THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 t
 
 
 ,
 
 JOSEPH GREEK AND 
 HIS DAUGHTER
 
 BY ME. WEBSTER 
 
 THE REAL ADVENTURE 
 
 THE PAINTED SCENE 
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 AN AMERICAN FAMILY 
 
 MARY WOLLASTON 
 
 REAL LIFE
 
 JOSEPH GREEK AND 
 HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 A Novel 
 
 By 
 HENRY KITCHELL WEBSTER 
 
 oar 
 
 INDIANAPOLIS 
 
 THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY 
 PUBLISHERS
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1922 
 BY THE PICTORIAL REVIEW COMPANY 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1922 
 BY THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY 
 
 Printed in the United States of America. 
 
 PRESS OF 
 
 BRAUNWORTH & CO 
 
 BOOK MANUFACTURERS 
 
 BROOKLYN, N. Y.
 
 AUTHOR'S NOTE 
 
 Joe Greer's stories of the South American jungle are 
 not inventions of my own. They are a few that have been 
 told me at odd times by my friend, F. "W. Updegraff of 
 Elmira, New York, the narrative of whose wanderings 
 among the tributaries of the upper Amazon is, I under 
 stand, presently to be published. If it has the charm of 
 his spoken word, it will be an entrancing tale. 
 
 I wish to add my assurance that no other items of Joe's 
 experience or of his character have been derived from Mr. 
 Updegraff or from anybody else I know. Joseph Greer, 
 like all the other characters in this novel, is, with the ex 
 ception noted, wholly fictitious. 
 
 H. K. W. 
 
 v3ir 
 
 .5
 
 JOSEPH GREEK AND 
 HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 CHAPTER ONE 
 
 THE PAWN- 
 
 ON THE face of it, John "Williamson 's invitation to lunch 
 was nothing that Henry Craven need especially wonder, 
 let alone worry, about. It was unusual Henry couldn't 
 remember, indeed, that it had ever happened before in 
 just these circumstances but surely one needn't feel on 
 that account that there was anything ominous about it. 
 The manner of giving it had been a little overbearing, 
 perhaps; high-handed, anyhow. But that was John Will 
 iamson's way, and no doubt his place in Chicago's finan 
 cial world entitled him to it. 
 
 Henry had been dictating a letter around eleven 
 o'clock this was when one of the bank's more important 
 customers spoke to him from across the marble rail. Evi 
 dently the man didn't care to come inside, so Henry went 
 to the rail to see what was wanted. His telephone rang 
 while he stood talking with the customer and, of course, 
 his stenographer answered it. He heard her say, "Yes, 
 Mr. Williamson." And then, "He's right here. Shan't I 
 call him?" But John, . evidently, hadn't thought it neces 
 sary to wait, even a minute. There was another pause 
 
 1
 
 while she made a notation on a pad, and finally, "Very 
 well, Mr. Williamson, I'll teU him." 
 
 She softened it up as well as she could when she trans 
 mitted the message, but he saw that what she'd written 
 on her pad was: "Be at J. "W.'s office at twelve-thirty. 
 Lunch." No "if's" at all. Not even an "if possible." 
 
 Well, of course there were no "if's." John was one of 
 two or three Olympians who, among their other cloudy 
 vast affairs, directed the policies of this great bank in 
 which his cousin-by-marriage, Henry Craven, after six 
 teen years of faithful service, had recently been promoted 
 to be one of the assistant cashiers. Naturally, then, if 
 John wanted him for any reason, big or little, Henry 
 would come. 
 
 It was unlikely, wasn't it, that the thing was of any 
 serious importance. It mightn't be a business matter at 
 all. Some little domestic problem or other. Violet (she 
 was John's wife and Henry's cousin) had a birthday 
 coming next week. It was possible that Henry's culti 
 vated taste was going to be requisitioned to pick out a 
 present for her. Only, would John have wasted a price 
 less lunch hour the most important hour of his hard- 
 driven day upon a trifle like that? It was inconceiv 
 able. The lunch table was just where men like John 
 talked over and arrived at their major decisions. 
 
 Yet what major decision of John's could imaginably 
 concern Henry? Unless unless it was a question of 
 Henry's own job in the bank. They weren't going to 
 promote him again; they'd just done that. But sup 
 pose suppose they felt he hadn't made good, and had 
 decided to do the other thing. Wouldn't it be broken 
 to him just like this, genially, over the lunch table? And 
 wouldn't this, for that matter, account for John's unwill 
 ingness to have him called to the phone? 
 
 He pulled himself up with a jerk and shot a glance at 
 his stenographer. Had his moment of panic been legible 
 to her in his face? But she was gazing out nowhere in 
 the sort of trance that is one of the accomplishments of 
 her profession,.
 
 THE PAWN 3 
 
 "What's the last thing I said?" he demanded. Then 
 as the girl started to read, "No, give me the whole thing 
 from the beginning." 
 
 He didn't need it but he did need another minute or 
 two in which to take possession of himself. That fear 
 that damnable black dog of a fear had slunk at his heels 
 since his first day at the bank. 
 
 It had been natural enough at first, when he was bruised 
 and bewildered by a sudden tragic change in the whole 
 prospect of his life. John had given him this job out of 
 charity, or, if you preferred putting it so, by way of 
 meeting an obligation he had assumed on marrying into 
 the Craven family. He'd come into the bank as a lame 
 duck. 
 
 There was, though, no reasonable doubt that he stayed 
 and advanced on his merits. All the evidence leaned that 
 way. But the fear persisted. Not, of course, as a con 
 stant companion. There were days, weeks of them to 
 gether sometimes, when he never thought of it. But at 
 some trifling enigma, fancied very likely, in the conduct 
 of one of his superiors, some conversation unavoidably 
 half overheard, some smile that he felt glanced his way, 
 the thing would seize him like a spasm of pain from an 
 injured nerve. 
 
 He knew it was a weakness. He made valiant attempts 
 to conquer it. He grew ashamed of it. He developed the 
 corollary fear that it would be discovered. 
 
 His latest promotion had, he'd supposed, worked a cure. 
 An assistant cashier was one of the officers of the bank. 
 "If ever they make me an officer," he had said to him 
 self a thousand times, "then I'll know I'm safe." And 
 indeed, during the three months since it had occurred, 
 he'd been breathing deeper, luxuriating in a new se 
 curity. 
 
 But now, for no better reason than that his cousin 
 John had invited him to lunch, he was quaking at the 
 pit of his stomach like a schoolboy who's been told to 
 report to the principal. It was absurd. He laughed at 
 the absurdity, and then kicked the recurrent question
 
 4 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 what, after all, did John want of him out of his mind 
 and vigorously resumed the dictation of his letter. 
 
 At twelve-thirty precisely he opened the door to John 
 Williamson's suite of offices. These occupied a corner of 
 the top floor of the bank building. The girl at the tele 
 phone board greeted Henry politely and asked him to 
 come in and sit down. Mr. "Williamson was engaged just 
 now but, she thought, wouldn't keep him waiting long. 
 So Henry sat down, in his overcoat, upon the chair she 
 indicated to him. 
 
 A desire came flooding over him as he sat upon that 
 straight chair in the outer office, both feet square on the 
 floor, his Derby hat balanced primly upon his knees, and, 
 for something to do, breathed upon and polished his eye 
 glasses assiduously over and over again, a passionate de 
 sire to do something unexpected, wicked quite possibly, 
 but successful, immense; to the effect that telephone girls 
 should stand in awe of him and private secretaries treat 
 him with respect. 
 
 ' ' I 'm sorry you should have to wait, ' ' the girl said, when 
 she came to the end of the letter she was typing. "Mr. 
 "Williamson's in an important conference but I'm positive 
 he thought he'd be through before this." 
 
 Henry said it didn't matter, and might have gone on 
 to enlarge upon the immateriality of the delay but for 
 the sound of voices that began coming, now the type 
 writer was stilled, through the partition. This "con 
 ference" was taking place in the secretary's office next 
 door. Words weren't distinguishable, but inflections 
 and intonations were. One man in there was telling a 
 story and the others were being amused by it. There 
 was a sudden laugh, checked because the narrator went 
 straight on and overrode it in a voice curiously resonant. 
 
 So that was what Henry was kept waiting for! He 
 could see the picture in there, he was confident, as easily 
 as if that mahogany partition had been glass instead. 
 John, smoking a cigar, of course, sitting on the table 
 clasping one stout knee in both hands, swinging the other
 
 leg. Young Roland Mill, John's secretary, tilted back 
 in his swivel chair, blowing smoke rings at the ceiling. 
 And somebody anybody of the sort who could walk past 
 telephone girls and office boys as if they didn't exist, 
 and open doors without knocking held the stage tell 
 ing them a "good one" he. had picked up in New York 
 last week. 
 
 Henry took his hat in both hands and sat a little 
 straighter in his chair. The girl, he noticed, had the 
 grace to blush over the way the excuse she'd offered for 
 her employer had been betrayed. But the next instant 
 she snatched her handkerchief, pressed it to her face and 
 turned away. To suppress a sneeze? Or a laugh at 
 him? Probably he did look ridiculous, sitting there glar 
 ing. He was trembling. He must make up his mind 
 what to do. Should he ask her sharply and authoritatively 
 to telephone in to John the information that he was wait 
 ing? Or should he give him another five minutes? 
 
 But five minutes weren't needed. Almost at once, the 
 door into Mill's office was briskly opened. Henry heard 
 young Mill, evidently at the other door, say, ''You can 
 get out this way, Mr. Greer." 
 
 The man addressed stood there in an attitude of ar 
 rested motion, grinning back into the room. And Henry, 
 while he stared at the sight of him, held his breath. All 
 his fidgety annoyances were forgotten, swallowed up in 
 the sensation which the man's appearance produced. 
 
 His beard was the first thing you saw. It was cut 
 round and short not fashioned at all and it was black, 
 as black as if it had been drawn upon his face with India 
 ink. His hair was just as black and thick, and it was 
 cut not quite short enough to hide a tendency to curl. 
 Against this blackness of jowl and brow, the gleam of his 
 teeth and the whites of his eyes made a dazzling contrast. 
 But indeed, as you took him in, you saw that he was a 
 bundle of contrasts. The lightness of his poise as he 
 stood there holding the door, against the burly breadth 
 of those shoulders and the bull neck; the look of gen-
 
 6 JOSEPH GREER AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 iality that you got from his smile contradicted by his nose 
 which jutted out in so bluntly aggressive a manner as to 
 be piratical almost, Henry felt. 
 
 He had answered Rollie Mill by saying in his peculiarly 
 resonant voice that he always thought he was lucky, com 
 ing to a place like this, if he could get out the same door 
 he'd come in by; and he continued for a minute rubbing 
 this in. All these robber barons of finance had, he sup 
 posed, a chute down which the unwary visitor, having 
 been shorn, was permitted to plunge. 
 
 Young Mill came smiling into the outer office at this, 
 nodded politely to Henry, saying aside to him, "Mr. Will 
 iamson's just getting on his coat; he'll be right out," 
 before he answered, more or less in kind, the departing 
 guest. Henry thought he hesitated just momentarily 
 whether to perform an introduction between the two 
 and then decided against it. 
 
 "When he came back from the corridor door whither he 
 had ceremoniously accompanied the pirate, the secretary 
 let out a long breath. 
 
 "Well, if any one wants to know what / think," he 
 began only it wasn't a beginning, for he said no more; 
 lapsed into a gloomy secretarial silence instead, and with 
 drew to his own office. Of course, it was obvious enough 
 what Rollie would think of a cheeky outsider who had the 
 effrontery to look like that and to make vulgar jokes at 
 his chief's expense. 
 
 John looked absent-minded when he appeared a moment 
 later. He said, "Hello, Henry. All ready?" just as if it 
 had been Henry who had caused the delay. "I guess 
 we'll run along then." 
 
 He said nothing more all the way down in the elevator 
 and up the street. From the turning he took at the corner, 
 Henry guessed that they were going to the Union League 
 Club for lunch. The oppression of the silence became 
 unbearable at last and he broke it. 
 
 "How's Violet these days?" he asked. "It must be, I 
 should say, two months since I've seen her."
 
 THE PAWN 7 
 
 "She's been east," said John. "Got home last week. 
 Brought Dorothy with her from school. Easter vaca 
 tion." 
 
 "Oh, I hope I may see Dorothy," Henry said brightly. 
 "That's a lovely age seventeen." 
 
 "It's a devil of an age," said John. "Dorothy's all 
 right, though, I guess." 
 
 Then, coming out of his abstraction just as they were 
 turning into the club, he took Henry by the arm. 
 
 ' ' Did you know that fellow ? " he asked. ' ' The man who 
 was up in my office?" 
 
 ' ' No, ' ' Henry said. ' ' I don 't believe I 've ever seen him 
 before. I'm sure he's not one of the customers over at the 
 bank." 
 
 "His name's Greer," said John. "Joseph Greer. Have 
 you ever heard of him?" 
 
 "The name's vaguely familiar, perhaps, but I can't 
 place it. I '11 be glad to look him up for you, if you like. ' ' 
 
 "We've looked him up," said John. "I guess we know 
 pretty much all there is to know about him. He's got a 
 proposition we're going to take up. Going into business 
 with him. I'll tell you the whole thing at lunch. That's 
 what I wanted to talk to you about." 
 
 They'd got rid of their coats by this time, and had gone 
 into the lavatory to wash up. Henry took off his eye 
 glasses, laid them on the little shelf above the bowl and 
 pressed his palms against his eyes a natural-looking 
 gesture enough, he hoped. The sudden ending of the sus 
 pense of the last two hours had turned him giddy. His 
 job was safe, after all. 
 
 He steadied himself as they went up to lunch with a 
 spurt of indignation. If the courteous way of doing 
 things had been John's way, that two hours of misery 
 need never have been suffered. John could have said, with 
 the loss of no more than one of his precious minutes, 
 that it was to talk over a new business enterprise involving 
 a man named Greer that he wanted Henry to lunch. It 
 was in just such failures of real consideration that the
 
 8 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 lack of true breeding showed itself. Just what one might 
 expect from the son of old Nick "Williamson. 
 
 Henry checked himself here with the reflection that 
 this was how his sister, Margaret, would look at it. And 
 then, a little startled, he sprang to Margaret's defense. 
 
 Poor Margaret! The ill-usage of fortune was a harder 
 thing for a woman to bear than it could possibly be for a 
 man. It was natural for a girl to cling to anything that 
 gave her support, even as unreal a thing as a fancied 
 social superiority long since forgotten by their world. 
 
 Margaret had been sixteen, Henry two years older or 
 so, when their beautiful cousin, Violet Prince, married, 
 and it was easy to remember that her selection of John 
 Williamson had been regarded by the charitable members 
 of the family as distinctly broad-minded and by the carp 
 ers as downright mercenary. 
 
 John had been all right, of course, even in those days. 
 Nicholas Williamson's only son couldn't lightly have been 
 left out of account by anybody. But old Nick himself, in 
 a community just waking to the gracious superfluities of 
 civilization, had been a hard lump to digest. It was not 
 only that, to the last day of his life, he had ostentatiously 
 chewed tobacco, drunk unconscionable quantities of corn 
 whisky and delighted in ribald stories, he was never 
 done taunting his tamer contemporaries with their decline 
 from these virile ways. It was his opinion that those of 
 them who sent their sons to eastern schools and colleges 
 and gallivanting about Europe afterward were making of 
 their offspring a lot of cane-sucking damn fools. His boy, 
 John, had gone from the West Division High School 
 straight to La Salle Street. 
 
 Old Nick's appearance at his son's wedding was one of 
 Henry's imperishable memories. Visibly exultant he was 
 over his boy's success in running in and cutting out this 
 prize from its surrounding convoy of cane-suckers. He 
 had gloated over Violet like an ogre. 
 
 Violet's marriage would have been a melancholy oc 
 casion for Henry in the best of circumstances. She was
 
 THE PAWN 9 
 
 twenty at the time, pretty as a peach of course, and he, 
 eighteen, addicted to sonnets, tender as a head of lettuce, 
 was her first cousin, privileged and, by that same token, 
 barred. He was one of the ushers, and he had blossomed 
 out, darkly, for the occasion in the double-breasted frock 
 coat of the period, tight-waisted, full in the skirt and in 
 credibly long. Old Nick had leered at him and later, in 
 his hearing, though not intentionally perhaps, had re 
 ferred to him, with a guffaw, as "that young undertaker's 
 apprentice." Violet had heard it, too. Henry still red 
 dened when he rememberd that. 
 
 It was a satisfaction to think how short-lived had 
 been old Nick's glee. The ogre was no match for a witch 
 like Violet, and she promptly took his son away from him. 
 She moved her husband bodily from his father's house 
 a red sandstone monstrosity on Ashland Avenue. The 
 young couple never slept a night there until they were 
 firmly established in a house of their own on the North 
 Side. She taught John to dress for dinner even when they 
 had no guests. She took him to the opera. She even 
 led him so far astray as Palm Beach in the winter, when 
 serious-minded men stuck to their desks. And she spent 
 his money (there was a wicked lot of it, of course, and 
 Violet's people, the Princes, had never been much more 
 than comfortably well-to-do) like, the old man used to say, 
 straw blowing out of a thrasher. So doing, she quenched 
 Henry's young romance. There must be a streak in her, 
 he feared, of a rather hard frivolity. 
 
 But if she, with the years, had come down in his regard, 
 John had risen. There was real kindliness in John. And 
 though his humor tended to be boisterous and his manner 
 was never precisely gentle, still it was hard to see anything 
 more than that in him of the savage old satyr his father 
 had been. John was shrewd ; mostly, it must be admitted, 
 on the make. He could treat nothing with whole-hearted 
 respect that wasn't successful, and, being successful, he 
 profoundly respected himself. He had increased two 
 fold, Henry guessed, the fortune he'd inherited from his
 
 10 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 father, Violet's extravagances notwithstanding. And it 
 was easy to read in him a comfortable sort of contempt 
 for some of his contemporaries whose stewardships hadn't 
 similarly prospered. Nevertheless, when disaster had 
 fallen upon the Craven family, none had been .kinder or 
 more helpful than this cousin-by-marriage who needn't 
 have bothered about them at all. 
 
 ""Why, this man Greer," John said, after he'd eaten 
 silently and methodically through the lunch he'd ordered 
 and lighted a cigar, "is a mechanical engineer. Machine 
 designer. One of the best in the business, Gregory Cor- 
 bett says. Industrial engineer. Inventor. A whole lot 
 of things. He's knocked about the world a lot, more than 
 any man I know, I guess, especially South America. Trop 
 ical South America. He lived five years, according to 
 him, on the upper tributaries of the Amazon, River of 
 Doubt and so on, long before Roosevelt came there. He 
 went naked, he says, and the Indians thought he was 
 some sort of god because he had so much hair on him and 
 could do better tricks than their own medicine men. He 's 
 something of a liar, I guess, but even so he must have seen 
 a lot of queer things." 
 
 Henry didn't doubt that. "And I should say," he 
 added, "from the glimpse I had of him in your office, 
 that he was still capable of going out looking for more." 
 
 ' ' He 's a queer cuss, and no mistake, ' ' John agreed. ' ' But 
 I don't think he's likely to go back to the jungle. He likes 
 civilization too well. That's his weakness, they say, now. 
 Drink and women. From all I can hear, he hits a pretty 
 swift pace. That's one of the things that's held us back 
 from going in with him. But he's prospered. Really 
 made quite a lot of money during the war. He was mak 
 ing aeroplane propellers and some aeroplane machinery 
 gears and so on out of compressed fibers. That Air 
 Board was just his meat and he got into them deep. 
 Signed up a big contract just before the Armistice that
 
 THE PAWN 11 
 
 he made them pay him half a million dollars to cancel. 
 He's not lying about that, anyhow. We know all about 
 it." 
 
 Still there was an air of skepticism about John, the 
 suggestion that he hadn't yet managed to lay his finger 
 upon the thing that Greer was lying about. Henry must 
 try to help. That's what he was there for, he supposed. 
 
 ''If the man's got as much money as that," he ven 
 tured, "and really believes that his idea is valuable, why 
 'does he ask you to go in with him? I take it that's what 
 he's done." 
 
 "Oh," John grunted, "that's the soundest thing about 
 him. Shows he's got good sense. It shows he isn't one 
 of these wild-eyed people who 're always trying to swing 
 a big proposition on a shoe-string. That's where a lot of 
 visionaries get their grudge against bankers and so on. 
 They start something they can't finish and they don't 
 begin to holler for help until they're going down for the 
 third time. And then they're sore, when their scheme is 
 saved, that is, if it proves to be worth saving to find 
 that it belongs mostly to somebody else. Greer is wise 
 enough to allow for mistakes, delays, education all those 
 things. No, he's all right, as far as that goes." 
 
 "What's his record?" Henry asked. "What has he done 
 besides run around naked on the banks of the Amazon?" 
 
 He was rather pleased with this humorous touch, and 
 expected to win a smile from John with it. But John, 
 though he boasted about his sense of humor, there were 
 two or three newspapers he bought simply because they 
 contained comic strips which were favorites of his, and he 
 enjoyed the sort of musical comedies they put on at the 
 Globe Theater didn't, as a rule, make nor recognize jokes 
 when they occurred in a serious conversation, that is to 
 say, in a business conversation. 
 
 He explained to Henry that Greer 's Amazonian adven 
 ture belonged to the period of his youth. Since then, he 
 seemed to have run straight enough. Evidently had an 
 enormous capacity for hard work, which John found it
 
 12 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 hard to reconcile with the stories of dissipation which 
 formed a sort of nebulous fringe around him. He'd been 
 employed, as a young man, by various big engineering 
 firms in Chicago, along in the latter 'nineties and early 
 nineteen-hundreds. Then, for some reason or other, not 
 discreditable so far as John knew, he 'd gone back to South 
 America. Not, however, to the jungle. He'd lived six 
 or eight years in Peru or Chile, perhaps in both countries, 
 getting on apparently very well in his profession. He 
 spoke Spanish like a native, it was said. And this was 
 probably where he picked up his odd way of making ges 
 tures when he talked. His beard, too, another feature 
 which made him seem queer, had been honestly come by, 
 you might say, in the same environment. 
 
 Well, he'd come back to Chicago in nineteen ten, or 
 thereabout, with capital enough to launch himself in 
 dependently as a consulting engineer. And, from then 
 on, they had a perfectly straight line on him. 
 
 There was no doubt at all that his work was first rate. 
 Corbett and Company had retained him after their big fire 
 in nineteen twelve, and had been important clients of 
 his off and on ever since. Gregory thought he'd saved 
 them a lot of money. He'd made some revolutionary 
 changes in their method of routing material and products 
 through the plant. He'd done the sort of thing for them 
 that people heard such a lot about in connection with 
 Ford's works at Detroit. Also, he'd redesigned a lot of 
 their machinery. 
 
 So, once more, as far as that went, he was all right. If 
 he told you a mechanical process could be carried out in 
 a certain way, you were safe, no doubt, in assuming that 
 it could. 
 
 "And, anyhow/' John concluded, after a little pause, 
 "that's the side of him we're going to do business with. 
 Generally speaking, it won't matter to us when he goes 
 to bed at night or who with, or how much champagne 
 they've had to drink." 
 
 He lapsed into an abstracted silence, and Henry, this
 
 THE PAWN 13 
 
 time, didn't try to break it. He felt that he'd achieved 
 at least a pretty good understanding of John 's perplexities. 
 This tough-sinewed adventurer, barbaric, genially pre 
 dacious, was almost as alien to John and his well-fed, 
 sober, respectable friends such as Frank Crawford and 
 Gregory Corbett as if he belonged to another species 
 altogether. They faced him uneasily with lowered 
 heads. It was an instinctive mistrust, like that of the 
 domestic animal for the wild beast that prowls about its 
 stable. 
 
 The idea amused Henry. He thought he'd tell Mar 
 garet about it, even though she would be scandalized. 
 His amusement deepened as it occurred to him how re 
 cent was the domestication of these stall-fed people, John 
 and Frank and Gregory. To their fathers grandfathers, 
 at most a man like Greer wouldn't have seemed strange. 
 Not to old Nick Williamson who had buccaneered his way 
 to fortune in the wheat market; nor to Myron Crawford 
 who'd made millions as a banker in the wild-cat days out 
 here in Illinois, when anything could be a bank and every 
 bank was printing, ad lib., its own money; nor to Gregory 
 Corbett this Corbett 's grandfather who had got his 
 canny start building wagons for the gold hunters of 
 'forty-nine and the early 'fifties to cross the plains in. 
 They were a hard-living, hard-drinking, as well as a hard 
 working, lot who would have taken this stranger in, 
 most likely in both senses of the phrase. 
 
 John's abstraction seemed to have come into focus at 
 last upon his table napkin. He was feeling it between a 
 moistened finger and thumb, studying its threads. 
 
 "I'm one of the directors of this club," he remarked, 
 "and I happen to know what we paid for this last lot of 
 linen we had to buy. It was a frightful price." 
 
 Henry nodded agreement. "I know. Margaret bought 
 me some handkerchiefs the other day. And they say it's 
 going to get worse rather than better. I suppose this 
 Sinn Fein rumpus in Ireland is what 's doing it. ' ' 
 
 "Linen doesn't come from Ireland," said John. "At
 
 14 JOSEPH GREER AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 least, the flax isn't grown there. Hardly any, only a few 
 thousand tons. The world's commercial flax supply 
 comes from Russia. "We can pretty well count on it that 
 the linen famine will last for years." 
 
 "Count on it?" Henry repeated. Then, perceiving 
 that this wasn't after all a digression, "Has Greer in 
 vented a substitute for linen?" he asked. 
 
 "Not a substitute," John corrected. "It's the real 
 thing. There's an average of two million acres a year 
 sown in flax right here in this country, up in the North 
 west. The farmers grow it for seed linseed oil, you know. 
 But do you know what they do with the straw? They 
 burn it, close to two million tons of it a year, right in the 
 fields where it grows." 
 
 Henry was properly amazed at this statement, and the 
 financier went on to explain. 
 
 He said the linen industry was just about where the 
 cotton industry would have been if the gin had never been 
 invented. The fibers still had to be extracted from 
 the straw by hand labor, peasant labor, old people 
 and children, who wouldn't have to be paid anything 
 for their toil. The woody gummy stuff in the straw 
 had to be rotted away from the linen fibers. Some 
 times they did it by tying the straw into bundles and 
 sinking it in the bottom of streams or ponds. Sometimes 
 by spreading it out on the grass land where the dew and 
 the wind and the sun could get at it. Anyhow, it took an 
 everlasting lot of work and watching, and weeks of time. 
 When it got rotted retted, the technical word was to 
 the proper point, they beat it and combed it by hand. 
 
 Nothing like that would do for America, of course. 
 There had been no end of attempts to devise a modern 
 labor-saving process that would do the work, but they'd 
 all failed. Mechanical processes ruined the fibers and 
 the chemical processes were too expensive, besides being 
 tricky and difficult. "Well, Greer had got on to another 
 way of doing it and it worked. 
 
 It seemed it wasn't the river water nor the
 
 THE PAWN 15 
 
 dew that rotted the woody fibers of the flax 
 straw, but a germ of some sort a microbe. That 
 was all that rotted anything. There were hundreds 
 of different kinds of rot; plants they were, little micro 
 scopic plants and some of them went after one thing 
 and some after another. Greer had got hold of the special 
 sort of bug that would eat the wood and gum in the flax 
 straw and leave the linen fiber alone. In Europe, the 
 universal practise was to pull the flax green, before it had 
 gone to seed. One of the great advantages of Greer 's 
 method was that it produced practically as good results 
 from the ripe straw, which gave you the seed crop as a 
 by-product. 
 
 "You can't patent a microbe, can you?" Henry asked. 
 
 "No," John admitted, "but you can patent pretty 
 near everything else, method of inoculation, storage, 
 all the machinery that goes into the process, and there's 
 quite a bit of it. No, there'll be no trouble about that. 
 What we'll do, eventually, will be to license the process 
 and rent the machinery to local corporations. But, in 
 order to get the thing going, we shall have to finance and 
 operate several of those local companies ourselves. It's 
 likely to spread out into an enormously big thing. 
 
 "Take the matter of getting raw material, for instance. 
 Eight now, you could get it for nothing or next to noth 
 ing. It's worthless to the farmers. They burn it. But 
 give them the idea that it's valuable, and they'll try to 
 hold ITS up. We may have to buy the seed as well as 
 the straw; finance the whole crop. That wants more 
 thinking out than we've given it so far. And, on the 
 other hand, there is the question of marketing the raw 
 linen without breaking the price. The longer you look 
 at it, the bigger it gets." 
 
 Oh, yes, it was a big thing, Henry conceded that, and 
 he listened attentively enough to the details which John 
 now went on to talk about. So many shares of common, 
 no par value ; so many shares of seven per cent, cumulative 
 preferred, convertible. Just the regular thing; a scheme
 
 16 JOSEPH GREER AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 of organization with which Henry's experience in the 
 bank had made him thoroughly familiar. 
 
 At the back of his mind as he listened, was the medie 
 valist's faint, unavailing regret at the fall of another 
 stronghold. The picture, so revolting to John, of children 
 and old people spreading the bundles of straw upon the 
 dew- wet grass for the sun and wind to work upon; the 
 jolly labor of beating and combing it ; the pleasant domes 
 tic hum of the little spinning-wheel in the corner of the 
 cottage during the long winter evenings; condemned, ob 
 literated, by Joe Greer's scientific inoculations and the 
 nasty clank of his machinery. Then, with a start, he 
 came wide awake. What was it John had said? 
 
 "You're the man we've picked for treasurer." 
 
 "I!" he exclaimed. "Oh, I don't think I could. I 
 it would " 
 
 He was trembling again, and he hastily hid his hands 
 beneath the table. "It would involve my leaving the 
 bank, I suppose, and I know nothing about this new busi 
 ness, you see, manufacturing and so on. And my my 
 work at the bank has been satisfactory, hasn't it?" 
 
 He had to support for a moment a look from John's 
 gray eyes as keen as the stroke of a surgeon's scalpel. 
 Then, mercifully, it was withdrawn. 
 
 "There isn't the slightest question," John said, "of 
 your value to the bank. But the bank's value to you, it 
 strikes me, is pretty well played out. There's no likely 
 chance of any promotion from the place you're holding 
 now, for years. This new job outside is a promotion. 
 We'll pay you ten thousand a year to begin with. That 
 will make you and Margaret a lot more comfortable, and it 
 will increase as the business warrants it. I'll carry a 
 block of preferred stock for you. You can pay it off at 
 your convenience. And the common that goes with it, if 
 the thing does anything like what we think it will, ought 
 to make you independent. That part of it's a gamble, 
 of course, but it looks good to us. As for your being 
 competent to fill the job, we all agreed upon that at once.
 
 THE PAWN 17 
 
 You've got a thorough knowledge of accounts and credit. 
 And that's all you need, except loyalty, which, of course, 
 we've got absolute confidence in. 
 
 "You see how we stand? "We believe in Greer's pro 
 cess. We believe in his technical ability. But we aren't 
 sure of the man himself. He 's to be president of the com 
 pany and he must be given, of course, a good deal of rope. 
 We can't spend all our time holding directors' meetings 
 on him, and it would hamper him unfairly if we did. Yet 
 he's never had other people's money in large amounts to 
 play with before, and we don't know how it will affect 
 him. He may get Napoleonic ideas. He may be slightly, 
 crooked. He may have a fool notion that he can do us 
 up. I 'm not a bit sure that he hasn 't. Well, as treasurer, 
 you 11 be able to see what's going on. Keep us posted. 
 You'll be our only representative there, day in, day out. 
 He's got somebody I don't know who that he means to 
 make secretary. And the whole staff will be his. You'll 
 be our watch-dog. Of course, you won't bark at him all 
 the time. It would be a great mistake to keep him rubbed 
 the wrong way. There's where a sociable kind of fellow 
 like you will be especially valuable." 
 
 There was a little silence. 
 
 "Oh, there's no doubt in our minds," John concluded, 
 "that you're the man for the job. You'll want a little 
 time to think it over, I know. The meeting isn't until 
 to-morrow, at three o'clock. Sleep on it to-night and call 
 me up the first thing in the morning to let me know what 
 you've decided." 
 
 3 
 
 The catastrophe which years ago had changed the di 
 rection and the prospect of Henry Craven's life was a 
 commonplace tragedy enough, the sudden death of his 
 father at only three or four years past fifty and the en 
 suing discovery by the widow and the two just grown 
 children that there was nothing, or but very little more 
 than nothing, for them to go on living upon.
 
 18 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 Chauncey Craven had been a golden youth. There are 
 plenty of old women to-day who still like to get talking 
 about him about what a voice he had, what looks, what 
 a Avay with him. He made a fortune before he was thirty 
 by a coup de main on the Board of Trade wheat it must 
 have been and then dramatically abjured speculation 
 altogether and settled down to the business of brokerage. 
 But he never was very assiduous at it. 
 
 He was always, Henry remembered, mildly deriding 
 his friends for taking their affairs too seriously. It was 
 easy to be rich enough for all reasonable purposes. He'd 
 proved that. Why should one submit to a grinding tyr 
 anny just to make one's self richer? The family had 
 spent a good deal of time abroad, primarily in the interest 
 of Mrs. Craven's health and seriously to the prejudice of 
 the children's formal education. Chauncey was genuinely 
 devoted to the querulous semi-invalid his wife had be 
 come, and was very affectionate and indulgent with the 
 children. Henry couldn't remember that he had ever been 
 denied anything he seriously wanted. 
 
 The boy's most pronounced appetite and aptitude was 
 for music, and this Chauncey gratified lavishly. He 
 even offered no objection to Henry's wish to forego col 
 lege, which he wasn't at all properly prepared for, when 
 the time came, and go on with his music instead. And, 
 though there was no thought of his making a profession of 
 it, Henry was still, in a desultory way, studying violin 
 and composition when his father died. 
 
 What they found when they looked into Chauncey 's af 
 fairs, though it horrified and astonished every one, was, 
 after all, just about what might have been expected. The 
 business a half-hearted enterprise at best had been 
 losing money. His family was becoming more expensive 
 from year to year as the children grew up and his wife's 
 cures were farther fetched, the easy and obvious ones 
 having been long exhausted. So, secretly operating 
 through another brokerage house, he had tried to repeat 
 that brilliant raid of twenty years ago, and failed.
 
 THE PAWN 19 
 
 This happened three or four years before he died, but he 
 revealed it to no one. He couldn't bear, Henry supposed, 
 to dissipate the golden aura of effortless success which 
 had enveloped him from youth. So he went on as if 
 nothing had happened. There was no shorten 
 ing of sail, no coming about upon a new tack. 
 They had gone on living, of course, upon his depleted 
 capital. He may have contemplated a third plunge in 
 the wheat pit and have been waiting for a likely looking 
 opportunity. He may have argued with himself that, by 
 keeping up appearances, he was preserving his credit 
 against this possible event. Or he may have been waiting 
 for nothing at all, unless perhaps a miracle. Henry ached 
 with pity whenever he thought of the hell his father must 
 have lived in during those last years. Yet he had be 
 trayed nothing, made no confidences. 
 
 Henry never really knew just how complete the smash 
 had been. John Williamson had taken hold and recovered 
 what salvage there was from the wreck. He sold the 
 big house which Chauncey had built in the exuberance of 
 that famous wheat corner (it was mortgaged to the eaves, 
 of course) advantageously enough to wring a small equity 
 out of it. Finally, with what the estate boiled down to, 
 he bought standard securities. Henry had always sus 
 pected some benignant hocus pocus on John's part about 
 this, but he took pains not to mention it. Whether that 
 little fund was something they were rightfully entitled to 
 or not they needed it; couldn't get on without it. The in 
 come wasn't sufficient as it was, with an invalid mother 
 on their hands, not though they moved into a modest 
 flat (in a good neighborhood, of course) ; not though 
 Margaret came home from her boarding-school to be con 
 stituted sole nurse, and Henry took the place John's in 
 terest made for him in the bank. One by one, those 
 thousand-dollar bonds had been sold secretly, so that 
 mother shouldn't suspect in the interest of one promis 
 ing method of treatment after another. She outlasted 
 them all she didn't die until the summer of nineteen
 
 20 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 eighteen but, by that time, Henry was earning enough 
 to carry them along. 
 
 They'd been pretty hard years, those fifteen quarter of 
 a lifetime almost between his father's death and his 
 mother's; drudging, discouraging years. And, Henry re 
 flected, harder for Margaret than for him. She had been, 
 people were always telling him as if he didn't know a 
 perfect brick about it. Faithful and tireless in her moth 
 er's service, endlessly self-sacrificing, so much, perhaps, one 
 might take for granted. Margaret had done better than 
 that. She'd kept herself from going slack. She'd man 
 aged, somehow, to dress well in circumstances and on an 
 income that would have reduced a domitable spirit to 
 acquiescence in frowsy hair and a soiled kimono. She'd 
 gone out to dinner parties when her bones must have ached 
 for bed and when there were hours of drudging domestic 
 toil waiting for her when she should come home. She'd 
 carried Henry along with her, driven him, spurred him, 
 made him keep up his interest in music even practise 
 on his violin. And this pride and resolution of hers had 
 won a sort of victory. Shaken in the sieve of calamity 
 all these years, the brother and sister had never fallen 
 through the meshes. They had hung on, thanks to 
 Margaret, in the social stratum they had been born 
 into. 
 
 Whether or not the victory was going, finally, to be 
 worth what it cost was a question Henry had never been 
 able to decide. They could have cut loose from many of 
 their worries and been materially more comfortable at 
 the same time by letting themselves simply drop out of 
 sight, into a world where there were no pretenses to keep 
 up. 
 
 To the eyes of their friends, there were upon Margaret 
 no visible marks of the struggle, but Henry saw her 
 closer to. There was a tightness in her voice when, off 
 guard, she failed to summon the masking suavity, and a 
 dry brightness in her eyes. Since their mother's death 
 (a release, of course; there was no possibility of a contrary
 
 THE PAWN 21 
 
 pretense), the signs of the strain had been plainer than 
 ever. She needed a change even Violet had come to 
 see that. But she passionately refused to go away. 
 Henry's assurances that he could get on perfectly by him 
 self for a few weeks, or months, missed the mark alto 
 gether. All she wanted was to be let alone, not fussed 
 over; above all, not stared at as if there was something 
 queer about her looks. 
 
 Henry came home early from the bank, the day John 
 offered him that new job, and was relieved when he let 
 himself into the apartment to find that Margaret was not 
 at home. He had, he supposed, already made up his 
 mind to accept John's offer. It was a promotion, of 
 course, which implied the solidest sort of compliment from 
 John's associates in the new enterprise as well as from 
 John himself. The feeling appropriate to the offer of a 
 chance like that was one of exuberant happiness. 
 
 Let him think what the new salary (nearly double what 
 he was getting at the bank) would mean. A competent 
 servant here in the flat for Margaret, somebody who 
 could cook a real dinner; less contriving over her clothes; 
 the taxi not merely when it was a brutal necessity, but 
 whenever it was desirable; Monday night seats good 
 seats down-stairs at the opera; a good piano, so that 
 when Novelli came to dinner he could be asked to play, 
 or Paula Wollaston might be tempted to sit down at it and 
 sing. None of that was a dream, though it would seem 
 like one. It was all clearly and reasonably predicable 
 from John's promise. The dream lay beyond that. A 
 gamble, John had called it, but unless he had confidently 
 and reasonably believed that it would come true, he 
 wouldn't be putting his money into it. Independence. A 
 restoration of the life which the unthinking boy he 'd been 
 had taken for granted as his natural lot. Security, travel, 
 leisure, his within ten years, five perhaps. 
 
 Yet, somehow, he could feel no thrill either at the dream 
 or at the reality. It frightened him; most of all, the 
 smiling, formidable face of Joe Greer whom he was ex-
 
 22 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 pected to watch. Suppose he shouldn't watch him suc 
 cessfully. Suppose, from his inadequacy to the task, the 
 enterprise collapsed. Or suppose it collapsed anyway. 
 "Where would he be then? If it weren't for Margaret, 
 lie believed he would refuse. The bank at all events 
 was safe, and he was safe in it. He knew that now. John 
 had told him so, for the first time, explicitly. But of 
 course Margaret was to be considered. And his present 
 salary at the bank, with prices going up the way they 
 were, was getting narrower all the time. 
 
 He tossed aside the evening paper he'd been holding in 
 his hand without even unfolding, hoisted himself out of 
 the easy chair he'd dropped into and wandered restlessly 
 about the room. 
 
 He must decide before to-morrow morning. He ought 
 to decide now before Margaret came home. She would be, 
 he uneasily suspected, upset about it, and more so if he 
 presented it to her as an open question than as a closed 
 one. Well, hadn't he, as a matter of fact, already de 
 cided ? The meeting was to-morrow afternoon. Wouldn 't 
 it embarrass John rather seriously if he were to call up in 
 the morning and say he wouldn't take it? Had John 
 weighed that for a moment as a possible alternative? Of 
 course not. The thing had been settled practically from 
 the beginning by John himself. The outcome, then, be 
 came one of John's responsibilities. 
 
 He took a long breath of relief. He'd fall upon Mar 
 garet when she came in and tell her joyfully the good 
 news. He wished he'd thought to stop at the florist's or 
 the confectioner's and buy something a little extravagant 
 that might stand as a token of it. Perhaps it wasn't yet 
 too late. 
 
 No, confound it, there went the buzzer now. Probably 
 Margaret herself, though she usually had a key. He 
 pressed the button to release the catch down-stairs and 
 opened the door into the corridor.
 
 THE PAWN 23 
 
 4 
 
 It wasn't Margaret, though. There were two people 
 coming up, and they proved to be Violet Williamson and 
 young Dorothy. The latter, when she saw who was wait 
 ing for them, left her mother behind, took the remaining 
 flight of stairs two at a time, flung her arms around him. 
 gave him a tight hug and kissed him soundly, just as she'd 
 used to do when she was unequivocally a little girl. It 
 was a heart-warming experience and made Henry wonder 
 what John had meant by saying seventeen was a devil of 
 an age. 
 
 Violet, though, coming up just as the embrace ended, 
 slightly raised her eyebrows over it, Henry thought. He 
 hoped the child didn't see. 
 
 Violet said: "I might almost kiss you myself. It's 
 such ages since I've seen you." But she didn't do it, and 
 went on to say that she hoped Margaret was at home. 
 
 "She isn't," Henry acknowledged. ''But she'll be 
 turning up any minute now. Come in, both of you, any 
 way. You two," he went on, glancing from one to the 
 other, "look more like sisters all the time. It's almost 
 impossible to believe you're anything else." 
 
 "Henry!" Dorothy cried instantly. "How sweet of 
 you!" 
 
 The tone with its artificial over-emphasis, adult, worldly, 
 ostentatiously insincere, startled him into staring at her. 
 The jolly child who had flung herself upon him a moment 
 ago had been somehow suppressed. 
 
 He noted details now that he hadn't taken in before. 
 The eyebrows narrowed to a finely penciled line, the 
 sophisticated slant of the little French sailor hat, the pose 
 erect and rather insolently square, the hands plunged 
 deep into pockets. There was still in his nostrils a faint 
 perfume that had been there, unnoted until now, since 
 she kissed him; some sort of innocent cosmetic, no doubt. 
 His eye didn't detect it. She turned away under his 
 gaze, easily enough, as if she were leaving the stage to het 
 mother.
 
 24 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 "I suppose that remark of mine must have sounded like 
 a dreadful bromide," he said to Violet. "I was betrayed 
 into it because it's literally true. Let me take your 
 wraps and make you some tea so that Margaret shan't 
 miss you." 
 
 "I suppose we might," Violet said dubiously. "It's 
 only," she went on, apparently realizing that this hadn't 
 sounded very gracious, "that I've a million things to do. 
 I just got back last week with Dorothy, and I'm spinning 
 like a top." 
 
 Henry nodded. "John told me. I had lunch with him 
 to-day." 
 
 She looked up at him with unmistakable, if faint, sur 
 prise. "What are you and John conspiring about?" she 
 asked. 
 
 Henry wasn't at all sure that he liked Violet, but it 
 was true that he had never quite got over being in love 
 with her. He was hypersensitive to her. The old string 
 had vibrated when she'd spoken a moment earlier of the 
 possibility of kissing him. He wondered whether she'd 
 meant it to. It wasn't an unreasonable assumption. She 
 was as pretty, he thought, as she'd been twenty years ago. 
 If there was no look of youth about her, neither was there 
 any of age. She looked as slender as the girl; her skin 
 as smooth, her flesh as firm, whatever artful processes 
 might have been employed to maintain these results. "What 
 she lacked she'd always lacked, and that was tenderness. 
 This was what he had felt in that last question of hers. 
 There mightn't have been any slighting implication in her 
 asking what he and John were conspiring about, but he 
 felt himself flushing a little and speaking stiffly when he 
 answered her. 
 
 "John wants me to be treasurer of the new company 
 they're getting up!" 
 
 He must, he supposed, have betrayed this feeling, for 
 she brightened instantly and cried: "How splendid! I 
 hope you'll make him pay you an enormous salary. What 
 company is it? I don't believe I know."
 
 THE PAWN 25 
 
 "Why, there's a man named Greer," he began, but she, 
 with a stare and a laugh, interrupted him. 
 
 ' ' Not that man ! ' ' she cried. ' ' Good gracious ! No, 
 I don't know a thing about it, really, only before I went 
 east there was quite a lot of talk about something he 
 wanted John to go into. What's the new company going 
 to do?" 
 
 It w r as a new process for making linen, Henry explained 
 a little lamely, for he felt he'd blundered somehow. 
 Then he asked to be excused a minute while he went out 
 and got the tea started. The maid, he thought, was out. 
 
 "I'm coming along to help," Dorothy announced, 
 taking off her hat and chucking it into the window-seat 
 as she said it. 
 
 Foraging with her in the pantry and through the ice 
 box for the materials they needed, he found his first im 
 pression of the girl who'd come flying up-stairs to hug 
 him reasserting itself. She made little jokes about his 
 ignorance of the establishment, exclaimed with whole 
 hearted delight over a trove of "Lorna Doones" in a 
 paper bag in the bread-box, and consoled him when an 
 exhaustive search had failed to produce a lemon. 
 
 "It doesn't matter about us," she said, "because 
 Violet takes milk in hers and I hate tea whatever they put 
 in it." 
 
 He had jumped at that "Violet" and now, looking 
 around at her, he saw that she'd blushed over it. 
 
 "I was practising on you," she admitted. "She wants 
 me to." 
 
 "Your mother?" 
 
 The girl nodded. "Alicia Wodehouse calls her mother 
 by her first name we spent last Sunday with them down 
 in Philadelphia. And it does sound rather amusing and 
 chic. And of course when any one looks as young as 
 mother, the other thing is ridiculous, really." 
 
 Henry was still speechless over this when he heard 
 Margaret talking to Violet in the other room. He was 
 stabbed by a prophetic sense that he'd committed a mis-
 
 26 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 demeanor in letting loose a guest even a child in this 
 part of the flat. It was a moment later that his sister, 
 without stopping to remove her wraps, swooped down 
 upon them in the pantry. She kissed Dorothy enthusiasti 
 cally and held her off in both hands. 
 
 "You're a delicious-looking young thing," she said. 
 
 "I wish I looked like you," the girl retorted, a little 
 flushed but easily enough. "I always have, you know." 
 
 People had just one adjective for Margaret good-look 
 ing. She fell short of beauty and there was nothing 
 pretty about her. She had regular features, rather finely 
 modeled, a good skin and enough hair. Had her life 
 run on in the channel that it had started in, she might 
 have attained an effect of style, smartness anyhow. As 
 it was, what she had achieved was a crispness of movement 
 and inflection, an air of adequacy to any situation that 
 might arise, which men, in the main, found a little for 
 midable. The men who liked her best were older than 
 she and married. But just this quality, it was easy to 
 guess, was what young Dorothy admired. And you could 
 not mistake the sincerity of what she had just said. 
 
 Margaret 's smile, though, had a quirk in it. ' ' It 's lucky 
 for you there's no fairy godmother hanging about," she 
 remarked, "to snap you up on a wish like that." Then, 
 abruptly, she shooed them out into the sitting-room to 
 keep Violet amused while she got the tea. 
 
 Dorothy went at once, of course, but Henry hung back. 
 He wanted, in two sentences, to tell Margaret about the 
 new job before Violet should force his hand, but she mis 
 read his intention. "Go along," she said curtly; "you 
 can't help me here." Still he hesitated for a second, but 
 the look he met in her eyes was too much for him and he 
 gave it up. He didn't quite dare, either, ask Violet not 
 to mention it. She mightn't take it right. Trust to luck 
 was all he could do. 
 
 And luck didn't favor him, because, just as Margaret 
 was coming in with the tray (the teapot and the cups upon 
 it were not, he noted, those that he and Dorothy had got
 
 27 
 
 out, and she had found a lemon), Violet said, "It must 
 seem strange to be leaving the bank, doesn't it?" 
 
 He answered quickly, "Margaret doesn't know." Then 
 to his sister he went on, "John offered me a new job at 
 lunch to-day and I I'm taking it." 
 
 Her eyebrows went up with an expression which be 
 trayed nothing but good-humored surprise, and she threw 
 Violet, in parenthesis, a question as to how she wanted 
 her tea before she made any other comment. Then she 
 said, "It must be pretty good if you could make up your 
 mind as quickly as that to take it." 
 
 "Well, I'm sure it must look good to John," Violet ob 
 served. "The whole scheme, I mean. Because unless it 
 had looked well marvelous, he'd never have gone in 
 with that man." 
 
 "Greer, you mean," Henry said, and turned once more 
 to Margaret with explanations. "He's an inventor and 
 he's found a way to make linen out of American flax 
 straw. They've never been able to do it before and the 
 farmers have burnt it thousands or maybe millions, of 
 tons of it every year. I don't understand Greer 's pro 
 cess in the least. I'm not even sure that John does. But 
 he seems to have no doubt it works. John wants me to 
 be treasurer of the new company," he concluded. "The 
 inventor himself is to be president." 
 "Have you met him yet?" Violet asked. 
 "I just got a glimpse of him," Henry answered. "I 
 hadn't time to see anything but his beard." 
 
 "That's the man, all right," Violet said, with a nod. 
 And went on, since they were both visibly waiting for 
 more, "Why, he sounds amusing to me; really attractive. 
 Jimmie Wallace likes him quite a lot. He likes to play 
 with theatrical people, that's how Jimmie knows him. 
 But, of course, Jimmie himself isn't exactly what you'd 
 call austere. He's got an apartment Greer, I mean 
 up on Sheridan Road, in the same building that Bella and 
 Bill Forrester are in. Bella is quite an authority on him. 
 Never met him, of course. But she meets up with him, ac-
 
 28 JOSEPH GREER AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 cidentally you know, every now and then, and they get 
 Tery pally. She's hoping, she says, that he'll invite her 
 to one of his parties. They must be pretty terrific from 
 all accounts." 
 
 "I got the impression," Henry observed, "from John's 
 biography of him, that he's a bachelor." 
 
 "I don't know," said Violet. "It comes to that, any 
 how. He lives in that big apartment all by himself. At 
 least ..." she qualified, and broke off with a glance to 
 ward her daughter. 
 
 "You needn't mind me," Dorothy said quietly. "I'm 
 reading The Literary Digest. All the same," the girl 
 went on, looking up at Henry from the magazine her 
 glance had fallen upon, "I think that sort of inventor 
 would be a wonderful person to have about. Mostly 
 they're so awfully noble and innocent, aren't they, and 
 about a hundred years old ? Or is that just in the movies ? 
 Anyhow, I think you'll like it a lot. I wish father would 
 give me a job in the new company." 
 
 She rose, then, put down her cup and coming round 
 behind her mother's chair, took her lightly by the 
 shoulders. "I was to drag you away by force at a quar 
 ter to six," she said. (Henry noted how she had evaded 
 using any term of address.) "It's nearly that, now, and 
 you haven't done your errand yet." 
 
 "I'm having a dinner to-morrow night," Violet ex 
 plained to Margaret, "and as things have turned out, I'm 
 simply gorged with men. Can I steal you away from 
 Henry ? It 's going to be frightfully dull, I 'm afraid. ..." 
 Margaret thought she could come. She didn't mind 
 being bored, she said as she went over to her little writ 
 ing desk to consult her calendar Violet's food was always 
 so wonderful. 
 
 Dorothy had come over to Henry and offered him her 
 hand, "for luck." He retained it as he turned to her 
 mother and asked, "How about an even exchange? Or 
 wouldn't it be proper? Or are you going to commandeer 
 Dorothy, too?"
 
 THE PAWN 29 
 
 "Yes, it's all right," Margaret said, from her desk in the 
 corner. "Love toi Seven-thirty?" 
 
 "Oh, Dorothy's perfectly unattainable," Violet told 
 Henry. "She's dining and dancing somewhere to-morrow 
 night. I don't in the least remember where. All I know 
 is I accepted eleven invitations for her for Easter week." 
 "I'm desolated that I can't dine with you, 7 ' Dorothy 
 cried in the best accents of Vanity Fair. "It would be 
 muck more amusing." 
 
 5 
 
 "I call that," Henry grumbled, after he had closed the 
 door behind them, "an infernal outrage. Oh, not your 
 going out to dinner ! " he added, for he had caught a look 
 in his sister's face that startled him. "I meant the way 
 she's trying to spoil that lovely child. John said to-day 
 that seventeen was a devilish age. He's wrong. It's 
 thirty-eight that is." 
 
 "I didn't suppose you meant about the dinner," she 
 said, her voice coming rather flat, "and I supposed you 
 did mean Dorothy. But there was just a chance, I 
 thought, that you resented the way John had treated you. ' ' 
 ' ' John ! In offering me the new job, you mean ? That 's 
 because you don't know about it yet. Violet spoiled 
 things, rather, making me tell it backward. It's ten 
 thousand a year, Peg, to begin with, stock in the com 
 pany independence again, if the thing goes right 
 something like old times." 
 
 He tried to enlarge upon the theme, as in his thoughts 
 he'd done earlier the piano, the opera seats, clothes, a 
 good cook, taxicabs but without getting any responsive 
 enthusiasm from her to keep him afloat. He took the 
 other tack, the fine reassuring compliment they had paid 
 him; not only John but the other associates, men like 
 Crawford and Gregory Corbett in picking him, as 
 they'd unanimously done, for the responsible task of 
 guarding their interests. They were putting a lot of 
 money into it, half a million dollars for a start. 
 
 "It's not very much for them," Margaret demurred.
 
 30 JOSEPH GREER AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 "It wouldn't even have been very much for John, if he 
 were paying it all himself." 
 
 In a sense this was, of course, true. The outright loss 
 of half a million dollars wouldn't well, impose any econ 
 omies on Violet. Yet it was Henry's experience with 
 rich men on- their pocketbook side, and this he tried to 
 tell his sister, that they didn't take losses lightly, not 
 even proportionately insignificant ones. In every trans 
 action, big or little, they wanted full measure good se 
 curity; and they showed extraordinary skill in getting it. 
 That probably was why they were rich. 
 
 She asked him abruptly, ""When did you first hear 
 about this?" 
 
 "Why just to-day at lunch. You don't think I'd 
 keep a thing like that from you. I'm sorry I told Violet 
 first, but it came up naturally, somehow, and then I took 
 it for granted that she'd know anyway." 
 
 "And you accepted it finallv right there at the lunch 
 table?" 
 
 "No, of course not. As a matter of fact, John didn't 
 ask me to. He knew I'd want to think it over talk it 
 over with you." 
 
 "How long did he give you to decide?" she asked. 
 
 "Well, the meeting is to-morrow afternoon," said Henry, 
 and all the wind went out of his sails on the admission. 
 "They'll want to know before then. I told John I'd call 
 him up in the morning." 
 
 "That's what I thought you might resent." Her voice 
 flattened down upon the words and, as she turned away 
 from him, they were hardly audible. 
 
 "I don't feel I'm being unduly hurried," he assured 
 her, "if that's what you mean. I've already decided, un 
 less you've some serious objection to urge, that I'll take 
 it." 
 
 "You haven't decided anything," she contradicted. 
 She was still speaking in that monotonous tone he had 
 learned to recognize as an early symptom of an emotional 
 disturbance of some kind. She was upset over this, just
 
 THE PAWN 31 
 
 as he'd felt she would be. "You haven't had any chance 
 to decide. You don't know whether the process works or 
 not. I don't believe you know whether it's ever been 
 tried or is just a theory. John 's decided it for you. He's 
 going to take a flyer. He can afford to lose as well as 
 not. He 's used you like a pawn in a game of chess push 
 ing you in. It won't matter to him whether you're taken 
 or not." 
 
 He had no answer ready, and she went on a moment 
 later to add the capstone to the fanciful edifice. "How 
 do you know," she asked, "that there isn't some one else 
 he wants your place in the bank for?" 
 
 "I haven't any proof that he doesn't," he said then, 
 gently. "But that doesn't square with his history. He's 
 shown us as much real kindness and good will, during the 
 last fifteen years, as we've found in anybody. If he 
 treats me as a pawn, it's because that's what I really am 
 on the business chess-board." 
 
 "You're three times as intelligent as he is," she pro 
 tested. 
 
 "So was father," he reminded her. "Intelligence isn't 
 the thing they play this game with. It wants a certain 
 stupidity, really, to keep you munching away at it all day 
 long, like one of John's Holsteins. Father couldn't do 
 that; couldn't keep his mind on it. He didn't hate it 
 until those last years, because he began by getting the 
 better of it. Well of course, I didn't begin that way. 
 And until John showed me this chance to-day at lunch, 
 it looked as if I never would get the better of it, short of 
 retiring on a wretched little pension when I was sixty- 
 five or so, too old to have any life left. This thing, of 
 course, may fail. I suppose you're right, that it's more 
 than likely to. But, if it doesn't, it's a way out. It's a 
 chance to live a little, while I 've still got something ..." 
 
 He pulled up short. He'd communed with himself in 
 this strain often enough, but he'd never heard himself 
 saying such things aloud. 
 
 Margaret remained silent. She was sitting where he
 
 32 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 couldn't see her face, so he went on, after a minute, dis 
 cussing the thing more soberly. He had no fear, he said, 
 that John would resent his deciding against the offer. He 
 had really an explicit assurance that he could stay on at 
 the bank if he wanted to. But his refusal would absolve 
 John from any further concern about his fortunes. If he 
 wanted to spend the rest of his life as a discount clerk, 
 and this was really what his duties at the bank amounted 
 to, he could. "Whereas, if he took the new thing under 
 John's orders, if she wanted to put it that way the fail 
 ure of the enterprise needn't do him any harm; wouldn't 
 if he'd shown himself capable of doing his part. 
 
 "I don't deny," he concluded, in another irresistible 
 outburst of candor, "that I'm nervous about it fright 
 ened. I'm supposed to watch Greer. They aren't even 
 quite sure he's straight. I don't know that I can watch 
 him, well enough. He's the sort of person I detest; a ty 
 rant, I think, and a bully. And of course, it will be all 
 day long, every day. But I'm going to. That's the price 
 and I'll pay it." 
 
 "You won't dislike him long," she said raggedly; and 
 added, "Wait until you begin going to those parties of his 
 that Bella Forrester tells about." 
 
 The breakdown of this attempt of hers to get on to a 
 lighter note betrayed to him the fact that she was crying. 
 
 "It's nothing," she declared, when he, full of concern, 
 came and sat on the arm of her chair and tried to comfort 
 her. " Nothing but just that I'm such a pig. I'm glad 
 you've got the chance, and of course you'd be perfectly 
 crazy not to take it. And I don't think the thing is go 
 ing to fail. Even if it does, there will be the big salary 
 for a while, anyhow, and that will mean a lot. You've 
 had such a rotten time all these years! Now you'll be 
 well freer, anyhow. And it makes it possible for you to 
 marry. That's the main thing." 
 
 He arose with a sigh and, in spite of himself, a shrug. 
 It was a topic that, in the past ten years, had been talked 
 threadbare oh, more than that, ragged as the wind-
 
 THE PAWN 33 
 
 whipped scare-crow in a farmer's corn-field. He didn't 
 want to marry, either as an abstract principle or, speci 
 fically, any girl. Particularly and almost truculently, 
 did he not want to marry any of the girls whom Margaret 
 picked as possibilities. 
 
 To-day, though, somewhat surprisingly, too, since as 
 a rule the gloomier Margaret was the more a discussion of 
 his marriage attracted her, the topic was checked without 
 running its course, either through likely candidates or ways 
 and means. He wondered, a little uneasily, if she'd noted 
 that impatient gesture of his. It would be a dreadful 
 thing to be rude to Margaret. 
 
 In a tone which he thought really sounded lighter- 
 hearted, she told him she was going to let him off his us 
 ual lecture. 
 
 "It won't be necessary any more, because it's going to 
 be possible now for you to have a little fun. Not being 
 held down as you've been, poor old boy, all these years 
 you're going to blossom out, I can see that. You'll meet 
 a lot of amusing people, and you'll find somebody." 
 
 "At one of Joe Greer's parties?" he asked, in good- 
 humored irony. "One of his beautiful demi-mondaines? 
 Can't you just imagine what a thrilling object I'd be to a 
 person like that?" 
 
 There were humorous possibilities in the theme, and he 
 glanced around at her for the tolerant smile which would 
 have encouraged him to embroider upon it. But she'd 
 fallen into an abstraction, looked as if she hadn't heard a 
 word he'd said. 
 
 He was left curiously at a loss. He could think of noth 
 ing to say. Yet the protracted silence was irksome, al 
 most painful, to him. He stood there for a moment over 
 the table where earlier he had thrown the still-folded even 
 ing paper. About the act of opening it out and sitting 
 down in the easy chair to read, there would be, it seemed 
 to him, a sort of brutality. The silver box beside it con 
 tained cigarettes for occasions when they had guests; at 
 other times he and Margaret very rarely smoked. In a
 
 34 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 kind of desperation, he took one now. As he turned away 
 to get a match from the mantel-shelf, she spoke. 
 
 "I wish the war hadn't stopped so soon after mother 
 died," she said; and added, with an outburst of cold pas 
 sion, "If it had gone on another year, I might have had a 
 chance, too." That was all; the gust had spent itself. 
 With hardly a pause, she added, "I think I'd better go out 
 and help Lydia with the dinner." 
 
 He had his cigarette alight by now and it did fortify 
 him a little. 
 
 "How about the Blackstone to-night, instead?" he sug 
 gested. "By way of ushering in the good times." 
 
 She gave him at that a most amazing look. Had it not 
 been Margaret, and at him, her brother, that she looked, 
 you'd have said there was a momentary gleam in it of 
 downright hate. It was gone in a flash, and she said in a 
 commonplace tone enough : ' ' Oh, not to-night, Henry dear. 
 I'm feeling rotten." 
 
 6 
 
 The meeting the next afternoon was, so far as its actual 
 proceedings went, a dull affair, the inevitable legal hocus 
 pocus occupying most of the time. Two lawyers were 
 present, a man named Nathan, who seemed to be Greer's 
 attorney, and, across the table, young Craig from Aldrich 's 
 office, who acted at first as secretary of the meeting. 
 Sometimes they differed solemnly and, it seemed to Henry, 
 interminably, over a trivial matter of phrasing. Sometimes 
 one of the principals took a hand. Once Henry heard 
 Craig say to John Williamson, "Mr. Aldrich will accept 
 this. He gave me a special memorandum on it." It 
 might, from the solemnity with which he spoke, have been 
 a special tablet from Mount Sinai, and John nodded with 
 an air of complete satisfaction, his momentary uneasiness 
 quite banished. To Henry, trying hard to keep awake, 
 this seemed mildly ludicrous. 
 
 But there were two outstanding features of the after 
 noon. One was the place where the meeting occurred 
 Greer 's offices in an upper story of one of the taller build-
 
 THE PAWN 35 
 
 ings which look out at the lake across Michigan Boulevard ; 
 the other was the light which this environment shed upon 
 the man who had created it. 
 
 Henry's approach had been down a narrow corridor 
 past a row of small private offices (one of them to be, from 
 now on, his own). The room was as big as the directors' 
 room in John Williamson's suite, but the chaste, almost 
 vacuous, impersonality of John's throne room found its 
 complete antithesis here. This room was a place w r here a 
 man very largely lived; and that man Joseph Greer, and 
 nobody else. His desk occupied a not very important 
 position in the corner of it. Two draughting tables stood 
 over near the windows, although a glimpse through an 
 open door revealed a large draughting-room beyond, in the 
 other arm of the L. The wall space was crowded with 
 firing cabinets and sectional book-cases, and the walls them 
 selves hung thick with framed drawings, plans, perspec 
 tives, strange designs, photographs of machines. 
 
 About these latter, all of them inexplicable to Henry, 
 there was, he noted with surprise, a look of ... He 
 stopped on the edge of calling it beauty, and adopted 
 style instead. Odd that he should take that impression 
 when he hadn't an idea what any of them was about! 
 
 The table the new directors were beginning to gather 
 around was a big solid affair of oak, the varnish of its top 
 pretty w y ell worn away and -the edges pitted by the hot 
 ends of innumerable cigarettes laid down by preoccupied 
 men who had needed both hands while they talked. A 
 shabby, serviceable room, cluttered with heterogeneous 
 objects samples, models. In a big box on the floor were 
 a number of little bundles of straw, of fiber, of tow, of 
 combed-out stuff that might be meant for a wig for Mar 
 guerite, in Faust. The linen they were going to make, of 
 course ! Successive processes. 
 
 Well, \vhen Greer came in late ; he was the last man to 
 arrive you saw at once that he belonged here. You per 
 ceived that all you had been sensing, during the twenty 
 minutes' wait he had imposed on you, was nothing but an
 
 36 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 outlying part of the man himself. And it might be (one 
 mustn't jump to conclusions) his truest index. Those 
 "terrific" parties for actresses! which had so fasci 
 nated Bella Forrester might not, indeed, be a myth, but 
 there was no doubt left in Henry's mind that many a mid 
 night must have found him here, in his shirt, sweating 
 under the white glare of electric light over one of those 
 draughting tables. 
 
 He seemed much less objectionably self-assertive here 
 than in John 's office yesterday. Possibly, Henry thought, 
 because he had more real self-assurance. He spoke more 
 quickly, exhibited what seemed like a real concern that he 
 should have been late and took the trouble to explain that 
 his tardiness was unavoidable. He roused a sympathetic 
 vibration in Henry, too, by showing himself desperately 
 bored by the phrase-mongering of the two lawyers and the 
 long drawn-out liturgy of legal fictions which they insisted 
 upon. 
 
 On the whole, then, except for the other outstanding 
 feature of the afternoon, Henry's fears and misgivings 
 would have been pretty well laid to rest. 
 
 But Greer sprang a sensation, along in the middle of the 
 meeting. Of the permanent directors, three, by agree 
 ment, were to be elected at his nomination; himself, of 
 course, his lawyer, Nathan, and J. MacArthur, who was, 
 also by agreement, to be made secretary of the company. 
 When the election had taken place and they were ready 
 to go on as a directors' meeting, John turned to Greer and 
 asked : 
 
 "Where is MacArthur? If he's to be secretary, he 
 ought to be here to take charge of the minutes. Can you 
 get hold of him?" 
 
 Joe's answer was to tilt back in his chair and, reaching 
 around without rising, press a button on his desk. Henry 
 guessed in that instant from a gleam in his eye, that some 
 thing was going to happen. 
 
 When an office boy answered the buzzer, Greer said, 
 "Ask Miss MacArthur to come in."
 
 THE PAWN 37 
 
 Well, there was nothing unprecedented about it, of 
 course. Plenty of women were directors of companies 
 and officers, too. But that they should have been led 
 into electing her in the dark like this gave them a sense 
 of having been tricked. John and Gregory Corbett looked 
 pretty blank. Greer glanced around from one set serious 
 face to the next with an open grin. He let the silence 
 last a moment or two, then said: 
 
 "She was secretary of my old company The Fiber 
 Products and I give you my word, gentlemen, she can't 
 be beat." 
 
 The door opened just then, and she came in. They all 
 got up, of course, and Greer, still wearing the remains of 
 his grin, introduced them around. 
 
 Her manner, if not her appearance, was immediately 
 reassuring. She acknowledged the introductions compos 
 edly enough, and then took young Craig's chair at Greer 's 
 right hand. Two or three cleanly directed questions and 
 a cursory look through his notes put her abreast of the sit 
 uation. The routine of the meeting could now proceed. 
 She knew her business, so much was easy to see. 
 
 Yet she was not, Henry felt, quite the type of business 
 woman he was acquainted with. Her dress had a somewhat 
 mannish air which these, as a rule, are careful to avoid. 
 It was a suit of light-colored homespun, quite new and 
 rather smart in its severity. Certainly none of the women 
 who worked in the bank wore clothes like that. And then 
 it struck him that she was wearing a hat, a high-crowned, 
 narrow-brimmed sailor of mahogany colored straw, sen 
 sible and rather severe though it went well with her red 
 hair. But why a hat at all, if she belonged here as 
 Greer had just explicitly declared she did? For that 
 matter, why the jacket, which she loosened and threw 
 back when she took her place at the table ? Why not the 
 skirt and blouse which they'd all have taken for granted, 
 without a thought, as the natural thing? 
 
 Wasn't this, Henry wondered, exactly the reason? 
 Wasn't it her wish to avoid being taken for granted as a
 
 38 JOSEPH GREER AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 mere stenographic convenience? Hadn't that hat a real 
 social significance? Mightn't it be a delicate assertion of 
 her equal voice and vote with the rest of themj? She was 
 a clever woman if she was capable of seizing a nuance like 
 that. And unusually self-assured, too unless Greer had 
 put her up to it. But Greer wouldn't have thought of 
 It. 
 
 The idea amused Henry. He settled back a little more 
 contentedly in his chair, watchful to see what the others 
 made of her; how, as time went on, they took her. He 
 wasn't at all sure how he was going to take her, himself. 
 
 No doubt she was competent; irritatingly so, he might 
 find her. She never was at an instant's loss for any of 
 their names, for example, though they'd been flung at her 
 all in a jumble. And one or two small tangles she straight 
 ened out almost negligently. There was something rather 
 shrewd about her; canny, perhaps, was the word. She'd 
 turn out, he guessed, to be Scotch rather than Irish. How 
 old? Oh, around Margaret's age, perhaps, or even his 
 own. Not young, certainly. But distinctly good to look 
 at. That was a really lovely skin she had, for all its pow 
 der of freckles. And it was interesting to watch the re 
 strained play of her eyebrows and her thin expressive lips. 
 
 Presently, his gaze got diverted from her face to John's 
 across the table from her. John had felt the inclination 
 for another smoke, drawn one of his thick cigars from its 
 case, bitten off the end of it and struck a match. It was 
 at this instant that Henry looked at him, saw him hesitate, 
 glance at her and then, dubiously, around the room. It 
 was pretty thick, of course; they'd all, or most of them, 
 been smoking in there for hours. John shook out his 
 match, content, apparently, to wait until there should 
 have been an opportunity to air out a bit. A triumph for 
 the hat, no doubt. 
 
 She, with her attention on the man who was talking, had 
 missed the by-play. But Greer had not, and his response 
 to it was, with a grin, to get out his own cigarette case, 
 spring it open and hold it out to Miss MacArthur; fairly, 
 indeed, under her nose.
 
 THE PAWN 39 
 
 She might well have been startled by the prank, Henry 
 reflected. She might have been painfully embarrassed by 
 the implication in it. Business women, so far as he knew 
 secretaries and such didn't smoke; not, at least, with 
 their employers during office hours. But this woman was 
 neither startled nor embarrassed. She declined the offer 
 with a mere unceremonious shake of the head and without 
 a glance at Greer. A quarter of a minute later, though, 
 there flickered across her lips just the faintest smile; a 
 mere quirk or dimple at one corner of her rather wide 
 mouth. A moment later she glanced across at John, and, 
 seeing him a little at a loss, his unlighted cigar in one hand 
 and the extinguished match still in the fingers of the 
 other, she told him not to mind her. She'd been thor 
 oughly smoke-cured years ago. 
 
 That smile of hers grew more suggestive and disquieting 
 to Henry the more he thought of it. He rummaged about 
 for an adjective that satisfactorily fitted it. Contemp 
 tuous? It was as hard as that but friendlier. Tolerant? 
 That wasn't active enough. Familiar? Oh, closer than 
 that! Domestic that perhaps was as well as he could do. 
 He'd seen just that look go over Violet's face when John, 
 in a rare mood, was being outrageous and she was amused 
 in spite of herself. It was a look of one who has learned 
 from long experience with a man that remonstrance will 
 only make him worse. It was a look, too, of pure amuse 
 ment, which meant, of course, that his prank hadn't rat 
 tled her the least bit in the world. Formidable as Greer 
 might be, it was plain enough that Miss J. MacArthur 
 wasn't afraid of him. 
 
 Henry was drifting, he perceived, toward a really start 
 ling conclusion. Was he going too far? On any accepted 
 theory of evidence, certainly he was. Suppose he walked 
 along with John after the meeting was over, and John 
 asked him what he thought of the secretary and director 
 whom Greer had so dramatically sprung upon them, and 
 suppose he were to reply that he'd come to the conclusion 
 she was Greer 's mistress, and give his only reason. Heav 
 ens ! John would think him a lunatic.
 
 40 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 This, perhaps, explains why, when the meeting broke 
 up, Henry avoided leaving the room until after John and 
 Gregory Corbett did. It was easy, for they were prompt 
 about getting away. His delay, occupied by the metic 
 ulous adjustment of his muffler before putting on his 
 overcoat, gave Miss MacArthur an opportunity, almost 
 an invitation, perhaps, to come up and speak to him. 
 
 ' ' Wouldn 't you like to see your new office, Mr. Craven, 
 before you go?" 
 
 Her voice certainly had nothing meretricious about it, 
 and its timbre and intonation were grateful to the ear. 
 He followed her down the corridor with a curiously stimu 
 lating sense of adventure. This notion he 'd come to about 
 her, though shocking, of course, to the whole moral fab 
 ric of his nature, hadn't at all the effect of making her 
 personally repulsive to him. "Was it possible that it cut the 
 other way? Created a real attraction? He was startled 
 by the suspicion that it did. 
 
 The room she ushered him into was intrinsically just 
 the conventional quartered oak and ground glass box-stall. 
 But its one broad window looked east, and at this height 
 the eighteenth or twentieth story they seemed almost 
 to overhang the lake. Three paces back from the sill, it 
 was all you could see. It was amazingly brilliant to-day, 
 for there was an east wind which swept it clean of smoke 
 and the sky was splotched with a cloud or two which threw 
 shadows of an incredible purple upon the blue water. 
 
 Involuntarily Henry gazed and held his breath. How 
 in the world, he wondered, could he do any work in the 
 face of a view like that ! He wouldn 't have dared say this, 
 of course, to the new secretary, but she must have come 
 somewhere near guessing it from his look, for she remarked, 
 "We all had to get used to that." 
 
 She went on, after a glance which indicated she had got 
 used to it: "This was Mr. Ferris 's office. He was treas 
 urer of the old company. At least," she added without 
 a smile, "he was called treasurer." 
 
 He perceived plainly enough that she meant to tell him
 
 THE PAWN 41 
 
 something and waited, with a trepidation he was afraid 
 wasn't quite concealed, for her to go on. 
 
 ''I only meant," she explained, "that Mr. Greer is al 
 ways so full of the one thing that happens to be on his 
 mind that the rest of us have to catch hold just anywhere 
 and fill in." 
 
 "I don't know how good I shall be at that," Henry 
 said, for it broke over him that with this penetrating 
 young woman no pretense to infallibility would carry him 
 very far. "You see I've always been at the bank where 
 the work is very thoroughly routined. I'm afraid I'll 
 have to rely on you to help me, anyhow at first." 
 
 "Call on me any time for anything," she said good- 
 humoredly. "That seems to be the one thing I'm for. 
 My office is right here next to yours," she added, after 
 opening the communicating door: "Of course, now we're 
 opening the new books, there will be a lot of things that 
 you're the only one who will know anything about. I've 
 always wished I was an accountant, but I've never had 
 time to learn more than the beginnings of it. We'll see 
 you Monday?" 
 
 He said he supposed so, and at that, with a nod, she 
 went into her own office and closed the door behind her. 
 
 He dropped down into the swivel chair his swivel 
 chair now feeling the imperative need of a few minutes 
 in which to get himself together. But before the process 
 of recollection had fairly found time to begin, he heard 
 steps Greer 's, he was sure come down the corridor and 
 turn into the secretary's office. 
 
 "Oh, hello," he heard her say. "I thought you'd 
 gone. ' ' 
 
 The other said it was Greer "God, what an after 
 noon!" and plumped down heavily on something, her 
 desk it sounded more like than a chair. They were as 
 easily audible in there to Henry, through the Saturday af 
 ternoon stillness, as if they'd been in the same room with 
 him. 
 
 "Well," Greer went on after striking a match, "I guess
 
 42 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 we're really started, at last. I don't believe there's any 
 more damned fee-fo-fum that they can think of. What 
 do you think of the new ..." 
 
 She silenced him somehow, and must have let him 
 know, in pantomime, that the man he meant to ask about 
 was in the next room. There was a moment of silence 
 an agonizing moment for Henry then a grunt from 
 Greer and the sound of his rising. 
 
 "See you to-morrow?" he asked, in a tone a little lower 
 but not much. "How about dinner up at the flat? My 
 train doesn't go until midnight." 
 
 "I can't come to dinner. But lunch is all right, if you 
 like, and the rest of the afternoon. ' ' 
 
 "Damn it, Jennie, can't you leave the one decent work 
 day in the week alone?" 
 
 "You have too many work days as it is. I'll be there 
 at one, but I won't wait. So if you're at work and don't 
 feel like stopping, you needn't." 
 
 "Oh, all right! One o'clock, then. You're an infer 
 nal tyrant, Jennie." 
 
 "So would you be, Joe (or did she call him Joey?), if 
 you got the chance, I guess." 
 
 A moment of silence; then, from Greer, "Well, crank up 
 your little Ford and buzz along. "Where are you parked ? ' ' 
 
 "Just around the corner. Can I take you anywhere?" 
 
 If he answered, it was with nothing more than a gesture. 
 The next moment Henry heard her going. 
 
 Then, before he could move or think, the communicating 
 door was thrown open, and Greer, at peace with the world 
 and certainly unashamed, came in upon him. He gave 
 Henry an amicable smile, pleased to find him there and 
 not thank Heaven the least in the world surprised. Be 
 fore speaking, he devoted a moment to a prodigious yawn 
 and stretch. 
 
 "Well," he said, as he squeezed the water out of his 
 eyes, "that's over. We're through with that sort of 
 hoakum for a while, anyway. You found it as dull as I 
 did, I could see that. Let 's go somewhere and have a chin.
 
 THE PAWN 43 
 
 And a drink," he added. "I'm dryer right now than 
 this country will ever be." 
 
 The idea of assisting at Joe's drink didn't disturb 
 Henry. He assumed a corner in some decorous club. But 
 when he found his companion guiding him through the 
 swing doors of \vhat was, in effect, nothing but a common, 
 saloon although it was run in connection with one of the 
 Boulevard hotels, he experienced a strong impulse to bolt. 
 He hadn 't been inside a place like this in years ; the bank 
 took a very high line in such matters. But he wasn't ex* 
 pected, he found, to stand up to the long bar and put his 
 foot on a brass rail. 
 
 Greer piloted him back into a sort of grill where, ap 
 parently, food was to be had as well as liquor, and when 
 Henry, asked what he would have, opted indifferently for 
 ginger ale, his host said, ' ' You can have anything you like, 
 of course, coffee, tea ? ' ' 
 
 "That's what I'd really like," said Henry, "a pot of 
 orange pekoe, if I may." 
 
 Greer nodded confirmation of this to the waiter, order 
 ed bourbon for himself and then told Henry that he liked 
 tea but found it too stimulating. He had tried, he guessed, 
 everything to drink that there was in the world, and had, 
 come to the conclusion that the most innocent of all bev 
 erages was honest corn whisky. But he didn 't go on from 
 there, as Henry feared he would, to discuss the dark incred 
 ible approach of Prohibition. (This was in April, 1919.) 
 There was something he really wanted to talk about. 
 
 "What do you make of Williamson?" he asked ab 
 ruptly. 
 
 "Make of him?" Henry echoed. "Why, I don't know. 
 I've known him, you see, for a great many years. He 
 married a cousin of mine." 
 
 "Married, is he?" Greer reflected. Then, "Living 
 with his wife?" 
 
 Henry jumped. ' ' Yes, ' ' he said. ' ' Oh, yes, certainly. ' '
 
 44 
 
 Apparently, from his host's point of view, it was by no 
 means a corollary. But, having received Henry's assur 
 ance on the point, he was content to let it drop and go 
 back to the main theme. 
 
 ""Well, I don't get any of .these fellows," he said; "the 
 financial gang. I don't see how they get away with it. 
 I don't see how they keep themselves alive. Oh, I know 
 you're on their side. You were in the bank, weren't you* 
 And they put you in here to keep an eye on me. But 
 you're no more like them really, than I am. I saw that 
 well enough at the meeting. There were a dozen times 
 to-day when we both wanted to say, 'to hell with it.' But 
 you've worked for 'em, seen 'em close to, so I thought 
 maybe you could tell me the answer." 
 
 "I'm not sure I quite understand what it is you find 
 puzzling about them," Henry said, sipping his tea and 
 feeling queerly at ease for the moment with his com 
 panion. "I've worked for them, as you say, a good part 
 of my life, but they've never struck me as enigmatic, es 
 pecially. Of course, they're my own people. But 
 you're quite right that I'm not one of them. I'd have 
 been a musician, if I could," he added. 
 
 "There you are," said Greer; "that's something. I 
 suppose music's just a form of engineering, really, only it 
 happens to be one that a man can't make a living by un 
 less he's a sort of freak. Well then, you're a musician; 
 I'm an engineer. But what the devil are they? What 
 do they see ? What do they think they see ? Oh, money, 
 of course, but money 's nothing but a way of getting things 
 done. What is it they're trying to get done? If I had 
 Williamson's money, I'd do something with it. So would 
 you. I doubt if he even has fun with it. Not as much 
 as I have on perhaps a twentieth as much. Round and 
 round he goes looking for safe investments for an income 
 that's already five or six times what he can spend; 
 making more work for himself all the time." 
 
 "I suppose," Henry put in, "that it's really power he 
 wants rather than money."
 
 THE PAWN 45 
 
 The other man snatched the word away from him. 
 "Power! I understand power, or I think I do. Power 
 is what can be used to move something. Well now, see 
 here ! Here 's a man who 's got a hobby for buying elec 
 tric storage cells and charging them, and he goes on col 
 lecting more and more of them and you go to him and 
 say, 'What are you going to do with all this?' and he says, 
 'Oh, I'm going to run a motor-generator outfit to charge 
 more cells.' Couldn't you take him before a judge and 
 get a conservator appointed on the strength of that? Of 
 course you could. Well, what's the difference? What 
 does Williamson want to run? The city? He could, if 
 he liked Roger Sullivan did. A railroad? A steam 
 ship line? An opera company? A harem? I don't care 
 what. But it ought to be something." 
 
 Henry said at this point that John did run, or had a 
 voice in running, an immense number of things. There 
 were a dozen directorates that Henry knew he served on, 
 and there might be as many more he'd never heard about. 
 
 "Exactly," said Greer. "But his interest is financial 
 in every case, isn't it, not operative. He's guarding his 
 dividends, or increasing 'em. Here's an example of it right 
 here; this company of ours. It's three months since I 
 went to him about it. I had a letter from Corbett; that's 
 how I got to him. Well, he was interested all right. 
 There were three points to my proposition: the linen 
 famine that was coming because of the state of things in 
 Russia, the sixteen hundred thousand tons of flax straw 
 that's grown every year in this country and burnt by the 
 farmers in the fields, and the fact that I had a commer 
 cial process for making that flax straw into linen. 
 
 "Well, the first two of those propositions really inter 
 ested him, fastened themselves in his mind. The third 
 simply was true or it wasn't. He hires Fuller, Price and 
 Company to make him a report on the thing. They look 
 me up along with the rest of it. They typewrite it all 
 out on sixteen gauge paper, bind it up in blltck Morocco 
 and send it to him; charge him a couple of thousand
 
 46 JOSEPH GREER AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 dollars for it. Well, if they've got the whole story of my 
 life in it, it's cheap at the price." 
 
 He illuminated this parenthesis with a dazzling grin, 
 but went straight on. ''Williamson reads it, or, for all 
 I know, hires somebody else to read it for him, and sends 
 me word he'll go in. But in all this time three months, 
 mind you he's never come out to our laboratory on the 
 West Side, where he could have seen the thing done, act 
 ually done under semi-commercial conditions He doesn't 
 care about how it's done. Nor, for that matter, what we 
 do. Any damn thing in the world that would show the 
 same profit between raw material and finished product, 
 and the same demand, would interest him just as much, 
 it would ~be the same thing to him. 
 
 "Cellulose fiber is one of the most interesting things in 
 the world. I've been thinking about it, off and on, ever 
 since the first time I found myself in a tropical jungle. 
 And the things you can do by dissolving it, or by matting 
 and compressing it, or by using it as a binder in plastic 
 substances there's no end. And we're just at the begin 
 ning, back in the Old Testament. But it might be putty 
 for all Williamson cares, or prunes." 
 
 He interrupted himself here to take another drink, and 
 Henry said: 
 
 "You're partly right, of course, but he knows more 
 about that process of yours than you think. And he knows 
 he's not a technical man. It may be caution as much as 
 lack of interest that's kept him away." 
 
 Greer caught that instantly over the edge of his up 
 raised glass. Henry found that glance of his curiously 
 stimulating. 
 
 "Anyhow," Henry went on, "he told me himself quite 
 a little about it about the bug, he called it, that you'd 
 discovered. ' ' 
 
 "Hell!" said Greer, putting down his glass. "I didn't 
 discover any bug. I'm not a bacteriologist. I hired a 
 fellow a young professor of botany at one of the uni 
 versities, and told him to discover it. It took him more
 
 THE PAWN 47 
 
 than a year, and if I hadn't been there to speed him up 
 it might have taken him twenty. They're queer birds, 
 too, these pure scientists, when it comes to that. They 
 don't care what any thing's for any more than the bankers 
 care how it works. It isn 't till a man like me comes along 
 and takes one in one hand and another in the other and 
 cracks their heads together that anything really happens 
 in the world." 
 
