lunched chocolate from the box in her left-hand bureau drawer, take off her shoes, and settle her old frame in comfort. No noisy grandchildren to disturb her rest. No fault-finding daughter-in-law to bustle her out of the way. The sounds that Anna made, moving about in the kitchen at the far end of the hall, were the subdued homely swishings and brushings that lulled and soothed rather than irritated.

At half-past two she rose, refreshed, dressed herself in her dotted Swiss with its rose-oval, or in black silk, modish both. She was, in fact, a moddish old lady, as were her three friends. friends. They were not the ultra-modern type of old lady who at sixty apes sixteen. They were neat and rather tart-tongued, septuagenarians, guiltless of artifice. Their soft white hair was dressed neatly and craftily so as to conceal the thinning spots that reveal the pink scalp beneath. Their corsets and their stomachs were too high, perhaps, for fashion, and their heavy brooches and chains and rings appeared clumsy when compared to the hoar-frost traceries.

of the Platinum Smith's exquisite art. But their skirts had pleats when pleated skirts were worn, and their sleeves were snug when snug sleeves were decreed. They were inclined to cling overlong to a favorite leather reticule, scuffed and shapeless as an old shoe, but they could hold their own at bridge on a rainy afternoon. In matters of material and cut, Mrs. Mandel triumphed. Her lace was likely to be real,

where that of the other three was imitation. So there they sat on a park bench in the pleasant afternoon air, filling their lives with emptiness. They had married and brought children into the world, sacrifice for them, managed a household, been widowed. They represented magnificent achievement those four old women, though they themselves did not know it. They had come up the long hill, reached its apex, and come down. Their journey was over, and yet they sat by the roadside.

They knew that which could have helped younger travelers over the next hill, but those fleet-footed ones pressed on, wanting none of their wisdom. Ma Mandel alone still moved. She still queened it over her own household. She alone still had the delightful task of making a man comfortable. If the whirl passed them by as they sat there, it did not pass unscathed. Their shrewd old eyes regarded the panorama undeceived. They did not try to keep up with the procession, but they derived a sly amusement and entertainment from their observation of the modes and manners of this amazing day and age.

Perhaps it was well that this plump matron in the overtight skirt, or that miss mincing on four-inch heels, could not hear the caustic comment of the white-haired four, sitting so mildly on the bench at the side of the path. Their talk, stray as it might, always came back to two-south. subjects. They never seemed to tire of them. Three talked of their daughters-in-law, and bitterness rasped their throats. One talked of her son, and her voice was unctuous with pride. My son's wife, one of the three would begin. There was something terribly significant in the mock respect with which she uttered the title. If I had ever thought, Mrs. Brunswick would say,

shaking her head, if I had ever thought that I would live to see the day, When I had to depend on strangers for my comfort, I would have wished myself dead. You wouldn't call your son a stranger, Mrs. Brunswick, in shock tones from Mrs. Mandel. A stranger has got more consideration. I count for nothing, less than nothing. I don't interfere in that household. I see enough and I hear enough, but I say nothing. My son's wife, she says it all.

A silent, thoughtful, brooding. Then, from Mrs. Wormser, What good do you have of your children? They grow up and what do you have of them? More shaking of heads, and a dark murmur about the advisability of an old people's home as a refuge. Then, my son Hugo, said only yesterday,

Ma, he said, when he comes to housekeeping, you could teach them all something. Believe me. Why, he says, If I was to try and get a cup of coffee like this in a restaurant, well you couldn't get it in a restaurant that's all you couldn't get it in any hotel michigan avenue or i don't care where goaded mrs lamb would look up from her knitting mark my words he'll marry yet she was a sallow lively woman her hair still markedly streaked with black her rheumatism twisted fingers were always grotesquely busy with some handiwork and the finished product was a marvel of perfection mrs worms are plump placid agreed. That's the kind always marries late, and they get it the worst. Say, my son was no spring

chicken either when he married. And you would think the sun rises and sets in his wife. Well, I suppose it's only natural, but you wait. Some girls going to have a snap. Mrs. Brunswick, eager, peering, a trifle vindictive, offered final opinion. The girls aren't going to let a bar like your Hugo get away. Not nowadays the way they run after them like crazy. All they think about is dress and a good time." The three smiled grimly. Ma Mandel smiled, too, a little nervously, her fingers creasing and increasing a fold of her black silk skirt, as she made airy answer, "'If I've said once I've said a million times to my son, Hugo. Hugo, why don't you pick out some nice girl and settle down? I won't be here always.'

And he says, getting tired of me, are you, ma? I guess maybe you're looking for a younger fellow? only last night i set at the table hugo when are you going to get married and he laughed when i find somebody that can cook dumplings like these pass me another ma that's all very well said mrs wormser but when the right one comes along he won't know dumplings from mud oh a man of forty isn't such a-he's just like a man of twenty-five only worse mrs mandel would rise abruptly well i guess you all know my son Hugo better than his own mother. How about a cup of coffee, ladies? They would proceed solemnly and eagerly to the columned and coolness of the park refectory, where they would drink their thick, creamy coffee. They never knew, perhaps, how keenly they counted on that cup of coffee, or how hungrily they drank it. Their minds unconsciously were definitely fixed on the four o'clock drink that stimulated the old nerves.

Life had not always been so plumply upholster for old lady Mandel. She had known its sharp corners and cruel edges. At 23, a strong, healthy, fun-loving girl, she had married Herman Mandel, a dower man 22 years her senior. In their 25 years of married life together, Hattie Mandel had never had a five-cent piece that she could call her own. Her husband was reputed to be wealthy and probably was, according to the standards of that day, there were three children, Etta, the oldest, a second

child, a girl who died, and Hugo. Her husband's miserliness and the grind of the planning, scheming, and contriving necessary to clothe and feed her two children, would have crushed the spirit of many women, but hard and glum as her old husband was, he never quite succeeded in subduing her courage or her love of fun. The habit of heart. breaking economy clung to her however even when days of plenty became hers it showed in little hoarding ways in the saving of burned matches of bits of ribbon of scraps of food of the very furniture and linen as though when these were gone no more would follow ten years after her marriage her husband retired from active business he busied himself now with his real estate with mysterious papers documents agents he was forever poking around the house at hours when a household should be manless grumbling about the waist where there was none peering into bread boxes prying into corners never meant for masculine eyes etta the girl was like him sharp-nosed ferret-faced stingy the mother and the boy turned to each other in a wordless way they grew very close those two it was as if they were silently matched against the father and daughter

It was a queer household, brooding, sinister, like something created in a Bronte brain. The two children were twenty-four and twenty-two, when the financial avalanche of ninety-three thundered across the continent, sweeping Herman Handel, a mere speck, into the debris. Stocks and bonds in real estate became paper with paper value. He clawed about with frantic clutching fingers, but his voice was lost in the shrieks of thousands more hopelessly hurt. You saw him sitting for hours together with a black tin box in front of him, pawing over papers, scribbling down figures, muttering. The bleak future that confronted them, had little terror for Haddy Mandel. It presented no contrast with the bleakness of

the past. On the day that she came upon him, his head fallen at a curious angle against the black tin box, his hands a sprawl, clutching the papers that strewn the table. She was appalled. She was appalled. not at what she found, but at the leap her heart gave at what she found. Herman Handel's sudden death was one of the least of the tragedies that trailed in the wake of the devastating panic. Thus it was that Hugo Handel, at 23, became the head of a household. He did not need to seek work. From the time he was 17 he had been employed in a large China importing house, starting

as a stock boy, brought up under the harsh circumstances of the. Hugo's youth, a boy becomes food for the reformatory or takes on the seriousness and responsibility of middle age. In Hugo's case, the second was true. From his father he had inherited a mathematical mind and a sense of material values. From his mother a certain patience and courage, though he never retained her iron indomitability. It had been a terrific struggle. His salary at twenty-three was most modest, but he was getting on.

He intended to be a buyer some day and take trips abroad to the great Austrian and French and English China houses. The day after the funeral he said to his mother, Well, now we've got to get Edna married. But married well, somebody who'll take care of her. You're a good son, Hugo, Mrs. Handel had said. Hugo shook his head. It isn't that. If she's comfortable and happy, or as happy as she knows how to be, she'll never come back.

That's what I want. There's debts to pay, too, but I guess we'll get along. They did get along, but at snail's pace. There followed five years of economy so rigid as to make the past seem profligate. Etta, the acid-tongued, the ferret faced, was not the start to go off without the impetus of a dowry. The man for Etta the shrew must be kindly, long-suffering, subdued, and in need of a start. He was. They managed a very decent trousseau and the miracle of five thousand dollars in cash. Every stitch in the trousseau and every penny in the dowry represented incredible sacrifice and self-denial on the part of mother and brother. Etta went off to her new home in Pittsburgh with her husband.

She had expressed thanks for nothing and had bickered with her mother to the last. But even Hugo knew that her suit and hat and gloves and shoes were right. She was almost handsome in them, the unwanted flush of excitement coloring her cheeks, brightening her eyes. The next day, Hugo came home with a new hat for his mother, a four-pound steak, and the announcement that he was going to take music lessons. A new era had begun in the life of Ma Mandel. Two people, no matter how far apart in years or tastes,

cannot struggle side by side like that in a common cause, without forging between them a bond indissoluble. Hugo at 28 had the serious mean of a man of 40. At 40 he was to revert to his sled at 28, but he did not know that then. His music lessons were his one protest against a beauty-starved youth. He played rather surprisingly well the cheap music of the day, wagging his head, already threatening baldness, in a professional vaudeville manner and squinting up through his cigar-smoke happily.

His mother, seated in the room, sewing would say, play that again, Hugo. that's beautiful. What's the name of that? He would tell her, for the dozenth time, and play it over, she humming off-key in his wake. The relation between them was more than that of mother and son. It was a complex thing that had in it something conjugal. When Hugo kissed his mother with a resounding smack, and assured her that she looked like a kid, she would push him away with little futile shoves, pat her hair into place and pretend annoyance. Go away, you big rough thing! She would cry. But all unconsciously she got from it a thrill that her husband's withered kisses had never given her. Twelve years had passed since Edith's marriage.