 The inward grimace Henry allowed himself at this ntust 
 have shown some reflection in his face, perceptible to 
 Greer, for almost instantly, with a shrug and a smile, he 
 went on: 
 
 "That sounds like brag to you. Perhaps it is. But 
 we're trying to get acquainted, aren't we? The sooner 
 we do, the better all around; isn't that the idea? Well, 
 then, you may as well know that I think I'm a better man 
 than John Williamson or any of his crowd. I think you 
 are, too, and that you know it. He inherited his money, 
 didn't he? Wasn't old Nick Williamson his father? 
 Well, the old man, I guess, had the goods. But his son, 
 why, he's had everything done for him. Turn him out in 
 the woods without a guide and a pack-train, and I don 't be 
 lieve he could keep alive a month. I don't believe he 
 could have earned his living with his hands and educated 
 himself for a profession at the same time. Well, I did 
 that, and I've done the other. And I could do it again 
 if I had to, though I am fifty years old." 
 
 "Fifty!" Henry's surprise was genuine. He'd been 
 thinking of the man as a contemporary. 
 
 Greer nodded. "Unless I've lost count," he said. 
 
 He paused reflectively over his drink, and gave Henry 
 a chance he had uncomfortably been waiting for. 
 
 "Of course," he said, "I couldn't keep alive in the 
 woods either, not even as long as John. I could hardly 
 have kept alive, I'm afraid, even in the ordinary ways of 
 civilization if I hadn't been helped. And the person who 
 gave me that help, with a perfectly ungrudging kindness, 
 was John Williamson."
 
 48 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 "Well, your game's a different game from his and from 
 mine," Greer said. "You're like some other people I 
 know, writers and painters and such. All you really ask 
 for is a chance to look on. But you can see what I'm 
 driving at, and these fat people couldn't. Oh, they have 
 their good side, I know," he conceded. "That's more 
 than I'd have admitted twenty years ago. I was a good 
 deal of a sore-head at thirty. I had a grudge that used to 
 keep me awake nights against the gang that has everything 
 brought to them on a platter. I wanted them kicked out, 
 to give better men a chance. But I've got over that. I'm 
 willing that they should play their game as long as they'll 
 let me play mine. But ..." 
 
 His look belied his words, Henry thought. His eyes, 
 smoldering, gazed out across the room. There was food 
 for thought, for John and his friends perhaps, in the look 
 of them. But an instant later, they came suddenly into 
 focus and brightened with pleased recognition. 
 
 "Hello, Twitch!" he called in a voice that drew every 
 eye in the room. "Where are you going? It's Franklin 
 Twitchell," he explained to Henry. "You know him, 
 don't you?" 
 
 8 
 
 The name of this celebrated comedian was, of course, 
 familiar to Henry. He'd even seen him in bygone years 
 upon the stage. But he'd have as soon expected to meet 
 in person the King of Hedjaz. 
 
 "Why, no," Henry began, but by that time Twitchell 
 was standing beside Greer 's chair, and was thumping him 
 with ferocious good will on the back. 
 
 "You damned old pirate," he cried, "why haven't you 
 been to see my show?" 
 
 "Shake hands with Henry Craven," Greer said, "and 
 pull up and sit down." He added, when this was ac 
 complished, "Why, Henry and I were thinking of going 
 to see it to-night." 
 
 "Have you got your seats?" Twitchell asked, looking 
 a bit worried. "It's Saturday, you know. They'r*
 
 THE PAWN 49 
 
 likely to be sold out." He scribbled a word or two on a 
 card, summoned a bus boy and despatched him with it to 
 the box-office of the theater, which happened to be next 
 door, overruling, with a wild glare of the eye, Greer's at 
 tempt to give the boy money to buy the seats with. 
 
 All this came through a fog of indecision and embarrass 
 ment to Henry, who couldn't, for the life of him, make out 
 whether he was the Henry, Greer meant, or not. He'd 
 never met the man before this afternoon and they hadn't, 
 of course, said a word about going to the theater together. 
 But mightn't this be just Greer's way? He could solve 
 the ambiguity of the situation by getting up and saying 
 he must be running along, but this would seem a fright 
 fully rude thing to do in case there was no other Henry. 
 And wouldn't the mere betrayal of his uncertainty that 
 he was meant be interpretable as a rebuke of Greer's un 
 warranted familiarity in calling him by his Christian 
 name ? 
 
 To his relief, they got off at once upon a volume of 
 jocund reminiscences which didn't demand his participa 
 tion, so he sat small and concentrated on a little terribly 
 strong tea which remained in the pot. The talk was amus 
 ing, though, and almost impalpably it enveloped him; a 
 glance, a laugh, a word or two, a solemn appeal for his 
 arbitrament of some ridiculous point of controversy, and 
 he found himself answering in kind, as if he were really 
 one of them. 
 
 It seemed to have been agreed upon without a single 
 spoken word on the subject that they were to dine as they 
 sat, with Greer the self-elected host. He ordered an ex 
 cellent dinner for Henry and himself; Twitchell, it amaz 
 ingly appeared, was a vegetarian and so chose for himself. 
 He was also even more incredibly a total abstainer from 
 every form of alcohol, and this fact turned out to have a 
 certain importance for Henry. 
 
 Joe had said, "I always celebrate Sunday by drinking 
 champagne Saturday night," and with this explanation 
 had ordered a quart of a very respectable vintage.
 
 50 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 "Twitch here," he added, "doesn't drink a drop, so I 
 hope you'll keep me company." 
 
 Henry took this for sarcasm, but the comedian con 
 firmed it with a nod. "And I suppose," he remarked, 
 "I've got as good a reputation for a drunkard as any man 
 in the United States. ' ' 
 
 This myth hadn 't, as it happened, reached Henry, but it 
 accounted for itself easily enough. There was something 
 disheveled both about the man 's looks and about his speech 
 which, in connection with the comic wildness of his eye, 
 suggested the genial stage of inebriation. 
 
 Henry did drink a little at the dinner parties he and 
 Margaret went to; never at home because they couldn't 
 afford it, and never during the day down-town because 
 of the bank. To-night, though, if the comedian hadn't 
 forestalled him, he probably would have declined to drink 
 at all, from a fear of committing himself to what might 
 turn out to be a debauch. But the fact that one member 
 of the party never began drinking guaranteed his own lib 
 erty didn't it? to stop when he pleased. He told 
 Greer that he liked champagne with his dinner very much. 
 
 So began a golden hour for Henry a chain of golden 
 hours. The good wine and the good food played their 
 parts, but these weren't novelties in his experience. The 
 thing that was new was a strangely comforting, glowing, 
 exhilarating sense of fellowship. These two strangers 
 as he had always reckoned such matters had taken him 
 in. They were friendlier, somehow, than any of his 
 friends. Not by virtue of anything they did for they 
 did nothing but talk at ease while he, for the most part, 
 listened but by virtue of what they did not do. They 
 did not, subtly, leave him out nor suddenly remember 
 him in a way that showed they had forgotten. There was 
 no implication that he was different in any essential way 
 from themselves. Joe had said, this was how Henry 
 thought of him by now, "Henry here's a musician." 
 And it had come out that both these men knew lots of musi 
 cians, some of them famous ones, and that they regarded a
 
 THE PAWN 51 
 
 musician as a very good sort of person to be. An attitude 
 of apology was not in the least called for. 
 
 And then, half-way through the dinner, Twitchell said, 
 "I want to hear some jungle stories. That," he added, 
 turning to Henry, "is what I put up with this old repro 
 bate for. You haven't heard them all, have you?" 
 
 "Up on the banks of the Amazon where he ran naked 
 so long?" Henry said audaciously. "I've been hoping to 
 get that. I haven't heard any of them." 
 
 "What!" cried Twitchell, scandalized. "Then we've 
 been wasting time. Crank up, Joe, and get started. Tell 
 him about the Inca girl and the bug in the kite's eye. If 
 it isn't a kite it's some ether strange sort of bird," he 
 went on explanatorily while Joe grumbled protests. 
 "And it's a little bug in his eye that makes him see so 
 well. And if you can kill him and find the little bug and 
 put it in your eye, then you can see as well as the kite." 
 
 It took a good deal of cranking to get Joe started, for 
 these jungle stories belonged in a remote past and he must 
 have had to tell them countless times. And he never did 
 get around to the Inca girl. But they launched him at 
 last, and from then on until Twitchell had to leave for the 
 theater, Henry listened entranced. 
 
 They weren 't stories that Joe told, not, at least, after he 
 got fairly into the vein mere random memories of adven 
 tures as strange, as intrinsically incredible, as any that 
 ever befell Marco Polo. Here was a man who had turned 
 back the pages of history ten thousand years, if one was 
 to believe his statement that he found people down there 
 who were in the stone age, people for whom even the bow 
 and arrow had not been invented, whose deadly weapons 
 were a chunk of stone lashed to the end of a stick and a 
 poisoned sliver of bamboo shot from a blow gun. 
 
 Other explorers in various parts of the world had found 
 races as primitive as this, but these had come among them 
 carrying the mysterious equipment of civilization: fire 
 arms, clothing, tents, trinkets for gifts and the rest of it. 
 He had come alone, unarmed and literally naked.
 
 52 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 "How?" Henry asked. "How could that happen?" 
 
 Greer explained simply enough. He had started up the 
 river an unnamed tributary of the Amazon with a lit 
 tle expedition of four canoes manned by Christian Indians 
 from the Jesuit mission and equipped with what supplies 
 he had been able to pack over the Andes on two mules. 
 He was searching for gold. There must be gold some 
 where, for natives brought it in occasionally to the mis 
 sion packed in quills. 
 
 They paddled steadily up this river for a month, ancj 
 then, supplies getting low, his Indians deserted him in the 
 night. His own canoe was wrecked. He got ashore in 
 his shirt and drawers, and, for a number of days he could 
 not compute, since before the end of them he was half 
 delirious with fever and starvation, he struggled for his 
 life with that impenetrable jungle. He had no objective, 
 no hope, but he found one day a trail and followed it, care 
 less where it led. All his clothing had been torn away by 
 the savage spiked undergrowth of the jungle. His feet 
 were a swollen mass of lacerations and imbedded thorns. 
 
 The trail he followed ended in a sort of house built of 
 thatch, but surprisingly big, the home evidently of a whole 
 community. A curtain of thatch over the gable end of it 
 hung to the ground. He pulled the curtain apart and 
 went in, more than half expecting to be transfixed by a 
 spear as he did so and utterly indifferent as to whether 
 this happened or not. The place was deserted, but there 
 were the remains of fires in it, covered with ashes, and 
 there was food. The tribe had gone away. "When they 
 came back, they would no doubt kill him eat him very 
 likely. But he had no thought of trying to escape. He 
 ate, he slept, he extracted the thorns from his feet and 
 bound his wounds with poultices of leaves. 
 
 Days passed, he didn't know how many. He grew bet 
 ter and stronger, became able to make little excursions out 
 of the house, down to the river where he contrived to 
 catch some fish. 
 
 One day, he discovered that the house had been visited
 
 THE PAWN 53 
 
 in his absence, and thereafter whenever he came back to 
 it he found traces of some intervening occupation. The 
 natives must be watching him constantly; whenever he 
 went out, they came stealing in. That gave him his idea. 
 They must think him a god. 
 
 Well then, his best chance lay in being one. A god was 
 a being they could not harm. If he knew he was a god, 
 he'd know they could not harm him. A complete indiffer 
 ence to danger, then, was prescribed. He must, so far as 
 appearances went, take no precautions whatever. If they 
 poisoned his food, he must eat it and trust to luck. If any 
 weakness or illness came upon him, he must disappear 
 until it was past. He must always remain unaccountable 
 to them. 
 
 His appearance helped a lot, his beard and his white 
 hairy skin. No hair grew on their faces and very little on 
 their bodies. But he dared not rely completely upon that. 
 He must develop some tricks. He had had, as a boy, some 
 rudimentary sleight of hand. He practised it now. 
 
 He had weeks alone in that big thatched house before 
 any member of the tribe ventured into his sight. By that 
 time he was ready for them. He had his line and he kept 
 it remained a god, or at all events a supernatural mas 
 ter, which came to the same thing. He bluffed it out on 
 that line, he said, with one tribe after another, for nearly 
 three years. When he thought one lot was finding him 
 out, he moved on to another. 
 
 "Three years!" said Twitchell under his breath. "Good 
 God! Think of sitting in a poker game as long as that 
 with never anything to draw to and your life always in the 
 pot." 
 
 It was a terrific idea. 
 
 "But I want to know," said Henry, "what happened 
 that first day, ,the day that first tribe came back. ' ' 
 
 Joe laughed grimly at the recollection. "Why, they got 
 quite bold," he said, "when they found they didn't fall 
 dead when I looked at them. Some of the young men came 
 crowding up and one of them made a pass at me with
 
 his spear. I had a flat white pebble about the diameter 
 of a quarter palmed in my hand. I walked up to him and 
 seemed to take it out of his mouth. Then I swallowed it 
 myself. ' ' 
 
 ' ' You mean you really swallowed it ? " both men asked at 
 once. 
 
 ' ' Hell ! I had to, ' ' Greer said. ' ' I hadn 't any pockets 
 to disappear it in. It went down damned hard, too, be 
 cause my mouth was pretty dry. But you should have 
 seen their faces! The man was shaking all over, like an 
 ague. I took his spear out of his hand, planted it in the 
 middle of the fire and burnt it. That man was dead. I 'd 
 eaten his soul. He went out into the jungle and did die, 
 for a fact. Partly of starvation, I suppose, but partly of 
 clear fright. 
 
 ' ' Oh, it was easy enough in a way, ' ' he added musingly. 
 "The danger was that I'd get to thinking it was too easy 
 and go off guard. The medicine men all hated me, of 
 course; never quit trying to show me up. But my dope 
 was always better than theirs. I could make better poison 
 for darts than they could, and so on. I got on all right. 
 Had a pretty good time, in a way. ' ' 
 
 It was plain that he meant it. His robust sense of humor 
 had found much to feed upon. Even the grimmest of his 
 adventures had their farcical side. And there were others 
 that weren't grim at all; just pure breathless wonder. 
 
 "When Twitchell, after three or four scowls at his watch, 
 got up to go to work, he laid a reverent hand on Joe's 
 shoulder. 
 
 "I always realize the next morning," he said to Henry, 
 "that this man must be a liar. But, boy, what a liar! 
 Come back and see me after the show, both of you." 
 
 "Sure," said Greer. Evidently, it didn't matter a bit 
 to him whether they thought him a liar or not. 
 
 ."Did you ever find any gold?" Henry asked, when 
 Twitchell had gone. 
 
 Greer shook his head. "It's there, though. If a man 
 went at it the right way, he could get it. But not for me.
 
 THE PAWN 55 
 
 It would take the better part of a man's life to get to 
 gether a serious amount of it, and what 's the good of gold 
 if you've nothing to spend it on? What a man might do, 
 though, I've thought of this sometimes is to go down 
 there with the right sort of backing and equipment and 
 make himself emperor of that country. A real old-fash 
 ioned emperor, half-god, like Cyrus and Alexander and 
 those old blokes. Just think what Alexander could have 
 done with modern science to help him out wireless teleg 
 raphy, a couple of aeroplanes, a dozen men he wouldn't 
 want more than that a dozen apostles as it were, who'd 
 play the game for him. A half-god! Why, he could be 
 the most powerful god that was ever worshipped. But I 
 didn't have enough to go on. I was never more than three 
 jumps ahead of a stone-headed club. No, I didn't get 
 any gold. All I'came out of the jungle with, that had any 
 cash value, was nine heads. I sold them to a museum for 
 twenty-seven hundred dollars." 
 
 "What kind of heads?" Henry wanted to know. 
 
 "Human heads," Greer told him simply. "Reduced 
 in size ; no bigger than baseballs, but in perfect proportion, 
 so that they might have been little portrait busts of the 
 men whose shoulders they were taken from. I watched 
 the whole process. I suppose I'm the only white man in 
 the world who knows hoAv that trick is done. Come along. 
 Those are box seats Twitch got for us, and unless we can 
 sit up at the rail we shan't see a thing." 
 
 The sort of show that Henry supposed this to be had 
 never amused him very much, whereas he'd gladly have 
 spent another couple of hours listening to Joe's talk. He 
 refrained even from hinting at this as a feasible alterna 
 tive, however, since it wouldn't do to disappoint "Old 
 Twitch" of their presence after he'd been so kind as to 
 give them box seats. 
 
 And the show most agreeably outran his tepid expecta 
 tions. He thought he'd never attended an entertainment
 
 56 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 which ran so brightly and swiftly, nor one which boasted 
 so many excruciatingly comic moments. He didn't be 
 lieve he'd^ver laughed so hard in his life. ^Toe enjoyed 
 it all as much as he did, roaring with laughter half the 
 time (like one of these great monitor lizards he had been 
 telling about or was it some other strange Amazonian 
 reptile?) until many an eye in the audience was turned to 
 look, 
 
 Henry's pleasure was spiced, too, with a new ingre 
 dient. From the very beginning, Twitch had been slanting 
 jokes in their direction, saying things that were meant for 
 them. He made use, for instance, of the phrase, "In a 
 kite's eye!" as an expression of incredulity; the whole 
 audience laughed over it, but he and Joe were the only 
 ones who got its full implication. It gave him a queer 
 glow of pleasure to be a real insider, like that. They 
 must be rather conspicuous, he supposed, sitting up in a 
 box, and there were at least two people in the audience 
 he knew: Bob Corbett and his wife. But there couldn't 
 be any real harm in that, could there? 
 
 He made another discovery, however, as the evening 
 wore on, which he found rather alarming. Twitch was 
 not the only friend Joe could boast in the company ; there 
 were two young women, both minor principals, who must 
 know him, it seemed rather well. One of them had a 
 couple of songs which she sang in a pleasant, throaty, 
 mezzo voice, and the other was a French girl whose duty 
 it was on two or three occasions to stupefy Twitch by the 
 rapidity with which she spoke in her native tongue. Both 
 of them played unmistakably at Joe, instantly following 
 Twitchell's lead when he gave it and launching occasional 
 shafts independently. 
 
 The French girl was distinctly attractive to Henry. He 'd 
 had a good part of his schooling in Geneva, and there had 
 been a time when he talked French almost as easily as 
 English. It was an accomplishment which had rusted 
 with disuse, but his ear was as good as ever, and he recog 
 nized her speech as well-bred. Also, he took a satisfaction
 
 THE PAWN 57 
 
 in reflecting that there weren't, in any probability, three 
 people in the audience, and quite possibly not one be 
 sides himself, who understood all she was saying. 
 
 Henry remembered Twitchell's invitation to come back 
 on the stage after the performance, and Joe's offhand ac 
 ceptance of it. It hadn't especially perturbed him at the 
 time, but the prospect which grew clearer as the show 
 went on, that these two young women were to be added 
 to their party was most alarming. It suggested possibil 
 ities which Henry simply dared not think about. 
 
 The thing came to a most dreadful climax at the end of 
 the performance. The company were taking their first 
 curtain when Twitch, with that glaring grin of his, clipped 
 these two girls around the waist and dragged them laugh 
 ing straight down toward Joe and Henry, already upon 
 their feet as most of the audience were. He said some 
 thing which was mercifully lost in the din of the orchestra, 
 but that gesture of his had unmistakably invited the two 
 men and offered the girls as the attraction. 
 
 Henry trembled with horror. He dared not look to 
 ward the Kobert Corbetts, but he was sure they must have 
 seen. Half a dozen people in their part of the house 
 had laughed outright. It was seconds before he dared 
 trust himself to speak. Then in a voice that he tried, in 
 vain he feared, to make sound commonplace and friendly, 
 he thanked Joe for a most delightful evening and asked 
 him also to thank Twitchell for him. 
 
 "Why, you're going back with me to see him now,'* 
 said Joe. "That was understood." 
 
 "I'm sorry," Henry answered, "but I think I must be 
 running along. ' ' 
 
 This brought Joe around, puzzled, for a square look at 
 him. Henry felt the blood come pringling into his face. 
 Joe stared a moment and then, understanding, smiled. 
 
 "Hell!" he said, "it isn't going to be that kind of a 
 party. I couldn't make a night of it if I wanted to. 
 I 've got to be at work to-morrow morning at seven o 'clock. 
 Come along.'*
 
 58 JOSEPH GREER AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 Contrition broke over Henry like a wave. There was 
 no possibility of pretending that he'd been misunder 
 stood, and he could find no words in which to apologize for 
 his injurious suspicion. The only way to make amends 
 was to follow Joe back-stage and, presently, into Twitch- 
 ell's dressing-room where the comedian, already in his un 
 derclothes, was wiping the grease-paint off his face upon a 
 towel. 
 
 He welcomed them with a dignified courtesy which 
 made an amazing contrast with that last outrageous prank 
 of his upon the stage. An armchair was placed for Henry, 
 a less ceremonious seat indicated to Joe, and a Japanese 
 dresser, with the manners of a first-class butler, passed 
 cigarettes and lighted them. Henry felt he needed one. 
 This was a bewildering world he'd got into. 
 
 It was only a few minutes before Joe, without explana 
 tion, left the room, and he was gone quite a long while. 
 But Henry got on very comfortably with the comedian. 
 Joe was their theme, of course. Twitchell had never seen 
 such a man. He'd sit up and talk and drink all night, 
 Twitch said, and then take a bath, change his clothes, eat 
 his breakfast and go to work with the milk wagons, just 
 as fresh as if he 'd had eight hours ' sleep. No wonder he 'd 
 had experiences. He had had twice as much time for 
 them as anybody else. 
 
 "A first-class chap," Twitchell went on, after having 
 touched fleetingly upon some of the adventures in ques 
 tion, "a first-class chap, but with a temper like a hyena. 
 Did you ever see it get away from him? Well, you don't 
 want to. It doesn't happen very often, of course. He 
 knows how dangerous it is. He says that's why he ran 
 away from school in the first place. He choked a school 
 master who'd said something unusually nasty to him, in 
 his own cravat. Might have killed the fellow. Have you 
 known him long?" 
 
 "Not very," said Henry. And then added, himself 
 surprised as it broke over him, " As a matter of fact, I met 
 him for the first time at three o'clock this afternoon."
 
 THE PAWN 59 
 
 Twitchell laughed. "That's like him, too," he said. 
 
 When Joe returned, just about then, he explained his 
 absence by saying, in a tone of disappointment, that the 
 girls had a party on. They were coming up to the flat, 
 however, for a drink or so, since they didn't mind arriv 
 ing at their party a little late, and Joe was going to 
 send them on in his car. He and Twitchell and Henry 
 would have to carry on by themselves until bedtime, unless 
 there was some one else Twitchell could think of to add to 
 their company. 
 
 But Twitchell was a broken reed. He felt a cold coming 
 on, he said, and was going nowhere but straight to bed. 
 
 Again Henry was forestalled. He'd meant to plead 
 some such excuse himself. His misgivings were once 
 more aroused. Joe was perfectly capable of making a 
 night of it, so Twitchell had just said, even when he had a 
 day's work to begin the next morning, and to accompany a 
 pair of unknown young actresses to his fiat at midnight 
 seemed an adventure almost necessarily disreputable. 
 Still, he couldn't repeat the other man's excuse, and he 
 was unable to invent any other which wouldn't betray the 
 transparent disbelief of Joe's assertion that the party was 
 going to be respectable. So he concealed his misery as 
 well as he could (wasn't this, perhaps, in the line of duty, 
 since the stockholders' meeting this afternoon?), sub 
 mitted in due course to an introduction to Bunny and 
 Yvette their surnames were pronounced to him but he 
 didn 't hear them clearly and they were never used again 
 and packed himself with them into a closed car enormous 
 as to hood and wheel base but designed for the luxurious 
 accommodation of only two passengers which they found 
 backed into the alley beside the stage door. 
 
 Joe's chauffeur, Henry learned during the swift flight 
 to the Sheridan Road apartment, never reported for duty 
 until six o'clock at night, but was on call from then on 
 until daybreak. Indeed, the only time when Joe felt the 
 need of any sort of domestic service was at night. He 
 worked all day.
 
 60 JOSEPH GREER AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 A man servant, who seemed to take their arrival as a 
 matter of course, held open the door of the flat for them 
 when they came in. They weren't going to want supper, 
 Joe told him, just sandwiches and champagne. The girls, 
 by way of making themselves at home as Joe urged them to 
 do, took off their hats as well as their coats. They 'd been 
 here before, Henry guessed. 
 
 But there was something in the air which reassured him 
 almost at once that he was not in for an orgy. The dignity 
 of the spacious drawing-room had something to 
 do with it. There was a good piano; there 
 was a wall thickly hung with etchings which looked 
 as if they would repay scrutiny ; and over the mantel hung 
 a painting, a big Sorolla which warmed the room with a 
 blaze of color. The furniture was well chosen and rather 
 sparse. It was a room, in short, from which many of 
 Henry's friends could have taken a lesson. 
 
 There was a little general talk, comfortably desultory, 
 until after the champagne and the sandwiches had come 
 in. Presently Bunny carried her glass over to the piano. 
 Joe followed her, and together they rummaged in a heap 
 of music which lay there. Yvette tucked herself up in an 
 attitude of comfortable relaxation in a corner of a big 
 sofa, and Henry, rather timidly, sat down beside her. 
 He'd have been desperately put to it for conversation had 
 not the wine and the musical atrocities Bunny was perpe- 
 tating at the piano relieved him of the necessity of keep 
 ing it up. Indeed, duty didn't seem, anywhere, to be in 
 volved. It was understood, all round, that you did what 
 you liked. 
 
 He asked her, after a while, what part of France she 
 eame from. He'd guessed, from her speech on the stage, 
 that it was the Touraine. She pounced upon this admis 
 sion that he possessed her language, and insisted that they 
 talk in French. It was ravishing to her to hear it. But 
 Henry's French was marvelous! "Why should he attempt 
 to deny? All the more enchanting because of its faintly 
 foreign accent. He himself was delighted with and a
 
 THE PAWN 61 1 
 
 little incredulous of his o\vn loquacity. He wouldn't 
 have thought he could do it. 
 
 And it was delicious, the way the girl lighted up at it. 
 She became a chatterbox; told him, in torrents of talk, 
 about herself. She'd had adventures almost as queer as 
 Joe 's. She 'd gone out as a child to live with her sister whose 
 husband was a silk merchant in Beyrut, Syria, and a few 
 years later had gone half-way around the world with them, 
 to Siam. Her sister had died out there. Her brother-in- 
 law had become, as she said, a little difficult, so she had 
 joined the chorus of an opera company a sort of Flying 
 Dutchman of an opera company which perpetually toured 
 from Bombay to Yokohama and never came home. She'd 
 had enough of this by the end of a year or so, and in 
 Manila had taken a job as a personal maid with an Ameri 
 can woman who was about starting home. This engage 
 ment terminated in San Francisco, and she'd gone to work 
 singing in a cafe. It was here Twitchell had found her. 
 
 What a life ! Yet after all of it she looked hardly older 
 than his little cousin Dorothy, and a lot more innocent. 
 She'd hovered over most of the moral plague spots of the 
 world, a bright-winged butterfly that had in some miracu 
 lous way escaped destruction. She adored American men, 
 she said. She was in a position to appreciate how dif 
 ferent they were from the others. 
 
 In a serious, unsmiling way, she let Henry see that she 
 especially liked him. There seemed to be no coquetry 
 about it. She made no advances and invited none from 
 him. She was infinitely content just to sit beside him and 
 talk in her own language. 
 
 They were interrupted, at last, by a summons from Joe. 
 Bunny, after a quiescent interval, was once more pos 
 sessed to sing and her attempts to accompany herself were 
 more than Joe could endure. Henry must take her place 
 at the instrument. He made a perfunctory protest that 
 he was no pianist, but this being overruled he sat down 
 at the keyboard and performed Bunny's accompaniment 
 in a manner which they all seemed genuinely to admire.
 
 62 
 
 Yvette seated herself beside him on the bench and, as 
 there wasn't much room, held herself fast with an arm 
 about his waist. Bunny stood behind him, her hands upon 
 his shoulders. But these were hardly caresses. Or, if 
 they were, there was a friendly unconsciousness about them 
 quite disarming. 
 
 They sang more songs all together, old ones Joan of 
 Arc and The Long, Long Trail. At last one of the girls 
 looked at her watch, showed it to the other, and both ex 
 claimed regretfully that they'd have to be going to their 
 party. Their host would be getting grumpy if they didn't 
 show up pretty soon. But even now there seemed to be 
 no hurry. Joe ordered his car and opened another bottle 
 of champagne while the girls were getting on their coats. 
 
 It was arranged, since Henry felt he must be going 
 along too, that they should drop him at his apartment on 
 the way down-town. The champagne was drunk, Joe was 
 candidly kissed good night by both the girls, the butler, 
 matter-of-fact as ever, ran them down in the elevator and 
 accompanied them to the car with instructions for the 
 chauffeur. 
 
 Bunny got in first, then Yvette, then Henry. And as 
 he took his seat in the corner he felt a friendly little hand 
 slip into his. 
 
 "You must be a wiz with the violin if you can play it 
 better than you can the piano," Bunny said, as they sped 
 through the park. "You ought to bring it up to Joe's 
 some night and we'll have a real party." 
 
 Yvette, leaning contentedly against his shoulder, said 
 nothing all the way. 
 
 10 
 
 His conscience dealt him a frightful thrust when he 
 found Margaret sitting up for him. She was reclining 
 in the sitting-room easy chair, wrapped in a bathrobe, a 
 reading lamp at her shoulder and a novel in her lap. She 
 yawned though, in a reasonably convincing way over his 
 exclamations of remorse, asked him what time it was and 
 professed herself astonished to be told it was nearly two
 
 THE PAWN 63 
 
 o'clock. It was only when he persisted in trying to ex 
 plain his omissions to telephone at the two periods of the 
 evening when he might have done so that she betrayed a 
 flash of impatience. 
 
 "Good heavens, Henry!" she cried. "I'm not your 
 wife, and I'm not the president of the bank. You don't 
 owe any account of yourself to me. I happened not to 
 feel sleepy, that was all, when I came home from Violet's, 
 so I sat down to read for a while. I didn't know it had 
 got so late." 
 
 The clock on the mantel shelf would have told her, 
 though, if she 'd glanced at it, and it struck the hours, too, 
 rather aggressively. He glanced toward her book but she 
 had both hands over it. 
 
 "What's Greer like?" she asked in a friendlier tone. 
 "Do you hate him as much as you thought you would?" 
 
 "I'm not sure," he said, "that I know just what to make 
 of him." 
 
 Margaret stirred slightly in her chair, and it came over 
 him that his attempt to speak in a detached, judicial man 
 ner had been a little overdone. His hand strayed over the 
 table to the silver box where they kept the cigarettes, but 
 his sister's eye followed the gesture, and, with a little 
 laugh which sounded foolish to him, he relinquished his 
 intention. "I've already smoked a good deal for me, this 
 evening," he said. 
 
 Then he pulled himself together and began on Greer. 
 "Why, we've been together every minute of the time since 
 the meeting broke up this afternoon. He came up and 
 suggested that we'd better begin to get acquainted since 
 it was supposed to be my job to keep an eye on him. He 
 said that in so many words; not in an ugly way at all, 
 but as if it was a perfectly natural thing for John to have 
 done. So we talked till dinner time. And then Frank 
 lin Twitchell the actor, you know came in, had dinner 
 with us and invited us to his show. And, being an old 
 friend of his, Twitchell got him talking about his jungle 
 adventures. You never heard such stories in your life. ' '
 
 64 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 It began to seem to him that he was talking a great deal 
 and rather fast, and that the sustaining interruptions he 
 might have accepted from Margaret weren't coming. Was 
 it possible that she suspected him of being intoxicated? 
 "Was he indeed acting quite like his normal self? It was 
 an appalling doubt. He was sure he hadn't taken enough 
 champagne to affect him in the least, but he had brought 
 a sort of glow in with him from that ride home in Joe's 
 car, which, innocent though it was, he could hardly under 
 take to explain to his sister. 
 
 After a pause, during which, after all, he lighted a cig 
 arette, she asked him in a tone of good-humored indif 
 ference how he liked the show. It was very good of its 
 kind, he told her. 
 
 He hated himself for the affected primness of his tone. 
 He'd have liked to turn loose and tell her all about it; 
 let her see how jolly it had been and what a corking time 
 he'd had. But the freezing spell of self-consciousness 
 which had settled upon him was too strong to break. 
 
 "And did you go on to one of Mr. Greer's terrific par 
 ties afterwards?" she asked. 
 
 There was no note of overt reproach in the question. 
 Indeed, she had faintly smiled over it. But to his horror 
 he found himself, as he answered, lying to Margaret! 
 By implication, if not categorically. 
 
 "Why, he asked Mr. Twitchell and some of the other 
 people hi the company to come up to his apartment for a 
 little while after the performance. He wanted me to 
 come too, and I couldn 't get out of it very well, so I went 
 along with them. But it wasn't 'terrific' in the least. 
 We had some sandwiches and champagne, and they sang 
 a little old songs mostly. It was as innocent as Aunt 
 Dinah's quilting party." 
 
 Margaret got up deliberately from her chair and 
 switched out the reading lamp. "And have you just 
 been ' seeing Nellie home ' ? " she asked. 
 
 He rose too. "We all came away together," he said 
 stiffly; "in Greer's car. The rest of them were going
 
 THE PAWN 65 
 
 on to another party a dance, I believe. But they 
 squeezed me in and dropped me here." 
 
 Margaret yawned behind her fingers. ''I suppose," 
 she remarked, as she moved toward the door, "that the 
 decent thing to do would be to ask him here to dinner." 
 
 "Greer?" Henry asked incredulously. 
 
 "Yes," she said. "Why not? Isn't he the sort of 
 person who could be asked to dinner?" 
 
 "Why, yes, of course," said Henry. "Yes, indeed. I 
 think it would be a very nice thing to do. I am very glad 
 you thought of it."
 
 CHAPTER TWO 
 
 THE BETTER HALF 
 
 MANY persons less given to analysis than Henry Craven 
 had speculated, during the past half-dozen years about the 
 relation between Joe Greer and Jennie MacArthur. They 
 saw, just as Henry did, that it differed somehow from the 
 accepted standard for important, busy employers and 
 their efficient, infallible secretaries. 
 
 Jennie, herself, would have found it hard to explain 
 where the difference lay. It may be added that it never 
 would have occurred to her to try. She belonged, tem 
 peramentally, to the adventurer class just as truly as Joe 
 himself belonged to it. From her earliest years, chance 
 had favored this development, but no conceivable circum 
 stances could have made her a conscript. Life had never 
 frightened her. She asked no better than to explore it 
 on her own responsibility ; accepted its challenges ; played 
 out its reasonable hazards; an attitude more masculine 
 than feminine, though there was nothing seriously abnor 
 mal about her. 
 
 When her first big chance came this was back in nine 
 teen twelve she had been waiting for it like a cat watch 
 ing a mouse-hole. She'd known that that nervous, head- 
 achey Miss Holt, smart as she was, couldn't last in the 
 chief's private office very long. And when one day Miss 
 Holt came out of the inner office in tears, put on her hat 
 and jacket and collected her belongings from the drawers 
 in her desk, and when the "old devil," as the girls called 
 him, came storming out into the stenographers' room him- 
 
 66
 
 THE BETTER HALF 67 
 
 self to pick out some one to go on with his work, it wasn't 
 all luck by any means that he picked Jennie. She was 
 the only one of the lot who wasn't in the flutters over the 
 explosion of Miss Holt. 
 
 Jennie was competent and she made herself indispen 
 sable. But that was only the beginning of it. She took 
 to Joe from the start. What appeared to the other girls as 
 his truly infernal temper never worried Jennie a bit. She 
 perceived there was no malice in it. He could think harder 
 and faster than anybody else, and a long succession of con 
 tacts with muddled minds or irresolute wills drove him 
 every now and then frantic. Her method with him was to 
 let him rave until he got the worst of it out of his system, 
 and then grin at him. She learned the trick of toning 
 down his letters without making them sound tame and 
 colorless, and before she'd worked for him a year, he'd 
 given up dictating altogether. ' ' Tell So-and-So to keep his 
 shirt on," he would say. "I know what he wants better 
 than he does and when I get around to it I'll tell him." 
 Jennie would write an eight-line letter to that precise 
 effect, but in a totally different vein, and Joe with a fero 
 cious smile, would sign it. 
 
 "You're the only stenographer in the world," he said 
 to her, apropos of some such performance as this. "Go 
 to the bookkeeper and tell him your salary is fifty dollars 
 a week. Any time you think that isn't enough, say so, 
 but don't you dare leave me on any account. You be 
 long to me, see?" He added, "You're not thinking of go 
 ing off and getting married, are you?" 
 
 When she told him she wasn't, he gave a sort of satisfied 
 grunt which carried with it the implication that she'd 
 better not try. 
 
 He worked her mercilessly when the need was and often 
 unconsciously he imposed long hours upon her by keeping 
 her idle in his more relaxed moods while he told her 
 stories. When he found that she was investing her sav 
 ings in various highly speculative and adventurous ways, 
 he gave her tips and sometimes took her in with him on
 
 68 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 flyers of his own. When he formed his company for the 
 manufacture of aeroplane parts, he made her secretary of 
 it and fixed her salary at six thousand a year. In every 
 ramification of his business interests, he gave her his 
 whole confidence, which was something no one else, she was 
 sure, shared with her, for he was naturally suspicious and 
 secretive. 
 
 During the whole seven years, from the day when she'd 
 first gone into his private office to the day of the direct 
 ors ' meeting that Henry Craven attended, she had never 
 considered leaving Joe. She'd spoiled him. She'd en 
 dured much. She had occasionally flared up to match 
 the red of her hair and driven some rebuking home truths 
 into him. But, on the whole, she'd enjoyed herself enor 
 mously. There was a zest about the whole thing that 
 made it more than a mere job ; a sparkle of variety, and a 
 spice, too, of danger. 
 
 Jennie was sophisticated enough to perceive that the 
 fact of Joe's being a man and her being a woman was 
 somehow a vital element in the relation. She wouldn't 
 have endured in a woman many of Joe's outstanding 
 characteristics, and she knew well enough that, had she 
 been a man, Joe never would have taken her into his con 
 fidence as he had done; would probably have disliked and 
 suspected her. Logically, then, it was a sex attraction 
 that held them together, no matter how little it looked 
 like it. 
 
 She had been wary of this danger, just at first, for even 
 without the gossip of the office she would have known that 
 he was a libertine. But she soon found that he was not 
 given to playing the fatherly game as some of her earlier 
 and more respectable employers had attempted to do. He 
 never indulged in any of these petty, pilfering caresses, 
 falsely unconscious but too small to make a fuss about, by 
 which many a girl shut up in a private office with an 
 older man is plagued. Having no moral pretenses to sus 
 tain this was how she worked it out he felt no need to 
 deceive himself. His amorous impulses dealt with for
 
 69 
 
 what they were, the rest of him was somehow released. 
 Outside their avowed domain, he was cleaner-minded, 
 she thought, than any Puritan was likely to be. It was 
 in the light of her own sophistication that she was able to 
 understand this. 
 
 Jennie, herself, had learned without any heartbreaking 
 or otherwise lamentable consequences, that love was not, 
 for her, anyhow, the transfiguring, all embracing, indis 
 pensable thing which its propagandists, the story-writers, 
 would have her believe. To any one coming to the experi 
 ence with the high romantic hopes, the expectation of a 
 miracle, so sedulously fostered in the minds of brides and 
 such, it must often be, she felt, a shocking and even tragic 
 disappointment. She didn 't see why people insisted on ly 
 ing about a thing like that. 
 
 She wasn't sure she wouldn't marry sometime. 
 She would if she found the right man and it 
 seemed the sensible thing to do. The essential lesson of 
 her experience was that love was a commensurable thing 
 with other serious facts of life. It was possible to pay 
 too high a price for it. A life without it might be a bet 
 ter thing than one in which it was unsuccessfully mixed. 
 
 Its mixture in her relation with Joe would be ruinous, 
 she felt sure, no matter what form it took. The attraction 
 between them was, then, a genuine danger, but, being wise 
 enough to recognize its existence, knowing that this reef 
 was there, she had been able for seven years to steer a suc 
 cessful course where a less open-eyed pilot might easily 
 have suffered shipwreck. 
 
 It was facts, however, rather than appearances that 
 she had to look out for. As regarded the latter, she could 
 afford a superb indifference. She was a magnificently 
 independent person, in that there was no one in the world 
 whose moral disapproval could affect adversely her eco 
 nomic status. She'd gone with Joe on many a business 
 trip to Washington, New York and elsewhere, and the 
 Grundy aspect of such an adventure, or of her going to 
 dine alone with him in his flat, never disturbed her in the
 
 70 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 least. A smile like the one which had so exercised the 
 speculative faculties of Henry Craven at the board meet 
 ing was the only tribute that she ever paid to the Moloch 
 of propriety. 
 
 Joe invited her to such a dinner one night in May about 
 a month after the directors' meeting, and within a few 
 days after his return from a trip to the Northwest where 
 he'd been engaged in settling the last details and letting 
 the contracts for the construction of their flax factories. 
 
 Invitations of this sort weren't so very frequent, and 
 they generally had a real occasion. (The two of them 
 dined together impromptu often at some down-town res 
 taurant as a mere conclusion of or interruption in a long 
 day's work.) She'd been aware of something on his mind 
 ever since his return, and from her first assumption that 
 it was something connected with company affairs she'd 
 come to the conclusion that it was not, or, at least, not 
 altogether. His invitation to dinner explicitly confirmed 
 her guess. He had something he wanted to talk with her 
 about, he said. "Oh, it's got nothing to do with any of 
 this." He smiled as he added on leaving her, "I'm going 
 to surprise you, Jennie." 
 
 "Well, there was that about him. No one could ever 
 know him well enough to exhaust that capacity for sur 
 prises. In any close relation with Joe, you did well to 
 remember this and to steer your course so that surprises 
 needn't be calamitous. Jennie didn't worry and she 
 wasted no time trying to guess. 
 
 A dinner at Joe's flat, whatever its occasion, deserved 
 to be treated as a party, so she went home a little early that 
 night from the office there wasn't so very much to do 
 these days and dressed in a leisurely and luxurious man 
 ner in a jade satin frock which she had bought, luckily, 
 only the week before. Jennie frankly enjoyed dressing up, 
 and one of her few grievances against the sort of life she 
 led was that it offered so few opportunities for this indul 
 gence. 
 
 The dinner was at seven-thirty and it was still broad
 
 THE BETTER HALF 71 
 
 'daylight when she parked her little coupe in the side- 
 street nearest Joe's doorway. In the doorway, she found 
 Joe's chauffeur waiting under his employer's orders for 
 her to drive up so that he might take her car into the 
 garage and bring it around again whenever she wanted it. 
 
 He was a prepossessing youngster who had taken this 
 job on getting demobilized from the army a few weeks 
 previously. The irregular hours and the touch of variety 
 about it made it, Jennie supposed, less unattractive to 
 him than most of the berths open to a man in his position. 
 But he was too good, she thought, for this sort of thing, 
 taking Joe 's actresses on joy-rides in the small hours of the 
 morning and so on; and she made a mental note, as she 
 spoke to him, of a resolution to persuade Joe to find some 
 thing better for him to do. His name was George Burns. 
 
 She told him her car was all right where it was, and 
 that when she was ready to go she wouldn't mind going 
 out to it alone, so if this was to have been his only duty 
 for the evening he might as well consider himself at lib 
 erty. He thanked her, but she guessed from his manner 
 that he didn't intend to act upon her permission. In the 
 same moment she realized, and she blushed a bright pink 
 as it broke over her, that the boy was shocked. That he 
 attributed it must be that a sinister interpretation to 
 her visit. Once or twice he'd driven her home from the 
 office when she'd worked late and they'd got to be quite 
 good friends. To-night he seemed to see her in a new and 
 rather lurid light. 
 
 In the elevator, she decided she'd say nothing about 
 the encounter to Joe, at least until she'd cooled down 
 enough to laugh over it. But he, meeting her in the hall 
 as the butler opened the door for her, had it all out of her 
 in two minutes. 
 
 "Good lord, Jennie! What's the matter with you?" 
 he asked at sight of her. 
 
 And to her "Well, what is?" he answered, "You look 
 as if you'd just been kissed by a traveling man." 
 
 At that, she laughed and told him.
 
 72 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 ''That's a nice mess," he commented with a grin. "Here, 
 give me your keys. And go and take off your cloak. You 
 know the room, don't you? I'll be back in a minute. No, 
 I don't blame him a bit. It's all your fault." 
 
 He had, it struck her, a rather thoughtful air, when he 
 joined her a few minutes later in the drawing-room. He 
 stood for a moment a little way off, candidly regarding 
 her before he spoke. 
 
 "You wear better-looking clothes than most of the 
 women who have nothing to do but buy them. How do 
 you manage it, Jennie?" 
 
 She felt that her new frock was vindicated, for it wasn't 
 often he showed the slightest consciousness of what she 
 wore. ' ' I happen to be the right size to wear models, ' ' she 
 said. ' ' That 's the answer. It saves a lot of trouble. ' ' 
 
 "The right size and the right shape," he amended. 
 "It's more than your clothes that looks good to me." 
 
 There was the same quality, oddly reflective for him, 
 about his gesture, for as he finished speaking he came up 
 and took her by both bare arms just above the elbow, 
 gently enough, as if he merely meant to hold her there 
 until the end of his train of thought. 
 
 She was perfectly comfortable, in his hands like that, 
 but it struck her perhaps because of her recent encoun 
 ter with George Burns as rather funny that this should 
 be true. They were great powerful hairy hands that held 
 her, and the face, so near hers, could take on, easily enough, 
 a feral look. She allowed herself to smile over her own 
 complacence. 
 
 "With a grunt, he released her and stepped away. "You 
 don't mind me a bit, do you?" he remarked. "And you 
 know me pretty well, too, wouldn't you say?" 
 
 "Pretty well as far as I go," she qualified. "No, I 
 didn't mind. I know you play fair." 
 
 ' ' And it 's how many years ? " he asked. 
 
 "That we've known each other? Seven, about." She 
 laughed. "You sound as if you were going to ask me to 
 give you a 'character' to somebody."
 
 THE BETTER HALF 73 
 
 He shot a look at her so startled and penetrating, that 
 she wondered if, in some preposterous way, her joke had 
 come near the mark. But he heard the butler coming in 
 with cocktails just then, and broke off to ask her what 
 wine she'd have with her dinner. 
 
 ' ' Why, if it 's anything hard you want me to do to-night, 
 you'd better not give me any," she told him. "Whereupon, 
 he swore and asked her what she meant; he'd asked her 
 here for a party, hadn't he? 
 
 "For a surprise, I thought," she argued. "And I had 
 a hunch it had probably been a surprise for you, too, and 
 that you'd be wanting some good advice. If you do, and 
 it's important, this cocktail will be plenty." 
 
 "Ice a pint of champagne for Miss MacArthur, An- 
 son, " Joe growled to the butler. "She'll never drink more 
 than that, so there's no use wasting it. Bourbon for me. 
 
 "I'm the last man to complain of anybody following a 
 hunch," he said when they had sat down to dinner. She 
 perceived from his conversational tone that she was to be 
 made to wait for the springing of the surprise. "I've 
 saved my life that way more times than I can count. But 
 sometimes you get a hunch that doesn 't lead you anywhere. 
 I had one like that out on this last trip. I kept getting 
 the idea wherever I went that somebody in the crowd I 
 was talking to knew more than he was supposed to, had 
 some sort of advance information about our plans or 
 about me. I couldn't pin it on to anybody, but it made 
 me feel sort of jumpy. I really don't believe there was 
 anything in it." 
 
 She offered no comment here. The faint nebulous no 
 tion which formed itself in the back of her mind as he 
 spoke, that a banker like John Williamson had a long 
 arm and might have reached it out in that direction, she 
 dismissed, for the present, largely because Joe went 
 straight on to speak of something else, which was clearly 
 more important. 
 
 "There's one thing up there, though, that's going to 
 make us trouble, as sure as I've got a nose on my face,
 
 74 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 and that's this damned Non-partisan League. If those 
 hicks up there knew what was good for them they'd run 
 Townley and the rest of those agitators out of the coun 
 try just like anybody else who was peddling gold bricks." 
 
 She laughed at him openly, and he demanded fiercely 
 to be told what she meant by it, although she thought he 
 knew. 
 
 ' ' Why, you 're the man with the gold brick, aren 't you ? ' ' 
 she said. ' ' Anyway, what you want those hicks to do is to 
 give you their good flax for just about nothing so that 
 we can make millions out of it without doing hardly any 
 real work at all. And the reason you'd like to run Town- 
 ley out of the country is because you're afraid he'll put 
 them wise." 
 
 He glared at her, and then, with a grunt and a grin, 
 subsided. ' ' Oh, I know you like to pretend to be a damned 
 red Bolshevik, and you think that some time or other 
 you'll get a real rise out of me. But you won't. You 
 know as well as I do that those farmers would go on burn 
 ing that good flax straw till Kingdom Come, no matter how 
 many bulletins the Department of Agriculture sent out 
 saying it was valuable. They're neither one thing nor 
 the other, that 's the trouble with them. They aren 't will 
 ing to work, like peasants, and they aren't willing to 
 think, and take the chance that they've thought right, like 
 us. All they 're willing to do is to make trouble for the men 
 who do think. And they '11 make some of it for us, unless I 
 miss my guess. It's a funny thing, too," he added, "but 
 that angle of the game doesn't worry Williamson as much 
 as it does me. You'd think it would be just the thing that 
 would scare him worst." 
 
 Jennie found nothing especially strange about that. 
 Agitators never had really worried the rich very seriously 
 in this country. There 'd been some sort of radical move 
 ment going on ever since she could remember, but the 
 financiers always got their way in the long run. They 
 pretended they were going to be ruined by this new law 
 or that, and they fought it through the courts and all, but
 
 THE BETTER HALF 75 
 
 when the dust had settled you saw them sitting just where 
 they'd sat before, playing, with a fresh pack perhaps, the 
 same old game. 
 
 Joe had been enjoying this, and his breast of guinea 
 fowl at the same time, nodding every now and then, in 
 grim acquiescence. The rich roused his indignation as 
 easily as the Reds. But her conclusion made him glare 
 again. 
 
 "You want to learn to take it easier, now you're one of 
 them/' she said. 
 
 "I'll never be one of them!" he vehemently declared. 
 "We're going along with them just now, or trying to, be 
 cause it happens to suit our ideas. But we're a different 
 breed of cats, and don't you forget it, from that stall-fed 
 bunch. That's what Henry calls 'em, and he's got 'em 
 right." 
 
 "Henry Craven?" she asked incredulously. "Well, but 
 what does Henry call himself?" 
 
 "A musician; and he's a good one, too. He's all right, 
 that little man." 
 
 To be sure he was ; Jennie conceded this readily enough. 
 Only, she wondered, what was Joe so sheepish about ? The 
 explanation came after a hesitant pause. "I went to 
 dinner with 'em," Joe said. "Him and his sister, at 
 their flat, last night. So I suppose you've got a right to 
 say that I'm turning respectable," he concluded. 
 
 Clearly, he was embarrassed about it, an amazing phe 
 nomenon to be seen in Joe. Jennie suppressed an impulse 
 to laugh at him and asked him, with a good appearance of 
 sobriety, if he'd had a good time. 
 
 He told her, a little dubiously, that he had; a first-rate 
 time, it would have been, except that he didn't quite get 
 them. She wanted to know what it was about them that 
 he didn't get. 
 
 "Why, I'd supposed," he said, "that they were society 
 people; 'way up in G. But instead of that, they're very 
 plain ; almost shabby. At least their place is. They must 
 have been starving Henry at the bank, and it seems he
 
 76 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 hasn't anything of his o\ra. They've got a good piano, 
 but it's new, I guess. Since the new job. They had some 
 nice people there. Novelli, the pianist, and his wife. She 
 seems to be an American, though he 's a Wop. He played 
 for us, and he's a whale at it, I'll say. Then there was a 
 Miss "Wollaston. That was all except themselves and me." 
 
 "Mary Wollaston?" Jennie asked. 
 
 "I don't know," said Joe. "I didn't start calling any 
 of 'em by their first names." 
 
 ' ' A very blonde girl rather pretty ? I '11 bet she flirted 
 with you like mad." 
 
 "Girl nothing," Joe retorted. "A grand old girl of 
 seventy, that's what she was." 
 
 "Oh, that would be her aunt Lucile. I know all about 
 them," Jennie went on to explain, "because they've taken 
 up Sarah March's brother. He's a composer, and Paula 
 Carresford that's Doctor Wollaston 's wife is going to 
 sing an opera of his at Ravinia this summer. Mrs. No- 
 A r elli," she concluded, "is Rodney Aldrich's sister, or his 
 wife's, I don't remember which. Oh, you've been in so 
 ciety, Joe, even though you didn't know it." 
 
 ' ' You talk like a society editor, ' ' he grumbled. ' ' Where 
 do you get that stuff?" 
 
 "I always read Madam X. Sunday morning. Learn a 
 lot that way. Tell me about Henry's sister. What's she 
 like? Is she older than he is, or younger?" 
 
 "Oh, younger," said Joe. "At least, I took her to be. 
 Why, she's a higher- voltage proposition than Henry, a 
 good deal. Knows what she's about, all right. Not what 
 you'd expect, exactly. Dresses up to the nines, shows a 
 good deal of leg, smokes cigarettes. She seemed very good- 
 natured and agreeable, except for one nasty look she gave 
 Henry when he did something she didn't like. She acted 
 friendly enough toward me. I suppose that's because no 
 one has told her yet what a devil I am." 
 
 The satirical observation that this didn't necessarily 
 follow was on Jennie's lips, but she suppressed it. The 
 force of the protective impulse which had sprung up in
 
 THE BETTER HALF 77 
 
 her, surprised her. She saw the woman and her motive 
 crystal-clear; hard, clever, determined, domineering her 
 brother's characteristic timidity made that plain; the 
 masking good-humor belied by that one nasty look. She 
 had cast her fly before ever she'd seen Joe, as soon as she 
 knew that this big fish was in the pool. A clever fly; 
 respectability brightened by the legs and the cigarettes! 
 But weren't men the limit? How was it possible that 
 Joe, with all his wariness, didn't see? Yet he didn't, at 
 all. It was he who broke the silence that had settled be 
 tween them. 
 
 ' ' It was friendly of her to ask me like that. And it was 
 her own idea. Henry told me that in so many words. 
 Didn't want me to think, I guess, that he was putting any 
 thing over on her. And they were all nice people. Nice, 
 regular people." He gave an embarrassed little laugh. 
 ' ' It does look as if I was turning respectable, doesn 't it ? " 
 
 She managed some sort of reply that satisfied him. It 
 didn't matter since he wasn't listening, anyway. 
 A moment later, he laughed again and sat back in his chair. 
 
 ' ' Well, that 's the funny way life works, ' ' he said. ' ' Just 
 as I'm getting ready to settle down and behave myself, 
 my wife's lawyer writes me to say she's going to get a di 
 vorce. ' ' 
 
 Jennie stared at him in clear incredulity. When she 
 could think at all, she tried to warn herself that this was 
 one of his jokes, but it wouldn't work. She knew him 
 too well to be deceived. "Your wife!" she echoed 
 blankly. 
 
 ' ' Didn 't I tell you you were going to be surprised ? " he 
 said. 
 
 After a silence of a minute, she asked, "How long have 
 you been married, Joe?" 
 
 ' ' Oh, twenty years, about. Bring your coffee along into 
 the other room where we can be comfortable. That's 
 what I wanted to talk over to-night. I '11 tell you all about 
 it."
 
 78 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 2 
 
 He won a reluctant smile from her almost at once by an 
 absurd solicitude over the perfectly irrelevant matter of 
 her comfort. The chair she liked best, placed with refer 
 ence to the breeze, cigarettes, matches, ash-tray. 
 
 "I'm not ninety years old," she said petulantly, to 
 check his running about; "nor an invalid just up from 
 an operation." 
 
 "You're pretty mad, though," he guessed. 
 
 ' ' I don 't know whether I am or not, ' ' she told him truth 
 fully. "I'm just wondering how well I know you, after 
 all." 
 
 "You know me exactly as well as you think you do," 
 he asserted. "Look here! Annabel and I were really 
 married living together, I mean about six months. I 
 haven't seen her in nineteen years. She lives out in Pasa 
 dena with her father; her mother died a couple of years 
 ago. It wasn't up to me, was it, to tell you the day you 
 came to work for me that I was a married man not living 
 with my wife? 
 
 "Oh, it's been kind of a dirty deal all round. I guess 
 that's why I've wanted to keep it dark. I've done a 
 whole lot worse things, ' ' he went on, feeling his way, ' ' and 
 haven't cared a damn who knew 'em. And I never tried 
 to make anybody think I was a plaster angel. But this 
 proposition, well, I never knew my own mind about it. 
 I've always thought I might clean it up some day. Only 
 when I did, I wanted to be in position to do it brown, see, 
 the handsome thing, so there wouldn't be anything left to 
 be said. 
 
 "And I give you my word, Jennie, I was getting ready 
 to do it. I had it doped out that, when this deal with 
 Williamson got settled, I'd run out to the coast and see 
 'em see my wife, I mean, find out what she wanted, 
 straighten everything out. And then, some days ago, a 
 smart Aleck of a lawyer writes me that she's going to get 
 a divorce. Of course, it's all right. I let her know, long 
 ago, that she was entitled to get one, if she wanted it,
 
 79 
 
 on any grounds she chose. As long as she didn't, I let it 
 ride. Well, there it is. Damn it, Jennie, can't you see it 
 at all ? You sit there looking like . . . " 
 
 He broke off, perceiving that he'd aroused her. 
 
 "Yes, I understand," she said, at last. "I ought to, 
 if anybody could. We're more alike than you think, Joe. 
 I could surprise you, too, I guess. No, I'm not going to 
 tell you about it now. This is your party. Go ahead and 
 tell me the whole story. What was she like? Where did 
 you meet her?" 
 
 "Are you married, too?" he asked, with an intent look 
 at her. 
 
 "No," she said. And she put such a weight of mean 
 ing into the monosyllable that it stopped the inquiry as 
 well as answered it. 
 
 Joe turned away thoughtfully to the smoking table and 
 relighted his cigar. 
 
 "Why, Annabel was a Chicago girl," he began presently. 
 "Lived down in Woodlawn with her father and mother 
 Fanning their name was. I boarded with them back in 
 the spring of 'ninety-nine, just twenty years ago now. 
 I'd just passed my examination for a licensed structural 
 engineer, got my seal and all, and I had my first white- 
 collar job, down in South Chicago. But I had to come 
 up to town a good deal, and Woodlawn was convenient 
 half-way between. They were the most respectable people 
 in the world, those Fannings. Poor but genteel good 
 God, so you could hardly breathe! They had put what 
 money they had into the building boom that struck that 
 part of town just before the World's Fair. They owned a 
 whole block of brick veneered houses, empty, most of them, 
 half the time, and renting, when they did, for just about 
 enough to cover the repairs. I was the first boarder 
 guest they called it they'd ever taken in, and we never 
 spoke of money. I sealed it up in an envelope every Mon 
 day morning and pinned it to my pin-cushion. 
 
 "But you know, Jennie, that sort of thing looked good 
 to me just about then. You see, I'm not a real rough-
 
 80 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 neck I mean, I wasn't born that way. I can't remem 
 ber my mother much. She died when I was six or seven. 
 I think she must have been a pretty woman and well 
 brought up. But my father God! I remember him. 
 He was a schoolmaster, and he had a temper just like mine. 
 I can't think of a more devilish combination than that. 
 He had to hold it in, you see, lose his job if he didn't, 
 so it struck in on him ; poisoned him, you might say. The 
 only person he could take any of it out on was me. I 
 think he must, have hated me. I know I hated him. But 
 just the same, if I 'd behaved myself, if I hadn 't disgraced 
 him, he'd have half starved himself to give me a college 
 education and make a schoolmaster out of me. He was 
 what you'd call a gentleman, all right. That's what I'm 
 getting at a gentleman and a scholar. There were a lot 
 of good books around the house, and I read when I could 
 without giving him the satisfaction of knowing I was do 
 ing it. 
 
 "I didn't run away, finally, until I was sixteen, and I 
 was as old then as most men are at twenty-five. I had to 
 begin shaving when I was thirteen, and I was older in 
 some ways, God knows, when I left home, than Henry 
 Craven will ever be. 
 
 "I suppose you might say it was respectability I ran 
 away from. And when I came back to the States from 
 Para, in 'ninety-three, it wasn't respectability that I'd 
 come back for. Lord! I struck New York with two 
 thousand dollars, and I blew it all in in a week, mostly in 
 a poker game. Thought I was the best poker player in 
 the world. Well, I didn't have any trouble finding three 
 men who were better. 
 
 "I guess it was lucky for me I got cleaned out. I 
 found myself, you see, on the edge of the gutter. And 
 you want to remember what year that was 'ninety-three 
 bank failures, bread lines, Coxey's Army. "Well, there 
 was one thing got rubbed into me that year so that I'll 
 never forget it. Everybody was hard-up, all right, the 
 white-collar people as well as the rest. They failed in
 
 THE BETTER HALF 81 
 
 business and closed their shops, stood off their creditors 
 and went through bankruptcy. They'd hock their dia 
 monds and fire a couple of parlor-maids and feel sorry as 
 hell for themselves. But it was all in their eye, really. 
 They kept just as warm and dry and well-fed as ever. 
 And, since the same thing was happening to all of them, 
 there was no disgrace about it. The people who got it in 
 the neck were the artisans. A man might be the most 
 skilful sort of cabinet-maker, but he was up against it 
 just as hard as a Hunkie, in bad times. 
 
 "Other things being equal, you know, I'd a whole lot 
 rather work at something that required bodily skill than 
 sit at a desk all day and tell people what to do. But that 
 year showed me there was nothing in it. The birds in the 
 swivel-chairs have got the game rigged their way. I hated 
 'em. I hated their pasty faces and their flabby hands 
 and their padded shoulders. Sometimes when I'd be 
 swinging a pick out on a road, I'd see one of 'em go driv 
 ing by and I'd want to take him and muss him up. I'd 
 think what I'd do to him if I had him out in the jungle. 
 But I knew I never would get him out in the jungle; I 
 never could do anything to him until I had got to where 
 I didn't have to do things with my own hands. That's 
 why I got me a swivel-chair, see? Not because I liked it, 
 but because I hated it. 
 
 "It took me six years, ten hours' work a day with my 
 hands and eight hours' work a night with my head. Not 
 all the time, of course. I 'd break loose now and then and 
 have a hell of a big spree to freshen me up and give me 
 a new start. I always knew what I wanted, though, and at 
 last I had it a first-class engineering education. And 
 I knew what to do with it when I got it, too. There's 
 where I had it all over any college boy that ever turned 
 up the bottoms of his pressed pants. Well, and the next 
 thing I knew I was turning up the bottoms of mine, too." 
 
 It was queer to see him detached like this, speculative. 
 He'd told Jennie, from time to time, innumerable stories, 
 incidents of that six years' struggle, for an education;
 
 82 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 queer shifts he'd adopted, fantastic and often not quite 
 credible adventures. But he'd never given her a glimpse 
 before of the wire upon which these beads were strung; 
 the purpose and passion that held them together. She 
 felt closer to the real man to-night than she 'd ever been. 
 
 She left unbroken for a little while the reflective silence 
 into which he'd fallen, before she prompted him. But 
 presently she got him going again by suggesting that the 
 cause of his concern over the crease in his trousers was 
 Annabel. 
 
 "Why, no, not exactly," he said. "I don't remember 
 thinking much of her just at first. I don't believe I saw 
 much of her. She may have been away from home, or 
 she may have been there and I not noticed her. She 
 wasn't the sort of girl that I ever had noticed. No, it 
 was the old folks I made up to. They sort of appealed to 
 me. They were so fussy and innocent. I must have been 
 close to thirty years old then, but in some ways I was a 
 good deal of a kid. And it was a kid trick I played, pre 
 tending at first to be just as innocent as they were. I had 
 had a good pious bringing-up, you see, knew the Bible and 
 all that. Lord ! I know it yet. It was all just for fun, in a 
 way. I mean I wasn 't trying to get anything on it. But 
 for a while I was as careful and tidy and' regular . . . 
 Shaved every morning, telephoned if I found I was going 
 to be late to meals. Even went to church with them a 
 few times at first. Of course, I didn't keep it up. It 
 wasn't very long before they began to get on to me; and 
 as soon as they did, they began to worry about Annabel." 
 
 Once more he needed prompting. Jennie had to ask him 
 what Annabel was like. 
 
 "Why, there was nothing the matter with her looks," 
 Joe said. "Now I think of it, she looked a little like 
 Henry's sister, though I wasn't reminded of it last night." 
 He grinned. "Annabel never dressed like that, to be 
 sure, and she'd have drunk poison before she'd have 
 touched a cigarette, but there is some sort of resemblance, 
 for a fact."
 
 THE BETTER HALF 83 
 
 "I've never seen Henry's sister," Jennie rather firmly, 
 reminded him. "How old was Annabel? What color 
 was her hair?" 
 
 "Lightish," Joe said; "not yellow; there wasn't much 
 color in it. I was fooled on her age, all right. I took it 
 for granted that she was just a kid, barely twenty, if as 
 old as that. When she gave her age at the license bureau 
 up in Milwaukee where we'd run off to get married, I 
 found she wasn't but five or six years younger than I 
 was. It would have made quite a difference if I'd known 
 that sooner," he added. 
 
 Jennie remarked that twenty-five wasn't too old for a 
 girl to marry. But Joe said this wasn't what he meant. 
 She was too old not to be more grown-up than she was. 
 
 "You see, she'd been having a fight with her father 
 and mother. I 'd seen something of the sort going on from 
 the first. It had struck me, every now and then, that I'd 
 interrupted a scene of some sort, when I came into a room 
 where they all were. And Annabel would sit through a 
 meal sometimes without saying a word, but meaning a 
 devil of a lot. But one night, out on the front porch, she 
 broke loose and told me her troubles. 
 
 "She wanted to be an artist, a sculptor, and they 
 wouldn't let her. She'd been going down to the Art In 
 stitute for quite a while taking lessons in drawing and 
 designing, china painting, I don't know what maybe a 
 little modeling. But now it was a question of a life class, 
 and they wouldn't hear of it. They were shocked that 
 she wanted to, thought it was improper and that if she was 
 really a nice-minded girl as she'd been brought up to be 
 she'd see it that way herself. 
 
 "Well, that interested me in her a whole lot more than 
 I'd been before, and the line her father and mother had 
 taken seemed so damned silly that the next chance I got 
 I tried to put in a word for her. It was a fool thing to 
 do, of course. It got Annabel in wrong, worse than ever, 
 for discussing such a subject with a young man she, her 
 self, was furious with me at first for not having seen that
 
 84 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 and they were already suspicious that I wasn't quite 
 so good as I looked. 
 
 ''Now, here's a damn funny thing, Jennie. Here's a 
 question I've asked myself a thousand times. Will you 
 tell me why I didn't just pack my trunk at that point and 
 clear out? I was tired of the old people and I wasn't in 
 love with Annabel, not one little bit. I didn't even want 
 her in a temporary sort of way. There were girls grow 
 ing on every bush that were more attractive, that way, than 
 she was. But I didn't get out. I went on butting myself 
 farther and farther in. "We had a hell of a time. The 
 old folks would hardly speak to me. They sat around 
 and kept watch so that I shouldn't be alone with Annabel. 
 I think the only reason they didn't turn me out of the 
 house was because they figured it was easier to keep us 
 apart as things were, having a line on me, than if they 
 hadn't any idea where I was. 
 
 "Well, the up-shot of it was that one day, along that 
 summer, we took the day boat the old whaleback, it was 
 to Milwaukee, got a license and a minister to marry us 
 and spent the night at the Plankington Hotel. Came 
 home on the train the next morning. 
 
 "The old folks wouldn't take us in, and it wasn't a 
 bluff either. But I found a furnished flat over in Hyde 
 Park it was easy enough to do in those days and we 
 set up housekeeping. I'd suggested a couple of rooms in 
 some family hotel, so that she could have more time to 
 herself. But she didn't want that. I was beginning to 
 wonder about that famous career of hers that the whole 
 row had been about. Finally I asked her one day why she 
 didn't go over to the Art Institute and register in the life 
 class. I remember how she looked at that and just what 
 she said. She gave me a stare and then a sort of laugh, 
 doubtful whether I wasn't joking, and she said: 'Why, you 
 silly old thing, what do I want to go there for, now?' " 
 
 To Jennie, the pattern had looked clear, bald fairly, 
 from the first mention of Annabel's confidences about a 
 career. Mere propinquity hadn't been enough to attract
 
 THE BETTER HALF 85 
 
 Joe to the rather colorless girl. So the family had tried 
 something else. They were all in it, of course, and they'd 
 played the game very cleverly. They had adopted what 
 was perhaps the one trick that would have worked. She 
 gave him, when he paused over Annabel's revelation, a 
 commiserating smile. 
 
 "Poor old Joe," she said. 
 
 But this was enough to show him how she had taken the 
 story and he dissented vigorously from her interpretation 
 of it. 
 
 "You've got it all wrong, Jennie. They didn't want me 
 to marry her. It looked like the wrath of God to them 
 when they first heard about it, and it never looked like 
 anything else. They never forgave me. 
 
 "She didn't really want to marry me herself. I bul 
 lied her into it. She cried most of the way to Milwaukee 
 on the boat, and I think she might have backed out of it 
 at last if the idea of turning up at home late at night and 
 telling her folks where she'd been hadn't scared her worse 
 than going through the ceremony with me. 
 
 "She hadn't any idea what marriage was about, Jennie. 
 Apparently supposed there was nothing to it beyond house 
 keeping and a little familiarity. And she couldn't stand 
 me, that's the long and the short of it. Lord! But she 
 was conscientious; all three of them were that. And 
 she must have had a talk with her mother that straight 
 ened things out a little. The one thing that reconciled 
 her to the relation at all was that it was legal and binding, 
 - going to last forever. 
 
 "I can't think of a worse mix-up than that. Because 
 with me, well, it had been like this. I'd never had any 
 thing to do with a woman before I never have since, for 
 that matter who wasn't in love with me, crazy about me, 
 for the time being anyhow. So this was wrong all 
 around. Yet she might have made some other sort of 
 man a good wife and been happy with him. But she 
 didn't like me, even in other ways. I think I frightened 
 her without meaning to. The way I talked shocked her.
 
 86 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 I tried to reform for a while. Good God! I've seen her 
 turn white over a plain 'hell' or a 'damn' or two, that I'd 
 use without thinking. I never swore at her. Never swore 
 at you, either, did I? 
 
 "It looked for a while oh, at the end of three months 
 or so as if we might make a go of it. She liked our 
 little flat, dusting and sticking the furniture around in 
 new ways, and making fancy desserts and things that she 
 got out of magazines. And, in a way, I liked it, too. I 
 liked the feeling of being anchored to something, having a 
 real address in the telephone book. I liked feeling re 
 spectable, and I was, too. Didn't do any bumming 
 around outside. 
 
 ' ' And then all of a sudden she got to hating me a whole 
 lot worse. Took to spending most of the time at home 
 with her folks. I tried to put my foot down on that, as 
 long as they wouldn't let me in the house. But it didn't 
 do any good. She went more and more and tried to keep 
 it dark. "Well, at last I got the offer of that big job down 
 in Lima. I didn't really need it, because I was getting on 
 first-rate in Chicago, but it looked to me like a good chance 
 for a showdown. So I accepted it and then I put it up to 
 her. She could come with me or she could quit me, just 
 as she liked. Well, she quit, and I don't know as I blame 
 her. I certainly didn't try to make it look good to her. 
 I'd told her some of my jungle stories, and I guess she 
 thought Peru was like that. She may have thought that 
 the climate went on getting hotter the farther south you 
 went. I didn't explain any. I wanted to get loose, that's 
 the gospel truth. She went back to her folks, and I 
 cleared out without saying good-by to her." 
 
 The only thing about this recital which Jennie found it 
 hard to understand was Joe's seriousness about it, the 
 weight he attached to the episode. It seemed strange that 
 so inconsiderable a person as Annabel could have left any 
 sort of mark upon him, let alone have bitten so deeply into 
 his memory. He hadn't loved her. He couldn't pos 
 sibly have loved a person like that. But mightn't he
 
 THE BETTER HALF 87 
 
 have loved, and gone on loving, silently and secretly and 
 perhaps a little shamefacedly, the things she feebly rep 
 resented to him; domesticity, all that sort of thing? 
 Had he carried in his heart all these years an un 
 acknowledged longing to be regular and respectable? It 
 was a startling notion of Joe, but it offered the only ex 
 planation she could think of. 
 
 "And you've never seen her since?" she asked, after a 
 few moments' of musing silence, "nor heard from her?" 
 
 "Oh, I've heard from her or about her, off and on. I 
 wrote to her from down in South America, asking her if 
 she didn't want to change her mind and come down and 
 join me. As things were, it was natural enough she didn't. 
 
 "I didn't come back to the States until nineteen-nine, 
 and when I started I went as far as Panama with the idea 
 that I'd go on up the west coast, drop off at San Pedro, 
 and go on up and see her. If I 'd made the big strike I 'd 
 been playing for down in Chile and just missed, I would 
 have gone to see her, no doubt about it. I'd have been 
 rich then. Able to make a proposition that I needn't be 
 ashamed of, however she took it if you see what I mean. 
 But I wasn't rich by a devil of a way. I had just about 
 enough to start myself again decently in Chicago, to come 
 back looking like a successful man. It's always been that 
 way with me, pretty much. I 'm always either just broke, 
 or just on the point of making a hell of a big thing. Any 
 how, I came up to Chicago by a fruit boat to New Orleans 
 instead of going round the long way. And, what with 
 the war and one thing and another, I haven 't been in shape 
 to fix things up with her until now. And now, just as 
 I am ready, I find out that she's tying a can to me. 
 
 "It's a funny thing. I was sore as hell when I read 
 that lawyer's letter. Since she had waited all that while, 
 I thought she might have waited a little longer. She might 
 have, too, for that matter." 
 
 It was funny, Jennie tacitly agreed; funnier than he 
 knew, to see him still nursing a grouch over the incon 
 stancy his wife had shown in not waiting another year on
 
 88 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 the end of twenty. But she checked an impulse to laugh 
 at him openly and instead asked him, as soberly as she 
 could manage, if he had any idea why Mrs. Greer was do 
 ing it. 
 
 "Oh, another man, I suppose," he said. 
 
 "When she cried out incredulously at that he wanted to 
 know why not. Wasn't it likely enough? "She's only 
 forty-five or thereabouts. Probably doesn 't look any older 
 to speak of than she did at thirty. She wouldn't a 
 woman like Annabel unless she's got fat. Some well- 
 preserved widower of sixty-odd there's enough of them 
 like that out in Pasadena, God knows has been making 
 up to her. Bungalow stuff; roses and orange blossoms; 
 warm nights! Lord, yes!" 
 
 He turned upon her with an impish gleam in his eye. 
 
 "Want to bet me a hundred dollars I haven't got it 
 doped out right?" he asked. 
 
 "No," she said thoughtfully, "I don't believe I do." 
 
 She often made bets with Joe, and not infrequently col 
 lected them, too; but never when that gleam in his eye 
 warned her that he was proposing a sure thing. Those 
 hadn't been blind speculations of his about Annabel and 
 her well-preserved widower. Somehow or other he'd 
 managed to inform himself of the facts. 
 
 "When was it you got her lawyer's letter?" she asked. 
 
 "Oh, quite a while ago," he admitted. "Just before I 
 started north." 
 
 "You aren't going to contest the divorce, are you?" 
 
 "Of course not," he grumbled. "What would I con 
 test it for? Oh, I haven't been putting detectives on her, 
 if that 's what you are getting at. Only, if you don 't want 
 to be walked on in a case like that, it's just as well to have 
 something to bargain with. I had Nathan get in touch 
 with a lawyer, a perfectly respectable chap, out in Pasa 
 dena, and asked him to look up the main facts, just so I 'd 
 know where I stood. There is a widower, all right, a re 
 tired Chautauqua lecturer with a weak throat. He 's got a 
 little lemon grove just outside Pasadena. I don't know 
 whether he's got one eye on Annabel's money or not.
 
 THE BETTER HALF 89 
 
 " Oh, it isn't hers yet," he went on, answering Jen 
 nie's exclamation of surprise. "But it seems old man Fan 
 ning 's done pretty well, especially in the last year or two. 
 He always had a fancy for bum real-estate, and he had 
 some in Los Angeles that they found oil on. It's nothing 
 enormous, would run to a couple of hundred thousand per 
 haps. He'll be getting on in his seventies by now, so it's 
 reasonable to suppose that Annabel will get it some day." 
 
 He got up with a spring, chucked the butt of his cigar 
 into the fireplace, and flexed his arms. "Well, the lemon 
 grower is welcome to Annabel, and the money, too, if he 
 can get it. I hope he does. And she 's welcome to him, as 
 long as she doesn't try to get rough with me." But his 
 minatory tone made so sharp a contrast with these benig 
 nant sentiments that Jennie looked up at him inquiringly. 
 
 "You mean if Annabel doesn't try to gouge you for 
 too much alimony?" she asked. 
 
 He checked the movement he was making and scowled 
 at her in a way that showed this wasn't what he had 
 meant. 
 
 ' ' No, ' ' he said, ' ' I wasn 't thinking of that. I was think 
 ing of the grounds for divorce she puts in her bill. I'll 
 look bad enough at the best, but I W 7 on't be made to look 
 any worse than necessary." 
 
 Why in the world, Jennie wondered, should he care how 
 he looked. It was plain that he did care tremendously. 
 Not on his own account. It couldn't possibly be that. 
 But who else was there to consider? For a moment, a 
 wild notion of Henry Craven's sister flashed through 
 her mind, to be dismissed as preposterous. Then came the 
 real idea, the luminous surmise. 
 
 "Joe," she asked him suddenly, "did Annabel have a 
 baby?" 
 
 3 
 
 She saw before he could answer that her shot had hit 
 the mark. There was something likably boyish in the way 
 it took him aback that she should guess, and in his trans 
 parent attempt to hide his dismay by minimizing her dis 
 covery.
 
 90 
 
 "I should think you might have seen that long ago/' he 
 grumbled. 
 
 "Well, she supposed she might have guessed. The ex 
 istence of a child was the one answer to the enigma that had 
 been puzzling her during the whole of his recital. This 
 was the one way by which a colorless, inconsiderable per 
 son like Annabel could leave her mark upon him. It was 
 the simplest, most natural thing in the world. 
 
 "A boy or a girl?" she asked, when her mind had got 
 into its stride again. 
 
 ' * God ! If it had been a boy, ' ' said Joe, " I 'd have gone 
 back. I 'd never have left a son of mine to be brought up 
 by Fannings. Being a girl, it seemed to belong to them 
 more. But at that I almost went back, as I told you. 
 
 "Jennie, I never was so flabbergasted in my life as the 
 day I got that letter, down in Lima, when I'd been away 
 about a year. I'd written Annabel, asking her to come 
 down and join me. She wrote back that she couldn't 
 come, because she didn't think the climate would be good 
 for 'baby'; and then she went on, I remember her exact 
 words, 'I guess you don't know about her. Her name is 
 Beatrice and she is eight months old.' 
 
 "That eight months made it plain enough what had 
 been the matter with her when I quit. Damn it! Why 
 couldn't she have told me what was on the way? I'd 
 have treated her more carefully, if I'd only understood. 
 That's the good woman of it, I suppose. She and her 
 mother are the only two of that sort I've ever known and 
 I guess they weren't meant for the likes of me. I've al 
 ways had an idea it was the mother's doing that Annabel 
 kept it dark. She hoped I'd clear out. I was a Beelzebub 
 to her, no less. "Well, they put me in wrong that time; 
 left me looking damned cheap and feeling cheaper than I 
 looked." 
 
 Jennie had never seen him so deeply moved. Nor had 
 she ever understood him so well. This new angle of vis 
 ion gave the effect of substituting a stereoscopic view for a 
 flat photograph.
 
 THE BETTER HALF 91 
 
 The fact that he had a daughter, born in wedlock of a 
 good woman, had been working in him all these years, a 
 vital ferment. His desertion and neglect of her of them 
 had remained an nnhealed sore in his memory. The de 
 sertion hadn't been altogether his fault, but why had he 
 persisted in his neglect? Well, that wasn't so hard to 
 understand, either, when you knew Joe. He'd spoken, 
 two or three times to-night, of his wish to do the handsome 
 thing, to do it up brown. With him, it would have to be 
 done that way or it couldn't be done at all. He couldn't, 
 in any common or rational way, be a devoted husband and 
 father; but by some sort of transformation scene, which 
 the possession of a lot of money would make possible, he 
 might become a sort of fairy god-father. And this was 
 what he had been dreaming of, looking forward to, shying 
 away from under a. sense that the properties and the 
 apparatus weren't ready yet. Another month or year 
 and the scene could be bigger and more splendid. And 
 too, most likely, there was a real shyness, a boyishness, be 
 hind it all which made him clutch at excuses for delay. 
 
 Yet Jennie found it easy to believe, to-night, she was in 
 a, for her, distinctly sentimental mood about him that 
 he had been hungry, all those years, for the very thing 
 which a boyish perversity had driven him to flout, respect 
 able domesticity, a wife, a daughter, an anchorage. It 
 was, she guessed, the feeling that he had been cheated out 
 of all that, having come so near attaining it, that had made 
 him so restless and quarrelsome. If he'd had the luck to 
 marry the right sort of woman . . . 
 
 She roused herself at the end of a long reflective silence 
 to remark that Beatrice must, by now, be pretty near 
 grown up. 
 
 ' ' She 's nineteen, ' ' he answered. " I've never known her 
 exact birthday. I've always known about how old she 
 was, though," he added. 
 
 "Don't you know at all what she's like? Haven't you 
 any sort of picture of her?" 
 
 "Picture! Lord, no! I told that Pasadena lawyer to
 
 92 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 try to get me one. But he hasn't succeeded; at least, it 
 hasn't turned up yet. Why, I suppose she must be a good 
 deal like Annabel. She's sure to have been brought up 
 like that. Innocent. Well, that's the way to bring up 
 a girl, all right. Do you know those old-fashioned bou 
 quets that are coming into style again, with a paper frill 
 around them? I suspect she's a good deal like that." 
 
 Looking up at him, near to tears with a sudden sym 
 pathy, she saw his face darken. It was so startling a 
 change that she cried out, "Joe! What is it!" 
 
 "Can you see," he asked, "how that child has been 
 brought up to think about me? They will have used me 
 as the bad man to frighten her with. 'Your father will 
 get you, if you're a naughty girl, Beatrice!' God! I 
 can hear old Ma Fanning say it. And now she's old 
 enough to think for herself, a nice little girl like that, she 
 probably turns cold all over when she thinks of me, afraid 
 I may crop up and disgrace them all. Goes and gets 
 into bed with her mother to be comforted. That may be 
 the reason Annabel's given her for getting a divorce. 
 Well, I suppose it's what I deserve, all right. 
 
 "But where I stick is at that damned widower, googling 
 at the kid, pawing her, telling her he's her daddy now, 
 holding her on his knee. Not if I know myself! 
 
 "There you are, Jennie! Now we're down to brass 
 tacks. If anybody's going to be that child's father, I am. 
 That's what I wanted to put up to you to-night." 
 
 "You mean," she asked, after lighting a cigarette to 
 give herself the appearance, at least, of calm reflection, 
 "that you want to take her away from her mother alto 
 gether and bring her out here to live with you?" 
 
 "You've got it," he said. "That's the idea to a dot. 
 I want you to help me figure out how it's to be done. 
 She 's of age, you want to remember ; under California law. 
 I looked it up." 
 
 He prowled restlessly about the room while she smoked 
 half-way through her cigarette; then, with his familiar 
 impatience, prodded her for results.
 
 93 
 
 "What's the simplest way? That's the place to begin. 
 And what's the objection to it? Come along. Think out 
 loud. You'll have come as far as that." 
 
 ' ' It 's a crazy idea, Joe, ' ' she then burst out desperately. 
 "I know how much you want her and how much you hate 
 the other thing. But it can't be done. Even if you did 
 get her to come to you, which I don't believe you could, 
 what would you do with her when she was here? She 
 couldn't live alone in this flat with you away half the 
 time. And anyway, the sort of life you live ..." 
 
 "Damn the sort of life I live!" he interrupted. 
 ' ' What 's that got to do with her ? It 's never had anything 
 to do with you, has it? And you've known me better than 
 anybody else, for seven years. If I could be decent to 
 you for that length of time, don't you think I could to 
 my own daughter? It's her life that we're talking about. 
 I tell you, nothing wrong would ever come within sighting 
 distance of it. She 'd never learn anything out of the way 
 from me or from anything she ever saw me do. There'll 
 never be any parties in this flat, Jennie. Not as long as 
 she makes her home in it." 
 
 "She couldn't live here alone in it, anyhow. Not with 
 you away half the time." 
 
 "I wouldn't try to keep her here all the time. I'd 
 send her to school, for one thing. Williamson's got a 
 daughter just about her age who's away at some boarding- 
 school or other. I'll find out from him where it is and 
 send Beatrice to the same place. That's a good idea. 
 They'll make friends. It'll give Beatrice the right sort of 
 start." 
 
 "There won't be any school till next September," Jennie 
 pointed out. "This year's practically over now. And 
 after the first of July you'll have to be up North most of 
 the time." 
 
 He grappled with this difficulty for a moment; then 
 faced her triumphantly with a solution. 
 
 "Henry Craven's persuaded his sister to take a cottage 
 somewhere on Cape Cod this summer. He's worried about
 
 94 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 Her for some reason ; thinks she needs a change. And the 
 Aldrichs have offered to loan her their place. She's 
 agreed to go for a couple of months if she can find some 
 body to go with her. Well, she could take Beatrice along, 
 just as well as not, even if she does get somebody else, too. 
 I could fix it so that the trip wouldn 't have to cost Henry 
 anything. She doesn't want to go till July, Henry says, 
 but that will just give Beatrice and me a chance to start 
 getting acquainted." 
 
 Jennie felt her mind going blank. What could you do 
 with a man like that? She got herself together, chucked 
 away her cigarette, and charged the position, head on. 
 "Joe, you're wild," she said. "You can't do things like 
 that not outside your own office, you can't. They won't 
 work. You haven't an idea, really, what the girl is like. 
 You don't know a thing about her tastes or her ways. 
 You don't know whether she'd like these people, or not. 
 Nor whether they'd like her." 
 
 "They'd better like her!" he retorted, half aloud. 
 Then, with a laugh, "Look here, Jennie! Do you want to 
 bet a thousand dollars, real money, that if I ask Miss 
 Craven to take Beatrice under her wing for a few weeks, 
 down East, she won 't grab it like a trout ? Come on, now. 
 Don't be a crab unless you're willing to back your 
 opinion." 
 
 Was that subtlety, she wondered, or naivete? Had he 
 just this moment blundered into it, or had he thought it 
 all out, in that amazing brain of his, at their dinner, the 
 night before? He being Joe, you never could be sure. 
 
 "No," she said, beaten; "I'm not taking any bets with 
 you, to-night." 
 
 "Anyhow," he immediately went on, not stopping to 
 gloat over her discomfiture, "this is all barking up the 
 wrong tree. There's no argument whether we want the 
 girl or not. The question is, how are we going to get 
 her?" 
 
 "Go out there yourself and see her," she answered 
 instantly.
 
 THE BETTER HALF 95 
 
 He nodded thoughtfully. "Yes, that's the simplest 
 thing. But it wouldn't do. First place, I'd scare her 
 to death just my looks, I mean. She mustn't see me 
 until she's been told I'm not so bad as I look. Second 
 place, if I was there, I couldn't get out of seeing Annabel, 
 and if I ever got drawn into an argument with her and 
 old man Fanning, let alone the widower, I'd spill all the 
 beans. No, that's out. What's the next thing?" 
 
 Then, after a dubious pause, "I was wondering about 
 you or Henry; which of you would be best to send out, 
 for me, I mean." 
 
 At that, she laughed outright. "Send us both, Joe, 
 together. We'd make a wonderful pair of kidnappers." 
 Then, seriously and patiently, as one would deal with a 
 little boy, she went on, "Anybody you sent in your place, 
 Joe, would have to explain who they were and why they 
 were mixed up in the business, and before they got through 
 the whole thing would look like a crime and you'd look 
 like an ogre. No, if you can't go yourself, you'll have to 
 write a letter." 
 
 By the way he grumbled over this decision, she was able 
 to guess that it was the one he himself had come to. But 
 his manner of acquiescing in it took her once more by 
 surprise. He went over to a desk in the corner of the 
 room and came back with a pad and pencil which he put 
 into her hand. 
 
 "All right," he said. "We'll do it now." 
 
 "You don't mean you're going to dictate it!" she ex 
 claimed. "A letter like that?" 
 
 "It's the only way I can do it," he assured her. "I'll 
 copy it out in my own handwriting after you've tran 
 scribed it. What's the matter? You haven't forgotten 
 your pothooks, have you?" 
 
 "Oh, all right," she told him. "Go ahead." 
 
 He began: " 'My dear little girl: This letter is from 
 your father. I hope you won't stop reading though, until 
 I have told you why I am writing. It's because I have 
 just heard of your mother's plan to get a divorce from me
 
 96 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 and marry again. I don't blame her for doing that, but 
 it strikes me that the new scheme may leave you out in 
 the cold, as it leaves me, and that maybe this is a good 
 time for us to get acquainted.' 
 
 "I put that in," he paused to explain to Jennie whom 
 he saw looking rather thoughtful over it, "on the off 
 chance that Annabel hasn't told her the real reason. She 
 may be keeping the marriage end of it dark. It would 
 be easy enough to do with a kid like that." 
 
 Jennie nodded a little dubiously, but made no remark, 
 and he went on. 
 
 11 'I don't know how much you have been told about 
 me, but I realize that you must think of me as a pretty 
 bad sort of person. From your mother's angle on it, I 
 surely have been, and from yours, too. I've had a hard, 
 rough life, full of ups and downs. I don't know that 
 there's much use in telling you a thing you will find it 
 so hard to believe, but it is true, nevertheless, that I have 
 been thinking about you ever since I first knew I had a 
 daughter, and have been wishing I could do for you the 
 things that a father ought to do. 
 
 " 'I have only just got things in shape so I can. I am 
 now the head of a big business and some of the biggest 
 bankers and such in Chicago are associated with me. I 
 have a good apartment at the above address and two 
 motor-cars. I am sure I can make you comfortable, for 
 a visit at least, and give you a good time. I don't ask for 
 more than a visit until, you have had time to decide 
 whether you care enough for me to adopt me as your real 
 father, or not.' ' 
 
 Again he paused, and this time evidently in the grip of 
 a real difficulty. "That's the devil of a letter," he burst 
 out at last. "How do I know she'll get it? If Annabel 
 sees it first, with a Chicago post-mark and all, she'll open 
 it sure. And if she has been keeping her widower dark, the 
 girl will never get a look in. ' ' 
 
 "There's this lawyer in Pasadena," Jennie suggested. 
 "He seems to be a convenient sort of person."
 
 TUB BETTER HALF 97 
 
 Joe nodded, grinned and resumed dictation. 
 
 " 'I'm sending this letter through my lawyer in Pasa 
 dena.' Wait, cut that out. 'You're welcome to show this 
 letter to your mother. I am sending it through my law 
 yer in Pasadena only in order to make sure that you really 
 get it and that you have a chance to decide the question 
 for yourself. I think that, being nineteen years old, you 
 are entitled to decide it that way, if you want to. I am 
 also sending him a check for a thousand dollars, with in 
 structions to pay you as much as you want of it for 
 making the journey with.' ' 
 
 "That's two or three times as much as she'll need," 
 Jennie objected. 
 
 ' ' I know it is, ' ' he said. ' ' That 's the only way I 've got 
 of showing her I'm not a piker. She'll take what she wants 
 and he'll pay his bill out of the rest." He went on with 
 the letter. 
 
 ' ' ' I am hoping, before you come, to get hold of a photo 
 graph of you, so that I will know whom to be looking for 
 when I meet the train. But I have an idea that I shall 
 know anyway. I am not sending you a photograph of 
 myself for fear it might frighten you. But I am not 
 really so bad as I look. Perhaps you don't know I am 
 fifty years old, five years older than your mother. I 
 honestly believe you will never be sorry for having given 
 me a chance to show you that I can be 
 
 " 'Your loving father.' 
 
 "Write it out long-hand, will you, Jennie? Then I'll 
 copy it and put it in the mail to-night." 
 
 It wasn't until she had finished this task that anything 
 more was said between them. As she concluded it, she 
 remarked, "That's a clever letter, Joe. But I wish ..." 
 
 She broke off there with a resolute shake of the head, 
 came over to where he was standing and took him im 
 pulsively by the shoulders. "I wish you luck, anyhow," 
 she went on. "I hope it works. I hope she makes you 
 happy. ' ' 
 
 Clearly, he was startled by the caress. She had never
 
 done anything just like that to him before. He didn't 
 respond to it with any gesture of his own, but his voice, 
 when he spoke, had real emotion in it. 
 
 "God, Jennie! If I had had the luck to marry you 
 twenty years ago," he said. "Well, what are you grin 
 ning at?" 
 
 For she 'd instantly stepped away from him at that, and 
 the quality of her smile was derisive. 
 
 "Annabel wasn't the wife for you, for a fact," she ad 
 mitted. "But you don't hate her, even now. And, oh, 
 lord, how you would have hated me ! ' ' 
 
 He didn't very much relish this, but she, having got 
 the upper hand of him again, pressed the point home. She 
 lighted another cigarette and seated herself comfortably 
 in his reading chair, before she spoke. 
 
 "The right wife for you," she said, "would have to be 
 pretty, silky, way up in the society game. She ought to 
 be a little afraid of you, so that she'd take care to keep 
 you afraid of her. And you'd have to be proud, when 
 ever you thought of it, that you'd got her." 
 
 She saw this go home to him. He flushed half angrily, 
 and came a stride or two nearer. 
 
 "How much more do you know?" he demanded. 
 
 She leaned back a little in her chair, and smiled ac 
 ceptance of his challenge. "You couldn't stand any 
 body," she added, "who knew you too well. You'd have 
 to be wonderful to her all the time, and mysterious. Oh, 
 I know, because that's the way I'd want a husband, if I 
 had one, to feel about me." 
 
 "All right," he said. "You needn't rub it in any 
 more. Look here, it's half past ten. You'd better be 
 running along home. I'll telephone Burns to bring your 
 car around." 
 
 She was mildly amused at his sudden concern for the 
 proprieties, and she tried to tease him a little about it, 
 but he insisted on treating the matter seriously. 
 
 "I don't want young Burns getting any funny ideas in 
 his head about you. He's welcome to think what he
 
 99 
 
 pleases about me, and about some of the people I play 
 around with. I don't care a damn what he thinks. But 
 I want you to be careful. Do you get that?" 
 
 "All right, Boss," she said, sounding very meek as she 
 rose and went to find her wrap. ' ' Sure I get it. ' ' 
 
 This final slant of the talk recalled her resolution re 
 garding the boy, so while she and Joe stood in the cor 
 ridor waiting for the car to come up, she told him she 
 thought he ought to find something better for young 
 Burns to do. "He's too good to be wasted driving ac 
 tresses home from parties and that sort of thing." 
 
 "A little soft on him, are you?" Joe asked. 
 
 "Oh, I suppose so," she admitted. "I probably 
 wouldn't have thought of it if he hadn't been so good- 
 looking. But it's true all the same." 
 
 Joe contradicted her, amiably but flatly. "If he's too 
 good for it," he went on to explain, "then it's just the 
 job for him. He has good pay and short hours ; the whole 
 day to himself except what he needs to make up lost sleep 
 in. If he wants to study or do anything else that's worth 
 while, he has all the chance in the world. If I could have 
 picked up a job like that at his age, I'd have blessed my 
 luck. Of course, it's true that, if he isn't any good, he 
 has a handsome chance to go to the devil. But that's no 
 concern of mine." 
 
 By now, the elevator had come up and she stepped into 
 it. "Are you sure it isn't?" she asked. "There's some 
 thing in the Bible about the man who said he wasn't his 
 brother's keeper." 
 
 "Yes," Joe acknowledged, with a grin. "That was 
 Cain. But he wasn't being blamed for not having seen 
 to it that Abel didn't eat too many green apples. He'd 
 just murdered his brother and he was trying to establish 
 an alibi. Didn't I tell you I knew the Bible? You want 
 to look it up before you spring anything like that on me. 
 Good night."
 
 CHAPTER THREE 
 
 SILK 
 
 AROUND this time Joe got into a quarrel not serious, 
 except as all business quarrels are serious with Gregory 
 Corbett. 
 
 Gregory had undertaken for Corbett and Company the 
 building of the machinery Joe had designed for the manu 
 facture of raw flax. There was, altogether, quite a lot 
 of it. The straw was to be handled directly from the 
 farmers' wagons and fed into a crusher. After this pre 
 liminary crushing, it had to be spread and sprayed with 
 the culture and conveyed to the bins. It was to be with 
 drawn from the bottoms of the bins after the retting was 
 completed, and put through the drying, breaking and 
 scutching processes necessary to get it ready for the mills. 
 
 The machinery was all, or nearly all, special work of a 
 particularly fussy sort, and from a manufacturer's point 
 of view it was not an attractive job. There were to be 
 four of each sort of machine to equip the four warehouses 
 which the company had contracted for in the Northwest. 
 But it wasn't likely that any of these designs would ever 
 be put into production on a really large scale. 
 
 Standardized production for an unlimited demand was 
 the bright motto of Corbett and Company. You didn't 
 mind how much time and money it took to get a thing 
 right, provided when you did get it right you could sell 
 ten million dollars' worth of it. There was no such pros 
 pect here. However, they were well equipped to do the 
 
 100
 
 SILK 101 
 
 work, and, as a favor to the new company this was his 
 honest feeling about it Gregory, at the April directors' 
 meeting, agreed to take the job. Joe sent the drawings 
 to Kiverdale by special messenger that same day and 
 started for the Northwest on the day following. 
 
 What happened is what always happens in such cases. 
 The Corbett engineers out at Riverdale found numerous 
 mistakes, or what they took to be mistakes, in Joe 's draw 
 ings, and saw various improvements, or what they con 
 ceived to be improvements, on his designs. And, since Joe 
 was not at hand for personal consultation, in some in 
 stances they made corrections on their own responsibility 
 and went ahead, and in others simply waited for Joe's 
 return. So when Joe came back along in May and went 
 out to Riverdale to see how things were getting along, 
 there was a first-class explosion. 
 
 Joe stood by his drawings. The ''improvements" were 
 ideas that he himself had rejected for good and sufficient 
 reasons long ago. The few ambiguities that there were in 
 his drawings were so obvious that any mechanical draughts 
 man with a teaspoonful of brains could have cleared them 
 up at sight. The engineers out at Riverdale were a pack 
 of congenital damn fools and vicious meddlers to boot. 
 What they'd left undone was a crime, and what they'd 
 done was worse, since it had simply to be undone again. 
 Brown, Corbett 's chief engineer, had to stand two hours of 
 this, and Bailey, the general manager and first vice-presi 
 dent, another hour. All that saved Gregory was that he 
 was out of town. 
 
 Joe went back, however, to his office and wrote Gregory 
 an outrageous letter behind Jennie MacArthur's back, 
 since he knew she 'd tone it down and he wanted it to be as 
 insulting as possible. Its purport was that, if Corbett and 
 Company weren't competent to do this work, he proposed 
 to equip a shop and do it himself. 
 
 His object in all this for Joe even in his tantrums us 
 ually had one was merely to raise the temperature to the 
 steaming point. His real indictment, unstated, was that
 
 102 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 the Riverdale people had been fiddling with the job in a 
 perfunctory way. He wanted to get everybody mad 
 enough so that things would begin to hum and the lost 
 time could be made up. And it was really a rush job by 
 now, for it had got deep into May and the harvest that it 
 was so necessary to be ready for was not many weeks 
 away. 
 
 He was therefore seriously disconcerted to receive, in the 
 course of a few days, a coldly polite letter from Gregory 
 stating that Corbett and Company would be very glad to 
 relinquish the contract. All work upon it had, by Greg 
 ory's orders, been stopped. Joe's drawings were baled up 
 and ready for delivery to any messenger he might send, 
 and he was welcome to execute them where and how he 
 pleased. 
 
 One's own words don't make a pleasant diet for any 
 body, but for Joe to crawl down and apologize was almost 
 impossible. So he appealed, or attempted to appeal, to- 
 John Williamson as a peacemaker. He telephoned John's 
 office and was told he was out of town. His attempts to 
 learn where John was were met merely by the information 
 that Mr. Williamson had left no instructions for the for 
 warding of any message whatever. He expected to be 
 back about the middle of next week. Even Rollie Mill, 
 John's secretary, when Joe identified himself over the 
 phone and explained that the matter was urgent, had 
 nothing more satisfactory than that to offer. Joe jammed 
 the telephone receiver down on its hook. 
 
 This was to him one of the most exasperating of the 
 strange customs of financiers, the trouble they took to 
 make themselves elusive and inaccessible. He couldn't 
 make up his mind whether it was pure swagger, a trick 
 to impress outsiders with their high-mightiness, or whether 
 they were so soft-skinned that they felt the need of a lot 
 of padding between themselves and the urgencies of life. 
 
 It was a great point of pride with Joe that his own 
 door always stood open. Anybody who wanted to talk 
 to him could walk straight up to him and say his say. If
 
 SILK 103 
 
 it wasn't worth listening to, Joe chucked him out. And 
 if he could do that, he believed anybody else could, who 
 had enough real ability to hold down his job. The advan 
 tage of it was that you really knew what was going on, 
 which you couldn't know if you surrounded yourself, like 
 some scared lazy Oriental potentate, with a lot of grand 
 viziers and eunuchs, all with their own fish to fry. 
 
 To this effect he freed his mind profanely and explo 
 sively to Henry Craven. "Here's an example of how 
 badly it works," he went on. "I'm sure Williamson 
 would want to know how we're being held up by Corbett's 
 getting on his high horse like this. These days we're los 
 ing now out at Riverdale will be precious as hell before 
 the summer's over; and Williamson could set it right in 
 half an hour, if I could get through to him." 
 
 Henry at this point startled him by producing an idea. 
 "Violet may know where John is," he suggested. "I can 
 call her up and see." 
 
 Joe was inclined to stick at that. "I guess I wouldn't 
 mix his wife in it," he said uneasily. "We don't want 
 to start anything." 
 
 Henry laughed at that idea. It was quite likely, he 
 admitted, that she wouldn't know enough of her husband's 
 whereabouts to do them any good, since they went about 
 pretty independently of each other, but certainly there 'd 
 be no harm in trying. 
 
 And within an hour, quite triumphant, he brought to 
 Joe's desk some items of information. He had pursued 
 Violet by telephone from one point to another, and 
 finally talked with her. She knew where John was, all, 
 right. He'd gone on a fishing excursion with Martin 
 Whitney up to Martin's camp in northern Wisconsin. 
 The name of the camp, she thought, was ' ' Big Pine Lodge. ' ' 
 It was a twenty-five mile drive from the nearest railroad 
 and telegraph station. But, unfortunately, she couldn't 
 remember the name of the station, though she'd heard it 
 often enough. Frederica this was Martin's wife was 
 out of town, in the East somewhere, but his eight-year-old
 
 104 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 boy, Peter, might know; somebody at the Whitney house 
 would, certainly, or Martin's brother-in-law, Rodney Aid- 
 rich, who went up there sometimes. But it took about 
 twenty-four hours to get a telegram through, and Violet 
 thought John would be back about Tuesday, anyhow. 
 
 And would Joe like Henry to telephone Aldrich, or 
 would he do it himself? 
 
 "We'll neither of us telephone," Joe answered posi 
 tively. "I hate like hell to wait till Tuesday, but we'll let 
 it lay right there just as it is. Oh, it's where she thinks 
 he is, all right, but it sounds like an alibi to me. I 
 wonder," he added with a grin, "if that isn't the way the 
 word fishy got started." 
 
 When Joe, by appointment, saw John Williamson at two 
 o'clock on the next Wednesday afternoon, he had to admit 
 that in this particular case, without prejudice to the gen 
 eral principle, he had been wrong. There was no doubt 
 at all that Williamson had been fishing. For the first 
 fifteen minutes, Joe could do nothing but listen to the 
 banker's summary of his piscatorial triumphs; the num 
 ber of trout taken, the gross weight of the catch, the size 
 of the biggest one, the duration in minutes of some of the 
 mightiest combats, stratagems employed by both sides and 
 so on. He had had four wonderful days and he made it 
 plain that he considered it an act of Spartan virtue to 
 have come back to the grind of business when he did. Well, 
 and what was the row with Gregory all about, anyway? 
 
 Joe couldn 't complain of his manner of dealing with the 
 business, once he had brought his mind around to it. It 
 was likely he'd already heard Corbett's version of the af 
 fair, and had come to his own conclusion probably that 
 Joe had made a damned fool of himself. But he betrayed 
 no feeling of this sort. Confound him, though, why 
 shouldn't he, if that was what he thought? They weren't 
 ladies at a tea party. They were two men trying to get 
 down to brass tacks. But, after listening with a good ap 
 pearance of sympathy to Joe's tale, he really gathered the 
 thing up pretty well.
 
 SILK 105 
 
 "I take it then, you never had any idea of taking the 
 job away from Corbett and Company, and never meant 
 Greg to think you had. And that all you want now is to 
 have them go ahead the way they started." 
 
 Joe nodded. That was about it. Corbett had taken 
 literally a phrase that had been meant merely to jazz 
 things up a bit. "Because, damn it, they weren't getting 
 started at all. It's almost June, now, and they haven't 
 started yet. But we haven't any alternative. I'll do 
 anything you say. If he wants an apology to soothe his 
 feelings, you can dictate anvthing you like and I'll sign 
 it." 
 
 "Oh, Corbett 's all right," the banker said in a tone 
 which struck Joe as subtly rebuking that last suggestion 
 of his. "That plant out at Riverdale is his religion, in a 
 way, and criticism of it makes him sore. I'll see him to 
 day was going to, anyhow, on another matter and I'll 
 straighten things out." 
 
 This was all Joe wanted, and he made a move to rise 
 from his chair when he saw that the financier had some 
 thing more to say, and sat back again. 
 
 "I should think that you'd take things a bit easier now 
 that everything is going on the rails; take time for a 
 little fun. Don't you ever fish?" 
 
 There was a stall-fed idea for you! "Everything on 
 the rails!" Let George do it. Even the Corbett diffi 
 culty would have taken care of itself. Would never have 
 arisen, Williamson evidently thought, if Joe hadn't med 
 dled. 
 
 He suppressed this line of thought without even the 
 flicker of a grin for its expression, and told the financier 
 that there had been times in his life when he had fished 
 assiduously. "I've netted 'em, speared 'em, hooked 'em 
 with hooks I've made myself out of turkey bones; I've 
 even caught 'em bare-handed. That's a poacher's trick. 
 Did you ever hear of tickling trout? But I hope I never 
 have to catch another. I've had enough of nature and 
 the wilds, roughing it, sleeping on the ground on the
 
 106 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 weather side of a camp-fire, sitting in the wet bottom of a 
 canoe all day. You see, I've done all that in earnest. 
 So now I want things smooth ; just as comfortable as I can 
 get them." 
 
 "Williamson got the idea. The man wasn't dull or, ex 
 actly, slow-witted. It was just that he'd never had enough 
 experience of the real life-or-death sort to know the feel 
 of naked reality. He went on, good-humoredly, to set right 
 some of Joe's misconceptions of the sport of fishing as 
 practised at Martin Whitney's camp. 
 
 Whitney had a bully house; built of logs but just as 
 comfortable as his house in town. And you were just as 
 well looked after. There was a big family: man and 
 wife, grown sons and daughters, a sprinkling of grand 
 children, who lived on the place the year round and took 
 care of it. You sent word you were coming a day or two 
 ahead, and you found fires going, beds made, water turned 
 on, everything. The place was wild, all right there were 
 bear, deer, all sorts of things to be found on it but the. 
 trails were so well kept up that it was perfectly easy to 
 go wherever you liked. And there was always a boy ready 
 to act as guide. The woods and waters were all carefully 
 preserved, the whole place patrolled, and Martin's own 
 hatcheries had been going long enough so that the fishing 
 was practically a sure thing. You simply couldn't have a 
 bad day. And when you got home at the end of it, you 
 sat down to a dinner that they'd be proud to serve at the 
 Blackstone; trout, a roast mallard apiece . . . 
 
 "Wild duck at this time of year?" Joe asked. "Where 
 are the game wardens in these parts? Or are they afraid 
 of as big a man as Whitney?" 
 
 "No, it's all right," Williamson insisted. "Whitney 
 breeds them up there. One of the boys on the place 
 started doing it just for a stunt, but Whitney saw the 
 value of the idea and regularly went in for it. They've 
 got a big enclosure have to keep their wings clipped, of 
 course, and feed them the right sort of stuff; I think 
 they taste better, for a fact, than the wild mallards. ' '
 
 SILK 107 
 
 Stall-fed, by God even the wild ducks! Joe didn't 
 say it aloud, but the thought jolted a laugh out of him. 
 
 "Oh, I know it sounds funny," said Williamson (he 
 didn't though; at least he didn't know why), "but it's a 
 great idea all the same. The point is, you have them when 
 you want 'em." 
 
 "Well, that's an important point, all right," Joe re 
 marked, getting out of his chair. "I wish you'd rub it 
 into Corbett until he appreciates it, too. I used the 
 wrong words in my letter to him, and I'm willing to take 
 'em back. But the sense of that letter was right and I 
 don't take it back for a minute. It'll make an enormous 
 difference whether we have that machinery ready when 
 we want it or not, and that's up to him. It can be done, 
 even now, but he'll have to forget some of his dignity and 
 start a sweat." 
 
 The banker had stayed in his chair and now, for a 
 minute before he answered, he drummed thoughtfully with 
 h]s fingers upon the desk. "Look here, Greer," he said 
 at last. "I've known Gregory Corbett a long time 
 always, you may say. I knew his grandfather. I think 
 you've got the idea that he's a pompous ass. At least 
 that he's acted that way about this. Well, he isn't. 
 You've got him wrong. He's a damned able fellow. If 
 you really sell him a proposition, get him enthusiastic over 
 it, he 's a whirlwind. But if you get him sore, he 's a bull 
 head. You'll have to get together with him on this if the 
 thing is going to work." 
 
 "He's put his own money into it," Joe observed. 
 "Can't he see where his own interest lies?" 
 
 "That isn't enough," the banker insisted. "After all, 
 he isn't in so very deep. But if you and he got 
 together in a friendly way over it ... I was just think 
 ing. Have you ever done any trap-shooting? Clay 
 pigeons, you know. He and I shoot a few frames almost 
 every Sunday morning. We both get up early and he 
 comes over and lias breakfast with me, and then we go 
 out to the traps and see what sort of an eye we've got.
 
 108 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 Put a quarter a bird on it just to make it amusing. Why 
 don't you drive up, next Sunday, and join us?" 
 
 It was touch and go, for a matter of seconds, whether 
 Joe wouldn't tell him to go to hell and take his clay pig 
 eons with him. Was it worth any real man 's while, trying 
 to work in harness with a fudging, trifling lot like this? 
 With their pretended sports, catching stall-fed fish, shoot 
 ing clay birds ! Pretended gambling to keep them amused ! 
 Twenty-five cents a bird to millionaires ! And having to 
 be coddled into a good temper before they 'd attend to what 
 was their own business! 
 
 It was, Joe decided afterward, a matter of pure chance 
 that tipped the beam. He had, instinctively, turned 
 away from the banker in that first moment of exaspera 
 tion, and what came under his eye was a framed chalk 
 drawing hanging alone on the wall, a portrait by Helleu of 
 a young girl. Joe didn't really look at it until the finan 
 cier, glancing round to learn why he didn't answer, saw 
 where his gaze was fixed. 
 
 "That's my daughter," he said. "They tell me it isn't 
 as good, artistically, as another he did of her, but it looks 
 like her, all right. It did, anyhow, two years ago when it 
 was done." 
 
 It was beautiful, Joe thought, and he said so, his mood 
 and intent changing with the suddenness of an alternating 
 current as he spoke. When Beatrice came (he felt sure 
 she would come, though he'd heard nothing as yet, either 
 from her or from the lawyer), he'd have a man as good as 
 that do a picture of her. And this girl on the wall was the 
 one he'd picked out to be his girl's friend. A charming 
 young thing she was, too, though a bit disconcerting, some 
 how. And he, with that damned temper of his, had been 
 on the point of wrecking the whole plan, just when Will 
 iamson was making his first really friendly advances. 
 (For it hadn't escaped Joe's attention that the banker had 
 never, up to now, asked him to his house. They 'd lunched 
 together two or three times at clubs and restaurants.) 
 After all, he'd gone into the china shop of his own free 
 will, hadn't he? Then why should he act like a bull?
 
 SILK 109 
 
 He walked over to Williamson, holding out his hand. 
 "You're right all the way through," he said. "I'll try 
 to slow down and take it a bit easier. And I'll be glad 
 to come up Sunday morning. "What do you mean by 
 early? Six o'clock?" 
 
 "Lord, no!" gasped the banker. "Why, we usually 
 have breakfast about eight-thirty. It won't matter if 
 you're late." 
 
 "I won't be," Joe assured him, "but I'm likely to be 
 hungry. Driving before breakfast always gives me an 
 appetite like a wolf. You'd better tell me how to find the 
 place, though." 
 
 2 
 
 The direct business result of the Sunday morning trap- 
 shooting was negligible. It was forestalled, indeed, by an 
 action of Jennie Mac Arthur's. As soon as Williamson 
 telephoned that Corbett and Company would go ahead 
 wilh the execution of the order, she wrote Gregory an 
 adroit letter which she persuaded Joe to sign. It had the 
 look of a proffered compromise, since it pointed out that 
 the need for the more complicated machinery, for the 
 processing of the flax after it had been retted, was much 
 less urgent than for the unloading, crushing and convey 
 ing machinery, which if they were to avoid heavy losses 
 must be ready when the flax was. It was written in a 
 perfect imitation of Joe's best vein, offhand, vigorous, 
 shot with a gleam of good-humored extravagance. 
 
 "You're a wonder, Jennie," Joe said as he read it. "I 
 swear I'll never do it again." Write a letter behind her 
 back, he meant. He had made that promise before, as 
 her smile reminded him. "I mean it this time," he as 
 serted, as he signed the letter. 
 
 It brought an immediate response from Corbett, a little 
 stiff in its phraseology for he had no such executive of 
 ficer as Jennie at his right hand but satisfactory in pur 
 port. The receiving machinery, at least, \vould be ready 
 as soon as the flax was. 
 
 Consequently, when the two men met in John William 
 son's gun-room, a mere word or two in addition to a mu-
 
 110 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 tually amiable greeting was all the business needed. Fur 
 ther than that they were never likely to go. Indeed, 
 Gregory's attempt at amends, a handsome reference to the 
 generosity of Joe's letter, rubbed him a little the wrong 
 way, since it was Jennie who deserved the credit of it. 
 
 But if the direct result of that Sunday morning excur 
 sion was unimportant, its by-products were not. The 
 ideas and impressions which Joe began collecting, from the 
 moment he drove through the great wrought-iron gates 
 which guarded John Williamson's estate, produced on 
 him a profound effect. 
 
 It was not Joe's way to formulate expectations, and 
 still less to go back to them afterward and compare them 
 with realities. All his emotional ideas were hazy. His 
 notions of the business life of a man like John Williamson 
 he had revealed to Henry Craven. Here was somebody 
 with no idea what the wealth he had inherited was for, 
 laboriously making more work for himself by increasing, 
 year by year, an income already unmanageably big. 
 
 His notion of the domestic life of a man like that was 
 cut off the same piece of goods. He fancied John at 
 home as the slave to the senseless elaborations of his own, 
 or his wife's, extravagance; living a life of stiff, uneasy. 
 ceremony, stifled by the meaningless assiduities of ser 
 vants, the object, on the whole, of contempt rather than 
 envy. He had got it, if anywhere, from the movies, 
 though he did not, of course, take literally the paranoiac 
 inanities of the cinemas; no more than he took literally 
 the comic shrimp in the colored supplement of one of the 
 Sunday papers, whose millions inspired a ferocious de 
 termination in his wife to "bring him up" to grotesque 
 standards of propriety and to dissociate him utterly from 
 the companions of his choice. Henry Craven, though, had 
 pretty distinctly intimated, Joe thought, that John Will 
 iamson's wife had made a point, during the early years 
 of their married life, of bringing up John. So, though 
 he did not expect to be affronted, when he presented him 
 self at the breakfast table, by a brandished rolling-pin,
 
 SILK 111 
 
 he did entertain, vaguely, the notion of a woman elab 
 orately gowned whose hauteur, equaling that of her but 
 ler, he might find rather trying. 
 
 Up to the moment when he entered the gun-room, there 
 had been nothing decisive to confirm or to belie his ex 
 pectations. The house was as big as he had supposed 
 it would be, and it stood, he guessed, the better part of 
 half a mile back from the road. But it hadn't, when he 
 got inside, at all the look of a hotel, and the only servant 
 he saw, unless one counted the lodge-keeper who'd opened 
 the great gate for him, was the pleasant young fellow 
 whom, upon pulling up at the carriage door, he had found 
 on the steps to receive him. 
 
 Did he care to have his car taken into the garage? It 
 was quite all right where it stood at the side of the drive, 
 unless it should come on to rain, and it looked at last as 
 if we could count on a fine morning. The gentleman was 
 expected in the gun-room, whither this friendly guide 
 now proceeded to conduct him. 
 
 John Williamson in the gun-room was, it is hardly too 
 much to say, a revelation to Joe. The room itself had 
 something to do with it. It was comfortable and mascu 
 line and shabby. The fender around the fireplace, a 
 broad seat upholstered in red leather, was scarred by the 
 heels of innumerable boots. The shallow cupboards, whose 
 unglazed walnut doors paneled both the flanking walls, 
 had a look of use and of diverse content, if one were to 
 judge by the different sorts of keyholes one saw. And the 
 keys, all the important little flat keys, would be in John's 
 pocket, guarding it would be fun to know what different 
 sorts of treasures. The room opened straight outdoors 
 on the ground level. The door stood open, as did the 
 casement windows, and let in, undefaced by any woven 
 wire screening, great splashes of sunshine upon the floor. 
 "Without, the turf as thick and short and firm as the pile of 
 a carpet came right up to the stone sill. 
 
 Joe knew without any telling, in his first glance through 
 that open door, that everything he could see belonged to
 
 112 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 Williamson. It struck him quite convincingly, though he 
 didn't stop to rationalize it, that nothing of his own, or 
 hardly anything, belonged to him in quite so ample and 
 secure a sense. And from the moment when the banker, 
 hearing him come in and emerging from his Sunday news 
 paper (he was rather shabbily dressed in a pair of old 
 knickerbockers and a soiled white sweater, and it was per 
 fectly apparent that the opinion of no human being upon 
 the propriety of his costume would interest him in the 
 least), rose and came over to greet him, Joe began to per 
 ceive that Williamson here in his place his fortress, if you 
 liked was a different man ; friendlier, perhaps, on the sur 
 face that was just hospitality but underneath more ar 
 rogant. And, perhaps, formidable ? The question rang in 
 Joe's mind like a tap on a big bell. He answered it with 
 a grin. All the better if the stall-fed could show a little 
 redder blood than he had credited them with. 
 
 Corbett, who came walking across the lawn to the gun 
 room door just about then, had a new look about him, 
 too. Joe had never seen him before except in business 
 clothes. He was dressed now in knickerbockers, a sport 
 shirt and a sleeveless shooting vest, unbuttoned, and the 
 sight of his neck and forearms gave Joe something more 
 to think about. He wasn't used to having to concede an 
 unquestionable physical superiority to those in whose com 
 pany he found himself. He'd often thought of Gregory 
 as some one out of whom it would be fun to take a fall. 
 Here was a misconception thoroughly corrected. The 
 man's strength was evidently prodigious. 
 
 Joe said as he shook hands with him, "I'd never have 
 written that letter if I'd seen you first with your coat 
 off." 
 
 "I might have kept my shirt on, though," Corbett re 
 plied, and blinked as if in surprise at the unforeseen wit 
 ticism. He added, seriously and a little stiffly, his appre 
 ciation of Joe's second letter, and said he didn't believe 
 there 'd be anything more to complain of in Corbett and 
 Company's execution of the order.
 
 SILK 113 
 
 Business wasn't mentioned again all the morning. Dur 
 ing the intermissions of a casual but excellent breakfast, 
 the talk divided itself equally between professional base 
 ball which, it seemed, had long been a hobby of William 
 son, and the important question of the moment, namely, 
 which of the three or four available guns Joe had better 
 take out to the traps with him. 
 
 They weren't at all put off by Joe's rather pointed un 
 concern. Indeed, after he had confessed that he had never 
 fired a shotgun in his life, and couldn't see that it mat 
 tered a damn what sort of lock, stock or barrel the thing 
 had, they took their responsibilities all the more seriously. 
 He might, he protested, have been going out after a tiger. 
 
 At the traps, he watched derisively while Williamson 
 scored twenty-two hits out of twenty-five chances and 
 Corbett, twenty-four. It was almost too absurd, he 
 thought, to be credible. You stood at a known range, 
 eighteen yards. You held your gun at your shoulder. 
 You said, ' ' Pull ! " to the keeper, or whatever they called 
 him. He pulled, and the skimming target flew off at one 
 of three predetermined angles, in rotation! And you 
 blazed away at it with a shell containing two 'ounces of 
 bird-shot ! His own failure to score more than six out of a 
 possible twenty-five didn't raise his opinion of the sport, 
 so very much, either. When he had finished his frame, 
 he laid his gun in the rack and told the servant that he'd 
 manage the lever while the man went to his motor and 
 fetched an automatic pistol and a case of cartridges which 
 he'd find in the left front door pocket. 
 
 His impression was that both the other men regarded 
 this proposal, to pot at clay pigeons with a pistol, as in 
 decorous but nevertheless amusing, and it was with a boy 
 ish air of guilt that they drew up, when his turn came, to 
 see what sort of luck he had. He moved up to a five-yard 
 range and told the man at the lever to pull whenever he 
 liked. "Fool me if you can," he added. "Get the idea?" 
 
 This was, of course, an idea that no well-trained servant 
 could possibly execute, so, after a trial or two, Williamson
 
 114 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 relieved him. Joe managed to smash eight out of the 
 frame, which both the others agreed was extraordinary 
 shooting. Williamson taking his turn, with Joe at the 
 lever, got none. As he turned away, he offered the pistol 
 to Corbett. "This man's supposed to be the best revolver 
 shot in Lake County," he explained. "He'll give you a 
 better run for your money." But Corbett thought he 
 wouldn't try it that morning. "Throw me off my draw," 
 he explained. "Looks no end of fun, though." 
 
 Joe, blazing away again in his turn, was startled by a 
 new voice a woman's, speaking from close by. 
 
 "Is this Chateau Thierry, or what?" 
 
 He spun round and looked, and his first thought was 
 that this was the girl whose portrait, in chalk, he'd seen 
 in Williamson's office. The next moment, she cut cleanly 
 through the jumbled situation created by Corbett 's 
 greeting her as Violet and asking why she was up at this 
 hour of the morning, and some superfluous sort of answer 
 to her question attempted by Williamson by holding out 
 a decisive hand to Joe and saying: 
 
 "I know you're Mr. Greer. I'm Mrs. Williamson." 
 
 She wasn't excessively small, but his first impression of 
 her, nevertheless, was as something jewel-like, finished 
 out to an incredible perfection in detail, and, despite the 
 rough texture and non-fitting cut of the sport suit she 
 affected, he felt a sensuous silkiness about her which these 
 contrasts perhaps heightened. And she was Williamson's 
 wife. Good lord! She couldn't be the mother of that 
 girl in the picture, could she! The resemblance seemed to 
 prove it. It needed her laugh and the withdrawal, not 
 brusk though, of her hand, to remind him that he had 
 been staring. 
 
 "I suppose you'd like to shoot me for interrupting," 
 she said; "but you've no idea how weird it was to hear 
 a rattle like this coming from the traps. Golf and bil 
 liards and bridge are solemn enough, but they're nothing 
 compared to these Sunday morning clay pigeons. This 
 looks like fun. D 'you suppose I could hit one ? ' '
 
 SILK 115 
 
 So she stayed, and took her turn; actually managed to 
 smash two targets. It wasn 't long before they 'd shot away 
 all the cartridges. By that time, Joe had become aware 
 that the other two men were getting remote; not hostile, 
 he thought, but he couldn't be sure. Did they resent a 
 certain lack of ceremony between him and the woman? 
 Wasn't she supposed to have appeared at all? And 
 shouldn't he, according to their ideas, have met her half 
 way? But she, sensing the new atmosphere herself, spoke 
 out about it. 
 
 "These two men," she said to Joe, "are feeling ashamed 
 of themselves, now that I've caught them playing hookey, 
 and they're getting ready to be very severe to make up 
 for it. Do you want to stay with them and shoot, properly, 
 or do you want to come and walk with me? You haven't 
 seen the place, have you?" 
 
 3 
 
 Violet Williamson, during the two hours or so that were 
 left of that Sunday morning, not so much stirred Joe, 
 though she did that, too, as stirred him up ; agitated a lot 
 of thoroughly precipitated ideas which had been lying un 
 disturbed in the bottom of his mind for a long time, and set 
 them afloat. She belonged, he decided, in a category the 
 existence of which he'd never suspected; she thrilled him 
 with a sense of discovery. 
 
 The women he'd known, aside from those who, like 
 Bunny and Yvette, frankly made a living out of their sex 
 appeal, and from the other lot, the more or less de-femi 
 nized ones, worker bees, a type which Jennie MacArthur 
 presented herself as an interesting variant from, the 
 women he'd known aside from these (who were alike in 
 the important respect that they had to look out for them 
 selves) were two other sorts, alike in the fact that they 
 didn't. There were the "good" women, as he'd called 
 them in talking to Jennie of Annabel and her mother, in 
 nocent, narrow-minded, domestic, to whom he conceded at 
 least an academic admiration and respect; and another 
 sort for whom he felt nothing but a profound contempt.
 
 116 JOSEPH GREEK AND BIS DAUGHTER 
 
 These were the wives of the prosperous nomad class to 
 which Joe, in default of anything better, had socially at 
 tached himself. The men were well enough. They were 
 usually good salesmen of bonds or real estate or insurance 
 or automobiles. They could tell good stories and often 
 had a real gift for repartee. They, with their wives, at 
 tended first nights; dined a good deal at the restaurants; 
 frequented the socially broader-minded sort of country 
 clubs, the women sticking pretty close to the verandas 
 and the cardrooms. They lived in expensive apartments 
 but they were always on the move. These women were, 
 he thought, broadly speaking, no good. They dawdled and 
 shopped; they went to the movies; they weren't good 
 enough housekeepers to keep servants; they read the 
 lighter sort of current fiction, and ate chocolate creams 
 when they weren't in a panic about getting fat; they 
 didn't have any children if they could help it. The source 
 of most of their wit and, indeed, a good part of their con 
 versation, in companies where both sexes were present, was 
 the supposed tendency toward infidelity on the part of 
 all married persons and the jealousy of the aggrieved 
 member of the partnership. It was thought to be a great 
 joke to split couples when going anywhere in taxicabs. 
 All the teasing and ragging was about this sort of thing. 
 Every now and then, one of these jokes got taken seriously 
 and flared up into a furious but half-histrionic quarrel. 
 Respectable kept women, that's what they were. And 
 their weak but febrile clutch upon respectability was the 
 thing about them which irritated Joe the worst. 
 
 Without having given very much -thought to the matter, 
 he had assumed that the wives of his new stall-fed asso 
 ciates were cut off pretty much the same piece of goods. 
 They'd be better kept, of course; they were out of the 
 precarious zone of ups-and-downs ; their luxuries would 
 be a realer thing, not a matter of. carefully contrived ap 
 pearances. But that they were, in fiber, as soft and slack 
 and irresolute, he'd never seriously doubted. 
 
 Violet began uprooting these preconceptions in the first 
 moments of their encounter. That the mother of a grown
 
 SILK 117 
 
 girl could look like that, and move around like that, was 
 an amazing phenomenon, to begin with. Her taking the 
 automatic, with no ornamental feminine flutters or squeals, 
 and bagging a couple of targets was unexpected too, as was 
 her matter-of-fact way, a few minutes later, of carrying 
 him off from her husband. She did this without a smile, 
 with no parade of tactics, without the remotest reference, 
 by glance or gesture, to the possibility that John "William 
 son mightn 't like to have his wife stroll off with a stranger 
 whom he certainly hadn 't taken the trouble to introduce to 
 her. She got away with it perfectly. The other two men, 
 as they resumed their guns, merely nodded pleasantly to 
 him and said they'd see him later. They didn't again 
 that morning, as it happened. 
 
 "You don't want to go around looking at the Holsteins, 
 do you?" she asked, as they paused a moment at a low 
 gate. "Or the Chester Whites, or the Black Anconas?" 
 She added, as he hesitated, "If it were John taking you 
 around, you'd have to, of course, but not with me." 
 
 He said he guessed not, and they didn't go through the 
 gate. 
 
 He got the idea that she had some other objective, for 
 there was nothing aimless about the way she guided him, 
 and the pace was, considering that she was a woman and 
 the morning warm, .brisk. She knew how to walk and 
 was properly shod and clad for it. Her homespun skirt 
 was short and light, and outlined, with agreeable frank 
 ness, her straight, slender legs. 
 
 She let him see at once that she had been inquiring about 
 him. Apparently she'd started Henry Craven retailing 
 some of his jungle stories. He tried to follow this lead, 
 but it went against the current of his thoughts and he 
 didn't make much of it; felt rather tongue-tied, somehow, 
 and a bit resentful, suspecting that she wanted him to ex 
 hibit himself as a curiosity, the wilder and queerer the 
 better. A rather audacious speculation of hers about the 
 number of cannibal princesses that he might have made 
 love to didn't help matters either. 
 
 Joe found no amusement in skating on the thin ice of
 
 118 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 innuendo about sex. He had a repertory of bawdy stories 
 and there was a sort of woman in the world whom he 
 occasionally told them to, but none of that sort were the 
 wives of men he knew. He couldn't be sure whether John 
 Williamson's wife had meant to invite him in that way, or 
 not; her manner didn't suggest it. She didn't bridle, 
 either, at the snub his silence administered, though she 
 now fell silent, too. She'd flushed a little, but this might 
 be due to the pace they were making and the warmth of 
 the morning. There was something Diana-like, he thought, 
 about her fineness and freedom of movement. She'd 
 make a wonderful model for one of Troubetskoy's figur 
 ines. They were going up a gentle acclivity, now, through 
 a grove of big trees, she a pace or two ahead, and the 
 dapple of sunlight and shade upon her heightened his im 
 pression of the huntress. 
 
 When they emerged from the grove, they were upon 
 the crest of the low ridge, and w r hat fell away before them 
 was a wide expanse of lawn. The house was in full view, 
 presenting its terrace and its long facade of Georgian 
 windows. There was a swimming pool, its curb gleaming 
 white like marble and the water in it, for some reason he 
 didn't understand, showing turquoise. There were ten 
 nis courts marked out in startling white upon the*green of 
 the lawn, and two great umbrellas of orange and white. 
 A garden, tumultuous in color, was just beyond. 
 
 Joe stopped and stood at gaze. ' ' I 'm glad you brought 
 me up here," he said. He was aware she wasn't looking 
 at it herself, but was watching him instead. 
 
 "Yes, this is the place to see it from," she said indif 
 ferently. 
 
 There was a hickory seat built round the trunk of a giant 
 outlier of the grove, and with him she moved over to it. 
 As soon as he was seated, however, she got up and, un 
 ceremoniously, sat upon the grass. 
 
 "You like it to look at," she said, "for a minute, like 
 this, on a bright spring Sunday morning. And next 
 month it will be even jollier, when the kids are all getting
 
 SILK 119 
 
 home from school. The pool there will be alive with them, 
 and the courts. The color's gorgeous, then, with the 
 swimming things they wear and white arms and legs all 
 over the place. It's a good show. You must come up 
 and see it." 
 
 He began saying he'd like to, but she hadn't yet got to 
 what was in her mind, and, with a bare nod, went on: 
 
 "Keally, though, except as a show, to look at now and 
 then, doesn't it bore you frantic? The whole thing, I 
 mean, our sort of thing, the sort of people we are?" 
 
 For a random shot, this came close home. He remem 
 bered his state of mind, three or four days ago, when 
 Williamson had invited him to come up here ; the opinions 
 that would have come steaming out of him, if he hadn't 
 managed, just in time, to clamp down the lid. That Will 
 iamson's wife should have asked him such a question was 
 amazing. 
 
 "I don't know any of you very well," he answered, 
 lamely. ''I'm not bored now." 
 
 "Oh, I suppose it's too much to expect you to talk out," 
 she said discontentedly. "Especially after I've been rub 
 bing you the wrong way, as we came along just now." She 
 overrode his gesture of protest. "Oh, yes, I did. You 
 thought I was just asking silly questions, like a girl meeting 
 her first actor. It wasn 't that exactly, but it sounded like 
 it." 
 
 He tried to tell her it hadn't struck him like that. His 
 jungle experience was a long way back, and this morning 
 it had seemed especially remote. He hadn't been able to 
 get into the swing of it. 
 
 She nodded amiably. "Some time you'll feel like it," 
 she said, "and then you'll tell me." 
 
 The implication that there were going to be times, ample 
 unlimited times, for talking together like this, stirred him, 
 half frightened him. He recalled, illogically, an observa 
 tion of Jennie MacArthur. "The right wife for you," 
 she'd said, "would have to be silky, way up in the society 
 game. You'd have to be proud, whenever you thought
 
 120 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 of it, that you 'd got her. ' ' He felt the blood pringling in 
 his forehead. She wasn't looking at him, though; she'd 
 gone on, thoughtfully, talking. He listened as well as he 
 could for looking at her. She'd taken off her hat and 
 tossed it on the grass, and, with its obstructing brim out 
 of the way, he could see, from the elevation of his bench, 
 the perfect turn of her throat, and the pearly translucence 
 of her skin where it was shaded by the thin blouse she 
 wore. 
 
 "You keep going," she said, "from the time you're 
 quite small, thinking that life's going to open out, some 
 how, like a door. And then some day you wake up and 
 realize you're thirty-five or so, and that it doesn't mean 
 to open out, at all; there isn't any door not to the thing 
 you're in. And then you hear about somebody who's 
 never been shut up, in anything; somebody the whole 
 world's always been open to. And you try to get people 
 to tell you about him, people like John who can't under 
 stand him one little bit, themselves, and Henry and Mar 
 garet Craven Margaret's funny about you. You won 
 der what that kind of freedom feels like. I should think 
 you'd feel," she looked around at him suddenly, "with us, 
 you know, like a big moose, or something, that finds itself 
 shut up in our pasture with the Holsteins." 
 
 She'd startled him again, this time into a laugh. It 
 didn't occur to him as a possibility that her cousin Henry 
 might have quoted that phrase of his about stall-fed 
 people to her. 
 
 He saw that his laugh had annoyed her ; more or less he 
 understood why: he hadn't "played up." 
 
 "I guess freedom's always a thing we think some one 
 else has," he commented. "It made me laugh that you 
 should have thought of me like that. The two really dif 
 ferent kinds of people in the world are the ones who have 
 been hungry and the ones who haven't I don't mean diet 
 ing, I mean against their will." 
 
 That brought her gaze round to him, a look of clear 
 wonder in her eyes. "Have you"?" she asked.
 
 SILK 121 
 
 It launched him, that wondering look, into a vein of 
 biography which would have afforded Jennie Mac- 
 Arthur a grin. "You'd have to be wonderful to her all 
 the time, and mysterious," Jennie had remarked, con 
 structing that hypothetical wife for him. Perhaps if Joe 
 had thought of that just now, he might have grinned, too, 
 invisibly. But he didn't think of it; he wasn't quite 
 conscious why he took the line he did. It was by mere in 
 stinct that he fed the. appetite for wonder he saw in her. 
 He didn't invent anything, at that, or not much. It was 
 only that the picture he showed her was as heavily cross- 
 lighted as a bit of stage scenery. 
 
 It was the story of Ishmael, the son of Hagar, that he 
 told her, "his hand against every man and every man's 
 hand against him." He'd found his real jungle, he said, 
 in the streets and alleys, the lumber-camps and the foundry 
 yards, of civilized society. He'd never belonged to any 
 union, any organization of any sort. He'd got most of his 
 jobs back in those years the troubled, panicky, early 'nine 
 ties working as a strike-breaker. He showed her what it 
 meant to load pig-iron all day, a day being an eternity of 
 ten hours; and then, before he could regain what shelter 
 he called home, to have to evade, or outfight, the pickets, 
 to slink along in the shadows, alert for ambuscades, 
 ready at any moment to fight or flee for his life. 
 
 She said very little while the tale went on, but that 
 extra, jungle sense of his told him that she was completely 
 plastic to it. She didn't look at him much, sat staring 
 off into vacancy; and this permitted his gaze to feed upon 
 her at will. He devoured every line and contour of her. 
 He could see the faint pulse at the base of her throat; he 
 watched her breathe. It was thus, at last, that he lost the 
 thread of his story and stopped. 
 
 She allowed this silence to lie unbroken between them 
 for so long that he was upon the point of some banal 
 apology for having talked so much about himself, when at 
 last she spoke. 
 
 "Well, I bet you're glad it all happened. Because it
 
 122 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 never beat you down. You never got meek and resigned, 
 and you never turned Socialist, wanting to divide every 
 thing up, or anything silly like that. I suppose you didn 't 
 want it divided up ; you wanted it all for yourself. So 
 you went off to the jungle, the real jungle, and made your 
 fortune somehow, and then you came back and showed 
 them." 
 
 He didn't correct this chronological misconception of 
 hers; the picture as she saw it accorded better with her 
 mood. "It wasn't much of a fortune I made down there," 
 he qualified. "Twenty-seven hundred dollars that I got 
 for some curios I brought out with me in a bag and sold 
 to a museum." 
 
 She frustrated a little touch of drama he'd prepared, by 
 not asking him what the curios were. She got reluctantly 
 to her feet. "You'll have to tell me about that next time," 
 she said. "I know it would be like the Arabian Nights, 
 and if I let you get started again, I'll sit here listening all 
 day. I've got to drive over to the Stannards' at Lake 
 Geneva for lunch, with John, and I suspect I'm horribly 
 late, now. Oh, that doesn't matter," she went on, across 
 his attempt to express contrition. "He probably won't 
 speak to me all the way, but that'll only give me more 
 time to think about the things you've been telling me." 
 
 They were walking, now, she setting a very leisurely 
 pace, down the slope toward the house. 
 
 "What I can't get over," she remarked, "is the places 
 you must have been, the things you must have seen ! I 've 
 never been in any place more exciting than St. Moritz or 
 Paris." 
 
 "Well, you've got it on me there," he said. "I've 
 never been to any of those places." 
 
 She stopped to stare at him. "You mean you've never 
 been to Europe at all ? " she asked. 
 
 He shook his head. "Never had time. I'll get around 
 to it some day, of course." 
 
 She laughed. "I was just thinking," she explained, 
 "that I'd like to be there when you do. Like to go along
 
 SILK 123 
 
 and show it to you; see how it took you. Oh, the gal 
 leries and the cathedrals and such, of course; but other 
 things, too: Longchamp and Henley, and the Easter 
 "Week bull fights in Madrid." 
 
 "That's what Sorolla said," he told her. 
 
 She stopped again to stare. ' ' Sorolla ? ' ' 
 
 He nodded. "Just what you said that he'd like to 
 see how I took it, the bull-ring and the Prado and all." 
 
 "When did you know Sorolla?" she demanded. Her 
 laugh seemed to be directed at her own astonishment. 
 
 "When he was here. I bought a picture of his, one 
 of those seashore things. I'd like you to see it sometime. 
 It's better than the one they've got at the Institute. He 
 painted a portrait of me, and then he wouldn't let me 
 have it. Took it back to Spain with him. We got pretty 
 well acquainted. I can talk Spanish, you see, better than 
 English ; politer anyhow. ' ' 
 
 She digested this in silence until they got to where his 
 car was standing in the drive. Even then, she made no 
 move to leave him. 
 
 "I'd commandeer you," she said, "and take you over 
 to the Stannards', except that you'd be so bored you'd 
 never forgive me." 
 
 He thought it best not to insist that he wouldn 't be. He 
 offered the excuse of work to do, and, getting into his 
 car, seated himself at the wheel. "You will come to see 
 the Sorolla sometime?" he asked. "Come to dinner, you 
 and your husband?" 
 
 She accepted this invitation a little absently. Then 
 promptly corrected her manner and told him, with polite 
 enthusiasm, she 'd love to. Still she lingered for a moment 
 beside his car, her elbows on the door, one foot on the 
 running-board. She asked him suddenly what he was 
 smiling at. 
 
 "Speaking of bull fights reminded me, I fought a bull 
 once myself. In the public square at Quito. I jumped 
 over the barrier on a bet a girl had just made with me." 
 
 ' ' Oh, go away ! ' ' she cried, releasing the car at last and
 
 124 JOSEPH GREER AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 stepping back. ' ' But come again. Soon. [And telephone 
 me when you want us for the dinner. John might for 
 get." 
 
 Joe had lied to Violet in one minor particular ; it hadn 't 
 been, directly, her reference to the bull fights in Madrid 
 that had reminded him of the bull he fought at Quito, but 
 her own attitude, during their moment of parting, while 
 she lingered beside his car. That had brought back the 
 young senora he'd made the bet with. His first serious 
 love-affair had been with her. Eighteen, he must have 
 been, or thereabouts; she couldn't have been more than a 
 year or two older. And her husband had been much the 
 same sort of stall-fed hidalgo in Ecuador as Williamson. 
 There had been, he remembered, about that Castilian girl, 
 the same quality of silkiness. And the same cool in 
 solence. She'd regarded him as a barbarian laughed at 
 his rudimentary Spanish and at his Northern manners. 
 But she'd come to him just the same. It was queer how 
 vividly he remembered her. He hadn't thought of her in 
 years. 
 
 He had driven all the way back to town, at a speed 
 reckless of the prowling Sunday motor cop, before it oc 
 curred to him that he hadn't told Violet a word about 
 Beatrice on whose sole account he had accepted John 
 [Williamson's invitation in the first place. He didn't go 
 on to admit that, from the moment of Violet's appearance 
 at the traps, he'd forgotten all about his daughter. "What 
 he decided was that it was just as well he'd waited until 
 he knew for sure the child was coming.
 
 CHAPTER FOUR 
 
 THE CUB 
 
 IT was not on the cards that Joe should forget about 
 his daughter for long. Within a day or two of his Sunday 
 morning adventure at Lake Forest, he got a telegram from 
 the serviceable lawyer at Pasadena, which brought Beat 
 rice vividly into the foreground of his thoughts. 
 
 "Your daughter plans leaving at once," it read. 
 "Wants entire thousand dollars. Is this OK?" 
 
 Joe went off at half-cock over this. His letter had suc 
 ceeded beyond his hopes. The girl was ready to come to 
 him, at once ! And now the whole thing was jeopardized 
 by the timidity of a piking, small-town lawyer, afraid to 
 let go the money that he had expected would pay his bill. 
 If the child wanted the whole thousand to make her feel 
 secure in setting out upon so vast an enterprise as this, 
 she should have it. It had been precisely to give her that 
 feeling of security, that Joe had offered it. The poor 
 kid, since she was born, had probably never traveled far 
 ther than Yosemite or San Diego; probably had never 
 spent a night on a Pullman. Chicago and Timbuctoo 
 would seem about equally distant to her. And here was 
 this fool lawyer making difficulties, asking for instruc 
 tions. He should have some, that he'd remember per 
 haps till next time! So there was a good deal of pepper 
 in the telegram which Joe despatched in reply. 
 
 "Instructions carried out. Have written," the lawyer 
 wired the next day, and Joe began looking out for a tele- 
 
 125
 
 126 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 gram from Beatrice herself. None came, and the mis 
 giving deepened in his mind that he'd have done well to 
 give a second thought to that hasty conclusion of his and, 
 perhaps, to consult Jennie MacArthur about it. He did 
 not mention the matter to her until the lawyer's letter 
 came in, just within the week. That really frightened him. 
 It began with the startling assumption that the girl was 
 already in Chicago with her father. 
 
 "Your daughter has, I trust, by this time told you, in 
 substance, the manner in which the instructions in your 
 letter of the thirteenth instant have been carried out. 
 
 "I was not able, until two days ago, to get into confi 
 dential communication with her without incurring the 
 risk of my intention becoming known in other quarters. 
 She came, however, by appointment, to my office, yes 
 terday about four o'clock, and read your letter to her in 
 my presence. She was greatly excited by it, so much so, 
 indeed, that she found herself unable to read it, and put 
 it into my hands to read to her. She declared her in 
 tention of starting at once and even demurred to return 
 ing to her home for the night, professing a fear that some 
 thing might happen to prevent her going altogether. She 
 also demanded the entire thousand dollars in cash, which 
 I took to be contrary to the expectation expressed in your 
 instructions. I ventured to point out to her your im 
 plied wish that she consult, or at least inform, her mother 
 in the matter; but this, with the utmost vehemence, she 
 refused to do. I then took refuge in the assertion of my 
 inability to provide a thousand dollars in cash until the 
 banks should open the next morning, and to this enforced 
 delay she consented. 
 
 "I telegraphed you at once and your reply, as you no 
 doubt remember, left me no discretion. So when she 
 called at my office, at eleven o'clock this morning, I paid 
 her the thousand dollars in currency. I must now con 
 sider my responsibility in the matter discharged. 
 
 "One minor matter remains, however, to be mentioned. 
 She brought me, this morning, a photograph of herself, 
 which she inscribed to you at my desk, asking me at the 
 same time to mail it to you. I pointed out to her that
 
 THE CUB 127 
 
 since she was leaving for Chicago that day, as I under 
 stood it to be her intention to do, the photograph would 
 reach you some days sooner if she carried it herself. She 
 insisted, nevertheless, and quite without explanation, that 
 I mail it to you as she requested, which I am doing under 
 separate cover. 
 
 "She declined my offers to procure her ticket and ac 
 commodation, and to have her accompanied to the train. 
 I trust I am unwarranted in making the assumption that 
 she had some other destination than Chicago, immediately 
 at least, in mind." 
 
 The letter disturbed Joe so profoundly that, when Jen 
 nie had read it (he had called her into the private office 
 for the purpose, the moment she arrived the next morning), 
 he made no attempt to shift from his own shoulders the 
 blame for what he feared had happened. Indeed, when 
 Jennie said of the lawyer, "He ought to have known bet 
 ter than let her go like that," Joe contradicted her. 
 
 " I 'm the only damn fool in this business, ' ' he said. ' ' I 
 wired him in so many words to tend to his. The only 
 question now is, what's to be done. "Whether to wire him 
 to try to have her found, or to go out myself on the next 
 train." 
 
 "Neither would do any good," Jennie reflected. "The 
 only thing you can do for the present is to telegraph your 
 wife what you've done, or else have the lawyer talk to 
 her. She may have some clue where the girl's gone, or 
 she may be frantic without one; but in either case it's up 
 to you to tell her." 
 
 Joe mopped the sweat from his forehead. "Yes," he 
 admitted gravely, "I suppose it is." And this humility 
 was so unlike him that Jennie set about finding what 
 comfort she could for him. 
 
 It wasn't likely the girl had come to any actual harm; 
 at least not to anything she herself would regard in that 
 light. Joe's thousand dollars had probably come down 
 from heaven to make possible the realization of some 
 dream of hers, and she'd simply snatched at it. She'd
 
 128 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 write to him when she got around to it. It might be a 
 silly dream, of course; she might have gone no farther 
 than Hollywood for a plunge into the movies, or eloped 
 with some boy lover of hers. Anyhow, Joe had accom 
 plished part of his purpose : Annabel 's lemon-grower was 
 deprived of the chance, which in prospect had so in 
 furiated Joe, of being a father to the girl. 
 
 But, even in this aspect of the affair, Joe found no con 
 solation, and for the rest, he protested that Jennie had it 
 doped out all wrong. An innocent simple-minded little 
 thing, such as Annabel's daughter would have been brought 
 up to be, wouldn't be capable of thinking of going into the 
 movies; and as for a schoolboy lover . . . He didn't see 
 how Jennie could entertain an idea like that. Why, the 
 kid was only nineteen ! 
 
 "You were down in the jungle by then," Jennie re 
 marked. 
 
 "But, damn it," Joe cried, "she's a girl!" 
 
 But when the photograph came to hand, as it did a day 
 or two later, he was forced to admit the possibility that 
 Jennie was nearer right than he. The force of the emotion 
 that seized him when he found the package on his hall 
 table and realized what it must contain, literally turned 
 him a bit giddy. He ripped away the wrappings with 
 hands that shook, but, before he opened the big brown 
 mount, he carried it into the next room and sat down. 
 
 It was with clear incredulity that he stared, for the first 
 minute, at the pictured woman it revealed. For it was 
 as a woman that he first saw her. She was looking 
 straight at him, very insolently, from under her heavy 
 black lashes, her head somewhat tilted back for the purpose. 
 Her black hair lost itself in the shadows of the dark 
 ground. It was what photographers speak of as a " fancy ' ' 
 head, her naked shoulders and bosom emerging from a 
 vignette of enveloping tulle. 
 
 It wasn't until later that he perceived the pathetic pre 
 tense there was about all this; that the insolence, the 
 shamelessness, the world-weary sophistication, were, after
 
 THE CUB 129 
 
 all, the mere imposture of a child. She had inscribed her- 
 self across one of the bare shoulders, with a fine swing of 
 bravado: "Your devoted daughter, Beatrice." And un 
 derneath, she'd written in smaller characters: "Not a 
 wise enough child to know her own father. Not yet, but 
 soon. ' ' 
 
 He spent the whole evening alone with it in a tangle of 
 violently contradictory emotions. He was angry and a 
 little ashamed; he was quite inordinately proud; he was 
 furiously jealous. For whom had she had that picture 
 taken? Not for him, he knew; the time had been too 
 short. He felt sure it was one the girl's mother had 
 never seen, let alone authorized. No, she'd had it taken 
 for some man, some movie actor, some hotel clerk. 
 There 'd be plenty of masculine admiration for a girl who 
 looked like that. She was quite extravagantly pretty. It 
 was a short broad boyish face, with a wide expressive 
 mouth and a real nose. There wasn't the slightest look of 
 Annabel about her. She was his, every drop of her. She 
 was nineteen years old, and this outrageous thing, with its 
 vampire stare and its pert inscription (he hadn't missed the 
 irony of that scrawled "devoted"), was his first communi 
 cation, his first knowledge of her. The Beatrice he'd 
 sentimentalized over all these years, the old-fashioned bou 
 quet with the paper frill about it that he'd told Jennie 
 about, was blown away like a wraith. This girl was flesh 
 of his flesh. 
 
 And, in all likelihood, he'd lost her! 
 
 "When Jennie saw the photograph, she laughed. "Any 
 one who'd ever seen you would know who her father was, 
 without any telling." 
 
 An actual physical likeness hadn't struck Joe, and he 
 professed himself skeptical about it. 
 
 "No, she's you all over," Jennie insisted. "I'll leave 
 it to anybody. Let me show it to Henry; see what he 
 says. ' ' 
 
 But Joe, instead of handing it over to her, rewrapped 
 it thoughtfully in the paper from which he'd just taken
 
 130 JOSEPH GREER AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 it. "I didn't think I'd say anything about her to Henry," 
 he explained, "until I knew for sure whether she was 
 coming, or not." 
 
 "She'll come," Jennie said confidently. "She says so, 
 right there on the photograph. And then, well, of 
 course, she'd come anyway. I guess you'll find she's like 
 you in a good deal more than looks. She's probably an 
 explorer, just like you. Willing to take a chance to find 
 out about things, especially anything as exciting as a 
 father she's never seen and they've told her she mustn't 
 ask about. She 's having some little fling of her own first, 
 but she'll come." 
 
 ; "But what kind of a fling, that's the point," Joe put in 
 somberly. "Damn it, Jennie! If she's come to harm 
 with that fool thousand dollars ..." 
 
 "She hasn't," Jennie assured him. "She won't com 
 mit herself to anything, or anybody, not even a movie 
 actor till she's found out what 7/ow're like. Any more 
 than you would, yourself. I tell you she's like you." 
 
 "Well, I hope you're right," he said. "It'll simplify 
 things quite a bit, if you are." 
 
 ' ' Simplify ? " She looked at him thoughtfully. ' ' WeU, 
 perhaps. If you can manage not to forget it 's true. That 
 must be a pretty hard sort of thing to remember, though." 
 
 He didn't see just what she meant by that, but he for 
 bore to ask. Her confidence that the girl would, ultimately, 
 turn up, intact and unencumbered with a movie-actor or 
 bell-hop husband, really comforted him, and enabled him 
 to dismiss the worst of the worry about Beatrice from his 
 mind, even though reverberations of the emotional earth 
 quake in Pasadena reached him daily in the form of 
 telegrams. 
 
 He did mention to Henry Craven, by way of preparing 
 the ground, that he was more than half expecting a visit 
 soon from his daughter. He added no explanations, and 
 Henry, though visibly bulging with questions, was too 
 polite to ask them. To Henry's sister, Margaret, a few 
 days later, he was a little more communicative.
 
 THE CUB 131 
 
 The occasion for this was a supper party, instead of 
 the dinner he'd originally planned, for the Williamsons. 
 A small and, to Joe's ideas, a rather tame supper party, 
 though it included a few stage people of the better sort; 
 Jimmy "Wallace, a dramatic critic ; and a bachelor portrait 
 painter, named Burton. The others were John "William 
 son and his wife, and Henry and Margaret Craven. The 
 brother and sister happened to be the first arrivals. It 
 was not their first visit to Joe's apartment, in Henry's 
 case, not by several. He, on coming into the drawing- 
 room, sat down at once, unceremoniously, at the piano, and 
 he continued amusing himself with it, in a fragmentary, 
 meditative sort of way, after Margaret had returned from 
 the room designated by Joe his own where she had left 
 her wraps. 
 
 "I've just been looking at a photograph," she said. "I 
 wondered . . . " 
 
 "Yes, that's Beatrice," Joe answered the unstated ques 
 tion. "I meant Henry to tell you. I'm expecting her in 
 a few days. I've not seen her in years. You see, my 
 wife's been living in California for a long time, and the 
 girl has been out there with her." 
 
 Margaret smiled. "I hadn't even known," she said, 
 "that you were married." 
 
 Joe looked at her squarely. "I shan't be very much 
 longer, ' ' he told her. ' ' She 's getting a divorce. Means to 
 marry again, I understand. Well, it's right enough she 
 should. We split up years ago." 
 
 "It must be delightful," Margaret said evenly, "to have 
 a grown-up daughter coming to make one a visit. Es 
 pecially a delicious young thing like that." 
 
 "She's younger than she looks in that picture," Joe 
 commented soberly. "Only nineteen. Of course she'll be 
 sort of a cat in a strange garret, at first. I thought I'd 
 like to bring her around to see you, if you'd let me." 
 
 For no longer than a breath, his appeal remained tin- 
 answered. Then, with a fully adequate cordiality, Mar 
 garet said she'd love to know the girl.
 
 132 JOSEPH GREER AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 Late that night, after the party a thoroughly success 
 ful one had broken up, as Joe was undressing, he observed 
 that the photograph, which he had left standing open on 
 his dressing-table, had been closed and laid down, the flap 
 of the mount even tucked under it to keep it from spring 
 ing. He wondered if Margaret Craven had done that, and, 
 if so, why. It might, of course, have been a sheer inad 
 vertence. "Williamson's wife hadn't spoken of the pic 
 ture, though he'd had quite a long talk with her. Ap 
 parently, neither of the Cravens had mentioned Beatrice 
 to her. 
 
 2 
 
 "No telegrams to-day?" For more than a week it had 
 been Joe's first question of the butler as the man opened 
 the door for him upon his daily return from the office, 
 despite a standing order that any wire that came to the 
 apartment during the day should be telephoned on to 
 wherever he was. 
 
 To-night, Anson said, as always, "No telegram, sir," but 
 the inflection of the phrase was different, and Joe de 
 manded sharply, "Well, what?" 
 
 ' ' The young lady herself has arrived. Miss Greer, sir. ' ' 
 
 "Arrived? In town? Where is she now?" 
 
 "In the library, I believe, sir." 
 
 Joe found that he was trembling. The man had taken 
 his hat. There was no reason why he shouldn't go straight 
 into the library, but he hesitated. ' ' When did she come ? ' ' 
 he asked. 
 
 "Just after noon, sir. Around two o'clock, I think." 
 
 "Two o'clock!" Joe echoed. "Why the devil wasn't I 
 told of it?" 
 
 "Miss Greer wished me not to disturb you, sir. She 
 said she wished a little time to get settled." He paused, 
 but Joe was speechless, so, after a moment, he went on. 
 ' ' I assisted in unpacking her trunk. She had it sent down 
 to the store-room about an hour ago." He added, a little 
 anxiously: "She took the blue room. I trust it's all 
 right, sir."
 
 THE CUB 133 
 
 "Of course it's all right," Joe answered curtly. "She's 
 my daughter, you understand? Going to live here with 
 me, for the present anyhow. That's all," he concluded. 
 "You may go." He waited where he was until the man 
 had gone through the service door. Then, after a steady 
 ing moment, alone, he made his way to the library. 
 
 She must have heard him talking to Anson, but she gave 
 no overt sign of being aware of his approach. She sat 
 facing him, one of the evening papers open in both hands 
 so that it hid her like a curtain. It occurred to Joe that 
 one didn't hold a paper quite so rigidly as that when one 
 was reading it. 
 
 "Is that you, Beatrice T" he asked. He had halted 
 without coming very close to her. 
 
 At his voice, she flung the paper aside and sprang to 
 her feet. "Hello, dad!" she cried. She almost managed 
 the air of one greeting a familiar at the end of a day's 
 separation. Her voice, like Joe's, had a startling reso 
 nance and a wide inflexional swing. She added, "I sup 
 pose that is you. ' ' She had tried, as before, to say it cas 
 ually, pertly even, but the wire edge in her voice betrayed 
 that she was frightened. 
 
 He had expected that. What surprised him was that 
 he was frightened, too. Almost for the first time in his 
 life, he felt he had to lock his teeth to prevent them from 
 chattering. He turned his look abruptly away from her 
 but still, as he gazed blankly out the window, he could 
 see the picture of her. She'd rouged her cheeks a little 
 and a sudden pallor had left the two spots, staring. She 
 was his. His daughter! She'd come, incredibly, to live 
 with him. She 'd unpacked her trunk and sent it down to 
 the store-room. She'd dressed as a woman dresses when 
 she is securely at home, in the sort of thing they callec^ he 
 thought, a tea-gown. And white silk stockings, and black 
 satin slippers, high-heeled with straps. He'd find her 
 like that, every day unless he frightened her off. 
 
 "Yes," he said, "we're here together, at last." Then, 
 in order not to stop talking, he went on : "You gave me a
 
 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 great scare. It's two weeks since that lawyer telegraphed 
 you'd left." 
 
 "You got my picture, though," she reminded him. "I 
 wrote on it I was coming. I had to go to San Francisco 
 first to get some clothes. Mother never would let me have 
 a thing I was fit to be seen in. I thought I'd better make 
 a good impression, so you wouldn't send me back on the 
 next train." She gave a nervous laugh. "Have I? Do 
 you like me?" 
 
 Somehow he couldn't look round at her, but he nodded 
 and said, "Yes. I must wire your mother you've come. 
 She's been in a terrible state about you." 
 
 She had begun coming toward him, but now she stopped. 
 "I guess you're still mad at me," she remarked, "for 
 having kept you waiting." 
 
 At this he turned to her. "I kept you waiting longer 
 than that," he said. "So what forgiving there is, you'll 
 have to do." 
 
 "Well, then," she answered, "let's kiss and make up. 
 I suppose that's the next thing to do." She uttered that 
 same nervous laugh again as she came to meet him, and, 
 when he took her in his hands, he saw that she winced. 
 Her head went back like a frightened animal's. 
 
 Instantly he let her go, and stepped back. ""We'll let 
 that stand over while you're getting used to me," he told 
 her. 
 
 Blood surged up into her face, and it was with a shrug 
 she turned away. "Suit yourself about that," she said. 
 
 The paralysis which had been upon him lifted. His 
 thought spoke itself, naturally, in words. "My dear, the 
 only woman who ever kissed me without wanting to was 
 your mother. I'm not going to have that handed on to 
 you. You're going to like me some day, and when you 
 do you'll come and kiss me without having to stiffen your 
 back." 
 
 At that, she smiled round a little more spontaneously 
 upon him. "I'm going to like it here, all right," she 
 said.
 
 THE CUB 135 
 
 And with this encouragement, partial as it was (for it 
 was it, he noted, that she'd prophesied she'd like, rather 
 than him), he took matters into his own hands. Had she 
 said anything to Anson about dinner, about anything 
 she'd specially like? Was she tired after her long jour 
 ney? If not, what would she say to their dining down 
 town, at the Blackstone, perhaps? And seeing a show 
 afterward, by way of making it a party ? 
 
 Fine! That's what they'd do, then. She could dress 
 or not, just as she liked. Evening dress, he meant. If 
 she didn't, any sort of street frock would do. All right, 
 then, he'd put on a dinner jacket himself, and they'd do 
 the thing right. He was afraid, though, if she was going 
 to need any help they'd have to call in the cook. 
 
 He had rung for the butler while he talked, and now, 
 as the man appeared, he said, "We're dining down-town, 
 Anson. Ask your wife if she '11 come in a few minutes and 
 help Miss Greer with her hooks. You'd better pick up a 
 maid to-morrow. We'll be needing one, now. Tell Burns 
 to be around with the closed car at ten minutes to seven. 
 And get me the theater agency on the phone. I'll talk to 
 them myself ; want to see w r hat they 've got. ' ' 
 
 The girl, as he meant her to, had stood drinking this in 
 with wide incredulous eyes, the eyes of a Cinderella, en 
 tranced. 
 
 Well, that wasn 't the beginning of it. He 'd make it up 
 to her for all those nineteen meager years. Just let her 
 *vrait and see. 
 
 She drew herself up as he finished his instructions, and 
 ventured, on her own account, a tentatively regal little 
 nod of dismissal as the butler turned to go. She flushed, 
 seeing Joe had caught her at it, and herself moved away 
 to the door. "I'll hurry," she said. 
 
 "You needn't," he called jovially after her. "The 
 party can't begin without you." 
 
 To the extent that he was capable of cool reflection, he 
 decided, when the evening was over, that it had gone well, 
 as well as he could have hoped. Its minor failures were
 
 136 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 all attributable to him. He shouldn't have suggested 
 evening dress to her, in the first place. She had dressed 
 up, thinking to please him, most likely, in a costume that 
 must have been the climax of that fevered week's shop 
 ping in San Francisco. The gown was of a sort Joe 
 knew well by experience, and the association made him 
 wince ; the sort a girl buys when she wants to make forty- 
 dollars look like four hundred. Extreme in cut, and with 
 the effect of being violent in color, though it was really 
 an off -shade of rose. She'd matched it more or less, too, 
 in stockings and slippers, and with an unfortunate hat 
 which he hadn't dared suggest she leave behind. He had 
 dined and supped at restaurants uncounted times with 
 girls who were dressed with that same general tone and 
 had enjoyed the effect himself as well as the echo it pro 
 duced from all and sundry who chanced to sit within its 
 range. The sting of this ineluctable comparison got 
 through his skin. He'd had to maintain an appearance 
 of calm in the face of two or three furious gusts of anger 
 which had swept over him when he'd seen people smile. 
 But he didn't think she'd been aware of any of that. 
 She'd flushed with pleasure over his enthusiastic praise 
 of the costume, and there 'd been nothing about her man 
 ner since to indicate disillusionment. 
 
 The cocktails, too, had been a mistake. A pure inad 
 vertence they were. The captain had come over, as he 
 always did, to take his order for drinks, and Joe had com 
 manded Martinis before he thought. Then he came to 
 and declined wine. He didn't suppose she'd ever tasted 
 anything with alcohol in it. He surmised a problem here : 
 on the broad question of intoxicants, what line ought he 
 take with the girl? She'd be better off without them, 
 of course. He wasn't going to begin by being a crab, 
 though, not to-night. The most he ventured, when the 
 glass was put before her, was a suggestion that a sip or 
 two wouldn't hurt her and that he'd drink up whatever 
 she left. She'd made an impudent face at him, at which 
 he laughed, and then, with a good deal of elaboration of
 
 THE CUB 137 
 
 manner, proceeded slowly to drink the whole thing. He 
 wondered uneasily whether her week in San Francisco had 
 contributed this item to her education; he'd get a more 
 detailed account of that sojourn from her, when he could 
 without seeming to pry. Then he grinned as it struck 
 him as probable that her school had been the movies. 
 
 The drink did go to her head, as the bright glow upon 
 her temples betrayed; but the effect of this was to alarm 
 her a little and to put her rather rigidly on guard. He 
 was inclined to think, looking over the evening in re 
 trospect, that this might have been the obstacle between 
 them that he 'd been faintly aware of from then on. 
 
 Or perhaps it had been the play, which wasn't, most 
 likely, the happiest possible choice. He'd picked it partly 
 because it was in the theater next door to the hotel ; partly 
 because he liked the charming young star who was playing 
 in it (she was a great friend of James "Wallace). But 
 partly too, because it was a nice wholesome little piece with 
 no possible harm in it ; the sort of thing an unsophisticated 
 young girl could appropriately be taken to. And this 
 quality of it was what she'd resented a little, scenting 
 something patronizing in his attitude. Naturally, anyhow, 
 her mood hadn't been receptive, to-night, to simplicity in 
 dotted Swiss. 
 
 Kiding home after the play (for he hadn't suggested 
 any further protraction of the party), she'd been almost 
 silent and a little aloof, half frightened, perhaps, over 
 the adventure she'd embarked on. But he'd gained enor 
 mously by forbearing to press her for more than she was 
 ready to give. He'd made no mistake here. She'd been 
 braced, he guessed, upon their return to the flat, for some 
 demand of confidences, a sentimental summary of their 
 first evening together, a looking forward to what their 
 life was going to mean and his apparently casual dis 
 missal of her to bed had evidently touched as well as sur 
 prised her. She'd hesitated in the doorway, as if half 
 minded to come back into his arms. If he'd invited her 
 by a gesture, he thought she would have come. Well, it
 
 138 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 was better not ; let her take her time. ' ' Telephone me at 
 the office in the morning when you wake up, " he 'd called 
 after her. 
 
 It was hours.after she'd gone to bed before he even tried 
 to sleep. His imagination was all ablaze with great pro 
 jects, cunning plans, and the center from which they all 
 radiated was that young thing, asleep by now, in there 
 behind that unlocked door. She was his! It had been 
 his act that created her. Now, for the first time in twenty 
 years, that incredible bond between them had been ac 
 knowledged by her own free act and will. She had come to 
 him, adventuring greatly, because he was her father. 
 Well, her trust should be rewarded a hundred-, a thou 
 sand-fold! There was nothing the stall-fed folk of the 
 world could do for their young that was more than he 
 would do for his. That arrogant security of theirs he 
 would make his own, in order to pass it on to her. He 
 would make a princess of her, a princess in her own right. 
 
 Alternately, with these luminous, grandiose conceptions, 
 his mind engaged itself with matters of minute detail: 
 how she could be dressed ; how taught the small, irritating 
 tricks of speech and manner by which the stall-fed tagged 
 themselves and identified each other. Henry's sister 
 would come in handy here ; she knew all the tricks, though 
 without money they'd never been worth much to her. His 
 sleep that night, when finally it came, was troubled by 
 strange dreams. Three times during the enlarging hours, 
 he had sprung wide awake, and, leaving his bed, had stolen 
 down the passage to listen for a moment outside her door. 
 
 At half -past seven the next morning, as he was sitting 
 down to breakfast, she amazed him by coming into the 
 dining-room. She was clad in a loose-sleeved bathrobe, 
 over her nightgown, and her hair, in two thick black 
 braids, hung over her shoulders. Her eyes were bright 
 with youth, and the bloom of sleep lay upon her unpainted 
 skin. Her greeting was a mere playful caress of one hand 
 upon his shoulder. Then she sat down in the armchair 
 opposite his, and made a great play of the domesticities of.
 
 THE CUB 139 
 
 breakfast; had the coffee urn and all the serving dishes 
 removed to her side of the table. 
 
 She chaffed him brightly while she served and, in the 
 intervals, made a hearty breakfast of her o\^n. She made 
 light of his concern that she should be up and about so 
 early. She wasn't one of the sort who had to sleep away 
 their days. There was nearly always something better 
 to do than sleep, she thought, and certainly her first 
 breakfast with her father was one of them. 
 
 The meal prolonged itself far beyond his usual limit for 
 breakfast, and the morning paper lay unregarded on the 
 floor. At last, however, he rose and said he must be off. 
 She rose, too, they had the room to themselves just then, 
 and for a moment she stood before him, breathless and 
 a little flushed. Then she flung her arms around him, 
 tight, and kissed his mouth. He gathered her up in his 
 arms, and tears, utterly unwonted and amazing, filled his 
 eyes. 
 
 "It was your beard I was afraid of," she murmured. 
 "But I guess I like it." 
 
 He let her go, abruptly, for there was another damned 
 echo in that. It was a thing that had been said to him 
 before. 
 
 Then he dashed the unwelcome memory out of his mind. 
 "Look here!" he cried. "How long will it take you to 
 dress? If you'll be quick, I'll wait. Take you down 
 town with me to the office. I want 'em to see you. Be 
 sides, it's the place you'll have to come when you want 
 money. ' ' 
 
 "I'll fly," she said. 
 
 3 
 
 "I'd never have left a son of mine," Joe had profanely 
 assured Jennie Mac Arthur, "to be brought up by Fan- 
 nings." His perfectly illogical assumption had been, all 
 along, that a son would have been like him; a daughter 
 must be like Annabel. 
 
 But when they had held up the new-born child for her 
 to see, Annabel had cried out, weakly, and covered her face
 
 140 JOSEPH GEEER AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 with her hands; for the baby was, literally, just a little 
 red image of her husband. The terrifying resemblance 
 faded, as such resemblances are likely to do, within the 
 first few hours, but not until it had been significantly re 
 marked and commented upon by the grandparents. t They 
 sometimes spoke, piously, of the child, as a "judgment." 
 Indeed, Beatrice could remember having heard them speak 
 of her like that, though without knowing exactly what they 
 meant. 
 
 It is a paradox, of course but not inadmissibly far 
 fetched, perhaps, to say that Beatrice, for all the smug 
 suburban atmosphere which was all she'd ever had to 
 breathe and her strictly pietistic upbringing, was much 
 more a creature of the jungle than Joe himself. The 
 cardinal fact in her life was fear, cutting two ways as it 
 does with all carnivorous wild things : fear of others, and 
 the fear she was able to inspire in others; though it wasn't 
 always the stronger she was afraid of, nor the weaker who 
 were afraid of her. She couldn't remember making the 
 discovery that her mother was sometimes afraid of her. It 
 was a fact she'd always known and, more or less, played 
 upon. 
 
 She'd early learned a wild animal's slyness. She 
 stalked the things she wanted, furtively, like a little half- 
 tamed cat; everything, from cookies in the pantry, up. 
 And when caught, in flagrant possession of her spoils, 
 she fought for them, furiously, winning as a rule a grudg 
 ing but sometimes illusory concession. 
 
 None of the Fannings, of course, this including Anna 
 bel could have entertained so impious a thought as a 
 doubt of their whole-hearted love for the child, and that 
 they did so love her an assertion continually reiterated, 
 usually in connection with disciplinary measures of some 
 sort, by the force of their own good faith, they made the 
 girl believe. It gave her a rather lurid idea, though, of 
 what love was. It was something that justified you in 
 doing the meanest and most tyrannous things you could 
 think of, to anybody who was the object of it. That was,
 
 THE CUB 141 
 
 apparently, the way God loved you, too. He was always 
 listening to things you said, spying on things you did, 
 putting black marks against you. When He 'd accumulated 
 enough black marks against you, He sent you to hell. She 
 worried about hell occasionally, but, in the main, she had 
 more immediate matters to occupy her mind. 
 
 Left to herself, Annabel wasn't capable of exercising a 
 very formidable, or even resolute, discipline, and there 
 were periods when, for one reason or another, she was so 
 left to herself. But under the incitement of the idea, 
 harped upon by her own parents, that the child 's escapades 
 truancies from school, mostly, her wilfulness, her 
 flashes of clear defiance, were "her father coming out in 
 her, ' ' and that it was a matter of salvation no less that 
 these manifestations be crushed, the mother could nerve 
 herself to acts of a frantic sort of severity. There wasn't 
 any rule or formula by which you could tell whether the 
 lightning was going to strike. 
 
 Beatrice had never been able to explain why she so 
 persistently played truant from school. She more or less 
 adopted, for lack of a better, her grandfather's explana 
 tion that it was at the promptings of the devil. The 
 simple fact was that she had inherited her father 's avidity 
 of mind and his capacity for concentration. When she 
 was sent to the first grade of the public school, at the 
 orthodox age of six, she was, by a year or two, precocious. 
 She devoured a week's pabulum in a day. It was an old- 
 fashioned grade school where they took no cognizance of a 
 mind like that, and they drove her frantic by telling her 
 patiently, over and over again, things she already knew; 
 remonstrating with her when she was inattentive. So, 
 making use of her feral technique for evading the eye of 
 authority, she disappeared in search of more profitable em 
 ployment. She burked messages they gave her to carry 
 home, and by ten, she was a successful forger of her 
 mother's rather formless handwriting. 
 