Hugo's salary was a comfortable thing now, even in these days of soaring prices. The habit of economy, so long a necessity, had become almost a vice in old lady Mandel. Hugo, with the elasticity of younger years, learned to spin freely, but his mother's thrift and shrewdness automatically swelled his savings. When he was on the road, as he sometimes was for weeks at a time, she spent only a tight of the generous sum he left with her. She and Anna ate those sketchy meals that obtained to a manless household. When Hugo was home, the table was abundant and even choice, though Ma Mandel often went blocks out of a way to save three cents on a bunch of new beats. So strong is usage. She would no more have wasted his money than she would have knifed

him in the dark. She ran the household capably, but her way was the old-fashioned way. Sometimes Hugo used to protest, a gasped at some petty act of parsimony. But, ma, what do you want to scrimp like that for? You're the worst tight wad I ever saw. Here, take this tin and blow it. You're worse than the squirrels in the park, darned if you ain't. She couldn't resist the tin. Neither could she resist, showing it next day, to Mrs. Brunswick, Mrs. Lamb, and Mrs. Worms her. How my son Hugo spoils me. He takes out a ten-dollar bill, and he stuffs it into my hand and says, Ma, you're the worst tight wad I ever saw. She laughed contentedly, but she did not blow the tin. As she grew older, Hugo regularly

lied to her about the price of theater tickets, dainties, articles of dress, railway fairs, luxuries. Her credulity increased with age, shrewd, though she naturally was. It was a second blooming for Ma Mandel. When he surprised her with an evening at the theater, she would fuss before her mirror for a full hour. Some gal, Hugo would shout when finally she emerged. Everybody'll be asking who the man is you're out with. First thing I know, I'll have a policewoman after me for going around with a chicken. Don't talk foolishness, but she would flush like a bride. She liked a musical comedy with a lot of girls in it and a good looking tenor. Next day you would hear her humming the catch-tune in an airy falsetto.

Sometimes she wondered about him. She was, after all, a rather wise old lady, and she knew something of men. She had a secret horror of his becoming, which she called fast. Why don't you take out some nice young girl instead of an old woman like me, Hugo? Any girl would be only too glad, but in her heart was a dread. She thought of Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Wormser, and her. to Mrs. Brunswick. So they had gone on year after year, in the comfortable flat on South Park Avenue, a pleasant thing, life.

And then, Hugo married. Suddenly, breathlessly, as a man of forty does. Afterward, Mar Mandel could recall almost nothing from which she might have taken warning. That was because he had said so little. She remembered that he had come home to dinner one evening, and had spoken admiringly of a woman buyer from Omaha. He did not often speak of business. She buys like a man, he said at dinner.

I never saw anything like it, knew what she wanted, and got it. She bought all my best numbers at rock bottom. I sold her a four-figure bill in half an hour, and no fuss. Everything right to the point, and when I asked her out to dinner, she turned me down. Good looking, too. She's coming in again tomorrow for novelties. Ma Mandel didn't even recall hearing her name until the knife descended. Hugo played the piano a great deal all that week after dinner.

Sentimental things with a minor wail in the chorus smoked a good deal, too. Twice he spent a full hour in dressing, whistling absent-mindedly during the process, and leaving his necktie rack looking like a nest of angry pythons when he went out, without saying where he was going. The following week he didn't touch the piano and took long walks in Washington Park alone after ten. He seemed uninterested in his meals. Usually he praised this dish or that. How'd you like the blueberry pie, Hugo?

It's all right, and declined a second piece. The third week he went west on business. When he came home, he dropped his bag in the hall, strode into his mother's bedroom, and stood before her like a schoolboy. Lil and I are going to be married, he said. Ma Mandel had looked up at him, her face a blank. Lil? "'Sure, I told you all about her.'

He hadn't. He had merely thought about her for three weeks, to the exclusion of everything else. Ma, you love her. She knows all about you. She's the grandest girl in the world. Say, I don't know why she never fell for a dub like me. Well, don't look so stunned.

I guess you're kind of suspicion, huh? But who—I never thought she'd look at me, earned her own good salary, and strictly business. But she's a real one. woman says she wants her own home and-and everything says every normal woman does says odd lib they were married the following month hugo sub-leased the flat on south park and took an eight-room apartment further east ma mandel's red and green plush parlor pieces and her mahogany rockers and her rubber plant and the fern and the can of grapefruit pits that she and anna had planted and that had come up miraculously in the form of shiny thick little green leaves all were swept away in the upheaval that followed gone too was polish anna with her damp calico and her ubiquitous pale and dripping rag and her guttrels in her place was a trim swede who wore white kid gloves in the afternoon and gray dresses and cob webb aprons the sight of the neat swede sitting in her room at two-thirty in the afternoon tatting never failed to fill ma mandel with a dumb fury anna had been an all-day sweet

rubber. But, Lil. Hugo thought her very beautiful, which she was not. A plump, voluble, full-bosomed woman, exquisitely neat, with a clear, firm skin, bright brown eyes, an unerring instinct for clothes and a shrewd business head. Hugo's devotion amounted to worship. He used to watch her at her toilette in their rose and black mahogany front bedroom. Her plump white shoulders gleamed from pink satin straps. She smelled pleasantly of sachet and a certain heady scent she affected. Seated before the mirror, she stared steadily at herself with a concentration such as an artist bestows upon a work that depends, for its perfection, upon nuances of light and shade. Everything about her shone and glittered. Her pink nails were like polished coral, her hair gleamed in smooth undulations,

not a strand out of place. Her skin was. Her skin was. was clear and smooth as a baby's. Her hands were plump and white. She was always getting what she called a facial, from which process she would emerge looking pinker and creamier than ever. Lil knew when camisoles were edged with fillet and when with Irish. Instinctively, she sensed when Taffeta was to be superseded by Foulard. The contents of her scented bureau drawers needed only a dab of whipped cream on top to look as if they might have been eaten as something souffle. "'How do I look at it, Hugo? Do you like it?'

"'Was a question that rose dilly to her lips. A new hat or frock or color or negligee. Not that she was unduly extravagant. She knew values and profited by her knowledge. Let's see. Turn around. It looks great on you. Yep, that's all right.'

He liked to fancy himself a connoisseur of women's clothes, and to prove it he sometimes brought home an article of feminine apparel glimpsed in a shop window or showcase. But Lil soon put a stop to that. She had her own ideas on clothes. He turned to jewelry. On Lil's silken bosom reposed a diamond and platinum pin the size and general color of a fish knife.

She had a dinner ring that crowded the second knuckle, and on her plump wrist sparkled an oblong so encrusted with diamonds that its utilitarian dial was almost lost. It wasn't a one-sided devotion, however, Lil knew much about men, and she had an instinct for making them comfortable. It is a gift that makes up for myriad minor shortcomings. She had a way of laying his clean things out on the bed, fresh linen, clean white socks, Hugo was addicted to white socks and tan, low-cut shoes, silk shirt, immaculate handkerchief.

When he came in at the end of a hard day downtown, hot, fagged, sticky, she saw to it that the bathroom was his own for an hour so that he could bathe shave powder dress and emerge refreshed to eat his good dinner in comfort lil was always waiting for him cool interested sweet-smelling when she said how's business lover she really wanted to know more than that when he told her she understood having herself been so long in the game she gave him shrewd advice to so shrewdly administered that he never realized he had been advised, and so manlike could never resent it. Ma Mandel's reign was over. To Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Brunswick, and Mrs. Wormser, Ma Mandel lied magnificently. Their eager, merciless questions pierced her like knives, but she made placid answer.

Young folks are young folks. They do things differently. I got my way. My son's wife has got hers. Then quick ears caught the familiar phrase. It's hard just the same, Mrs. Wormser insisted. After you've been boss all these years to have somebody else step in and shove you out of the way, don't I know? I'm glad to have a little rest. Marketing and housekeeping nowadays is no snap. With the price is what they are. Anybody that wants the pleasure is welcome. but they knew the three there was in ma mandel's tone a hollow pretense that deceived no one they knew and she knew that they knew she was even as they were a drinker of the hemlock cup and eater of ashes hugo mandel was happier and more comfortable than he had ever been in his life it wasn't merely his love for lill and her love for him that made him happy lill set a good table though perhaps it was not as bounteous as his mother's had been

his food somehow seemed to agree with him better than it used to it was because lil selected her provisions with an eye to their building value and to hugo's figure she told him he was getting too fat and showed him where and hugo agreed with her and took off twenty-five burdensome pounds but Ma Mandel thought every ounce of it. You weaken yourself, Hugo, eat. How can a man work and not eat? I never heard of such a thing. Fads. But these were purely physical things. It was certain mental relaxation that Hugo enjoyed,

though he did not definitely know it. He only knew that Lil seemed somehow to understand. For years his mother had trailed after him, putting away things that he wanted left out, tidying that which he preferred left in seeming disorder. Lil seemed miraculously to understand about those things. He liked, for example, a certain grimy, gritty old rag with which he was wont to polish his golf clubs.

It was caked with dirt and most disreputable, but it was of just the right material or weight or size or something, and he had for it the unreasoning affection that a child has for a tattered rag doll among a whole family of golden-haired blue-eyed beauties. Ma Mandel, tidying up, used to throw away that rag in horror. Sometimes he would rescue it, crusted as it was with sand and mud and scouring dust. Sometimes he would have to train a new rag, and it was never as good as the old. Lil understood about that rag and approved of it.