 When she was around twelve years olcL, she die 1 find * 
 teacher who understood what was the matter with her. -2*.
 
 142 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 vivid, wonderful, almost unbelievable person she seemed 
 to Beatrice, who held her attention instead of scolding 
 her for not giving it; who challenged her with hard tasks 
 and shared her triumph over their accomplishment. They 
 took walks together; they talked^ about things that weren't 
 lessons; they shared, or so it seemed to Beatrice, con 
 fidences. There was the space of a few months when the 
 Fannings doubtfully began to believe that the change of 
 heart, the saving descent of grace which they 'd prayed for 
 so long, had come. But, abruptly, just before the end of 
 that school year, this teacher was dismissed. Beatrice 
 couldn't learn precisely why, though it was something that 
 had to do with a man. She was engaged to a man who was 
 married, or something like that. At home, her name 
 couldn't be mentioned. Miss Morgan wrote her a note 
 which Grandma Fanning got hold of, exhibited to her 
 and burned in her presence without permitting her to 
 read. 
 
 Beatrice made active war on her family for a while 
 after that and she went no more to school that year; but 
 against people you had to see every day and live with and 
 were dependent on, a feud couldn't be kept up indefinitely. 
 It subsided into 'what the family called sulks and were 
 content, in the main, to ignore. 
 
 Behind the blank wall of sullen acquiescence, which she 
 persistently turned toward them, an epoch-making event 
 took place in the girl's life. Rummaging, one afternoon 
 during her mother's absence, through a box in the store 
 room, she came upon a packet of old letters which Joe had 
 written, at one time and another, to Annabel. (It is a 
 perfect key to Annabel's character that she had never de 
 stroyed these letters; had kept them all, in chronological 
 order, hidden under a heap of discarded clothes in an 
 old box.) The girl read through half the letters, per 
 haps, carried on by nothing deeper than mischief, a sense 
 of scoring off her mother. Then, with the dazzling sud 
 denness of revelation, it broke over her that the writer of 
 the letters was her own father. Her first act was to ab-
 
 TIIE CUB 143 
 
 stract the whole bundle from her mother's hiding-place 
 and transfer it to one of her own (she had plenty of them 
 and she chose the safest). She took the most elaborate pre 
 cautions against the mischance of getting caught reading 
 them, but during hours of real security she pored over 
 them like a scholar over a precious newly-discovered text. 
 She brought to them all the powers of logical deduction 
 and all the capacity for imaginative surmise which she 
 possessed. They became, for a period of months, the cen 
 tral fact in her life. 
 
 Any one of the Fannings would have said confidently 
 that Joe had never been mentioned in his daughter's pres 
 ence except, in reply to an occasional direct question about 
 him, to the effect that she mustn't ask. It was wicked 
 to lie, so of course, they'd never told her her father was 
 dead. There had been, as a matter of fact, a good many 
 references to him, either in language they thought she 
 wouldn't understand or at times when they hadn't sup 
 posed she was listening, and her inbred slyness had in 
 duced them to go on thinking so. But it wasn't till now 
 that she'd ever taken the enigma of him seriously, or set 
 about solving it. Under the powerful stimulus of the let 
 ters, the dragnet of her memory brought up a number of 
 facts which she pieced in with those the letters contained. 
 
 Her father had been, according to Fanning standards, a 
 wicked man. But then, weren't most of the nice people 
 in the world wicked? She'd been led to think so. He'd 
 done something, she supposed, just as Miss Morgan had, 
 that had condemned him to be sent away and consigned to' 
 oblivion. He must have gone very soon after she was 
 born; for she couldn't remember him at all. Perhaps 
 making her mother have a baby had been his crime. 
 Maybe she, Beatrice, was a child of sin. It was a phrase 
 she'd heard, occasionally, but had never been able to get 
 interpreted. But why hadn't he taken her with him when 
 he went away? She thought one who was wicked, one's 
 self, might have treated her own derelictions more toler 
 antly.
 
 144 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 She built him up into an imaginary ally; a romantic 
 stranger, disguised, sometimes, in rags, sometimes in over 
 whelming panoply, coming dramatically to her rescue in 
 hours of need. 
 
 Romance, indeed, "was in the very fabric of the letters 
 from South America, in the foreign feel of the paper and 
 the queer look of the stamps and post-marks, in his bold 
 black handwriting. Of explicit facts about the life he 
 led, there were not many; occasional nuggets, merely, but 
 these had the malleability of fine gold, and hammered out 
 thin by much thinking, they gilded vast areas ; construction 
 camps, Indians, hours in the saddle, mountain and desert, 
 revolutionary armies, vast waterfalls and canyons, muti 
 nies and feuds. There were darker references, too, to ear 
 lier experiences, which, it appeared, her mother had already 
 known something about, to jungles and cannibals and 
 poisoned darts. 
 
 There was a quiescent period of months a breathing 
 spell for the Fannings when she was content to day 
 dream about him. Then an access of energy took her and 
 she bought a pony. 
 
 The next thing to godliness, in Grandpa Fanning 's 
 mind, was thrift, and in this, back in the era of Miss 
 Morgan's influence, she had taken a sudden interest. She 
 had consented to the impounding of the major part of 
 her small allowance in a savings-account. She had under 
 taken and more or less fulfilled sundry tasks at a wage 
 agreed upon. Grandpa, now and then when her zeal 
 showed signs of flagging, had fortified it by a donation, 
 once in a soft moment to the princely tune of twenty- 
 five dollars. The sheer enormity of the crime of em 
 bezzling this fund, by the simple process of drawing it 
 out of the bank, had prevented any of them even, for a 
 good while, Beatrice herself from thinking of it. 
 
 But a neighbor boy she knew he was in her class in 
 high school discovered a passionate need, irately denied 
 by his father, for a wireless outfit. His one possession, 
 doubtfully negotiable, was a Welsh pony. At random, one
 
 THE CUB 145 
 
 day, on the back seat in French class, he spoke to Beatrice 
 about it. She scribbled in her exercise book, "I'll pay 
 you fifty dollars for him," and, within a day, the trans 
 action was completed. There was need on both sides that 
 it remain confidential. The pony continued to be housed 
 and fed at the expense of the boy's unsuspecting father, 
 but he belonged, forelock to shoes, saddle, bridle and 
 quirt, to Beatrice. She had no clothes she could ride in, 
 so the boy threw in a flannel shirt and a pair of knicker 
 bockers, discarded since he had gone into trousers. 
 
 She played truant now not merely to escape the boredom 
 of school but to carry out delightful and moderately ad 
 venturous projects. They lived in the outskirts of town 
 whence it was easy for the girl to ride into the open 
 country, and it was months before her new activities were 
 found out at home. She was caught at a time when, 
 lucidly, her grandparents were away on a trip to Seattle, 
 and Beatrice had only her mother to reckon with. Fight 
 ing furiously to keep her loved possession, she found she 
 had a weapon, a threat which turned her mother white. 
 
 "If you take my pony away from me," she said, "I'll 
 run away. I'll go to my father." 
 
 She was clever enough not to elaborate the threat, aware 
 that an attempt to do so might betray her inability to 
 carry it out. She answered none of the frantic questions 
 that were flung at her; entrenched herself in silence and 
 waited. And she won a victory. Her mother conceded 
 the pony, exacting certain lightly given promises in re 
 turn : that Beatrice would be a good obedient girl and go 
 regularly to school. The threat wasn 't again referred to ; 
 Beatrice guessed it never was mentioned to her grand 
 parents. When they returned, the pony was an openly 
 vested possession with which they did not attempt to in 
 terfere. 
 
 This victory had one important result. It brought 
 about her acquaintance with Carmichael Blair. She came 
 upon him one morning, this was in June, 1915, just at 
 the beginning of her school vacation, out beyond the San
 
 146 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 Gabriel Mission, painting swiftly upon a number-forty 
 canvas, a picture that was nearly all sky. He said hello 
 to her in an amiably absent-minded way as she rode up 
 and, without interruption, sped on with his work. She 
 looked on from the saddle for a moment or two; then, as 
 his preoccupation seemed to make her welcome rather 
 than otherwise, dismounted, threw her reins over the 
 pony's head, and came up behind his shoulder where she 
 could follow the brush from palette to canvas. 
 
 She'd never thought of the sky as anything but solid 
 blue, or the process of painting one as anything be 
 yond getting the right tint of blue paint spread smoothly 
 over the canvas. This surprising person was putting the 
 most incredible colors into it. 
 
 ' ' You 're too close to it, ' ' he said, interpreting a protest 
 ing gasp she gave. "Come back here." 
 
 She followed him back four or five paces for a look, but 
 even from this distance it wasn't entirely convincing. 
 
 "It's sort of exciting, though," she conceded. 
 
 But the really exciting thing was watching him do it. 
 She stayed for two or three hours, absorbed, most of the 
 time, just in the brush strokes, though her attention 
 strayed now and then to make notes upon his person and 
 his equipment. He was rather nice-looking, she decided, 
 in an unromantic, matter-of-fact sort of way. He looked 
 fairly old, but the easy-going bruskness of his manner made 
 him seem younger than any other adult person she knew. 
 He spoke to her but seldom, and then in mere snatches, 
 occasionally to ask her for something which she was di 
 rected to find in his car. She rather liked taking these 
 orders, since they carried an implicit permission to stay 
 on watching him work. 
 
 The car was amusing. It would have absorbed her but 
 for her livelier interest in something else. It was a small 
 touring car, or had been once, but it had been ingeniously 
 adapted to serve his special needs. The back seat had 
 been taken out, and the whole tonneau was filled with what 
 looked like a wild miscellany of incongruous objects:
 
 THE CUB 147 
 
 jugs, boxes, hampers, a blanket roll, a rack for canvasses. 
 Both doors on one side were blocked off by a thing which 
 she finally decided was a sort of folding-bed that hinged 
 down and opened out. 
 
 ' ' I can stay out for days with that, ' ' he told her. ' ' Eat, 
 drink, sleep and paint. My wife says it looks like the last 
 stages of Noah's Ark. She doesn't mind, though." 
 
 The" knowledge that he was married did not impress 
 Beatrice much. Her interest in him wasn't romantic; 
 hardly personal. 
 
 He remarked, after a while, that he guessed it must be 
 lunch time, and directed her to the hamper where food was 
 to be found. But when she'd opened it, he showed no 
 intention to stop painting. "Pitch in," he commanded. 
 "This light's changing so darn fast I don't dare quit." 
 So she ate, with unwonted diffidence, a sandwich or two 
 and an orange. 
 
 At last, his furious pace slackened. He paid no more 
 attention to the altered sky; turned the canvas round so 
 that the light fell upon it differently. He went on gazing 
 at it abstractedly for a good many minutes, sometimes 
 making imperceptible changes upon it with brush or 
 fingers, and in the same preoccupied way he reached into 
 the hamper and ate a sandwich, consuming, indifferently, 
 along with it, an amount of paint which she hoped wouldn 't 
 prove fatal. 
 
 Suddenly he looked at her. "Well," he said simply, 
 "I think that's a peach, myself. How do you like it!" 
 
 She went around beside him where she could see it, too ; 
 and now it broke over her that the thing was wonderful. 
 It made her feel a little like crying. Even though, she 
 persisted, it didn't look exactly like the thing he'd been 
 painting. It had never occurred to her, before, that a 
 picture could be meant for anything except to be like 
 something else. He seemed amused, and pleased, too, 
 when she said something of the sort. 
 
 He fitted the picture into the place in the rack from 
 which, a blank canvas, it had been taken out a little ear-
 
 148 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 Her; put the rest of his traps into the tonneau; sat down 
 at the steering-wheel, and pressed the starter, evidently 
 bent, now his business was finished, on going somewhere 
 else, home, most likely, wherever that was, without loss 
 of time. She felt pretty blank at this, and he must have 
 seen it in her face, for he got down from the car again 
 and came to her, holding out a hand. 
 
 ' ' It has been a nice day, hasn 't it ? ' ' he said. ' ' I 've en 
 joyed it a lot." 
 
 She stammered that she hoped she could watch him paint 
 again some time, and his response to this was cordiality it 
 self though completely vague. 
 
 "I hope so, too," he told her. "That'll be fine!" 
 With no more words than that, he got back into his car 
 and drove away, in a cloud of dust. 
 
 Beatrice getting home that night, late and ravenous for 
 supper, told her mother at the end of the meal that she 
 knew what she wanted to do. She wanted to be a painter. 
 
 She was startled by her mother's reception of the idea, 
 for she.'d been braced for the usual scandalized refusal. 
 Her mother was suspicious of course; wanted to know 
 whatever put that idea into the girl's head. And equally 
 of course, Beatrice lied about the reason; suppressed the 
 painter completely. 
 
 But her mother's incredulity seemed to spring from 
 hope rather than dismay, and she began planning prac 
 tical details at once. There was a woman who lived in a 
 little bungalow the other side of town, who gave drawing 
 lessons. "When Beatrice protested that she wanted to 
 paint, not draw, her mother laughed at her with good- 
 humored indulgence. "You have to learn to draw first, 
 Bee," she said. "Besides, Miss Jackson paints, too, when 
 you get that far. "Water colors; very pretty. I saw 
 some of them the other day at "Watson 's store. Miniatures, 
 too, I think. On ivory. If you really want to learn, the 
 sooner you begin, the better." 
 
 The misgiving that she didn't want to learn anything 
 that the casual Miss Jackson could teach her was stifled for
 
 THE CUB 149 
 
 the time in astonishment over her mother's attitude. She 
 acted queerly stirred about it, strangely affectionate, flut 
 tered; she even cried a little. And at last, she gave the 
 girl an explanation. 
 
 "It seems so queer," she said, "after all these years, to 
 find something in you that you take after me. ' ' She added, 
 a little sheepishly, to the girl's echoed, "After youf* 
 "I wanted to be an artist once. I might have been one 
 now, just as good as Miss Jackson, if papa hadn't stopped 
 me." 
 
 Beatrice's misgiving, that drawing lessons with Miss 
 Jackson weren't what she wanted at all, was confirmed up 
 to the hilt during the first week. The lady was tall, thin 
 and aggressively optimistic. She always prefaced criti 
 cism, even the most destructive, with little exclamations of 
 encouragement. "Well, well, we're getting on fine!" she 
 would say. "But don't you see, dear, . . ." Her fun 
 damental axiom was that you had to lay the foundation, 
 down underneath the ground, before you could go on to 
 the more ornamental and agreeable parts of the building. 
 And, if the foundation wasn't right, everything after 
 ward would be wrong. Laying the foundation consisted, 
 it seemed, in having your pencil sharpened just so, and 
 holding it just so, when you were learning to make certain 
 kinds of lines, straight lines and curved lines. You draw 
 a great many pictures of a cube in various positions, get 
 ting the angles square and the sides alike, except where 
 there entered a mysterious thing which Miss Jackson called 
 " purrspective " and talked about with an assurance 
 which struck the girl as perhaps a little unreal. From 
 this, you were promoted to a flower pot, below the level 
 of the eye so that its top was seen as an ellipse. 
 
 "There's a way of drawing that right," Beatrice said, 
 after struggling with it for a while. "You do it with a 
 loose string fastened between two pins. I learned that in 
 geometry. ' ' 
 
 The idea horrified Miss Jackson. This was free-hand 
 drawing we were doing. The use of mechanical aids, such
 
 150 JOSEPH GREEK AND IHS DAUGHTER 
 
 as rulers, compasses and so forth, was immoral, like 
 cheating. She told Beatrice about Andrea del Sarto. He 
 was a painter so great that he could draw, free-hand, a 
 circle so perfect that it couldn't be distinguished, even by 
 experts, from one produced by means of instruments. 
 
 By way of enlivening her pupil's labors, she talked en 
 thusiastically of the successive steps : after the flower pot, 
 a teacup and saucer, with a lump of sugar beside it ; and, 
 after this, shapes still more difficult. When you'd become 
 proficient with lead pencil, you were promoted to char 
 coal, and the mysteries of shading, with a stump. The 
 day would come wheli that plaster Demosthenes in the cor 
 ner would be set before you, at a suitable angle, to draw. 
 And beyond that, well, there was no reason why we 
 shouldn't some day begin to sketch in water color. 
 
 "But how about regular painting?" Beatrice asked. 
 "That's what I want to do." 
 
 "Oils? Oh, that's the last thing. That's very serious, 
 indeed." 
 
 Beatrice stuck for a week, and it wouldn't have lasted 
 as long as that had not her scouting trips, in search of the 
 man who painted the sky, proved unsuccessful. She 
 jogged about, pony-back, every afternoon, in the vicinity of 
 San Gabriel, without finding a trace of him. 
 
 Finally, rather late one afternoon, as she was returning 
 from another unsuccessful cast this time along the rim of 
 the Arroyo, just on the edge of town, she saw, through a 
 gateway in a wall, his car and without hesitation she rode 
 in. The enclosure was a little yard or compound between 
 a bungalow and a low stone building which she 'd have as 
 sumed to be a garage except that it didn 't look like one. It 
 had an arched doorway filled by an ancient oak door with 
 great hinges and bolts in it like one of the missions, and 
 this resemblance was heightened by what looked like a 
 shrine, a niche with a little painted statue of a saint or 
 something in it. 
 
 An old woman now stuck her head out of the kitchen 
 door of the bungalow ; an old wrinkled leather-faced woman
 
 THE CUB 151 
 
 who looked at her earnestly a moment and then called 
 back shrilly into the house in French, Beatrice thought. 
 After an uneasy minute, for the foreign language made the 
 girl wonder a little what she'd got into, the other bunga 
 low door opened and another woman appeared, very jolly- 
 looking somehow, with a fresh clean brightness about her. 
 She paused an instant in the doorway; then, seeing her 
 visitor was mounted, she came out toward the girl. 
 
 "Have you come to see me?" she asked. 
 
 "Why, I came," Beatrice said, "to see the man that 
 paints. I've been looking everywhere for him for about 
 a week, and I saw his car in here . .- . " 
 
 "He'll be out in a minute," the woman said. "He's 
 over there," she nodded toward the convent-garage, "in 
 the studio. But I'm afraid he can't stop to see you now; 
 he's just flying off in an awful rush in order not to miss 
 a light he wants." 
 
 "It's all right," Beatrice said, "if he lives here. I can 
 come again, any time." 
 
 "Wait a minute!" the woman said. She was standing 
 now at the girl's stirrup, and without warning she called 
 suddenly, "Mike!" 
 
 The pony took it into its head to resent this and shied 
 violently. The convent door burst open with a creak, 
 and the painter came out carrying a big half-painted 
 canvas. The pony, further affronted, reared. The 
 woman cried out. The man whipped his canvas back into 
 the shelter of the doorway. Beatrice gave the pony the 
 quirt and kicked him in the ribs as hard as she could, at 
 the same time. He subsided at once, and she swung him 
 around, for safe-keeping, into the angle of the wall. The 
 painter, now his canvas was out of the way, was coming 
 to her assistance. 
 
 "He's all right," she assured him. 
 
 "Why, it's you!" he cried, in a tone of pleased recog 
 nition, and was apparently coming over to shake hands 
 with her, when he stopped short and backed away again, 
 narrowed his eyes and stared. "By golly!" he cried.
 
 152 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 "I've always known I wanted to do something with that 
 corner. Do you mind staying there a minute ten min 
 utes until I can get it down?" He didn't wait for her 
 answer, but bolted back into the studio. 
 
 His wife laughed. "You're the limit, Mike," she called 
 after him. Then she turned to the girl. "You don't 
 mind, do you? You are perfectly lovely like that, with 
 that light on you." 
 
 Beatrice replied, a little dazed, that she didn't. No 
 one had ever told her that she looked lovely, even when 
 she was dressed up, and in these awful old riding things 
 it seemed incredible. 
 
 The painter came out again in a minute or two carrying 
 a big flat wooden box; sat down on a bench against the 
 wall of the bungalow, opened the box on his knees and 
 began drawing, apparently on the inside of the lid. 
 
 His wife nodded to the girl, said, "There'll be tea pretty 
 soon," and disappeared into the house. 
 
 As for the man, he didn't speak a word, and, though he 
 kept looking up at her every minute, it was, somehow, as 
 if he didn't see her at all. The glare of the low-hanging 
 sun, reflected from the pink wall and the hard-packed 
 red earth, was hot in her face. The pony fidgeted, and 
 she had hard work keeping him still. The ten minutes 
 the painter had asked for must have been long exceeded. 
 How long, she couldn't guess. But the man painted on, 
 oblivious. 
 
 His wife came out, at last ; said to her with a commiser 
 ating smile, "I hope you're not too awfully tired," and 
 then, looking over her husband 's shoulder, forgot all about 
 her. "That's gorgeous, Mike!" she said. 
 
 "Isn't it great," he asked, "the way that scarf reflects 
 on the under side of her face?" For another short eter 
 nity, he worked on. At last, he laid palette and brushes 
 on the bench beside him, held the color box out at arm's 
 length in both hands, stared at it intently a while, and 
 rose. ' ' That '11 do, ' '. he said. " I '11 paint it up some day. ' ' 
 Then, somehow, the look that he turned upon the girl
 
 THE CUB 153 
 
 lighted into a smile which swept away her pent-up re 
 sentment. "I'm just awfully obliged to you," he said. 
 
 On the way into the house for tea after they had tied 
 up the pony in the shade he let her stop to look at what 
 he had been painting, a terribly embarrassing moment 
 since she couldn't find a word to say. The thing looked, 
 simply, like an unbelievable daub, as if it had been paint 
 ed by a child. Things like her hands and the pony's feet 
 weren't painted at all. Her face hadn't any features, 
 was just a mess of red and ugly ochre paint. But neither 
 the man nor his wife seemed affronted by her silence. 
 
 And in their living-room a funny, big, half-empty 
 place, she forgot the picture, for a while, altogether. 
 
 She'd never met people like these. They were unmis 
 takably grown-up but they didn't act nor talk that way. 
 They just acted natural; did and said, it seemed, what 
 ever they liked. They called each other Mike and Wanda, 
 and, when they learned her name, they called her Beatrice. 
 The leather-faced old French woman, who was in and 
 out of the room as she chose, bringing edibles as it occurred 
 to her to do so and taking them away when she thought 
 they'd had enough, didn't act like a servant, though 
 plainly enough she was. She talked with them, in her 
 own language, volubly ; sometimes it sounded as if she was 
 scolding them, but they didn't seem to care, answering, 
 now meekly, now jocularly, in French that seemed to cut 
 the corners just as hers did. She tried to imagine her 
 mother talking to a servant like that. 
 
 Mike arose, indolently, after a while, and, without ex 
 cuse or explanation, wandered out into the yard (they both 
 managed, she observed, to seem perfectly nice and amiable 
 without any of the flourishes which she'd been taught 
 were manners), and, pretty soon, she heard him come in 
 again. She didn't turn to see what he was doing, down 
 there at the other end of the room behind her, because 
 Wanda went straight on talking. But presently the 
 woman said, "Now, look round, and see what you think of 
 yourself."
 
 154 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 Mike had just hung a picture on the wall, and it was 
 it must be the very picture he'd just painted of her. It 
 was in a frame. She didn't see how a picture could be 
 framed as quickly as that. Besides, it didn't seem cred 
 ible that it could be the same. From away off here at the 
 other end of the room, it looked finished; beautiful! 
 The pony was all there ; she was all there herself, even her 
 face, and she knew he hadn't painted a face at all. And 
 the blaze of sunlight glorified it. 
 
 "It sings, doesn't it?" "Wanda remarked. And this 
 seemed to be literally true. It appeared that both of them 
 enjoyed her frank astonishment over it. 
 
 "You know," she mustered courage to say to Mike, as 
 he wandered over and stood beside her, "why I wanted 
 to find you, was to ask you if you'd teach me to paint, too. 
 I don't suppose I ever could." 
 
 "Well, you never can tell till you try," he answered, 
 off the top of his mind. Then, coming into a little sharper 
 focus, "Ever studied at all?" he asked. 
 
 She decided to annihilate Miss Jackson. "Never," she 
 said. 
 
 "That's fine!" he exclaimed. "I'm going up the Ar 
 royo to-morrow morning pretty early, though. You can 
 come along, if you like. Wear some old clothes. You're 
 likely to get as much paint on yourself as you do on the 
 picture." 
 
 "Paint?" she asked. "You mean oil paint? You'd 
 let me begin that way?" 
 
 "It's the only way to teach anybody to let outlines 
 alone," he said indifferently. 
 
 "You don't care when you get home, do you?" Wanda 
 warned her. "If he gets going, he usually makes a day 
 of it. I'll put you up some grub." 
 
 It occurred to Beatrice, as she rode home through the 
 thick twilight, that they hadn 't asked her a question : who 
 she was, where she lived, anything. Nor had they volun 
 teered any more facts than they'd asked. Beyond Mike 
 and Wanda, she didn't even know their names. And he
 
 THE CUB 155 
 
 hadn't said a word about how many lessons she'd need, 
 nor breathed a hint about pay. 
 
 She told her mother, accounting for the fact that she 
 was late for supper, that she'd got lost, up the Arroyo. 
 That night, she filched a sheet of her mother's note paper 
 and wrote a little letter to Miss Jackson to the effect that 
 Beatrice was going to be away a good deal for the next 
 few weeks and wouldn't be able to finish this term of les 
 sons. It was all right, though, about the money, and she 
 might come back for another term later. With the unlost 
 skill of long experience, she signed her mother 's name and 
 slipped out to the post-box with it. 
 
 She made no perceptible progress at painting, under 
 Carmichael Blair's instruction. With pencil she did a 
 little better, but not much. But the Blairs between them 
 gave her more real education, during the swift months of 
 that summer, than she'd ever got before. She saw one or 
 the other of them almost daily. She made uncounted ex 
 cursions in the car, with Mike, listening to his talk when 
 he was in the mood for it; silently watching him paint 
 when, as more often happened, he was not. She spent 
 whole days in the studio or the bungalow, reading, when 
 she couldn't get Wanda to tell her stories of their travels. 
 One may say it was during that summer she learned to 
 read, as anything beyond a compulsory academic exer 
 cise. She devoured books about the sea, Captain Mar- 
 ryat and Clark Russell: Two Tears before The Mast and 
 The Cruise of the Cachalot. She read The Three Muske 
 teers, and made a start on Gil Bias (the Blairs had it, in 
 French, illustrated with marvelous wood cuts, which in 
 spired her to draw an English translation of it out of the 
 Public Library). And Rudyard Kipling burst upon her 
 like a revelation. 
 
 It was the personal quality of Mike and Wanda that 
 supplied the vital spark for all this. They had voyaged 
 long weeks over distant seas; they'd lived in Paris and 
 Rome and London; they'd been in Egypt and Siam and 
 India knew that those places were really there. They
 
 156 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 gave actuality, too, to the newspaper accounts of the 
 progress of the war. Most of those French and Belgian 
 towns that figured in the despatches were places whose 
 streets they had walked. 
 
 Broadly, it came to this : they rolled up the curtains of 
 the world, her own world to some extent as well as the 
 wider one. It was possible, somehow, it must be pos 
 sible because they managed it to be free without being 
 outlaws. In time, they might have tamed her out of her 
 cat-like furtiveness, but that one summer's acquaintance 
 wasn't long enough. 
 
 It had been founded upon a lie, and, upon an ascending 
 progression of lies to her mother, it was maintained. She 
 wasn't forced to lie much to the Blairs, so little were they 
 addicted to prying into her with questions. The very 
 sketchy account of her home life with which she furnished 
 them satisfied what little curiosity they showed. 
 
 She'd puzzled Mike, every now and then, by an ap 
 parent revival of her interest in drawing. She'd take a 
 pencil and a pad and start something, and it never was 
 very hard to impose on his simplicity (she had an uneasy 
 feeling that Wanda wasn't quite so completely taken in) 
 to the extent of getting him to take the pencil away from 
 her and show her how the thing ought to be done. The 
 product, eighty per cent, his perhaps, she unobtrusively 
 carried off and exhibited at home as evidence of her dili 
 gence and progress with Miss Jackson. The imposture 
 wouldn't have worked even with Annabel if it had not 
 squared with her hopes, and if the girl's real happiness 
 had not produced, in minor domestic matters, an appear 
 ance of docility. 
 
 "What brought about her exposure was the enthusiasm of 
 a chance caller over her sketches. The unstinted praise 
 was sweet to Annabel, who hadn't thought very highly of 
 the drawings herself, and she wrote a "nice little note" to 
 Miss Jackson and invited her up to tea. 
 
 Beatrice had known she'd get caught some time, but she 
 hadn 't at all foreseen how painful the experience was going
 
 THE CUB 157 
 
 to be, nor how drastic the result of it. She 'd be forbidden 
 ever to see the Blairs again and, no doubt, the prohibition 
 would interfere, for a while, with their companionship. 
 But she counted on them, confidently, as resourceful allies. 
 
 It was to this expectation she anchored, securely she 
 thought, through the worst domestic tempest she'd ever 
 experienced. They kept her prisoner for two days, by the 
 expedient of abstracting her clothes while she slept and 
 locking them up; and during this time her grandfather 
 sold her pony. She won her release from Annabel under 
 the threat of escaping into the street in her nightgown, a 
 thing which she was resolutely determined to do. She 
 went straight to the Blairs' bungalow, and here she found 
 bitter disappointment. 
 
 Blair must have seen her coming for he met her in the 
 yard. "You can't come here any more, you know," he 
 said. The fact that his tone was, superficially, as pleas 
 ant as ever made it all the more unendurable. "Your 
 grandfather came to see us last night. Told us all about 
 it. He made us feel, Wanda and me, like about fifteen 
 cents apiece. You see, we aren't sneaks, though that's 
 naturally what he thought we'd been about you. And 
 we can't be friends with people who tell us lies and who 
 tell lies about us." 
 
 She stood staring at him, speechless, aghast. She knew 
 she was going to cry, for the first time almost since she 
 could remember. 
 
 "I'm sorry," he concluded at the end of a pause she 
 couldn't even try to make use of, "but that's all." He 
 turned and went into the studio, and Beatrice went home, 
 sobbing, heedless of the stares and the sometimes attempted 
 questions of the people she met along the way. 
 
 Her only protection against the acid of Blair's comment 
 was a furious anger against the pair, and this she fanned 
 into flame whenever they came into her thoughts. Meet 
 ing Wanda on the street, a week or two later, she passed 
 her without a nod or a glance. But the woman turned and 
 walked a little way beside her.
 
 158 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 "I'm horribly sorry about it all," she said. "And 
 Mike is, too. I think he took it a little too hard, but he 
 can't help that. Anything that isn't just the plain truth 
 is poison to him." 
 
 The girl gave no indication that she'd heard. 
 
 "In one way," Wanda went on, after they'd walked a 
 few paces in silence, "it doesn't matter so much. Be 
 cause we're going away in a week or two, anyhow. "We're 
 going back east and find some way of getting into the 
 war." Then, "Good-by, Beatrice." 
 
 "Good-by," Beatrice said hoarsely. But she didn't 
 pause nor glance around, and Wanda, with a little shrug 
 ging gesture, turned back. 
 
 So the episode ended by leaving a scar of real cynicism 
 upon the adolescent spirit ; a scar not necessarily indelible, 
 but not to be removed by the mere lapse of time. The 
 years, nearly four, between the going away of the Blairs 
 and Beatrice's own flight to Chicago, had no healing in 
 them. Rather empty uneventful years they were, dur 
 ing which she alternated between phases of weak restless 
 revolt against the life her authorities prescribed for her, 
 and a sullen acquiescence in it. Sometimes in an access 
 of energy, she would read or study furiously for a few 
 weeks. She had a spurt or two of activity in war work, in 
 cited mostly by the fact that the war was frowned upon 
 at home. She drifted along through high school and, 
 after five years of desultory attendance, managed to 
 graduate. 
 
 She made the discovery of the male sex, as such, rather 
 late, considering her precocity, and, during the last two 
 years that she lived with her mother, most of her talent 
 for intrigue was devoted to escapades innocent if one 
 uses the word in its narrow technical sense, but not very 
 wholesome with schoolboys and young men. Her atti 
 tude toward them was meretricious rather than romantic. 
 A boy who had the run of a car, and was pecunious and 
 liberal enough to stand excursions into Los Angeles or out 
 to the beaches, was a desirable possession, to be kept good-
 
 THE CUB 159 
 
 humored and interested by the discreet allowance to the 
 sentimental, semi-amorous privileges demanded. She was, 
 in the main, quite frigid about all this, and never felt the 
 stir of any desire urgent enough to be alarming. In a 
 shabby, second-rate sort of way, she became rather sophis 
 ticated. Her spiritual tone was pretty well established 
 by the movies which she assiduously frequented. 
 
 Her grandmother's death, in nineteen-eighteen, gave 
 her, though not at once, an idea that had a hope behind it. 
 Her grandfather, some time, and perhaps before very long, 
 would die, too; when that happened she would have only 
 her mother to reckon with. And Annabel had grown, with 
 every passing year, less formidable to her. She 'd be able, 
 she believed, to make her mother do anything she liked. 
 
 She marked the appearance of a Mr. Hawthorne Whit- 
 tington in their domestic circle, and even his steadily in 
 creasing importance, without very serious concern. Her 
 mild dislike of him was spiced by a contemptuous amuse 
 ment. Though it was several years since he 'd retired from 
 the lecture platform to his lemon grove, he'd kept a pub 
 lic manner the sort of air that made people say after 
 he 'd passed, ' ' Who was that ? ' ' and a love for the center 
 of the stage, and these harmless weaknesses provided Bea 
 trice with moments of amusement at his expense. It was 
 fun to reduce him to helpless, because inexpressible, wrath 
 with a well-placed interruption, or to see how blank he 
 looked when she caused one of his well-oiled witticisms to 
 miss fire by taking him literally. Even after his visits 
 had come to be almost daily affairs, she didn't surmise that 
 his dislike, or hatred, could ever be important to her. 
 
 It was a lawyer's visit to the house, one evening, that 
 frightened her. The falsely casual attempt to give it the 
 air of a social call, a reference, by the man, to "the little 
 matter" he and her mother had to talk about, Annabel's 
 flutters and the solemnity of the withdrawal into the 
 dining-room and the shutting of the door, all were por 
 tentous. Beatrice, left alone on the veranda with her 
 grandfather, felt a sudden sinking of the heart. Some-
 
 160 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 thing was happening that she must know about, at once, 
 but she 'd gain no knowledge from that old man by asking 
 questions. 
 
 She rose and lounged across to the rail, where, without 
 turning, he could not watch her. Then she laughed. 
 "Isn't mother funny!" she said. 
 
 "Funny!" her grandfather growled. "She's doing it 
 for you." 
 
 "She needn't," said the girl. 
 
 "No, I s'pose not," he sneered. "But she's going to, 
 and it'll be a good thing for you. I'm going to die before 
 long. And you do need somebody. Younger 'n I am 
 and stronger. If it wasn't for that I wouldn't let her do 
 it. Foolish risk, any time. Nonsense, at her age. But 
 this one ain't a limb of Satan and that's what the other 
 one was." 
 
 "You mean my father?" Beatrice asked. 
 
 The question roused the old man from his soliloquy. He 
 hadn't consciously been talking to her at all. He turned 
 and eyed her suspiciously; then told her she'd better go 
 to bed. 
 
 She went, not unwillingly, having got enough to keep 
 her mind occupied for a while. Next morning, finding her 
 mother alone, she asked, casually, "How long does it take 
 to get a divorce, mother!" 
 
 Annabel's embroidery scissors flew out of her hand; her 
 face flamed. "Who told you?" she demanded in a panic. 
 
 Beatrice surprised them all by taking the prospective 
 revolution so quietly. It was, in fact, much too serious a 
 matter for anything so ineffectual as threats and rages. 
 Hawthorne Whittington as a stepfather would make life 
 intolerable; before the marriage took place, she would 
 run away. But she wasted no moves by serving notice 
 of her intention. She had her picture taken and began 
 stringing her wires for Hollywood. 
 
 Joe's letter, though it reduced her for an hour or two 
 to a state of dazed and almost helpless excitement, drew 
 from her no gush of affection for him, like water smitten
 
 THE CUB 161 
 
 miraculously from the rock. It didn't even restore him 
 as the romantic rescuer who had been, a few years back, so 
 constantly the hero of her day-dreams. She thought of 
 him as soon as the recession of the first flurry made it 
 possible for her to think at all a little resentfully and 
 quite cynically, as a stranger ; a man like all men, a tyrant 
 if he could get a chance to be, and a bargainer not inclined 
 to give something for nothing. He had some motive, un- 
 avowed, in breaking this silence of twenty years and send 
 ing for her now. 
 
 She had sensed in his letter the patronizing note; the 
 fact that she was being talked down to, as a little girl 
 innocent, ignorant, easy to control. And this observation 
 gave her her line: the thing to do with a man like that 
 was to get the jump on him, surprise him, keep him guess 
 ing. It was deliberately a part of her campaign that she 
 demanded the whole of the thousand dollars, and, for a 
 fortnight, disappeared with it. If he demanded explana 
 tions, she would refuse them as insolently as possible. 
 Whatever happened, she must bluff it out ; she must never 
 let him see that she was frightened. 
 
 4 
 
 The tears she saw in her father's eyes, when she'd kissed 
 him over their first breakfast, obliterated the fear that 
 she'd be shipped back to Pasadena as unsatisfactory; as 
 his forbearance, the evening before, had made it plain 
 that she wouldn't have to run away from him. They'd 
 "get on" all right. And the menage she found him in, 
 as well as the place he seemed to offer her in it, was far 
 beyond the wildest of her hopes. The "good flat" and 
 the two cars he had mentioned in his letter had suggested 
 no such establishment as this. Anson dignified, in 
 scrutable, sophisticated, and, implicitly at least, under her 
 orders was as incredible as if he'd come out of the mov 
 ies. And Burns, the chauffeur her chauffeur, in effect, 
 since her father seemed never to require his services by day, 
 was as good-looking and jolly and serviceable to her
 
 162 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 caprice as any of the young princes of Hollywood who 
 sometimes disguised themselves in jobs like that, for a lark 
 or a purpose. 
 
 The car she elected to do most of her driving in was not 
 the sumptuous monster in which Joe had taken her down 
 to dinner on that first evening, but a sport model of the 
 same famous make. Her first edict was that she be al 
 lowed to learn to drive it. They made daily cruises, she 
 and young Burns, of uncounted miles and unreckoned 
 hours. She even liked the country. The color and fresh 
 ness and variety of the foliage excited her, accustomed as 
 she was to the palmetto-punctuated monotony of southern 
 California. 
 
 Most of the time during those first few days, she felt 
 like Ali Baba when he had first said, "Open sesame!" 
 But, again like Ali Baba, she w r as to experience no comfort 
 able security in the possession of her treasure trove. 
 There were enigmas about her father's life she couldn't 
 solve ; alarms that kept her constantly on the alert. 
 
 She'd stumbled upon the first of these the morning Joe 
 took her to the office. He'd introduced her round promis 
 cuously, during the ostensible process of showing her over 
 the place, to all sorts of people, draughtsmen, clerks, 
 stenographers usually in a perfectly one-sided manner: 
 ' ' This is my daughter, Beatrice " ; of course, it didn 't mat 
 ter to her who they were. 
 
 But to this procedure there had been a striking excep 
 tion. On leading her up to one young woman, a creature 
 with some pretense to looks and a lot of red hair ; probably 
 some sort of head stenographer since she seemed to have an 
 office of her own, her father had said, "Beatrice, this is 
 Jennie MacArthur. ' ' He 'd said it, too, on a different note, 
 significantly somehow, and the significance seemed to be 
 that here was somebody who, for an unguessed reason, did 
 matter. He added, as if to put it beyond doubt, "I want 
 you two to get acquainted." 
 
 Beatrice, startled and feeling herself flushed, managed 
 a rather cavalier nod and an abbreviated "How do you
 
 THE CUB 163 
 
 do"; and then, though she hadn't meant to, extended her 
 hand. 
 
 The woman didn't act snubbed at all, though the in 
 tention, Beatrice thought, had been plain enough. Her 
 look was penetrating and deliberate. "We're very glad 
 you've come," she said. Then, turning to him her em 
 ployer, "Congratulations!" She didn't merely say it, 
 either; she put something into it, some special meaning. 
 
 There 'd been conversation disjointed, rather at ran 
 dom after this ; questions about the sort of trip she 'd had 
 across the continent ; a brief account of what they 'd done 
 the night before. 
 
 At last she said, amazingly: "There's nothing much 
 here this morning, Joe. Why don't you take the day 
 off?" 
 
 Though he vetoed the suggestion bruskly, there was 
 something he particularly wanted to get at he didn't 
 seem to feel that there 'd been anything officious about it. 
 And the "Joe" neither of them seemed to have been con 
 scious of, at all. Evidently it was what she called him. 
 
 Who was she? What was she? What was her hold 
 on him, and how had she managed to get it? 
 
 She thought her father acted, now, as if he'd still like 
 to stay longer, but was conscious of being turned out. He 
 said, "Well, we won't bother you any more, now, 
 but ..." 
 
 Jennie MacArthur nodded an easy farewell to the girl. 
 "Oh, we'll get acquainted all right in time," she said. 
 
 Beatrice was too wary to ask her father any questions, 
 and to his, that night at dinner what did she think of 
 Jennie MacArthur; how had she liked her? her replies 
 had been colorless enough, she thought, to give him no hint 
 of her surmise. 
 
 Casually, in the course of a driving lesson, she put a 
 question or two to Burns. Who was the good-looking 
 woman in the office, with red hair? 
 
 Miss MacArthur? Oh, yes, he knew her. Very pleas 
 ant she was, and smart, too, he guessed. He understood
 
 164 JOSEPH GEEER AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 she was secretary of the company. She lived up in Edge- 
 water. He'd driven her home once or twice when her 
 own car had been out of commission. 
 
 She had a car, then, Beatrice commented. 
 
 He qualified this. It was a flivver coupe. 
 
 "Home from where?" Beatrice asked. "Does she 
 ever come to our house ? ' ' 
 
 "I couldn't say as to that," he answered, and it struck 
 her that his manner was a little artificially discreet. Not 
 even the thrill of learning to run the big car could drive 
 the problem out of her mind. 
 
 But it was pretty well supplanted, a few days later, by 
 another, more serious. Her father, as they were leaving 
 the breakfast table, said to Anson: "Mr. Craven and his 
 sister are dining with us to-night. No one else." 
 
 She perceived, from the moment of real attention he gave 
 the butler's question as to what wine they should have, 
 that the dinner wasn't quite the casual thing his offhand 
 announcement of it was meant to make it appear. (Wine 
 hadn't been an item at their dinners, nor even, since that 
 first night at the Blackstone, cocktails. Her father helped 
 himself to whisky out of a carafe, but never offered any 
 to her.) She asked, when he was on the point of going 
 off without telling her, who the Cravens were. 
 
 "Why, you met Henry, that day at the office," he said. 
 "He's treasurer of the company." 
 
 "Was he the smallish man with eye-glasses?" she asked. 
 And, at his nod, "Is he a particular friend of yours?" 
 
 There was something she took as not quite serious about 
 his answer. "Sure he is. Henry and I have cottoned up 
 in great style. ' ' He hesitated, then went on, more soberly : 
 "His sister Margaret's a mighty fine woman. You want 
 to make a good impression on her." At the door, he 
 turned back to say: "Better wear your little blue dress, 
 I guess. More the thing for a small family dinner than 
 the red one." 
 
 She was in two minds, during the day, whether she 
 wouldn 't defy him here, by way of establishing a principle
 
 THE CUB 165 
 
 she was in danger of allowing to lapse. But a misgiving, 
 picked up she knew not where, about that rose-colored cos 
 tume, which had looked so desirably smart in the Market 
 Street shop, led her to follow her father 's suggestion. For 
 a few minutes after their guests arrived, she was glad she 
 had done so. She sniffed danger in the wind, and until 
 it had passed she didn't want her hands tied by a quarrel, 
 no matter how trivial, with her father. 
 
 She couldn't have said just what it was that made her 
 uneasy, but her pitiless young eyes saw, beneath Margaret 's 
 surface suavity, something haggard. It betrayed itself 
 in the corners of her eyelids and in the tightness of her 
 throat muscles. It could be heard, sometimes, in the wire 
 edge of a word addressed, usually, to her brother, or 
 when, with what was meant to sound like pure good 
 humor, she told stories at his expense. She was old and 
 tired and, for some reason only to be guessed, not far 
 from desperate. 
 
 But, all the more for that, she was formidable. Over 
 the cocktails in the drawing-room she had addressed her 
 host as Joe, but without quite Jennie MacArthur's un 
 consciousness. A gleam in his eye told the girl that he 
 had noted it, too, with interest and perhaps with pleasure. 
 So it must have been the first time. The woman hadn't 
 done it idly; nothing she did was idle. 
 
 Beatrice contented herself with a single sip at her glass ; 
 then carried it over to her father. ''I ought to have done 
 this, last time," she admitted confidentially, and he 
 squeezed her arm in approval. But when Margaret took a 
 cigarette, she helped herself to one also. She 'd had a fort 
 night of assiduous practise and decided she could safely 
 venture. He laughed at this bit of bravado, but didn't 
 seem displeased. She felt it was a good beginning; her 
 father's darling and the complete hostess were the two 
 fronts she wished to present, a double warning to tres 
 passers. 
 
 And as the evening advanced, she gained confidence that 
 she was succeeding with both. She sat very straight, in
 
 166 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 the high-backed armchair which faced her father's, and 
 felt herself satisfactorily in the part (the movies have their 
 uses, after all. She'd learned a lot from Pauline Fred 
 erick and Elsie Ferguson). Anson fortified her somehow; 
 it was the first time she'd felt him clearly as an ally. 
 But the great thing was her father's look. Something 
 came into it, whenever he turned it upon her, that quick 
 ened her heartbeat. As long as he went on looking at her 
 like that she was in no danger from anybody. 
 
 Their hour in the drawing-room after dinner was really 
 rather jolly, and one of her few conversational ventures, 
 made in the course of it, proved a distinct success. Miss 
 Craven had been admiring the big Sorolla, when Beatrice 
 asked, "Did you ever hear of a painter named Carmichael 
 Blair?" 
 
 They'd all heard of him, it seemed. He'd had a show, 
 only a few months earlier, at the Institute. But why had 
 she asked? 
 
 "Some of his pictures are a little like that, I think," 
 she said. "They sort of sing, just like that does." 
 
 In that moment she decided that, without reserve, she 
 liked Henry Craven, just for the way his face lighted up 
 over this remark. "You're perfectly right," he told her; 
 "there's a real resemblance, in just that quality." He 
 added, "Blair lived out in California for a while, didn't 
 he?" 
 
 She nodded. "He tried to teach me to paint, once. 
 But I wasn't much good at it." She had the satisfaction 
 of feeling that she'd said that exactly right. 
 
 So the evening summed up to a real success. Her com 
 ments on their guests, after they 'd gone, were enthusiastic ; 
 genuine, as they concerned Henry, and so nearly in the 
 same tone as they concerned Margaret that she didn't be 
 lieve her father could tell the difference. 
 
 But the little lunch Margaret had for her, a week later, 
 didn't go off so well, and she came home from it de 
 pressed, vaguely resentful, and with her first misgiving 
 of the woman's design upon her father wide awake again.
 
 THE CUB 167 
 
 Margaret 's flat had been a shock to her. She 'd assumed 
 that these people were rich, in the circle of big bankers 
 her father had spoken of in his letter. But they couldn't 
 be; they were poor; the flat was small, the furniture old- 
 fashioned, and the only servant in evidence might have 
 been one in her mother's endless succession out in Pasa 
 dena. She wondered, uneasily, if her father had been 
 taken in. 
 
 The shabbiness of the setting in which she was revealed 
 didn't lessen at all her hostess's assurance; heightened it, 
 if anything. She seemed cooler and harder, as well as 
 somehow more mechanical, than on the night she and 
 her brother had come to dinner. Beatrice was the first 
 of the guests to arrive and during those few minutes while 
 they were alone she had the uncomfortable sense of being 
 under examination; on trial to have it decided whether 
 she would do! The questions themselves were friendly 
 enough. How did she amuse herself during the long, 
 hours her father spent at the office? (Margaret knew 
 how long they were, because of her brother.) Had she 
 any trouble finding her way about? Had she been shop 
 ping ? Margaret w r ould go with her if she liked, almost any 
 day, and show her where well, the right sort of things, 
 were to be found. One could waste a lot of time as well 
 as a lot of money in a strange city, making all those dis 
 coveries for one's self. No, there was no harm in the 
 questions; only the girl's answers seemed, always, some 
 how, to give her away. 
 
 The arrival of the other guests didn't improve matters, 
 either. There were only two of them (it wasn't a party, 
 Margaret explained), young girls of aboutxher own age. 
 After the buzzer had announced them in the vestibule, her 
 hostess teld her, swiftly, w r ho they were. One was Dor 
 othy Williamson, whose father had gone in with hers in 
 the new flax business She had got back, only the week 
 before, from her school, Thornycroft, in the East. The 
 other was her particular friend, Sylvia Stannard. Syl 
 via's people had a place at Lake Geneva, but her brother
 
 168 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 had lately bought a farm, out on the Elgin road, in which 
 she was taking a passionate interest, and her conversation, 
 unless she was summarily dealt with, was likely to be, 
 heavily agricultural. "If she talks about Duroc- Jerseys" 
 Margaret finished the sentence though the two girls were 
 now coming into the room "don't think she means cows. 
 She caught me that way, the other day." 
 
 From the first moment, in the mere acknowledgment of 
 the introduction, they disconcerted Beatrice, though she 
 couldn't be sure they meant to. At least, they didn't 
 sneer nor toss their heads nor turn their shoulders upon 
 her, the way the thing was done in the movies. But she 
 couldn't get in step with them. Their easy, rather jolly 
 talk gave her no handles to hold on by. Miss Craven, every 
 now and then, threw her what was plainly meant for a 
 life-line, but when she tried to take these leads and ven 
 tured out of her shell of silence, it was into a vacuum. 
 They were both younger than she, she decided, and neither 
 was as much dressed-up. She was confident that she 
 knew more about a lot of things than they did. "When a 
 telephone call took their hostess out of the room, for 
 quite a long while, the vacuum got higher than ever. 
 They didn't talk about men at all, even with this oppor 
 tunity, and Beatrice's attempt to introduce the topic was, 
 as her instinct had warned her it would be, a failure. 
 
 "I think Henry Craven's a peach!" Beatrice had vol 
 unteered, apropos of something that had been said about 
 Margaret. "I had a lot of fun with him at dinner the 
 other night." Then, uneasily aware that both the o f her 
 girls were looking a bit blank, she added, "You know him, 
 don't you?" 
 
 "Rather!" the Williamson girl answered. "He's my 
 cousin. Yes, he's a lamb." 
 
 Beatrice flushed and looked away; it was as if a door 
 had been shut in her face. 
 
 Later, after Margaret had come back, the talk veered to 
 plans for the summer. Margaret and Portia Novelli were 
 taking the Aldrichs' cottage on Cape Cod (Portia's hus-
 
 THE CUB 169 
 
 band was going to be busy all summer at Ravinia). Mar 
 garet said in a casual but friendly way to Beatrice, "You 
 ought to come down and see us. Get acquainted with the 
 Atlantic Ocean as well as the Pacific. It isn't so big, but 
 it's rather nice." 
 
 Sylvia meant to spend most of the summer all of it, 
 unless her mother got too unpleasant about it with the 
 boys on the farm. 
 
 Dorothy yawned. "I've a hunch that we're going to 
 have a little barytone in our home this summer. We met 
 him last week, in New York. He's signed up for the Ra 
 vinia season. He doesn't speak any English, and Violet's 
 French is rather funny round the edges, so I suppose I'll 
 be kept standing by most of the time, to see that they 
 don't get tangled up." 
 
 "Is Violet your sister?" Beatrice asked. 
 
 "Mother," said Dorothy, and Sylvia giggled. 
 
 "Really, Dorothy, that's outrageous," Margaret re 
 monstrated. 
 
 "Well, she's the one that makes me do it," was Dorothy's 
 retort. 
 
 There broke over Beatrice a wave of something like 
 homesickness. Home had never been a place she'd con 
 sciously loved. She'd never found much sympathy or 
 security in it ; nor anything better than meager and un 
 satisfying spiritual fare in the world that surrounded it. 
 But its inhabitants and their codes and standards were, 
 after all, familiar and intelligible to her. These people 
 were aliens. They left her out, not so much from malice 
 as from the lack of any connective medium. She glanced 
 round, desperately, at the clock; it would be almost an 
 hour before Burns would call for her with the car. Luck 
 ily, the other guests went earlier, and she experienced a 
 certain relief at being left alone with Miss Craven. 
 
 Just as she was leaving, the invitation for a visit to the 
 Cape Cod cottage was repeated, this time in a way to 
 show that it was meant and must be, in some fashion, dealt 
 with.
 
 170 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 "Why, it's frightfully kind of you," Beatrice said. "I 
 don't think father means me to go away again as soon as 
 this. I 've just come, you see. But I '11 speak to him about 
 it." 
 
 "Do!" said Margaret. "If he's going to be away him 
 self any time this summer, up in the Northwest where 
 they're building their flax factories, it might just fit in." 
 
 5 
 
 Beatrice awaited his return from the office that evening 
 with an emotion that was more filial and domestic than 
 anything she had felt toward him before. She had never, 
 from the first moment, been indifferent to him. Her 
 scheme for keeping the whip hand of him by an alteration 
 of cajolery and defiance had fallen to pieces when he re 
 jected her first proffered kiss and told her why. He'd 
 frightened her since then, he'd quickened her heartbeat, 
 he'd made himself, once more, the center of her thoughts 
 and dreams; he'd given her, in some ecstatic moments, a 
 vertiginous sense of conquest. But until she came home, 
 depressed and forlorn, from Margaret Craven's lunch, she 
 had never waited for him as an inseparable ally, a bringer 
 of security and confidence. 
 
 She'd hoped he would be early something he'd said 
 that morning had led her to think he might be, but his 
 regular time passed and the better part of an hour after 
 that before she heard Anson letting him in, and by then 
 she was on the verge of tears. Unluckily, too, he came to 
 her full of something some idea or plan or triumph of 
 his own. He was very jovial about it, whatever it was, 
 and the hug and the kiss he gave her, though vigorous and 
 enthusiastic, lacked the tenderness she, for the first time, 
 wanted. She released herself with a movement of petu 
 lance which caught his attention. 
 
 "What's the matter with you?" he asked. "Getting 
 lonesome ? ' ' 
 
 The tone of the question, good-natured as it was, didn't 
 invite confidences. She felt no real concern in it. So
 
 THE CUB 171 
 
 she scolded him for being late; erected his casual predic 
 tion of that morning into a promise, that he'd be home 
 early. 
 
 "I'm sorry about that, Trix," he said. (This was the 
 nickname she'd elected.) "I started out all right, but I 
 got caught by something unexpected. Damn unexpected ! ' ' 
 he added, mostly to himself. 
 
 But she heard it, and with a resentful glance made sure 
 that the unexpected thing had still the principal place in 
 his thoughts. She wouldn't give him the satisfaction of 
 asking him what it was. 
 
 "I'll make it up to you now, though," he went on. 
 "What can you think of that it would be fun to do? I 
 guess we've seen most of the shows, but if you want to 
 repeat on any of them, I'm game. And there's still time 
 to go down-town to dinner. "We won't stop to dress; you 
 look great, just as you are." 
 
 "You hate that red dress of mine, I know you do," 
 she said. "I guess you're ashamed of me in it." Her 
 voice broke over that and betrayed the fact that she was 
 crying. 
 
 There was a long moment before he made any response 
 at all. She had a sense of him, for she didn 't turn to look, 
 standing unnaturally still and not looking at her. Then, 
 without warning, for he moved lightly and the rugs were 
 soft, she felt his hands upon her. Of her weak resistance 
 and her broken, "No, let me alone," he took no account at 
 all, but picked her up bodily, carried her to his special 
 big chair and sat down in it with her in his lap. 
 
 "Put your head down," he said, in his vibrant voice, 
 "and cry as long as you like. And then, when you're 
 ready, tell me all about it." 
 
 She didn't want to cry any more indeed, surprise at 
 being taken up like that had checked her tears, but 
 neither did she want to talk. She had, for just that 
 moment, no sense of grievance, against him or against the 
 world. Everything else was swallowed up in the sensa 
 tion of his comprehensive embrace ; nothing even remotely
 
 172 
 
 like that had, in the whole length of her memory, hap 
 pened to her before. 
 
 This didn't last long. Her consciousness, so deeply- 
 submerged in this new element, came floating to the sur 
 face again. She was aware of the prickle of his beard 
 upon her wet face ; she wondered if he was smiling. 
 
 "I expect it's just lonesomeness that made you feel that 
 way, ' ' he said, and she noted, even then, something forced 
 in his tone of reassurance, as if he were managing a small 
 child. ''You've been sitting around by yourself all day, 
 with nothing to do and nobody to talk to. We'll have to 
 tackle that problem, somehow." 
 
 She told him, without raising her head, that this was a 
 bad guess. It hadn't been an unoccupied day, at all. 
 She'd gone to a party. 
 
 "Margaret Craven's lunch," he said. "I know." (She 
 was sure, though, that he'd forgotten all about it.) "But 
 I guess you can feel lonesomer at a party than anywhere 
 else, if things don't go just right. What went wrong this 
 time?" 
 
 "Oh, nothing much," she said, over a catch that had 
 come back into her breathing. She wished he wouldn't 
 ask her questions; just go on, holding her still. Again 
 she felt, from the movement of his beard, that he was 
 smiling. 
 
 ' ' Did you wear the wrong sort of hat ? " he asked. 
 
 "I guess so," she agreed dully. "She as good as told 
 me so." 
 
 "Oh, damn!" she heard Joe murmur. Then, with an 
 edge in his voice, "You don't mean she was really im 
 polite to you, unfriendly?" 
 
 "Oh, no; she was all right," Beatrice told him. "She 
 offered to take me shopping with her. Show me where 
 I could get 'the right sort of things,' as if she could see 
 plain enough mine weren't. I suppose that's what you 
 think, too. I wish you would go shopping with me." 
 
 "What makes you think I know anything about women's 
 clothes ? " he demanded, but in a tone she recognized as not
 
 THE CUB 173 
 
 serious. It had a joke in it for his private enjoyment. Of 
 course, he'd probably bought clothes for all sorts of women, 
 but that wasn't the sort of thing he'd expect her to guess. 
 
 "You want to take up that offer of hers," he said, after 
 a silence. "She's a mighty well-dressed woman herself, 
 and she hasn't had much to do it on, I guess. I'm sure 
 she meant it in a friendly way. And she could give you 
 the right dope about lots of things." 
 
 "I don't care whether it's the right dope or not," she 
 persisted. "I don't want her telling me what to wear. 
 I want you to. ' ' She slipped her free arm round his mas 
 sive shoulder. "Will you go shopping with me, dad?" 
 she said. ' ' You '11 know what you like anyhow, and that 's 
 all I care about." 
 
 He hugged her up tighter at that. ' ' All right, ' ' he said, 
 "it's a bargain. "We'll go some day, the first chance we 
 get." There was silence for a while after that, but he 
 hadn't, as she hoped, done with the luncheon. "Did she 
 have anything else to say?" he asked, and the girl per 
 versely asked, "Who?" 
 
 "Why, Margaret Craven." 
 
 She thought he'd hesitated a little over the use of the 
 name. "Oh, nothing much," she told him. 
 
 He waited for more; then he asked who else was at the 
 party. 
 
 It wasn't a real party, she said. There were only two 
 other girls besides herself. One of them was named Stan- 
 nard Sylvia Stannard; she pretended to be crazy about 
 farming. And the other was Dorothy Williamson. 
 
 "What's she like?" The question was asked on so dif 
 ferent a note, with such an appearance of personal con 
 cern, that Beatrice sat erect and looked at him. "Why," 
 he explained, "she's Williamson's daughter, that's gone 
 into business with me. He's got a picture of her, a chalk, 
 on the wall of his office. Very pretty girl I'd have said 
 from that. Anyhow, I'd like you to make friends with 
 her." 
 
 "Well, I 'm not likely to, ' ' she said. ' ' She 's a little up-
 
 174 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 stage snip, that 's what she is. And she isn 't pretty, that 
 is, not very. I got enough of her to-day to last me a long 
 time. ' ' She rose from his knees at that, and walked away, 
 noting that he had made no effort to detain her. 
 
 "Look here, Trix," he said, at last, "we want to get 
 things straight. Don't want to make any mistakes right 
 at the start. I think it's a safe bet that that girl will 
 treat you all right when she knows who you are: after 
 her mother has had a talk with her, anyhow. And she 
 probably is all right, though she may be a little high and 
 mighty. They're all that, one way and another. But, 
 with them, the point is, it isn't a bluff. They really are 
 like that, not putting it on. They know they're solid, 
 and they don't give a damn, for anybody. 
 
 "Take those Williamsons. I didn't understand 'em till 
 I saw w r here they lived. They've got one of the most 
 beautiful places I ever saw, up at Lake Forest. Acres and 
 acres of it, I don't know how big it is. And a house as 
 big as a hotel. But it might be a five-room cottage for 
 anything they care. They have things as they like; do 
 and dress as they please. There's no one to tell 'em what 
 they shall do or what they shan't. 
 
 ' ' Well, we 're going to be like that ourselves. We are now 
 only they haven't found it out, altogether. Some day, 
 we'll have a place like Williamson's. I'm not as rich as 
 he is now, but I'm on the way to be. I expect there 're 
 some of them we '11 find pretty dull and stuffy, but there 're 
 others that aren't. I've found that out already. On the 
 whole, once they see we're inside the fence, they're a per 
 fectly friendly lot. And as good a lot to settle down among 
 as you'll find anywhere. Well, and that's what we're 
 going to do, when I 've polished off this flax business. ' ' 
 
 The girl stirred, impatiently. She was standing at the 
 window, looking out over the lake where a bank of heavy 
 clouds was coming up with a summer shower. 
 
 Her father rose and came toward her. * ' How does that 
 strike you?" he asked. 
 
 "I suppose it's all right to settle down some time," she
 
 THE CUB 175 
 
 said. "Only that isn't what I'd hoped I'd do with you. 
 I thought maybe we'd go off somewhere together, ex 
 ploring like you used to. Down in South America. I 
 found some letters once, that you wrote mother. Long 
 ago, that was, when I was a little girl, but I've never for 
 gotten the things you told about. She'd have hated it all, 
 of course, but I'd love it. Riding over mountain passes, 
 and crossing canyons on rope bridges. Finding out 
 things; seeing things nobody else had seen. I wouldn't 
 be afraid anywhere, with you." 
 
 He was silent at that, and, from a glance she stole at 
 his face, thoughtful. For a breath-arresting moment, she 
 believed he was entertaining her plea seriously, but, at the 
 end of it, he laughed. "Out in the middle of that," he 
 said, with a gesture toward the lake, "with a gale blow 
 ing up, and a rotten little leaky dug-out. Paddling for 
 your cheap life ; baling. And then a night on shore, with 
 out a fire, nothing to make it w r ith and not daring to risk 
 it if you had." He drew a deep breath. "No, this is 
 better, when you've got your grip on it." 
 
 He turned to her. "We'll travel, Trix. "Well travel 
 a lot. Don't you worry about that. We'll go to places 
 I've never seen, any more than you. Paris, and Madrid, 
 and a place up in the mountains, called St. Moritz, where 
 they have winter sports. We'll have a grand time, little 
 girl, as soon as I dare take my hands off this thing. For 
 a while, I '11 have to stick, tight. And that '11 give you time 
 to learn the game. 
 
 "Their game, d'you see, Trix? Because they've got 
 one, and it has to be learned. You'll be able to play it, 
 when you get the hang of it, better than those kids you saw 
 to-day. They were born with it in their mouths; they 
 don't even know it's a game. If they ever had to learn a 
 different one, they'd be lost. But you and I aren't like 
 that. We can show 'em a few things they don't know, when 
 the time comes. Well, how about it? Is that a bargain?" 
 
 Anson had come in to announce dinner, and was wait 
 ing respectfully and rather spectrally, in the doorway,
 
 176 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 for his employer to finish speaking. A serious reply 
 wasn't possible, just then. "Oh, I suppose so," she said, 
 but without any idea that, in doing so, she'd signed a 
 treaty. 
 
 But they hadn't been alone over the coffee cups two 
 minutes before her father, reverting to the abandoned 
 theme- proceeded on the assumption that she had. ''I'm 
 glad you see it that way, Trix. It's no disgrace to be 
 ignorant of things you care nothing about, things that 
 can neither please you nor hurt you. But a thing that 
 can please you or a thing that can hurt you, you want to 
 know all about. Take this society chicken-feed. It may 
 not seem worth while; it isn't until it can get you some 
 where you want to go, or keep you from getting there. If 
 it can, it's important. I've had to study etiquette, of lots 
 of different kinds. My life's depended on it, more than 
 once, in some of the qiieer places I 've been. On my know 
 ing how to do the right thing with a mouthful of grub, for 
 instance. 
 
 "Of course, with me, now, it's different. They know 
 I'm hard-boiled, and they suspect I'm dangerous. That's 
 why they put Henry Craven into the company: to watch 
 me. Henry! He's all right, at that. They know, some 
 of 'em, that I 'm a better man than they are, and they like 
 me to be what they call 'unconventional.' They have to 
 like it, because they know I can get away with it. 
 
 "But you, I want you to learn their game. You can 
 do it; I've seen that, already. But it'll mean watching 
 'em, learning their tricks. I'd thought of sending you 
 for a year to the same school the Williamson girl goes to, 
 but it seems they 're full. ' ' 
 
 "It's lucky for them they are," she commented. "I've 
 had all the school I want." 
 
 "Well, we can consider that later," he said. "But 
 for this summer, there isn't a person who could teach you 
 more or who knows the game better than Henry's sister." 
 He added casually, "We're to go up to the Williamsons' 
 Sunday. That'll give you a notion what they're like."
 
 THE CUB 177 
 
 The girl was sullenly aware that she was being managed, 
 "Miss Craven's going away next week," she said. 
 
 "Yes, so Henry told me." He was apparently thinking 
 it out as he went along. "You know, I believe if I gave 
 him a tip. she 'd be glad to ask you to come down and visit 
 her. She's got a cottage on the seashore, and she'll prob 
 ably have lots of room. You see, 111 have to be away a 
 good deal myself, this summer, up in the Northwest; get 
 ting ready for our flax and getting it in. How would that 
 strike you?" 
 
 Anger was the first thing she felt; an outraged sense 
 that she'd been betrayed, conspired about, between this 
 woman and her father. His pretended candor infuriated 
 her. She didn't answer his question. "When she spoke, 
 after a dark silence, it was to ask one of her own. 
 
 "Dad, are you going to marry her?" 
 
 The shot told, surprisingly. His head went back under 
 the impact of it. "Marry? Who?" he growled. 
 
 She took that for rhetoric, and waited. 
 
 Presently his face cleared, into a dazzling grin. "You 
 mean Margaret Craven ? Is that what you 've been worry 
 ing about?" 
 
 Still watching him intently, she nodded. 
 
 "Not till hell freezes over!" he assured her seriously. 
 "Probably not then. But I'd like to know what put it in 
 your head." 
 
 Still she wasn't convinced to the point of laying all her 
 cards on the table; he wasn't showing her all his, she was 
 sure. "I didn't see why she should be so friendly when 
 she doesn't like me much, offering to help me get my 
 clothes, and all. Nor how you could be so sure she'd ask 
 me to visit her." 
 
 "Well, it's simple enough when you know," he ex 
 plained. "She's worried about Henry. He supports her, 
 I guess. I don't think they've got anything else. And 
 she's afraid I'll lead him astray; w r ants to keep an eye on 
 him. So she has to keep in with me. And the 
 easiest way to keep in with me is by making up to you.
 
 178 JOSEPH GREER AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 She's a clever woman; she's had to be, I guess. Besides, 
 I think she does like you. She seemed to the other 
 night." 
 
 Beatrice pushed back her chair and rose. "All right, 
 dad," she said, "I'll be good. I'll go with her to Cape 
 Cod, or wherever it is. ' ' She paused to shoot an impudent 
 grin at him. "You see, she invited me this afternoon. 
 Made me promise to ask you if I might go." 
 
 Then, laughing over his look of blank discomfiture, she 
 came round the table and kissed him. But it wasn't the 
 sort of kiss she'd had waiting for him at five o'clock that 
 afternoon.
 
 CHAPTER FIVE 
 
 A DETOUR 
 
 SIMONE GREVILLE once spoke of a group of women, which 
 had included Violet, as perpetual tasters of sensations, 
 mostly mental; passive epicures, waiting to be made to 
 feel. She said she didn't know whether their precocity 
 had exhausted them before they were ripe or whether they 
 had too many ideas to leave room for anything else, but 
 she'd come to believe that an astonishing proportion of 
 them, anyhow, went through life passionless, frigid, miss 
 ing the groat thing altogether. 
 
 As applied to Violet, this was pretty good diagnosis, if 
 by Violet one means merely what Violet meant to her 
 self the only Violet she knew or, until her thirty-ninth 
 year, suspected the existence of. 
 
 When, on that notable Sunday morning in May, she'd 
 had her first taste of Joe Greer, she'd consciously ad 
 mitted nothing really had been aware of nothing that 
 differentiated the experience from a series of forays to the 
 pantry that went back twenty years, to her first experi 
 ment upon her boy cousin, Henry, undertaken during a 
 summer tour the Prince and Craven families had made 
 among the French chateaux. 
 
 Her experiment with John "Williamson, while it got 
 from the fact of their marriage a social significance that 
 was revolutionary and, she assumed, permanent, was not, 
 in its psychological aspect, very much more important 
 than some of the others. The first weeks of marriage had 
 
 179
 
 180 
 
 given her some appalling hours, of fright, of revulsion and 
 of a wildly incredulous disappointment. But the subsi 
 dence of all this had been an acquiescence, a little ironic 
 but near enough contentment to pass for it. So that was 
 what it was like ! Very well ; now she knew. 
 
 John developed, under her spirited pruning, into, really, 
 an old dear ; jolly, just a bit outrageous now and then, in 
 dulgent always and sometimes sympathetic. She had an 
 immense pride in his weight and position in the com 
 munity, and she was deeply impressed by the discovery, 
 once in a while, of something she couldn't make him do. 
 She was "terribly fond of him." 
 
 He was easily the most important item in her land 
 scape, but he'd long been, also, the most familiar one. A 
 new item especially if strange, almost monstrous, as Joe 
 Greer appeared to be was, naturally, a subject for in 
 vestigation. John, thank goodness, understood this per 
 fectly. It would have been terribly silly of him, of course, 
 to make a fuss, though there were husbands, Violet was 
 well aware, who did. 
 
 Sophisticated as she believed herself to be and as, in the 
 true sense of the word, she was, yet, in the valid expe 
 rience of life, she was deficient to a degree that might fairly 
 be called perverse if her case were not so common among 
 carefully nurtured American women. What she had told 
 Joe, about going through life waiting for a door to open 
 and coming to the conclusion that there was no door to the 
 thing she was in, had been, so far as she knew, merely a 
 part of her technique, a useful item in her standard reper 
 tory, which could be counted upon to get almost any 
 man, even the most reluctant, started. She hadn't the 
 dimmest notion how profoundly true it was. 
 
 She didn't feel at all sure she liked the taste of Joe. 
 She found his realistic moments unpleasantly acrid; his 
 egotism, naive; and his prudery, for she'd been aware that 
 she'd sometimes shocked him, ridiculous. She admitted 
 the attractiveness of his looks, his surprisingly good 
 speech, his vigor and freshness, and the queer miscellany
 
 A DETOUR 181 
 
 that formed his background: the jungle, and the musical 
 comedy stage; that he bought pictures, and had never 
 been to Europe, and knew Sorolla. This was how her 
 palate reported it, about as a boy's palate reports his 
 first taste of strong drink. She didn 't reckon on anything 
 in her, behind her palate and capable of overruling its 
 report, being concerned in the matter. But even on that 
 first morning, she'd been forced to ignore as irrelevant 
 some rather queer sensations and impulses she'd had. 
 
 It annoyed her to learn that Joe was a married man with 
 a grown daughter; she lost her temper with John, who 
 told her about it. "He's probably got five or six wives," 
 she rapped out. "One in every port, like a sailor. I 
 suppose one of them is trying to put him in jail and he's 
 come to you. And I'd bet you've said you'd help him 
 out!" 
 
 She would barely listen to John's detailed explanation 
 that Greer's matrimonial difficulties were, comparatively 
 speaking, respectable, and it did not in the least placate 
 her when she heard. ' ' Respectable ! ' ' she fumed. ' ' That 's 
 the beastly second-rate vulgarity of it. "Why do they think 
 they have to marry those people?" 
 
 When she heard about Beatrice, and Joe's wish to en 
 ter her in a smart school, preferably Thornycroft, where 
 Dorothy was, she fairly boiled over. What affair was it 
 of his, or his daughter's, where Dodo went to school? 
 How did he even know of the school unless John had been 
 babbling about it? But of course John had been! Given 
 the man all the details, no doubt, Miss Hood's address, 
 himself as a reference, everything! 
 
 "What's the harm if I did?" he asked. "He couldn't 
 get her into that school in a hundred years; not in ten, 
 anyhow. And next year's all that matters to us." It 
 wasn't this argument, however, that had the effect of 
 pulling his wife up short; it was his look of curiosity at 
 her. What was there for her to be so disturbed about? 
 
 She, herself, couldn't understand why she'd been so 
 bitter about it nor why she went on thinking and feeling
 
 182 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 that way. She tried to make out that she was angry with 
 herself for being angry, but the intricacies of this abstrac 
 tion were a little beyond her. Preposterously, what 
 warmed her into a friendlier feeling for the man was the 
 outrageous surmise that the girl mightn't be his daughter, 
 after all, but some little fluff he was trying to palm off 
 upon them, tinder a cloak no one would think to look be 
 neath. She found this notion rather entertaining, though 
 she didn't take it seriously. Well, she didn't take him 
 seriously, either! 
 
 She didn't pass it on to John, for she had a clear pre 
 monition that he wouldn't think it funny. She didn't sup 
 pose Margaret Craven would think it funny, either, but 
 this didn't prevent her mentioning it to Margaret, ex 
 perimentally. 
 
 Margaret took it in the most surprising way; fairly 
 flew at her, over it. 
 
 "That's like you, Violet," she said, when, after a tight 
 silence, she spoke at all. Her voice was brittle with anger, 
 and her eyes were dry with it. "How long have you been 
 telling that sweet little story?" 
 
 The mere impact of the charge took Violet's breath. 
 "I haven't been telling it at all," she protested. "I only 
 just thought of it. It struck me as amusing, and I said 
 it." 
 
 "It will be frightfully amusing for her, won't it?" 
 There was no quality of reflection in Margaret's voice, 
 not even the thinnest veneer to give it a surface. ' ' To find 
 a story like that going round ! A young girl, alone as she 
 is; even her father a stranger to her." 
 
 "It isn't going around," Violet reiterated. Then, with 
 a short laugh, as she recovered her balance : " Or if it is, 
 it's not my doings. But it's a natural enough thing for 
 anybody to think of, who knows what he's like. As a 
 possibility, anyhow. After all, how do you know it isn't 
 true?" 
 
 "I met her last night," Margaret said. "We had din 
 ner there, Henry and I. She happens to look like him, in
 
 A DETOUE 183 
 
 the first place. He had a photograph of her before she 
 came; you could even tell from that. So, if you want a 
 story," she went on, after a breathless pause, "you'd bet 
 ter make it that she's illegitimate. It isn't likely that she 
 brought her mother's marriage certificate with her." 
 
 Astonishment over the onslaught had, so far, kept Vio 
 let from feeling anything else. Now, however, she was 
 angry, too. ''Do you mind telling me," she asked, 
 "what's Driven you the extraordinary idea that I want a 
 story! What you think I've got to do with it, from first 
 to last?" 
 
 Margaret laughed. "Oh, if you've taken him on, 
 yourself, of course a grown daughter turning up is a 
 nuisance. ' ' 
 
 "I see," said Violet reflectively. And then, with a 
 laugh, as she rose to get a cigarette, "Well, I guess we've 
 pretty well covered that." 
 
 Margaret matched her tone. "I should think we had! 
 I feel as if I'd been in the movies. My cook left this 
 morning; I suppose that's what started it. Have you 
 heard that Paula Wollaston is going to sing at Ravinia, 
 after all? She's left John down in North Carolina and 
 come back for rehearsals. Going to open the season in 
 Tosca, Wallace Hood says." 
 
 Violet caught the ball expertly, and tossed it back. 
 ' ' Oh, I know the man who will be singing with her. Four- 
 nier his name is. Dodo and I met him in New York. 
 Frightfully distinguished-looking, and attractive. ' ' 
 
 They went on and ate their prearranged lunch together 
 as if nothing had happened. But just before they parted, 
 Margaret went back, firmly and with a hand as steady as 
 a surgeon's, to the focus of their quarrel. 
 
 ' ' She 's really rather nice, Joe Greer 's daughter. Not 
 quite so much a cat in a strange garret as he was afraid 
 she was going to be. He wants me to look -after her a little, 
 and I'm glad to do it. Mind if I ask Dodo to lunch with 
 her some day?" 
 
 To Violet, the purport of this was as plain as it was as-
 
 184 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 tonishing. If Margaret had said, in so many words, "I 
 think of marrying this man. I've made a start toward 
 getting him. So, if you want to play fair, you'll let him 
 alone," she couldn't have made it clearer. As a decent, 
 married middle-aged member of society, Violet had to 
 acknowledge the reasonableness of this request. In some 
 moods, she even accorded a tentative half-approval of the 
 plan. If Joe was in the way to make a serious fortune 
 out of this linen process that looked so good to John, he'd 
 be a pretty good matrimonial risk, as good as Margaret 
 would ever get a chance to take. 
 
 Violet wanted her married. She was still a social as 
 set, for a difficult dinner or a week-end party; but ten 
 years from now, a little tighter drawn, her wit oftener 
 mordant than refreshingly acidulous, one wouldn't know 
 what to do with her. In such a marriage Mar 
 garet, fastidious as she was, would, of course, 
 loathe the man himself. Her first unguarded 
 comments upon him had really been funny. It 
 wasn't likely the instinct of a lifetime could have changed 
 enough in two or three months to make him seem, per 
 sonally, desirable. It was that prospective fortune Mar 
 garet was banking on, a line of reasoning which justified 
 Violet, the first chance she got, in putting the project be 
 fore John. 
 
 Her opening startled him, for she began by asking if 
 the linen business was really a frightfully good thing, and 
 he jumped to the surmise that Joe was trying to unload his 
 stock on some of her friends. It took a minute or two to 
 get him back on the rails. 
 
 "It's him I want to know about," she insisted. 
 "Whether he's going to get frightfully rich out of it, or 
 not. Because Margaret means to marry him." 
 
 Again it took her a few minutes to get him calmed to 
 the listening point. 
 
 Margaret wasn't eloping with him this afternoon; she 
 wasn't even engaged to him. "I didn't say she was go 
 ing to marry him ; I said she meant to, when the time came.
 
 A DETOUR 185 
 
 It's a plan of hers, that's all. Only I thought you might 
 as well know." 
 
 Let down, he swung the other way and treated the idea 
 jocularly, as another of her numerous mare 's nests. ' ' How 
 did you find out about it? Did she tell you herself?" 
 
 " Practically," Violet asserted, and went on with con 
 firmatory details. Margaret had been seeing quite a lot 
 of him; she'd known about his daughter before any of 
 the rest of them, before the girl came on at all ; had seen 
 a photograph of her; they'd dined there again last night, 
 she and Henry, to meet her. "She says the girl's rather 
 nice and she's going to take her up. She's asking Dodo 
 for a lunch for her, next week. Doesn't that look as if 
 she meant something? And if he's going to be really 
 rich, ' ' Violet watched her husband intently as she ventured 
 this, "it might not be such a bad thing for her." 
 
 She could see that he was upset by the idea, though he 
 went on proclaiming his total disbelief in it. A fine 
 grained girl like Margaret couldn't be considering Joe 
 Greer as a husband ; a man of rough manners, no morals, a 
 brutal temper, not even divorced yet, and fifty years old. 
 And, on top of it all, a mere adventurer, anyhow. 
 
 "His age wouldn 't bother anybody," she remarked 
 dryly. "And he won't go on being an adventurer, if this 
 linen business makes him rich really rich, I mean." 
 
 "Well, if that's what she's counting on," he grumbled, 
 "she'll wait a while. If she takes my advice, she will." 
 
 "Why?" Violet demanded. "Don't you think it's a 
 good thing?" 
 
 "Of course I do. Wouldn't have put money into it if 
 I didn't. But that doesn't mean necessarily that he'll get 
 rich over it." 
 
 He went on, in response to a rather startled look she 
 shot him, to explain. He didn't mean anything sinister 
 by that. Only, with a fellow like Greer, you never could 
 tell. He might fly off the handle any time. "He isn't 
 the sort that naturally gets rich. Sooner or later, he's 
 likely to bite off more than he can chew. Of course, if
 
 186 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 she did marry him ..." He relapsed into an abstracted 
 silence and took two or three drafts on his cigar. "She 
 won't, though, I don't believe," he concluded. 
 
 He hadn't taken the idea as hard as he might have been 
 expected to, for the amount he'd done for Margaret, all 
 these years, had made him a bit romantic about her, and 
 he liked having her around, just as she was: at home in 
 his house, on call. He might have vetoed the thing sum 
 marily, and ordered it broken up; given his wife carte 
 blanche to see that it went no further. Distinctly, he 
 hadn't done that. Margaret had better go slow, this was 
 all his advice came to ; and she 'd have to do that, anyhow. 
 Even if the man were divorced to-day, she couldn't marry 
 him legally, here in Illinois, for another year. And any 
 number of things could happen in that time. The thing 
 he'd said that had given Violet most food for thought was 
 that broken sentence, "Of course, if he married Mar 
 garet . . ." Had he meant that this would bring Joe, 
 somehow, within the pale? Afford him the protection of 
 another code, so that he 'd be allowed to get rich, after all ? 
 
 Anyhow, the thing for Violet to do for the next few 
 months was to let Joe Greer alone. If she as much as 
 looked at him, let alone lifted a finger, Margaret would 
 attribute the probable failure of her project (for what 
 serious attraction could a cold finicky person like Mar 
 garet effectively exert upon this genial freebooter?) to 
 her, and, judging by the latest sample of her conduct, act 
 most unreasonably about it. Luckily, it mattered very 
 little to Violet herself; she'd have nothing to do with 
 Joe for the present, anyhow. 
 
 She kept this resolution scrupulously, for a little less 
 than a week; then, on the afternoon of Margaret's lunch 
 for Beatrice, as a result of a chance encounter with him, 
 she broke it rather badly. She'd motored in with Dorothy, 
 having three or four things she wanted to do in town 
 the most important of these being a call on Eileen Corbett, 
 Gregory's wife, who was at the Presbyterian Hospital 
 having had her appendix out. It was around five o'clock
 
 A DETOUR 187 
 
 when she left the hospital. She hadn't gone more than a 
 block or two, when her chauffeur ran over a jagged frag 
 ment of a broken milk bottle and blew a tire. He trundled 
 over to the curb, stopped behind a car that was parked 
 there it had, she thought at the time, a faintly familiar 
 look, and went to work, in the disgustingly deliberate 
 manner characteristic of chauffeurs, putting on a spare. 
 
 It was the hottest part of what had turned out to be a 
 remorselessly hot day, and this particular spot was, she 
 was sure, the hottest in Chicago. The prospect of a 
 fifteen or twenty minutes' wait was irksome. But, be 
 fore the first of them had passed, Joe appeared, amazingly, 
 descending in the freight elevator from the very build 
 ing opposite which they'd stopped. 
 
 "What on earth are you doing out here?" she cried at 
 sight of him. She cared nothing about an answer; the 
 question was galvanic. All she was aware of was a tin 
 gling sensation from the brilliant look he gave her and the 
 feel of the hand which met the one she'd stretched out to 
 him. 
 
 But his answer was not perfunctory. "This is the last 
 place I'd expect you to come to," he said. "Even your 
 husband's never paid us a visit here." Then, perceiving 
 the chauffeur's occupation and, in the same instant, in 
 terpreting her puzzled frown, he explained, "Why, this is 
 our laboratory. I thought, for a minute, you'd come out 
 to see what our linen process was like." 
 
 "I didn't even know you had a laboratory," she said. 
 "What is it like? A laboratory always sounds exciting." 
 
 "This one isn't," he told her derisively. 
 
 "It's so beastly hot right here," she began, "that 
 almost anything ..." 
 
 "It's hotter up there," he broke in. "And it stinks to 
 heaven. I wish there were some place The roar of a 
 passing elevated train checked his speech, but he went on 
 staring at her thoughtfully until it passed. " I wish 
 there were some cool quiet place that I could take you to, 
 and make you comfortable, and give you a drink or a
 
 188 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 eup of tea. But if there's such a place within a mile of 
 here, I don't know it." 
 
 She agreed with him about the frightfulness of the "West 
 Side and then told him idly that her father-in-law's old 
 house, where John had lived until they married, was just 
 round the corner. She was still in the possession of his 
 look, and feeling half resentful and half amused over the 
 way it had appropriated her. At this, however, he laughed 
 outright and his gaze abandoned her. 
 
 "The human animal can change a lot in one generation, 
 'can't it?" he observed. "They tell a wonderful lot of 
 stories about old Nick. It's queer to think you must have 
 known him." 
 
 This irreverence gave her, of course, an excellent chance 
 to snub him, put him in his place, and begin keeping, once 
 more, her forgotten resolution. But instead of trying any 
 thing like this, she said, "Know him! I should think I 
 did;" then laughed, and added, "You'd have got on with 
 him." 
 
 "I expect he was more my kind than your husband is," 
 'Joe commented soberly. But the next moment he grinned 
 straight into her face and said, "I'll bet you got on with 
 him yourself, like a house afire." 
 
 He gave her no chance to deal with this, for by now 
 he 'd got an idea. There was no need of her sitting here, 
 sweltering. He could take her in his car wherever she had 
 been going and hers could follow and pick her up as soon 
 as it was in running order. 
 
 "Why, I've nowhere to go," she told him, with a faint 
 smile, "except Lake Forest." 
 
 He took her up. "I've plenty of time and gas. Come 
 along!" 
 
 But this was rather farther than she cared to go. "I'll 
 tell you what you can do though, if you've really time to 
 rescue me; you can take me to our town house. There's 
 no one there but the care-takers, but a closed-up house is 
 always the coolest place there is." 
 
 She couldn't tell whether this amendment relieved or
 
 A DETOUK 189 
 
 disappointed him. He merely nodded, and held the door 
 while she instructed her chauffeur. "Come to Astor 
 Street for me, Jeffrey," she said. "But you'd better get 
 a new spare tire, first." Joe showed no sign of noting, 
 either, that this order of hers substantially protracted the 
 time she'd have to wait. It really meant nothing to him, 
 of course, because she hadn't the least idea of asking him 
 to wait with her. 
 
 He kept her wondering about him all the way home. She 
 wondered why he didn 't follow the obvious boulevard route 
 instead of threading his way among the West Side streets 
 and then whipping her across West Chicago Avenue. Did 
 he feel there was something necessarily clandestine about 
 taking another man's wife for a ride in his car? Or had 
 he the idea of showing her how the other half that once 
 had been his lived? He showed an unexpected, and 
 likable, friendliness toward the people, especially the 
 children, who swarmed these streets. He shouted jokes at 
 the ball players whose games their passage interrupted and 
 waved a brotherly hand to youngsters who gazed, awe- 
 entranced, at the glories of his car. He drove fast but 
 with unexpected care. And he made no effort to talk to 
 her. As they turned into Chicago Avenue, he nodded to 
 ward a plain brick building and told her it was another 
 laboratory, Hugh Corbett's. "There's one of your bunch. 
 I'd like really to know," he said; and when she asked, with. 
 a laugh, "The only one?" he let the question go with no 
 more answer than an unsmiling look. 
 
 It had a queer effect upon her, making suddenly pal 
 pable a vague sense she'd had ever since she sat down 
 beside him in the car, of something unexplored she had ia 
 common with him. That look was his acknowledgment of 
 it. "You won't tell, and I won't ask, but we understand 
 each other." That's what it said. 
 
 She had to direct him to her house, and something about 
 his smile, when she commented on the oddity of his not 
 knowing where she lived, decided her to invite him ia. 
 There was a dash of mischief about it, too, for she saw he
 
 190 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 didn 't know how much or how little she meant by it. " Oh, 
 come in, ' ' she insisted. ' ' You deserve a chance to get cool 
 after rescuing me like that; and it's only for a few min 
 utes." But not even the drink she provided put him at 
 ease. 
 
 Experimentally, with the rewarded purpose of surpris 
 ing him, she spoke of his daughter, whom he, apparently, 
 had no intention of mentioning. "Margaret's been tell 
 ing me how nice she is. Why have you kept her dark?" 
 But the surprise proved a boomerang. After his first 
 start, he took time to frame a deliberate answer which left 
 her gasping. 
 
 "It wasn't because I'm ashamed of her. It was be 
 cause I don't know where you and I stand. I don't care 
 what you take me for, a pirate or a cannibal anything 
 you like." There was nothing humorous about this; his 
 tone was almost menacing. "But she's no cannibal 
 princess ! And if I can help it, she isn't going to be taken 
 that way." 
 
 Violet knew exactly the manner she wanted to meet 
 this onslaught, but she found herself unable to command 
 it, She was trembling; she felt the blood burning in her 
 face. She thought Margaret must have betrayed her. "I 
 don't know," she faltered^ "what any one may have told 
 you I 've said ..." 
 
 "No one has told me anything," he broke in. "Who 
 would? Who knew? Except the Cravens." He stopped 
 for a thoughtful smile. "No, Margaret hasn't said any 
 thing, ' ' he went on. ' ' It was just the smell in the air. ' ' 
 
 She was, she assured herself, furious with him for hav 
 ing shaken her like that. It was what one deservedly got 
 for playing with outsiders. She'd turn him out sum 
 marily make an end of him if it weren't that Jeffrey's 
 arrival with the car any minute, now would save her 
 the trouble. But, all the while, she was in the grip of a 
 sort of nightmare obsession that, if he wanted to, now, 
 he'd come over to her and take her in his arms and she 
 wouldn't even try to hold him off. And that he knew she 
 wouldn't.
 
 A DETOUR 191] 
 
 Instead of this fantastic happening, he sat back more at 
 his ease than he'd been before, and reflectively went on 
 talking. He began with a disarming apology for having 
 startled her. He'd spoken out more plainly than she was 
 used to, but he hadn't done it wantonly. There was some 
 thing he wanted her to understand. 
 
 ' ' I 've always been a law unto myself, ' ' he said. ' ' That 's 
 the only kind of a person I could be. If you're like that, 
 you 've got to make up your mind not to care a damn what 
 any one else thinks of you or of the things you do. It's 
 the only possible line to take, if you stop to think. But 
 that doesn 't mean that I 've been satisfied with everything 
 I've done. I've done some things that were pretty low 
 down. I've treated some people that way. One of them 
 was my wife. I deserted her before Beatrice was born. 
 Before I knew she was going to be born. She was almost 
 a year old before I knew I had a daughter. Well, I can't 
 make anything up to my wife. She hates me ; always did. 
 I 'm the last sort of man in the world for her to have mar 
 ried. You must have seen things happen like that your 
 self. But I can make it up to the girl, and I'm going to 
 do it. She hasn't had much of a life up to now, but now 
 it's going to begin. The best there is of everything. It 
 may not be all smooth sailing, at first. I thought I'd put 
 her in the same school your daughter goes to, but they've 
 written to say they're full." 
 
 His skeptical manner gave her a clue. "I'm sure that's 
 true," she said. "We had to enter Dorothy at Thorny- 
 croft years before she was ready to go. Everybody does. 
 I suppose that's why you thought you didn't know where 
 you stood, as you said, with me. 
 
 "The trouble with you is," she went on after a silence, 
 "that you think you're still in the jungle." 
 
 "And are you telling me I'm not?" he asked. "Shall 
 I begin trusting everybody?" 
 
 A disconcerting memory flashed into her mind of the 
 way John had said that the great possibilities of the linen 
 business didn't mean, necessarily, that Joe was going to
 
 192 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 be rich. She laughed. "Trust your friends, anyhow," 
 she said, adding, after another pause, "And don't let 
 Margaret Craven monopolize that nice daughter of yours. 
 Bring her up to see us Sunday morning. Everybody 
 comes, more or less, to swim and play tennis and so on, 
 and stays to lunch." 
 
 He showed himself frankly pleased by the invitation, 
 but, perversely, this was not the note she wanted to part 
 with him upon. She added a final touch. "I'll see that 
 Margaret's there for you," she said. 
 
 He made, in words, no reply to this, but his look took 
 hold of her again and for a good long moment held her 
 tight, so that, once more, she felt the blood burn in her 
 face. She'd been kissed with a good deal less intimacy 
 than that came to. He didn't offer even the formal con 
 tact of a hand-shake; merely nodded at her and went 
 away, wearing his most brilliant grin. 
 
 He left her ruffled, breathless, and uncertain whether 
 she was angry or elated. She tried to establish the former 
 by fastening upon an object, but there was no one, really, 
 but herself to be angry with unless one put the blame on 
 Margaret for entertaining foolish hopes and trying to 
 maintain preposterous prohibitions. It was idiotic to take 
 the affair as seriously as that. She couldn't see that she 
 would hurt Margaret's chances a bit by taking Joe in and 
 being decently friendly with him. "Wasn't Margaret's 
 only possible attraction for him based on the class she be 
 longed to ? If he liked them all, learned that conventional 
 behavior had its mitigations, wouldn't he be a lot more 
 likely to ask Margaret to, as it were, make an honest man 
 of him? 
 
 His daughter was a tiresome complication, of course, but 
 it had been rather thrilling, the way he 'd talked about her, 
 and perhaps Margaret had been truthful in saying she 
 wasn't so bad. 
 
 The only thing to be watchful of was the possibility of 
 her having a bad influence on Dorothy. (Violet had can- 
 vulsive moments of taking the responsibilities of mother-
 
 A DETOUR 193 
 
 hood very seriously indeed.) But Dorothy's report of 
 the luncheon put that misgiving away. Violet had to ask 
 for it, for Dodo, after two days on the Wollaston farm 
 with Sylvia, had forgotten all about the girl. 
 
 ' ' Oh, at Margaret 's lunch ! Why, she 's all right. ' ' This 
 was said through a yawn. "She knows all about finger- 
 bowls and things. Dressed to kill, rather. I think she 
 meant us to understand from something she said while 
 Margaret was out of the room, that she means to vamp 
 Henry. Shouldn't wonder if she could, too." 
 
 "Is she all right, do you think?" Violet put the 
 question dubiously, not quite sure what the girl would 
 think she meant by it, nor, to tell the truth, exactly what 
 she did mean. But the confidential atmosphere in which 
 the words were enveloped was what mattered. 
 
 "Oh, she isn't poisonous, if that's what you mean,''* 
 the child assured her. "She's all right; only not much. 
 It's sort of too bad, too, because I think her father must 
 be rather a lark." 
 
 "Well, it's a case of love me, love my dog," Violet re 
 marked. "If you want to get on with him, don't try to 
 treat her like a cannibal princess, because he won't have 
 it. They're coming up, Sunday," she added. 
 
 "If she was anywhere near as amusing as a cannibal 
 princess, it would be easier," said Dodo dispassionately, 
 "but I'll do my best, mother." 
 
 2 
 
 Sunday at the Williamsons' went off, Joe decided, very 
 well. (Margaret, it may be noted, was not there, "for 
 him.") There was nothing, even in the smell of the air, 
 to suggest that Beatrice was being taken as a cannibal 
 princess. She seemed, whenever his eyes fell upon her, to 
 be having not only a jolly time but to be making, es 
 pecially with the boys, a real success. She was in the 
 pool, most of the time before lunch, getting taught, en 
 thusiastically, to swim. 
 
 After lunch, he lost sight of her for a while, but she
 
 194 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 turned up, just as he was beginning to wonder about her, 
 in the company of a white-flanneled youngster with whom 
 she seemed on very good terms. He had dark red curly 
 hair; his features, without being insignificant, were small 
 and fine, so that he'd have made an unusually pretty girl, 
 though his build was sturdy enough. He walked with a 
 well-marked limp. 
 
 Joe heard him call her Trixie, and took his first oppor 
 tunity to ask, not of the girl herself, who he was. His in 
 formant was Mrs. Hugh Corbett. 
 
 "He's Lansing Ware," she told him, but stopped at 
 that, short of giving him any further details; 
 
 Joe asked if he 'd been wounded in the war, and noted a 
 momentary hesitation about her reply. 
 
 ' ' He was in the Aviation, ' ' she said. ' ' He got that stiff 
 ankle in an accident at his training camp, quite early. I 
 don't know exactly what it was." She added at once, 
 "I'll always be grateful to his sister, Muriel. She gave 
 me a chance to be a bridesmaid at Anne Corbett 's wed 
 ding by getting a stye just before the day of the cere 
 mony." 
 
 Joe asked no more questions about his daughter's cav 
 alier. The boy was placed, implicitly, as one of the "reg 
 ular" people he wanted her to know, and that "Trixie," 
 along with his rather intimate way with her, was as far 
 as he could see, merely part and parcel of the manners 
 current here. 
 
 Driving home with her, that afternoon, after a few 
 miles of thoughtful silence, he told her she needn't, unless 
 she liked, go to Cape Cod with Margaret oh, perhaps for 
 a week or two later. Joe was vaguely aware that it had 
 been in the course of his one talk with Violet that he'd 
 changed his plans for his daughter's summer. Yet he'd 
 hardly have said then that Violet was responsible for the 
 change, let alone that she'd suggested it. 
 
 The visit had not produced quite the sort of step in his 
 acquaintance with Violet that he'd looked forward to. 
 She hadn 't carried him off for a walk, nor withdrawn with
 
 A DETOUR 195 
 
 him to the shade of that grove of oaks to look down upon 
 the show she 'd once promised him. She 'd been, decidedly, 
 one of the performers in it all the while. Her duties as 
 hostess had been made heavier, too, by the presence, among 
 the guests, of three or four opera singers just arrived for 
 the Ravinia season, one of them especially a Frenchman 
 named Fournier who spoke no English and needed care 
 ful management to keep him from getting stranded. But 
 Joe hadn't felt slighted. Even her unconcern had sug 
 gested a certain friendliness, and, on the terrace after 
 lunch, she'd openly made an opportunity for a talk with 
 him. 
 
 His first sight of her that morning had affected him 
 powerfully, too, renewing the bewildered incredulity, the 
 discoverer's excitement and the strong sensuous attraction 
 that he'd felt the morning she appeared at the traps. 
 She was in the pool, when he and Beatrice arrived, among 
 the earliest of the day's visitors, and it was literally true 
 that, for a moment, after she'd climbed the ladder at the 
 deep end and come to greet them, he didn't know her. 
 The tight blue rubber bathing-cap which confined her 
 hair, and the clinging wet sheen of the swimming suit, no 
 more ample than one her daughter would have worn, 
 triumphantly challenged youth itself. She'd smiled at 
 his stare, and laughed at his explanation of it. Dorothy, 
 who had escorted them down from the house, said dispas 
 sionately to Beatrice, "You see how hopeless it is. Now 
 do you wonder I don't call her mother?" Joe did not, at 
 all events. She seemed, standing there erect, unsmiling, 
 a little detached, the older of the two. 
 
 His vision of Violet, revealed, Diana-like, finer and 
 whiter and silkier than his imagination would have dared 
 pretend, persisted. It was not far in the background of 
 his thoughts, while they talked on the terrace. Yet this 
 sensuous appeal was not the only one, nor perhaps, the 
 strongest, she'd made to him. He'd enjoyed the friendly 
 good-humor of her ready laugh ; her sallies of what might 
 pass, unscrutinized, for wit; her light-handed way of re-
 
 196 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 disposing people when the old groupings were growing a 
 little stale. She took it easier than Margaret, and there 
 fore did it better. 
 
 He was pleasantly stirred by her relation with her daugh 
 ter, the spectacle they sometimes presented of a com 
 plete reversal of roles. The pair understood each other, 
 down to the ground, and were, no doubt, deeply fond of 
 each other, though they never expressed that fact in any 
 of the orthodox ways. He wondered how it would seem 
 to have Beatrice calling him Joe, but decided he wouldn't 
 like it. There were scores of girls who'd done that, at 
 one time or another, but she was the only one who called 
 him dad. But, as between Violet and Dorothy, where none 
 of these echoes intruded, it bespoke a charming confi 
 dence which couldn't have been built up in the absence of 
 a sympathetic understanding on the part of the mother. 
 
 Violet had given him, too, one evidence of friendly con 
 cern that touched him. She'd remembered the wish he'd 
 expressed to meet Hugh Corbett, and had made, it seemed, 
 a special effort to secure Hugh and his wife to-day for the 
 purpose of bringing this meeting about. (Joe had had a 
 wonderful talk with Hugh, having found in him one whose 
 imagination could do justice to cellulose fiber, one to 
 whom it mightn't just as well have been putty, or prunes.) 
 
 The sum of all this was that, when Violet told him to 
 pull that chair a little farther around the corner into a 
 position more easily overlooked, and then sat down in it 
 with the expressed hope that they might have a few min 
 utes to themselves, his jungle wariness was in abeyance. 
 She spoke at once about Beatrice, in terms, of course, of 
 praise. Fascinating, she called her, and a dear. Delight 
 ful to look at, too, clothes and all, and with a freshness 
 about her most engaging. To the father's charmed ear 
 there was nothing suggestive of the cannibal princess in 
 any of this. He let himself begin to talk, more freely 
 than he'd ever supposed he could talk with a woman who 
 attracted him as this one did, about the girl, his hopes for 
 her, the problems she presented. And in this connection,
 
 A DETOUR 197 
 
 he told her how Margaret figured in the design, and about 
 the contemplated summer on Cape Cod. 
 
 All he perceived, at first, was that Violet saw some aspect 
 of this plan that hadn't occurred to him and that she 
 was quietly finding a source of amusement in it. Yet it 
 wasn't as if she were laughing at him. There was a gleam 
 of mischief about her almost suppressed smile which hinted 
 that she 'd like to share the joke with him, if she dared. 
 
 He didn't ask her to tell him what the joke was. His 
 returning wariness warned him, indeed, not to let her guess 
 he saw she had one. What he did ask her was whether she 
 didn't think an association like that was just what the 
 girl needed. 
 
 "Why, yes, I suppose so," Violet assented dubiously, 
 "only I'm not sure it isn't a little austere. The place 
 they 're going is awfully quiet ; Rose and Rodney never go 
 there except when they want to get away from absolutely 
 everybody. The only people there are some professors 
 and a writer or two. And, of course, a complete rest is 
 what Margaret is supposed to need. So, if the girl's been 
 having well, rather a thin time, this might strike her as 
 not very jolly. She's adoring it here, to-day; any one 
 could see that." 
 
 She went on, with an earnestness he couldn 't account for, 
 to sing Margaret 's praises, as if she feared that what she 'd 
 just said might have done her cousin a disservice, thrown 
 out of gear some plan of hers. "We've always thought she 
 was a perfect wonder, John and I. The way she waited 
 hand and foot on her mother all those years fifteen any 
 how, after Uncle Chauncey died; and managed, and kept 
 afloat even kept her looks, through it all. It takes a 
 real person to do that; I couldn't have, I know. I'd have 
 looked a hag, if I'd been through half what Margaret has. 
 And she couldn't have stood much more of it. She must 
 have been just about desperate never showing a thing, of 
 course; she, never does when you came along with that 
 invention of yours, and made a real job for Henry." 
 
 Joe remarked, with a grin, that he hadn 't done anything
 
 for Henry, except by being the sort of person John Will 
 iamson had thought it necessary to appoint somebody to 
 watch. 
 
 She colored a little at this, he thought, but went on 
 without contradicting it. "Well, anyhow, I don't want to 
 interfere with any plan of Margaret's. If she wants 
 Beatrice, to brighten things a bit and well, be a sort of 
 mother to, I hope you 11 let her have her. And, of course," 
 she concluded, getting up to receive the farewell of an 
 approaching guest, "if yon could manage to run down 
 there for a while, that would be great, for everybody." 
 
 "I'd thought of sending Henry," he began, and it 
 wasn't until then that he saw the recurrent gleam of that 
 enigmatic smile of hers upon her lips. He no longer sought 
 to interpret it; dismissed, indeed, the interpretation that 
 suggested itself as damn nonsense. But there came a faint 
 reflection of the same smile in his face, and it recurred 
 when he told Beatrice she needn't count on Margaret and 
 Cape Cod for this summer unless she liked. "Wanted to 
 be a sort of mother to her," eh? Violet might be mis 
 taken as to her cousin's plan, but she had given him, he'd 
 come by then to believe, a useful tip. 
 
 The change of the plan for Trixie's summer amazed Joe 
 and thoroughly alarmed him by bringing about his first 
 quarrel with his daughter. She'd struck him as being 
 oddly non-committal, even ungracious, about it, on the 
 way home from Lake Forest, and, at one point in his ex- 
 plantation of the change it was substantially a restate 
 ment of Violet's objections, though the source of them was 
 not acknowledged, she 'd uttered a short laugh and had re 
 fused to tell him why. But he was in no mood for fault 
 finding with her, and, dropping the subject, wooed her 
 back into an affectionate humor with him by telling her 
 stories and taking her for a long ride. They, swung out 
 west to the Fox River valley, and, by avoiding the 
 crowded thoroughfares, as his minute knowledge of the
 
 A DETOUR 199 
 
 roads enabled him to do, they had a delightful cruise. 
 For the last hour, she lay contentedly against his shoulder, 
 so soft and still that he believed her to be asleep ; while he, 
 incredulous of the happiness this long delayed experience 
 in fatherhood had brought him, could have thought he 
 was dreaming, too. 
 
 Two or three evenings later, without misgiving, he 
 brought up the matter of Margaret again, this time as a 
 question comfortably disposed of. He was glad, indeed, 
 of something tangible to discuss with her that night, for a 
 trifling incident upon his return from the office, just 
 before dinner, had been rankling absurdly in his mind ever 
 since. 
 
 Anson, on letting him in and being asked where she was, 
 had expressed the correctly servile ''belief" that she was 
 at the telephone. A minute later, Joe had met her com 
 ing down the hall, kissed her with his accustomed hug, and 
 then, merely by way of saying something, asked her whom 
 she'd been telephoning to. She answered, instantly, "I 
 wasn't telephoning"; adding, a moment later, "Oh, it was 
 just a wrong number." 
 
 The thing had been buzzing in his brain ever since like a 
 plaguey mosquito. The servants in that somewhat over 
 staffed establishment were supposed to answer the phone, 
 and Beatrice, lazy and disposed to lounge when there was 
 no particular call upon her energy, didn't make a prac 
 tise of snatching their duties away from them; she was 
 distinctly reveling, poor child, in the unaccustomed lux 
 ury of having things done for her. Then the form of 
 Anson 's reply suggested a real conversation. And had 
 there been about the look of the girl, when her eye first 
 fell upon him, a somewhat flurried air? No, damn it, 
 there had not ! That was a mere imagining, promoted by 
 jealousy that went along with a strong new-born love like 
 his. But why hadn't she said it was a wrong number in 
 the first place, rather than at the end of a palpable hesi 
 tation. There must be a dozen ways of explaining the con 
 tradiction, only he couldn 't think of one nor could he make
 
 200 JOSEPH GREEE AND IIIS DAUGHTER 
 
 up his mind to ask her. It was with a sense of escape 
 from all this that he launched a subject that could be 
 talked about. 
 
 "You needn't worry any more about that Cape Cod 
 idea," he told her. "That's all fixed. I told Henry, 
 yesterday, that I meant to keep you round with me for a 
 while before you went anywhere; but he gave me a sort 
 of a hint that I'd better talk it over with Margaret, my 
 self, so I dropped in there to-night on the way home. The 
 invitation's still open; any time you want to go down 
 there for a week or two, we're to let her know a few days 
 ahead. But she understands it won 't be for the summer. ' ' 
 
 Beatrice said rather dryly, "I suppose she's broken 
 hearted about that." He suppressed a momentary irri 
 tation over the tone she'd taken and answered simply that 
 Margaret was disappointed, all right, but that she'd been 
 perfectly friendly about it. 
 
 ' ' They 're all perfectly friendly with you, seems to me, ' ' 
 the girl commented. 
 
 Joe said he was glad they were. "One thing I've 
 learned in fifty years, is to take the best advice I can get, 
 whenever I'm off my own beat. And there's probably 
 nothing I'm more ignorant about than bringing up young 
 girls. So, if Margaret or Jennie MacArthur or Mrs. Will 
 iamson feels friendly enough to offer me any suggestions, 
 I'm just that much ahead. So far as I know, there aren't 
 any professional consultants in that field, though it's 
 plain there ought to be." 
 
 All this was said into a vacuum. She'd turned, petu 
 lantly, her back upon him and gave no indication even 
 that she'd heard. His patience under this sort of treat 
 ment would have amazed Jennie MacArthur. 
 
 "I don't know just how we're going to manage things," 
 he went on, a propitiatory good-humor transforming the 
 words. "It's the biggest handful I ever tackled. You 
 see, you can't live here alone very well, with just the 
 servants, if only for the look of the thing. It looks to me 
 as if the thing to do was to hire some middle-aged womaa
 
 A DETOUR 201 
 
 to be a sort of governess-companion for your housekeeper 
 on the side. Then I could go away, when I had to, with 
 out leaving you high and dry. I'm going to have to be 
 away a good deal too, this summer and fall especially. 
 Even when I'm not away, you're alone too much in the 
 daytime. She could take you to matinees, all sorts of 
 places where you wouldn't want to go alone. And morn 
 ings, she could give you lessons. She'd want to be the 
 right sort, of course. But there wouldn 't be much trouble 
 about that; there are plenty of them to choose among, 
 some English woman, I suppose, would be best." 
 
 Still without looking around at him, she asked, "What 
 kind of lessons? History, and French, and things like 
 that?" 
 
 Her tone was muffled, ambiguous ; and it was this, more 
 than anything else, that made him hesitate. "Why, I 
 suppose so," he answered dubiously. 
 
 "Manners, too?" she inquired. "How to talk with an 
 English accent, and never raise my voice? And what 
 kind of clothes to wear, so that that nasty little Dorothy 
 Williamson can't laugh at me behind my back?" 
 
 "Look here, Trix," he commanded. "We've been over 
 this before. You agreed to learn their game. It's no 
 disgrace not to know it, but it's silly to make a fuss about 
 learning it, when to go on not knowing it will put you at 
 a disadvantage. It won't be hard to do. I know a girl 
 who learned enough of it to get by with, on the stage, in 
 one summer. And she was a real rough-neck, to begin 
 with; an illiterate little musical-comedy kid, in the chorus 
 till she worked up an imitation stunt they let her do. She 
 got a chance at a part she wanted, but a friend of hers 
 told her that, to make good with it, she'd have to change 
 her voice, speech, way of moving around, everything. 
 Instead of getting sore, she sailed in to do it; spent a 
 whole summer where she had the right sort of people 
 around, and she didn't miss a trick. Watched how they 
 did things; listened to everything they said; and, when 
 the piece went into production, she walked on and knocked
 
 'em cold. And she had the time of her life learning it, 
 too, she said. 
 
 ' ' You would, too, if you 'd take it like that. But, if you 
 go around flinching at everything and imagining people 
 are laughing at you, you can be damn unhappy. It is 
 imagination, mostly, with you. Certainly no one was 
 laughing at you last Sunday, up at "Williamsons'." 
 
 She whipped round upon him with a furious contradic 
 tion. "They were! A whole lot you know about it! 
 You weren't there to see." 
 
 "I could see you were having what sounded like a good 
 time." 
 
 ' ' I laughed too loud, I suppose, ' ' she commented. ' ' Oh, 
 some of the fellows were decent enough. But the girls, 
 especially your darling Dodo . . . Oh, she makes me 
 sick!" 
 
 "She's no darling of mine," he declared with a grin, 
 for the notion that Trix might be jealous amused him. 
 "Go after her, if you don't like her. Beat her at her own 
 game. Take her boys away from her. Show her up. 
 Only you won't do it by wishing you could. Let me hire 
 you the right sort of governess and after she's showed 
 you the ropes you '11 be able to give Dodo the laugh. ' ' 
 
 "That isn't what you want her for," the girl said, with 
 sulky conviction, at the end of a long stare. "You want 
 her because those women have been telling you how hor 
 rible it is for me to have any fun my own way; going 
 anywhere alone, or taking drives with nobody but George. 
 George Burns, I mean." This in answer to his sharply 
 interrogatory frown. "I suppose Dodo would call him 
 Burns. They've made you ashamed of me, too, I guess. 
 That's why you think I'm like that musical-comedy kid, 
 you told me about. Did you hire a governess for her ? ' ' 
 
 "Don't be a fool, Trix!" He hadn't meant to be as 
 sharp as that, though, and he paused to get control of a 
 quieter manner. " I 'm sorry, but I guess you didn 't know 
 how that sounded. Nobody's said a 'word to me about 
 Burns, and I'd never thought of there being any special
 
 A DETOUR 203 
 
 harm in it, but of course you ought to have some one be 
 sides a professional chauffeur with you when you go out 
 on long drives. And when it comes to entertaining your 
 friends here, you can't have young men coming to see you 
 and finding you alone; nobody but the servants. Even 
 for going anywhere at night, when I'm away, you'll want 
 some one. I hadn't thought it through as far as that, be 
 fore. We'll call that settled, I guess, Trix." 
 
 But he saw it was anything but settled, in his daughter's 
 mind. "All my life," she said, with a sort of vicious 
 quietness, "I've had people sticking their noses into the 
 things I was doing, telling tales on me, making mother say 
 I couldn't do this or it was wrong to do that. And now, 
 you talk about hiring some one to do just that thing. 
 "Well, it isn't what I came here for. If you trusted me, 
 you wouldn 't mind having people coming to see me without 
 a chaperon spying on me all the time. But you don't 
 trust me; that's the trouble. You asked me to-night who 
 I'd been telephoning to. It wasn't anybody, but if it had 
 been I wouldn't have told you." 
 
 She was, beyond concealment, crying now, and this 
 phenomenon, while it paralyzed him, seemed to rob her of 
 even the wish for self-control. "You wouldn't have 
 thought of it, yourself," she sobbed. "It's all been put 
 into your head that I'm a freak that has to be taught 
 how to act, and watched to see that I don't do anything 
 awful. Jennie MacArthur and Mrs. Williamson and 
 'Margaret'!" 
 
 She crumpled her handkerchief into her fist and beat 
 on the table with it. "I'm not going to have your mis 
 tresses telling you what I'm to do," she cried. "Nor an 
 old maid that's trying to marry you, either!" 
 
 He reached across and seized her by the arms. "What 
 the devil do you mean by that?" he roared at her. She 
 wasted no breath answering; her single-minded purpose 
 was to break out of his grip. Her teeth were locked, her 
 face flushed, her eyes blazing. "You listen!" he went on 
 during a panting lull in the struggle. "If you were a
 
 204 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 boy, you'd get the finest licking of your young life for 
 saying a thing like that. Being a girl, you oughtn't to 
 know enough to say it. But this is the fact, and don't you 
 ever forget it. Jennie MacArthur is as good a woman as 
 your mother is. And for anything I know about it one 
 way or the other, Mrs. Williamson is, too. You little 
 wildcat! Stop fighting and I'll let you go." 
 
 But with an unexpected sudden wrench that pulled him 
 a little off balance, she broke away. "I don't have to 
 stay here, ' ' she panted from the doorway. ' ' I can go back 
 to California. I've got the rest of that thousand dollars 
 where you can 't find it. ' ' Another sob got in the way of 
 whatever more she had to tell him, and she fled to her 
 room and slammed the door behind her. 
 
 She left her father completely disorganized, like a man 
 just awakened from a nightmare, tremors running through 
 his muscles in ripples, his mouth dry, and the only thought 
 he was capable of, an incredulous assertion that it couldn't 
 have happened. 
 
 He had been wont to argue with Jennie that quarrels 
 did him good, opened his pores, stimulated his mind, made 
 even his disposition more benevolent. It was nonsense to 
 pretend that there was anything poisonous about them. 
 Evidently, though, quarrels with his daughter went into 
 a special class. 
 
 The sober processes of reflection, when he had cooled 
 down enough to make them possible, brought him little 
 comfort. He had a sense of irreparable injury done to a 
 precious fragile thing. It might be patched together after 
 a fashion, but it could never again be as it had been be 
 fore. He felt no abiding anger against the girl, was 
 unable, indeed, to remember what she had done to provoke 
 his explosion. He loved and admired her more than ever ; 
 her courage in fighting him off, defying him, even while his 
 hands had gripped her. No tears, then! No hint of 
 surrender. 
 
 For hours, he sat in the chair he'd risen from to 
 spring upon her, smoking, sipping whisky, meditating in
 
 A DETOUR 205 
 
 a mood of deepening melancholy. Jennie MacArthur had 
 warned him that his plan wouldn't work, and it looked as 
 if Jennie, once more, was right. It would have worked, 
 though, but for his infernal temper. The girl was like 
 him; was more, in every way, his daughter than either of 
 them had dreamed possible. They might, if he had not 
 smashed the possibility to bits, to-night, have become the 
 finest sort of comrades an alliance, defensive and of 
 fensive, against the world! He'd like to prove Jennie 
 wrong, for once. 
 
 Where the devil, he wondered, had Trix picked up that 
 fantastic idea about him and Jennie? She couldn't have 
 thought of such a thing by herself. Some one must have 
 told her the slander in so many words. He'd manage to 
 find out who the traitor was, if it was the last no, the 
 next to the last thing he ever did. 
 
 He got up, stiffly, feeling old, and went out into the 
 passage on his way to bed. Outside his daughter's door 
 he stopped to listen. Until that moment, it hadn't oc 
 curred to him to wonder how she had spent the interven 
 ing hours. Had they been as miserable for her as for him ? 
 Had she been weeping quietly over her own defeated hopes? 
 The thought brought a lump into his throat. 
 
 She wasn't weeping now. It was dead still in there. 
 Then came her voice, young, clear, unruffled. "Is that 
 you, dad?" His own would not at once respond to com 
 mand, and she went on, "If it is, come in." It was an 
 invitation he'd never had, nor sought, before. 
 
 She switched on the night lamp as he entered, and pat 
 ted the edge of the bed as the place where she wanted him 
 to sit. When he was seated, she held out both hands to 
 him, displaying the full length of her bare arms. His 
 finger prints were upon them both, in the livid discolora 
 tion of bruises. 
 
 "Good God, Trix," he cried, aghast, "did I do that to 
 you?" 
 
 She nodded, with a smile of friendly mischief. "I 
 bruise awfully easy," she explained. "Sometimes when it
 
 206 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 hasn't hurt at all. It's been kind of lucky, in a way. It 
 kept grandfather and the rest from getting rough with 
 me. They never punished me except by shutting me up, 
 and I could usually get out, somehow." 
 
 "You can't go back to that," he said. 
 
 "No," she admitted soberly. "I couldn't go back there, 
 even if Mr. Whittington wasn't going to marry mother. 
 But I can go back to Hollywood. I'm practically sure I 
 can get a job there." 
 
 "Then you can't forgive me?" he asked. 
 
 ' ' Of course I do ! " She seemed astonished at the ques 
 tion. "It was mostly my fault, anyhow. It seemed as if 
 I just had to get you mad. I don't know why ex 
 actly. But I 'm crazy about you, dad. I think you 're the 
 most wonderful man in the world." 
 
 "Then why," he demanded, "do you talk about going 
 off and leaving me ? Is it just because I wanted to hire a 
 companion for you f ' ' 
 
 She stirred uneasily at the question; it wasn't one, ap 
 parently, that she had a categorical answer for. "I could 
 have got on well enough with my mother," she said at 
 last, "if grandpa and grandma hadn't kept butting in all 
 the time, putting ideas into her head and making her go 
 back on things she 'd promised. I hate nosey interfering 
 people, whoever they are. So when I saw those women 
 deciding things for you about me changing you round 
 just as they liked, it made me so mad I didn't care what 
 happened." She added, after a moment's pause, "I'm 
 glad I found out about Miss MacArthur, though." 
 
 "Trix," he asked, "do you mind telling me it's just a 
 matter of curiosity who put an idea like that into your 
 head? It was a hell of a thing to do, whoever did it." 
 
 "Why, nobody did it," she declared, instantly, wide- 
 eyed. "Nobody but you and her. The way you acted 
 together, her calling you Joe and knowing such a lot about 
 me and telling you you needn 't stay and work that day un 
 less you liked. When you were supposed to be her boss! 
 And the way you liked it, and wanted to sit around and
 
 A DETOUR 207 
 
 talk. I don't know. It struck me as natural, that was 
 all." 
 
 "But how could it? That's what I want to know. 
 How could you think of a thing like that? Or don't you 
 know what it means? I can't even talk to you about it." 
 
 She smiled up at him, incredibly composed, gentle with 
 his embarrassment. ' ' Dad, ' ' she remonstrated, ' ' am I sup 
 posed to think you've lived all these years since you left 
 mother like a monk in a monastery?" 
 
 Had he been a mere disinterested bystander, his fine ear 
 might have spotted that line as a quotation, picked up, 
 treasured, rehearsed perhaps. As it was, nothing of 
 the sort occurred to him. He stared at her in astonished 
 silence while she, having got the whip hand of him now, 
 went on : 
 
 "You hate having me know things like that, and if I 
 was going to stay with you I suppose I'd have to pretend 
 I didn't. I guess that's the real reason I can't. You 
 want a nice little girl, and I don't believe I ever was that. 
 I always hated to be bossed. I wanted to find things out 
 for myself. But everything they found I wanted to do, 
 they told me I mustn't. They were afraid I was going to 
 be like you and they were trying to break my will. They 
 didn't, though," She paused to smile at him. "I guess I 
 turned out like you, after all." 
 
 ' ' Bless your heart ! " he murmured. 
 
 His vision of her blurred with tears, and at the invita 
 tion of her hands he bent down and kissed her, she holding 
 him, for a moment, in a tight embrace. Then she pushed 
 him away and with her palms blotted the tears from her 
 own eyes. 
 
 ' ' I hated you, once, ' ' she said, with a shaky laugh. ' ' Oh, 
 for years and years. Because you left me there with them. 
 I didn't think I was going to love you when I got your 
 letter. The reason I came was because you said I was of 
 age and had a right to decide things for myself. I made 
 up my mind I 'd hold you to that. I thought if I got you 
 sort of silly about me, it would be easy to make you. I
 
 208 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 didn't figure on getting silly about you. But I have, 
 and that's why I've got to go away again." 
 
 He tried to protest that this conclusion was nonsense, 
 but she wasn't ready to hear him yet. "I'd hate any 
 governess you hired for me. I'd hate anybody who told 
 you tales about me or advised you what to do with me. 
 I wouldn't mind if I didn't love you. I'd get what I 
 wanted, somehow, just the way I always did at home. 
 But I'd be m-miserable treating you like that. Because 
 you aren't like them." 
 
 She was weeping now in a way that made continued 
 speech impossible. She sat erect and clung to him. "Oh, 
 dad," she wailed, "I don't want to go." 
 
 Until she was quiet he held her without a word, but 
 when the soothing of his hands had had its effect, he said, 
 "All right, Trix. You win. I guess I've been a fool 
 about it. I hope so, anyway. But I can't let you go. 
 Not after this!" 
 
 Her eyes were luminous through her tears. He'd never, 
 he thought, seen anything so rapturously lovely. "You 
 mean it, dad?" she cried. "You'll let me be a real grown 
 up? Run your house for you, and everything? Like 
 Margaret Craven does Henry's ?" 
 
 He roared at that, and she laughed with him, but at 
 the end of it she asked, for reassurance, "Really, dad?" 
 
 "It's on the level," he told her soberly. "You can 
 write your own contract, little girl." 
 
 There was another damned echo in that, and it was a 
 moment before her enthusiasm got an appropriate response 
 from him. She shook him by the shoulders. "Say you 
 think it's going to be wonderful," she commanded. 
 
 "Yes, my dear," he said; "I believe it is." 
 
 4 
 
 John Williamson surprised Joe by coming to him with 
 an idea about flax. An eccentric gentleman farmer he 
 knew had been talking to him and, more or less, frighten 
 ing him about it. He was a retired wholesale grocer,
 
 A DETOUE 209 
 
 Nicholson by name, and he had a big place out on the 
 Fox River. He devoted an energetic leisure to the culti 
 vation of hobbies, semi- or pseudo-scientific, and he 'd been 
 experimenting, for the past two or three years since a 
 fortuitous war refugee had given him the idea, with the 
 growing of Belgian flax, the plan being to process it by 
 hand and provide a domestic winter occupation for 
 farmers' wives. 
 
 He was bitterly skeptical about Joe's project for mak 
 ing any use of American seed flax, and he went on to say 
 some things that worried John a little. Flax was very 
 funny stuff; it was supposed to exhaust the soil. This 
 was why, in America, it had always been a pioneer crop. 
 Fresh-broken, virgin soil could stand it; even, apparently, 
 benefited by it; but two or three seasons was all it was 
 good for. The growth became sickly, and the crop had 
 to be abandoned altogether. The center of American flax 
 production was always on the move, westward, in search 
 of new land. 
 
 Nicholson had got hold of a theory that flax didn't 
 really exhaust the soil; it was specially liable to disease, 
 the fact was, and the germs of the disease accumulated in 
 the old fields from year to year until they killed the 
 crop. But it didn't work that way abroad. They had 
 grown flax in the same fields in Belgium for hundreds of 
 years. Nicholson was confident that he had explained the 
 difference. In Europe, they harvested the crop by hand. 
 And they didn't cut it off above the ground either; they 
 pulled it up by the roots, and, by so doing, baffled the 
 disease germs. 
 
 If he was right about this, and there was no doubt in his 
 own mind about it, here was the end of any dream, such 
 as John had put his money into, of a large-scale mechanical 
 production of linen. It was decreed by God to be a hand 
 process, from the very harvesting of the crop. The old 
 Scotch grocer had a strong strain of Presbyterian re 
 ligion in him, though he swore like a sergeant in the Na 
 tional Guard.
 
 210 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 "He filled me full of details," John concluded, "and I 
 can't remember them; but that's the bones of it. I'd 
 like, to take you out to meet him some time, and hear for 
 yourself what he's got to say." 
 
 Joe said, seriously, that he'd be very glad to go. There 
 was nothing new about old Nicholson's facts, and nothing 
 very alarming about his theories, but he'd be worth talk 
 ing to anyhow, and his stand of Belgian flax worth see 
 ing. If that stuff could be made to grow in this soil and 
 climate, it might be worth a lot to them. 
 
 He didn't mention to John that, for three months, he 
 had put in odd hours designing a harvester that would 
 pull flax up by the roots not for the purpose of baffling 
 the disease germs but of adding four inches or so to the 
 length of the fiber. He was always as secretive with his 
 immature idea as a cat with her blind kittens. 
 
 "All right," said John, "we'll plan to go out there 
 some time within the next week or so." 
 
 "Why not call him up," Joe asked, "and see if he's 
 there now? If he's really got anything to tell me, the 
 sooner I know it, the better. Unless you've got something 
 to do that you can 't get out of, ' ' he added, for John looked 
 dubious and unhappy. 
 
 "Why, I have, as a matter of fact," he said, uncer 
 tainly. 
 
 Joe grinned in his beard. He could manage it to-mor 
 row, he said, though it was a pretty full day. And he 
 was going north to-morrow night. 
 
 "To-morrow's impossible for me," said John. "Oh, 
 damn it, yes, I'll make it to-day. If Nicholson's there. 
 I'd promised Dodo I'd go to a ball-game with her Giants 
 and the Cubs. But she'll let me off, I guess." 
 
 Nicholson was at home and would be glad to see them. 
 So the date with Dorothy had to be broken. (Joe made 
 a mental note to tell Trix about this and a promise to 
 take her to the game to-morrow. Ball-games were a thing 
 he hadn't thought of as a resource for her.) The two ate 
 lunch together and immediately afterward, in Joe's road-
 
 A DETOUR 211 
 
 ster, drove out the Elgin road to Nicholson's. It was a 
 fine hot July day, sultry and rather still, with the pos 
 sibility, low down in the western sky, of a summer storm. 
 
 Joe enjoyed the afternoon thoroughly. He'd never 
 liked John Williamson so well before; he had never had 
 so little the sense that they belonged to two different 
 species. They talked, for the first time, at ease, and found, 
 within rather narrow limits, a common language. 
 
 As for old Nicholson, he proved clear treasure trove. 
 He was wild, possibly a little mad, utterly unsound in all 
 his scientific ideas; and his manners, though somewhat 
 more elaborate, were as outrageous as Joe's own. But he 
 was a perfectly real unaffected person, happily living a 
 life that was just about as he wanted it, and as sublimely 
 indifferent to collective opinion as he was to the facts of 
 physics and chemistry. 
 
 He and Joe, as they tramped out to the flax fields and 
 back to the "laboratories," and as they sat in his veranda 
 discussing a hospitable supply of Scotch and soda, argued 
 and swore at each other, until, by five o'clock, they were 
 old friends. It was about this time that John was called 
 to the telephone. Joe took advantage of the interruption 
 for a look at the sky. 
 
 "We're going to have a hell of a big rain before night," 
 he remarked. 
 
 Old Nicholson nodded. "I could have told you that 
 this morning, when you telephoned, only you wouldn't 
 have believed me. For that matter, I could have told you 
 a week ago. Got it written down in my almanac, if you 
 want to look. I've got a weather bureau of my own, out 
 here, that makes those meteorological experts the govern 
 ment pays good money to, look foolish." 
 
 Joe would have asked for a look at the almanac (it 
 ought to be an amusing thing to see) if Williamson hadn't 
 come back, just then, with something else to talk about. 
 It was Violet who had telephoned. Dorothy had driven 
 her out to Hickory Hill this was Graham Stannard's and 
 Rush Wollaston's farm and, with the storm coming up,
 
 212 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 she didn't care to let the girl drive back. The Nichol 
 son place was only three or four miles away, and Violet's 
 idea was that John should pick them up at Hickory Hill 
 and drive them home. "I told them," John concluded, 
 "that we'd come out in your car, but that I didn't think 
 you'd mind taking me over there, and perhaps take Violet 
 home in my place. That little roadster of Dodo's would 
 be a tight fit for three. It's taking you a lot out of your 
 way, of course." 
 
 The request pleased Joe. It was of a piece with the 
 more companionable feeling he'd been aware of between 
 them all the afternoon. He would be late for dinner and 
 he'd been punctual as a commuter since Trix had been 
 promoted to the head of his household, but he'd con 
 trive to telephone from somewhere and let her know what 
 to expect. 
 
 They left Nicholson's at once, but the stop at Hickory 
 Hill used up a good deal more time than they'd counted 
 upon. They were an attractive lot of people, there, with 
 whom it w r as easy to linger and chat ; Miss Wollaston, 
 whom Joe had already met at the Cravens'; her brother, 
 John, convalescing from his desperate illness of the spring ; 
 the two boys, and, utterly in her element, young Sylvia. 
 They had an amusing house which Joe had to be shown 
 over. Then there were chains to be put on the cars, and 
 the vigorous discussions of what would be the best road, 
 in view of the now imminent storm. No road was good all 
 the way, and most of the detours would be tricky in bad 
 weather. 
 
 It amused Joe to note that there never was the slightest 
 question in John's mind as to how their party of four 
 should be divided up. John, and nobody else, was go 
 ing to drive his precious Dorothy over those tricky de 
 tours. Violet, he believed from a gleam he caught in her 
 eye, was somewhat dryly aware of the same thing. 
 
 Joe, with Violet, started out ahead; but the position 
 was reversed as soon as it began to rain, for he pulled out 
 to the side of the road at once and began putting up the
 
 A DETOUR 213 
 
 storm curtains, and the others came on by, passing with a 
 derisive honk from John and a shouted comment, only 
 half audible, from Dorothy. Her idea seemed to be that 
 the storm wasn't going to amount to anything, and that 
 the rain felt good anyway. 
 
 "They'll go on like that till they're soaked," Violet 
 said discontentedly, "and then they'll put up the curtains 
 to keep the wetness in. I'm like a cat about getting wet," 
 she added. "I hate it." 
 
 Joe's car had a right-hand drive, and his lever, es 
 pecially with the hand-brake set and the storm curtains 
 up, barred his entrance to the driving seat. It was rain 
 ing in good earnest before he'd finished with the cur 
 tains, and, in the light of that last remark of hers, he 
 hesitated to ask her to get out so that he could get in. 
 
 "I can climb in over you," he suggested, "if you don't 
 mind being squeezed a bit." 
 
 "I don't mind," she said, and he clambered in, over 
 her knees. Then he reached across her and buttoned the 
 last curtain fast. 
 
 "You're wet already," she remarked, laying her hand 
 upon his sleeve. 
 
 He told her it was nothing, but that, if she'd let him, 
 he ? d take off his coat. She nodded, and helped him extri 
 cate his arms from the sleeves. He chucked the wet coat 
 into a little boot behind the seat, released his brake, and 
 drove on. 
 
 The state of his mind and feeling toward her, when 
 they had started out from Hickory Hill, would have satis 
 fied the most exacting husband in the world. John Will 
 iamson, had he possessed the clairvoyant power to read 
 it, would probably have smiled over it as not quite cred 
 ibly austere. No human male of virile years could be ex 
 pected to set out upon a long drive with as pretty a 
 woman as Violet for his sole companion without a little 
 more disposition to improve the shining hour oh, in a 
 perfectly harmless decent way, of course than could be 
 read in Joe's intentions.
 
 214 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 Her sensuous appeal to him was completely in abeyance. 
 She was John Williamson's wife, and John was, after all, 
 a thoroughly good fellow. She was also, in a way he'd 
 never been lucky enough to experience before, willing to 
 make friends with him. He wanted her for a friend, on 
 Trix's account as well as on his own. And then, last and 
 and first and all the time, he was that newly discovered 
 being, Trix's father. Emotions awakened on the night of 
 his quarrel with her hadn't had time to subside into com 
 monplace tepidity. The chance that Trix's father should 
 even glance aside at the amorous possibilities of another 
 woman would have been unthinkable to him when he 
 left Hickory Hill. But when he started the car, after that 
 pause to put the curtains up, there had been a change. 
 
 The subtlety of the sense perceptions, when they are 
 trained and relied upon, as Joe's were, is beyond language, 
 altogether. It was with perfect innocence that he sug 
 gested it mightn't be necessary for her to get out of the 
 car in order to let him in, if she didn't mind being squeezed 
 a bit. But some quality of her voice when she answered, 
 "I don't mind," roused him. She had inflected it in a 
 thoroughly matter-of-fact way, too. There was the same 
 message in the feel of her body as he crowded across it, 
 in the non-withdrawal of her breast from contact with his 
 arm as he buttoned the curtains, in her discovery of the 
 wetness of his coat and in the way she helped him out of it 
 A series of acts which could have been described in pre 
 cisely the same words, might have told him nothing at all, 
 might have left him as coolly unconscious of her sex as he 'd 
 been when he stopped the car. There wasn't the faintest 
 doubt in him of the authenticity of the message. Whether 
 she'd meant to convey it, or even was aware she had, he 
 couldn't feel sure. 
 
 He called up a sullen resistance to meet it. He drove 
 bruskly and hard through the pounding rain. His left 
 hand was kept busy sweeping the windshield clear with 
 the squeeze, and every time his arm came back to the 
 driving position, it had to crowd its way in beside her
 
 A DETOUR 215 
 
 body. There was nothing tender about the way he did it. 
 He talked, doggedly, dully, about old Nicholson and his 
 flax and his mad ideas. He talked about the Wollastons 
 and the success John 's wife was making at Ravinia. Any 
 thing that would press back his consciousness and his 
 awareness of hers that they were shut in together snug 
 and close against the storm, alone and secure; of their 
 bodily warmth, the nearness of flesh to flesh. 
 
 She did nothing to help him. She said little, made no 
 conversation of her own. And what she did say was no 
 longer friendly, but curt, preoccupied. Well, he knew 
 he knew too damned well what her preoccupation was. 
 
 He gave over trying to talk at last, and drove all the 
 harder. He could feel his heart pounding like a sulky 
 motor. The rain had increased to a cloud-burst. It 
 looked like a solid wall of water he was driving into. 
 There was only a lurid dusk of daylight left and the two 
 misty pencils from his head-lights illuminated nothing. 
 
 "I suppose it's dangerous to go on through this," she 
 remarked indifferently. 
 
 "It'd be a damn sight more dangerous to stop," he 
 growled and didn't know whether she had heard or not. 
 She gave no sign, anyhow, that he could hear or feel, and 
 he didn't turn to look. 
 
 But within a minute or two the question of going on 
 was settled for him. He had been balancing the car on 
 the crown of a newly worked dirt road. It was a trick 
 comparable to walking a tight-rope, and when a loose 
 stone threw him a little to one side the car instantly be 
 came unsteerable. He killed the motor and with the clutch 
 in, braked as hard as he dared, which wasn't much, to 
 check their momentum, but there was no way to stop their 
 side-slip. The only question was whether they would bring 
 up in a ditch, in which case the car would no doubt roll 
 over, or against a cut-down bank. It depended on which 
 was there. 
 
 Violet laughed as she felt them going, but not, he noted, 
 the sort of laugh one might expect. There was nothing
 
 216 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 of panic in it. It was only a matter of seconds before 
 they brought up against the bank and stopped with a jolt 
 which threw her violently upon him. 
 
 For a moment, her body was like steel, every muscle 
 stretched taut; but even so she made no movement away 
 from him. He eased the position of his shoulder, by slip 
 ping it under her, and at that, with a gasp, she went soft. 
 His arm closed round her and held her where she was. 
 
 "You're a good sport," he told her hoarsely. "There's 
 no telling where you're going to bring up when you start 
 a side-slip like that." 
 
 Her answer was hardly articulate. " been slipping 
 a long while " was what he thought he heard. 
 
 He felt an imperious need to see her face, and reach 
 ing out with his free hand he switched on the dash lamp. 
 She flinched at the faint glow but made no spoken pro 
 test. The little light made the outer darkness deeper. 
 The rain shut them in like a many folded curtain. "Oh, 
 God!" he whispered helplessly. Then, with a laugh, "I 
 guess there's nothing we can do about it." 
 
 "Not a thing," she murmured. 
 
 He pulled her up higher so that her head fell back upon 
 his shoulder, and kissed her up-turned mouth, hotly, un 
 equivocally. Then he drew back and stared down into 
 her face. 
 
 Her eyes, wide open, luminous, returned his gaze with 
 something in them that confounded him; an impossible 
 thing. Innocence ! The incredulous half -terrified awaken 
 ing of a new surmise ! She was a mother of a grown girl. 
 She had been married the better part of twenty years. 
 But she made him think of Beatrice. 
 
 He shifted her over to her own side of the seat, gently 
 enough but with a movement of sudden resolution; then, 
 he clenched his hands on the wheel. "We can't go on 
 with this," he said, holding his voice as steady as he 
 could. "It isn't easy to pull up, but it can be done." 
 
 He didn't look at her; gazed out fixedly through the 
 windshield as if he'd been driving the car. But he was
 
 A DETOUR 217 
 
 aware of her, slumped down a little in her seat and shud 
 dering. She gave no indication of listening to him, but 
 he plunged heavily on, in spurts. The mess had got to be 
 cleared up somehow, now, before it grew any worse. 
 
 "That's the way we feel about each other all right; 
 there's no getting away from that. Have from the first, 
 I guess. . . . But it isn't the only way, not with me 
 anyhow. . . .It's nobody's fault this happened. Just 
 bad luck. And there's no harm done, yet. . . . It's a 
 string we can't play out, that's all. We don't want to 
 play it out. You don't want to make a fool of your hus 
 band, and neither do I. And I do want to be friends with 
 you the other way. I want you for a friend, for Bea 
 trice. And this would spoil all that. We can't have it 
 "both ways. And we can't go half-way and stop. It's 
 got to be all or nothing with us. I'm not saying it's 
 easy. ' ' His voice rose and his grip on the wheel tightened. 
 "It's a hell of a thing the way it jumps on you, out of 
 the bushes. But it's not the only thing in the world." 
 
 She turned upon him, now, and the movement brought 
 his eyes round to her for the first time since he'd begun 
 speaking. She was still trembling, and her eyes were 
 bright, but with a furious anger. "Oh, you're unspeak 
 able ! ' ' she cried. 
 
 "For telling the truth?" 
 
 "The truth!" Rage made her almost voiceless. "I 
 wouldn't have listened as long as I did if I'd understood 
 what you meant. The beastly thing you meant." 
 
 "We meant the same thing, for a minute or two," he 
 told her bluntly. "It shocked you to realize it. Well, it 
 shocked me, too, though you may not believe it. And I 
 thought the only way for us to get back on the other 
 "basis as friends ..." 
 
 Frantically, she snatched the word away from him. 
 "Friends? With you? After the beastly things you've 
 done and said?" 
 
 " It 's the saying that 's the crime, ' ' he commented grimly. 
 "What we did wouldn't have mattered, to you, I guegs,
 
 218 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 if we'd pretended it was nothing. Aren't you any realer 
 than that?" 
 
 "If you speak to me again," she declared wildly, "I'll 
 get out of the car. I'll wade in the mud till I find some 
 body who '11 come back and ..." She shrank away from 
 him, leaving the threat to be guessed at, buried her face 
 in her hands and began crying, like a child. 
 
 He clenched the wheel, fighting down the impulse to 
 take her up in his arms again. He knew what would 
 happen if he did. She'd struggle for a minute, and then 
 go soft again and they'd be back where they were be 
 fore. The old Adam in him was grinning at him for a 
 fool to have taken her so seriously. Even a prudential 
 consideration whispered that she'd be less dangerous 
 less troublesome, anyhow; she couldn't be dangerous so 
 dealt with, than as now. But he sat still and the wave 
 passed, leaving him cool, unmoved, as if the storm had 
 never been. 
 
 Outside, the storm was, he finally decided, thinning. He 
 looked cautiously round at Violet. She'd about stopped 
 crying, too, though her face was still buried in her hands. 
 ' ' If you '11 let me out, ' ' he said, " I '11 see what can be done 
 about getting started, again." 
 
 She stepped down into the road without a word or a 
 glance at him. When he came back, twenty minutes later, 
 with some boards he'd found, she was at first nowhere to 
 be seen, but presently he made her out by the faint day 
 light that was returning as the sky cleared, up on the bank 
 a little distance away, looking down the road. He gave no 
 sign of having seen her, but when he went to work jacking 
 up the wheels and sliding the boards under them she came 
 down and asked him, composedly enough, if he needed her 
 help. She remained near by, just the same, when he told 
 her he did not, and even volunteered a remark about the 
 weather. She asked to have the curtains taken off be 
 fore they started on again, and a something peremptory 
 in her voice when she said it was all that slanted in 
 any way toward what had happened between them. She
 
 A DETOUR 219 
 
 took her place beside him with no appearance of hesita 
 tion. 
 
 They had a wild mile or two slithering over .those in 
 clined planes of clay which made what was supposed to 
 be a road. Repeatedly they began sliding toward one of 
 the ditches or the other, and it wanted all his skill and 
 sometimes most of his strength to avoid disaster. She said 
 very little but she showed a perfectly normal concern for 
 his success, and by the time they were safely upon gravel 
 again he felt that she was, in balance and tone, much the 
 same person with whom he'd left Hickory Hill. But of 
 her intentions toward him, the sort of modus vivendi, if 
 any, she meant to offer him, he had no inkling whatever. 
 
 He was conscious of a growing intangibility about her as 
 she became more at ease. Indeed, it struck him, amusedly, 
 at something she said, that she'd have said just that thing, 
 and in just that tone, to Jeffrey, her chauffeur. But his 
 last impression of her that day was to be of a different 
 sort. 
 
 They had sloAved down for a right-angle turn in the 
 road when simultaneously they saw the other car, stand 
 ing in a drive that led up to a big comfortable-looking 
 farm-house. Joe stopped at once, and began backing to 
 turn in. 
 
 "You needn't do that," she said sharply. "I can get 
 out right here." She added, when he went on without 
 obeying her, "I've already been in the mud, so it's too 
 late for that." 
 
 She was fumbling with the door-handle so, instead of 
 cutting forward, he went on backing the car, across the 
 culvert and up the drive. He made her no other answer 
 until she demanded furiously, "Why don't you do as I 
 say? What are you going to do?" 
 
 "I don't even know your husband's in that house. I 
 suppose he is. But I'm not going to leave you till I can 
 turn you over to him as good as I got you." 
 
 Again he saw she was trembling violently. "You 
 cad/" she whispered.
 
 220 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 "I'm not going to tell him anything," he said. "I'm 
 going to let him have a good look at me, that's all." 
 
 By now, he had stopped his car before the door. She 
 sprang down and fled up the path to the door-step, but 
 he followed, only a pace behind. At the door, she turned 
 and spoke to him in the high, clear, cultivated, leisurely 
 tone which connotes security and place and unlimited as 
 surance. "I'm terribly sorry you don't think you can 
 stop, but I know how frightfully late I've made you, 
 already. Good-by. ' ' 
 
 But her face made of that manner a pitiable travesty. 
 She was on the verge of the complete demoralization of 
 panic. She couldn't endure seeing her husband and her 
 daughter in the same room with him. Not to-day at any 
 rate. There was clear hatred of him in her eyes but there 
 was appeal, as well, and this he couldn't resist. 
 
 He turned sharply away and was getting into his car 
 when John Williamson opened the door. He waved one 
 hand while he slid his transmission lever into first speed 
 with the other. A moment more and he was driving as 
 fast as he could back to town and Beatrice. He didn't 
 care a damn what John or any of the rest of that gang 
 thought of him.
 
 CHAPTER SIX 
 
 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 FOE Henry Craven, after he and Novell! had put his 
 sister and Portia on the Boston train, there began at once 
 a life of guilty pleasure. It was guilty only in that it was 
 pleasurable. He ought to have missed Margaret, of course, 
 suddenly deprived of the care she'd always lavished upon 
 him, and he was perfectly aware of this moral obligation. 
 Margaret, in fact, had pointed it out indirectly, by re 
 ferring to herself as a good riddance and laughing at his 
 protest that he shouldn't know how to get on without her. 
 But, unnatural as it was to feel this way, he liked being 
 left alone "let alone" he stopped on the brink of put 
 ting it. There was no disguising the throb of elation he 
 felt at the end of the day's work with the realization that 
 he needn't go home nor even telephone to explain why. 
 
 Usually he did go home, after picking up a bite to eat 
 on the way, but this, too, was fun of a sort. If it was a 
 hot night, he'd undress, leaving his clothes about just as 
 he liked, and get into pajamas, and then sit down at the 
 piano and read a score (his piano technique was so sketchy 
 that this diversion always got on Margaret's nerves, when 
 she was about j she couldn 't, either, see why, if he felt like 
 music, he didn't practise on his violin, an instrument he 
 could play) or a detective story in an easy chair. He 
 became aware of a lack, somewhere, about this, and 
 finally supplied it by the purchase of an expensive Eng 
 lish pipe and some tobacco Hugh Corbett recommended. 
 
 221
 
 222 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 He didn't like the taste of it, exactly, but the connotative 
 sensations were immensely satisfactory. 
 
 TVlien the bill at Ravinia attracted him he'd go directly 
 to the Park from down-town, 'without bothering to dress, 
 get his dinner in the casino, and hear just as much of the 
 opera as he liked, usually without committing himself to 
 a seat in the pavilion. Sometimes he'd find Mary Wol- 
 laston (she was keeping house for Paula that summer) and 
 go for a stroll with her about the lawns. And if, after 
 spending the intermission in pleasant gossip with her, he 
 decided he didn 't want to hear any more music that night, 
 lie simply took the next car back to town without an ex 
 planatory word to anybody. He hadn't known an irre 
 sponsibility like this since his father's death, sixteen years 
 ago half his lifetime, almost. 
 
 One night the intoxication of liberty led him more 
 widely astray, to a place known as the Blue Moon Garden. 
 He didn't know just what sort of place it was, but if the 
 respectability of some of the persons he knew to be its oc 
 casional patrons was a criterion, it couldn't be, exactly, 
 disreputable. He was sure he'd heard the Bob Corbetts 
 and Eleanor Randolph speak of going there. They were 
 advertising a new revue at the place, and when Henry 
 read James "Wallace's comment in his paper, to the effect 
 that the music was less painful than most of the jazz one 
 heard nowadays, and that, though sumptuously undressed, 
 the show was not vulgar and rather smart, it surprisingly 
 struck him that it would be fun to go and see what an en 
 tertainment of this sort was like. Even so, he'd hardly 
 have overcome a countervailing reluctance if it had not 
 occurred to him to ask himself what this reluctance sprang 
 from. It was not, he decided, from a real distaste. He'd 
 caught himself wishing that Joe Greer were back in town 
 from the North and would ask him to go ; Joe, who knew 
 the ropes and would see him through if anything hap 
 pened. But what possibly could happen? The trouble 
 with him was that he was afraid! That settled the ques 
 tion, of course. He'd have to go.
 
 THE SAMARITANS 223 
 
 He felt absurd over his fears after he 'd got inside. The 
 place was nothing but what would have been called a beer- 
 garden before the days of prohibition. A band shell, a 
 dancing floor with rows of tables round it rising in ter 
 races, and at one side a rudimentary and imperfectly iso 
 lated stage, a few scraggy limes surviving the strangu 
 lation of the wooden platforms that had been built round 
 their trunks, and a wild medley of colored incandescent 
 lamps in meaningless festoons. Henry gratefully ac 
 cepted the head- waiter's consignment of him to an incon 
 spicuous table in a corner and ordered ginger-ale as the 
 least unpleasant of the drinks that were lawfully left to 
 him. 
 
 He seriously contemplated walking out of the place 
 again before the show began, for the tone of the crowd of 
 fended him. He disliked their voices and their table man 
 ners and especially he disliked the way they danced. The 
 floor was as yet only half filled, but the couples upon 
 it, plastered as tight together as mutually embracing arms 
 could hold, made almost no lateral motion beyond a lan 
 guid circling, and the stammering drunken rhythm of the 
 music expressed itself in the twitching of shoulders and 
 the w r rithing of hips. 
 
 This wasn't so very different r he was aware, from the 
 way young people danced at the parties Dorothy went to, 
 but well, if Dorothy danced like that she wouldn't do it 
 that way. Nothing she did could be ugly or vile, as the 
 movements, for example, of that little rag of a girl in 
 black, with the long feather, were ugly and vile. Did he 
 mean to pretend that well-bred people could do, without of 
 fense, the same things that were indecent when vulgar folk 
 did them? Yes, he guessed that was exactly what he 
 meant. 
 
 It was an immense relief to him when the noise of the 
 jazz players was stilled, the floor cleared and the show 
 begun. It needed, no doubt, all the advantage it got from 
 comparison with its audience to make it seem smart and 
 well-behaved, and, as the evening advanced, this con-
 
 trast was less enforced. The entertainment percolated 
 from the dance floor, whence it had flowed from the 
 stage, among the tables, and during the long intermis 
 sions he recognized performers sitting at the tables and 
 dancing with the spectators. 
 
 About ten o 'clock, a girl, one of the principal performers 
 it appeared from the way the music and the lights were 
 employed to dramatize her entrance, sang a song upon the 
 familiar theme of a quest for a lover. The idea was made 
 plain that any one possessing certain elemental qualifi 
 cations would do and it was packed with innuendo which 
 delighted the audience. After she had sung a verse from 
 the stage she moved down among the tables, stopping here 
 and there to make her plea to such individuals as would 
 be most embarrassed by it. 
 
 Until she came into Henry's neighborhood, he didn't 
 recognize her at all, for she was extravagantly made up as 
 the familiar vampire type and, too, he'd avoided looking 
 at her very closely from a fear of attracting her eye. But 
 when he perceived by the direction of stares from the 
 near-by tables that she was actually bearing down upon 
 him, he looked up in desperation and realized that he 
 knew her. She was one of the two girls who had come 
 home from Twitchell's show with Joe Greer; not the 
 French girl he'd liked so well, but the other one. What 
 was her name? Bunny something. 
 
 In the same instant she recognized him and relinquished 
 her intention, transfixing, in his stead, a victim at the 
 next table. But he was sure that as she passed, close 
 enough to brush his sleeve, she'd spoken to him, to the 
 effect, he thought, that she'd see him later. He found 
 her name in his program and made sure he 'd not been mis 
 taken. Yes, there it was in big black letters, Bunny Bar 
 rett. 
 
 Certainly he wouldn't go and look her up at the end of 
 the performance if this was what she 'd meant but was it ? 
 Wouldn't it be more sensible to slip away at once? He'd 
 had enough of this, hadn't he? Yes, of course. All the
 
 THE SAMARITANS 225 
 
 same he didn't go. Probably she'd meant nothing at all 
 by that aside of hers, if, indeed, he hadn't mistaken her, 
 altogether. 
 
 So he was still sitting there, a bit uneasy but myste 
 riously excited, when, early in the next intermission, he 
 saw her coming toward him again, decorously cloaked, now, 
 in a light evening wrap and with some of the more fla 
 grant items of her make-up removed, but unmistakable, 
 nevertheless, to the occupants of the tables, who stared 
 after her with open curiosity. It was too late then, of 
 course, for Henry to do anything but get up and shake 
 hands and ask her to sit down with him. Fortified by his 
 program he was able to address her as Miss Barrett. 
 
 The officious proximity of a waiter suggested an offer 
 of refreshment, which he, a little hesitantly, made. "I 
 come on again," she said, "so I haven't time to eat any 
 thing, but I would like a glass of Munich beer." He 
 thought this was facetious and began, "So would I . . . " 
 when he perceived she'd said it seriously. "You can get 
 anything if they know you," she assured him, and, turn 
 ing, informed the waiter that he was all right. "Abso 
 lutely!" So Henry, feeling superbly wicked, said he'd 
 take Munich beer, too. A half litre for each of them. 
 
 Conversation with Bunny didn't flow freely, even under 
 the liquefactive influence of the beer. She asked about 
 Joe and learned he was out-of-town. She revived memo 
 ries of their party and regretted that the real one, to which 
 he was to have brought his violin, hadn 't come off. Henry 
 made what he could of these infertile topics but it was not 
 much, and he had no others to launch in place of them. 
 Yet, preposterously, he was enjoying the adventure. He 
 basked in the respectful envy of the tables round about, 
 in his status as a trustworthy lawbreaker, established by 
 Bunny's guarantee, with the waiter. She'd transfigured 
 him this was what, in a word, it came to into a per 
 sonage ! 
 
 But before she left him his complacence was destined to 
 collapse. He was looking out over the dance floor hope-
 
 226 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 ful of seeing something -which might be made to serve as 
 conversational grist, when his glance fell upon Joe 's daugh 
 ter, Beatrice. Evidently she had just come in, for the 
 head-waiter was conducting her and her companion to a 
 reserved table. Henry knew him, too. He was young 
 Lansing Ware. Their progress attracted a good deal of 
 attention, the girl's prettiness, her swagger and her con 
 spicuous dress (it was an evening frock of rose or straw 
 berry color, matched, more or less, in stockings, slippers 
 and an explosive hat) making this inevitable. Henry was 
 disconcerted, on turning back to Bunny, to find her watch 
 ing them with an interest evidently as personal as his. 
 
 "Quite some baby, Lance has pronged out to-night!" 
 she observed, adding with a sniff, " And then people 
 talk about actresses!" She seemed quite sure that Bea 
 trice did not belong to her profession. 
 "Do you know him?" he asked. 
 
 Bunny nodded. "He's a cold storage egg, all right," 
 she said. Her tone was as derogatory as the unusual 
 epithet she had applied to him, but it struck Henry, from 
 the way she changed her position and kept looking at the 
 egg, that she'd be glad to attract his attention. The 
 table they'd taken wasn't far away and she might easily 
 manage it. 
 
 The mere glimpse of the corollary possibility, that Bea 
 trice and young "Ware would see him, in his present com 
 pany, reduced him to a state of acute embarrassment. He 
 was ashamed of the feeling but this didn 't help him to over 
 come it. He sat as small as he could and fixed his eyes 
 upon the food-stained bill of fare upon the table. Another 
 dance began presently and he was able to dismiss, for the 
 moment, his fears (though not his disgust with himself 
 for having entertained them) by observing that the other 
 couple had merged themselves into the milling mass of 
 dancers upon the floor. Also, it appeared, this dance 
 was Bunny's call to quarters. 
 
 She said as she took leave of him that she'd be free 
 again a little after eleven, but he assured her that he was
 
 THE SAMARITANS 227 
 
 leaving almost at once. It was terribly nice of her to have 
 remembered him, and he hoped that they might meet again 
 some time. "The head-waiter 11 send a note back any 
 time you come," she told him, and upon his fervid promise 
 to write such a note the next time he came back to the 
 Blue Moon she left him. She was a nice, friendly, hard 
 working girl and he was a pitiful snob to have been 
 ashamed of her merely because two people he knew hap 
 pened to come into the garden, but bootless contrition 
 wasn't the thing the moment called for. He must make 
 Tip his mind what to do about Beatrice. 
 
 Lansing "Ware was, unless the gossip of his own circle 
 did him grave injustice, a pretty bad lot. Bunny's simile 
 had really been charitable. He'd been court-martialed for 
 drunkenness, Henry had been told, and his limp was not 
 an honorable wound, but the result of a joy-riding es 
 capade of an unusually discreditable sort. The real in 
 dictment against him, however, seemed to be that he elab 
 orated and encouraged the myth among all persons to 
 whom the truth could not be told, beginning with his de 
 voted mother and sister, that he'd been disabled in the 
 strikingly courageous performance of duty. It was not 
 a disability that interfered with any of his pleasures, so 
 far as one could see. He might not have been able to 
 dance the waltz of Henry's day, but at what they called 
 dancing here, to-night, he seemed adept. 
 
 Henry's impulse, as soon as Bunny's departure set him 
 at liberty, was to attach himself to the couple, if only as a 
 barnacle, discourage young "Ware, if possible amuse Bea 
 trice, and eventir.iiy take her home. But it wasn't his 
 way, after all those years of Margaret's training, to do 
 anything impulsively, even when his inclination was clear 
 and in this case it was not. 
 
 He liked the girl, a little, and what he didn't like about 
 her he whole-heartedly pitied. Yet he was aware that his 
 pity would be resented and the grounds for it inexplicable 
 to her. He had thought he found in her, at the begin 
 ning of their acquaintance, the germ of a genuine liking
 
 228 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 for him, an evanescent lighting up and opening out to him 
 which wasn't at all a matter of consciously presented ap 
 pearances; but very likely he'd been mistaken in this. 
 
 Margaret thought so, anyhow. She'd cut him short 
 with a satirical smile, during his only talk with her upon 
 the subject, and had told him bluntly that the girl was 
 only to use her own vocabulary stringing him. "She 
 was smiling over your shoulder at her father whenever she 
 got a chance. And I understand she boasted of you as a 
 conquest, to Dorothy." Margaret took some of the sting 
 out of this by adding the general truth that any girl of 
 that age could make a fool of any man over thirty-five. 
 
 She was probably right, even in this special case. 
 Women were a lot less credulous than men; saw things 
 clearer. And he'd felt, for himself, about some of Bea 
 trice 's professions and approaches, a naive coquetry. Any 
 how he was pretty sure that if he attached himself to her 
 to-night he'd be received, not as a friend but as a rival of 
 Lansing Ware, who would be made, perhaps, the recip 
 ient of surreptitious smiling glances of commiseration. It 
 would be a thoroughly unpleasant position as that of an 
 ineffectual altruist usually was. 
 
 It was the ineffectuality rather than the unpleasantness 
 that held him back. He didn't dance, these days. (His 
 hatred of the new rhythms was too intense even for Mar 
 garet to overcome.) All he could do would be to sit at 
 their table and trust their charity to bring them back to 
 it. He thought, too late, of an audacious strategic re 
 source he'd thrown away, Bunny! With her enlisted 
 help, he might have accomplished something. But he ac 
 knowledged, with disgust, that his courage wouldn't have 
 been equal to this, even if he'd thought of it in time, and 
 in this reaction he unobtrusively left the garden and went 
 home to bed. 
 
 Very likely this mountain he 'd been making was nothing 
 but a molehill, after all. Young girls of unimpeachable 
 social position did frequent places of this sort, or worse, if 
 one believed the gossip, in no more protective company
 
 THE SAMARITANS 229 
 
 than that of boys of their own years and class. They de 
 serted respectable dinners and dances their parents had 
 consigned them to, and adventured abroad, in the small 
 hours, carrying their liquor with them. Yet Henry be 
 lieved they emerged from this phase of quasi-libertinage, 
 shabby as it was, more or less intact. Then why worry 
 about Beatrice ? 
 
 Well, Beatrice's social position wasn't unimpeachable. 
 She hadn't the protection of the pale. During these 
 weeks of her father's absence, she lacked even the protec 
 tion of a home. She was mistress of a flat an atrocious 
 position for a girl to have been abandoned in. Henry 
 wondered why Joe had done it. He had never under 
 stood why the plan for sending her east with Margaret 
 had so suddenly been dropped. 
 
 Margaret, he was aware, had been deeply offended by 
 the change, and he suspected, from an enigmatic phrase or 
 two she'd used, that Joe was not the sole object of her 
 anger ; but she had repulsed so fiercely his own innocently 
 meant questions, that he'd been glad to let the subject 
 alone. There was no doubt, however, that she'd washed 
 her hands of both the Greers before she went away. She 'd 
 been, indeed, unusually explicit about it. It had been 
 on this occasion that she'd spoken her mind to her brother 
 about the nature of Beatrice's regard for him. 
 
 It was painfully clear to Henry that she'd be annoyed 
 to be told and of course he'd have to tell her that he 
 had attempted anything in the nature of a rescue. Of 
 Dulcinea del Toboso! That would be Margaret's view of 
 it, and with, he couldn't deny, a certain justification. He 
 would feel foolish, paraded in the guise of captive at the 
 chariot-tail of the young thing he'd seen to-night in Lan 
 sing Ware 's embrace ! Yet something had got to be done 
 about it. 
 
 A telephoned reminder from Violet that he hadn't been 
 near them since Margaret went away and a specific invi 
 tation to come up to an early dinner and go to the Park 
 afterward to hear Fournier sing in Thais, showed him, he
 
 230 
 
 thought, a way to making a truce with his conscience. 
 Violet was the person, of course, to give Beatrice the tact 
 ful looking-after she needed. She'd quite made friends 
 with Joe. There was, in the back of his head, a faint 
 surmise that some suggestion of hers, inadvertent, no 
 doubt, was responsible for Joe's having given up his idea 
 of sending Beatrice east for the summer. She might 
 easily enough have said, without meaning as much as he'd 
 supposed, that she'd keep a friendly eye on the girl. The 
 simplest way to fulfill the promise would be for Violet to 
 invite her to stay with them until her father's return. 
 
 He found everything auspicious, beyond his hopes, for 
 the unfolding of this project. Another pair of guests 
 hadn't been able to come, Dodo was off somewhere, so 
 the bare three of them, Violet and John and Henry, sat 
 down to dine together. She struck him, too, as unusually 
 amiable, to-night, affectionate with him as she'd only rarely 
 been since the distant days among the Chateaux of their 
 youthful romance. 
 
 She kept the reins of the talk, though, in her own hands. 
 She was full of enthusiasm over the summer opera, the 
 amazingly high quality of the performances, the fun it all 
 was. She'd been going quite a lot to rehearsals, lately. 
 You never really understood an opera until you'd heard 
 it rehearsed. "What did Henry think of Fournier ? What 
 had he heard him in? "Wasn't he the greatest of all the 
 modern acting barytones? Oh, Baklanoff was great, of 
 course but this man was so delightful, personally. He'd 
 been playing round with them quite a lot, lately. He loved 
 shooting over the traps with John and was awfully good 
 at it, which you wouldn't expect, somehow, of an artist 
 like that. But it seemed he'd done it for years at Monte 
 Carlo, using live birds, of course. 
 
 The theme showed no signs of exhausting itself as the 
 dinner progressed so Henry, at last, to forestall her leav 
 ing him with John to their cigars, plunged into his story 
 from a standing start. He'd had a rather uncomfortable 
 experience, he said, and he wanted to "tell them about it
 
 THE SAMARITANS 231 
 
 particularly Violet. He threw that in because he fancied 
 from a restless movement of hers that she contemplated 
 leaving them, anyhow. He brightened up his beginning as 
 best he could by stressing his unfamiliarity with the role 
 of dissolute bachelor, which had led him to visit a place 
 like the Blue Moon. He told them, upon the same tack, 
 about Bunny, explaining, though pretty concisely, the cir 
 cumstances in which he'd formerly met her; and he felt, 
 at once, through his skin, that this had been a mistake. 
 It was too late to help that now, though, so he went 
 straight on to the heart of the business. 
 
 "Well, that's the sort of place it is. I suppose you 
 know all about it. Anyhow it was a great shock to me to 
 see young Beatrice Greer there. Lansing Ware brought 
 her in, just as I was on the point of leaving." 
 
 He elected to look up at John, at that, instead of at Vio 
 let. She had said nothing, nor moved, so far as he was 
 aware, but he knew that, for some reason, his mission 
 wasn't prospering. John mysteriously confirmed this by 
 looking fixedly at him, lowering his off-eyelid the one 
 Violet couldn't see, and almost perceptibly shaking his 
 head a plain warning that Henry was on thin ice. How 
 ever, you aren't lifted off it by the mere knowledge that 
 it's thin. 
 
 "Oh, I suppose any one might go there," he hurried on; 
 "even Dorothy, for a lark, with the right sort of crowd. 
 But a girl like Beatrice, who hasn't yet had a chance to 
 learn her way about, going alone to a resort like that with 
 a rotter like young Ware, is in well, real danger, it 
 seems to me. And since you're on friendly terms with 
 Joe ..." 
 
 He forced himself, at this point, to look round at Vio 
 let, by way of driving it home to her that he'd used the 
 pronoun in the singular personal sense, and the sight of 
 her face stopped him short. It was ablaze with anger. 
 She gave an ugly laugh and contemptuously repeated his 
 word. 
 
 "Danger! She's past that, I guess. Her father's
 
 232 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 daughter if that's what she is! He was in the habit of 
 taking his girls home with him, wasn't he? "Well, that's 
 probably what she's doing, now she's been given the 
 chance, with Lansing Ware and so on." 
 
 Henry, frozen speechless, was a little relieved to see that 
 John was gathering himself up for a protest. Evidently, 
 though, Violet perceived the same thing. Springing up 
 and thrusting back her chair, she forestalled him. "It's 
 his own fault," she told her husband sharply; " men 
 tioning Dodo in the same breath with a thing like that ! ' ' 
 Then she turned on Henry. "I won't have that man 
 spoken of, so you may as well make up your mind to it. 
 He isn't speakable. He's been bragging to yon, I sup 
 pose, of the 'friendly terms' he's on with me." 
 
 It was not, in form, a question Henry had neither 
 voice nor wits to have dealt with it if it had been but 
 he got the impression that she awaited, breathless for a 
 moment, an answer. "When she saw he meant to make 
 none, the tension slackened and she gave him a dry little 
 smile. "You're the one John and I are worrying about," 
 she said, and with a nod and a matter-of-fact admoni 
 tion not to smoke too long, as they didn't want to be 
 late for the first act, she left them. 
 
 "It'll be 'business as usual' with Greer, from now on," 
 John explained, at the end of a long thick silence, punc 
 tuated by a sigh and a heart-felt damn or two, "but as a 
 social account he's written off the books. And the girl, 
 too, of course. Sort of a pity, because she isn't so bad, 
 but there's nothing else to do." 
 
 "Something happened, I suppose," Henry ventured 
 weakly. 
 
 John nodded. "I don't know what, exactly. Violet 
 swears it was nothing that had to be taken up, you know. 
 "Why, we were all driving back from Hickory Hill oh, 
 a couple of weeks ago, this was, the day we had that 
 cloud-burst and I'd put her in with him. I was driving 
 Dodo in the little roadster. "When they came up with us, 
 at the house we'd taken shelter in, she left him and fin-
 
 THE SAMARITANS 233 
 
 ished the drive with Dodo and me. Tried to make out 
 it was nothing but that she didn't want to take him so 
 far out of his way. But I could see she'd been badly 
 shaken up. Some rotten thing he'd said to her, I sup 
 pose. Of course she doesn 't want a mess made of it, so the 
 only thing to do is to let it alone. I could kick myself for 
 having given him a chance even to look at her, because, 
 of course, I knew he was a damned mucker, from the first. 
 But he seemed to act all right, at the start. I almost 
 liked him that day we went to Hickory Hill. And all the 
 while, I suppose, he was just waiting for his chance." 
 
 It was fortunate, Henry felt, for him, that John wasn't 
 watching him very closely, and that his responsive 
 indignation over the story of Joe's misbehavior 
 was taken so confidently for granted. He stubbornly 
 and to himself, surprisingly disbelieved that Joe had 
 been waiting for his chance or that he'd made an un 
 warranted use of it. The thing that stood out in his mind 
 was Violet's look while she waited to learn whether Joe 
 had told him his version of the episode and her evident 
 relief when she came to the conclusion that he had not. 
 Henry had been observing her for many years with a 
 pretty well disillusioned eye, and he had memories of his 
 own which served as interpreters. Violet might have got 
 more than she bargained for, but she had not been the 
 victim of an unprovoked assault. And if there 'd been 
 anything she could tell John, she'd have told it. But 
 these reflections were clearly not presentable to John "Will 
 iamson. It was hardly prudent even to entertain them 
 in his presence. 
 
 "You said something about business as usual," Henry 
 reminded him. "I suppose that applies to me." 
 
 John assured him that it did. He added, rather more 
 thoughtfully, "And even on the personal side, as far as 
 you're concerned, I wouldn't make any difference, if I 
 were you for the present. We can't possibly get rid of 
 him for another year, and there's no good stirring him up, 
 unnecessarily, or making him suspicious. In some ways,
 
 234 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 the better he likes you, the simpler the situation will be. 
 You've done well with him, so far. Better than I thought 
 you could. Well, keep it up. Don't worry about Vio 
 let. I'll square you with her. It's damned unlucky, on 
 that side, that this thing had to break the way it did. No 
 help for it, of course. I don 't suppose there 's any chance, 
 even now, of getting Margaret to take the girl ? ' ' 
 
 "I'm afraid that can't be managed," Henry said, 
 more decisively than he often spoke. 
 
 John, though, seemed quite unaware of this, and went 
 on, comfortably, "Oh, well, do the best you can to keep 
 him on the rails. That's really important, you know." 
 
 Anger was a rare and slowly roused emotion with 
 Henry, but it burned in him like a fever, as he sat in 
 Violet's box that evening, pretending to listen to the in 
 anities of Thais, so hot that he wondered they didn't ask 
 what was the matter with him. Complacently, they saw 
 nothing. Violet was absorbed in her new pet, the bary 
 tone, Fournier a safer sort, for the role of tame cat she 
 evidently thought him, than Joe had turned out to be. 
 And John what was the matter of his contented contem 
 plations? His patent importance; his possessions in 
 cluding the most highly valued of them, his pretty wife; 
 his profits, past and future including those he meant to 
 make out of Joe Greer 's genius, before he got rid of him ? 
 
 John was the unconscious object of the hottest of Hen 
 ry's wrath. The hardly veiled implications in that talk 
 of theirs, burned under his skin like a corrosive. He un 
 derstood, now, the true nature of the job John had so 
 benevolently offered him last April. A spy, expected to 
 insinuate his way into the confidence of a business asso 
 ciate, quiet his suspicions, ' ' keep him on the rails, ' ' against 
 the day of his precalculated destruction. Well, Henry 
 would see them damned first, and he'd go to John, upon 
 a fitting occasion naturally not here in the box, to-night, 
 and tell him so. 
 
 At the intermission he pleaded a headache, which some 
 thing about his looks seemed to make plausible to Violet,
 
 THE SAMARITANS 235 
 
 and took the next trolley back to town ; but the change of 
 scene did not effect a recession of his anger. It kept him 
 half awake till dawn, like a recurrent nightmare. 
 
 He'd have to resign his job with the flax company. It 
 was not, under his present instructions, the sort of job a 
 man with any self-respect could hold. Not if he'd under 
 stood those instructions aright. Well, there couldn't be 
 any serious doubt could there? that he had. He'd say 
 that to John in so many words. They could find some one 
 else, no doubt. He'd go back to his old job in the bank. 
 But would they take him back? No, they wouldn't. The 
 ranks, there, had closed up behind him. 
 