For that matter, she had a rag of her own, which she used to remove coal cream from her face and throat. It was a clean enough bit of soft cloth to start with, but she clung to it as an actress often does, until it was smeared with the pink of makeup and the black of Chicago's soot. She used to search remote corners of it for an inch of unused, unsmeared space. Lil knew about not talking when you wanted to read the paper, too. Ma Mandel at breakfast had always had a long and intricate story to tell about the milkman, or the strawberries that she had got the day before, and that had spoiled overnight in the icebox.

A shame. Sometimes he had wanted to say, Let me read my paper in peace, won't you? But he never had. Now it was Lil, who listened patiently to Ma Mandel's small grievances, and Hugo was left free to peruse the headlines. If you had told Ma Mandel that she was doing her best

to ruin the life of the one point of the one person, person she loved best in all the world, she would have told you that you were insane. If you had told her that she was jealous, she would have denied it furiously. But both were true. When Hugo brought his wife a gift, he brought one for his mother as well. You don't need to think you have to bring your old mother anything, she would say unreasonably. Didn't I always bring you something, Ma? If Sepanty can be said to sulk, Ma Mandel Salt.

Lil, on her way to market in the morning, was a pleasant sight, trim, well-shod, immaculate. Ma, whose marketing costume had always been neat, but sketchy, would I her disapprovingly. Are you going out? Just to market. I thought I'd start early before everything was picked over. Oh, to market. I thought you were going to a party. You're so dressy.

In the beginning, Lil had offered to allow Ma Mandel to continue with the marketing. But Mrs. Mandel had declined acidly, Oh, no, she had said, This is your household now. But she never failed to inspect the groceries as they lay on the kitchen table after delivery. She would press a wise and disdainful thumb into a head of lettuce,

poke a pot roast with disapproving finger, turn a plump chicken over and thump it down with a look that was pregnant with meaning. Ma Mandel disapproved of Mee. many things. Of Lil's silken, lacy lingerie, of her social activities, of what she termed her wastefulness. Lil wore the fewest possible undergarments, according to the fashion of the day, and she worried good-naturedly about additional plumpness that was the result of leisure and of rich food. She was addicted to afternoon parties at the homes of married women of her own age

and station, pretty well-dressed, over-indulged women who regularly ate, too much. They served a mayonnaise chicken salad and little hot buttery biscuits and strong coffee with sugar and cream, and there were dishes of salted almonds and great shining, oily, black, ripe olives, and a heavy, rich dessert. When she came home, she ate nothing. I couldn't eat a bite of dinner, she would say. Let me tell you what we had. She would come to the table in one of her silken lace-bedeked teagowns, and talk animatedly to Hugo while he ate his dinner, and eyed her appreciatively as she sat there leaning one elbow on the cloth, the sleeve fallen back so that you saw her plump white forearm. She kept her clear rosy skin in spite of the pastry

and sweets and the indolent life, and even the layers of powder with which she was forever dabbing her face had not coarsened its texture. Hugo, manlike, was unconscious of the undercurrent of animosity between the two women. He was very happy. He only knew that Lil understood about cigar ashes, that she didn't mind if a pillow wasn't plumped and padded after his Sunday nap on the Davenport, that she never complained to him about the shortcomings of the Little Swede, as Ma Mandel had about Polish honor, even at house-cleaning time, which Ma Mandel had always treated as a scourge,

things were as smooth running and peaceful as at ordinary times. Just a little bear, perhaps, as to the floors and smelling of cleanliness. Lil applied business-like methods to the conduct of her house, and they were successful in spite of Ma Mandel's steady efforts to block them. Old Lady Mandel did not mean to be cruel. She only thought that she was protecting her son's interests. She did not know that the wise men had a definite name for the mental, processes which caused her perversely to do just the thing which she knew she should not do.

Hugo and Lil went out a great deal in the evening. They liked the theater, restaurant life, gaiety. Hugo learned to dance and became marvelously expert at it, as does your fat man. Come on and go out with us this evening, Mother, Lil would say. Sure, Hugo would agree heartily. Come along, ma. We'll show you some nightlife. I don't want to go.

Ma Mandel would mutter, I'm better off at home. You enjoy yourself better without an old woman dragging along. That being true, they vowed it was not, and renewed their urging. In the end, she went, grudgingly, but her old eyes would droop. The late supper would disagree with her. The noise, the music, the laughter, and shrill talk bewildered her. She did not understand the banter and resented it. Next day in the park she would boast of her life of gaiety. to the vaguely suspicious three. Later she refused to go out with them. She stayed in her room a good deal,

fussing about deranging bureau drawers already geometrically precise, winding endless old ribbons, ripping the trimming off hats long passe, and retrimming them with odds and ends and scraps of feathers and flowers. Hugo and Lil used to ask her to go with them to the movies, but they liked the second show at 8.30, while she preferred the earlier one at seven.

She grew sleepy early, though she often lay awake for hours after composing herself asleep. She would watch the picture absurdly, but when she stepped blinking into the bright glare of 53rd Street, she always had a sense of letdown, of depression. A wise old lady of 70 who could not apply her wisdom for her own good. A rather lonely old lady, with hardening arteries and a dilating her. heart. An increasingly fault-finding old lady, even Hugo began to notice it. She would wait for him to come home, and then, motioning him mysteriously into her own room, would pour a tale of fancied

insult into his ear. I ran a household and brought up a family before she was born. I don't have to be told what's what. I may be an old woman, but I'm not so old that I can sit and let my own son be made a fool of. One girl isn't enough. She's got to have a watch. And now a washwoman isn't enough. She's got to have a woman to clean one day a week." An hour later, from the front bedroom where Hugo was dressing, would come the low murmur of conversation. Lil had reached the complaining point, goaded by much repetition. The attitude of the two women distressed and bewildered Hugo. He was a simple soul, and this was a complex situation. His mind leaped from mother to wife and back again, joltingly. After all, he was a simple soul, and this was a complex situation.

all, one woman at a time, is all that any man can handle successfully. What's got into you women's folks, he would say? Always quarreling. Why can't you get along? One night after dinner, Lil said quite innocently, Mother, we haven't a decent picture of you. Why don't you have one taken, in your black lace? Oh, Lady Mandel broke into sudden fury.

I guess you think I'm going to die. A picture to put on the piano after I'm gone, huh? That's my dear mother that's gone. Well, I don't have any picture taken. You can think of me the way I was when I was alive. The thing grew and swelled and took on bitterness as it progressed. Lil's face grew strangely flushed, and little veins stood out on her temples. All the pent-up bitterness that had been seething in Ma Mandel's mind broke bounds now and welled to her lips.

Accusation, denial, vituperation, retort. You'll be happier when I'm gone. If I am, it's your fault. It's the ones that are used to nothing that always want the most. They don't know where to stop. When you were working in Omaha. The salary I gave up to marry your son was more money than you ever saw. And through it all, like a light motif, ran Hugo's attempt at pacification.

Now, Ma, don't, Lil. You'll only excite yourself. What's got into you two women? It was after dinner. In the inn Ma Mandel slammed out of the house, hatless. Her old legs were trembling, her hands shook. It was a hot June night. She felt as if she were burning up.

In her frantic mind there was even thought of self-destruction. There were thousands of motor-cars streaming by. The glare of their lamps and the smell of the gasoline blinded and stifled her. Once at a crossing, she almost stumbled in front of an onrushing car. The curses of the startled driver sounded in her terrified ears after she had made the opposite curb in a frantic bound. She walked on and on to what seemed to her to be a long time with plotting heavy step. She was not conscious of being tired.

She came to a park bench and sat down, feeling very abused and lonely and agonized. This was what she had come to in her old days. It was for this you bore children and brought them up and sacrificed for them. How right they were, Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Brunswick, and Mrs. Wormser. Useless, unconsidered, in the way. By degrees she grew calmer. Her brain cooled as her fevered old body lost the heat of anger. Lil had looked kind of sick, perhaps, and how worried Hugo had looked.

Feeling suddenly impelled, she got up from the bench and started toward home. Her walk, which had seemed interminable, had really lasted scarcely more than half an hour. She had sat in the park scarcely fifteen minutes. Altogether her flight had been, perhaps, an hour in duration. She had her latch key in her pocket. She opened the door, softly. The place was in darkness. Voices from the front bedroom and the sound of someone sobbing as though

spent. Old Lady Mandel's face hardened again. The door of the front bedroom was closed, plotting against her. She crouched there in the hall listening, Lil's voice, hoarse with sobs. I've tried and tried, but she hates me. Nothing I do suits her. If it wasn't for the baby coming, sometimes, I think I'd—' You're just nervous and excited, Lil? It'll come out all right. She's an old lady. I know it. I know it. I've said that a million times in the last year and a half, but that doesn't excuse everything, does it? Is that any reason why she should spoil our lives? It isn't fair. It isn't fair. Shh, don't cry like that, dear. Don't. You only make yourself sick.

Her sobs again, racking, choking, and the gentle murmur of his soothing endearments. Then, unexpectedly, a little high-pitched laugh through the tears. no i'm not hysterical i-i it just struck me funny i was just wondering if i might be like that when i grow old and my son marries maybe i'll think everything his wife does is wrong i suppose if we love them too much we really harm them i suppose oh it's going to be a son is it yes another silence then come dear bathe your poor eyes you're all worn out for I'm crying. Why, sweetheart, I don't believe I ever saw you cry before. I know it. I feel better now.

I wish crying would make it all right. I'm sorry. She's so old, dear. That's the trouble. They live in the past, and they expect us to live in the past with them. You're a good son to her, Hugie. That's why you make such a wonderful husband. Too good, maybe.

You've spoiled us both, and now we both want all of you." Hugo. was silent a moment. He was not a quick-thinking man. A husband belongs to his wife, he said then, simply. He's his mother's son by accident of birth, but he's his wife's husband by choice and deliberation. But she laughed again at that. It isn't as easy as that, sweetheart. If it was, there'd be no jokes in the funny papers. My poor boy. And just now, too, when you're so worried about business. "'Business will be all right, Lil.