 He realized with a sensation of spiritual nausea, that a 
 quarrel to the finish with John was, simply, not open to 
 him. Not with Margaret . . . No, it wasn't Margaret. 
 He couldn't hide behind her. She'd be looked after, no 
 doubt, kept safely on the hither side of actual privation, 
 anyhow, no matter what he did. But there 'd be no mercy 
 shown him, once he had openly presented himself to 
 John in the colors of an ingrate and renegade. Life, in the 
 limbo John and his friends could consign him to, was a 
 thing he couldn't face. 
 
 In the morning, though, after he'd shaved and had his 
 breakfast, he was able to take a less cheerless, as well as 
 a less drastic, view of the situation. He couldn't be con 
 sidered a spy upon Joe, because his position was openly 
 acknowledged. He was there to protect the legitimate 
 interests of a certain group of stock-holders, and there was 
 no reason why he should not go on protecting them. His 
 personal sentiments toward Joe were irrelevant. There 
 was no need of insisting to John that his friendship for 
 the man was genuine and not simulated. John's assump 
 tion that it was simulated was really, though unpalatable, 
 about the best lubricant the situation could have. He had, 
 for example, given a carte blanche which fully licensed 
 Henry's new-born project for constituting himself an 
 uncle to Beatrice. 
 
 But at the end of a fortnight in the course of which he
 
 236 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 had made four or five attempts to get himself established 
 in the girl's mind as a friendly anchorage, he confessed 
 himself defeated. Jennie MacArthur was the person to 
 whom the confession was made. 
 
 2 
 
 Until both Joe and Margaret went away, Henry had 
 made little conscious progress toward a friendship with 
 the infallible secretary. From the first they'd got on 
 well enough. He had not, as he'd expected, found her 
 superhuman efficiency irritating, nor himself put upon 
 the defensive by it. After the first two or three days of 
 routine work in the office, he blushed whenever he recalled 
 his injurious suspicion, entertained on the day of the di 
 rectors' meeting, that there might be a sexual liaison be 
 tween her and Joe. By the end of the first week he had 
 forgotten that he'd ever entertained it. He found she'd 
 meant literally her invitation to call on her any time for 
 anything in the w T hole range of the activities of the new and 
 rather chaotic business, and his dependence upon her was 
 a little humiliating until, along in June, she was out a 
 fortnight with an attack of flu, and he found that every 
 one else missed her just as he did. But that she had any 
 existence out of office hours hadn't occurred to him. 
 
 In the office, however, it wasn't all business a dis 
 covery which had delighted Henry after his long years of 
 habituation to the cold inelastic routine of the bank. This 
 atmosphere, by contrast, seemed almost frivolous. Work 
 always got done, to be sure, but there was no prescribed 
 manner, no look of solemn preoccupied importance to be 
 maintained, and if there was nothing to do, you did noth 
 ing, openly and unabashed. Oftener than not it happened 
 during some chink in the day that Henry would find him 
 self with Miss MacArthur and Joe, sitting in one of their 
 offices very much at ease, chatting about amusing matters 
 that had nothing remotely to do with the flax business or 
 any other. 
 
 Joe was chiefly responsible for these recesses and,
 
 THE SAMARITANS 237 
 
 naturally, was the focus of them, talking most of the time 
 himself, but Jennie contributed something indispensable 
 to them, a sort of warm luminous atmosphere like the aura 
 her hair made when you saw her against the light. This 
 same gracious atmosphere enveloped Henry's momentary 
 encounters with her in the course of the day 's work. 
 
 It was nothing she consciously generated, nor that Henry 
 was specifically aware of, but when it occurred to him, 
 one day, that not once since he had stepped into this new 
 birth had his old hounding fear of losing his job assailed 
 him, he decided that Jennie had had a lot to do with this 
 immunity; more, even, than Joe. She could so easily 
 have made him feel useless and inept, especially if she'd 
 set out to be helpful and encouraging. 
 
 Joe's absence in the North threw them, of course, into 
 a much closer association than there 'd been any need of 
 before, and revealed, to Henry, unsuspected qualities in 
 her. Her suppleness and her abundance in resource he'd 
 always perceived, but he found in her now a penetration, 
 an ability to think through, with which he'd never credited 
 her. 
 
 He thought about her a lot, even during his leisurely 
 meditations away from the office, but even so it was as a 
 detached phenomenon which materialized when she left her 
 little car over in Grant Park in the morning and demate- 
 rialized again when she went to get it at night. When, 
 with the wearing off of the novelty of doing without Mar 
 garet, he began casting about for companions for occa 
 sional evenings, Jennie presented herself at first to his 
 mind as a pleasant but, somehow, fanciful possibility; he 
 played for several days with the notion of inviting her out 
 to dinner or to a show without getting any nearer to the 
 point of doing it. It might, he feared, strike her as a little 
 absurd. 
 
 But when, in his deepening perplexity about Beatrice, 
 he thought of Jennie as a helpful counselor, he seized upon 
 this as an excuse, walked straight into her office with it, 
 and asked her if she'd dine with him that night; " or
 
 238 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 any night within the next few days when you happen to 
 be free. There 's something I 'd like to talk over with you, ' ' 
 he added a little hurriedly, "and the office doesn't strike 
 me as just the place for it." 
 
 She did smile, in open amusement, over his explanation, 
 but her comment saved him from feeling that he'd been 
 laughed at, "That's like Joe," she said. "Yes, I'll be 
 glad to come. To-night's all right, for me." She asked, 
 after he'd brought up the question of the hour and the 
 place, "Is it anything about the business?" 
 
 He felt a little apologetic about admitting it was not, 
 but her explanation disposed of this misgiving at once. 
 
 "If it isn't about the business, I'd like to go home and 
 'dress, first. So it won't be quite so much a business 
 woman 's advice you '11 get. That 's what I say, ' ' she added, 
 "but I suppose the real reason is that I like an excuse for 
 pretending it's a party." 
 
 "It is a party, really," he confessed. "The advice was 
 my excuse. I felt I needed one, somehow." So they de 
 cided amicably upon the Blackstone at seven o'clock. 
 Henry went home and dressed, too, a thing he hadn't 
 done since Margaret went away. 
 
 He had been looking at her long enough, after he came 
 into the hotel lobby, to think what a charming-looking 
 woman that was and how well she was dressed before he 
 knew her for Jennie at all; indeed, if she hadn't nodded 
 and risen to meet him just when she did, he might have 
 turned his gaze away and gone on w r ith his search for 
 her. The costume she'd put on to "make it feel like a 
 party" was just the simple sort of thing appropriate to 
 the warm night and the occasion they'd planned, but, 
 bringing out, as it did, a feminine aspect of her he'd never 
 surmised, it amounted almost to a metamorphosis. It 
 seemed queer to hear this stranger speak in Jennie 's forth 
 right full-throated voice. 
 
 "I know musicians hate eating to music," she said, 
 when the question of the choice of dining-rooms came up, 
 "so we'll go into the small one, where there isn't any."
 
 THE SAMARITANS 239 
 
 He acquiesced in the choice she had made for him, though 
 he suspected it was not her own, and thanked her for it 
 after they were seated at a snug little table by an open 
 window. "I don't think I've ever had that preference 
 recognized before," he said. "Most of my friends re 
 fuse to believe, even when I tell them, that I hate all 
 restaurant orchestras; the better, the worse since I 
 pretend to be musical. I wonder if you'd mind telling me 
 how you knew." 
 
 "One of my oldest friends is a musician," she told him, 
 "Anthony March. I guess you've heard of him." 
 
 Indeed Henry had! From Paula YVollaston and others 
 of her circle, he'd been hearing of very little else, for 
 months. He'd heard some of his music, too. Paula had 
 sung a cycle of Whitman songs of his, one night last spring. 
 Amazing stuff, it was. He was greatly interested (he 
 hoped he was concealing the fact that he was also aston 
 ished) to learn that Jennie knew the man, and he hoped 
 she'd tell something about him. 
 
 She seemed willing enough to do this, though the nar 
 rative wasn't embroidered much. "It was through his 
 sister, Sarah, that I got acquainted with him," she con 
 cluded, "and it's only the man, himself, I know. His 
 music's miles above my head." 
 
 ""Well, it's miles above mine, too," Henry admitted, a 
 little to his own surprise. "He begins just about where 
 I leave off. I have to take my hat off to an accomplish 
 ment like his, even though, in a way, it shows me up. To 
 myself, I mean." 
 
 Under her intent thoughtful look, and aware of an odd 
 sense of support he got from it, he plunged ahead with 
 his confession. "I've, for a long time, felt rather mis 
 treated by fortune. The only real ambition I ever had 
 was to be a musician. Not just a musical amateur. The 
 two things are worlds apart. But my father's death hap 
 pened at an unlucky time, and cut off that possibility. 
 At least, that's what I've always managed to make myself 
 believe. If he had lived a few years longer, and I could
 
 240 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 have gone on, studying . . . But when I see what a born 
 musician like March can do, without half the chances or 
 the help I 've had, I have to admit I got all I deserve. ' ' 
 
 She demurred, reflectively, to this conclusion of his. 
 "It isn't always easy to be sure what a person's helps 
 really are. Or their handicaps. Some of the things that 
 look hard for him, to you, are just what made it easier. 
 He hadn't anything but just himself and his music, and 
 his music was pretty much all he wanted. And that 
 made it easy for him to cut loose. But a lot of your helps 
 must have been things you couldn't cut loose from." 
 
 In his heart he was warmly grateful to her for this de 
 fense (and how wise she was to have thought of it!), but 
 he smiled over it, and shook his head. "No, I'm just be 
 ginning to see that you get what you really want, in this 
 world, though it doesn't always seem so. If there 'd been 
 any music I really needed to write, I'd have written it. 
 I'd have taken my job at the bank the way March took 
 his piano tuning as something to keep my sister and 
 me alive while the main thing went on. But there wasn't 
 anything that had to be written, in that sense. Joe told 
 me the truth about myself, once, during the first talk we 
 ever had. All I really asked for, he said, was a chance 
 to look on." 
 
 A realization, involved with a memory of Margaret's 
 dry smile, broke over him that he'd been talking steadily 
 about himself for a long while. Jennie wasn't smiling, 
 though, even invisibly, he was sure. 
 
 "You understand what you look on at," she remarked, 
 "better than most people." 
 
 "Not always," he said quickly, and wondered whether 
 he'd ever know her well enough to tell her what he'd mis 
 understood, in the first instance, about her and Joe. It 
 wasn't unthinkable. He went on, "I think I do under 
 stand, well enough, the thing I wanted to talk over with 
 you, to-night, but it's a case where understanding alone 
 isn't much good. And what I've tried to do has amounted 
 to little worse than nothing. It's about Beatrice Greer."
 
 THE SAMARITANS 241 
 
 She nodded and said, "I hoped it was that. How bad 
 do you think it is?" 
 
 He had no decisive knowledge, he hastily told her, that 
 it Avas what one could fairly call "bad" at all. Only, 
 when things had got to that stage it was too late for 
 friendly interposition to do much good. The thing that 
 had led him to try his hand had been a chance glimpse 
 of her at the Blue Moon in the company of a young man 
 his friends didn't think any too highly of. It had brought 
 her loneliness and unprotectedness home to him and he'd 
 been trying, in a rather futile sort of way, it seemed, to 
 remedy these conditions. He'd been to see her two or 
 three times, usually after telephoning and making an 
 engagement with her, but once without this preliminary. 
 He'd taken her out to some places of amusement, too, 
 that he'd thought she'd like, beginning with Ravinia 
 which had bored her beyond concealment. Of course, he 
 must have bored her himself, wherever they went, though 
 she hadn't told him so. 
 
 "In fact," he remarked, "it would have been easier if 
 she had. But she felt it necessary to treat me as a con 
 temporary or rather as if I regarded myself as a con 
 temporary, and a competitor with the others which, of 
 course, made my whole attempt seem ridiculous. If she 
 could have taken me as an avuncular old duffer, who 
 could be yawned at when she was sleepy confided in and 
 asked sympathy of sent home when I was in the way, I 
 might have been of some use to her. 
 
 "As it was, I've never felt more futile in my life 
 though it's a sensation I'm pretty well accustomed to 
 than last Sunday afternoon. That was the time I went 
 to see her without having telephoned first. I did it in an 
 effort to seem friendly and informal, but it didn't work 
 out that way. She acted pleased enough over my having 
 come, though she seemed just a bit embarrassed by it, and 
 when she asked me to stay for a scratch dinner with her 
 and go for a drive afterward, I thought she really wanted 
 me to and said I would.
 
 242 JOSEPH GREER AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 "It was a mistake, of course. She'd other guests asked 
 whom my staying seemed to make it necessary to get rid 
 of. She was at the telephone a dozen times within the 
 liour, getting called to it or putting calls through herself, 
 and she'd taken me, unluckily, into the library where it 
 wasn't possible to avoid hearing, more or less, what she 
 said or guessing pretty well what they were saying to 
 her. Evidently it was a pretty rowdy gang she'd com 
 mitted herself to and they were determined not to be put 
 off. Saying things to her that she had to evade answer 
 ing directly. Threatening a descent upon her in force; 
 jocularly, you know, but more than half in earnest. I 
 took it, at last, that she was trying to buy them off by 
 offering to send down to them wherever they were a 
 quart of Joe's Scotch, and that even this wasn't accepted. 
 
 "I'd ignored everything up to then, but that was too 
 much, so I told her I was sure my presence was embarrass 
 ing her and said we'd have our dinner and our ride some 
 other time. It wasn 't, I guess, a very tactful time to do it, 
 but I tried to make her see that the last thing I wanted 
 was to be in the way. My whole purpose in inflicting 
 myself upon her I did use that word was to be service 
 able and . . . "Well, I thought the purport of what I was 
 saying was plain enough. I don 't know whether she really 
 misunderstood me or not. She's never been quite candid 
 with me, you see. She denied, by implication, the first 
 time I called on her, that she'd ever been to the Blue, 
 Moon, with Ware or any one else. Anyhow she pretended 
 now to understand me as having said that I'd taken her 
 on merely as an obligation I owed her father. She whipped 
 herself up into such a tempest about it that I couldn't 
 cope with her, at all, and she finished by telling me I 
 could go and take my advice with me and not come back. 
 "Which, of course, there was nothing for it but for me to 
 do. I suppose, on the whole, I've made a pretty average 
 mess of it." 
 
 "Oh, yes," Jennie answered dispassionately. He 
 blinked at this, whereupon she smiled at him, a smile *rith
 
 THE SAMARITANS 243 
 
 no alkaline pucker of irony in it to make him feel small and 
 inept, and added, ''But you don't know, now, how it hap 
 pened, exactly, nor where you missed out with her. ' ' 
 
 He said, earnestly, * ' If you do, I wish you 'd tell me. ' ' 
 
 She took her time about beginning; lighted and smoked 
 half an inch of a cigarette before saying a word. Finally, 
 "I think about the only person you don't understand very 
 well, is yourself. I mean, the way you seem to other peo 
 ple. You think you must look to them the way you do to 
 yourself. Take that girl : you were so sure she must think 
 of you as some sort of 'old duffer.' . . . You used a 
 funny word, there. I didn't know what it meant." 
 
 "Avuncular," he said when he saw she was waiting to 
 be told. ' ' It means, like an uncle. ' ' 
 
 She even made sure, before she went on, that she knew 
 how to spell it. "Some time," she threw in, "I'll make 
 you tell me what the word is that means like an aunt. 
 
 "Well, you were so sure she thought of you like that, 
 that when she wouldn't treat you that way, you thought 
 she must be pretending. It never struck you it couldn 't, 
 I suppose that you'd really be a wonderful person to 
 her, with your manners and culture, and everything, 
 or that she'd be proud beyond anything to have you act 
 as if you liked her. I don't believe she was bored when 
 you took her to the opera. She was just so afraid of 
 seeming stupid making some ignorant break. . . . Don't 
 you see? And if you'd pretended to think she loved it, 
 and had asked her to go again well, she 'd have made her 
 self think she loved it, whether she did or not, because you 
 wanted her to. And about last Sunday: I'm sure she 
 wanted you to stay, and was desperately anxious to get rid 
 of her gang. Frightened stiff for fear they would come 
 and you'd think less of her for knowing them. And when 
 you went away, she thought that was why. Oh, I don't 
 expect to convince you all at once!" this in answer to a 
 skeptical shake of his head. "You've thought the other 
 way too long." 
 
 "If she'd really liked me," he said, "I think she'd have
 
 244 
 
 been candid with me, and she never was that. You don't 
 lie to people you haven't a certain contempt for." 
 
 Jennie dissented vigorously from this conclusion. 
 "People like you take frankness for granted a lot too 
 easily. You're used to tolerance been brought up on 
 it. You haven 't any idea how narrow-minded most people 
 are. If you want to do anything they don't do, you have 
 to take care they don't catch you at it. And a girl, with 
 as much of her father in her as Beatrice has, must have 
 found out, while she was almost a baby, that telling the 
 truth was what usually got her into trouble. It'd be the 
 last thing she would try with anybody she wanted the 
 good opinion of. She must have had a rotten bringing up, 
 every way. I wish I might have adopted her, ten years 
 ago or so ! " 
 
 "Do it now," Henry said quickly. 
 
 She shook her head and smiled faintly. "I got off on 
 the wrong foot with Beatrice. She got an idea about the 
 basis Joe and I were on, and until she's perfectly sure 
 that that was a mistake of hers ..." She looked up at 
 Henry and he felt himself blushing to the hair. Her 
 smile broadened. "I guess it must be sort of a natural 
 thing for people to think, from the way we treat each 
 other." 
 
 "It was a question that asked itself in my mind, the 
 day of our first directors' meeting," he admitted. "But 
 it had answered itself, finally, before that week was out. 
 I'm glad of a chance to apologize." 
 
 "As long as you answered the question yourself, with 
 out asking any one else, I don't see what you have to 
 apologize for," she said. "I felt like apologizing to you, 
 after Joe came into my office, that day. Anyway, it's all 
 right. But you can see how any advice I might give 
 Beatrice, when she comes to me for money it's the only 
 time I ever see her would go down the wrong way. She 's 
 spending a lot, but Joe told me, before he left, to let her 
 have all she wanted, so there's nothing to do about that." 
 
 "I hope he comes back soon," Henry said at the end 
 of a thoughtful silence ; ' ' and takes her with him when he
 
 THE SAMARITANS 245 
 
 goes again. It's mad of him to leave her on the loose, 
 like this." 
 
 "I don't know," Jennie reflected soberly. She was 
 gazing down at the cloth, her elbows on the table, her chin 
 propped upon her hands. They were very fine, beauti 
 ful hands, Henry for the first time noted. "She has to 
 be like that, I guess. She can't be helped by shutting her 
 in, anyway. She's too much like Joe, for that. Has to 
 find ever3 T thing out for herself, even if she gets hurt do 
 ing it. If she could only start poor, the way he did, and 
 have to work for her life . . . She's got plenty of steam, 
 you see, and real courage. So I suppose she'll come out 
 all right, in the long run. Poor old Joe's the one I'm 
 sorry for. He 's going to have a pretty bad time. ' ' 
 
 ' ' Yes, ' ' Henry said ; " I 'm afraid he is. ' ' He was think 
 ing of more than the trouble the girl would cause him; 
 of Violet 's enmity and John 's designs ; and he must have 
 put more weight of meaning into the words than a mere 
 agreement with Jennie would have accounted for, for she 
 looked quickly up at him, questioningly, through a bright 
 moisture of tears that had sprung into her eyes. It was 
 a look that established itself among the memorabilia of an 
 altogether memorable evening. 
 
 They had abandoned discussion of the Greers by tacit 
 consent at that point, and from then on the talk had been 
 in a lighter-hearted vein, more appropriate to an event 
 which had been spoken of in advance as a party. It was 
 among his triumphs that he'd twice made her laugh, out 
 right. Nevertheless, it struck him as she drove him home 
 that, after all, they 'd done nothing but talk, and he 'd per 
 haps got more entertainment than he'd provided. He 
 might have suggested their going on to a show after din 
 ner. Her having her own little coupe at hand, and her 
 derisive rejection of his proposal to ride out home with her 
 and return in the Elevated, had something to do with this 
 feeling. Also, there was observable about her, at the 
 wheel of her car, a faint re-emergence of her efficient of 
 fice manner. 
 
 Anyhow, when he stood on the pavement outside his own
 
 246 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 door and she with five or six miles still to drive to hers! 
 there was a touch of apology about his farewell. She 'd 
 given him a delightful evening and he hoped she hadn't 
 been too heavily bored with all his talk; such an un 
 conscionable lot of it, he was afraid, about himself. 
 
 At this she smiled at him with a gleam of clear mis 
 chief. "Anyway," she remarked, "you've taught me the 
 meaning of the word avuncular. You don 't want to forget 
 that!" She didn't leave him, though, on that note, for 
 while he was still stammering for the first word of a reply, 
 she added indignantly: 
 
 "Henry! Use your imagination. Forget what you 
 think you're like, for a minute, and think what this eve 
 ning has been like, for me. Do you suppose I'm used to 
 better company? Now, if I say I've had a wonderful 
 time, myself, will you decide I was pretending?" 
 
 "There's an easy test of that," he said. "When will 
 you try it again?" 
 
 "Any time!" she declared, and having shaken hands 
 with him all over again, she drove off and left him jubi 
 lant. 
 
 3 
 
 On the following Sunday afternoon, Jennie got a tele 
 gram from Joe Greer. It had been delivered at her flat 
 before noon, but as she had been out for lunch she didn't 
 find it until her return, about four o'clock. He was ar 
 riving that day, he said, over the Northwestern, at five- 
 thirty, for a few hours only, as he was going out again that 
 night. He wanted a talk with her and a visit with Trix. 
 She was to telephone direct to Burns to meet him at the 
 station and drive him straight out to her flat. 
 
 There were two rather striking singularities about this 
 message and she paused to make sure she understood the 
 implication in it before carrying out its explicit instruc 
 tions. It was queer that Joe, with so little time at his 
 disposal, should propose wasting any of it driving clear 
 out to her flat when the office, which would be right in 
 his way, would be the natural place for a talk with her;
 
 THE SAMARITANS 247 
 
 especially on Sunday afternoon, when it was always quiet. 
 It was not sure to be completely deserted, of course ; there 
 was always the chance of an odd draughtsman cleaning up 
 some job or other. And if, for some reason, Joe didn't 
 want any one in the organization, outside herself, to know 
 he'd even been in town . . . She supposed that must be 
 it. 
 
 It was also worth remark that he'd instructed her to 
 telephone directly to his chauffeur instead of transmit 
 ting the message through his apartment, the natural way 
 to do it unless he wanted to take Beatrice by surprise. 
 This was a familiar form of pleasantry with him and she 
 attributed to him no ulterior intention now. He ran the 
 obvious risk of missing his daughter altogether just for 
 the pleasure of seeing her start and gasp at the sight of 
 him for she might easily be out, somewhere, and not 
 recoverable at the last minute. But Jennie believed, in 
 the light of what she'd recently learned from Henry 
 Craven, that he ran a worse risk than this, and for a few 
 minutes she wavered over the alternative of transmitting 
 the message to Burns through Anson, the butler. She 
 could, easily enough, pretend to Joe that she had misread 
 his instructions. And Beatrice would get, in case she 
 needed it, a few hours' warning. If she didn't need it, 
 there would be no harm done beyond the spoiling of her 
 father's boyish joke. 
 
 The thing that stood in the way of this humane design 
 was, really, nothing but Jennie's professional pride in her 
 long established infallibility. For seven years Joe had 
 lived in an unshaken certainty that she never misunder 
 stood instructions nor failed to grasp the underlying in 
 tent of them, and she couldn't bear the thought of sap 
 ping that confidence now. She wasn't afraid of him. 
 She'd mutinied more than once; refused, point-blank, to 
 carry out his orders and, at the time or afterward, told 
 him why. But these tactics weren't available here, for 
 she couldn't tell him she was unwilling to have the girl 
 taken by surprise, without giving her away altogether.
 
 248 
 
 So, reluctantly, she telephoned George Burns' boarding- 
 house and, disappointingly, found him there. If he'd 
 been out with one of the cars she'd have been justified, 
 she thought, in calling Anson. 
 
 The moment she told him who she was, Burns said 
 not at all in his professional manner, "I was just making 
 up my mind to call you up, Miss MacArthur. ' ' With the 
 wild idea in her head that he might be on the point of 
 proposing a joy-ride, she forbore to ask him why and went 
 straight on with the transmission of Joe's orders. 
 
 He repeated mechanically, "Five-thirty at the North 
 western, ' ' was silent for a moment, then added, as she was 
 about to hang up, "Well, that settles it. Miss MacArthur, 
 I've got to see you, at once. If you're at your flat, I'll 
 drive straight out there. There'll still be time to meet the 
 train if we decide that's the thing for me to do. You are 
 telephoning from your flat, aren't you?" 
 
 "I don't understand at all," she protested. "Yes, I'm 
 at my flat, but if something's wrong, tell me what it is, 
 now. ' ' 
 
 "I can't, from here," he said curtly. "I've got to 
 talk to you. Nothing's wrong no accident, nor anything 
 only we've got to decide what to do." A click in the 
 instrument informed her that he'd left the telephone. 
 
 There was nothing for her to do but sit in her front 
 window and look out for him, keeping her imagination 
 in control as best she could. It was less than ten minutes 
 before he appeared, but in that time she'd thought of 
 enough horrifying possibilities to fill an evening paper. 
 She was holding the door open for him when he came 
 springing up the stairs. 
 
 "Miss Greer isn't at home," he told her, at once. "She 
 was out all last night. They don't know where she is. 
 That fool of an Anson didn't tell me about it till I called 
 up, after lunch, to find out whether they were going to 
 want me this afternoon. It seems she went out with 
 some people after dinner last night for a swim, over here 
 at the hotel beach."
 
 THE SAMARITANS 249 
 
 At Jennie's horrified stare he impatiently shook his 
 head. ''No, she isn't drowned, or there's no reason for 
 thinking so. They got some sort of message about her late 
 last night. Couldn't make anything of it except that she 
 was all right and would be home first thing this morn 
 ing. I asked Anson why he hadn't got more than that; 
 if the party that gave the message was drunk. He seemed 
 to think that was disrespectful and none of my business, 
 so lie wouldn't say. I guess that was it, though. 
 
 "When I told him I was going to start straight out 
 and see if I couldn 't find her, he ordered me to do nothing 
 of the sort. I don't know whether he's got a right to give 
 me orders or not. He's been with Mr. Greer, of course, a lot 
 longer than I have. So I was thinking of getting your 
 angle on it. But with him getting in at five-thirty and 
 me with orders to meet him, we're pretty tight up against 
 it." 
 
 "Do you really think you could find her?" Jennie 
 asked. "Within the next hour or so?" 
 
 ' ' I don 't know, ' ' he said. ' ' I couldn 't promise to. But 
 I've found out from driving her around where a good 
 many of the places are that she goes, and where some of 
 the people live that she runs around with. Of course, 
 I'd have to be careful what sort of questions I asked. 
 But, damn it, there isn't any time! I ought to be on my 
 way down-town now!" 
 
 "You see if you can find the girl," Jennie commanded 
 him crisply. "I'll drive in, in my car, and meet Mr. 
 Greer. I can make it, all right. That lets you out, be 
 cause I don't have to tell him that I passed on the orders 
 to you at all. I felt like a drive so I came down, myself, 
 instead. He was coming to talk to me, anyway. I'll 
 keep him as long as I can. Call up Anson whenever you 
 get a chance, to find out whether she hasn't come home by 
 herself. When Mr. Greer is ready to go home, I'll drive 
 him over and hope you'll have got there first, with her. 
 That's all straight, isn't it?" 
 
 He nodded, gave her a probably unconscious military
 
 250 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 salute, and sped down to his car. He was a good boy, and 
 he'd do, she thought, a good job, though he'd need a 
 reasonable break in the luck to make it successful. Well, 
 she had a job of her own, on hand, one in which she couldn 't 
 foresee that luck would figure at all decisively. It was just 
 a question of how skilfully she could manage Joe. 
 
 Luck did befriend her, though, right at the beginning. 
 Joe's train was the better part of an hour late. It was 
 not a train from the North and she'd been wondering a 
 little uneasily whether there might not have been some 
 mistake about his message, when she was doubly reassured 
 by seeing him coming down the platform. The way his 
 face cleared of its glowering abstraction when he caught 
 sight of her waiting for him, made it plain that he was 
 pleased by her amendment to his orders. 
 
 "That's what you get for trying to improve on what I 
 tell you!" he said jovially. "Cooling your heels down 
 here half a Sunday afternoon! All the same, I'm glad 
 you did. We '11 have a little ride and talk as we go. ' ' 
 
 He wasn 't talkative, though, and after a few perfunctory 
 questions as to how things had been going in the office, 
 whether anything out of the ordinary had happened, how 
 Henry had been acting lately (this last inflected face 
 tiously, of course) he lapsed into the same abstraction she'd 
 seenJiim in when he got off the train. 
 
 She asked him, then, if it was really necessary for him 
 to go away again that night. Now that he was actually 
 here, couldn't he stay long enough to see for himself how 
 things w r ere going? Two or three days couldn't make 
 much difference, could they! He threw a sharp look at 
 her, as if he suspected that something unacknowledged lay 
 behind these questions, but he answered them simply and 
 emphatically by telling her that this was the week the 
 harvesting of the flax began. The machinery he had 
 designed would be put to its first real test with the un 
 loading, crushing, spraying and storing of the straw as it 
 was brought to their warehouses under the varied condi 
 tions of the harvest. Some of these conditions they
 
 THE SAMARITANS 251 
 
 wouldn't have foreseen. Here and there, something was 
 bound to break down. "Eve of battle, see?" he con 
 cluded with a grin. "Sheridan twenty miles away!" 
 
 After having worked for him seven years she didn't 
 need all this elaboration, and, of course, he knew it. The 
 question he evidently didn't mean to answer was why he 
 had left the field of battle on the eve of it. She remarked, 
 "You didn't come straight down from the North." 
 
 His look conceded a mystery here, and his words made 
 a boyish joke of it. "You'd never have thought of that 
 if you'd let Burns meet me as I told you to. No, I've 
 been talking to a man who thinks he knows something 
 about flax. When I got through with him I found it was 
 just as easy to go back by way of Chicago." 
 
 In his own good time, she knew, he'd tell her the whole 
 story; meanwhile, she was content to wait. She made no 
 further attempt at conversation and merely drove him 
 about at random among the less crowded of the West 
 Side streets. At last he said, quietly: 
 
 "Put this on file, Jennie, where you won't forget it. If 
 anything unexpected turns up, before I come back, don't 
 try to find me first. Take it up with Henry and see that 
 he goes straight to Williamson with it. Or to Corbett or 
 Crawford if Williamson isn't where he can get at him. 
 Whatever it is, see that one of them knows about it you 
 see to that, yourself before you pass it on to me." 
 
 "All right, Joe," she said. She knew it had been to 
 tell her this, exactly this and no more, that he had come 
 to Chicago. Pie was like that, with her. He'd offer no 
 explanations whatever, no denials that he foresaw the sort 
 of "unexpected" thing that might turn up. He knew 
 she'd ask for nothing of the sort. It was wonderful to be 
 taken for granted, like that. It was this capacity in him 
 for confidence that she came nearest loving him for. 
 
 He asked her, presently, in a perfectly natural man 
 ner, IIOAV Trix had been getting on, lately. She wasn't 
 much of a letter-writer, he said, and it must have been a 
 week since he'd heard from her.
 
 252 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 Jennie was ready with her answer. "Why, it's three 
 or four days since I've seen her," she said. "I don't, 
 except when she comes to the office. Henry's been see 
 ing quite a lot of her, though, he tells me, taking her 
 round to shows and things. You asked how he'd .been 
 acting; you know it's wonderful what it's done for him, 
 having his sister away. I've never seen her that I know 
 of, but I think she must be a horrible sort of woman." 
 
 "Oh, I wouldn't go as far as that," he protested. 
 "What have you got against her?" 
 
 "I think she must be a sort of vampire," Jennie said 
 judicially; "not a movie vampire but a real one. The 
 kind that sucks your blood. That's the only trouble with 
 Henry. She'd taken all the spunk out of him. Must 
 have been doing it for years. Making him think that 
 people were bored with him, or laughing at him, all the 
 time. He'd be a peach, if he could be let alone for a 
 "while. I wouldn't have dared talk to you like this three 
 months ago," she added. "I thought, then, she was prob 
 ably going to marry you." 
 
 "My God, Jennie, you too!" he roared at her. "You 
 and Trix and . . . How do you women get that way ? ' ' 
 
 She made him a provocative answer, but even so she 
 found she hadn't launched him as she'd hoped to do. 
 * ' Trix wrote that she 'd been up to Ravinia with him. Has 
 he been opening up with you, too?" 
 
 She confessed to their dinner. "I had an awfully good 
 time with him," she insisted seriously. "I really like him 
 a whole lot." 
 
 But this wasn't the line Joe wanted to follow. "Oh, 
 yes, he's all right," he conceded absently. "Best of his 
 gang, by a long way. But what has he been saying to 
 you, now he's opened out? Anything that would inter 
 est me?" 
 
 "Everything he said was interesting," she began, 
 honestly puzzled to see what he was driving at, "but there 
 wasn't anything up . . ." 
 
 A vivid flash of memory interrupted her, and Joe was
 
 THE SAMARITANS 253 
 
 upon her instantly with the demand, ' ' Well, let 's hear what 
 it was he told you." 
 
 "It was so nearly nothing," she answered, after a 
 moment's reflection, "that I can't tell you what he really 
 said, at all. But I remember getting the idea, just for a 
 minute, that he thought you were in for some sort of hard 
 time that I didn't know anything about. I didn't ask him 
 what he meant, and I haven't thought of it again, since." 
 
 Joe laughed grimly. "It was a good hunch, Jennie. 
 He sees something headed my way, all right. So do I, 
 though I haven't made out what it is, yet. Williamson 
 thinks he's got a score to settle with me. He has, too, in 
 a way though it isn't what he thinks it is." 
 
 At the end of a reflective silence, he laughed again. ' ' I 
 was challenged to fight a duel once, down in Quito, by a 
 fat Spaniard about Williamson's build. It never came off 
 because the weapons I chose were a pair of old single-action 
 Colt forty-fives. Shoot it out with him at twenty paces, 
 was my idea. He was game all right. Mad enough for 
 anything; but the seconds objected. Williamson's no 
 Spaniard, though. He balances all his accounts in the 
 ledger. 
 
 "Oh, it's nothing to get excited about," he went on, 
 perceiving, Jennie felt, her sudden dismay. "It would 
 come to the same thing anyhow. They haven't any idea, 
 none of that gang, what a whale of a proposition this is 
 going to be. They haven't seen the country, and they 
 don't even guess at the clean-up that's waiting for us 
 there. Not ten years from now, Jennie, nor five. We 
 can get ten per cent, of next year's crop if we go at it 
 right. You just sit down sometime and figure out what 
 that'll mean. When they do that, they'll try to take the 
 thing away from us. That's just as sure as to-morrow's 
 sunrise. Hell, of course they will. You know that as well 
 as I do. We've always known it. That's the sort of 
 people they are. But this thing that Henry sees may be 
 something new. Something they are starting sooner than 
 they mean to. That's what we've got to be ready for.
 
 254 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 "For thirty years or so," he went on after a long re 
 flective silence, "I've known that before I got through 
 I was going to have one hell of a big fight with this stall- 
 fed bunch. You might say I 'd been looking forward to it, 
 in a way. I used to look forward to it, for a fact. 
 Thought it would be a cinch, they looked so soft and help 
 less. Blithering sort of people! But they aren't so easy 
 as they look, Jennie. I can see that from here. They are 
 fat, and they're soft, but if a man happened to be down 
 where they could trample on him, they'd be damned 
 heavy. They've got a lot of queer weapons, too. Things 
 you wouldn't think they'd use, that get into you in a way 
 you don 't expect. And, my God, how they stick together ! 
 They and their wives and their poor relations . . . ! How 
 about Henry, Jennie? When it comes to a showdown, I 
 mean. I know he likes us and he doesn't care a damn for 
 them, really. But if it came down to a vote, say, in di 
 rectors' meeting, is there a tinker's chance that he'd come 
 over to us? A whole lot might hang on that, you know." 
 
 ' ' I think he might, ' ' she said, ' ' if he saw that the right 
 was on our side." 
 
 "It's so damn unlikely it will be on our side, though," 
 he mused. "Having the right on their side is one of the 
 best things they do ; sort of a specialty of theirs. All the 
 same, we may get Henry anyhow, one way or another. 
 All right, Jennie ! "We 've got nothing more on our minds, 
 have we? Let's go back. I want to see Trix. First I've 
 ever missed anybody, just like that." 
 
 They were out in Humboldt Park, by now. Jennie had 
 pulled up in the parking space beside the refectory where 
 they could watch the children playing in the rowboats on 
 the lagoon. She wanted to keep him longer if she could. 
 Burns hadn't had a fair chance yet. 
 
 "I'm hungry, Joe," she said. "Shan't we go in here 
 and get a bite of supper first?" She hated lying to him 
 and doing it so badly, too! Her voice sounded wrong 
 in her own ears. 
 
 He looked round at her in open surprise. "We aren't
 
 THE SAMARITANS 255 
 
 a half hour's drive from home," he observed. "I'm 
 hungry myself. You'll come home and have supper with 
 Trix and me." 
 
 She argued against this. He'd want Trix to himself 
 after his long absence. Besides, she didn't know Beatrice 
 well enough to come popping into supper without any 
 warning. She might have other guests. Or for that mat 
 ter, she might not be at home to-night, herself. 
 
 "That's the funniest line of reasoning I ever heard you 
 put up," he commented bluntly, and then, telling her to 
 wait a minute, he got out of the car. "Going to tele 
 phone," he called back as he walked away. 
 
 Well, she'd done all she could. She could think of no 
 other stratagem and if she could, she wouldn't avail her 
 self of it. She wouldn't have Joe looking at her again 
 with that gleam of half-awakened suspicion not for 
 Beatrice, nor for any one in the world. Not even for Joe, 
 himself. 
 
 "She isn't at home, for a fact," he told her as he climbed 
 back into the little coupe. "They're expecting her any 
 minute. I told Anson vou and I'd be coming for sup 
 per." 
 
 She didn't know whether there was any authentic com 
 fort to be derived from this or not. Burns might have 
 found Trix or the girl might herself have telephoned at 
 last, but Anson would, most likely, have said just what he 
 did, in any case. Jennie drove as slowly as she dared un 
 til a restless movement of Joe's betrayed his suspicion that 
 this was w y hat she was doing ; after that she bored into the 
 dense Sunday traffic like a taxi driver. Four or five 
 minutes one way or the other weren't likely to make much 
 difference, whereas the arousing of Joe's jungle sense of 
 something amiss would be, almost certainly, disastrous. 
 
 The exact minute of their arrival did make a difference, 
 as things turned out, but whether for the better or the 
 worse, Jennie was unable to decide. As she slipped her 
 Ford into the south-bound stream of traffic in Sheridan 
 Road, a block north of Joe's apartment building, he re-
 
 256 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 \ 
 
 marked, "There she is! We're right on time. That's 
 the roadster, three cars ahead of us. Funny she's letting 
 Burns drive ; getting bored with it, already, I suppose. ' ' 
 
 The big roadster was standing before Joe's doorway, in 
 the curve of the semi-elliptical drive, when Jennie turned 
 in, but neither Beatrice nor the chauffeur had made any 
 move to alight. The top was down and they could see 
 that he had spoken to her and was tensely awaiting an 
 answer. She was slumped low in her seat, nothing visible 
 of her but the top of her small hat. 
 
 That Joe had instantly perceived something wrong was 
 evident. He did not hail and it was with the silent swift 
 ness of a big cat that he left Jennie's car and made his 
 way to the curb side of the other. Burns ' head went back 
 at the apparition of him as from the impact of a blow. 
 Then, as if he had to overcome a certain rigidity, he got 
 down from under the wheel and faced his employer. So 
 far, no one had said a word, but now Beatrice roused her 
 self. 
 
 "Is that you, dad, for a fact?" she asked, sitting half 
 erect. "I didn't know you'd come home. Honest, I 
 didn't. Thought thoughtful George, here, was . . "." 
 "Stringing me" seemed to be what she was trying to say, 
 but its linguistic difficulties were too much for her. It 
 was blazingly clear that she was drunk. 
 
 Joe took Burns by the shoulders and pulled him round 
 between himself and the girl. The two faces, the bearded 
 one contorted by passion, the young clean-shaven one ex 
 pressionless, were not six inches apart. 
 
 "Where have you been with her? What in hell have 
 you been doing with her?" 
 
 * ' Bringing rher home, sir. She 'd gone out not knowing 
 you were coming. When I got word of it, I followed where 
 she'd gone and told her. And she came back with me." 
 
 "If there was any liquor on your breath, I'd kill you 
 where you stand. That's the truth, is it?" 
 
 "Yes, sir. And I haven't had a drink in eight weeks. 
 That's true, too."
 
 THE SAMAKITANS 257 
 
 Nothing, Jennie believed, but the fact that the big car 
 was cramped across the full width of the narrow drive, had 
 held her a witness to this scene, for the impulse to panic 
 flight had been strong upon her from the moment the girl 
 spoke. But pity took its place as she saw Joe accept the 
 truth of the chauffeur's statement. The gesture with 
 which he let the man go and the look he then turned upon 
 his daughter were the most tragic expressions she had ever 
 seen. 
 
 Tragedy, though, was not all that Beatrice saw in her 
 father's face, as he moved round the car to the side where 
 she was sitting. She cried out, not loud but with mani 
 fest terror, as he came near. 
 
 The cry restored Jennie's motor faculties. She slipped 
 swiftly from her seat in the Ford and went to meet him, 
 ready to help or to interpose against him as might seem 
 necessary. He said, "Wait a minute, Jennie," but she 
 did not stop. 
 
 "You can't stay out here," she answered. "I'll help 
 you in with her." 
 
 "She isn't going to need any help," he said. "I'll tell 
 you what I want of you, presently." 
 
 He turned to the girl. "Look at me, now," he com 
 manded, "and listen. Whatever you've been this after 
 noon, you're sober now. You're going to get out of this 
 car by yourself and walk with me into that corridor and 
 go up in the elevator as if nothing had happened or was 
 going to happen. When we get into the apartment you'll 
 go into your own room to take off your hat. And you 11 
 wait in there till I come in. You understand all that, 
 don't you?" 
 
 She was trembling to the lips but she pressed them to 
 gether and nodded her head. "All right," he said. 
 "Take a minute to think it over." Then he turned back 
 to Jennie. 
 
 ' ' Burns will drive you home in his car. He can put up 
 your Ford in the garage first. You pack a hand-bag and 
 a trunk. Bring the bag back with you in the car, in about
 
 an hour. Leave directions for the trunk to be sent here 
 to-morrow. You're going to live here for a while." 
 
 A protest, the mere mechanical reaction of surprise, 
 sprang to her lips but before she could say more than a 
 word he cut her short. 
 
 "That's not an order, of course, Jennie. But if we're 
 friends, you'll do it. I've got to go back to-night. No 
 getting out of that. And somebody's got to be here. 
 You '11 go to the office when and how you can. We '11 talk 
 about that later. But you'll do it for me, Jennie?" 
 
 "I'll do anything you like, of course," she said. "But 
 I think I'd better come in with you, now." 
 
 A gleam of clear menace in his eyes and an uncontrolled 
 movement of his hands showed how truly she'd seen be 
 neath his surface quietness. "I want her to myself, for 
 a while," he said. But he added instantly, at her ges 
 ture of dissent, " I 'm not going to hurt her. Give you my 
 word for that. Here, we '11 leave it to her ! Trix, do you 
 want Miss MacArthur along for protection, or will you 
 come with me?" 
 
 "I'll I'll be all right with you," she said. 
 
 He opened the off-side door for her and with the un 
 obtrusive guidance of his hand she stepped down into the 
 road- way. "I'll be all right," she repeated. She re 
 leased herself from his hand and rather slowly, very erect 
 and infinitely pitiable, she walked to the door. Joe, with 
 a wordless nod of dismissal to the other pair, followed 
 her. 
 
 From George Burns as he drove Jennie home, she got an 
 account of what had happened. He told it with an ap 
 pearance of dispassion that was betrayed only occasionally 
 by a flash of intense feeling. She had not pressed him 
 for it and he had taken his time about deciding to talk at 
 all, so that they drove the first half of the way in silence, 
 but the conclusion he came to evidently was that she had 
 better be put in full possession of the facts. 
 
 He'd had no trouble finding Miss Greer. He had al 
 ready learned from Anson who most of the original swim-
 
 THE SAMARITANS 259 
 
 ming party were, so lie went straight to the hotel beach 
 and talked with the professional instructor there. The 
 questions he asked were not about Beatrice but about an 
 other young woman he knew was in the party, a married 
 woman whose husband had quarreled with her a few weeks 
 ago and left her. The swimming professional's natural 
 surmise would be that the chauffeur had been unofficially 
 retained by the husband to pick up significant facts about 
 the wife. ' ' It happened he did make me a proposition like 
 that the other day," Burns interpolated, "but I turned 
 him down." The party had been talking over their 
 plans for the rest of the evening before they left the 
 beach, and a good long drive up the shore had been agreed 
 upon. A certain married couple in the company had of 
 fered drinks as an objective. 
 
 Burns knew where they lived. They 'd taken a house for 
 the summer, on the lake a little north of Glencoe. It 
 sounded like a good steer to him, so he drove straight up 
 there as fast as he could and told the servant who answered 
 his ring that he'd come with an important message for 
 Miss Greer. She was there, all right, and he ought to 
 have been in plenty of time, as it was only just after six 
 o'clock. He was told that they were all in bathing, so 
 he went down to the beach below the house, and found 
 them. 
 
 "It was about the worst lot of hang-overs I ever saw," 
 he told Jennie candidly. "They must have been a 
 drunken bunch the night before, for fair. They were ly 
 ing around the sand, in bathing suits, most of them Miss 
 Greer was all right trying to get up nerve enough to go 
 into the water. It was pretty cold, with the off-shore wind. 
 Just what they needed to sober them up. A lot of rich 
 bums, that's all most of them are. 
 
 "I told Miss Greer about the telegram and asked her to 
 dress as fast as she could and come along with me. She 
 was a little bit boozy (it doesn't take but a little to 
 put her out), but she'd have been all right by the end of 
 the drive home.
 
 260 JOSEPH GREEB AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 "But the rest of the gang pretended they didn't be 
 lieve her father was coming. They've been kidding her 
 more or less, it seems, about liking me, and their gag was 
 that I'd made it up or that she and I had made it up 
 between us, in order to go off by ourselves. They hadn't 
 any reason for making a crack like that. It's just 'the 
 natural rottenness of their minds. They said they'd all 
 come up to the house and telephone Miss Greer's apart 
 ment to see if it was true or not. 
 
 "I ought to have let them do it, of course, but I was 
 so mad I was rattled and I told her I didn't think they 
 knew at the house that her father was coming. The or 
 ders had come straight through to me. That raised a 
 howl, of course, and left her not knowing whether to be 
 lieve me or not. 
 
 "She finally came along with me up to the house to 
 dress, but most of the men in the crowd came along, too, 
 joshing her and arguing with her. They were good- 
 natured enough, all but one. He's a fellow named Ware, 
 who's been going around with her a good deal lately. He 
 was pretty ugly, to me; tried to 'put me in my place,' 
 but wasn't quite sober enough to do it. He was the only 
 man in the crowd who wasn 't in a bathing suit. 
 
 "Miss Greer finally agreed to go in and dress and told 
 me to wait in the car for her. They all went into the 
 house together, though. I waited about half an hour ; then 
 I rang the front-door bell and walked right in, just as she 
 was coming down the stairs ready to start. I tried to 
 get her to go straight out with me and get in the car, 
 but the rest of them were in the dining-room you could 
 hear them in there, all right and she wanted to go in and 
 say good-by to them. 
 
 "I went along with her. They'd got out some more 
 hooch and offered her a drink, for a pick-me-up, they said. 
 I knew what would happen if that started and asked her 
 not to take anything. I suppose it was a mistake. They 
 guyed her about it pretty strong and got her mad at me, 
 so that she ordered me out to the car to wait for her.
 
 THE SAMARITANS 261 
 
 Said she'd come when she got ready. There was nothing 
 else for me to do that I could see, unless I could have 
 cleaned up the whole bunch and carried her off by force, 
 and I don't believe I could have got away with that. 
 
 ' ' It was about fifteen minutes more before she came out, 
 with Ware, the others following along behind. I don't 
 know how much she'd had to drink in there but it was 
 enough to do the business for her. Ware had put on a 
 dust-coat and cap and he walked straight up to the driv 
 ing seat and got in. Miss Greer had asked him to drive 
 her home, he said. 
 
 "I was holding the door for her on the other side and 
 I waited till she was fixed and I could shut the door after 
 her. I told her to stay right where she was and then I 
 went around to Ware. He 'd started the motor but hadn 't 
 got his gear-shift in. I grabbed him by the wrist and 
 told him to get out ; put a good twist on it too, so that he 
 yelped. 
 
 "He tumbled out, all right, and then started for me. 
 I didn't think he'd do that, but it's what I'd been praying 
 for, for about a month. I'd have rather had him sober, 
 but it's all right. He'll have what I gave him a long 
 time after he's sobered up. I got in twice on his right 
 eye and I think I broke his nose. And I gave him one in 
 the pit of his stomach to finish him off ; all inside of half 
 a minute. The rest didn't want any. Lucky for me, I 
 guess. I knew just where there was a handy spanner and 
 I 'd 've liked to have waded in with it. I might have killed 
 somebody just as well as not." 
 
 He paused, and Jennie asked her first question. "Bea 
 trice didn't try to get out of the car?" 
 
 ' ' No, ' ' he said, and added after another pause : ' ' She 
 was perfectly willing to come with me." 
 
 Evidently, though, the drive home with her wasn't to 
 furnish many details. "She was pretty excited one way 
 and another " he summarized, presently, "but when she 
 quieted down she was sort of dopey, just like you saw her. 
 I stopped at a cafeteria on the way down and tried to get
 
 262 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 her to come in and have some black coffee, but she 
 wouldn't and I didn't want to start anything conspicuous. 
 I 'd have tried harder but I thought there was a pretty good 
 chance, if Mr. Greer was going to have a long business 
 talk with you, that I could get her home ahead of him. 
 Happening the way it did was just exactly wrong." 
 
 "That's what I thought, at the time," Jennie said. 
 "I'm not sure, though, that it didn't happen just exactly 
 right." 
 
 "To make her father put his foot down on her?" he 
 asked, and shook his head skeptically. "I don't believe 
 it does anybody any good to be showed up looking worse 
 than they really are. Specially not when they're young. 
 And a man like that like Mr. Greer will always sort of 
 half believe the worst about it. Every time he gets mad, 
 he'll show her that he believes it. I never thought I had 
 much of a chance, but when I look at the kind of chance 
 she's had . . . ! She's a fine girl, Miss MacArthur, 
 poisoned ! ' ' 
 
 He had more to say about her, now he was fairly started, 
 to which Jennie listened only half attentively. She'd 
 taken to swimming and diving as naturally as a seal. 
 Born in her, it was; she'd never learned at all until she 
 came to Chicago. And she could drive a car as far as 
 mere driving went as well as George himself. She was 
 as quick as lightning. She had all the pluck in the world, 
 and never lost her head. She'd have made a wonder of a 
 flyer if she 'd been a man. And she was a lot smarter than 
 most men ; took after her father in that, George supposed. 
 Unconsciously and, to Jennie rather pathetically, he was 
 giving himself away, hand over hand. Before he'd 
 brought her back to Joe's apartment, he'd given her a lot 
 to think "vbout. 
 
 This "^as the better part of two hours later, for she 
 gave -Joe all the time she could in which to get the girl 
 sober and reach an understanding with her assuming any 
 understanding whatever was possible. She looked for 
 ward to her return to that flat as to the crater of an ac-
 
 THE SAMARITANS 263 
 
 live volcano. But her foresight, here, was altogether at 
 fault. Joe himself let her in, carried her bag to the 
 room that was to be hers and asked her, when she was 
 ready, to come out into the library for a smoke with him. 
 Trix, he said, was asleep. 
 
 His mood was strangely slack and his manner quieter 
 than any she could remember in him. He knew how she 
 hated taking this job, he said, but it wouldn't be for very 
 long. By the middle of September, he thought, he'd be 
 able to be at home again, permanently except for short 
 trips. Meanwhile, Jennie possessed his full authority over 
 everything. Trix understood this and agreed to it; 
 seemed to be glad, rather than otherwise, that Jennie was 
 coming, since she had been lonely as the devil. 
 
 "She's got, though," he told her, "the better half of 
 that original thousand I sent her, tucked away, somewhere ; 
 and if she really makes up her mind to quit you won't be 
 able to stop her. No more could I, of course. You'll do 
 as well as I've done, I guess, and if she goes I won't lay 
 it up against you. But keep her for me if you can, 
 Jennie. ' ' 
 
 "Are you sure," she asked it wasn't a comfortable sort 
 of question "that Beatrice understood what you ex 
 pect me to do? I mean, that she will understand it when 
 she wakes up in the morning and finds you gone and me 
 here?" 
 
 "Was she sober enough to understand it is that what 
 you mean? Yes, of course she was. She wasn't very 
 drunk when Burns brought her in, dazed more than any 
 thing else, and rattled at seeing me. I gave her some 
 thing that fixed her up, right off That's one sort of 
 doctoring I know all about, anyhow. God, I never thought 
 I 'd need it for my own daughter, though ! 
 
 "However, that's bygones, absolutely. You want to 
 remember that, Jennie. The slate's clean. It wasn't her 
 fault in the first place. Mine a wiiole lot more than 
 hers." 
 
 He poured himself a drink and settled himself in a big
 
 264 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 chair. "I was beginning to get a fool idea that some of 
 these people we were doing business with were the sort 
 we could tie up to ; make friends with, as we settled down, 
 you know. That's the bottom of the whole trouble. Trix 
 found 'em out for a lot of rotters before I did, I'll say 
 that for her, but I came around to her way of thinking 
 before I went north. "We'll do business with 'em, Jennie, 
 up to the hilt farther than they expect, maybe, but that's 
 all we'll do. Why, that woman, Williamson's wife, prom 
 ised to give Trix a hand, show her the ropes a bit as she 
 needed it; asked me not to send her east with Henry's 
 sister so she could have a good time with her girl's crowd. 
 And then never looked at her. Trix says she asked the 
 girl, Dodo, they call her, to lunch one day and bring a 
 friend of hers along, and they turned her down cold. 
 
 "Well, I could have told her they would, by that time. 
 I'd had my own experience, by then. There are some 
 kinds of things I didn't suppose I could ever be surprised 
 about, any more, but, my God, I was mistaken. Found 
 out I hadn 't been named Joseph for nothing, either. Now 
 if you know your Bible you can go as far as you like. 
 
 "You know I've always said we were a different breed 
 of cats from that gang. That 's what we are. A different 
 breed, people like you and me. And Trix too. I forgot 
 that for a while, but I'm straightened out on it now. 
 The only way to treat 'em is to lick hell out of 'em, so 
 they won't try to trample you, and then let 'em alone. 
 They can say what they like and think what they please, 
 and we don't care one damn. That's what I was telling 
 Trix before she went to sleep. We're going to turn over 
 and start with a clean page." 
 
 There was nothing very new about any of this to Jen 
 nie, except that it didn't sound like Joe; there was none 
 of his characteristic effervescence about it; it was like 
 flat champagne. She wished he'd drink some champagne 
 instead of morosely sipping that whisky. She could think 
 of nothing comforting or stimulating to say to him; the 
 flatness of his mood seemed contagious.
 
 THE SAMARITANS 265 
 
 "There's a swine named Ware," he said, after a period 
 of dark rumination, ' ' who 's been at the bottom of most of 
 this trouble. He's one of their lot, though I guess they 
 know what a rotter he is. Trix met him at the William 
 sons' the one day we were up there. One of these days, 
 when I get around to it, I'll deal with him separately." 
 
 "Did Beatrice tell you how he's already been dealt 
 with ? ' ' Jennie asked. Evidently not, for Joe asked what 
 she meant. Had Burns been telling her about to-day's af 
 fair ? How much did she know about it ? 
 
 She'd rather hoped for a chance to tell Joe the story of 
 the boy's resourcefulness and loyalty, but she felt a little 
 uncertain as she began whether it had been wise or not to 
 launch out upon it a misgiving which deepened as she 
 went on. Was the chauffeur's account contradicting, in 
 some vital way, the story Trix had told her father? His 
 dark set face was disquieting but not informative. She 
 condensed the tale as much as she dared, but Ware's lick 
 ing, which must be accounted for as well as described, 
 involved a lot. 
 
 Uneasy as she'd been all the while she talked, she was 
 utterly unprepared for the line Joe took when she finished. 
 "The first thing to do to-morrow morning," he said, "is 
 to let him go. See to that, will you?" 
 
 "Let him go!" she cried incredulously. "George 
 Burns? After what he's done for you to-day? You don't 
 want me to do that, Joe! I wouldn't do it." 
 
 Her defiance didn't arouse him at all. "I'll let him 
 know to-night then that he's discharged. Guess that'd be 
 better anyway. ' ' He said it without conviction but equally 
 without any sign of wavering. 
 
 "That'll be the first really unfair thing I've ever known 
 you to do, Joe. If you really do it. I don't believe you 
 will. You can't reward a really fine service that way. 
 Why, if she'd been drowning, and he'd . . . " 
 
 "I know all that," he interrupted. "And I'll reward 
 him, too. You can write him any sort of recommendation 
 you like, to-night, and I '11 sign it. Write him a check, too,
 
 266 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 for a thousand dollars, and I'll sign that. Look here! 
 You've always kicked on my keeping him as a chauffeur, 
 haven't you? Said he was too good for it. "Well, now 
 I'm doing what you've always wanted me to. That thou 
 sand w*ill get him two years' schooling, if he wants it. Or 
 set him up in a little business for himself. Buy him a taxi- 
 cab. Anything he likes. As a reward for what he did to 
 day. Nothing unfair about that, is there? The only 
 string on it is that he's got to keep away from me and my 
 daughter. I don't want him around. 
 
 ' ' Because he was mixed up in that mess, more or less. 
 Else, how r did he know how to find her as easy as that? 
 Why wouldn't they believe him when he said he had a 
 message from me? You can see that yourself! For that 
 matter, why did Trix keep all that end of it dark? She 
 did. You've given it away, you know. 
 
 " I told her we were going to let bygones be bygones. 
 Start with a clean slate. Well, we are ! I 'm never going 
 to ask her another question. Even about this. But if 
 she or you has got any idea I'll keep a man working for 
 me as chauffeur who she 's let get to know her as well as he 
 seems to, you're making a big mistake." 
 
 "I really believe," Jennie said deliberately, "that 
 George Burns chauffeur or not is the best friend Bea 
 trice has to-day. I believe he's got the best influence over 
 her. He's certainly done more than either Henry Craven 
 or I, though we've worried and wondered and done what 
 we could. But he's really held out a hand to her, I 
 guess. It's only a guess, of course." 
 
 "Well, now you've said it yourself!" he declared. "I 
 won't have her making friends with a man like that. 
 Friends hell ! Three months of a friendship like that and 
 father gets a telegram from Crown Point saying, 'We're 
 married.' There's one in the newspaper every morning. 
 But it's a thing that isn't going to happen in my family, 
 and that's a tip you can bet on. And when you hire a 
 new chauffeur, to-morrow, see that you get one that there 
 won't be any temptation to hold hands with."
 
 THE SAMARITANS 267 
 
 A certain penetrative power which she'd always found 
 in his mental processes up to now, was lacking to-night. 
 It was as if a light had been switched off. And in the 
 absence of it she was conscious of a sort of stupid vul 
 garity about his way of seeing and putting things. He was 
 still suffering from the shock Beatrice had given him, 
 fumbling about in a twilight, upsetting things. She hated 
 having him go away to-night leaving these irrevocable de 
 cisions behind him and with a touch of real timidity she 
 urged, again, his staying over one more day. 
 
 As she'd feared, this only irritated him. " Can't you 
 understand plain facts?" he snapped at her. "I've got 
 to be on the ground to-morrow night. "We begin receiv 
 ing in the Number One warehouse Tuesday morning. And 
 I haven't got any aeroplane. Anyhow, I'm glad to go. 
 Had about enough for one trip, and I guess Trix has had 
 enough of me." 
 
 His manner turned kindlier when it came time for him 
 to go and he tried as best he could to reassure her. He 
 wouldn't quarrel with Burns, nor make the boy feel that 
 he was being dismissed. Jennie needn't worry about that. 
 And he was sure she wouldn't have any trouble with 
 Beatrice. "She understands that I'm backing you up, 
 whatever you do, and that it won't do her any good to 
 appeal to me over your head. I don't believe she'll try 
 it, but if she does I promise it won't get her anything. 
 Your veto goes with me." 
 
 "But what's the child going to do?" Jennie asked 
 desperately, of the universe rather than of Joe. "What 
 is there she can do?" 
 
 His answer was that she could do any of the things 
 decent people ordinarily did. She was to cut out drink 
 ing, dancing in tough cabarets and nocturnal joy-riding. 
 She was to steer clear, altogether, of the gang she had been 
 running with. But even after these deletions there was 
 still plenty left, as far as he could see.
 
 268 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 4 
 
 It seemed to Jennie that two people conld hardly be 
 brought into close quarters in a situation more thoroughly 
 false and hopeless than this that Joe had left her and 
 Beatrice in. For three days she avoided discussion with 
 the girl, though whether this was tactics or cowardice on 
 her own part, she couldn't feel sure. She was anxious not 
 to take a line until she could work one out that showed 
 promise of getting them somewhere. 
 
 Trix, who had never particularly liked her, undoubtedly 
 detested her, now. An attitude, therefore, appropriate 
 to a friendly guest and companion would be so glaring an 
 affectation as to be, to the girl, insufferable. Yet the 
 only obvious alternative, a governessy middle-aged pose, 
 authority made easy by bits of encouragement, orders 
 sugar-coated into the form of advice and suggestion, would 
 drive her to open rebellion if not, Jennie reflected, to 
 homicide ! 
 
 Meanwhile, lying low, going early to the office and 
 coming back just in time for dinner, bringing home work 
 to do in the evening, sticking to a casual preoccupied and 
 not over-friendly tone in the strictly unimportant conver 
 sation she addressed to the girl, she found a modus vivendi 
 establishing itself. On the first morning at breakfast, in 
 reply to a domestic question raised by the butler upon the 
 tentative presumption that she was now the head of the 
 household, she had told him to go on taking his orders 
 from Miss Greer as usual. 
 
 After dinner that same night Beatrice brought the 
 question up, explicitly. "Anson says you told him I was 
 to go on giving the orders. Is that what you meant?" 
 
 "Heavens!" said Jennie, looking round her paper, "I 
 don't know anything about running an establishment like 
 this. You'll have to do that." 
 
 "Does that take in the cars, too and the new chauf 
 feur?" 
 
 Jennie ignored the overt resentment in the last phrase. 
 "Why not? I've no use for him. I drive my own!"
 
 THE SAMARITANS 269 
 
 It struck her as she plunged back into her reading (too 
 suddenly, she was aware, for good histrionism) that her 
 young ward looked a bit let down. If she 'd been luxuriat 
 ing in the close-confinement, bread-and-water theory, this 
 treatment was sound as far as it went. 
 
 But it went nowhere near far enough. It supplied in 
 sufficient material even for small talk, let alone real com 
 panionship. Jennie found her rule, to do nothing and to 
 say nothing except when there was something perfectly ob 
 vious for her to do or say, wearing pretty thin. Finally, 
 after their third dinner together, a meal eaten dismally 
 through in almost total silence, Beatrice exploded. 
 
 "I think, after this," she said, "I'll have my meals in 
 my room. I can't stand this. It's too ghastly." 
 
 "It is ghastly," Jennie agreed, "and it's ridiculous. 
 I've had all I can stand of it myself. Of all the prepos 
 terous, idiotic things your father ever did, chucking you 
 and me together like this is the worst ! I don 't know what 
 to do about it, any better than you do. I've been afraid 
 to open my mouth for three days, for fear of getting in 
 worse with you than I was, and I was in badly enough, 
 already. I'm ready to try saying everything that comes 
 into my head and see what happens. It can't be worse 
 than this. Perhaps if you do the same thing, we may get 
 somewhere. ' ' 
 
 Trix had been staring at her, from the first words, in 
 blank simple incredulity at first, later through a tangle of 
 contradictory surmises and doubts. She w r ent on staring, 
 for a while, after Jennie had done. "All right," she said, 
 at last. "This is what I'm thinking. If you hate it like 
 this, and think it's idiotic of father to have asked you to 
 come here, why did you do it?" 
 
 "I'm terribly fond of him," Jennie answered instantly. 
 "Not the way I guess you thought I was when you first 
 came out here. I 've never been in love with him, and he 's 
 never tried to make love to me. But there's hardly any 
 body I 've cared for as much as I do for him, and there 's 
 nobody on God 's green earth that I 'd go as far for, in th?
 
 270 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 way of doing what lie wanted me to. He looked so per 
 fectly sick and helpless last Sunday night over what had 
 happened, that it never occurred to me, till he'd gone off 
 and left me here, that I 'd had any choice in the matter. ' ' 
 
 "You're on his side, though," the girl remarked. "You 
 don't care anything about me. You've made that plain 
 enough from the first." 
 
 "Don't hint," Jennie commanded crisply. "We've 
 made a good start talking out. Let's keep it up. How 
 did I make it plain I didn't like you?" 
 
 "You've never come here to the house, since I've been 
 here, though he's asked you to, he says. But you used to 
 come, before that." 
 
 "You never asked me to come. I thought you would 
 when you made up your mind I was all right, and I 'd wait 
 for that. But of course I'm on his side," Jennie went 
 on. "As I said, I'm fond of him. All I've cared about 
 you was whether you were going to make him happy or 
 miserable. That's all I've had a chance to care about, 
 because I don't know you very well. I think I could get 
 to like you, if we ever had a decent human chance. You 're 
 enough like him, for that. 
 
 ' ' But in this last particular mess I was on your side. I 
 did all I could to keep it from being a mess. I met Joe 
 at the train, myself, and lied to him about the reason why 
 which isn't a thing I like to do with people I care about. 
 I kept him away from home as long as I possibly could, to 
 give George Burns a chance to bring you back, first. So 
 I haven't been an enemy, exactly." 
 
 The girl's eyes were smoldering. "If you weren't an 
 enemy, why did you give George away?" she asked sul 
 lenly. 
 
 "That was my mistake," Jennie admitted. "I didn't 
 think of it as giving him away. I thought he'd done a 
 good job and I wanted him to get the credit for it. When 
 I saw how Joe was taking it, it was too late to stop. ' ' 
 
 ' ' I should think you might have known ! ' ' 
 
 It wasn't a gracious reception of an apology, but there
 
 THE SAMARITANS 271 
 
 was a note of wavering in it, that gave the older woman 
 an intimation of victory. She Avas content to say, ' ' That 's 
 right; I suppose I might have," and waited. 
 
 "Oh, I haven't got anything against you especially," 
 Trix broke out, at last. "And I don't suppose it's your 
 fault that you're here. But did you ever have anybody 
 watching you and telling tales on you? Making that their 
 business? Well, you'd hate it, too. And you'd hate any 
 body that did it. And the nicer and smoother they tried 
 to be, the more you'd hate them. I don't know why 
 you've been letting me alone, like you have; having ine 
 give the orders and letting me go wherever I liked in the 
 car ..." 
 
 "But you think it was because I was trying to get 
 something on you, to report to Joe? Is that it? Good 
 lord! Talk about poisoning wells! I don't mean you, 
 nor Joe, either. But what a situation!" 
 
 She took a minute to think it over; blankly, at first, 
 but then she began to find her line. "Look here, Trix," 
 she said ; " we '11 sign a treaty. I '11 give you my word not to 
 write any letters to Joe about you, or about anything that 
 concerns you. You manage the correspondence yourself. 
 If we come to a final smash, I'll write and tell him why, 
 but I'll show you the letter before it goes. In the mean 
 time, I'm not a spy. I'm not watching you, and I'm not 
 having you watched, either. I won't ask the new chauf 
 feur where you've been. That's the sort of thing I mean. 
 Is that all right, as far as it goes?" 
 
 The girl had curled herself up in a corner of the daven 
 port, her chin in the crook of an elbow. There was some 
 thing compact about her poses, even in relaxation. She 
 looked quite a lot like a young tom-cat. She said nothing 
 to Jennie's proposal for the better part of a minute, when 
 she did speak it was not to answer. 
 
 "What do you want me to promise, on my side?" she 
 asked. 
 
 "I can't think of anything I want to ask you to prom 
 ise." Jennie had put a faint stress on the word ask, but
 
 272 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 she didn't know whether it had reached the girl's ear or 
 not. 
 
 After another silence Beatrice asked, "Does that in 
 clude telegrams, too? That you won't send father, about 
 me?" 
 
 Until she tacked on the supplementary question, Jen 
 nie hadn't the least idea what she was talking about. 
 "Telegrams?" she echoed. Then as the meaning broke 
 over her, "Oh! . . . Good God!" 
 
 The surge of contemptuous disgust at a suspicion so 
 mean, and a mind ungenerous enough to entertain it, was 
 openly revealed in her tone. Trix looked round, met Jen 
 nie's eyes and then lowered her own. 
 
 "I'm sorry," she said. "I beg your pardon for asking 
 that. Only what are you doing it for? If you're that 
 kind of a person, why did you come ? And if you despise 
 me like that and and aren't going to tell on me, why do 
 you stay? I know you hate it. You said you did. And 
 it seemed as if there must be a trick about it, somehow." 
 
 Jennie's mood veered suddenly round to pity. "You 
 poor child," she said; "you have had a rotten time of it, 
 haven't you? I'll try to tell you the why of it all, as far 
 as I'm concerned. I came, as I did, because Joe wanted 
 me to. It was a little weak-minded of me, I guess. One 
 of the things in the world I 'm proud of is the idea he 's got 
 that I never fail him. He certainly needed help from 
 somewhere, Sunday night, so when he asked me for it, 
 I said I'd try. On the off chance, to tell the truth, that 
 I could make a better job of it than he had. I can do 
 better than he, once in a while, with certain kinds of 
 things. 
 
 "I'll tell you why I thought perhaps I could, here. It's 
 because you're so much like him. I've worked for him 
 and with him for seven years, which is seven times as 
 long, he says, as any one else ever lasted. I know his 
 faults like a book. He's suspicious, just the way you are. 
 He's got the devil's own temper. He doesn't bother 
 much about other people's rights; expects them to look
 
 THE SAMARITANS 273 
 
 out for their own, and fight for them if necessary. And 
 along with all that, he's the biggest man I know, and the 
 ablest, and one of the most lovable. I 've got on with him, 
 and been a help to him, and I'm proud of it. And since 
 you're like him, I was interested to see whether I couldn't 
 get on with you, too; and be a help to you. 
 
 "He's handicapped with you, of course, by the fact 
 that he adores you. I 've never known him to be like that, 
 before. Ever since he wrote you that letter. He's been 
 like a boy about you; fierce and proud and some times 
 downright idiotic. Well, I don't adore you, no more 
 than I do him. If I'd adored him or been afraid of 
 him I'd have lasted about one month. 
 
 "I've made up my mind I'll try treating you the way 
 I've always treated him. I've never told tales on him. 
 He's found out that when he tells me a thing, it's buried. 
 I don 't even tell it back to him as a reminder. That 's why 
 I won't tell tales of you. You'll find it out, gradually, if 
 there's time enough. I never ask him questions. Some 
 times he tells me things for fun, and sometimes to see how 
 they strike me, but never because I claim any right to 
 know. I won't claim any such rights with you. You 
 aren't under any obligation to me. You don't have to 
 ask my permission to do anything. You don't even have 
 to pretend you like me; he never bothered to do that. 
 I'm here, that's all. I'm intelligent and shock-proof and 
 experienced. Experienced in more ways than you 're likely 
 to think. I mean, I'm not an old maid, exactly." 
 
 "How old are you?" Trix asked. 
 
 "Oh, I'm old enough," said Jennie, composedly; 
 "thirty-four." 
 
 This seemed to be about all. She got up, lighted her 
 self a cigarette, unfolded an evening paper and carried it 
 across to the windows. Then she heard Beatrice speak 
 ing. 
 
 "You aren't old enough to have been my mother. But 
 I wish my mother had been a person like you. I wish I 'd 
 known somebody like you before this."
 
 274 JOSEPH GEEER AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 Jennie's "line," which she'd been feeling a bit too 
 complacent about, failed her suddenly at this point. It 
 was beautifully logical to decide to treat the girl, in all 
 situations, as she'd have treated the girl's father; but 
 what would she have done with Joe, if, at the end of one 
 of their talks, he'd burst into tears? 
 
 She went back to the davenport, patted the heaving 
 shoulder, clumsily she felt, tried to say something en 
 couraging and, to her consternation, heard her own voice 
 break and saw Beatrice swim away in a blur of tears. 
 
 The break caught the girl's attention, instantly. She 
 stopped weeping, sprang up, took a look to make sure and, 
 with a laugh, flung her arms round Jennie. "You aren't 
 as hard-boiled as you let on to be," she said. 
 
 "I was a fool to say I was experienced, anyhow," Jen 
 nie admitted. "I've hardly ever seen anybody cry be 
 fore. I suppose I'll have to get used to it." 
 
 She was, however, much too experienced in the ways of 
 human fallibility to fall into the error of supposing that 
 merely by winning the opening skirmish she had estab 
 lished, permanently, the sound sane relation with Joe's 
 daughter which any real help would have to be built upon. 
 
 Trix, having hated her, whole-heartedly, started swing 
 ing now quite to the other end of the arc. Jennie had not 
 worked in the stenographers' rooms of numerous big busi 
 ness offices without learning what the sort of sentimental 
 affection known as a "crush" is like. She had, though 
 not often, been made the unwilling recipient of attentions 
 of this sort and she had always hated them, sensing their 
 fundamental unhealthiness. She couldn't have imagined 
 herself reciprocating an attachment of this sort. Yet now, 
 with Beatrice, she was slow in recognizing the familiar 
 manifestations as belonging in that category. 
 
 Trix began getting up for breakfast with her, coming to 
 the table in nightgown and robe, pouring her coffee, mak 
 ing her toast, superfluously seeing to it that everything was 
 exactly right; superfluously because Joe's domestic ser 
 vice was always perfect anyhow. He was one of those
 
 THE SAMARITANS 275 
 
 men who have the knack of getting it. But the child did 
 succeed in investing the utilitarian meal with an atmos 
 phere which Jennie enjoyed, though it was to the detri 
 ment of the morning paper. Then she constituted her 
 self Jennie's chauffeur, driving her down-town every 
 morning with great elan in the roadster and calling for her 
 faithfully every night; a real inconvenience, this was, 
 since Jennie was used to being free to come and go when 
 she liked. Yet she found herself surprisingly reluctant to 
 rebel at it. And she did enjoy their long rides, before or 
 after dinner. Trix was an amazingly good driver, just on 
 the hither side of recklessness and held there by faultless 
 judgment and skill. 
 
 "You ought to have been an aviator," Jennie said once, 
 at the end of a vivid ten seconds during which she'd held 
 her breath. 
 
 "So I've been told," the girl remarked, "by some one 
 who ought to know." At the end of another mile she 
 made it clear enough who this was. "George Burns was 
 a flyer in the war practically." 
 
 When Jennie, with a laugh, inquired how he could be 
 "practically" a flyer and not really one, she explained, 
 with a certain degree of feeling. "They never gave the 
 enlisted men a dog's chance to get pilots' licenses. 
 George was a mechanic, but he was going up all the time, 
 of course, and some of his officers were decent enough to 
 let him drive. Ashamed not to, I guess, because he was 
 better at it than most of them. He could do all the stunts. 
 Isn't it rotten that he never could have a chance! "When 
 you think of some of the chumps that go strutting around 
 with a pair of wings." 
 
 Jennie didn't believe, she said, that many of the men 
 with wings on their blouses were chumps, but she agreed, 
 without reservation, that it was rotten about George. 
 
 "Oh, he should worry!" Trix exclaimed. "He's fly 
 ing now, all right. Got a good job in the air mail service." 
 
 Jennie remembered her treaty and suppressed the ques 
 tion that was on her tongue, but this restraint cost her
 
 276 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 some painful uncertainties. She felt more doubtful of 
 her loyalty to Joe during the ensuing hours than she'd 
 ever been before. She had volunteered nothing to Bea 
 trice concerning the details of Burns' dismissal, of the 
 "reward" Joe had paid him and the condition attached 
 to it. Trix might very well be ignorant of this whole 
 matter, even if she were in communication (as she delib 
 erately had hinted) with the man. An enlightenment on 
 this point might make a vital difference, both in her feel 
 ings toward him and toward her father. If George was 
 pretending to be a martyr he ought to be exposed, forth 
 with. But Jennie held doggedly to her line. She owed 
 her present strong position in Trix's regard to the way 
 she'd lived up to her promise not to meddle, and she 
 wouldn't, even at this apparently critical point, begin 
 meddling now. 
 
 She was rewarded by a measure of reassurance that 
 night before she went to bed. She'd retired to her room, 
 got into dressing-gown and slippers and was belatedly 
 reading the financial news in the evening paper. This 
 had more than an academic interest for her she always 
 had an iron or two of her own in LaSalle Street, but she 
 was not so absorbed in it that the sound of Trix's opening 
 door didn't instantly divert her attention. A moment 
 later the girl came in, in her nightgown, her hair loose 
 about her shoulders, thrust aside the paper and sat down 
 on the arm of Jennie's chair. 
 
 "You're a peach, Jennie," she said. "And I'm a 
 pig. It was in the paper, about George being one of the 
 mail pilots. I thought I'd show it to you when I read it, 
 and then I thought I wouldn't." She gave a little laugh 
 and asked, "You didn't think I'd been going with him on 
 the sly, did you?" 
 
 ' ' I supposed he 'd written to you, ' ' Jennie admitted. ' ' I 
 never thought of its being in the paper." 
 
 The girl sat thoughtfully silent a while, stroking Jen 
 nie's forearm, an absent-minded impersonal caress, much 
 like having a kitten rub itself against your legs. Pres-
 
 THE SAMARITANS 277 
 
 ently, though, the quality of it changed. She took the 
 older woman by the shoulders in a grip and looked in 
 tently into her eyes. 
 
 "You're the only person in the world who's like that," 
 she declared. "Anybody else, the minute I said that about 
 him, would have thought of something horrid. And be 
 lieved it, too, as quick as they thought of it. Dad, quicker 
 than anybody. And, oh, the hell he'd have raised about 
 it!" 
 
 "There's a reason for that, you don't want to forget," 
 Jennie reminded her. "He adores you. You're the 
 only thing in the world he really cares about. ' ' 
 
 Again there came a change in the look of the girl 's face, 
 in the quality of her smile, in the feel of her hands. She 
 slipped from the chair-arm down into Jennie's lap, curled 
 herself there and went soft and heavy. "Don't you love 
 me a little bit, yourself ? ' ' she asked. 
 
 "Oh say half of that," Jennie replied contentedly. 
 But at the end of a five minutes' silence she roused her 
 self bruskly and pushed the girl away. "It's pretty near 
 one o'clock, and by half-past eight to-morrow morning 
 I 've got to be somewhere where they expect me to be worth 
 my salt. Hun along and let me get some sleep ! ' ' 
 
 "I'll drive you down," Trix said through a yawn as 
 she made her reluctant way toward the door. 
 
 "Not to-morrow T ," Jennie answered decisively. "I've 
 got to do a lot of running around during the day, and I '11 
 want the Ford." 
 
 Trix shot back a quick look at her, faintly suspicious and 
 openly resentful, a look which Jennie rewarded with a 
 laugh. "Oh, just as you like," the girl said, with a 
 shrug; "good night." 
 
 It was true enough; Jennie was going to want her own 
 car, but this was not quite her whole reason for declining 
 Trix 's offer. She had been surprised by the force and the 
 ambiguity of what she felt when the girl snuggled into 
 her arms. It left a rankling afterthought behind it, too; 
 a doubt whether, after all, it had been through the news-
 
 278 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 paper that Trix had learned of George Burns' job in the 
 air mail. She hadn't explicitly said so, Jennie remem 
 bered, and she felt the sting of contempt the thing Henry 
 Craven had talked about in the prevarication, if this 
 were what it was. Yet, could she be sure there was not, in 
 herself, a background of jealousy for this suspicion to 
 shine out against? One thing was plain, anyhow: the re 
 lation between her and Beatrice wanted an astringent 
 treatment. And a good, thorough aeration; it was get 
 ting stuffy. 
 
 Henry Craven occurred to her as a possible ally in this 
 project. She had often wished she might take him in as 
 counselor upon some of the problems her young ward 
 presented, but this had never struck her as quite feasible 
 since she couldn 't take him fully into her confidences with 
 out betraying both Joe's flying visit and Beatrice's es 
 capade. He knew she had moved into Joe's flat for the 
 rest of the term of his absence to keep Trix company, but 
 she had volunteered no further explanations. What she 
 wanted of him now, though, was not advice but action. 
 
 "I'm thinking of asking Henry Craven to dinner," she 
 said to Beatrice one evening. "What do you say to that?" 
 
 The answer was not encouraging. "He's a poor fish. 
 "What do you want him to dinner for?" 
 
 "That's more or less his own idea of himself, but you're 
 both wrong about him. I like him a lot." 
 
 "His own idea!" Trix laughed contemptuously. 
 "Why, he doesn't think ordinary air is fit for him to 
 breathe. Do you want him to improve me? So that I 
 can learn to talk with an English accent? De-ah me!" 
 
 Jennie admitted, good-humoredly, that any one who 
 pronounced "r's" and "a's" the way Henry did was 
 justly suspect, but she insisted that in this case appear 
 ances were misleading. "He isn't shy, exactly, but he's 
 timid. He doesn't think people are interested in him. He 
 thinks they're laughing at him when they aren't in the 
 least. It's that sour sister of his that's done it to him, I 
 think. He's been a lot jollier since she went away. You
 
 THE SAMARITANS 279 
 
 "were lucky to escape a summer with her. But he 's as pleas 
 ant and friendly as you could want anybody to be. ' ' 
 
 "Has he been going around with you since Margaret's 
 been away?" 
 
 Jennie felt herself reddening with annoyance at the 
 tone, which was neither friendly nor pleasant, but she 
 answered evenly, "Oh, two or three times. A dinner or 
 two, and a show. And I think I'd like to return the com 
 pliment." 
 
 "Oh, all right," Beatrice said sulkily. "I didn't know 
 you were getting silly about him." 
 
 Jennie was able to laugh at that. "If I never get sil 
 lier about any man than I am about Henry . . . But, Trix, 
 I thought you liked him." 
 
 It was one straw too many. "Did he tell you that ? ' ' she 
 demanded, with a blaze of temper. "Well, I'll tell you, 
 once for all, I don't. I don't like him, nor his sister, nor 
 his nice little cousin Dodo. I don't like his holy airs. Oh, 
 he makes me sick!" 
 
 "Well, that's plain enough," Jennie commented. "All 
 the same, I think I '11 invite him to dinner with me. ' ' 
 
 "Here?" 
 
 "Naturally not, since you feel like that about him and 
 this is your house. No, I '11 take him to one of the hotels or 
 gardens. To-morrow night, I guess, if he's free." 
 
 The quarrel went no further that evening and Jennie 
 hoped that a night's sleep would obliterate it. She even 
 had an olive branch ready in the form of an offhand sug 
 gestion that Trix change her mind and join the party. 
 But she was allowed to eat breakfast alone, and just be- 
 fort she left the flat for the office, the girl, looking like a 
 young msenad, stopped her in the bedroom corridor. 
 
 "I'm to have a night off, am I?" she asked. 
 
 "Yes, if you want to put it like that," Jennie answered 
 coolly. "That is unless Henry turns out to have some 
 thing else to do. If that's the case, shall I telephone?" 
 
 "You mean, you don't care one damn what I do while 
 you're off with him?"
 
 280 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 "Why, yes, it comes to about that. I mean, it's up to 
 you, what you do with yourself to-night, just as it's been 
 from the first. I'm not your keeper and I've never pre 
 tended to be." 
 
 This was, both reason and instinct assured her, the only 
 possible line to take, with the situation developed to that 
 point. (And whether she might have managed better 
 than to let it get to that point was an academic question. 
 She'd done the best she could, all along.) But she had a 
 racking sort of day. And even the evening, cheered and, 
 indescribably, comforted as it was by Henry's company, 
 was punctuated by twinges of misgiving that hurt like a 
 neuralgia. 
 
 They didn't talk very much about Beatrice, but he gave 
 her one suggestion that she thanked him for. He'd asked 
 what the girl did with her days. They must be pretty 
 long, he thought, for any one with her energy. "It 
 wouldn't surprise me," he ventured, "if she were to turn 
 up an artistic talent of some sort. Joe's full of it, you 
 know. Think of the music he manages to hear. And the 
 pictures he buys just because he can't resist them. She 
 said something once that made me think she might take to 
 sculpture or painting. But almost anything of the sort 
 she could learn to do with her hands would be an outlet 
 for her. Joe's never seen that. He's dammed her up." 
 
 It was a promising suggestion, and one Jennie re 
 proached herself for not having thought of earlier. If 
 it weren't too late she'd offer it, still, carefully conceal 
 ing the source of it. But what chance had she, after that 
 last furious warning that had been launched after her 
 of finding the girl. 
 
 She stuck it out with Henry exactly as if nothing had 
 happened, and if he saw anything queer about her manner 
 he forbore to notice it. She drove home, after she'd left 
 him as usual at his own door, at her steady twenty-two 
 miles an hour, put her car in the garage and let herself 
 into the apartment exactly in her accustomed manner. 
 But in her room, when she saw, propped against her pin-
 
 THE SAMARITANS 281 
 
 cushion, a note addressed in Trix's familiar scrawl, she 
 had to summon all her resolution for courage to open it. 
 
 "You can ask Anson what I've been doing this eve 
 ning," was all it said. In an even mixture of relief and 
 annoyance she undressed and went to bed. 
 
 She'd hardly switched off the light, however, before 
 Beatrice came into her room. "I thought you'd either 
 ask Anson or else come in and see if I was there, ' ' she said. 
 " I don't blame you for being mad at me, though. I 
 don't see how you can stand me at all." 
 
 Jennie would have met this advance half-way if she 
 could, but there was no emotion in her to respond to it. 
 Trix came and sat on the edge of the bed and told how 
 she'd done penance; gone to bed supperless at seven 
 o'clock, after having left orders that she wasn't to be 
 called even to the telephone, no matter who it was. 
 