Trade will open up next winter. It's got to. We've kept going on the Japanese and English stuff, but if the French and Austrian factories start running, we'll have a whirlwind year. If it hadn't been for you this past year, I don't know how I'd have stood the strain. No importing and the business just keeping its head above water.

But you are right, honey. We've weathered the worst of it now. I'm glad you didn't tell Mother about it. she'd have worried herself sick if she had known we both put every cent we had into the business we'll get it back ten times over you'll see the sound of footsteps i wonder where she went she oughtn't to be out alone i'm kind of worried about her hugo don't you think you'd better Ma Mandel opened the front door and then slammed it ostentatiously, as though she had just come in. He turned on the hall light. She stood there blinking, a bent, pathetic little figure. Her eyes were averted. Are you all right, Ma? We began to worry about you. I'm all right. I'm going to bed.

He made a clumsy, masculine pretense at heartiness. Lil and I are going over to the drugstore for a soda. It's so hot. Come along, Ma. "'Lill joined him in the doorway of the bedroom. Her eyes were red-rimmed behind the powder that she had hastily dabbed on, but she smiled bravely. Come on, Mother, she said, It'll cool you off. But Ma Mandel shook her head. I'm better off at home. You run along, you two. That was all. But the two standing there caught something in her tone, something new, something gentle, something wise. She went down the hall to her room. She took off. her clothes and hung them away, neatly, but once in her nightgown she did not get into bed.

She sat there in the chair by the window. Old Lady Mandel had lived to be seventy, and had acquired much wisdom. One cannot live to be seventy without having experienced almost everything in life. But to crystallize that experience of a long lifetime into terms that would express the meaning of life, this she had never tried to do. She could not do it now, for that matter. But she groped around painfully in her mind. There had been herself and Hugo, and now Hugo's wife and the child to be—they were

the ones that counted now. That was the law of life. She did not put it into words. But something of this she thought as she sat there in her plain white nightgown, her scanty white locks pinned in a neat knob at the top of her head. Selfishness. That was it. They called it love, but it was selfishness.

She must tell them about it tomorrow, Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Brunswick, and Mrs. Warmser. Only yesterday Mrs. Brunswick had waxed bitter because her daughter-in-law had let a moth get into her husband's winter suit. I never had a moth in my house, Mrs. Brunswick had declared, never, but nowadays housekeeping is nothing. A suit is ruined. What does my son's wife care? I never had a moth in my house."

Ma Mandel chuckled to herself there in the darkness. I bet she did. She forgets. We all forget. It was very hot to-night. Now and then there was a wisp of breeze from the lake, but not often. How red Lill's eyes had been! Poor girl!

Moved by a sudden impulse, Ma Mandele thuddered down the hall in her bare feet, found a scrap of paper in the writing-desk drawer, scribbled a line on it, turned out the light, and went into the empty front room. With a pin from the tray on the dresser, she fastened the note to Lil's pillow, high up where she must see at the instant she turned on the light. Then she scuttled down the hall to her room again. She felt the heat terribly. She would sit by the window again. All the blood in her body seemed to be pounding in her head, pounding in her head, pounding.

At ten, Hugo and Lil came in, softly. Hugo tiptoed down the hall, as was his want and listened. The room was in darkness. Sleeping Ma, he whispered. He could not see the white-gowned figure sitting peacefully by the window, and there was no answer. He tiptoed with painful awkwardness up the hall again. She's asleep, all right.

I didn't think she'd get to sleep so early on a scourche like this. Lil turned on the light in her room. It's too hot to sleep, she said. She began to disrobe languidly. Her eyes fell on the scrap of paper pinned to her pillow. She went over to it curiously, leaned over, read it. Oh, look, Hugo! She gave a tremulous little laugh that was more than half sob.

He came over to her and read it, his arm around her shoulder. My son Hugo and my daughter, Lil, they are the best, son and daughter in the world a sudden hot gaze before his eyes blotted out the words as he finished reading them end of old lady mandel long distance by edna ferber this laborvox recording is in the public domain long distance chet ball was painting a wooden chicken yellow the wooden chicken was mounted on a six-by-12 board. The board was mounted on four tiny wheels. The hole would eventually be pulled on a strain guided by the plump, moist hand of some blissful six-year-old. You got the incongruity of it the instant your eye fell upon Chet Ball. Chet's shoulders alone would have loomed large in contrast with any wooden toy ever devised, including

the Trojan horse. Everything about him from the big, blunt-fingered hands that held the ridiculous chick to the great muscular pillar of his neck was in direct opposition to his task his surroundings and his attitude chet's proper milieu was chicago illinois the west side his job that of linemen for the gaslight and power company his normal working position astride the top of a telephone pole supported in his perilous perch by a lineman's leather belt and the kindly fates both of which or likely to trick you in an emergency. Yet now he lolled back among his pillows, dabbling complacently at the absurd yellow toy. A description of his surroundings would sound like page three to seventeen of a novel by Mrs. Humphrey Ward.

The place was all greensward and terraces and sun-dials and beaches, and even those rhododendrons without which no English novel or country estate is complete. The presence of Chetball among his pillows and some hundreds similarly disposed revealed to you at once the fact that this particular English estate was now transformed into Reconstruction Hospital No. 9. The painting of the chicken quite finished, including two beady black paint eyes, Chet was momentarily at a loss. Miss Kate had not told him to stop painting when the chicken was completed. Miss Kate was at the other end of the sunny garden walk,

bending over a wheelchair. So Chet went on painting placidly. One by one, with meticulous nicety, he painted all his fingernails a bright and cheery yellow. Then he did the whole of his left thumb, and was starting on the second joint of the index finger, when Miss Kate came up behind him and took the brush gently from his strong,

hands. You shouldn't have painted your fingers, she said. Chet surveyed them with pride. They look swell. Miss Kate did not argue the point. She put the freshly painted wooden chicken on the table to dry in the sun. Her eyes fell upon a letter bearing an American postmarked and addressed to Sergeant Chester Ball, with a lot of cryptic figures and letters strung out after it, such as

A-E-F and C-O-11. Here's a letter for you. She infused a lot of glad into her voice, but Chet only cast a languid eye upon it and said, Yeah, I'll read it to you, shall I? It's a nice fat one. Chet sat back, indifferent, negatively acquiescent, and Miss Kate began to read in her clear young voice,

there in the sunshine and scent of the century's old English garden. It marked an epic in Chet's life, that letter, but before we can appreciate it, we'll have to know Chester Ball in his Chicago days. Your true lineman has a dare-double way with the women, as have all men whose calling is a hazardous one. Chet was a crack workman. He could shenny up a pole, strap his emergency belt, open his toolkit, wield his pliers with expert deafness, and climb down again in record time. It was his hushney up a pole, his pleasure, and seemingly the pleasure and privilege of all lineman's gangs the world over, to whistle blithely and to call impudently to any passing petticoat that caught his fancy. Perched three feet from the top of the high pole, he would cling, protected seemingly,

by some force working in direct defiance of the law of gravity, and now and then, by way of brightening the tedium of their job, he and his gang would call to a girl passing in the street below. Hoo-hoo! Hello, sweetheart! There was nothing vicious in it. Chet would have come to the aid of beauty and distress as quickly as Don Quixote. Any man with the blue shirt as clean and shave as smooth and haircut as round as Chetballs has no meanness in him.

A certain dare-devil-tree went hand in hand with his work. A calling in which a careless low dispatcher, cut wire, or a faulty strap may mean instant death. Usually the girls laughed and called back to them and went on more quickly, the collar in their cheeks a little higher. But not Anastasia Rourke. Early the first morning of a two-week's job on the new plant of the Western Castings Company, Chetball, glancing down from his dizzy perch atop an electric light pole, espied Miss Anastasia Rourke going to work. He didn't know her name, nor anything about her, except that she was pretty. You could see that from a distance even more remote than Chet's. But you couldn't know that Stasia

was a lady not to be trifled with. We know her name was Rourke, but he didn't. So then, Hoo-hoo! he had called. Hello, sweetheart, wait for me, and I'll be down. Stasia Rourke had lifted her face to where he perched so high above the streets. Her cheeks were five shades pinker than was their want, which would make them border on the red. You big coward you, she called in her clear, crisp voice. If you had your foot on the ground, you wouldn't dast called to a decent girl like that. If you were down here, I'd slap the face of you. You know you're safe up there. The words were scarcely out of her mouth, before Chet Ball's sturdy legs were twinkling down the pole.

His spurred heels dug into the soft pine of the pole with little ripe tearing sounds. He walked up to Stasia and stood squarely in front of her, six feet of brawn and brazen nerve. One ruddy cheek he presented to her astonished gaze. Hello, sweetheart, he said and waited. The Roarque girl hesitated just a second. All the Irish heart in her was melting at the boyish impudence of the man before her. Then she lifted one hand and slapped his smooth cheek. It was a ringing slap.

You saw the four marks of her fingers upon his face. Chet straightened, his blue eyes bluer. Stasia looked up at him, her eyes wide, then downed her own hand as if it belonged to somebody else. Her hand came up to her face. She burst into tears, turned and ran, and as she ran, and as she wept, She saw that Chet was still standing there, looking after her.

Next morning when Stasia Rourke went by to work, Chet Ball was standing at the foot of the pole, waiting. They were to have been married that next June, but that next June Chetball perched perilously on the branch of a tree in a small woodsy spot somewhere in France was one reason why the American artillery in that same woodsy spot was getting such a deadly range on the enemy. Chet's costume was so devised that even through field-glasses, made in Germany,

you couldn't tell where the tree left off and Chet began. Then quite suddenly the Germans got the range. The tree in which Chet was hidden came down with a crash and Chet lay there, more than ever, indiscernible amongst its tender foliage. Which brings us back to the English garden, the yellow chicken, Miss Kate and the letter. His shattered leg was mending by one of those miracles of modern war surgery, though he never again would dig his spurred heels into the pine of a GL&P company pole,

but the other thing they put it down under the broad general head of shell-shock. In the lovely English garden they set him to weaving and painting as a means of soothing the shattered nerves. He had made everything from pottery jar. to bead chains, from baskets to rugs. Slowly the tortured nerves healed. But the doctors, when they stopped at Chet's cotter chair, talked always of the memory center. Chet seemed satisfied to go on placidly painting toys or weaving chains with his great

square-tipped fingers, the fingers that had wielded the pliers so cleverly in his pole-climbing days. "'It's just something that only luck or an accident can mend,' said the nerve specialist. "'Time may do it, but I doubt it. Sometimes just a word, the right word, will set the thing in motion again. Does he get any letters?' "'His girl writes to him, find letters, but she doesn't know yet about—about this. I've written his letters for him.