 Joe would never have done a thing like that, Jennie 
 noted, but she kept this reflection to herself. ' ' The thing 
 you need, ' ' she said, rousing herself unconsciously into her 
 down-town manner, "is something to do. Some sort of 
 real work to do. That's the main thing your father has 
 been doing all his life. The rest is never anything but 
 trimmings. And I hate to think what would happen to 
 him if he should ever begin taking it easy. There's no 
 point in your trying to earn money, I suppose. Probably 
 he wouldn't want you to. But if there was something 
 you could study ... I was wondering about the Art 
 Institute. Have you ever thought of that?" 
 
 Trix pounced unerringly. ' ' I bet I know who did think 
 of it. Henry Craven. It's just the sort of silly idea he'd 
 have." 
 
 "Well, I didn't ask him for it," Jennie declared. "I 
 didn't want to talk about you at all; nor think of you, any 
 more than I could help. You've given me a devil of a day, 
 Trix, and that's the truth. What do you suppose I'd 
 have said to Joe, if I 'd come home and found you 'd flown 
 the rails? His orders weren't to treat you the way I've 
 done. I thought my way was better and I took a chance.
 
 282 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 But it wasn't my own money I was speculating with. 
 See?" 
 
 "Wasn't any of it yours?" Trix asked pathetically. 
 "Oh, go along to bed!" Jennie commanded with a re 
 luctant laugh. "Yes, of course, it was." 
 
 But this was cleanly the end of the sentimental phase of 
 the relation. Trix didn't offer to resume her duties as 
 chauffeur nor as ministrant at the breakfast table. After 
 a day or two she did begin appearing at breakfast before 
 Jennie left, but very brisk and businesslike and visibly 
 occupied with her own affairs. It didn't seem to Jennie, 
 either, that the girl was trying to tease her into asking 
 what she was up to. 
 
 What seemed a little more like a deliberate stimulus to 
 her curiosity was a letter Trix wrote, the evening of the 
 first of these days, on Jennie's Corona, during the writing 
 of which she asked Jennie how you spelled Pasadena. 
 "You'd think I'd know how to spell it after all these 
 years," she remarked with a laugh. "I've had to write 
 it before, of course, but not when it mattered whether I 
 spelled it right or not." 
 
 The knowledge that she was writing a letter to Pasa 
 dena of some special sort which had to be correctly spelled, 
 would certainly have startled Joe, and it gave Jennie 
 something to think about, but she asked no questions. 
 Trix asked her for some money, too, in a bigger lump than 
 she usually wanted, a hundred and fifty dollars, and Jen 
 nie wrote her the check, not feeling at all sure whether she 
 was playing the part of a wise woman or a misguided fool. 
 
 Nothing untoward happened, however. Trix gave a 
 standing order for her car at eight o'clock every morning 
 and bolted her breakfast if necessary to enable her to leave 
 at this hour. She drove herself; rarely, Anson volun 
 teered, came home for lunch, and read, as a rule, in the 
 evening in an absorption which contrasted strongly with 
 her former restlessness; acted, Jennie thought, like a per 
 son who had really taken a line of her own. 
 
 After a week of this she revealed her mystery. "I
 
 THE SAMARITANS 283 
 
 wanted to see whether I liked it or not before I said any 
 thing, that's all," she told Jennie. " Why, I'm going 
 to school. You see, when you told me I ought to do some- 
 tiling take lessons, you know, the only thing I could 
 think of that I wanted to go on taking lessons in was swim 
 ming. That sounds kind of silly, I know, but it's so. 
 There 's a peach of a swimming teacher I 'd heard of at the 
 gym out in Evanston, so I went to see him about it. But 
 it seems that the gym is part of Northwestern University, 
 and except in summer he doesn't give lessons, only to 
 students in the university. 
 
 "Any sort of student would do, though; you didn't have 
 to study Latin or mathematics, so I went around to the 
 office to see what kind of student I wanted to be. They've 
 got a special school there, School of Speech, they call it, 
 and I thought that would be pretty good for me. Every 
 body laughs at the way I talk, anyhow. So I planked 
 down my hundred and fifty and wrote a letter to the High 
 School at Pasadena to send word on that I'd really grad 
 uated, and there I am. I like the school even better than 
 the swimming. They teach you a lot of interesting things ; 
 acting, dancing and so on. Physical education, they call it. 
 Things that are some earthly good to you ! I 'm going to be 
 good at it, too. Shew 'em a few things! You watch." 
 
 This, at first blush, seemed to Jennie to solve all prob 
 lems at a stroke. Her efforts and those of Henry Craven, 
 to act as good Samaritans, hadn't amounted to much. It 
 was the girl herself who, having fallen among thieves, had 
 picked herself up, tied up her own wounds, and set her 
 self upon her way. 
 
 There were still plenty of adverse chances to be reckoned 
 with; a momentary discouragement, a succession of dull 
 days, a wayward impulse to a lark, a flare of temper at 
 an unimaginative touch of discipline, and the whole enter 
 prise might go up in smoke. The child had no code, nor 
 harness of habit to steady her through a bit of hard going. 
 Yet the point about which most of Jennie's apprehen 
 sions clustered was Joe's return. What line would lie
 
 284 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 take with his daughter? Would he be content to keep 
 hands off, to leave her reticences unforced? Would it be 
 possible for him to keep in mind how like him, at twenty, 
 Beatrice was? Would Jennie help matters much by re 
 minding him, scolding him, interfering? Mightn't he be 
 jealous of her ascendency over the girl? 
 
 No use worrying about it, of course! She'd have to 
 wait and see what happened. 
 
 5 
 
 Meanwhile, it had got into October and Joe kept postpon 
 ing his return from the Northwest. For weeks his reports 
 had been full of material for enthusiasm. All the ma 
 chinery for processing the flax was installed and in order. 
 They had begun working the retted straw. It was going 
 through without a hitch. There were some improvements 
 in the direction of economy and simplification which 
 could profitably be made, but they had turned up no 
 serious defects. 
 
 Williamson and the Corbetts had begun showing 
 symptoms of an enlivened interest; took to dropping 
 in at the office to see the samples which Joe was 
 sending down, in greater bulk from week to week, for test 
 ing in the laboratory, and the finished products that came 
 out of it. They had equipped the laboratory, by now, un 
 der the charge of a new technical man, as a mill with 
 spinning machinery and looms; all the equivalents, on a 
 reduced scale, for commercial linen manufacture and 
 the way the stuff came through these searching tests was 
 well beyond the more conservative of their expectations; 
 not far short, indeed, of Joe's glowing prophecies. 
 
 But this was only the beginning of it. Interest in the 
 new process, excitement over the prospect it offered of 
 finding a fortune in the worthless straw of seed flax, 
 was spreading over the Northwest country like a prairie 
 fire. Groups of local capitalists were coming almost 
 daily to visit the four mills. The organization of sub 
 sidiary companies was already getting beyond the talking
 
 THE SAMARITANS 285 
 
 stage. Money, itself, was beginning to talk. Capital was 
 being subscribed. By the time next year's crop came in, 
 three states would be dotted with little four-thousand-ton 
 mills producing raw linen under the Greer process. 
 
 To the financiers' startled reminder that their original 
 program had not contemplated going as fast as this, Joe's 
 replies were more confident and urgent than ever. Now 
 was the time to strike. Everybody was ready ; confidence 
 was running high everywhere. If they bestirred them 
 selves, seized the opportunity at the flood, they could re 
 pay the whole investment in the enterprise out of the first 
 year's profits, and be on velvet thereafter. Joe was irre 
 sistible in the phase.' He had taken the bit in his teeth, but 
 it wasn 't possible to say he was running wild. The figures 
 and the facts, as well as the temper of the country, were 
 going along with him. The great post-war boom was at 
 its height during the summer and autumn of 1919. 
 
 And then, one day, when expectation was looking its 
 rosiest, a letter came into the office that produced a 
 panic. It was from a firm of patent lawyers, one of the 
 bet established and most formidable in the city, and it 
 served formal warning that Joe's process in general and 
 much of his machinery in particular, infringed the prior 
 patents of a client. All manufacture and sale of linen 
 under the Greer process would henceforth be carried on 
 9* the peril of the Greer Company. 
 
 Jennie, to whom the letter was brought as soon as it 
 was opened, took a few minutes for intense reflection 
 upon its startling contents before she 'carried it to Henry. 
 For a month after Joe's flying visit she'd kept an alert 
 eye for the "unexpected" thing she was instantly to com 
 municate to Williamson or, in his absence, Corbett, but 
 nothing had turned up which was not foreseen by the 
 adopted policy of the company and she had ceased look 
 ing for it. It had been, very likely, no more than one of 
 Joe's many fancies that never took form. He seldom took 
 the trouble to inform her of the abandonment of his pro 
 jects; in many cases forgot he'd ever entertained them.
 
 286 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 The sudden looming of trouble over the patents was 
 certainly unexpected, but was it the unexpected thing 
 he'd had in mind? Wasn't it, on its face, a thing he could 
 not have foreseen, and one that for a dozen reasons he 
 might wish to be informed of before "Williamson and Cor- 
 bett or even Henry knew it had arisen? 
 
 She found herself sitting with fists clenched and brows 
 drawn down tight, and mechanically she relaxed and 
 lighted herself a cigarette. Let her recall the circum 
 stances in which Joe had instructed her. It had struck her 
 as likely, she remembered, that he had made that secret 
 trip to Chicago for the single purpose of saying that one 
 thing; which meant, if this was a good guess, that he re 
 garded it as too important, and too confiden 
 tial, to be risked in a letter. What made it 
 so important? "Wouldn't she, naturally, in the face 
 of anything as startling as this, take it to Henry 
 at once? And wouldn't Henry be sure to tell John Will 
 iamson about it without delay? Of course! Unless it 
 happened to be a thing of such a complexion that her loy 
 alty to Joe, and perhaps even Henry's, would incline them 
 to keep quiet about it until he could be forewarned. Un 
 less, in other words, it was a thing exactly like this ! She 
 let go a long expiration of relief, and carried the letter to 
 Henry. 
 
 "We'd better try to telephone Joe, hadn't we?" he 
 said, at the end of a moment of blank astonishment. 
 1 ' That '11 be quicker and surer than telegraphing. ' ' 
 
 "It might take us all day to find him," Jennie pointed 
 out, "and when we did, there wouldn't be anything he 
 could do but come home and talk it over with Mr. Will 
 iamson and Mr. Corbett. I think we ought to tell them 
 first one of them, anyway. Then, if they want Joe to 
 come home for a conference, they can send for him. I 
 don't think we ought to lose a minute letting them know 
 about it." 
 
 "Unless," Henry argued dubiously, "you think it's 
 something Joe would like to know about, first. ' '
 
 THE SAMARITANS 287 
 
 A luminous conviction broke over Jennie that she'd 
 taken the right tack. "Oh, I'm sure it's nothing like 
 that," she said. 
 
 The financiers decided that they did want Joe and he 
 was sent for the next day, but they didn't waste time 
 waiting for him. They retained, in addition to the firm 
 that had drawn Joe's patents, a glittering specialist in the 
 field, and they called Rodney Aldrich into consultation to 
 cover any legal questions which might possibly lie outside 
 the technical area of the case. By the time Joe arrived, 
 three days later, the decks were cleared, if not for action 
 at least for conference of the weightier sort. 
 
 Jennie tried to make an opportunity for a talk with him 
 before the first meeting took place but did not succeed in 
 bringing it about. She got a good look at him, which told 
 her nothing, a painfully vigorous handshake, answered 
 his, "You and Trix getting on all right?" with an af 
 firmative nod, and by that time the other conferees were 
 straggling into the room. Everything else, including any 
 sort of intimation whether or not she'd done right in this 
 present business, had to stand over. 
 
 The greeting between him and John Williamson was 
 worth watching ; in form it was friendly enough, but both 
 men bristled at it. She wondered, suddenly, as they took 
 their places, whether this move might not have originated 
 in the banker's camp, the first in the campaign which Joe 
 had prophesied would be launched against him. It was 
 his unconcealed wariness, his poker face, that suggested 
 this surprising idea. They'd all be able to see that he 
 suspected something. 
 
 His disposition, at the outset, was to minimize the 
 danger from the threatened attack, though he never tried 
 to deny that it deserved to be considered seriously. He 
 didn't believe any of the mechanical infringements 
 amounted to a damn. If there were any coincidences he 
 could design around them. If their more basic claims 
 showed interferences, his offhand advice would be to go 
 ahead and let the other side worry. The Lord knew that,
 
 288 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 with the mess the patent situation was in in the United 
 States, nobody with capital behind him need hesitate about 
 infringing to his heart 's content, even in a clear case. And 
 no case could remain clear very long, while a bunch of 
 Federal judges with less mechanical knowledge or in 
 stinct than an average boy of twelve had the deciding of 
 it. Start two units to decide the same question in two 
 jurisdictions and you had a good chance to get two diamet 
 rically opposed decisions equally authoritative. As it 
 looked to Joe, the important thing to look into was not the 
 merit of their opponent's claims, but his motives and the 
 extent of his financial resources ; in other words, how hard 
 it would be, and how long it would take, to tire him out. 
 
 This was, crudely, about the line Jennie would have ex 
 pected the financiers to take, but she saw that, put as it 
 was, they didn't find it palatable. Aldrich was staring 
 out the window, his fingers drumming the table ; "William 
 son drawing meaningless nervous designs on a scratch 
 pad. It was Corbett who answered, the others mutely 
 signifying approval while he spoke. 
 
 They wouldn't for one moment consider an act of high 
 way robbery, even if their immunity were as great as 
 Greer seemed to think it was. But there were a good 
 many cases, on recent record, where powerful corporations 
 had attempted to follow this course and had very justly 
 been compelled to reimburse their intended victims to the 
 tune, sometimes, of millions. This, however, was be 
 side the mark. If they had taken innocently, he assumed 
 ideas or processes which were the patented property of 
 some one else, rich or poor, they'd pay him what those 
 ideas were fairly worth. Offer to pay, at least. Of 
 course, if the patentee had exorbitant notions of their 
 value, refused to listen to reason, tried to hold them up, 
 why then the tactics Mr. Greer had outlined would have 
 his full approval. But obviously, the first thing to 
 settle was the purely technical question as to the merit 
 and the value including the nuisance value of their 
 opponent's invention.
 
 THE SAMARITANS 289 
 
 Joe agreed at once. He hadn't meant to say he didn't 
 favor taking up the technical question first. He had a 
 very lively personal interest in it, if only for the purpose 
 of finding out why their own investigation of the files, 
 his search, and the independent one which Corbett and 
 Williamson had had made, had failed to turn up this al 
 leged interference. 
 
 Corbett 's patent lawyer made an openly apologetic ex 
 planation of this. The rival process was one of an enor 
 mous freak class for the industrial utilization of corn 
 stalks. The file-wrapper and contents had had a cursory; 
 examination, but the serious claims were buried under a 
 mass of others so fantastic that their purport hadn't been 
 detected. 
 
 Joe let off one of his characteristic explosions at this 
 point. He 'doubted if there were a dozen men in the 
 country who could be trusted to read a blue-print prop 
 erly. To a decently educated engineer the purport of any 
 diagram ought to be as instantly apparent as the purport 
 of the seven of spades. "They blunder them out," he 
 fumed, "like children mispronouncing hard words! Let's 
 have a look at the stuff," he concluded. "You've got it 
 here, haven't you? I don't believe, yet, that there's any 
 thing in it." 
 
 But it soon became plain to Jennie and to the others, 
 she couldn't but suppose that this opinion of his was 
 seriously shaken by the diagrams and descriptions that 
 were spread before him. He studied them with deepening 
 seriousness, his dark face now intent, now abstracted, now 
 illuminated by a gleam of rueful appreciation. At last, 
 with a sigh, he pushed them away from him. "There's 
 no use detaining you gentlemen any longer to-day," he 
 said. "I shall want to put in a night's work on this be 
 fore I shall have an opinion that's worth giving. Offhand, 
 some of it looks good. I hope it isn't so good as it looks. 
 There are some minor points where his stuff is better than 
 mine, obviously; and one or two that aren't so damned 
 minor. Anyhow, by to-morrow morning I'll be able to
 
 290 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 tell you pretty near what we're up against. Will eleven 
 o'clock suit everybody?" 
 
 Jennie lingered after the rest had gone. She hoped 
 for a sign; not a detailed explication of his mind it 
 wasn't like Joe, in the heat of battle, to indulge his lieu 
 tenants so far but a burst of profanity, or the gleam of 
 a grin, from which she could draw her own conclusions 
 whether or not this thing was a trap, and, if a trap, of 
 whose setting; whether, first of all, she'd done right in 
 treating it as the "unexpected" thing he'd forewarned 
 her of. But she got nothing of the sort. His abstraction 
 didn't lift. 
 
 He smiled, presently, and nodded her to a chair. "Let's 
 hear all about things," he commanded. 
 
 "Business or personal?" she asked. 
 
 "Business, hell! How've things been going at home? 
 What's the girl been doing with herself? Giving you any 
 trouble? You've been damn uncommunicative, seems to 
 me. I don't believe you've written me about her, once." 
 
 "No, I haven't," she began, but he had unhooked his 
 telephone and she waited to see what he was going to do. 
 He called the number of his flat and flung Jennie an ex 
 planation while he waited. 
 
 "I'll just say hello to Trix, now," lie said. "Get her 
 to come down here to dinner with me, I guess. I can leave 
 this mess long enough for that. Wish I didn't have to 
 work all night." 
 
 "I don't believe you 11 find her there as early as this," 
 Jennie remarked with a look at her watch. "She spoke 
 of waiting for you, but I couldn't tell her when you were 
 coming exactly, so she decided not to." 
 
 "If she isn't at home, where is she?" he asked, but got 
 his connection before she could answer. "Tell her to 
 call me up at my office the minute she comes in," he 
 ordered, and hung up. "You know where she is, don't 
 you?" he shot at Jennie. 
 
 "Not exactly," she admitted. "Of course that means 
 I don't really know at all. I haven't kept track of her
 
 THE SAMARITANS 291 
 
 like that; haven't tried to. I'd better tell you from the 
 beginning. The reason I didn't write to you about her 
 was because I promised her I wouldn't. And I promised, 
 at the same time, not to ask her any questions, nor to 
 question any one else about her. That was about three 
 days after you left, when I saw that anything else would 
 be perfectly hopeless." 
 
 "That's a damned funny way of carrying out my in 
 structions," he commented. 
 
 "I wasn't trying to carry out your instructions. I 
 never told you I would. I said I 'd do the best I could for 
 the girl, and I've done it my own way. It wasn't by being 
 a spy, or a governess, or any of the things a girl like Trix 
 would be sure to hate. And it's worked, Joe. No, you 
 give me a chance to tell you about it!" He relinquished 
 the intended interruption with no very good grace and 
 sat back in his chair again. 
 
 Against the gloomy abstraction of his look she found it 
 hard to hit upon the beginning she wanted for her story. 
 She plunged, finally, into the middle of it. ' ' She 's going 
 to school, Joe. Up in Northwestern University. It was 
 her own idea from the start. She picked out what she 
 wanted, registered and paid her tuition ; wrote out to Pasa 
 dena for her certificate from the high school all before 
 she told me a thing about it. She's working hard, and 
 she's happy at it. She drives off at eight o'clock every 
 morning as regular as the clock, and what with some of 
 the extra things she's taking swimming lessons and all 
 she's hardly ever home much before dinner. And she 
 studies at night. She's been doing it now for nearly a 
 month." 
 
 "What's she studying?" he asked, and seemed un 
 favorably impressed by the list Jennie endeavored to fur 
 nish him with. "What sort of reports does she get!" 
 Jennie had seen none; no, not even of attendance. What 
 were her teachers like? The swimming teacher, for in 
 stance? Had Jennie talked with any of them? No, she 
 hadn't. The swimming teacher was supposed to be the
 
 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 best man at it in this part of the country. At least, so 
 Beatrice regarded him. 
 
 "She admits he's a man, does she? Look here, Jennie! 
 How do you know she's doing anything but swimming? 
 How do you know she's going to school at all? How do 
 you know anything except that she drives off in the car 
 every morning by herself, I suppose and stays away all 
 day ? How do you know she isn 't running with "Ware and 
 his lot? Or with George Burns, for that matter? She 
 may be picking him up on some drug-store corner every 
 other afternoon." 
 
 "She may," Jennie admitted. "I haven't any alibi for 
 her. But she doesn't act, to me, as. if that was the sort 
 of thing she was doing. She doesn't have to lie to me and 
 she tells me a different story. She's made friends with 
 me, you see. Make friends with her, yourself, and then 
 see what you think." 
 
 "Make friends with her!" he cried, deeply affronted. 
 "Why, my God, Jennie, I love that child as I never loved 
 anything before in the world. But that wasn't enough to 
 keep her safe. She needs somebody to watch her. I left 
 that job to you. And it seems to me you've fallen down 
 on it. 
 
 "I'm not blaming you," he added, misreading her ges 
 ture of despair over his wrong-headedness. "She doesn't 
 mean much to you, compared to what she means to me. 
 You can afford to take chances. But I can't. Not after 
 that night Burns brought her home. She'd been out all 
 the night before, Jennie, with that rotten drunken gang. 
 Anything could have happened to her." 
 
 "You promised to let that be bygones," she reminded 
 him. 
 
 "And I will," he asserted, "as far as she's concerned. 
 I '11 never speak of it again to her. Never ask her a ques 
 tion. But I can't help thinking about it, can I? Won 
 dering what did happen to her? She swore she was all 
 right. Nothing's happened since has there to make 
 you think . . . "
 
 THE SAMARITANS 293 
 
 "For God's sake, Joe," she broke in upofi him, "drop 
 it! You're all wrong. You're talking like a sentimental 
 idiot. If you take that line with her when you see her, 
 you '11 do her a lot more harm, yourself, than was done her 
 that night even supposing she did lose her innocence!" 
 
 His only answer was an incredulous stare. 
 
 "All right," she went on ; "be as shocked as you like ! I 
 mean you to be. I'm trying to wake you up. Innocence 
 is a good thing to have, but it isn't the only thing in the 
 world. You'd lost yours long before you were as old 
 as she is. In more ways than you mean about her. 
 You'd run amuck. You'd got down, you've often told me, 
 to the the edge of the gutter. You're proud of it, too! 
 Because of the way you built yourself up from, there. By 
 yourself. Without any help from anybody. 
 
 "Well, she's like you. You've said that yourself, but I 
 told you you'd never be able to remember it. She's got 
 to find things out for herself, even if she gets hurt, now 
 and then, doing it. Nobody can help her unless they begin 
 by trusting her to find her own way. And if she sees that 
 you don 't ; finds you watching her and spying on her 
 it'll do her more harm than any drunken lover could do 
 her at the end of a joy-ride. I mean that, Joe ; literally. ' ' 
 
 His only answer, for the moment, was to say that he 
 wouldn't have believed a woman a good woman could 
 have talked like that. 
 
 She uttered a mirthless laugh. "I don't believe you 
 know much about good women. I doubt if you know one 
 when you see one." 
 
 "I'm not going north again," he said, after a heavy 
 silence. "There were a few things I wanted to finish up 
 but they can stand over. I've got a job here, I can see 
 that. I couldn't expect anybody else to do it for me. 
 She's my daughter, that's the difference. I'm going to 
 look after her my own way. I don't mean to spy on her. 
 She won't know I'm watching or asking questions. But 
 I'm going to know!" 
 
 "She'll see through you like so much glass," Jennie
 
 294 JOSEPH GREER AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 predicted bitterly. "She hasn't got your wits for noth 
 ing. But she's your daughter, as you say." 
 
 The note of finality in her voice made him look up at 
 her quickly, with another assurance that he didn't blame 
 her for seeing the thing the way she had nor for acting 
 according to her lights. He hoped she 'd go on giving him 
 advice about the girl, helping where she could. Above all, 
 he hoped she'd stay on with them in the flat. 
 
 But this she wouldn't consider. "Two people trying 
 to do the same thing in opposite ways are sure to make a 
 mess of it even if either one of them could have done it 
 alone. No, I '11 pull out, Joe, and leave the wheel to you. 
 Of course I'm not hurt about it! It'll seem pretty good, 
 I tell you, to be back in my old joint again. When you've 
 been a hermit as long as I have, you sort of need to be by 
 yourself. ' ' 
 
 She may, at the moment, have talked herself into a half 
 belief that this was true, but it was not a conviction with 
 stamina enough to last out her first evening alone in her 
 flat. She was miserably lonely. She wanted Trix, rang 
 ing in, hugging her at haphazard, sprawling on the chair- 
 arm or the rug, talking neither very wisely nor very wit 
 tily, at random, yawning, fondling her shoulder or her 
 knee for a moment with a careless hand, and saying she 
 was going to bed. Naive, pathetic, lovely, young, just 
 beginning to find herself! "What right had Joe to come 
 trampling into this little garden, just because a momen 
 tary casual act of his, forgotten for twenty years, had 
 begotten her! His daughter, was she? 
 
 6 
 
 Their conferences over the patent situation endured for 
 days. The lawyers studied Joe's report with grave at 
 tention and presented a report of their own. To the 
 bored laymen sitting round the table each of these re 
 ports made the situation the more labyrinthine. The al 
 leged infringements raised curious questions of law as 
 well as of fact. Rodney Aldrich enthusiastically declared
 
 THE SAMARITANS 295 
 
 it a fascinating problem a dictum which, coming from 
 him, made the others of them shudder. 
 
 John Williamson put an end to this phase of the dis 
 cussion by declaring that if their own experts were as 
 dubious as all this, it was clear the other side had better 
 be bought off without further delay. All the non-tech 
 nical people around the table agreed with him, and, with 
 this, the discussion shifted to the question of tactics. 
 John was in favor of a cold offer, liberal enough to be 
 attractive, but accompanied by the stiffest bluff they 
 could make that the alternative to its acceptance was a 
 fight to the finish. 
 
 "Take time to look 'em up, first," Joe insisted. "You 
 don't know yet what '11 be attractive to them. My expe 
 rience is that if a man expects twenty-five dollars and you 
 offer him two hundred he'll refuse it and sue you for 
 fifty thousand." This was sound observation, they all 
 agreed. 
 
 "Get a line on the inventor himself," Joe went on. 
 "Find out who's backing him. I'll tell you frankly that 
 I've taken measures, on my own account, to get a line on 
 him, and until I'm satisfied that my line goes all the way 
 round and ties in a knot, I won't vote for paying him a 
 cent." (Did he suspect, Jennie wondered, that this in 
 ventor was a pawn in John "Williamson's game? There 
 was an edge in his voice which suggested he did.) "If 
 he 's what he looks like, so far, we can buy him up so cheap 
 we'll feel foolish." 
 
 But it turned out that Joe was wrong in that. The in 
 ventor was skilfully stalked, sounded out, impressed, and 
 eventually was offered the sum in cold cash which, after 
 so much deliberation, had been agreed upon. The offer, 
 through his attorneys, was instantly rejected and a coun 
 ter-proposal submitted wilich consternated the directors. 
 The cash price of the patents was prohibitive, fantastic, 
 and the alternative offer was a substantial block of stock 
 in the Greer company. The inventor believed that the 
 Greer process, improved by his own, had enormous possi-
 
 296 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 bilities. He wished to be in on it. He had deliberately 
 put his cash price at a prohibitive figure because the 
 stock was what he really wanted. 
 
 Joe, from the moment this offer was made, favored re 
 jecting both alternatives of it, and fighting it out with the 
 idiot through the courts. The question was not worth de 
 bating, and anybody who saw a need for debating it was 
 either lacking in courage or had his own fish to fry. 
 
 He was called sharply to order for this insinuation, and 
 Jennie was nnhappily aware that the explosion had not 
 furthered his cause. It might have made some impression 
 on Williamson, she thought, but never on men like Cor- 
 bett and Crawford. Their jaws set ominously over it. It 
 was still the sense of the directors that an arrangement 
 should be made. Crawford made a formal motion that the 
 settlement be made, when it was made, in stock. 
 
 This put Joe in a corner. Real danger always quieted 
 him, and his argument though forcible was low-voiced and 
 conciliatory. The fundamental difficulty about organiz 
 ing this company, he pointed out, had been over the ques 
 tion of control. He had felt at first, that since he was put 
 ting his whole fortune into the company and was to be 
 its technical head, he was entitled to full control. It had 
 been with the greatest reluctance that he had consented 
 to a divided control, an even fifty per cent, in his hand 
 and fifty in the hands of the associates. He had relied 
 upon a gentleman's agreement that this balance should 
 not be disturbed by the issuance of treasury stock. He 
 felt that the payment of the inventor in this stock was 
 dangerous to his interests as likely to disturb that balance. 
 It would be a much easier matter for Williamson, Corbett 
 and Crawford, or their friends, to possess themselves of 
 that stock, than it would be for him. He urged, therefore, 
 in the interest of fair play, that the cash price, or rather, 
 the best compromise they could make on a cash basis, be 
 accepted. 
 
 "Question," Corbett murmured, when they had heard 
 him in silence to the end. But Frank Crawford, after a
 
 THE SAMARITANS 297 
 
 glance down the table at Henry Craven's troubled face, 
 made a little speech of reassurance. The agreement was 
 still a gentlemen's agreement, and there was no disposi 
 tion on the part of any one to violate it. The control had 
 from the first been ambiguous and it would be no more so 
 after the stock sale had been made. There was no reason 
 to believe that the inventor was not entirely disinterested. 
 Crawford was voting for a stock payment both because he 
 did not wish the company's financial resources depleted 
 and because he did wish the personnel strengthened, as 
 he believed it would be by the enlistment of a man whose 
 talents, as an inventor, had been so highly praised by 
 their president. 
 
 The vote was then taken and the motion carried, Joe, 
 Jennie and Nathan voting against it. It was supported 
 by Williamson, Corbett, Crawford and, most unhappily, 
 by Henry Craven. Joe shook hands with him after the 
 meeting and told him not to feel bad about it. He 'd acted 
 in accordance with the clear understanding under which 
 he'd been elected. He hadn't the heart to stay around, 
 however, to talk it out with Joe and Jennie, and left with 
 John Williamson. 
 
 Jennie, tired out and thoroughly dispirited, hadn 't much 
 wanted to stay and talk it out, either, but she had been 
 detained by an imperative signal from Joe. She stood 
 looking out the window over the lake while she waited for 
 the room to clear. When the door had shut for the last 
 time, she turned with what began as a smile of en 
 couragement for her defeated boss. But it ended with a 
 gasp. 
 
 "Joe!" she cried. He was gazing after John William 
 son's back, with his most brilliant grin. 
 
 "We've got 'em, Jennie! We've got 'em by the short 
 hairs!" 
 
 "Was this what you were working for, all along? But 
 Joe, why?" 
 
 "Good lord, yes! Didn't you see it? I hoped you 
 wouldn't, because it made your face safer, but I didn't
 
 298 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 suppose I could get by with you. I'm pretty good when I 
 can do that." 
 
 "I don't see, yet," she confessed, "what you've got out 
 of it, unless this inventor you were so anxious to have 
 them look up is somebody you own, more or less." 
 
 "Hell!" said Joe. "I am the inventor. Patented the 
 whole thing myself as an infringement before I pat 
 ented the others. Corn-stalks was a damn good idea, wasn 't 
 it. They might have found the thing before they went in 
 and gummed the whole game. But they didn't, Jennie. 
 Do you think I 'd go into business with that bunch without 
 something up my sleeve? 
 
 "That stock will stay right where it is, see, until they 
 try to pull their stuff. I may not have to show down even 
 then, if I can get Henry. I believe I could have got him 
 to-day if I'd wanted him. I could only use him once, of 
 course. 
 
 "Been feeling sorry for the old man, have you? "Well, 
 next time you wait. We've got 'em by the short hairs, 
 Jennie, and when we get ready, they're going to yelp!"
 
 CHAPTER SEVEN 
 
 TRUE LOVE 
 
 JOE'S misgivings about the use Beatrice had been making 
 of her liberty was warranted. She had picked up George 
 Burns on a drug-store corner more than once, and though 
 this did not happen as often as her father, with deliberate 
 exaggeration, had suggested to Jennie, the bond between 
 the pair was stronger than anything his speculations ran 
 to. "Within a month of her coming to Chicago, there had 
 been an episode which Trix herself recognized as important. 
 
 Until this happened she had romanticized about her 
 chauffeur in the half-amused, half-credulous vein, natural 
 to one in whose cultural background the movies were so 
 important a factor. The solid circumstantial facts of her 
 transplanting from her mother's household to her father's 
 seemed unreal enough to justify her in a day-dreaming 
 projection of them. George Burns was in his middle 
 twenties, strong, straight-standing, well-coordinated; he 
 had carried over into his job as Greer's chauffeur a mili 
 tary neatness and smartness which he had learned in the 
 army. His smoothly brushed hair had an ineradicable 
 wave in it. He had an engaging smile and a pleasurably 
 virile voice. The niceties of speech \vere beyond him, but 
 to these, the girl 's ear was not, at this time, sensitive. 
 
 She did not, of course, seriously believe that George was 
 really a millionaire's son or the heir of a fabulously rich 
 uncle; nor that he'd taken this humble job as a means of 
 showing any one his true worth, or of finding some one who 
 
 299
 
 300 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 would love him for himself alone, or of foiling the matri 
 monial machinations of some sordid mother or aunt. Yet 
 he made a substantial peg upon which to hang idle ro 
 mances of this general character. 
 
 According to her mood, her treatment of him veered 
 capriciously; sometimes she was haughty and remote, the 
 complete employer; sometimes, experimentally and quite 
 unsuccessfully she tempted him; sometimes, since she 
 really liked him, she forgot all her poses and treated him 
 like a friend. He was, literally, for weeks, her only coeval 
 companion, and for longer than that, the only one of them 
 whose good- will she didn 't more or less suspect. 
 
 This opening phase of their relation, after it had lasted 
 about a month, was brought abruptly to an end. It was 
 an especially fine day after three of rain, a jolly south 
 wind blowing gustily drying the roads and fields and a 
 sultry red sun "carrying water." They'd been cruising 
 about hunting out some of the new forest preserves, Bea 
 trice, of course, at the wheel. 
 
 She'd been in her friendliest mood with him at first, im 
 pudent, familiar, easily amused. She sat low in the half- 
 reclining seat, her feet riding the clutch and brake pedals. 
 The wind tousled her uncovered head and whipped her 
 skirt about her knees. She had George find a cigarette for 
 her in the pocket of her discarded pongee coat and strike 
 matches for her, amid mutual charges of wilful clumsiness, 
 until it was alight. She invited him to take off his stiff- 
 visored cap as well as the military blouse, which must be 
 horribly hot, and make himself comfortable; and when he 
 refused she speculatively suggested as reasons that he was 
 afraid of mussing his hair and that he hadn't any proper 
 shirt on beneath the blouse; only a dicky. 
 
 Apart from his refusal to get out of uniform, though, 
 he was not very ceremonious with her. He shouted, ' ' Hey ! 
 Where you going?" when she steered the big car out of 
 the road into a divergent cart-track. 
 
 "It's the way in," she explained with a nod toward a 
 sign post; "why not?" But they were going faster than
 
 TRUE LOVE 301 
 
 it was written that any car could go over those humps and 
 hollows and a series of heavy jolts supplied an answer. 
 George reached over to her side and cut off the ignition. 
 
 "That's why," he said. "Better back out before you 
 get any deeper in." 
 
 She sat up with a cold stare at him and started the 
 motor again. "Whose car is this, anyway?" she asked. 
 "Anybody given it to you? I told you I was going into 
 those woods, and I am. It's a nice little woods even if 
 it would get a laugh out in California. And this road's 
 the regular way in." 
 
 * ' It was never meant for a car like this, ' ' he said. 
 
 From his tone and the flush in his face she knew he was 
 angry and, perversely, she added another shovelful to the 
 fire. ' ' I know what 's the matter with you, ' ' she said with 
 a short laugh. "You're afraid you'll have to wash. Get 
 ting spoiled and lazy. A little work won't hurt you a 
 bit." He flared a brighter red but said nothing. 
 
 She was driving slowly, now, with all her skill and 
 caution; both were needed. Presently she found herself 
 on the bank of a sluggish little stream. The road, twist 
 ing down a shallow gully, led through it, a slippery rutted 
 incline of clay, but the stream-bed itself, she saw, was 
 paved in concrete. 
 
 ' ' Look here, Trix ! " he burst out, in the face, apparently, 
 of a fully formed resolution not to speak again. "If you 
 go across there you won't get out." 
 
 Once before, this afternoon, he'd called her that, un 
 consciously as now, and she, rather pleased than not, had 
 ignored the slip. But this time, annoyed by the misgiving 
 that he was right, she snatched the advantage it gave her. 
 "You're forgetting yourself, Burns," she said, as in 
 solently as she knew how. "When I want any advice of 
 my servants, I ask for it." 
 
 It was still her program to make it up with him after 
 she should have put him completely in the wrong by emerg 
 ing unscratched upon a hard road, somewhere. But the 
 program couldn 't be carried out, for the track, after a twist
 
 302 JOSEPH GREER AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 or two among the trees on the farther bank, betrayed her 
 by disappearing altogether in a morass. She tried to cut 
 the car around but at the first attempt she backed into a 
 tree and found she was wedged fast. Tears of vexation 
 were too near her eyes to make it safe to chance a look 
 into the chauffeur's set face. 
 
 "I'm going to get out and look for some may-apples," 
 she said. "If you want to turn the car around you can. 
 If you don't, you can wait till I come back." 
 
 She found neither the may-apples nor the better hu 
 mored self-command which was really what she'd gone off 
 to seek. She got thoroughly mired, scratched and torn by 
 thorns, and horribly bitten by mosquitoes. She didn't 
 know whether she was glad or sorry to find on her return 
 that George had got the car around. She found him look 
 ing stonily at a crumpled mudguard. "You can drive," 
 she told him meekly, as she got into the passenger's seat. 
 
 "When they were back on the hard road she tried, non- 
 committally, to make peace with him, exhibiting her rents, 
 scratches and mosquito bites; but these unworded appeals 
 for his sympathy were fruitless. Exasperated again by 
 his silence, she said presently, "If you're afraid father '11 
 fire you, or anything, for the mess you got the car into, 
 you needn't worry. I'll tell him I did it. Of course it 
 was my fault, I suppose." 
 
 " I 'm not worrying about getting fired, ' ' he said grimly. 
 "I've already quit." 
 
 She was startled into betraying real consternation at 
 this, but soon learned it was not an accomplished fact but 
 a mere intention. He'd been trying, he said, for the past 
 two or three days to get a chance to give Mr. Greer notice, 
 but hadn't succeeded. He wanted to do it in a friendly 
 way because Mr. Greer had always treated him white. 
 
 To get even with him for having startled her she laughed, 
 skeptically. "For a minute, I thought you meant it." 
 
 "You can tell him, to-night," he retorted. "With or 
 without two weeks' notice, just as he likes. It can't be 
 too quick to suit me. And you can tell him why, too. ' '
 
 TRUE LOVE 303 
 
 She said she didn't know why. "He pays you well 
 enough, doesn't he?" 
 
 "You know why, all right," he said. "There's nobody 
 in this world can treat me the way you do and get away 
 with it." 
 
 ' ' If you don 't want to be treated like a servant, I don 't 
 see why you took this job," she grumbled. 
 
 "Like a servant!" he echoed. "I had two years of it 
 in the army, from a lot of tin stampings they called of 
 ficers. One minute they 'd forget that was what they were, 
 and get familiar with you, and then they'd remember and 
 ride you for it. And you couldn't quit. You had to take 
 all they wanted to give you. Well, the war's over and 
 I'm through. If a person wants to treat their chauffeur 
 like part of the machinery of the car, they won't hear any 
 kick coming from me. But this being treated like old 
 home folks for a while and then like a dog . . . Dog! 
 Why, you wouldn't know how to treat a good dog." 
 
 "You've said enough," Trix told him furiously. 
 "You've quit all right." 
 
 But at the end of ten silent miles she laid her hand upon 
 his knee and said she was sorry. The more she liked 
 people the more she was under the necessity, now and 
 then, of getting them raging mad at her. She even did it 
 to her father, sometimes. It was sort of like Fate, she 
 forlornly supposed. She did like George. Old home folks 
 was exactly how she felt about him. She didn't blame 
 him for hating the job which he was too good for and 
 she had acted like a pig and she didn't suppose he could 
 forgive her. 
 
 Her hand had been caressing his knee all the while 
 and at this point his driving got a bit wobbly, so with a 
 little laugh, she suggested that he pull out at the side of 
 the road to finish their talk. 
 
 She was luxuriating in penitence, of course, and the 
 knowledge that he was deeply moved by it encouraged her 
 to go all the further, but the feeling she overexpressed was 
 nevertheless real. Fundamentally his attitude toward her
 
 304 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 was loyal and chivalrous, and these were qualities she did 
 not find elsewhere not even in her father. She couldn't 
 do without George Burns. 
 
 She was a little on guard with him the next time they 
 went out together, for she had held his hand during the 
 last part of their talk and she had cried when he'd told 
 her that he'd stick whatever happened and would always 
 be her faithful friend and servant. The thing couldn't 
 go on upon this plane, of course. 
 
 She was relieved, and about equally disappointed, to 
 find in him no disposition that it should. He was always 
 the correct chauffeur when this was what she wanted him 
 to be. He never pressed for confidences, let alone for 
 endearments. He listened and advised her gravely when 
 she talked to him about her new friends and the problems 
 of conduct they presented. 
 
 By snatches, he told her a good deal about himself, and, 
 so doing, dissipated all that was left of her romantic imag 
 inings about him. He was no prince in disguise. 
 
 He had been adopted out of an orphanage when he was 
 too young to remember it, by a well-to-do childless couple 
 who lived in one of the smaller down-state cities. His 
 adoptive father was proprietor of a machine-shop and 
 a big garage and a dealer in automobiles. Had made 
 good money at it. 
 
 As a little boy, George had been made much of ; noth 
 ing too good for him. But then the woman, contrary to 
 earlier expectations, had had a baby of her own, and be 
 gan developing a jealousy, more rancorous from year to 
 year until it was almost insane, of the older boy. Every 
 cent that was spent upon him came to seem to her a bare 
 faced robbery of their own child. She resented his school 
 ing, the friends he made, his fun. 
 
 The husband was a well-meaning man and in the in 
 terest of common decency and justice combated his wife's 
 notion as best he could, but his best was ineffectual. 
 George quit school at fifteen and went to work in thq 
 garage, as floor boy, machinist's helper, and so on. This
 
 TRUE LOVE 305 
 
 made things more peaceful at home for a while, but the 
 mother began professing the fear that his new rough com 
 panions and ways would corrupt the younger boy. 
 Everything she could do, to emphasize a social distinc 
 tion between the two, she did. 
 
 By the time he was eighteen George had had all he 
 could stand of it and left for Chicago to make his own 
 way. He'd always been able to earn a decent living and 
 he'd never been without ambition to raise himself out of 
 the artisan class. He had joined the Y. M. C. A. and was 
 working at some of the technical courses they offered at 
 night school when the draft got him. 
 
 In the army, just as in his earlier years, at home, he 
 had felt himself the victim, Beatrice found, of invidious 
 caste distinctions. He had made a good soldier, smart, 
 steady, ambitious. So far as any relevant tests went, 
 mental or physical, he was top-notch material for a flyer. 
 But he wasn 't a ' ' college boy ' ' and they never gave him a 
 chance. He was a machinist and he had to be grateful 
 for what crumbs of flying experience his pilots were good- 
 natured enough to let him have. 
 
 Trix was a good enough democrat, academically at 
 least, to take the view that this had been an outrage, and 
 the two of them often discussed their common hatred of 
 snobbery. It didn't often lead her to show any considera 
 tion for his comfort or convenience at the expense of her 
 own, but it gave her a logical and meritorious basis for 
 treating him as a social equal when she felt like doing so. 
 
 She drifted into the habit of bestowing small fugitive 
 caresses upon him, patting his knee, stroking his hand. 
 Sometimes when he was driving she snuggled close to him 
 and rested her head on his shoulder. Her appetite for this 
 grew by what it fed upon until she realized it was serious 
 and tried to break it off. Often she'd be with him for 
 hours without touching him but usually before the end of 
 their ride she'd find herself doing it again. He never 
 made any overt response though she was often made 
 aware that he turned to iron in his effort not, to do so.
 
 306 JOSEPH GREER AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 He believed, evidently, that these were not amorous ap 
 proaches on her part but mere innocent tokens of friend 
 liness and good will. 
 
 She pretty well persuaded herself that this was what 
 they were, though she never denied that they were silly 
 and dangerous. His self-control piqued her, while she 
 presumed upon it. If he would just break loose some time 
 and try to make love to her she 'd find it easy, she managed 
 to believe, to repulse him indignantly, tell him he'd mis 
 understood her and "spoiled everything" and, there 
 after, let him alone. But in the luxurious day-dreams 
 she sometimes indulged in, she imagined him as her lover. 
 
 There was no longer any glow of romance about the at 
 traction he exerted upon her. She saw, cold ' and clear, 
 the folly of falling in love with him and that this was 
 what she was doing was a fact which five minutes of honest 
 reflection could always force home to her. She evaded it 
 when she could. 
 
 Her taking up with Lansing Ware and the "bunch" of 
 ambiguous nomads his inclinations attracted him to, rep 
 resented a deliberate effort on her part to break away 
 from George Burns. Their recklessness, their boozy vul 
 garity, their pretended contempt for the gold-coast set 
 whose manners they believed they imitated, all found a 
 responsive echo in the cynical desperation of her preva 
 lent mood, though there were moments when she loathed 
 them all. Henry Craven, given a little more self-confi 
 dence and imagination, might have been an effectual res 
 cuer. That Sunday afternoon he told Jennie MacArthur 
 about was one of the critical angles in the course Beatrice 
 steered that summer. 
 
 Angered by what she took to be his disdainful superior 
 ity to her new friends, she abandoned herself more 
 recklessly than before to their ways. There w r as nothing 
 repressive about them, anyhow. They had no polite hor 
 ror of scenes. When they quarreled they threatened sui 
 cide or murder and their reconciliations were equally un 
 restrained.
 
 TRUE LOVE 307 
 
 Yet even to Trix's youthful inexperience, the reality of 
 all this was suspect. They weren't so prosperous as they 
 pretended to be, nor so self-assured, nor so primitive nor 
 even so bad. 
 
 They were not, either, an escape from George Burns. 
 They'd most likely have guessed some sort of scandalous 
 attachment between the girl and her father's chauffeur 
 even if no such thing had existed. The discovery, soon 
 made, that it actually did exist was a succulent morsel ex 
 actly to their taste. They treated it sentimentally, jocu 
 larly, melodramatically, but whatever color they gave it, it 
 was always kept in the foreground of Beatrice's con 
 sciousness. The two were sometimes kept apart, sometimes 
 thrown together and speculation was unbridled as to the 
 use they made of their opportunities. 
 
 George's solid virtues, his self-control and loyalty fore 
 most among them, acquired a certain splendor by contrast 
 with all this fustian. He showed her openly the contempt 
 in which he held these "rich bums" she had made friends 
 with and he often begged her to let them alone, but he 
 never made her feel, even during her participation in their 
 least creditable goings-on, that she was, in his eyes, tarred 
 with the same stick. Indeed, his confidence in her funda 
 mental innocence seemed to grow with the need he felt of 
 defending it. And that this somewhat shop-worn inno 
 cence of hers was still, technically at least, intact on the 
 day he so satisfactorily licked Lansing Ware was due, pri 
 marily perhaps, just to this impregnable faith of his and 
 her consciousness of it. 
 
 On the third day after his dismissal Trix, with an elab 
 oration of clandestine contrivance, met him and had a long 
 talk with him. She'd chosen a rendezvous, unhappily, 
 upon the Municipal Pier, a place packed that hot August 
 day with banana-munching trippers and resonant with 
 brass bands and the chant of barkers for the quarter- 
 hourly excursions to Lincoln Park. 
 
 She'd come off without the car, though Jennie had by 
 this time licensed her use of it, partly from a fear of
 
 308 
 
 being spied upon and partly from an idea that she might 
 never go back at all to her father's house. There was no 
 hope of any real happiness for her there after what had 
 happened. She knew, now, that she loved George and 
 if her distorted memories could be trusted she'd avowed 
 the fact to him during their drive home from Glencoe. 
 "Why shouldn't they, then, run off to-day to Milwaukee or 
 somewhere and get married? If he asked her to, she 
 would. If he didn't, she thought perhaps she'd ask him. 
 
 But the mere sight of him was disconcerting. She'd 
 never seen him before in an ordinary straw hat and 
 regular civilian clothes, and a certain air which she'd 
 regarded as inseparable from him was gone. It would be 
 a little too much to say that he looked cheap but he would 
 never, for a fact, have served, like this, as lay figure to 
 hang romances about a disguised prince upon. She sus 
 pected, too, that she had somewhat impaired herself with 
 him, arriving afoot, hot and flushed and flecked with 
 soot from the vomiting funnels of the little excursion 
 steamers. 
 
 The pair found a corner where they could sit in the 
 shade. The fact that they loved each other got itself de 
 clared and accepted as a basis almost at once. He put his 
 arm around her half of the paired people out here were 
 linked that way and during a moment of fortuitous, 
 privacy they kissed. 
 
 But the feel of the adventure was pedestrian, not aerial. 
 George pointed out that he hadn't a job, and, he added 
 with a manner which struck her as a little unnatural, prac 
 tically no money. She had nearly four hundred dollars 
 of her own, she said, with her ; but he told her hotly, that, 
 when they ran away to get married, it wouldn't be upon 
 her money that they did it. She didn 't contest the point ; 
 lacked the spirit to do it, somehow. 
 
 Anyway, he went on to say, they'd have to come down, 
 eventually, to living on what he could earn. Mr. Greer 
 would do nothing for them, even in the way of making an 
 opening for him. Forlornly she conceded this, too. She
 
 TRUE LOVE 309 
 
 knew how implacable her father's resentments were, 
 though she was rather surprised that her lover should see 
 so clearly. 
 
 If they'd been sitting, while they had this talk, in the 
 roadster, skimming along a white ribbon of road, or pulled 
 up in the shade of some secluded lane, she might have 
 been able to romanticize the idea of poverty with her lover 
 and insist upon embracing it. A tiny cottage, a single 
 room, anything that sheltered the pair of them together 
 would be enough. 
 
 But out here on the pier this couldn't be done. There 
 were too many object lessons all about. Shrill children 
 carrying all-day suckers on sticks, harassed mothers, a 
 sheepish father here and there, peremptory denials of any 
 more pennies for the slot-machines; this was pleasure! 
 This was a red letter day! 
 
 Her courage wasn't equal to it, nor his, either, the truth 
 was. For the present they'd have to give it up. If a 
 piece of luck came George's way ... He had a plan in 
 mind but wouldn't tell her now what it was. 
 
 They exchanged some promises, that day; she, never to 
 have anything more to do with Ware or his bunch, or any 
 one like them, and to quit drinking as he had done, ab 
 solutely, two months before ; he, never to take another job 
 as chauffeur but stick it out for something that looked 
 toward the future; and not to lose himself where she 
 couldn't find him if she needed him. 
 
 They parted mournfully enough, but comforted some 
 what by the meeting, for all that. He'd never distrust her 
 again, he said, whatever happened. He had thought when 
 her father fired him, that night on the way to the train, 
 that she might have thrown him over made him the 
 goat. 
 
 "I never told him anything about you," Trix asserted. 
 "How do you suppose he found out?" 
 
 It must have been Miss MacArthur, then. George had 
 talked to her. He'd had so much on his chest that night 
 that he'd had to blow off to somebody. He'd realized he
 
 310 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 was giving himself away more or less, but had thought 
 Jennie too good a friend to take advantage. So the 
 warmest emotion Trix went home with that afternoon, was 
 a lively hatred of Jennie. 
 
 This was short-lived, of course, for it was on that very 
 evening that Jennie offered her treaty and won a victory. 
 This might, it is easy to believe, have been much more 
 complete than it turned out to be; for, after all, Jennie 
 failed. 
 
 Her failure was due to a defect rather characteristic of 
 her sex though it is one they are not often charged with. 
 She was too logical. She had taken a good line with the 
 girl in promising to ask no questions and claim no privi 
 leges, even those of affection, but she clung to this line 
 with a blind consistency when a readier obedience to her 
 own instincts would have led her to abandon it, 
 
 For a while after she had adopted Jennie as her friend, 
 Trix thought of George Burns though still tenderly and 
 sometimes passionately as a danger from which she had 
 been saved. Jennie gave her a new, and much needed, 
 emotional outlet, and for those first weeks the novelty made 
 this enough. But the time soon came when she wanted 
 more. She wanted Jennie to ask questions and make de 
 mands, for the simple reassurance that Jennie cared. She 
 wanted love. She offered it and she felt that the offer 
 was repulsed. 
 
 So George regained his place in her reveries, and, when 
 these would no longer serve a need sometimes as urgent as 
 hunger, she began having little talks with him over the 
 telephone, made more difficult and more exciting by an 
 elaboration of devices against detection which she half 
 hoped Jennie would solve. 
 
 She saw him, for the first time since their parting, the 
 day she read in the paper of his having got a job as pilot 
 in the air mail service. They had an afternoon together, 
 in the car again, revisiting some old haunts of theirs, but 
 despite the romantic accessories, it was not a very happy 
 time. He pressed her hotly now to marry him and said
 
 TRUE LOVE 311 
 
 some pretty bitter things when she refused to promise any 
 thing. Wasn't the job good enough to suit her? He got 
 a base pay of fifty a week and five cents a mile. On the 
 Cleveland run this figured nearly fifty a week more. 
 And between round trips, one day each way, he had two 
 days off. If she wouldn't take him at that . . . 
 
 "I couldn't stand it, just waiting. You'd be away half, 
 the nights, even." They both thought, when they parted 
 that day, that it was the end of everything. 
 
 Going to school, though it represented at first nothing 
 more than a random attempt to escape from the tyranny 
 of her need of him, afforded her, presently, a more hopeful 
 idea. Most of her fellow students, she found, were not 
 here to pass the time nor even to improve themselves, but 
 with the sharply defined aim of learning to earn them 
 selves a living. Teachers, most of them professedly meant 
 to be, professional entertainers, a few more; some of the 
 boldest avowed a hope of becoming real actors, on the 
 stage. Trix confidently appraised herself as superior to 
 any of them, harder of will, quicker of mind, more at 
 tractive of person. Anything they could hope to do, she 
 could. Secure in her ability to pay her own way, she 
 could have George, she thought, on any terms she liked. 
 
 He wasn't very sympathetic toward this idea when she 
 broached it to him ; they were always on the edge of quar 
 reling over it, and she was none too confident of it herself. 
 Indeed, there was nothing very confident or clear about 
 her life, within or without, during the weeks that inter 
 vened between her father's disastrous flying visit in Au 
 gust and his final return late in October. Her wishes and 
 her dreams contradicted each other and frequently them 
 selves, and her actions followed as best they could through 
 the maze. 
 
 Before Joe took up his post as sentry, determined, as he 
 said, to know, she had drifted into a modus vivendi with 
 her lover. She saw him once during each of his off-duty 
 periods in Chicago, for as long as she could safely give 
 him, usually in the afternoon. In fine weather, they drove
 
 312 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 out into the country; for bad days they found various 
 ignoble and humiliating hiding-places in town. They 
 didn't plan much nor hope for much. They merely 
 drifted, dangerously they both knew, compromising as 
 best they could with the desire that held them in the 
 grip of its great disinterested hand. 
 
 2 
 
 Beatrice, as Jennie had prophesied she would, saw 
 through her father's intention like so much glass. Even 
 during their first dinner together down-town he asked 
 enough innocent-seeming questions to put her thoroughly 
 on guard. 
 
 She'd looked forward to his coming, during the three 
 days since she 'd known he was expected, with a very mixed 
 lot of anticipations. One of these, incredulously indulged 
 now and then, had been a picture of him finding her wait 
 ing in the library, as he had found her the first time, 
 picking her up in his arms as he had not done that time 
 and sitting doAvn in the big easy chair with her in his 
 lap. She'd wondered whether she'd feel, if he did that, 
 a resurgence of that sense of being swallowed up in his 
 comprehensive embrace, of having found harbor there, 
 from doubts and from desires. 
 
 Probably it would not have worked out like that even if 
 he had come home and there had been no restaurant table 
 to make it impossible. Even their first kiss, enthusiastic 
 as it had been, had left her unmoved. She had appraised 
 its visible effect upon him simply as an advantage to her 
 a good card in her hand. 
 
 At dinner, she threw out, pathetically, the supposition 
 that he'd be going away again in a day or two, after hav 
 ing stayed just long enough to make her homesick. 
 
 "I don't think I'll go back at all," he answered, offhand. 
 "I'd meant to clean up a few things before I came away 
 for good, but as things turn out, I guess they need me more 
 at this end. If I do find I have to run up there again, it 
 will only be for a few days. "What would you say to 
 coming alon$r?"
 
 TRUE LOVE 313 
 
 "Oh, dad, that would be great!" she cried, beaming 
 upon him and reaching out to pat his hand. "I've al 
 ways been perfectly crazy to travel with you. Any 
 where ! ' ' 
 
 He meant to keep as close watch as that, did he? 
 
 "How about your school, though?" he asked. "Do you 
 suppose they'll let you off for a week?" 
 
 There might be a trap here, either way; he might be 
 angling for an admission that the school had been a 
 mere excuse for evading Jennie, or he might be waiting to 
 see whether she'd use it with him as a reason why she 
 couldn't leave town when he did. 
 
 "I'd forgotten all about school," she told him with a 
 fine air of candor. "Oh, but of course they'd let me off 
 to go somewhere with you. I want you to come out," she 
 added, "the very first day you can, and see what it's like. 
 And see what they think about me, too. Mother never 
 would believe the marks I'm getting. How about to-mor 
 row?" She feared that sounded a bit overdone. "Oh, 
 I know you wouldn't be working to-night unless you were 
 going to be busy to-morrow. But as soon as you can, any 
 way. ' ' 
 
 He nodded. "Three or four days will see us through 
 this mess. I '11 be tied down every minute of the time, till 
 then. Day and night, most likely. Leave you more alone 
 than ever, since Jennie 's going back to her own flat. ' ' 
 
 "And a darned good time for me to be careful," Trix 
 reflected. 
 
 "But after that, I'm going to take it easy for a while, 
 and we'll play around together. How does that strike 
 you?" 
 
 She said it would be wonderful but she didn't believe it 
 would ever happen. He'd made promises like this be 
 fore. 
 
 As they were leaving the restaurant early, since it was 
 necessary for him to get back to work he asked her how 
 the new chauffeur was doing. "All right," she told him 
 coolly. "He doesn't drive as well as George did, but he 
 keeps the cars nicer." The implausibility of her indif-
 
 314 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 ference drew from him a searching look of overt suspicion. 
 She returned it with a challenging stare. 
 
 The note between them was not always so hostile as that. 
 During the month that elapsed before the final explosion 
 they were together more than ever before and often, for 
 hours and even days on end, the surface they presented 
 each other was one of unbroken confidence and tender 
 ness. Trix sometimes believed in the honesty of her own, 
 managed to think she loved him as well as ever, but she 
 never wholly trusted him. She was fully conscious of his 
 charm. She was aware that she enjoyed his society as she 
 never enjoyed, except in the one special way, that of her 
 lover, yet the effect of this was only to intensify her war 
 iness with him. And she knew, all the while, that the end 
 would have to come, some time. 
 
 Her knowledge that she was being watched spied upon 
 > was fortified by evidence, though the items of it were 
 too minute to be reported; a glance at the superscription 
 of a letter, the too casual tone of a question, an explanation 
 a little too circumstantial of his plans for the day, an. oc 
 casional something queer about a telephone call. 
 
 She took a rather cruel pleasure, though it wasn't en 
 tirely wanton, in feeding his suspicion with false clues, 
 making small mysteries of nothing. She didn't believe he 
 was on the main trail. "Ware, whom she hadn't seen since 
 his licking, and some of his associates were still in her 
 father 's thoughts, and he seemed uneasy, too, about some of 
 the new friends she had made at school. These suspi 
 cions of his, she deliberately inflamed. 
 
 The victories were not all with her, however. He was a 
 strategist, too. Within a week of his return, he maneuv 
 ered her out of half her liberty by appropriating the road 
 ster to his own use. The closed car was at her disposal 
 but since it was a limousine the chauffeur naturally went 
 with it, and this unescapable social convention made it 
 useless for the most important of her purposes. Yet in 
 the teeth of the bleak autumnal weather she couldn 't avow 
 a preference for the open car.
 
 TRUE LOVE 315 
 
 In another way, too, the weather helped force the situa 
 tion. When Joe finally got round to going north again, 
 about the middle of November, there was no possibility of 
 giving the journey the color of a pleasure outing for Trix. 
 He put his command that she go with him in the form of 
 an invitation but didn't try, beyond this, to disguise the 
 fact that he was taking her with him because he was 
 afraid to leave her at home alone. He flushed under the 
 sting of her laugh and the savage sarcasm of her, * ' What a 
 wonderful time we '11 have ! ' ' But he offered no explana 
 tion and asked none. 
 
 During the whole ten days the journey lasted, storms 
 and the mud kept her virtually a prisoner in a succession 
 of small hotels. She wrote long daily letters to George 
 Burns while her father was away about his business and 
 in the evening when he came back she entertained him. 
 with a sulky silence, varied sometimes by a spiritless ac 
 quiescence in a suggested movie show or by a pretended ab 
 sorption in a magazine. Before they returned they had 
 worn the situation down to its last shred of tolerability. 
 
 They got into town on the morning of the Wednesday 
 before Thanksgiving. The closed car was waiting for 
 them but Joe declined to share it with her, even as far as 
 the office, and bolted into a taxi. He had been savagely 
 restless, she'd noted, over his breakfast and behind his 
 newspaper. She had the chauffeur drive her to Field's 
 and dismissed him there, saying she didn't know how long 
 her shopping would take and that she would come home by 
 bus when she had finished. 
 
 The one thought in her mind was to get to George as 
 quickly as she could. She had figured this as one of his 
 off days and was sure, having written she was getting 
 home to-day, that he would be waiting at his boarding- 
 house to hear from her. The fortnight since she 'd seen him 
 seemed a year. 
 
 She was angrily incredulous of the voice that of a 
 boarding-house slavey which informed her that Mr. Burns 
 was out, and after this assurance had been rammed home to
 
 316 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 her there was a black moment or two when she turned her 
 wrath upon her lover. Then it occurred to lier that he 
 might be the victim of a change in his timetable and, call 
 ing up the office of the superintendent of the air mail, 
 she learned that this was true. Pilot Burns had taken out 
 the Cleveland mail that morning. He'd be returning with 
 it to-morrow, some time around noon. 
 
 It was an unbearably fine day to be deprived of him, 
 mild and clear ; they could have spent it in the open. 
 And to-morrow was Thanksgiving, a holiday, which would 
 mean that her father wouldn't let her out of his sight all 
 day. 
 
 A panicky foreboding took possession of her, that she 
 might not again be allowed even such qualified liberty as 
 she enjoyed to-day. She had heard of sanitoriums for 
 nerve and brain cases where a person could be shut up. 
 Wasn't her father, angry as he would be if ever he found 
 out about George, just the sort of person to try a thing 
 like that and get away with it? She ought to be pre 
 pared to bolt to George and marry him at a moment's 
 notice, any time. 
 
 In the train of this half-serious notion she spent the 
 rest of the morning buying a traveling bag and equipping 
 it with a complete outfit for the emergency she foresaw, 
 including suit, hat and shoes, all inconspicuous and ser 
 viceable. 
 
 She deposited this "iron ration" in the care of the 
 head porter in one of the smaller down-town hotels, a man 
 who had already served as her ally in one or two small 
 matters. It was to be kept till called for, no matter when, 
 to-morrow or next year. Now if she quarreled with her 
 father in the middle of the night or during an evening 
 party she couldn't be kept prisoner by a lack of clothes. 
 
 Her afternoon's entertainment consisted in looking at 
 furnished rooms which had been advertised for light house 
 keeping. To the landladies she saw, she gave her name as 
 Mrs. George Burns and described herself as the wife of 
 one of the mail aviators. She got a good deal of emotional
 
 TRUE LOVE 317 
 
 stimulus out of this, for they were without exception in 
 terested and in one case deeply sympathetic; Mrs. Hen 
 derson didn't see how she could endure the suspense of 
 knowing her husband might be killed any day. Any day, 
 absolutely! And Fridays! She hoped Mr. Burns never 
 had to fly on Friday! 
 
 The danger never had worried Beatrice very much; it 
 existed, of course for every one but George. But it was 
 comforting to be cried over and made a heroine of, and 
 she stayed the better part of an hour in the nice little 
 apartment Mrs. Henderson had to let. She got a thrill, 
 too, from the domestic intimacies the place suggested. It 
 consisted of a sitting-room with a double bed in an al 
 cove, a bathroom and a closet equipped as a kitchenette. 
 She almost hired the place outright, and she left with a 
 strong intimation that she would do so, if it weren't taken 
 in the meantime, within a day or two. Things couldn't 
 go on as they were at home much longer, anyhow. 
 Mightn't she as well make an end of that intolerable situa 
 tion now as later? 
 
 But she found on reaching home about six o'clock that 
 this decision had already been taken out of her hands. 
 The look in Anson's face when he met her in the hall told 
 her that something unprecedented had happened. 
 
 3 
 
 "Father home yet?" she asked, with an affected care 
 lessness which didn't sound just right. Her heart, for 
 some incomprehensible reason, had come up into her throat. 
 
 "He was brought home, Miss Beatrice," Anson said re 
 proachfully. "Around eleven o'clock this morning, in an 
 ambulance. He'd been in an accident." 
 
 She was bewildered by this news. In the first flash it 
 seemed unfair, sweeping her own concerns off the boards, 
 as it did, so summarily. "Not a bad accident, Anson?" 
 she asked. Oh, but it couldn't be! 
 
 "I couldn't say, Miss Beatrice. He won't have it that 
 it is. The doctor was apprehensive at first, but ..."
 
 318 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 "He's in bed, I suppose," she interrupted. "I'll go to 
 him. I can see him, can 't I ? " Some involuntary signifi 
 cation of dissent on Anson's part was what made her ask 
 that last question. 
 
 He said, "Certainly, Miss Beatrice," but she waited for 
 him to explain his reluctance. "You may not find him 
 quite himself," he warned her, and added that the doc 
 tor's orders were strict against any excitement. 
 
 "Well, of course, Anson knew the sort of terms she 's been 
 on with her father lately. She gathered herself up for a 
 retort and then found she hadn't the heart to make it. 
 Before going to her father she paused a moment in her 
 own room to rid herself of her outdoor things and, as well, 
 to steady herself. She tried to think what it would be 
 like to see him helpless. She wondered whether she was 
 sorry or glad. Oh, of course she was sorry. The tears 
 were already near her eyes when she paused in his door 
 way for her first look at him. 
 
 The pillows were packed behind him so that he half re 
 clined, his head was encased in bandages, his left forearm 
 lay across his chest in splints ; there was a strong hospital- 
 like smell in the room, of iodoform or something of the 
 sort. All this she was prepared for and instantly thrust 
 aside as unimportant. What engrossed and frightened her 
 was the way he was looking at her as if her appearance 
 bewildered him, as if he found it unaccountable. 
 
 She said, in answer to its seeming question, "Don't you 
 know me, dad? It's Trix!" 
 
 "Of course I know you," he answered petulantly, and 
 thickly as if his tongue were swollen. " I 'm not out of my 
 head. What made you think I was? Anson been talk 
 ing?" 
 
 "It was just the way you looked at me," she said shakily, 
 and then went to him. "Oh, dad, I'm so sorry!" she 
 cried. 
 
 "Better not touch me," he warned her; "and don't sit 
 on the bed. I'm so sore it hurts to be looked at." Ex 
 cept for the thickness of his speech this sounded natura? 
 enough. She pulled up a chair to sit in and forbore t<
 
 TRUE LOVE 319 
 
 touch even the big hairy hand that lay slackly on the 
 counterpane. 
 
 "I didn't know, of course," she said. "I just came in 
 this minute. I haven't heard yet what happened, or; 
 how. Are you well enough to tell me?" 
 
 Instead of answering her question he asked one of his 
 own. "Where you been all day, Trix?" For a moment 
 his look pinned her fast; then it wavered away and left 
 her. 
 
 "Nowhere much," she answered. "Shopping for a 
 while, and then just wandering around. There didn't 
 seem to be any special point in coming home." 
 
 "Alone?" he asked. 
 
 She found herself crying as she answered yes. When 
 she'd wiped her tears and controlled her voice, she elab 
 orated. "Absolutely alone, dad. All day. I haven't 
 spoken to a person I knew since I left you this morning. 
 There wasn't anybody I knew to talk to. Dad, it's true I 
 You do trust me as much as that, don't you?" 
 
 He shook his head but it wasn 't, she thought, so much in 
 dissent as in perplexity ; as if she 'd thrown him back upon 
 some puzzle of his own. The expression was lost in the 
 twinge of pain the movement cost him. "Poor dad, you 
 must lie still," she admonished him gently. "Tell me 
 what happened to you." 
 
 "Hit by a motor-car, it seems. I don't know anything 
 about it. Must have stepped right in front of it, I guess. 
 I sort of remember a lot of yelling and the next thing I 
 knew I was in a bed in St. Luke's Hospital. I'm not 
 damaged to speak of. Broken collar-bone and something 
 in my arm. Half a dozen stitches in my scalp. They 
 thought my skull was fractured at first, but it isn't that 
 kind of a skull. Don't amount to anything any of that. 
 Tried to saddle a nurse on me ! Damned nonsense ! Only 
 I 've got such a hell of a headache. I 'm kind of mixed up. 
 I can't seem to remember." 
 
 ' ' I 'm going to be your nurse, ' ' she said. Then she asked, 
 in a more or less automatic attempt to explore his lack of 
 memory, "Where were you when all this happened?"
 
 S20 JOSEPH GREER AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 He stared hard at her and that same frightened look 
 came back into his face. "I don't know," he admitted. 
 "Must have been wandering round, myself, I guess. I'd 
 been to see . . .I'd been to some office or other. There 
 were some papers . . . You see, they undressed me at the 
 hospital. I had Anson look through my clothes and he 
 says they aren't there." 
 
 She volunteered to go through his pockets for the papers 
 she understood him to say were missing. This was what 
 he meant, wasn 't it ? And if she didn 't turn them up, she 
 could telephone the hospital and find out if they were 
 there. What sort of papers were they? 
 
 "You let my pockets alone!" he commanded her 
 truculently. "I didn't say I'd lost any papers. I'll re 
 member all right in a few hours, anyway. My head's 
 clearing up. Just a little more letting alone that's all 
 I need. You'd better go away now and let me see if I 
 can't get to sleep." 
 
 She rose, obediently, moved the chair out of the way, 
 minutely readjusted sundry small articles on the night 
 table, started toward the door at last, and then, with a 
 long-suppressed sob came back to him, kneeled down be 
 side the bed and laid her cheek gently upon his hand. 
 
 "I do love you, dad!" she cried. "I want you to love 
 me again. I want you to forgive me for being such a 
 beast to you." 
 
 He did not speak, but his hand stirred and lightly 
 stroked her face. She kissed the palm, sat back upon her 
 heels like a little twentieth-century Magdalen, squeezed the 
 tears out of her eyes and smiled at him. "I hope you're 
 going to be sick a good long time so you can find out I 
 really mean it," she added. 
 
 Anson knocked just then, to announce Doctor Bennett, 
 and she fled to her own room to wash her face. Her last 
 impression of her father was just what her first had 
 been. It had the look in it of one who is struggling with 
 some incredible distortion of memory. 
 
 Doctor Bennett was an old friend of Joe's, a convivial,
 
 TRUE LOVE 321 
 
 witty, worldly-wise bachelor whom Beatrice had once or 
 twice met and not taken very seriously since his manner 
 toward her had an obsolete touch of gallantry about it. 
 But his gravity, when he talked with her in the library at 
 the end of his visit to her father, was disquieting. He 
 knew, he said, what a shock it must have been to her to 
 come home, unwarned, and find him like this, but she 
 must contrive to control her feelings and do nothing to 
 excite him. He'd had a terrific blow on the head. The 
 car that had hit him had pitched him, head first, against 
 one of the steel pillars of the elevated railroad, with a 
 noise, the horrified chauffeur had said, like a pile-driver. 
 The scalp had burst wide open from the impact. 
 
 Apparently the skull wasn't fractured though it 
 wasn't always easy to be sure of this. Anyhow, he'd sus 
 tained a terrible concussion of the brain. The only treat 
 ment for this was to keep him warm and quiet. "He's 
 bothering over some confusion in his memory. It's a 
 wonder he hasn't lost it altogether, temporarily. But 
 don't try to prod it by asking him questions or helping him 
 to put two and two together. Let it alone. He's clearing 
 up fast enough as it is." She readily promised obedience 
 in this matter and asked for further instructions in the de 
 tails of feeding, temperature-taking and so on. 
 
 She was sorry these duties were not more exacting, for 
 the one thing about her feelings she was sure of was that 
 she didn't want to be left sitting round doing nothing. 
 She didn't want to try to appraise the impulse that had 
 taken her back to her father's bedside just before the doc 
 tor came nor to decide whether she had meant, by asking 
 him to forgive her, a renunciation of George Burns or 
 not. As a method of not thinking she dressed rather care 
 fully for dinner, which was still a half-hour off when the 
 doctor left. 
 
 It was while she was eating this solitary meal and wish 
 ing she'd telephoned Jennie MacArthur to come down and 
 share it with her, that she heard the door-bell ring, and a 
 wonder whether it mightn't actually be Jennie made her
 
 322 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 listen intently when Anson opened the door. It was, 
 though, a rather coarse-sounding man's voice asking for 
 Mr. Greer. Anson shut the door at this point and she 
 heard no more, but it struck her as odd that it took him 
 as long as it did to get rid of the visitor. He explained 
 upon resuming his duties in the dining-room that the 
 man had found something her father had evidently lost 
 and had been disposed to insist on seeing Mr. Greer with 
 the idea of being rewarded for his trouble. Anson had 
 satisfied him by paying him five dollars out of his own 
 pocket. 
 
 "Was it those papers he's been worrying about?" Bea 
 trice asked. Anson couldn't say as to that but they were 
 what appeared to be some papers in a very dirty envelope, 
 addressed to Mr. Greer. He had put them on Mr. Greer 's 
 writing desk in the library. 
 
 It was in a spirit of sheer idleness that the girl, when 
 she had repaired to this room for an after-dinner ciga 
 rette, went over to the desk and looked at the envelope. 
 It was a plain legal-size envelope that had been sealed and 
 roughly torn open. It was crumpled and smeared with 
 mud and the sheaf of typewritten sheets it contained 
 bulged out a little and was threatened with contamination, 
 The impulse that moved her to withdraw it altogether was 
 perhaps half curiosity as to whether this was, after all, 
 the document whose loss had so distressed her father, and 
 the other half mere fastidiousness. 
 
 "With a gingerly pinch of her finger tips she conveyed 
 the envelope to the wastepaper basket. The stiff sheets in 
 the other hand sprang open and she glanced idly at their 
 typewritten contents. She had no sense of prying. She 
 had assumed all along that the papers related to some 
 matter of business and business was something in which 
 she took the most tepid interest. But her attention was 
 caught by the first line her eye fell upon. 
 
 "Party was met at corner of Broadway and . . . " 
 Why, that was the drug-store corner where she used to 
 meet George! ... "by young lady driving 1918 model 
 Archer roadster, license number ..."
 
 TRUE LOVE 323 
 
 For a moment the meaning of the words was lost and 
 she stood staring blankly at the page, beset by a sensation 
 of weakness and nausea, undetermined between fright and 
 anger. Then she sat down in the nearest chair and read 
 the document through from the beginning. 
 
 It was the report of a detective agency upon her and 
 George, from the twentieth of October, the week of her 
 father's return from the Northwest, to the fifteenth of 
 November, when she'd gone north with him again. It was 
 a pretty thorough job of spying, she noted; not many of 
 their meetings had been missed. 
 
 The thing was loathsome; this was what she felt first, 
 before any thought of the consequences of its revelations 
 had time to form in her mind; loathsome in the chop- 
 licking leering nastiness of its attitude, its implications, 
 even its very English, though here an attempt had been 
 made to give it a businesslike impersonal cast. She could 
 see the slinking figure of the ' ' operative ' ' loitering outside 
 doorways, looking at its watch, licking its pencil and writ 
 ing misspelled notes in a greasy note-book. She felt her 
 decency affronted as it would have been by the discovery 
 of a Peeping Tom at her bathroom window. 
 
 In her mind she knew it was her father who had put 
 this affront upon her the phraseology of the report made 
 this explicit, yet it was a good while before her anger 
 crystallized itself against him. Every one she knew, in 
 cluding herself, seemed bedaubed with the same smeary 
 stuff. People were like that. Her mother and her grand 
 parents had spied upon her. George would probably spy 
 upon her as soon as a sense of a proprietorial right over 
 her licensed his jealousy. 
 
 She wanted to get clear of them all, where she could live 
 naked in an empty world. But there was no such world. 
 All worlds were thick with people, loving, hating, spying. 
 She entertained the idea of killing herself. Her father 
 had two or three revolvers and she knew where he kept 
 them. It would serve him right if she did that! Only 
 it would be playing his game, as far as George was con 
 cerned. And besides, it wouldn't .be fair to George.
 
 S24 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 She wasn't thinking of George as a lover. That de 
 tective's report had put her out of conceit with love, 
 made it seem dirty to her. It was hard to realize that it 
 was only this afternoon she had been looking at Mrs. 
 Henderson's rooms, pretending to be George's wife. But 
 he was her friend, anyhow. He and Jennie MacArthur 
 were the two squarest people she knew. So she couldn't 
 kill herself. She couldn't even run away without seeing 
 him first. 
 
 At half-past eight or thereabouts, she heard her father 
 ring and on impulse she forestalled Anson and answered 
 it herself. She carried the detective's report along with 
 her, rolled up tight in one hand. She had forgotten 
 Doctor Bennett's orders as well as a resolution of her own 
 not to see her father again nor speak to him until he was 
 well nor until her own mind was made up as to what she 
 was going to do. 
 
 ''Good!" he said crisply, at sight of her in the door 
 way. "It was you I wanted to see." , 
 
 "You look better since your nap," she remarked. 
 
 "I feel like the devil," he told her; "but my mind's 
 cleared up all right. That's why I want to talk to you, 
 without waiting any longer. Sit down." 
 
 She obeyed him without a word. He waited a moment 
 longer before he spoke again. Then, "I've got the goods 
 on you, Trix. I know what you've been up to with this 
 man Burns." 
 
 "Yes, and I know what you've been up to, too," she 
 countered. "I've been reading this." She tossed the 
 document contemptuously upon the bed. His good hand 
 groped for it but couldn't quite reach it. "It's the re 
 port of your detectives," she added. 
 
 "Where in hell did you get hold of that?" he asked. 
 
 "A man brought it to the door while I was at din 
 ner, ' ' she told him. ' ' He wanted a reward for it and An 
 son paid him. The envelope was torn open and all muddy. 
 It fell out of your pocket, I suppose, when you were hit 
 by that car. The man had read it, of course and goodness
 
 TRUE LOVE 325 
 
 knows how many other people. Not that that matters 
 much to anybody. I spent an hour reading it myself. 
 It's pretty good. Gave you what you wanted, anyhow. 
 And it'll save a lot of sob-stuff between you and me, I 
 mean. ' ' 
 
 She was elated by the knowledge that she was hurting 
 him, savagely. He writhed and then, at the pain this 
 movement cost him, groaned out, "Oh, God!" 
 
 "You'd better lie still," she went on quietly. "I'm 
 going to tell you what I meant about the sob-stuff. We 
 had quite a lot of it the other time, when George brought 
 me home drunk. All about how you loved me and were 
 going to trust me just the same. Jennie was going to 
 stay here while you were away to take care of me and 
 be my friend. But the past was going to be forgotten. It 
 was a clean slate, you said. I suppose you thought she'd 
 spy on me, anyway. Maybe you told her to. But she 
 didn't. Jennie was square, with me and with you, too. 
 But when you came home she hadn't anything bad to tell 
 you about me. So, before you'd been home a week you 
 hired detectives to get the goods on me like you said." 
 
 He contradicted her here. "I didn't. I didn't put 
 detectives on you. I put 'em on that dog of a chauffeur 
 I'd fired for getting too familiar with you. And God 
 knows I was right to do it." 
 
 "Oh, yes, you were right," she admitted. "You thought 
 you 'd get me that way, and you did. But if you 'd trusted 
 me like you pretended to, or loved me one little bit the 
 way a girl's father is supposed to you wouldn't have 
 thought so. That's why I say we can cut out the sob- 
 stuff." 
 
 "You stop talking a minute and listen," he commanded. 
 "I happen to want you to get this straight. Burns gave 
 me as a reference when he applied for this job in the air 
 mail. I was fool enough to write them a good strong let 
 ter about him. Said he had left me voluntarily to im 
 prove his position and I thought he deserved to. I put in 
 everything I could think of to help him. So when I came
 
 326 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 home after he'd got the job, I wanted to see how he was 
 getting on. Asked the superintendent about him. I 
 stopped at the field one morning thinking I'd see him 
 take the mail out ; wish him luck and so on. It happened 
 I was just too late. He was still in sight, headed south 
 along the lake when I got there. But I stopped and talked 
 with his mechanic. The man had quite a lot to say about 
 him and his luck. One thing he said was that Burns was 
 a hit with the women. There was one swell Jane, he said, 
 used to meet him quite often. Came out sometimes in a 
 big car. 
 
 "Trix, I swear I didn't think it was you. Wouldn't 
 believe it was you. But I knew you were sore because 
 I'd let him go. You gave that away the first night we 
 had dinner after I came back. Down at the restaurant 
 remember? I thought if I could prove to you that he 
 was running with somebody else you'd quit thinking about 
 him. That's why I told the agency to look him up. I 
 never thought they'd get you with him." 
 
 "Why not?" she asked. Her reason had accepted his 
 explanation as about half true. He might have gone to 
 see George off in a spirit not wholly unfriendly. He 
 might have entertained a hope that the swell Jane would 
 prove to be some one other than herself. But these con 
 cessions did him, in her present mood, no service. His pre 
 varications only made her angrier. So she put all the 
 contempt of clear incredulity into her question. "Why 
 shouldn't it have been me?" 
 
 His face darkened. "Why not?" he echoed. "Be 
 cause I couldn't believe it of you. I couldn't believe that 
 a daughter of mine could ever lower herself to be the 
 private snap of a discharged chauffeur. Why, good God, 
 Trix, when I read that paper this morning in Nathan's of 
 fice something queer happened to me. I didn't know 
 where I was. I don't know, now, where I went after I 
 left there, until that car hit me. When I came to I 
 thought perhaps the whole thing had been a kind of night 
 mare that I'd had since I got hurt ; going to Nathan's of-
 
 TRUE LOVE 327 
 
 fice and reading that damned paper and all. And when 
 you put your face down on my hand a while ago and 
 said you you wanted me to love you again ..." 
 
 His voice broke at that and she felt the tears coming 
 up into her eyes. "Trix!" he cried at sight of them. 
 "Tell me it isn't true the stuff in that paper. Tell me 
 it's a lie from beginning to end. Say the bare word and 
 I'll believe you, even now!" 
 
 She took him up. "It isn't true," she said quietly. 
 
 At the blankly incredulous stare this drew from him, 
 she uttered a short laugh. "What it says is true," she 
 went on. "George and I went to the places he says we 
 did, and I guess we stayed as long. But what that de 
 tective thinks, isn't true. Nor what you think, either. 
 George is in love with me, but he wants to marry me. 
 And he'd rather wait till then. I wouldn't have cared 
 much, myself, except for the way he felt about it. I 
 didn't know whether I wanted to marry him or not, but 
 I'm going to, now." 
 
 There was a long silence between them after that. She 
 knew it for a lull rather than the end but she waited com 
 fortably, feeling very solid and invincible. She'd never 
 said outright, before, even to herself, that she was go 
 ing to marry George, and the declaration steadied her. 
 
 ' ' If that 's true . . . " her father began at last, but 
 he flinched under her smile and revised the sentence. "As 
 long as that's true, that you haven't gone too far with 
 him, there's still time to avoid a smash. Say the word 
 and I'll buy tickets to-morrow for a trip abroad. Medi 
 terranean cruise. Algiers maybe Cairo; ride around on 
 camels and things. We could start right after Christmas. 
 I could get away by then, I think." 
 
 Her momentary security collapsed. It was a dazzling 
 bribe he offered. Travel, adventure, bright colors in the 
 sunshine, hot sands, camels! But he didn't stop there; 
 hardly paused. 
 
 "I wish we could start to-morrow! It's this next couple 
 of months . . . That's only half the bargain, Trix.
 
 328 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 You'll have to cut this other business out, absolutely. No 
 tapering off with last farewells and that sort of stuff. 
 You've been on thin ice God! and if you have got by 
 so far, it's just a plain miracle. Take my word for that. 
 I know how those things go." 
 
 "I suppose you do," she said reflectively, and this 
 stopped him short, with a dull flush and a shifting of the 
 eyes. "I wonder," she persisted, "if you ever saved a 
 girl against herself, the way George has saved me. ' ' 
 
 "Drop that line, right there!" he commanded. "That 
 isn't decent." 
 
 "I wasn't trying to be decent," she said listlessly, "but 
 that's as you like. Only I don't see why you should be 
 so down on me marrying him." 
 
 "Then you don't read the papers. Good lord, Trix, 
 you're out of your head! Just about every other day 
 there's some fool daughter of a rich man runs off with 
 her father's chauffeur, and it always ends either in a 
 shooting or in the divorce court. This is my fault, in a 
 way. I was a damned fool to let you run with him the 
 way you did when you first came. But I thought you 
 were a little girl, then; too young to be thinking about 
 things like that. I didn't wake up till it was too 
 late. But I'm awake now, all right. There's no argu 
 ment on George Burns. He's out!" 
 
 "Dad ..." she began, but paused a moment to search 
 her mind. She'd never been so deeply serious in her life, 
 nor felt so compelling a need to dig out the truth. ' ' Dad, 
 I'm in love with George. I want him. I'm not silly 
 about him any more. I was at first, like those girls in 
 the papers. But I 've learned a lot in these last six months 
 and I always did know more than you thought I did. 
 Out in Pasadena there were boys that I let do some of 
 the things they wanted to. Spoony things, I mean. I 
 didn't like it, specially, except that when they were silly 
 about me, that way, they were nice in other ways; did 
 whatever I wanted them to, and took me to places. And 
 there have been one or two, like that, since I came here.
 
 TRUE LOVE 329 
 
 It was kind of exciting in a way but that was all. I 'm 
 telling you that so you'll see how I know that George is 
 different. 
 