She knows now that his leg is healed, and she wonders—' That had been a month ago. Today Miss Kate slit the envelope postmarked Chicago. Chet was fingering the yellow wooden chicken, pride in his eyes. In Miss Kate's eyes there was a troubled, baffled look, as she began to read. Chet, dear, it's raining in Chicago. And you know when it rains in Chicago it's wetter and muddier and rainier than any place in the world, except maybe this Flanders we're reading so much about.

They say for rain and mud, that place. takes the prize. I don't know what I'm going on about rain and mud for, Chet, darling, when it's you I'm thinking of. Nothing else and nobody else. Chet, I got a funny feeling there's something you're keeping back from me. You're hurt worse than just a leg. Boy, dear, don't you know it won't make any difference with me, how you look or feel

or anything? I don't care how bad you're smashed up. I'd rather have you, without any features at all, that any man with... Two sets. Whatever's happened to the outside of you, they can't change your insides. And you're the same man that called out to me that day. Hoo-hoo! Hello, sweetheart. And when I gave you a piece of my mind, climb down off the pole and put your face up to be slapped. God bless the boy in you. A sharp little sound from him.

Kate looked up quickly. Chet Ball was staring at the beady-eyed yellow chicken in his hand. What's this thing? He demanded in a strange voice. Miss Kate answered him very quietly, trying to keep her voice easy and natural. That's the toy chicken cut out of wood. What am I doing with it?

You've just painted it. Chetball held it in his great hand and stared at it for a brief moment, struggling between anger and amusement. And between anger and amusement, he put it down on the table none too gently and stood up, yawning a little, That's a hell of a job for a he-man.

Then in utter contrition—oh, begging your pardon, that was fierce. I didn't— But there was nothing shocked about the expression on Miss Kate's face. She was registering joy. Pure joy. End of Long Distance. 100% by Edna Ferber. This Leber Fox recording is in the public domain.

100%. There had always been two morning papers. He his, she hers, the times. Both. Nothing could illustrate more clearly the plan on which Mr. and Mrs. T. A. Buck conducted their married life. There's was the morning calm in harmony, which comes to two people who are free to digest breakfast, and the first page simultaneously, with no, just let me see the inside sheet,

will you, dear? To mar the day's beginning. In the days when she had been Mrs. Emma McChesney, traveling saleswoman for the T.A. Buck-Fetherloom Petticoat Company, New York, her perusal of the morning news had been perforce a hasty process, accomplished between trains, or in a small-town hotel bus jolting its way to the depot for the 752, or over an American-plan breakfast, throughout which seven-eighths of her mind was intent on the purchasing possibilities of a prospective nine o'clock shirt-buyer, there was no need now of haste, but the habit of years still clung.

From 8.30 to 8.35 a.m., Emma McChesney Buck was always in partial eclipse behind the billowing pages of her newspaper. Only the tip of her topmost coral of bright hair was visible. She read swiftly, darting from war news to health hints, from stock market to support page, and finding something of interest in each. For her there was nothing cryptic in a headline such as Rudy slams one home, and Doe PFD, followed by dotted lines and vulgar fractions, were to her as easily translated as the Daily Hint from Paris. Hers was a photographic eye and the alert brain that can film a column or a page at a glance.

Across the table her husband sat turned slightly sidewise, his chair, his paper folded in a tidy oblong. He read down one column, top of the next, and down that, seriously and methodically, giving to toast or coffee cup the single-handed and groping attention of one whose interest is elsewhere. The light from the big bay window fell on the printed page and cameoed his profile. After three years of daily contact with it, Emma still caught herself occasionally, gazing with appreciation at that clear-cut profile and the clean, shining line of his hair as it grew away

from the temple. T.A., she had announced one morning to his mystification, you're the Francis X. Bushman of the breakfast table. I believe you sit that way purposely. Francis X. He was not a follower of the films. Emma elucidated. Discoverer and World's Champion exponent of the side face. I might punish you, Emma, by making a pun about its all being Greek to me, but I shan't. He turned to page two, column four. Usually their conversation was comfortably monosyllabic and disjointed, as is the breakfast

talk of two people who understand each other. Amicable silence was the rule, broken only by the rustle of paper, the clink of China, and occasional toaster, and when Buck, in a low vibrating tone, slightly muffled by buttered corn muffin said, dogs. Emma knew he was pursuing the daily Shrekken-lichen. Upon this cozy scene, conservation cast his gaunt shadow. It was in June the year of America's great step that Emma, examining her household, pronounced it fatally degenerate, with complications, and performed upon it a severe and skillful surgical operation. Among the rest, one morning paper ought to be enough for any husband and wife who aren't living on a boffin basis.

There'll be one copy of the time as delivered at this house in the future, Mr. Buck. We might match pennies for it mornings. It lay there on the hall table that first morning, an innocent oblong, its headlines staring up at them with inky eyes. Paper, T.A., she said, handing it to him. You take it, dear. No, no, no. She poured the coffee, trying to keep her gaze away from the tantalizing tail end of the headline

at whose first half she could only guess. By Jove Emma, listen to this. Pershing says, if we have one— Stop right there. We've become pretty well acquainted in the last three years, T.A. But if you haven't learned that if there's one thing I can't endure, it's being fed across the table with scraps of the daily news. I shall have to consider our marriage a failure."

Oh, very well. I merely thought you'd be, I am, but there's something about having it read to you. On the second morning, Emma hurriedly fastening the middle button of her blouse on her way downstairs, collided with her husband, who was shrugging himself into his coat. They continued their way downstairs with considerable dignity and pronounced leisure. The paper lay on the hall table. They reached for it. There was a moment just the fraction of a minute, when each clutched a corner of it, eyeing

the other grimly, then both let go suddenly as though the paper had burned their fingers. They stared at each other, surprise and horror in their gaze. The paper fell to the floor with a little slap. Both stooped for it, apologetically. Their heads bumped. They staggered back, semi-stunned. Emma found herself laughing rather wildly. Buck joined in after a moment, a rueful laugh.

She was the first to recover. That settles it. I'm willing to eat trick-bread and whale meat and drink surgola's coffee, but I draw the line at hating my husband for the price of a newspaper subscription. White paper may be scarce, but so are husbands. It's cheaper to get two newspapers than to set up to establishments. They were only two among many millions who at that time were playing an amusing and fashionable game called Win the War.

They did not realize that the game was to develop into a grim and magnificently functioning business to whose demands they would cheerfully sacrifice all that they most treasured. Of late, Emma had spent less and less time in the offices of the Featherloom Company. For more than ten years, that flourishing business and the career of her son, Jock McChessney, had been the twin orbits about which her existence had revolved. But Jock Machesney was a man of family now with a wife, two babies, and an uncanny advertising sense that threatened to put his name on the letterhead of the Raynor Advertising Company of Chicago.

As for the Featherloon factory, it seemed to go of its own momentum. After her marriage to the firm's head, Emma's interest in the business was unflagging. Now look here, Emma, Buck would say. you've given enough to this firm play a while cut up forget you're the and company in t a bucking company but i'm so used to it i'd miss it so you know what happened the first year of our marriage when i tried to do the duchess i don't know how to lull if you take fellow looms away from me i'll degenerate into a madam chairman you'll see she might have too if the war had not come along and saved her by midsummer you'll beaughan you'll see she might have too if the war had not come along and saved her by midsummer The workrooms were turning out strange garments, such as gray and khaki flannel shirts, flannelette one-piece pajamas and woollen bloomers, all intended for the needs of women-war workers going abroad.

Emma had dropped into the workroom one day and had picked up a half-finished gray flannel garment. She eyed it critically, her deft fingers manipulating the neckband, a little frown gathered between her eyes. Somehow a woman in a flannel shirt always looks as if she had quincy. It's the collar. They cut them like a man's small size, but a woman's neck is as different from a man's as her collarbone is.

She picked up a piece of flannel and smoothed it on the cutting table. The head designer had looked on in disapproval, while her employer's wife had experimented with scraps of cloth and pins and chalk and scissors, but Emma had gone on serenely cutting and snipping and pinning. They made up samples of surface shirts with the new neck-hugging collar and submitted them to Miss Nebens, the head of the woman's uniform department at Fife and Gardens. That astute lady had been obliged to listen to scores of cantoners, nurses, secretaries, and motorleaguers, who, standing before a long mirror in one of the many fitting rooms, had gazed, frowned,

and fumbled at the collar and topmost button and said, but it looks so, so lumpy around the neck. Miss Kate Nevins replied to this pliant was, Oh, when you get your tie on? Perhaps they'll let me wear a turned-down collar, absolutely against regulations. The rules strictly forbid anything but the high, close-fitting collar. The fair war worker would sigh,

mutter something about supposing they'd shoot you at sunrise for wearing a becoming shirt and order six grumbling. Kate Nevins had known Mrs. T.A. Buck in that lady's Emma McChesney days. At the end of the first day's trial of the new Featherloom's shirt, she had telephoned the Featherloom factory and had asked for Emma McChesney. People who had known her by that name never seemed able to get the trick of calling her by any other. With every fitting room in the Fife and Garden establishment demanding her attention, Miss Nevins' conversation was necessarily brief. Emma McChesney?

Kate Nevins. Who's responsible for the collar on those featherloom shirts? I was sure of it. No regular designer could cut a collar like that. Takes a genius. Hmm? Well, I mean it. I'm going to write to Washington and have them vote you a distinguished service medal.

This is the first day since Les I don't know when that hasn't found me in the last stages of nervous exhaustion at six o'clock. All these women warriors are willing to bleed and die for their country, but they want to do it in a collar that fits, and I don't blame them. After I saw the pictures of that Russian battalion of death, I understand why. Yes, I know I oughtn't to say that, but... By autumn, Emma was wearing one of those featherloom service shirts herself. It was inevitable that a woman of her executive ability, initiative, and details since, should be

pressed into active service. November saw Fifth Avenue a glitter with uniforms, and one-third of them seemed to be petticoated. The Featherloom factory saw little of Emma now. She bore the title of commandant with feminine captains, lieutenants, and girl workers under her, and her blue uniform, as she herself put it, was so a jingle with straps, buckles, belts, bars, and bolts, that when she first put it on she felt like a jail. She left the house at eight in the morning now. Dinner time rarely found her back in 63rd Street.

Buck was devoting four evenings a week to the draft board. At the time of the second Liberty Loan Drive in the autumn, he had deserted featherlooms for bonds. His success was due to the commodity he had for sale, the type of person to whom he sold it, and his own selling methods and personality. There was something about this slim, leisurely man with a handsome eyes. and the quiet voice that convinced and impressed you. It's your complete lack of eagerness in the transaction, too.

Emma remarked after watching him land a $25,000 bond pledge, the buyer, a business rival of the Featherloom pedicode company, you make it seem a privilege, not a favor. A man with your method could sell sandbags in the Sahara. Sometimes the two dined downtown together. Sometimes they scarcely saw each other for days on end. One afternoon at 5.30, Emma, on duty-bound, espied him walking home up Fifth Avenue on the opposite side of the street. She felt a little pang as she watched the easy, graceful figure swinging

its way up the brilliant flag-decked avenue. She had given him so little time and thought. She had bestowed upon the house such scant attention in the last few weeks. She turned abruptly and crossed the street, dodging the late afternoon traffic with a sort of expert recklessness. She almost ran after the tall figure that was now a block ahead of her and walking fast. She caught up with him, matched his stride, and touched his arm lightly. I beg your pardon, aren't you, Mr. T. A. Buck? Yes. How do you do? I'm Mrs. Buck. Then they had giggled together, deliciously, and he had put a firm hand on the smartly tailored blue serge's sleeve. I thought so. That being the case, you're a call. You're

Coming home along me, young woman. Can't do it. I'm on my way to the ritz to meet a dashing delegation from Serbia. You never saw such gorgeous creatures, all gold and green and red with swords and snatework and glittering boots. They'd make a musical comedy soldier look like an undertaker. There came a queer little look into his eyes. But this isn't musical comedy, dear.

These men are— Look, here, Emma, I want to talk to you. Let's walk home together and have dinner decently in our own dining room. There are things at the office. Some possible, Mr. Buck. I am late now. And you know perfectly well. There are two vice-commodans ready to snatch my shoulder-straps.

Emma! At his tone, the smiling animation of her face was dimmed. What's gone wrong? Nothing. Everything. At least, nothing that I can discuss with you at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-Fist Street. When does this Serbian thing end? I'll call for you.

There's no telling. Anyway, the fannings will drive me home. Thanks, dear. He looked down at her. She was unbelievably girlish and distinguished in the blue uniform. A straight slim figure topped by an impudent cock hat. The flannel shirt of workaday service was replaced today by a severely smart affair of white silk, high-colored, stitched, expensively simple.

And yet he frowned. as he looked. Fisk got his exemption papers today, with apparent irrelevancy. Yes, she was glancing sharply up and down, the throng street. Better call me a cab, dear, I'm awfully late. Oh, well, with his wife practically an invalid and all the expense of the baby's illness and the funeral, the Ritz, dear, and tell him to hurry. She stepped into the cab a little nervous frown between her eyes. But Buck, standing at the curb, seemed bent on delaying her. Fisk told me the doctor's son. said all she needs is a couple of months at a sanitarium where she can be bathed and massaged

and fed with milk, and if Fis could go to her camp now he'd have a commission in no time. He's had training, you know. He spent his vacation last summer at Plattsburgh. But he's due on his advanced spring trip in two or three weeks, isn't he? I really must hurry, T. A. Ritz, said Buck shortly to the chauffeur, and hurry. He turned away abruptly without a backward glance. Emma's head jerked over her shoulder and surprised. eyes, but he did not turn. The tall figure disappeared. Emma's taxi crept into the stream, but uppermost in her mind was not the thought of Serbians, uniforms, fisk, or writs, but of her husband's right hand, which, as he turned away from the cab, had been folded tight into a fist.

She meant to ask an explanation of the clenched fingers, but the Serbians, despite their four tragic years turned out to be as brightly as their uniforms, and it was past midnight when the fannings dropped her off at her door. Her husband was rather ostentatiously asleep. As she doffed her warlike garments, her feminine caniness warned her that this was no time for explanations. Tomorrow morning would be better. But next morning's breakfast turned out to be all jock. A letter from Grace, his wife. Grace McChesney had been a good. been Grace Gate, one of the youngest and cleverest women advertising writers in the profession. When Jock was a cub in the Raynor office, she had been turning out compelling copy. They

had been married four years. Now Jock ruled a mahogany domain of his own in the Rainer suite, overlooking the lake in the Great Michigan Avenue building. And Grace was saying, Eat the crust, Curly. It's the crust that makes your hair grow curly. Emma, uniform for work, read hasty extracts from Grace's letter, Buck listened in silence. You wouldn't know, Jock. He's restless, irritable, moody, and the queer part of it is he doesn't know it.

He tries to be cheerful, and I could weep to see him. He has tried to cover it up with every kind of war work from Red Crossing to Liberty Loaning and from writing free, full-page, national advertising copy, to giving up his tobacco money to the smoke fund. And he's miserable. He wants to get into it. And he ought.

But, you know, I haven't been really. really husky since Buddy came. Not ill, but the doctor says it will be another six months before I myself, really. If I only had myself to think of, how simple. But two kiddies need such a lot of things. I could get a job at Rainers. They need writers. Jock says bitterly that all the worthwhile men have left. Don't think I'm complaining. I'm just trying to see my way clear, and talking to someone who understands often clears the way. "'Well,' said Emma, and—' "'Well?' said Emma. "'And well,' said T.A. She sat, fingering the letter, her breakfast cooling before her.

Of course Jock wants to get into it. I wish he could. I'd be so proud of him. He'd be beautiful and khaki, but there's work to do right here, and he ought to be willing to wait six months. They can't wait six months over there, Emma. They need him now. Oh, come, T.A. One man multiplied by a million. Look at Fisk.

Just such another case. The shrill summons of the telephone cut him short. Emma's head came up alertly. She glanced at her wristwatch and gave a little exclamation of horror. That's for me. I'm half an hour late. The first time, too. She was at the telephone a second later.

Explanatory, apologetic. Then back in the dining-room doorway, her cheeks flushed, tugging at her gloves, poised for flight. Sorry, dear, but this morning was so important, and that letter by Jock upset me. I'm afraid I'm a rotten soldier. I'm afraid you are, Emma." She stared at that.

Why—oh, you're still angry at something. Listen, dear, I'll call for you at the office tonight at five, and we'll walk home together. Wait for me. I may be a few minutes late. She was off. The front door slammed sharply. Buck sat very still for a long minute, staring down at the coffee cup, whose contents he did not mean to drink.

The light from the window cameoed his fine profile, and you saw that his first His jaw was set. His mind was a thousand miles away in Chicago, Illinois, with the boy who wanted to fight and couldn't. Emma, flashing down Fifth Avenue as fast as wheels and traffic rules would permit, saw nothing of the splendid street. Her mind was a thousand miles away in Chicago, Illinois. And a thousand miles away in Chicago, Illinois, Jock McChesney, three hours later, was slamming

down the big two windows of his office, from up the street came the sound of a bugle and of a band playing a brisk march, and his office windows looked out upon Michigan Avenue. If you know Chicago, you know the building that housed the Raynor offices, a great gray shaft towering even above its giant neighbors, its head in the clouds, its face set toward the blue beauty of Lake Michigan. Until very recently, those windows of his office, had been a source of joy and inspiration to Jock McChesney. The green of Grant Park just below, the tangle of eye-sea-tracks beyond that, and the great, gracious lake beyond that, as far as the eye could see.

He had seen the changes the year had brought, the lake dotted with sinister gray craft, dog-tents in Grant Park, sprung up overnight like brown mushrooms, men, mere boys, most of them, awkward in their work-a-day clothes of office and shop. drilling, wheeling, marching at the noon hour, and parades, and parades, and parades. At first, Jock, and, in fact, the entire office staff, heads of departments, writers, secretaries, stenographers, office boys, would suspend business and crowd to the windows to see the pageant pass in the street below, stirring music, khaki columns, flags, pennants, horses, bugles.

And always the Jackie Band from the Great Lakes Station, its white leggings twinkling down the street in the lead of its six-foot-six contortionist drum major. By October the window-gazers watching the parades from the Raynar windows were mostly pedicoded and exclamatory. Jock stayed away from the window now. It seemed to his tortured mind that there was a fresh parade hourly and that bugles and bands sounded a taunting note. "'Where are you?' sounded the bugle.

"'Where are you? Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?' He slammed down the windows, summoned a stenographer, and gave out dictation in a loud, rasping voice. Yours of the tenth at hand, and contents noted. In reply, I wish to say,

"'Boom, boom, and boom, boom, boom!' All copy for the... and sent soap, is now ready for your approval, and will be mailed to you today under separate cover. We in the office think that this copy marks a new record in soap advertising. Over there, over there, send the word, send the word over there. Just read that last line, will you, Miss Dugan? Over the—I mean, we in the office think that this copy marks a new record in soap advertising.

Hmm, yes. A moment's pause, a dreamy look on the face of the girl's stenographer, Jack interpreted it. He knew that the stenographer was in the chair at the side of his desk, taking his dictation accurately and swiftly, while the spirit of the girl herself was far and away at Camp Grant at Rockford, Illinois, with an olive drab unit in an olive drab world. And, in fact, in advertising copy of any description that has been sent out from the Raynor offices. The girl's pencil flew over the pad, but when Jock paused for thought or breath she lifted

her head, and her eyes grew soft and bright, and her foot, in its absurd high-heeled gray boot, beat a smart left, left, left, left, right, left. Something of this picture T.A. Buck saw in his untasted coffee cup. Much of it Emma visualized in her speeding motor-car, all of it Grace knew by heart, and as she moved about the new, shining house in the Chicago suburb, thinking, planning, feeling his agony and trying not to admit the transparency of the look about her hands and her temples. So much for Chicago. At five o'clock, Emma left the war office to its own devices, and dropped in at the loft building

in which featherlooms were born and grew up. Might the elevator man twisted his gray head about at an unbelievable length to gaze appreciatively at the trim, uniformed figure." "'Haven't seen you around for many days, Miss Buck. Been too busy, Mike.' Mike turned back to face the door. "'Well, tis great responsibility, running this war and all.' He stopped at the featherland floor and opened the door with his grandish flourish.

Emma glanced at him quickly. His face was impassive. She passed into the reception room with a little jingling of buckles and strapped hooks. The workday was almost ended. The display room was empty of buyers. She could see the back of her husband's head in his office. He was busy at his desk. A stock girl was clearing away the piles of garments that littered tables and chairs.

At the window near the door, Fisk the Western Territory man, stood talking with O'Brien, city salesman. The two looked around at her approach. O'Brien's face lighted up with admiration. into Fisk's face their flashed a look so nearly resembling resentment that Emma, curious to know its origin, stopped to chat a moment with the two. Said O'Brien, the gallant Irishman, I'm more resigned to war this minute, Mrs. Buck, than I've been since it began. Emma dimpled, turned to Fisk, stood at attention. Fisk said nothing. His face was unsmiling.

Like my uniform? Emma asked and wished somehow that she hadn't. Fisk stared. His eyes had none of the softness of admiration. They were hard resentful. Suddenly, Like it. God, I wish I could wear one.

He turned away abruptly. O'Brien threw him a sharp look. Then he cleared his throat apologetically. Emma glanced down at her own trim self, at her stitched seams, her tailored lengths, her shining belt and buckles, her gloved hands. And suddenly and unaccountably her pride in them vanished. Something—something—something—she wheeled and made for Buck's office her color high. He looked up, Rose offered her a chair.

She felt strangely ill at ease there in the office, to which she had given years of service. The bookkeeper in the glass-enclosed cubby-hole across the little hall, smiled and nodded and called through the open door. my, you're a stranger, Mrs. Buck. Be with you in a minute, Emma, said T.A. And turned to his desk again. She rose and strolled toward the door, restlessly. Don't hurry.

Out in the showroom again, she saw Fisk standing before a long table. He was ticketing and folding samples of petticoats, pajamas, blouses, and nightgowns. His cigar was gripped savagely between his teeth, and his eyes squinted, half-closed. through the smoke. She strolled over to him and fingered the cotton flannel of a garment that lay under her hand. Spring samples? Yes.

It ought to be a good trip. They say the West is dripping money war or no war. It's right. How's Gertie? Don't get me started, Mrs. Buck. That girl. Say I knew what she was when I married her, and so did you. She was head stenographer here long enough.

But I never really knew that kid until now. We've been married two years. You know what the last year has been for her, the baby and all, and then losing him. And do you know what she says? That if there was somebody who knew the Western Territory and could cover it, she'd get a job and send me to war. Yes, sir, that's Gert. We've been married two years, and she says herself it's the first really happy time

she's ever known. You know what she had at home. Why, even when I was away, on my long springtime. trip, she used to say it wasn't so bad being alone because there was always my home coming to count on. How's that for a wife? Gertie splendid, agreed Emma, and wondered why it sounded so lame. You don't know her. Why? When it comes to patriotism, she makes TR look like a pacifist. She says if she could sell my line on the road, she'd make you give her the job so she could send her man to war.

Gert says a traveling man's wife ought to make an ideal soldier's wife anyway, and that if I went, it would only be like my long western trip, multiplied by about ten, maybe. That's Gertie. Emma was fingering the cotton flannel garment on the table. Buck crossed the room and stood beside her. Sorry I kept you waiting. Three of the boys were called today. It crippled us pretty badly in the shipping room.

Ready? Yes. Good night, Charlie. give my love to Gertie. Thanks, Mrs. Buck. He picked up his cigar, took an appreciative puff, and went on ticketing and folding. There was a grin behind the cigar now.

Into the late afternoon glitter of Fifth Avenue. Five o'clock Fifth Avenue. Flags of every nation save one. Uniforms of every blue from French to navy. Of almost any shade save field green. Pongy colored Englishmen seeming seven. feet high to a man, aviators, slim and elegant, with walking sticks made of the propeller of their shattered planes, with a notch for every hun plane bagged.

Slim girls, exotic as the archids they wore, gazing limpid eyes at these warrior elegance. Women uniform to the last degree of tailored exquisiteness. Girls wore a coutard, who brought arms up in sharp salute as they passed Emma. eyeed them gravely, hat and arm, describing parabolas with increasing frequency as they approached fiftieth street, slackening as the colorful pageant grew less brilliant, thinned, and faded into the park mists. Emma's cheeks were a glorious rose pink, head high, shoulders back, she matched her husband's long stride every step of the way. Her eyes were bright and very blue.

There's a beautiful one, T.A., the Canadian officer with the limp. They've all been gassed and shot five times in the thigh and seven in the shoulder, and yet, look at them. What do you suppose they were when they were new if they can look like that damaged? Buck cut a vicious little semicircle in the air with his walking stick. I know now how the father of the Grotchey felt and why you never heard him mentioned. Nonsense, T.A. You're doing a lot.

She did not intend her tone to be smug. But if she had glanced sidewise at her husband, she might have seen the pained red mount from chin to brow. She did not seem to sense his hurt. They went on, past the plaza now. Only a few blocks lay between them and their home, the old brownstone house that had been New York's definition of architectural elegance in the time of T.A. Buck, Sr.

Tell me, Emma, does this satisfy you the work you're doing, I mean? Do you think you're giving the best you've got? Well, of course I'd like to go to France. I didn't ask you what you'd like. Yes, sir, very good, sir. I don't know what you call, giving the best one is got, but you know I work from eight in the morning until midnight often and often. Oh, I don't say that someone else couldn't do my work just as well,

and I don't say either that it doesn't include a lot of dashing up and down, Avenue and teeing at the writs, and meeting magnificent missions and being cooled over by lady millionaires. But if you'd like a few statistics as to the number of hundreds of thousands of soldiers we've canteened since last June, I'd be pleased to oblige. She tugged at a capacious pocket and brought forth a smart leather-bound notebook. Spare me! I've had all these statistics I can stand for one day at the office.

I know you're working hard. I just wondered if you didn't realize— They turned into their own street. Realize what? Nothing, nothing. Emma sighed a muck sigh and glanced up at the windows of her own house. Oh, well, everybody's difficult these days, T.A., including husbands. That second window shade is crooked.

Isn't it queer how maids never do—I'll tell you what I can't realize, though. I realize we're going to have dinner at home, regular. old-fashioned before to war, and I can bathe before dinner. There's richness. But when she appeared at dinner, glowing, radiant, her hair shiningly re-coffered, she again wore the blue uniform with the service cap atop her head. Buck surveyed her, unsmiling. She seated herself at table with a little clinking of buckles and buttons.

She flung her motor gloves on a nearby chair, ran an ink, acquiring finger along belt and collar with a little gesture that was absurdly feminine in its imitation of masculinity. Buck did not sit down. He stood at the opposite side of the table, one hand on his chair, the knuckles showing white where he gripped it. It seems to me, Emma, that you might manage to wear something a little less military when you're dining at home. War is war, but I don't see why you should make me feel like you're orderly. It's like being married to a policewoman. Surely you can neglect your country for the length of time it takes to dine with your husband. It was the bitterest speech he had

made to her in the years of their married life. She flushed a little. I thought you knew that I was going out again immediately after dinner. I left at five with the understanding that I'd be on duty again at 8.30. He said nothing. He stood looking down at his own hand that gripped the chair back so tightly. Emma sat back and surveyed her trim and tailored self with a placidity that had in it perhaps a dash of malice. His last speech had cut. Then she reached forward, helped herself to an olive,

and nibbled it head on one side. Do you know, T.A., what I think? Hmm? I think you're jealous of your wife's uniform. She had touched the match to the dynamite. He looked up, at the blaze in his eyes. She shrank back a little. His face was white.

He was breathing quickly. You're right. I am. I am jealous. I'm jealous of every buck private in the army. I'm jealous of the mule drivers. Of the veterinarians, of the stokers and the transports. Men.

He doubled his hand into a fist. His fine eyes glowed. Men. And suddenly he sat down, heavily, and covered his eyes with his eyes with his hands. Emma sat staring at him for a dull, sickening moment. Then she looked down at herself, horror in her eyes. Then up again at him.

She got up and came over to him. Why, dear, dearest, I didn't know. I thought you were satisfied. I thought you were happy. You— Honey, the only man who's happy is the man in khaki. The rest of us are gritting our teeth and pretending. She put a hand on his shoulder.

But what do you want? What can you do that— He reached back over his shoulder and found her hand. He straightened. His head came up. They offered me a job in Bordeaux. It isn't a fancy job. It has to do with merchandising.

But I think you know they're having a devil of a time with all the millions of bills of goods. They need men who know materials. I ought to. I've handled cloth and clothes enough. I know values. It would mean hard work, manual work lots of times, no pay, and happiness for me. There was a silence. It seemed to fill the room, that silence.

It filled the house. It roared and thundered about Emma's ears, that silence, when finally she broke it. Blind, she said. Blind, deaf, dumb, and crazy. She laughed, and two tears sped down her cheeks and dropped on the unblemished blue serge uniform. Oh, T.A. Where have I been? How you must have despised me. Me, in my uniform. In my uniform that was costing the government three strapping men, my uniform that was keeping three man-sized soldiers out of khaki. You, jock and fisk. Why didn't you, tequila, why didn't you, Tell me, dear. Why didn't you tell me?

I tried. I couldn't. You've always seen things first. I couldn't ask you to go back to the factory. Factory? Factory? Nothing. I'm going back on the road.

I'm taking Fisk's western territory. I know the Middle West better than Fisk himself. I ought to. I covered it for ten years. I'll pay Gertie Fisks' salary until she's able to come back to us as stenographer. We've never had one so far. good, Grace can give the office a few hours a week, and we can promote O'Brien to manager while I'm on the road."

Buck was staring at her dully. Grace? Now wait a minute. You're traveling too fast for a mere man. His hand was gripping hers tight, tight. Their dinner was cooling on the table. They ignored it. She pulled a chair around to his.

They sat shoulder to shoulder, elbows on the cloth. It took me long enough to wake up, didn't it? I've got to make up for lost time. The whole thing's clear in my mind. Now get this. Jock gets a commission. Grace and the babies pack up and come to New York and live right here with me in this house. Fisk goes to war.

Gertie gets well and comes back to work for featherlooms. Mr. T.A. Buck goes to Bordeaux. Old Emma takes off her uniform and begins to serve her country on the road. At that he got up and began pacing the room. I can't have you do that, dear. Why, you left all that behind when you married me. Yes, but our marriage certificate didn't carry a war guarantee. Gad, Emma, you're glorious.

Glorious, nothing. I'm going to earn the living for three families for a few months until things get going. And there's nothing glorious about that, old dear. I haven't any illusions about what taking a line on the road means these days. It isn't traveling, it's exploring. You never know where you're going to land or win, unless you're traveling in a freight train. Bear cock of the walk now. I think I'll check myself through as first-class freight, or send my pack ahead with natives on foot like an African explorer.

But it'll be awfully good for my character, and when I'm eaten that criminal cornbread they serve on dining cars on a train that's seven hours late into Duluth, I'll remember when I'm, I had my picture in uniform in the Sunday supplements with my hand on the steering wheel along of the nobility and gentry. Listen, dear, I can't have you too late. Got a pencil? Let's send fifty words to Jock and Grace. They'll wire back, no, but another fifty'll fetch him. After all, it takes more than one night letter to explain a move that is going to change

eight lives. Now let's have dinner, dear. It'll be cold, but filling. perhaps in the whirlwind ten days that followed a woman of less energy less determination less courage and magnificent vitality might have faltered and failed in an undertaking of such magnitude but emma was alert and forceful enough to keep just one jump ahead of the swift moving times in a less cataclysmic age the changes she wrought within a period of two weeks would have seemed herculean but in this time of stress and change when every household, in every street, in every town in all the country was feeling the tremor of upheaval, the readjustment of this little family and business group was so unremarkable as to pass unnoticed. Even the members of the group itself, seeing themselves scattered

to camp, to France, to New York, to the Middle West, shuffled like pawns that the great game might the better be won, felt strangely unconcerned and unruffled. It was little more than two years. weeks after the night of Emma's awakening that she was talking fast to keep from crying hard as she stuffed plain, practical, blue-surge garments, un-military, into a bellow's suitcase. Can't count on trunks these days, she had said, I'm not taking any chances on a clean shirt-waist. Buck, standing in the doorway, tried hard to keep his gaze from the contemplation of his khaki-clad self reflected in the long mirror.

At intervals he said, Can't I help, dear? Or talk about the early pilgrim mothers And the revolutionary mothers and the Civil War mothers I'd like to know what they had on you, Emma. And from Emma, yeah, ain't I noble? Then, after a pause, This house is going to be so full of women, folks,

It'll look like a home for decayed, gentlewomen. Buddy McChesney, eight six months, is going to be the only male protector around the place. We will make him Captain of the Home Guard. Gertie was in today. She says I'm a shrimp in my uniform compared to Charlie. You know she always was the nervous little stenographer we ever had about the place, but she knows more about featherlooms than any woman in the shop, except you.

She's down to 98 pounds, poor little girl, but every ounce of its pure pluck, and she says she'll be as good as new in a month or two, and I honestly believe she will. Emma was counting a neat stack of folded handkerchiefs, 17, 18. When she comes back we'll have to pay her twice the salary she got when she left, but then you have to pay an errand-boy what you used to pay a shipping clerk, and a stock girl demands money that an operator used to brag about. Nineteen. Buck came over to her and put a hand on the bright hair that was rumpled now,

from much diving into bags and suitcases and clothes closets. All except you. Emma, you'll be working without a salary, working like a man, like three men. Working for three men, TA, three fighting men. I've got two service buttons already, she glanced down at her blouse, and Charlie Fisk said I had the right to wear one for him. I'll look like a mosaic, but I'm going to put them all on. The day before Emma's departure for the West, Grace arrived with bags, bundles, and babies. A wan and tired grace, but proud, too, with the spirit of the times in her eyes. Jock! she repeated in answer to their questions. My dears, he doesn't know I'm alive. I visited him

at camp the day before I left. He thinks he'll be transferred east as we hoped. Wouldn't that be glorious? Well, I had all sorts of intimate and vital things to discuss with him, and he didn't hear what I was saying. He wasn't even listening. He couldn't wait until he could wait until I had finished a sentence so that he could cut in with something about his work. I murmured to him in the moonlight that there was something I had long meant to tell him, and he answered that, damn it, he forgot to report that rifle that exploded. And when I said, Dearest, isn't this hotel a little like the place we spent our honeymoon in?

That porch and all? He said, see this fellow coming, Gracie? The big guy with the mustache. Now mash him, Gracie. He's my captain. I'm going to introduce you. He was a senior at college when I was. I was afresh. But the peace and the pride in her eyes belied her words. Emma's trip, already

delayed, was begun ten days before her husband's date of sailing. She bore that, too, with smiling equanimity. When I went to school, she said, I thought I hated the second Peloponnesian war, worse than any war I'd ever heard of. But I hate this one so that I want everyone to get into it one hundred percent, so that it'll be over-suffiniscan. sooner, and because we've won." They said little on their way to the train. She stood on the rear platform just before the train pulled out. They had tried, frantically, to get a lower berth, but unsuccessfully.

Don't look so tragic about it, she laughed. It's like old times. These last three years have been a dream, a delusion. He looked up at her as she stood there in her blue suit and white blouse and trim blue hat and crisp veil. Gad, Emma, it's uncanny. I believe you're right. You look exactly as you did when I first saw you,

when you came in off the road after father died, and I had just taken hold of the business. For answer, she hummed a few plaintive bars. He grinned as he recognized silver threads among the gold. The train moved away, gathered speed. He followed it. They were not smiling now. She was leaning over the railing,

as though to be as near to him as the fast-moving train would allow, he was walking swiftly along with the train as though hypnotized. Their eyes held. The brave figure in blue on the train platform, the brave figure in khaki outside, the blue suddenly swam in a haze before his eyes, but khaki a mist before hers. The crisp little veil was a limp little rag when finally she went in to search for upper 11. The white-coated figure that had passed up and down the aisle unnoticed and unnoticing as

she sat hidden behind the kindly folds of her newspaper, suddenly became a very human being as Emma regained control, decided on dinner as a panacea, and informed the white coat that she desired upper 11 made up early. The white coat had said, yes, um, and glanced up at her, whereupon she had said, white william and he well foe de land tain't miss mechesney well my sake's alive miss mcchessney i ain't seen yo since y'all married i dunn't he'll marry your boss an got a swell brown stone house and everything grand i've got everything william but a lower berth to chicago they swore they couldn't give me anything but an upper a speculative look crept into william's rolling eye emma recognized it her hand reached towards her hand reached towards her water bag. Then it stopped. She smiled, no, no, William. Time was, but not these days. Four years ago, I'd have slipped you fifty cents right now, and you'd have produced a lower birth from somewhere.

But I'm going to fool you. My boss has gone to war, William, and so has my son. And I'm going to take that fifty cents and buy thrift stamps for Miss Emma McChesney, age three, and Mr. Buddy McChesney aged six months, and I'll dispose my old bones in upper eleven. She went into dinner. At 8.30, a soft and deferential voice sounded in her ear. I got y'all made up, Miss Pichesney. But this is my—he beckoned. He padded down the aisle with that walk which is a peculiar result of flat feet and

twenty years of swaying car. Emma followed. He stopped before lower six and drew aside the curtain. It was that lower which can always be produced magically, though ticket-sellers, Pullman agents, porters, and train conductors swear that it does not exist. The key to it is silver, but tonight Emma McChesney Buck had unlocked it with finer metal, gold, pure gold. For William drew aside the curtain with a gesture such as one of his slave ancestors might have used

before a queen of Egypt. He carefully brushed a cinder from the sheet with one gray-black hand, then he bowed like any courtier. Emma sank down on the edge of the couch with a little sigh of weariness. Gratefulness was in it, too. She looked up at him, at the wrinkled, kindly ape-like face, and he looked down at her. William, she said, war is a filthy, evil, vile thing. But it bears wonderful white flowers.

Yes, him, agreed William, genially. and smiled all over his rubbery gray-black countenance yassum and who shall say he did not understand end of one hundred per cent end of the dancing girls by edna