 "When I found out what the difference was, I tried to 
 stop. I didn't want to fall in love with him. I was 
 frightened about it. But I couldn't stop. So I don't see 
 what else there is for me to do. If I married somebody 
 else, that I wasn't in love with, I don't know what I 
 might do. And if I don't marry anybody . . . Dad, you 
 must know how it is! I'm like you. I must be, be 
 cause I 'm not like mother, a bit. It never was any trouble 
 for her to be good, I guess." 
 
 But this, she saw, was an issue he would not, or could 
 not, meet. "If you're afraid of him," he said uneasily, 
 ' ' I should think that was reason enough not to marry him. ' ' 
 
 "I said of it, not of him," she retorted. "I couldn't 
 be afraid of him. Dad, he's good! He's kind and he's 
 square. He's never tried to take any advantage, even 
 when I've let him see that he could. And he's for me. 
 He's believed in me through everything. And he's seen 
 enough, goodness knows! And if you'd be friendly to 
 us, and help him a little . . . He isn't a chauffeur now 
 and he isn't ever going to be, again." 
 
 She saw she was getting nowhere with the plea. Her 
 father's face was set. "Good!" she flared out. "He's 
 too good for me, that's the only trouble. He's the best 
 man I know. He's better than either of us." 
 
 "The hell he is!" said Joe. "I didn't mean to spring 
 this on you but I guess it 's time I did. I 'm going to show 
 up this bird. Go to the small middle drawer in my desk 
 and bring me a plain sealed envelope you'll find there. 
 Bring it in just as it is, ' ' he called after her, when, without 
 a word she had gone on the errand. She hated herself 
 for being frightened, but there was no disguising the fact 
 that she was. "Now, open it," he commanded when again 
 she stood before him. "Look and see what's inside." 
 
 It was a cancelled check for a thousand dollars, made 
 out to George Burns, and bearing her father's signature.
 
 "Turn it over and look at the endorsement," he added. 
 "You know his handwriting, I guess." 
 
 She obeyed him mechanically. "What was this for?" 
 she asked. She managed to make her voice ring cold and 
 hard enough, but she sat down quickly in the chair she 
 had recently quitted. 
 
 "Doesn't the date tell you anything?" he asked. It 
 was back in August. "Why, that's the day I fired him. 
 The day he brought you home drunk. As you say, he'd 
 seen enough." 
 
 She repeated, word for word, her former question, this 
 time with a peremptory emphasis. "What was this check 
 
 It stung him to an outburst of anger. "Why, if you 
 want it straight, it was the price he got for keeping his 
 mouth shut and for letting you alone." 
 
 "Blackmail?" she asked. 
 
 "Call it that if you like. That was the understanding 
 between us. He 's welshed on half of it, it seems. Whether 
 he has on the other or not, I don't know. Anyhow, there's 
 your paragon. And there's how much in love with you 
 he is. Less than a thousand dollars' worth!" 
 
 She felt herself strangled, drowning, and she beat her 
 way frantically back to breathable air. "I know you're 
 a liar," she gasped, "and I believe you're lying about 
 this. ' ' Then, more to the purpose, as her intelligence came 
 to the rescue, "If that's what he is, why did you recom 
 mend him for the air service? And why did you go 
 down to see him off and wish him luck the day his me 
 chanic told you about me?" 
 
 The fierceness of her attack had won her a moment's 
 breathing space. She folded the check and tucked it 
 into the bosom of her dress. 
 
 "W T hat are you doing with that?" he demanded. 
 
 "I'm going to show it to him, to-morrow; see what his 
 side of the story is. Maybe he's what you say he is. I 
 don't know about anybody, any more. But I want his 
 own word for this."
 
 TRUE LOVE 331 
 
 With that she rose to leave him. He struggled to sit 
 erect but dropped back with an uncontrollable groan of 
 anguish. A smile, which felt all awry, came unexpectedly 
 into her face. "It's a dirty trick to fight with you when 
 you're helpless like this," she observed. "But I suppose 
 if you'd been up and around you'd have choked me, long 
 ago." 
 
 "Never mind about that," he told her. "But listen to 
 this so there won't be any mistake about it. Back last 
 April, some time, I asked you to come and be my daughter. 
 I'd got along without you all right till then. I can get 
 along without you now. And if you see that dog again, 
 even if it's only to match his word against mine, I'm 
 through. Perhaps you'd better not tell him so till 
 after he's married you. It might make some difference 
 to him. I mean it, Trix. That 's a promise I won 't break, 
 anyhow. ' ' 
 
 "Oh, we're at the end, all right, whatever I do about 
 George. We'd have come to smash about some 
 thing, I suppose, if it hadn't been for him. We're too 
 much alike, that's the trouble with us. Just a little more 
 difference and we might have made it. I I wish we 
 had!" 
 
 Suddenly she turned away from him, feeling she couldn't 
 bear the look in his face. "I guess I may as well go now," 
 she added roughly. "No use dragging out the agony any 
 longer, is there?" 
 
 She left the room swiftly without waiting for a reply, 
 but a few minutes later, clad in a big fur coat he had given 
 her before they went North and with her purse in the 
 pocket of it, she reappeared in his doorway. She could 
 perfectly well have taken time to change and pack, but it 
 was better drama like this and she needed all the support 
 she could get. The little bag in the down-town hotel made 
 it easy. 
 
 ' ' You don 't mean you 're going now ! ' ' her father cried. 
 ' ' Not at this time of night ! Where could you go ? " 
 
 She saw he didn't believe she meant it. "It isn't late,"
 
 332 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 she said. "Not much after nine. And there are plenty 
 of hotels. I've still got that good old original five hun 
 dred, you see. Most of it. I do mean it, dad. I 'rn really 
 going. It wouldn't do any good to wait till morning. It 
 would only mean that we'd have another big fight and 
 they aren't good for you when you're like this." 
 
 She went over to the side of the room where he was, 
 moving warily as she approached the bed, and, bending 
 down, rang his bell. "Some farewell orders to Anson," 
 was all the explanation she vouchsafed. 
 
 When the man answered the summons, she said, ' ' I 'm go 
 ing away, Anson. I'd like you to telephone Miss Mac- 
 Arthur. Tell her how things are and say I want her to 
 come here and take charge till father's around again. 
 And I think you'd better telephone the doctor, too. He 
 said dad was to be quiet, and we haven't been, very, so 
 perhaps he'll be worse. That's all, I guess. You can 
 tend to everything else, yourself." 
 
 Anson hesitated, expecting, perhaps, some contradictory 
 word from his employer, but none came and he turned to 
 go. "Wait a minute," Trix called, and held out her hand 
 to him. "Good-by, " she said as he came back and took it. 
 " You've been awfully nice to me, Anson." 
 
 "Good-by, Miss Beatrice. I'm sorry you're leaving us. 
 Not for long, I hope." 
 
 ' ' Oh, till hell freezes over, or thereabouts, ' ' she told him 
 with a sort of laugh. " I 'm sorry, too. ' ' 
 
 He bowed gravely, without the slightest change of man 
 ner, and went away, to telephone. "That's the kind of 
 person to be," she commented as she turned, wet-eyed, to 
 her father. 
 
 She wanted a breath and a gulp or two before she could 
 be sure of any voice to go on with. "I'd kiss you good- 
 by," she said, with another laugh mostly sob, this time, 
 " if I wasn 't afraid you 'd wring my neck if you got hold of 
 me. Because I do love you, dad. I guess I always will; 
 whatever happens, I'm glad I came last April and I'm 
 sorry I've got to go away now."
 
 TRUE LOVE 333 
 
 "You don't have to/' he asserted. "This is all your 
 own doing." 
 
 She was in the doorway when he said that, and she 
 turned at it. "Will you let George come here with me 
 when he comes back from Cleveland, to-morrow, and see 
 what he's got to say about that check?" 
 
 But she saw from his look, before she'd done speaking, 
 that he took this as a symptom of weakening ; the threat 
 ened departure as a bluff. So without giving him time 
 to refuse she went straight on. "Oh, of course, that 
 wouldn't do any good. Very likely I'd go with him any 
 how. Good-by. ' ' 
 
 His voice broke in a sob as he called after her, "God 
 damn you, Trix ! ' ' 
 
 4 
 
 She took a taxi to the hotel where she'd checked her 
 hand-bag, with the idea of stopping there for the night, 
 but in the lobby a wave of homesickness broke over her 
 and on an obscure impulse she telephoned to Mrs. Hender 
 son. If the rooms she'd looked at this afternoon were 
 still vacant she'd come down and occupy them to-night. 
 She couldn't promise to rent them permanently until 
 she'd shown them to her husband but she'd pay for the 
 night's lodging, anyhow. Mrs. Henderson was agreeable 
 and within another half-hour Beatrice was installed in 
 what might become her home. 
 
 Her assessment of this likelihood wavered a good deal 
 during the night. The landlady, at their second meeting, 
 was not the gushing fountain of sympathy Trix had found 
 her in the afternoon. The furs and the evening frock 
 seemed to have a chilling effect; awakened suspicion, 
 perhaps. But the little apartment, when the girl was left 
 alone in it, made a background for exciting fancies. It 
 was spacious enough for two, and quite decently clean. 
 Its dinginess would disappear under a little brightening 
 up. In imagination she furnished it with two or three 
 good rugs, an easy chair apiece for her and George, and 
 a reading lamp for the table. The funereal onyx mantel
 
 334 JOSEPH GREER AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 she put back into the shadows behind the glow of an an 
 thracite fire. Could she do it all to-morrow morning, she 
 wondered, and have it ready to show George when he 
 came? No, of course she couldn't. To-morrow was 
 Thanksgiving (poor old dad!) and the stores would be 
 closed. In her nightdress she pottered about fancifully 
 for an hour, until the cold finally drove her to bed. 
 
 She fell asleep at once, having had, since she 'd awakened 
 in the Minneapolis train that morning, a pretty full day. 
 But later, in the dead of night, she found herself broad 
 awake and unable for a few minutes to remember where 
 she was. A high wind had sprung up and was banging 
 the loose window sashes furiously. The bed was cold, and 
 worn down into unaccommodating hollows. 
 
 The thought of sharing that bed with George Burns 
 presented itself to her as fantastic impossible. She must 
 have been clean out of her head to have entertained it ; to 
 have come to wait for him in a place like this. 
 
 It was funny about that thousand dollar check that he 
 should have pocketed it and cashed it, and then have come 
 to meet her on the Municipal Pier that day and said noth 
 ing about it; neither then nor since. Of course he had 
 taken it. There was no getting away from that signa 
 ture. It would seem like an awful lot of money if you 
 were working for thirty dollars a week. Only well, it 
 showed how little you could tell about people. Probably 
 she was lucky to have found out about him in time. 
 
 To-morrow . . . She could never go back to her 
 father. He 'd have her at his mercy if she did that. Sub 
 jugated that was the word. She couldn't go back to her 
 mother, either not with the lemon-grower hanging about. 
 He 'd never give her a look in. A job, then ; that was what 
 it came to. Hollywood, that she 'd flaunted in her father 's 
 face with such bravado? It broke over her that her no 
 tion of becoming a picture actress had been nothing but 
 childish folly, a dream she'd shared with ten million other 
 girls and had little better chance than they of realizing. 
 If she had all the clothes her father had bought her during
 
 TRUE LOVE 335 
 
 the last six months she could get work enough as an 
 extra to keep her alive in lodgings meaner than these 
 that depressed her now. And she might work into stunts, 
 doubling for well-known stars, but even this was a long 
 road. 
 
 What was the use? She'd been a fool to leave home 
 without one of her father's revolvers. Of course, there 
 was always the lake. The lake, on a night like this ! The 
 storm terrified her. She thought of George trying to fly 
 through it. Perhaps he wouldn't come to-morrow. 
 
 What sleep she managed to get during the rest of the 
 night was troubled by dreams and half -wakings, and by 
 morning she was pretty well washed out. She made a 
 wretched breakfast at a cheap neighborhood restaurant 
 and at nine o'clock telephoned Anson to inquire about her 
 father, especially to learn how much the worse he was for 
 their quarrel the night before. 
 
 He was very official. He was answering, she surmised, 
 at an instrument which was within her father's hearing, 
 and he recited his instructions in a tone that conveyed no 
 human feeling whatever. He couldn't say as to Mr. 
 Greer's condition and he was to receive no messages. 
 
 "Oh, well, give him my love when you get a chance," 
 she said forlornly. "Keep it for yourself until you do. 
 I'll write him a letter, to-morrow, maybe." She was com 
 pletely resourceless when she turned away from the tele 
 phone. She had literally nothing to do. 
 
 The weather, though, gave her something to think about. 
 Last night's gale was still blowing in from the lake. It 
 wasn't possible was it that George would try to fly 
 to-day? About ten o'clock she telephoned the office of 
 the superintendent of the air mail to put an end to her 
 uneasiness by confirming this opinion, and to her horri 
 fied amazement was told in matter-of-fact tones that the 
 mail had left Cleveland at eight-thirty as usual and might 
 be expected in about noon. 
 
 She set out at once afoot for Grant Park despite a 
 prospective wait there of nearly two hours. Common
 
 336 JOSEPH GREER AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 sense, she was aware, in the person of Jennie MacArthur or 
 Mrs. Henderson, would have counseled diversion, pointing 
 out that she couldn't do the flyer any good by watching 
 the clouds and worrying about him. Diversion ! That 
 showed what common sense amounted to. 
 
 As it happened (and often it does!) irrational 
 instinct proved the better guide. The fierceness of 
 the gale more evident here on the lake front 
 than back among the big buildings of the loop 
 whipped up a corresponding fierceness in her mood, an 
 emotion much more stimulating than the cold misery of 
 the earlier morning. She raged at the order and the com 
 placent authority of a world where soft-bellied men in 
 armchairs could send their betters aloft to play tag with, 
 death, not upon glorious enterprises but about the pro 
 saic business of delivering letters. It would serve them 
 right if George should arrive with bombs instead of his 
 sacks of mail and sprinkle them around upon the roofs of 
 that lazy town where, by the way of celebrating a holi 
 day, people overslept in anticipation of overeating, later 
 on. She built up an angry grievance against the absen 
 tees from the park they turned out numerously enough, 
 goodness knew, on a fine day! and equally against the 
 indifferent few who were here, variously occupied but 
 alike in their dull unconcern with the storm. 
 
 A special object of her annoyance was the driver of a 
 small mail truck who drove out over the Randolph Street 
 viaduct and backed up against the wind not far from 
 where she stood. She watched him resentfully for five 
 minutes, while he was getting his pipe alight and making 
 himself comfortable, before she recognized, in his pres 
 ence here, an official expectation that George would ac 
 complish his journey safely. 
 
 She went over to him and asked if he was waiting for 
 the air mail. "When he nodded she went on, "Do you 
 think he'll ever make it, a day like this?" 
 
 "Going to make a record trip, I guess with this wind 
 behind him. It's the fellow going the other way you 
 want to be sorry for."
 
 TRUE LOVE 337 
 
 This struck Trix as outrageously unfair. "You'd be 
 sorry for yourself, I bet, if you had to land in a place like 
 this." 
 
 He didn't deny it, but he thought this man would prob 
 ably get down all right. "You can never tell, though," 
 he went on. "They killed one of these fellows only day 
 before yesterday. Plane caught fire and burnt him to a 
 crisp. ' ' 
 
 She had turned away with justifiable homicide in her 
 heart and was walking off, when he called after her, 
 "There he comes, now!" 
 
 She saw the plane, far out over the lake. It didn't 
 seem possible or endurable that he could fly so slowly. 
 She would shut her eyes and count long seconds before 
 she looked again, only to see him, a little bigger, perhaps, 
 in the same place. 
 
 A crew of mechanics had come out of the hangar and 
 were watching him, too callously, she thought. They 
 didn't care whether he got down safely or not. It seemed 
 to her now that he was going straight by, as if he didn't 
 know where he was. They ought to signal him somehow. 
 Oh, the fools, the fools, to stand there doing nothing ! 
 
 No, he was turning now, careening horribly as he came 
 round. She felt herself going sick and shut her eyes but 
 opened them again as the roar of his motor ceased. He 
 whipped across the park like a bit of driven scud, banked 
 again and was on the ground, taxying toward them, the 
 plane bouncing and bucking along like a mean horse. 
 She could hear the rigid fabric clanking like a loose tin 
 roof. The crew were running toward him. 
 
 She wanted to run, too, but she couldn't. She hadn't 
 strength enough to stir. He 'd get out of his plane and go 
 away and never know she'd come to meet him. 
 
 The truck-driver had been cranking his motor; now as 
 it started he looked round at her. "Want to ride over 
 there?" he asked, and added as she assented with a 
 speechless nod, "I didn't know he was your fellow or I 
 wouldn't have been so careless what I said."
 
 338 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 George didn't see her as she came up and she was glad 
 of a minute to feast her eyes upon him. He was deep in 
 talk with the master mechanic, "tail heavy" was a 
 phrase her ear picked up, criticizing details of the plane's 
 performance. He had his helmet dangling in his hand 
 and the wind was ruffling his short curly hair and drying 
 the sweat on his forehead. "Well," the master said, 
 "two hours and twenty-four minutes is nothing to kick 
 about. Fastest yet, I guess." 
 
 At that George turned and saw her standing beside 
 him and in an instant she was in his arms, her mouth upon 
 his, and the world a dancing blur. Hitherto, in public, 
 they'd always been careful to give their meetings a cas 
 ual air, but this embrace was as much at his initiative as 
 at hers. 
 
 "I didn't think you'd come, to-day," he said unstead 
 ily, "with your father home, and all; and me ahead of 
 time, too. But I wanted you so, I was afraid to look 
 around for you." 
 
 "I've been waiting out here for you," she declared, 
 "ever since I heard you'd started. 
 
 "I've had an awful row with dad," she told him, when 
 he'd drawn her aside to make way for the activities of the 
 crew. "He says I'm not his daughter, any more. He 
 told me to tell you that because it might make a difference. 
 Does it?" 
 
 ' ' I should say it did ! " he cried, pulling her up in his 
 arms again. "Does it mean you're going to marry me, 
 now, Trix?" 
 
 She told him, blissfully, that it did. "To-day! This 
 minute, if we could. I've already got a place for us to 
 live," she added, and she felt him give a sob at that. "I 
 slept there alone, last night." 
 
 The mail-truck driver in defiance of strictest regula 
 tions gave them a ride across the long viaduct, she sit 
 ting in George's lap, and a cruising yellow cab conveyed 
 them to the City Hall. It wasn't till they had rattled the 
 locked door of the license clerk's office and stared blankly
 
 TRUE LOVE 339 
 
 at each other in the deserted corridor, that they realized 
 that the Thanksgiving holiday frustrated their plan. 
 
 "I suppose to-morrow will have to do," she said dis 
 mally. "Oh, well, cheer up! One day isn't so much." 
 
 "It can't be to-morrow, either," he dejectedly informed 
 her. "I've got to take the mail out again at eight-thirty 
 in the morning, and this office won't be open by then." 
 
 "How about your two days off, between trips?" she 
 demanded blankly. 
 
 He explained that he was doing double duty, this week. 
 There 'd been an accident . . . 
 
 "The man that was killed? Burnt up?" 
 
 There 'd been an accident, he repeated, ignoring the in 
 terruption, and as they were short-handed he had volun 
 teered to fill in. He was paid extra mileage, of course, but 
 it wasn't that. It was so as not to interrupt the service. 
 
 She blew up before he could say any more and, in a 
 mixture of tears and temper, accused him of not caring 
 when they were married, of not wanting to marry her at 
 all, and in a final fury she delivered an ultimatum: un 
 less he married her to-morrow, somehow, she wouldn't 
 marry him; she'd go back to California on the night train. 
 They 'd let him off to-morrow 's run if he 'd just show spunk 
 enough to ask them to. 
 
 He was pretty glum about agreeing to this, but at last 
 he did, and even consented to her going with him to make 
 the request. They walked in unbroken silence to the 
 post-office, only to find they'd missed the superintendent 
 by minutes. He'd gone home to his Thanksgiving din 
 ner. Trix got his home address, though, from the clerk 
 and they picked up another taxi and started to hunt him 
 down. She was on the point of weeping again over her 
 lover's reluctance when suddenly she laughed instead and 
 snuggled against him. 
 
 "I've got an idea," she declared. "We won't ask him 
 to let you off. We'll ask him to let me go with you. 
 We'll fly over together and be married in Cleveland, to 
 morrow. ' '
 
 340 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 She couldn't at first get him to take the idea seriously. 
 They never carried passengers in the mail planes. It 
 wasn't allowed. She argued that this was no reason why 
 it shouldn't be done, for once, in a case like this. Let him 
 leave the man to her. She 'd fix him ! 
 
 "Suppose anything was to happen, Trix," he ventured, 
 but she had a swift answer to this argument. 
 
 "If you're going to be killed, to-morrow, I'd rather be 
 killed with you than have you killed by yourself. 
 .Wouldn't you?" 
 
 She had her way, even as she predicted she would. 
 They found the official in his least official mood, and 
 what with the starry look in her eyes and the thrill in 
 her voice and the romance inherent in the situation, he was 
 able to offer no more than a perfunctory resistance. By 
 four o'clock the red tape was unwound, the necessary au 
 thorization signed and sealed and the pair, in their fourth 
 taxi, laughed in happy vacuity at the chauffeur's ques 
 tion, where to? 
 
 ' ' I sort of believe I must be hungry, ' ' George remarked. 
 "I haven't eaten since breakfast. Didn't want the sand 
 wich they gave me at Bryan." 
 
 "I haven't eaten anything since last night," she said. 
 "George! Thanksgiving dinner!" 
 
 She directed the chauffeur to one of her father's fav 
 orite restaurants and here they spent two unregarded 
 hours, silent and talkative by turns, sometimes frankly 
 holding hands across the board, sometimes, for fun, dis 
 tantly ceremonious. 
 
 When he got out his pocketbook to pay the bill, she 
 laughed in a way that made him ask her why. 
 
 "I thought of something I'd forgotten," she said. 
 "Something I promised dad I'd ask you about. It's that 
 thousand dollar check he gave you the night you brought 
 me home, last summer." 
 
 He flushed bright red and before answering unbut 
 toned his waistcoat and from a deep pocket pulled out a 
 sealed envelope which he handed over to her. It was ad-
 
 TRUE LOVE 341 
 
 dressed, she saw, to her father, but a thrill she got out of 
 the moist, body-warm feel of the packet distracted her at 
 tention. 
 
 "There's his dirty money, waiting for him," George 
 said. "I've been wanting to tell you about that. He 
 gave me the check that night when I took him to the 
 train. He said it was a reward for looking after you. 
 And then, at the last minute, like, he said he didn't want 
 me for chauffeur, any more, and I was to understand I 
 was to let you alone and keep my mouth shut. 
 
 "I'd have given it back to him, then, only, you see, I 
 didn't know what you'd been telling him. Thought you 
 might have made me the goat. I was rattled and I couldn 't 
 think, for the minute, how else he could have found out 
 about everything. And the next day, when I hadn't 
 heard from you, I cashed the check in those same bills. 
 I 've never touched a cent of it. After that, I didn 't know 
 what to do with it. I didn't know how things were com 
 ing out with you. And I couldn't send it back to him with 
 out as good as telling him that I was going with you. So 
 I just waited." 
 
 "I knew it must be something like that," she remarked. 
 "It didn't bother me a bit." 
 
 "Well," he said, "it can go back to him to-night, all 
 right. I'm glad to be rid of it." 
 
 Her ear caught something a little unreal in the readi 
 ness of this declaration; not unwillingness nor even quite 
 regret. After all, a thousand dollars was a lot of money. 
 Would be, to them. 
 
 "I don't see why it should go back," she asserted. "No, 
 George, listen. You kept your bargain with him that day 
 on the Municipal Pier, when I wanted to run away with 
 you and you wouldn't. You said you hadn't any money 
 and you wouldn't do it on mine. Now, when I've had 
 a row with him and he's turned me out in the snow 
 I don 't see what kick he has on my coming to you. ' ' 
 
 He laughed at this argument and said it sounded pretty 
 thin to him. "However," he added, "we can talk about 
 that, later."
 
 342 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 She tucked the envelope into her coat pocket. "Talk, 
 nothing!" she said. "You've already paid the money 
 back. To me. I'll write and tell him so, anyhow. And 
 I'll decide whether to send it along to him, or not." 
 
 They both fell silent after this and presently she asked 
 him what he was thinking about. "About to-morrow's 
 flight," he reluctantly confessed. ""Wondering how 
 rough the air would be and how high a ceiling we'd have. 
 Sometimes when one of these east gales has blown out it 
 pulls around and gives you as pretty a day as you ever 
 saw. But if it's bad, Trix, the thing's off, for you 
 see?" She didn't openly dissent and after a minute he 
 added with an uneasy laugh, "I never was scared of a 
 trip before. But when I think what it would mean if 
 anything went wrong . . . " 
 
 "You're tired," she interrupted; "that's all the matter 
 with you. No wonder, doing double work like this. Let's 
 forget it, for to-night, anyway. I'll tell you what let's 
 do. Let's go and have a look at the place I've picked out 
 for us to live. See what you think of it. It looked pretty 
 good to me last night, when I was thinking how we'd fix 
 it up." 
 
 "I can't believe that part of it, Trix. That's God's 
 own truth," he told her, and his voice broke over the 
 words. 
 
 "I've brought Mr. Burns," she told Mrs. Henderson 
 half an hour later, "to see whether he likes our house. 
 If he does, we're going to take it. You needn't bother to 
 come up, 1 guess. I can show him around all right." 
 But Mrs. Henderson, full of sympathetic good-will once 
 more, wouldn't consider it a bother, and there might be 
 some questions Mr. Burns would like to ask ; so she heavily 
 led the way up-stairs and showed them into the apartment, 
 with ceremony. 
 
 George hadn't any questions to ask, it seemed, and his 
 replies to those of Beatrice, whether he liked this, or 
 thought that would do, were almost monosyllabic, but when 
 the tour of inspection was finished, she answered, confi-
 
 TRUE LOVE 343 
 
 dently, for his being satisfied with it. "We'll take it for 
 a month, then, anyway. And I guess we might as well 
 pay now. Shall I, George, or have you got it handy ? ' ' 
 
 "I've got it, right here," he said. 
 
 "Well, I'll be glad to have you here," Mrs. Henderson 
 assured him, "though I expect it'll be a strain on my 
 nerves. Your wife was telling me yesterday about your 
 job you had. My heart ached for her, alone last night, 
 what with the storm and all. I'm glad she'll have you 
 with her to-night." 
 
 Trix saw her lover's face go dull red and noted that his 
 hands, busy with his pocketbook, were shaking so that he 
 could hardly extricate the bills he wanted. But he made 
 no disclaimer and he paid over the first month's rent. 
 Mrs. Henderson, apparently, had seen nothing. She said, 
 as she went away with the money, that she'd bring back 
 the receipt as soon as ever she could make it out. 
 
 "Don't bother," Trix called after her. "Leave it on 
 the hall table and we '11 get it some time or other. ' ' Then 
 she closed the door, and, leaning back against it, faced 
 her lover. 
 
 There was one aspect of her aerial elopment which Bea 
 trice had not counted upon. She had been vaguely aware 
 that their departure in the mail plane on Friday morning 
 had stimulated a marked interest in the group of spectators. 
 She'd also been conscious, through the haze of enveloping 
 sensations, when they landed in Cleveland, of the click of 
 cameras and the rattle of questions. And there 'd been an 
 awfully nice girl, a reporter on one of the local papers, 
 who'd made her a call at the hotel after their marriage in 
 the afternoon and might have stayed longer if George's 
 return hadn't shooed her away. But none of this had 
 prepared her for the next morning's paper. MILLION 
 AIRE'S DAUGHTER ELOPES WITH MAIL PILOT 
 was the seven-column heading across the front page. She 
 had become a celebrity! She wondered what her father 
 would think of that.
 
 JOE suffered no apparent relapse as a result of his 
 quarrel with his daughter. He saw the papers, of course, 
 with the sensational accounts of her elopement, including 
 interviews with Beatrice herself, but they were able to 
 spare him the reporters who came to get his side of the 
 story. Jennie, who had come back to the apartment in 
 response to Anson's message and stayed a fortnight, dealt 
 with them competently, of course. Two or three days was 
 all that phase of the affair lasted. He surprised her by 
 taking it so quietly, for the papers were making him look 
 like the theatrical purse-proud father who hadn't thought 
 an ex-aviator who had fought in France good enough to 
 marry his daughter. They made it appear, also, that 
 George, already in love with Beatrice, had taken the job 
 of chauffeur, in order to be near her. Whether this 
 was the story the pair were telling, or merely the conven 
 tional line of least resistance always followed by re-write 
 men in newspaper offices, it came to the same thing. 
 
 Joe's only defense was to make Jennie read the report 
 of the detective agency, and during the sleepless hours of 
 the night after she had finished it, she was angry and 
 humiliated. She felt the sting of contempt in the girl's 
 duplicity. She could remember dates mentioned in the 
 report as specific days; how on this day and that, after 
 stolen hours with her lover, Trix had come back to her, 
 demure, innocent laughing at her! She'd been fooled to 
 
 344
 
 ROMANCE 345 
 
 the top of her bent, and she acknowledged as much to 
 Joe when she came into his room next morning to see what 
 sort of night he'd had. 
 
 "Pretty rotten with this headache," he told her, "but 
 better than you, at that, judging from your looks. You 
 look like a washout." 
 
 "That's about how I feel," she admitted. "I don't 
 see how you can forgive me, Joe. I was wrong about her, 
 all the way through and never surer in my life that I 
 was right. I wouldn't have believed it, except for what's 
 happened." 
 
 "It's all right," he told her. "No good crying over 
 spilt milk." He added, "Here's a letter from her; came 
 in this morning. Dispose of it, will you ? ' ' 
 
 The envelope, addressed in the girl's sprawling hand, 
 was still sealed. "Dispose of it how?" Jennie asked. 
 
 "Burn it up, I guess. Read it first if you like, of 
 course, but don't tell me what's in it. I don't want to 
 know. I've had enough, Jennie." 
 
 She guessed that he'd like to have her read it and tell 
 him she 'd done so, but she carried it to the office with her, 
 undecided whether she would or not. She felt, with the 
 report of the detective agency fresh in her mind, that, 
 like Joe, she'd had enough, and, finally, she tore the let 
 ter to bits, unopened, and dropped them into her waste- 
 paper basket, telling herself as she did so that this was the 
 end of her concern with Beatrice Greer. 
 
 Of course it was not. The girl had been too vital a factor 
 in her life during the past half-year to be dismissed like 
 that. It would have been easier, she thought during the 
 first of the ensuing days, to stop wondering about her if 
 she'd read that letter. It was curiosity that was nag 
 ging her, demanding satisfaction. 
 
 A week or thereabout after she'd destroyed the letter, 
 Beatrice walked into her office with no more warning than 
 the tap of a knuckle upon her half-open door. Jennie, who 
 had swung round in her chair to see who the visitor was, 
 felt herself go limp at the sight of her. Her face was
 
 346 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 glowing with the sting of the wind-driven snow, tiny 
 melted drops of it hung, in her eyelashes, and it lay in 
 drifts in the folds of her fur coat. She blinked the blur 
 out of her eyes, looked at Jennie fixedly for a moment, 
 then stooped and, bruskly, kissed her. "I thought I'd 
 !do that before you could stop me," she said. She turned 
 away as she threw back her coat, then pulled up a chair 
 and sat down. 
 
 "I didn't specially want to stop you," Jennie said; 
 " only I know now that it doesn't mean anything. And 
 never did." 
 
 "That means dad has been making you read the de 
 tective's report, I suppose," Beatrice commented. "I did 
 think, perhaps . . . But never mind that, now. "What I 
 came for was to make you tell me about my father. I've 
 telephoned two or three times, but Anson won't say a 
 word. Last night I went to your flat to see you, but you 
 weren't there, so I suppose you're still at our house. It 
 was one of George 's nights at Cleveland and I was feeling 
 kind of lonesome. He'll be back to-day, about noon ' 
 She glanced out the window where a momentary flaw of, 
 snow had obliterated the shore-line of the lake. " Un 
 less he gets lost in that. So I thought, while I was wait 
 ing, I'd come here and find out; from you or Henry 
 Craven. I want to know if I made him a lot worse, that 
 night I went away, by quarreling with him." 
 
 "No, I don't think so," Jennie said. "Doctor Bennett 
 seems to think he's getting on as well as could be expected. 
 Both the bones are knitting up very nicely. Of course 
 he's terribly bothered by having only one hand. But it's 
 his head that makes the most of the trouble. ' ' 
 
 "His head!" The girl frowned, but there was a gleam 
 of something besides concern in her eye. "Do you mean 
 there's anything the matter with it?" 
 
 "There's nothing the matter with his mind, if that's 
 what you're thinking of," Jennie answered rather grimly. 
 "Why? Did you hope there was?" 
 
 "Not exactly. Only I wrote him a letter a while ago, 
 that I thought perhaps he'd answer; and he never did."
 
 ROMANCE 347 
 
 "He got it all right," Jennie informed her, "but he 
 wouldn't read it. Gave it to me to tear up for him. I 
 did without opening it." 
 
 Beatrice laughed shortly. "There was a perfectly good 
 check for a thousand dollars in that letter." In response 
 to Jennie's stare of undisguised astonishment, she went on 
 to explain. "It was the thousand dad gave George as a 
 reward. He cashed the check for it, but never touched the 
 money. When he ran away with me, he made me send it 
 back. I put it in my account at the bank and sent dad 
 a check for it, telling him, in the letter, what it was. I 
 didn't much want to, but George stood over me until I 
 did. But I guess if you tore it up, that settles that. Only 
 you might tell dad what was in the letter." 
 
 "I don't think I will," Jennie said thoughtfully. "Not 
 for the present, anyhow. When his head gets better, I 
 suppose I will." 
 
 "What is the matter with his head?" Beatrice asked. 
 
 "It aches," Jennie told her simply. "All the time. 
 Night and day. Never stops. It isn't a sharp ache, he 
 says; it's just as if his brain was a size too big for his 
 skull. But if he gets excited or makes any exertion, it's 
 worse; beats, like hammers. That's why I'm not going 
 to tell him." 
 
 "Pretty awful for him, that would be," the girl re 
 flected soberly. "How long will it keep up, do you sup 
 pose ? ' ' 
 
 ' ' Months, perhaps, Doctor Bennett says. He hasn 't told 
 Joe that, though." 
 
 "Months!" Trix echoed, aghast. "That'll drive him 
 crazy. ' ' 
 
 "I don't know what it'll drive him to," said Jennie. 
 
 "And I suppose," Beatrice said roughly, "you think 
 it 'sail my fault." 
 
 Jennie didn't answer at once. "I wish I did," she 
 said at last. "It's my fault, a good deal of it. That's 
 what's worrying me." 
 
 "Because you didn't play detective, yourself, and find 
 out about George before dad came home ? What difference
 
 348 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 would that have made? You came nearer succeeding, the 
 \vay you tried. You almost made it. If you'd cared 
 about me a little more enough so you had to ask ques 
 tions . . . Oh, it would have come to the same thing in 
 the end, I guess, whatever anybody did. Only, Jen 
 nie ..." 
 
 Beatrice got up, restlessly, and went to the window. 
 "It's clearing up a little, I believe," she said; but then 
 she came back, seated herself on the corner of Jennie's 
 desk, and tried again. "You told me once it was the 
 first real talk we ever had together that you weren't an 
 old maid, exactly. I've thought of that, since, and won 
 dered what you meant by it. I don't suppose you'd care 
 to tell me that, now, feeling about me the way you do." 
 
 She paused there, tentatively, but Jennie volunteered 
 nothing, and after a moment's silence, without looking at 
 her, Trix went on. "I thought perhaps you meant that 
 you'd had a lover once, yourself. Really, I mean. And 
 that you knew what it meant to want him. And if you 
 did mean that, maybe you'd understand . . . You said 
 when I kissed you, just now, that you knew it didn't mean 
 anything and never had. "Well, I thought if you did a lit 
 tle remembering, maybe you'd know better than that." 
 
 ' ' I guess perhaps I do, ' ' Jennie admitted. She took the 
 girl's two arms for a moment in a tight grip. "I'm glad 
 you said that, ' ' she added. " I 'm on Joe 's side, more than 
 ever. He's going to need all the help he can get. What 
 ever I do '11 be done for him. All the same I wish you 
 luck, and I hope you're going to be happy. You are, I 
 suppose, now." 
 
 "Yes, I am." The words were uninflected, and her 
 laugh acknowledged how dubious they had sounded. "I 
 mean, ' ' she explained, ' ' I don 't know whether happy 's the 
 exact word or not. I'm glad I did it. I'd be glad, even 
 if it was all going to end in a crash, half an hour from 
 now out there on the lake front, when George gets in from 
 Cleveland. Because it 's been something, already, that I 'd 
 never have been quite alive without. But life's kind of
 
 ROMANCE 349 
 
 funny, isn't it? Funnier than any one ever tells you. 
 You have to go ahead and find it out for yourself. ' ' 
 
 She wasn't asking for sympathy, though, as she made 
 clear by rising from the corner of the desk and moving 
 away a little. ' ' I 'in going to school, again, ' ' she added, on 
 a brighter note. "George isn't crazy about having me 
 do it, but I tell him I'd go crazy if I didn't. What I'd 
 really like is to learn to drive a plane and then get a job, 
 myself, in the mail. I'd get the Omaha run, you see, and 
 then we could come sailing in from opposite directions at 
 the same time, and have our two days off, together, here. 
 It gives George fits to have me talk like that, but it's silly 
 of him because I could learn to do it just as well as he 
 could. Anyhow, there isn't a chance of it, so he needn't 
 worry. ' ' 
 
 She scribbled a line or two on Jennie's scratch pad. 
 "There's where we live, now," she concluded. "I don't 
 know how long we'll stay. George is talking about mov 
 ing to Cleveland, but I don't want to, much. Anyhow, 
 they '11 forward it, if anything happens you want to tell me 
 about. ' ' 
 
 "I don't suppose anything much will happen," Jennie 
 said, rising and walking to the door with her. " It 's prob 
 ably just the sort of mood I 've been in that makes me feel 
 as if something would. I'm glad to have your address, 
 anyway. And if anything happens to you, let me know. 
 I'm glad you came to-day and told me what you did. 
 Good-by, Trix." 
 
 She'd had to resist an impulse to say a good deal more 
 than that. All her resentment against the girl had been 
 sponged out and the underlying affection made legible 
 again. She'd have liked to say, "Come to me, nights 
 when George is in Cleveland. ' ' But Joe would never have 
 been able to understand a divided loyalty, nor would she 
 dare risk an attempt to keep him in the dark about it. 
 No, Trix would have to lie in the bed she had made. Jen 
 nie went to the window to stare at the lead-colored sky 
 and watch the thinning flurries of snow. She didn't even
 
 350 JOSEPH GREER AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 try to get her mind back upon her own affairs until she 
 had seen the Cleveland mail plane make a safe landing in 
 Grant Park. 
 
 Before Christmas she found a use for the address Bea 
 trice had given her. Joe was up and about by that time, 
 and she had moved back once more to her own 
 flat. He asked her, on one of the first days 
 after his return to the office, to go to his apart 
 ment at her convenience, sometime when he wasn't there, 
 and clear out the blue room, pack everything up that 
 she'd find there and dispose of it. Anson and his wife 
 would help her. The blue room had belonged to Beatrice. 
 
 "Do you care what I do with the stuff?" she asked. 
 
 "Not a damn," he told her with a steady stare, "as long 
 as you don't tell me anything about it. I want to find the 
 room empty." 
 
 So Jennie packed all the clothes and trinkets she found 
 in the blue room and despatched them to Beatrice. It 
 was, she had no doubt, what Joe wanted her to do with 
 them. 
 
 2 
 
 Joe had expressed his wish to Jennie with characteristic 
 accuracy; he wanted to find Beatrice's room empty. 
 Sweeping away all reminders of her was merely the 
 symbol of the harder thing he was trying to do empty 
 his memory of her. He kept casting back in his thoughts 
 to the time, less than a year ago, before the news had come 
 of his wife's contemplated divorce. He'd been comfortable 
 and contented enough then. Let him go on from there, 
 as if the services of the respectable lawyer in Pasadena 
 had never been retained and the letter to Trix, despatched 
 over Jennie's protest, had never been written. 
 
 It was funny that had never occurred to him before 
 but he saw, now, how true it was that the only really 
 bitter experiences of his life were those which involved 
 him with members of his family; in youth with his father, 
 in early manhood with his wife, in middle age with his 
 daughter.
 
 ROMANCE 351 
 
 With the rest of the world he got on satisfactorily 
 enough. Not always amicably, to be sure, but where was 
 the harm in a good fight with a stranger or even with the 
 sort of pleasant acquaintance you called a friend? It 
 keyed you up to a better best than you could command in 
 ordinary circumstances, and there wasn't a drop of poison 
 in it. You gave, or took, your licking and went on from 
 there. When it was done, it was done with. But with 
 your own blood, or with the wife of your bed, it was dif 
 ferent, whichever way the battle went. 
 
 He'd been no match for his father, not even after he'd 
 grown too big to lick, and for many years after the final 
 defeat of which his flight had been the admission, there 
 had rankled in him an insatiable grudge. He'd never got 
 over it, really, until his affair with Annabel gave him 
 something else to think about. 
 
 And then, look at Annabel! She'd been no match for 
 him. He'd bullied her rather than quarreled with her 
 there wasn't enough to her to quarrel with seriously. 
 Anyhow, it had been as the unchallenged victor in their 
 differences that he'd gone off to Lima. He'd put her 
 clearly in the wrong by asking her to go with him. But 
 had this fact done him any good? Not a bit of it. The 
 thought of her had rankled, too; longer and more bitterly 
 than the boyhood memories of his father. It was funny 
 about that, too. He'd had relations with other women 
 that had lasted longer, and meant more at the time, than 
 those unhappy months with Annabel, and none of them 
 had ever bothered him much. Annabel had gone on 
 bothering him until Beatrice had put her out of his head. 
 
 Well, he wasn't going to let Beatrice nag him through 
 the next twenty years, not though she had declared, in 
 what were almost the last words she'd spoken to him, that 
 she would never stop loving him. 
 
 Loving! A lot she'd loved him leaving him like that, 
 helpless, seriously ill, for a damned chauffeur ! And 
 after he'd shown her that cancelled check, too, with 
 George Burns 's endorsement on it, documentary proof of
 
 352 
 
 the man's duplicity. Her retort to that had been to call 
 her own father a liar. She 'd been lying to him for weeks, 
 months from the very beginning, most likely. 
 
 She hadn't got away with it, though. She'd deceived 
 Jennie, but she hadn't deceived him. Very likely she'd 
 lied to him that night in proclaiming the innocence of her 
 love-affair with George. It was quite possible the sweat 
 beaded out on Joe's forehead when he thought of this 
 that she was already pregnant that night; that she had 
 no alternative to marrying George, crook though he 'd been 
 proved to be. 
 
 She'd shown herself his own daughter in that, anyhow. 
 She'd bluffed it through and left him with the colors of 
 her pride still flying at the mast-head. There had, in 
 deed, been no victor and no vanquished in that engagement. 
 This time the fighters had been fairly matched. He 
 thought Trix herself would acknowledge that. 
 
 Often he wondered what she had said in the letter he'd 
 turned over to Jennie to destroy. Jennie had read it 
 first, most likely ; he 'd as good as told her to. He 'd never 
 ask her what had been in the letter, but he would rather 
 like to know whether she'd read it or not. Just as well 
 not to ask, though. Just as well and a whole lot better. 
 There was no telling where you'd stop if you began ask 
 ing questions. He'd been thinking about the girl now, for 
 an hour. Quit! That was the only thing to do. Forget 
 her. Sweep her out. Make the place empty. 
 
 One thing would make it easier. The girl could take 
 care of herself. She'd pretty well proved that. Always 
 light on her feet somehow, she would. In that, again, she, 
 was her father's daughter. That had been the principal 
 trouble about Annabel. She had been so damned help 
 less. And then, of course, Annabel had a baby. Trix 
 would have a baby, too, most likely. If his latest guess 
 about her was right, she had one already on the way. A 
 grandson of his! No, by God! Not as long as that 
 damned chauffeur was his father. 
 
 Suppose the fellow left her as a man was apt to do
 
 ROMANCE 353 
 
 when he'd married after the first climax of passion was 
 past what then? Trix would never come creeping home 
 with her baby in a bundle, after the manner of the heroines 
 of old melodrama, to say she'd been foolish and had done 
 wrong. Not in a thousand years! Not Trix. She'd 
 starve first, she and the baby together. Or jump in the 
 lake. Or turn on the gas. Why in the hell did he sit 
 there like a maudlin fool, thinking of things like that! 
 She knew he would, damn her. That's why she'd said, 
 just before she went away, that she'd never stop loving 
 him. Just to give the screw a last tormenting turn. 
 Now he'd waked up his head again. Started the ham 
 mers going inside his skull. 
 
 That was the whole trouble with him, really. And Ben 
 nett, the complacent ass, insisted that there was nothing 
 to be done about it except wear it out. Three to six 
 months, or it might be even longer, that headache would 
 last, he said. Idiocy, that was. There must be something 
 that would relieve the pressure. Lift the cloud. But Ben 
 nett wouldn't tell him, he supposed, from a fear that the 
 medicine, whatever it was, would be bad for him, affect 
 his heart, perhaps, or form a habit. What if it did? 
 There was no habit that couldn't be broken, granted a 
 man had a strong enough jaw to lock his teeth. 
 
 At his normal pitch of resolution, he would have called 
 in another doctor forthwith, and in default of anything 
 satisfactory out of him would have begun experimenting 
 on his own account among the analgic and narcotic drugs 
 for his remedy; but the trouble with him, precisely, was 
 that he couldn't screw himself up to normal pitch. He 
 couldn't think, as he'd been wont to do, through to a de 
 cision. He could only go running about in a fog, getting 
 nowhere. The pain the normal minimum pain was 
 not unbearably severe. If it had been anywhere but in 
 his head, he thought, he could have ignored it and gone 
 about his business. But this unremitting pressure against 
 the inside of his skull stupefied him. 
 
 There were two or three fascinating half-solved prob-
 
 354 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 lems on his desk and his drawing-board at which he could 
 do no more than blankly stare. There were important 
 questions of business policy to be settled, but when he sat 
 in conference with "Williamson and Corbett, he didn't more 
 than half follow what they were talking about, and if he 
 roused himself, with a spurt of temper, to take hold and 
 wrest the lead away from them, the effort only started the 
 hammers going again in his head. 
 
 The devil of it was, they could see there was something 
 wrong with him. They looked at him, sometimes, with an 
 appearance of concern, and Williamson, one day, with an 
 air that was friendlier than any he'd pretended to of late, 
 asked him why he didn't run off for a month's vacation, 
 to Bermuda or somewhere. He scoffed at the suggestion 
 vacations, he said, weren't in his line but it worried 
 him. They were planning to put something over on him, 
 most likely. He didn't even want a vacation. He re 
 buffed Jennie's sound advice that he take a week at 
 French Lick, playing the roulette wheel or the little 
 horses. 
 
 There was a girl in town, in one of the musical shows, 
 with whom he'd had some rather vivid times in seasons 
 past, but he felt no inclination, now, to look her up. 
 She'd telephoned, one Sunday morning, and he'd told 
 Anson to say he was out. Henry Craven had asked him 
 once or twice to share his seats at the opera (Margaret 
 had gone away again, this time to Italy), but he'd de 
 clined. There was nowhere he wanted to go, no one he 
 had the smallest wish to see. He didn't want to know who 
 the people were who called him on the telephone, let alone 
 talk to them. Like a wounded bear, he had crawled into 
 the darkest corner of his cave. 
 
 "Weeks went by like that. Jennie and Henry Craven, 
 who saw him daily at the office, gave up trying to 
 cheer or even to interest him. They had been forced to 
 the conclusion that the only thing to do was to let him 
 alone and wait for this phase to pass. 
 
 Eventually it did. Quite by inadvertence, Joe found
 
 ROMANCE 355 
 
 his remedy in whisky. He would never have thought of 
 it, for he did not consider alcohol as a drug, nor, hardly, 
 the well seasoned Kentucky bourbon he had stocked so 
 lavishly with the first threatened approach of prohibi 
 tion, as an intoxicant. "When he said to Henry, in the 
 course of their first talk, that, having tried every sort of 
 drink in the world, he had come to the conclusion that 
 the most innocent of them was corn whisky, he was not 
 trying, as Henry thought, to be witty or paradoxical; he 
 was stating his honest opinion. 
 
 He drank it with all his meals but breakfast. He us 
 ually had a drink or two of it at the fag end of the after 
 noon, and if he were passing the evening domestically, 
 reading or talking with a chance visitor, he drank it at 
 intervals till bedtime. He rarely drank it convivially. 
 When there was a party on, he turned to more sophisti 
 cated and stimulating beverages. The belief current 
 among his companions in these affairs was that, no mat 
 ter what he drank, Joe couldn't get drunk. He knew 
 better, but it suited his egregious and overbearing humor 
 to keep this knowledge to himself. He enjoyed being ex 
 ceptional. 
 
 The dullness of those winter days after he had got his 
 arm out of its sling and had begun going through the 
 motions of living his normal life drove him insensibly to 
 drinking rather more than his liberal ration of whisky, 
 and from week to week the increase went on, without, for 
 a long while, producing any effect to attract his attention. 
 But there came a vile fog-bound sleety Sunday in the 
 month of February when he sat from his late breakfast far 
 into the afternoon, the litter of the Sunday papers he was 
 too deeply bored to read around him, and the carafe and 
 syphon at his elbow. About four o'clock Anson heard 
 himself being called for in an excited tone that brought 
 him in haste. 
 
 "Anson," Joe demanded, "do you see anything of that 
 damned headache of mine lying around anywhere? Be 
 cause, by God, I believe I've lost it!" His voice had a
 
 356 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 ring in it that the man hadn't heard since before the ac 
 cident. 
 
 Anson looked around, not because he expected to see a 
 headache lying there, but because Joe had told him to. 
 "I hope it has gone, sir," he said. "Have you been tak 
 ing anything . . . ?" His glance had got round by that 
 time to the carafe, and he broke off short. 
 
 "What do you mean 'taking anything'?" Joe de 
 manded. His look followed the butler's and came to 
 rest on the carafe. 
 
 "Nothing, sir, except that I filled that this morning 
 and it's rather low, now, sir." 
 
 Joe laughed out, "Rather low! I should say it was!" 
 He shook his head tentatively and added, "That's funny. 
 If I'd laughed like that this morning it would have 
 started all the hammers going at once. Don 't feel a thing 
 now. Look here, Anson, would you say I was drunk?" 
 
 "Certainly not, sir." The man seemed shocked at the 
 bare idea. 
 
 "I expect I am, though. Must be. The headache is, 
 anyhow. Sunk. Drowned. Well, I'm glad I've got on 
 to the trick of it. I'd have gone mad in another month. 
 This way, we'll be able to manage. See? God, what a 
 relief!" He stretched, flexed his arms, kicked at the 
 heap of papers that lay about his feet. 
 
 The dramatic section of one of them was disturbed by 
 the movement and his eye fell upon a reproduced draw 
 ing of a good-looking young actress. He stooped and 
 picked it up and began reading the interview which filled 
 the rest of the page. He knew Ashleigh, the critic who 
 wrote it, pretty well, and he grinned appreciatively over 
 the wit and the subtlety of some of its implications. ' ' Es 
 ther sounds like the same old girl," he remarked to 
 Anson, who not having been dismissed was still standing 
 by. "She always used to stop at the Congress. Call up 
 and see if she's there now. If she is, I'll talk to her. I 
 feel like having a party." 
 
 To Jennie, the change looked at first almost like a
 
 ROMANCE 357 
 
 miracle. He came breezing into the office like a man 
 back from a long journey, with a word of unceremonious 
 greeting to fling at everybody who crossed his path. He 
 kept her and Henry gossiping half the morning in his 
 private office. It was or so it seemed at first exactly 
 as if he had been away ever since that November journey 
 of his, when he had taken Trix with him, and was now 
 back again really back, his old self. 
 
 It wasn't long certainly not a week before Jennie's 
 happiness over his recovery began to be clouded by a mis 
 giving that it wasn 't so real as it seemed. He only grinned 
 at her when she demanded that she be told how the 
 cure had been wrought grinned at her with that gleam of 
 boyish mischief in his eye that would have made a school 
 mistress want to shake him. 
 
 Jennie had never allowed herself to be teased into that 
 attitude toward him, and she didn't try to scold or cross- 
 examine him now; but privately she wondered. 
 
 No doubt, with his uncanny perceptions, he guessed that 
 this was so, for within a day or two, serious but for the 
 gleam in his eye, he assured her that there was nothing to 
 it. There never was anything the matter with him but 
 that damned headache, and it quit all at once, about four 
 o 'clock last Sunday afternoon. ' ' How should I know why ? 
 You act as if it was something you hoped I would leave 
 you in my will ! ' ' 
 
 She wasn't at all convinced, and it struck her that she 
 would like some time to ask Doctor Bennett if a thing could 
 happen like that. Of course she never would ; clear med 
 dling that would be. She even concealed her doubts from 
 Henry, though they grew graver, and drew nearer to be 
 ing certainties all the while. 
 
 One thing she had been quick to note: Joe let his 
 drawing-board severely alone. The design for the flax 
 harvester he had been playing with was no farther along 
 than it had been last summer ; and nothing new had ir 
 rupted to take its place. 
 
 He remained curiously indifferent, too, to the more
 
 358 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 broadly political aspects of the business. The Greer Com 
 pany was under contract to buy the entire output of the 
 newly organized subsidiary companies, and if this ran 
 into anything like the tonnage they expected, the prob 
 lem of marketing it would be, it seemed to Jennie, serious. 
 They would have what amounted to a new product, that 
 must be made either to adapt itself to existing channels 
 of trade or to cut new ones. A revolutionary matter any 
 way you looked at it. The figures it involved ran up 
 into millions of dollars. 
 
 Joe would not put his back into this dawning phase of 
 the business. He agreed with a good deal of what Jen 
 nie was saying, but he yawned as he listened and he al 
 ways finished the discussion by saying that it was a prob 
 lem of supply, not of demand. The important thing was 
 to get those little mills ready in time for the next crop. 
 
 3 
 
 ' ' Speaking of vacations, ' ' Joe broke out, though this was 
 not precisely what they had been speaking of, "Henry, 
 here, is the man who needs one. He looks like the devil to 
 me. Doesn't he to you?" 
 
 John Williamson, to whom the question was directed, 
 looked thoughtfully for a moment at his cousin by mar 
 riage, and said he believed Joe was right. The three men 
 were lunching together. The month was still February; 
 Joe 's alcohol cure was in its earliest phase ; and what they 
 had been talking about was his astonishing return to 
 health. 
 
 Henry denied conscientiously that he was ill, beyond the 
 chronic cold which every one was likely to pick up in the 
 fag end of the winter and certainly no one could pre 
 tend that he was overworked. But the thought of a va 
 cation was one he couldn't repudiate very heartily. 
 
 Any change of scene would be welcomed as giving him 
 a chance to stop worrying for a while. Very likely he 
 would not succeed in breaking the habit altogether. He 
 recognized that thinking in circles was a constitutional vice,
 
 ROMANCE 359 
 
 but since last summer to be precise, since that evening 
 when he had dined with John and Violet at Lake Forest, 
 and learned of Violet's quarrel with Joe, and caught the 
 sinister implication in John's instructions to him Henry 
 had carried this vice of worrying to an excess which he 
 was forced to recognize as serious. It was hounding him 
 into a chronic insomnia; it was debilitating his own judg 
 ment or at least shaking his confidence in it, which came 
 to the same thing. 
 
 This luncheon to-day afforded an illustration. It was 
 one of a series of steps in a friendly advance on John's 
 part toward a man with whom he had severed, a few 
 months back, all but the most necessary business relations. 
 The advance had become perceptible soon after Violet had 
 gone away, taking Margaret with her, to Italy. Henry 
 wondered what that advance meant. It might be nothing 
 but the natural rebound of John's innate kindliness, now 
 that Violet was off the board, toward a likable chap who 
 had been hard hit by a double stroke of misfortune. It 
 might have occurred to John to wonder how he would 
 have felt if, simultaneously with a disabling accident to 
 himself, Dodo, were to have run off with Jeffrey. 
 
 On the surface, it looked like that to Henry. He had 
 never known John pleasanter than he was at lunch to-day 
 but mightn't it be a part of a deliberate campaign to 
 keep Joe seated firmly on the rails that had been greased 
 to his foreseen destruction? When the time came for 
 them to hand Henry the part he was expected to play in 
 their little drama of financial assassination if they did 
 hand it to him what would he do? "Would he have the 
 courage to tell them to go to hell? It literally made him 
 sweat whenever he asked himself that question and he 
 had asked it almost daily for months. 
 
 But for that question, he would be happier than he had 
 ever been since his father's death. Life was kindlier than 
 it had ever been. It had been wonderful, for instance, to 
 be able to say, when Violet invited Margaret to go to 
 Italy with her as her guest, that this arrangement would
 
 360 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 not be necessary, and to go and buy her steamship tickets 
 himself. The thought of subjecting Margaret to a rever 
 sion from that to the old shifting dependence was intol 
 erable ; yet this was what a defiance of John and a refusal 
 to play his part would mean. Round and round that 
 grizzly maypole his thoughts danced in a contracting spiral. 
 Damn it, why couldn't he stop? He wasn't doing any 
 body any good. 
 
 It made him nervous now to have the two men looking 
 at him, though there was nothing but good will in their 
 faces. "Anyhow," he concluded, after denying that he 
 needed a vacation, "I can't think of any place I particu 
 larly want to go. The annual meeting is coming in a few 
 weeks, and I should have to be back for that. There 
 wouldn't be time, really, to go anywhere." 
 
 "You could get to Tokio and back before the meeting, 
 if you wanted to," Joe contradicted. "Why don't you 
 go there? You'd have time to pick a few cherry blossoms, 
 and so on." 
 
 " I '11 tell you what you might do, ' ' John put in, speaking 
 more seriously. "Go to Mentone and spend a couple of 
 weeks with Violet and Margaret. Take them over to 
 Nice for mi-careme. You'd just about hit it, I think. I 
 wish you would do that, for a fact. I'd like a first-hand 
 report on Violet." The speaker glanced aside to Joe as 
 he went on to explain, "She hasn't been very well this 
 winter wasn't at least before she went away, and her 
 letters don't answer my questions." 
 
 Joe answered with a proper assumption of concern that 
 he was sorry to hear Mrs. Williamson had not been well; 
 and there the subject dropped, leaving Henry sunk in a 
 maze of conjecture as to John's reason for bringing Violet 
 into the talk. 
 
 As they left the lunch table, John went back quite 
 seriously to the project of Henry's vacation. "Think it 
 over," he commanded. "There isn't a reason on earth, is 
 there" (the question was directed to Joe), "why he 
 shouldn't run over to the Riviera for a couple of weeks?" 
 
 "Not that I know of," said Joe. And he added with a
 
 ROMANCE 361 
 
 grin, "I'll stand without hitching for that long. Give you 
 *ny word, I will." 
 
 " It 's all nonsense, ' ' Henry protested fretfully, as he and 
 Joe walked back to the office together. "I couldn't get 
 passage for weeks. Those Mediterranean boats are 
 crowded this time of the year." 
 
 ' ' Leave that to me, ' ' said Joe ; and half an hour later he, 
 brought into Henry's office a memorandum of the num 
 ber of his berth, the name of his steamer, and the date of 
 his sailing from New York. 
 
 ' ' Go to the photographer down-stairs now and get mugged 
 for your passport; then you can put in your appli 
 cation to-morrow." 
 
 Henry, in a daze, obeyed. 
 
 Until his steamer cast off from the wharf in New York 
 ten days later, Henry's mind did not fully accept the fact 
 that he was going to Europe again, after all these years. 
 To glimpse the Azores; buy oranges and things from the 
 old women who would come aboard at Gibraltar ; gaze once 
 more upon the Chateau d'lf whence they had chucked 
 Monte Cristo into the sea; hear the banging of the guns 
 while they shot pigeons at Monte Carlo; sit out in the 
 Mediterranean sunshine under a green-lined pongee um 
 brella, watching the idle world go by himself as idle as 
 the best of them. He was embarked for that, when a fort 
 night ago ... It was queer the way Joe sent you spin 
 ning off on some tangent or other whenever you touched 
 him. 
 
 He had an even two weeks from the day he landed at 
 Marseilles to the day when he must set sail for home from, 
 Genoa, and he feared he disappointed and offended Mar 
 garet by electing to devote the whole of his time to the 
 little strip of sun-drenched and mountain-sheltered para 
 dise which lay between these two cities. He rejected with 
 unconcealed horror, Margaret's suggestion that he make a 
 dash north through France, for a day or two in Paris, and 
 a short tour of the battle-fields; and he dealt almost as 
 shortly with the compromise she offered, a trip across to 
 Venice, upon which she said she would accompany him.
 
 362 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 ' ' I 'm going to stay right here in the sun, ' ' he said, with 
 a decisiveness which amazed her. "I'm going to pretend 
 that the rest of Europe is just the way it was twenty years 
 ago, and that I've got all the time and all the money that 
 I need. That's the secret of the Riviera. It's the one 
 place I know in the world where you can do that." 
 
 It was in Violet 's presence that he made this declaration 
 of independence, and Margaret couldn't say much. Later, 
 when she got her brother by himself, she remonstrated with 
 him seriously. His coming over at all for so short a time 
 seemed to her a piece of unwarranted extravagance. But 
 his refusal to make the most of the little time he had was 
 simply perverse. It wasn't like him. "It's like that hor 
 rible man Greer," she went on. "I hope you aren't try 
 ing to imitate him." 
 
 Henry laughed. "Joe's suggestion was," he com 
 mented, ''that I run over to Tokio and pick a few cherry 
 blossoms. ' * 
 
 ' ' Cherry blossoms ! ' ' Margaret echoed, with a shudder of 
 disgust. "I know what he meant by that as well as vou 
 do." 
 
 "He meant cherry blossoms," Henry said quietly. "If 
 he had meant Geisha girls, or whatever the polite name 
 for them is, he would have said so in so many words. 
 Poor old Joe! I wish you would let him alone. He has 
 been pretty hard hit this winter." 
 
 "Well, I hope you let him alone," she retorted; "es 
 pecially before Violet. She could tell you a few things 
 about him if she wanted to." 
 
 "Has she been telling them to you?" Henry asked; 
 but Margaret denied that this was the case. 
 
 "You've changed somehow," she concluded. "You 
 aren't the same person you were a year ago whether it's 
 due to Mr. Greer or to somebody else." 
 
 "Who else?" Henry wondered, but he didn't ask. 
 Anyhow, Margaret acquiesced with a pretty good grace 
 after that in the frivolous regime of his vacation. He be 
 gan with a lucky day at Monte Carlo, winning nearly four
 
 ROMANCE 363 
 
 thousand francs. This frightened him away from the 
 salle de jeu for the rest of his stay, but it enabled him to 
 play the host to the two women with just the degree of 
 modest lavishness that suited him, and with a comfortable 
 conscience. Even Margaret could see the experience was 
 doing him good refreshing him, filling him out, brighten 
 ing his eyes and lending timbre to his voice. 
 
 For once, there was a reversal of roles between him and 
 Violet. Henry had never seen her look faded before. 
 Time had seemed to pass over her frictionless, leaving no 
 mark upon her whatever; but now, it was as if some ob 
 scure reagent had been at work, bringing the old marks 
 out. 
 
 He had been pretty skeptical of the ill health which had 
 been alleged as the reason for her going abroad just after 
 Christmas. Mere restlessness, he had taken it to be. Bore 
 dom with the endless bridge she played. Perhaps the 
 hope of picking up another barytone or even Fournier 
 himself. Henry had bestowed what sympathy he had to 
 spare in that direction upon John. 
 
 It was plain to him now, though the surface she showed 
 was as crisp and finely finished as ever, that she was pro 
 foundly unhappy. Was she ill, he wondered? Was some 
 threat hanging over her which she dared not look in the 
 face? Anyhow, he was sorry for her, and on the tide of 
 this sympathy there came back his old affection for her, 
 half cousinly, half romantic. He betrayed it candidly, 
 undeterred by his sister's good-natured or almost good- 
 natured scorn of this relapse. 
 
 He was careful whenever he was with Violet to avoid 
 saying anything that even slanted toward Joe Greer. He 
 had been strongly impressed that this was a sensitive point 
 which must not even be approached. But for this convic 
 tion, he would have thought more than once that she had 
 given him a lead toward Joe. Certainly, wishing to avoid 
 him as she did, she showed less than her characteristic tact 
 in sometimes asking questions or recalling incidents that 
 would lead the unwary into his neighborhood.
 
 364 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 On the morning of his last day but one in Mentone, as 
 the three of them sat idly after breakfast, looking out over 
 the Mediterranean, Henry said, "Two weeks from to-day 
 I shall be looking out at Lake Michigan from my office 
 window, and it may be just as blue and nice as this or it 
 may be buried in a snow-storm. There is no monotony 
 about it back there, anyhow." 
 
 ' ' I 'm going back with you, ' ' Violet said. ' ' I wish you 'd 
 go in and telegraph to Cook's to hold a cabin for me. We 
 can all run up to Nice this morning and buy my ticket. ' ' 
 
 "You don't mean that, Violet!" Margaret cried. 
 
 Violet nodded. "I spent most all last night packing," 
 she said. "I couldn't sleep." 
 
 There was a long silence, blank with the astonishment of 
 her two auditors, electric, on Violet's part, with an un 
 accountable emotion. "I know it's horrid," she burst out 
 again, "but I can't help it. I've got to go back and see 
 John. There are some things I want to talk with him 
 about." She managed, as she turned to Margaret, a short 
 laugh and a drier, more matter-of-fact manner. "If I 
 stayed here another two months, as we'd planned, you'd 
 get to hating the sight of me. I suppose Henry will be 
 fore he gets me to New York, but he 's so soft hearted, he '11 
 forgive me." 
 
 "I promised Portia Novelli I'd buy some things for her 
 in Italy," Margaret said, " furniture and glass, mostly 
 and I think she's counting on it. I don't see how I 
 can ... If you'd just told me a couple of weeks ago, 
 even . . . " 
 
 But Margaret mustn't even think of giving up the rest 
 of the trip to come home with her, Violet interrupted, 
 excitedly. It would be too silly! Of course she must go 
 on and carry out the plans the pair of them had made 
 together. It wasn't merely a matter of carrying out Por 
 tia's commissions. Harriet Aldrich was expecting them in 
 Rome, and with old friends like Anne Duncan and her 
 husband right here in Mentone, Margaret wouldn't feel 
 abandoned, would she?
 
 ROMANCE 365 
 
 Henry was uneasily aware that Violet's volubility was 
 not producing the effect it aimed at with Margaret. If 
 she said much more, Margaret would make it an affair of 
 conscience, decide that Violet needed her, and cut her 
 own vacation short. Either that, or begin thinking Violet 
 was trying to get rid of her ! He knew his sister extraordi 
 narily well. 
 
 He now interposed to say that Portia's commissions did 
 not strike him as important enough to go to Italy for, in 
 case Margaret, herself, had had enough of Europe for the 
 present, and felt like coming back with them. It would 
 be awfully nice to have her at home once more. She had 
 better take a day to think it over, then decide on the sole 
 basis of her own preference. He was sure there would be 
 room on the steamer homeward bound at this time of year. 
 
 "When he was alone, he questioned his own motives for 
 this interposition a little uneasily. Had he been wholly 
 unselfish in trying to save Margaret from being worried 
 or provoked into making a decision contrary to her real 
 choice, or was it perhaps true that the prospect of ten 
 days at sea alone with Violet attracted him the after 
 math of that old romance? He was able, however, to in 
 terrupt this train of thought \vith the audacious reflec 
 tion that it didn't in the least matter what his motives had 
 been. What he had done had been to make it possible 
 for Margaret to choose for herself. If it worked out to 
 giving a little extra fillip to his enjoyment of his vacation, 
 where was the harm? 
 
 Margaret decided she would stay on, long enough at 
 least to do Portia's shopping for her. She was really get 
 ting interested in the possibilities of the decorating and 
 furnishing business, she said, especially since knocking 
 around New England with Portia last summer. She knew, 
 it happened, quite a lot about Italian stuff, and if her 
 purchases were as sound as she hoped they would be, who 
 knew but it might result in her getting a commission to 
 come over again next year possibly in her going in with 
 Portia as a partner?
 
 She went down to Genoa to see Henry and Violet off, 
 and left them with a humorous injunction to be as senti 
 mental as they liked. She would feel a lot safer about 
 Henry, she concluded, tied to Violet's innocent apron 
 strings than ranging about Chicago on the loose. 
 
 When the flurry of departure was over, and they were 
 seated side by side in their deck chairs, Violet reverted to 
 that last remark of Margaret's, and commented upon it. 
 "I think it does frighten her a little the people you've 
 been playing around with in Chicago lately." 
 
 "I suppose your opinion of those people is the same as 
 hers, ' ' he said, after waiting half a minute to take thought. 
 Then, "Look here, Violet, do you want me to talk about 
 this ? You made it pretty clear to me one night last sum 
 mer, I thought, that you didn't." 
 
 She said quickly in rather a thin voice, ' ' I don 't want to 
 talk about anything, Henry, except how nice and blue the 
 sky is, and whether we shall have a chance to go ashore at 
 Gibraltar, and what time it is when they ring fire bells. 
 Unless you feel like remembering old times and holding 
 my hand once in a while. Not being sentimental about 
 us, the way we are now, you know, but about the pair 
 of kids we were that summer in France. Gracious, what 
 a time ago that seems! I'll bet you've forgotten all about 
 it." 
 
 He did not hold her hand, since it was his observation 
 of her that she didn't always like to be taken literally 
 when she threw out invitations like that; but he did with 
 smiling gravity set about disproving her assertion that 
 he had forgotten. He recalled a day at Chenonceau when, 
 tired of Diane de Poictiers, they had given the others the 
 slip, and embarked on the Cher in a canoe he found. 
 
 He noticed she was not contributing much to their com 
 mon stock of reminiscences. Either she had forgotten a 
 good deal, or she didn 't care to acknowledge her memories ; 
 and it was with an enthusiasm suggestive of relief that she 
 greeted a pair of promenaders walking by. New York 
 people they were parents of a girl in Dorothy's class at
 
 ROMANCE 367 
 
 Thorny croft. She hadn't known before that they were 
 aboard. 
 
 "Thank heaven," she cried, "now we can have some 
 bridge!" 
 
 They didn't see much of the Mediterranean after that, 
 nor the blue sky; and they pretty well ignored Gibraltar, 
 though they swung for hours in the very shadow of it. 
 
 Henry didn't mind. To his astonishment, he found 
 himself enjoying the smoke-room. His knowledge of 
 bridge had always been sound, and the weakness of his 
 play temperamental. "What made the difference now was 
 the hundred dollars or so that was left of his winnings at 
 Monte Carlo. This was velvet. He could lose it with a 
 clear conscience. When it was lost, he would stop play 
 ing. 
 
 But he didn 't lose. For days he consistently held better 
 than average hands, and he played them resolutely for 
 all they were worth. Meanwhile, he had followed the 
 others in putting his sovereign into the ship's pool. For 
 several days the numbers he drew seemed to him unlikely, 
 and he didn't bid them in. But at last one night, when 
 they weren't more than two days out of New York, he 
 drew a number that struck him as propitious, and fortified 
 by another good day at the bridge table, protected it 
 though it cost him around twenty pounds to do so. It was 
 the last pool on the voyage, and the play was high. 
 
 He wasn't particularly surprised, when the run was 
 posted just before lunch next day, to find that he had 
 won. Somehow, he had thought he would; but he was 
 shocked at the amount of his winnings. Heavens, there 
 was enough here to pay for his whole trip, and a good deal 
 of Margaret's in the bargain! 
 
 It was hard not to act apologetic about it, and to ride 
 down a misgiving that some of the other passengers might 
 be wondering if he wasn't a professional gambler. 
 
 Violet hadn't appeared yet that day, and after lunch he 
 permitted himself to be involved in a strictly masculine 
 bridge game, which he sat down to in the unavowed hope of
 
 368 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 losing some of his guilty gains. The cards ran strongly 
 his way, however, and he went right on winning, though 
 the game was protracted straight through the dinner hour 
 and on into the evening. 
 
 After dinner, Violet appeared in the smoke-room with 
 her two New York friends and an odd man a bearded for 
 eigner in some diplomatic service or other and this four 
 started a game of their own. 
 
 Toward eleven o'clock, the steward brought Henry a 
 note from Violet. "Come and get me out of this," it 
 read. "I can't stand any more of it." 
 
 "I hate beards," she said, as he steadied her across the 
 high sill to the companionway. "I don't see why people 
 wear them." It was an unpleasant night misty, 
 splashed with occasional squalls of rain, and the dark 
 decks were almost deserted. She spoke as if her teeth 
 were chattering with cold; and he wondered in frank per 
 plexity what he was going to do with her. 
 
 "You aren't well," he said. "What you really ought 
 to do is take a big drink of whisky, and turn in. ' ' 
 
 "Turn in!" she echoed derisively. "Go to sleep like a 
 good child and forget my nonsense and feel all right in 
 the morning? You aren't going to be rid of me as easily 
 as that. Come down with me while I get my fur coat 
 and an extra rug or two ; and then we '11 find a couple of 
 chairs in a dry corner, and be comfortable." 
 
 She had a big outside cabin, one deck down, which 
 opened by means of a short transverse corridor right out 
 on deck. At this outer door, he stopped. 
 
 "Come on in," she commanded, "and help me carry 
 out the things. You haven 't seen my room, anyway, have 
 you? It's rather nice." 
 
 She was feeling her way ahead of her in the dark. Now 
 she switched on a shaded lamp on the night stand. It 
 was a charming room, fantastically big for a steamer's 
 cabin brass bed, chaise longue, easy chairs, even (ludi 
 crously) a fireplace. He exclaimed at it in admiration. 
 
 "It would be nice," she said, "if we could sit and talk
 
 ROMANCE 369 
 
 right here." But then, at the look in his face, she 
 laughed. "I don't mean it, Henry, so don't get fright 
 ened. It's no good starting a scandal unless you're going 
 to have a run for your money." 
 
 She pulled her big fur coat out of the wardrobe, as she 
 spoke, let him help her into it, indicated the rugs he was 
 to bring along, and switched off the light. He waited 
 until she was clear of the door before he attempted to 
 follow her out, and he heard her give another short laugh 
 when, after a moment's hesitation, she had preceded him. 
 They found a pair of chairs just outside her window. 
 After he had tucked her up in the rug, he asked whether 
 he shouldn 't go, after all, and get the drink he had spoken 
 of. 
 
 "No," she said, "whisky wouldn't do me any good to 
 night. I'm not cold, anyhow. Sit down. I don't want 
 you to go away." She added, after he had wrapped his 
 own rug around him and settled himself beside her, "I'm 
 afraid. That's all the matter with me." 
 
 She didn't immediately answer when he asked quickly, 
 "What of?" 
 
 "1 have been wanting to talk to you all the way across. 
 That's why I got rid of Margaret, and came away with 
 you. Now we 're nearly to New York and I haven 't talked 
 to you yet. I knew unless I did something desperate to 
 night, I wouldn't." 
 
 "You don't mean," he said, with a laugh, "that you've 
 been afraid of me? Why, good heavens, I'm only 
 Henry!" 
 
 She echoed, "Only Henry," and matched his laugh. 
 "I should think you'd have hated me all these years. I 
 would have if I'd been you. You aren't 'only Henry' 
 though, any more. I guess that's why I've been afraid 
 of you. You're different, somehow. I didn't notice it at 
 Mentone, when Margaret was talking about it, but since 
 we've been on the boat, I've seen it plainly enough. 
 You're a terrific bridge player. I don't believe John ever 
 won as much money on a trip as you must have. ' '
 
 370 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 He remarked that no one could be more surprised at 
 this phenomenon than he, himself. "But it isn't that I 
 am different," he went on reflectively. "I've been ad 
 miring some people all my life for their nerve, wishing I 
 could be courageous and resolute as they were. I've just 
 found out how easy it is to play the game that way when 
 you're doing it all the while on velvet. If I had happened 
 to lose the hundred francs that I had decided to blow in on 
 a little thrill at Monte Carlo, I would have gone right on 
 being the same harmless little piker that's the word, 
 isn't it? that you've always known me for. But I never 
 did lose it. I was always ahead. I had quite a little of 
 it left money that I didn't think of as really mine, you 
 know when we came aboard. I had meant to turn it over 
 to Margaret, but I didn't somehow. Now, of course, I've 
 still got it it and a whole lot more. I've never really 
 had anything at stake, you see." 
 
 He ended a reflective pause with a short laugh. "Up 
 in the smoke-room to-day when the steward posted the 
 run, I saw a little Englishman admiring me for my un 
 concern over winning a great lot of money like that. I 
 thought it was ridiculous that he should, until it came over 
 me that a lot of people I had envied and admired for their 
 nerve were really just like me just like what I happened 
 for this once to be, I mean. People who have nothing at 
 stake ; people, some of them, who have never been on any 
 thing but velvet all their lives. It must be rather an easy 
 game to play, I think the whole game of success when 
 there isn 't any real penalty for losing. ' ' 
 
 "People like John, you mean," she interrupted, and 
 startled him into a horrified disclaimer. He had never 
 thought of John like that. 
 
 "It's true, however," she said flatly. "It really is 
 true of most of us stall-fed people. And you've been 
 thrown with us always; never had a chance to get away 
 from us until lately. But you've kept up your courage 
 and never complained about how hard it must have been. 
 Henry, have you got a good big handkerchief? Oh, don't
 
 ROMANCE 371 
 
 you care! I was sure to have cried about something to 
 night." 
 
 She went on after she had wiped her eyes and got her 
 voice under control again. "Anyhow, you are different. 
 I don't believe you'd ever have thought of a thing like 
 that if you hadn't known Joe Greer. He hates us, I think. 
 I know he despises us. Doesn't he? Hasn't he told you 
 so?" 
 
 It struck him as strange that he wasn't surprised at 
 her deliberately bringing Joe's name into their talk let 
 alone upon this note. It seemed to him now that he had 
 known from the first whom she had wanted to talk with 
 him about. Not as Margaret's "that man Greer," either. 
 As Joe. He answered her question rather at random, 
 aware that it didn't matter what he said. It wasn't in 
 formation she wanted. 
 
 "Joe is a good deal of a boy in some ways," he said. 
 "I don't believe his bite is ever as bad as his bark; and 
 as far as I know, he has never even barked at you. He 
 used to turn loose pretty gorgeously on the subject of 
 John every now and then, but he hasn't been doing that 
 lately. They seemed on the best of terms when I left 
 Chicago. It was when we were all three having lunch 
 together that they talked me into this vacation." 
 
 He heard her draw in a long tremulous breath, and on 
 a quite genuine impulse of affection, he reached under her 
 rug and found her hand. 
 
 "Come along with the talk," he commanded. "I can't 
 seem very formidable to you, even though I did win the 
 pool to-day." 
 
 "John is the person I ought to talk to," she said, "but 
 I never can do it. I've been having some awfully queer 
 feelings about John lately. They're what I'm frightened 
 about, I suppose. I've always known him so well, you 
 see. Twenty years more than half my life. "We've got 
 on awfully well as well as any two people ever do, I 
 guess. He has been frightfully kind to me. Generous, 
 and considerate, too in ways that lots of husbands aren't
 
 372 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 from what I hear. And of course everybody thinks the 
 world of him men and women you and the Whitneys, 
 and the Crawfords, and Rose and Rodney everybody that 
 really knows him. He's an old peach. I'm a lot luckier 
 than I deserve to be, I guess. But lately, he's looked 
 different to me, somehow." 
 
 "How's he changed?" Henry asked. 
 
 "That's it. He hasn't changed a bit. He's always 
 been just the way I see him now. There are some things 
 he never could understand. There's one he misunder 
 stands now and the more he tries to make it right, the 
 worse it gets ; and the more I try to make him let it alone, 
 the more he misunderstands. It's about that quarrel I 
 had with Mr. Greer last summer." She added quickly, 
 forestalling his attempt to speak, "It isn't him I care 
 about. It's John. You know about it, I suppose?" 
 
 "A little," Henry admitted. 
 
 "Did he tell you about it," she demanded sharply, "or 
 was it John?" 
 
 "Joe never mentioned the thing. John gave me his 
 view of it the night we went to Ravinia to hear Thais." 
 
 "His view!" Violet echoed bitterly. "Well, that's the 
 whole trouble. I'm going to tell you what really hap 
 pened. It isn't very nice to talk about. I was furious 
 with him." (Henry frowned in the dark, and then per 
 ceived that "him" unless otherwise explained had its ante 
 cedent in Joe Greer.) "I never was angrier in my life 
 nor had a better right to be. Because of course he is a 
 terrible outsider in lots of ways. And the people he goes 
 with the women chorus-girls and corset models! And 
 he never bothers to make any pretense about it. There 
 isn 't one scrap of niceness in him, that way. So of course, 
 with him, it was natural enough the thing that happened, 
 I mean. It was my fault in a way, because I might have 
 known. Only when you're with him, you forget that 
 side of him." 
 
 She stuck fast at that point for a minute or two, but 
 Henry, without trying to prompt her, sat still and waited
 
 ROMANCE 373 
 
 and continued to hold her hand. He had to overcome 
 a tendency also to hold his own breath. 
 
 ''Why, this is what happened," she went on at last. 
 "We were driving along in his car, you know, with the 
 curtain down because of the cloud-burst, and we slid off 
 the road and couldn't go on for a while. He got the idea 
 that I was trying to flirt with him. I don't mean that 
 exactly worse than that. He thought I was making 
 advances to him. Like one of his beastly chorus-girls, I 
 suppose." She uttered a ragged little laugh. "He was 
 shocked! He began preaching me a sermon. I didn't 
 know what he meant at first. How should I? When I 
 saw what was in his mind the beastly rotten thing that 
 was in his mind I felt as if he had thrown me out in the 
 mud and was wiping his feet on me. I told him if he 
 said another word, I 'd get out of the car and go find some 
 body to come back and kill him. I felt like killing him 
 myself. Well, he stopped then, and after a while it 
 cleared a little, and we went on and caught up with John 
 and Dorothy. 
 
 "He wanted to go into the house and see John, he said. 
 I don't know what he meant to do. You never can tell, 
 with him, what he will do. He may have wanted to make 
 his little speech to John. I suppose he was as angry by 
 that time as I was. Or perhaps he only wanted to go in 
 and look at him register virtue. But I knew if he did go 
 in, something would happen. And he kept on meaning 
 to do it right up to the very door. It was the most hor 
 rible thing that ever happened to me. At the very last 
 second before John opened the door, he went back to the 
 car and drove off. 
 
 "It left me looking like a wreck. I couldn't help that. 
 I was simply speechless for a while what with Dodo 
 looking on, and all. Scared half to death, the child was. 
 Maybe if I could have talked to John alone, then, I could 
 have told him what really happened ; but it wouldn 't have 
 been especially easy even then. Men are a lot alike in 
 those things. But with Dodo there, it wasn't possible.
 
 374 
 
 "Afterward, I did try to talk to John about it. I said 
 we had had a quarrel, and gone into the ditch ; and it was 
 going into the ditch that rattled me, I said. I hated Joe 
 and never wanted to see him again; but I gave John my 
 solemn word that nothing had happened, and there was 
 nothing to make a fuss about. I wanted the whole thing 
 let alone, and I wanted to be let alone about it. 
 
 "But you see, John wouldn't let it alone. He couldn't, 
 I suppose. He hasn't got a quick temper like mine or 
 Joe Greer's. He just keeps on stewing slow but sure. I 
 knew what he thought. He thought Joe had tried to take 
 some horrible advantage of me. But I couldn't very well 
 explain that he hadn't. You can see that, can't you? 
 Besides, I didn't want to explain. I didn't want to talk 
 about him at all. I was just about as furious with him, I 
 guess, as I would have been over what John thought it 
 was. Of course, I suppose he thinks that's what I told 
 John a regular Potiphar's wife affair. 
 
 "I don't care about that; really, I don't, Henry. It's 
 John that's driving me wild about it. He means to get 
 even with Joe. He as good as told me so, by way of 
 making me feel all right about it again. I don't have to 
 worry, he says. He is going to get his deserts. But do 
 you know how I believe he means to get even ? ' ' She tried 
 to laugh, but sobbed instead. "By taking his money away 
 from him, or fixing it so he can't get rich out of your 
 beastly linen company. I don't know anything, really. 
 It's just hints. I am to be patient, and wait and see and 
 it will all come right. Right! 
 
 "Well, there you are. I guess you've got it all now. 
 Maybe you can see how I feel about John." Her hold on 
 Henry's hand tightened into a frenzied clutch. "If John 
 thought what he does think, and if he really cared for me, 
 myself, he'd take Joe Greer out and shoot him. But he's 
 going to take his money away from him instead, and keep 
 it! And it's just what John would do, Henry. That is 
 the horrible thing I've come to see. Can you imagine 
 how it will look to Joe when it has all happened? Can
 
 ROMANCE 375 
 
 you see what he'll think about both of us, John and me? 
 Well, I think just about the same thing he will. That's 
 what I'm thinking now." 
 
 Always the first thing in Henry to respond to any ap 
 peal was his tenderness. He saw Violet's predicament 
 part of it, anyhow. Incidentally, it was hours before he 
 perceived his own. "I'm sure," he began, "that John 
 believes exactly what you told him, and what he after 
 ward told me that Joe had not committed or attempted 
 any crime ; that he had done nothing, I mean, that required 
 to be acted upon. He was angry with himself, first of 
 all, so he said to me, for having put you in a position 
 where an unpleasant experience could happen to you ; and 
 I think he was held back from doing anything overt by 
 his feeling that you wouldn 't want it done that way. And 
 then you've got to remember that he's John, just as much 
 as Joe's Joe. There isn't the slightest doubt he cares for 
 you." 
 
 "Who?" she asked sharply. Then in the same breath, 
 "Oh, John you mean. Yes, of course he does in his 
 way. ' ' 
 
 "It's the only way he has," Henry remarked, a little at 
 random, for that "who" of hers had startled him. 
 
 "Henry," she asked, after a silence, "has he ever said 
 anything about me to you at all since the day he was 
 hurt, and that daughter of his eloped in an aeroplane ? ' ' 
 
 To the best of his memory, he told her, Joe had not said 
 a word. 
 
 "Because," she explained, "I did a rather crazy thing. 
 I went to see him about a week after it happened. His 
 butler came to the door and said Mr. Greer wasn't seeing 
 anybody. I didn't leave a card or anything, but I'm sure 
 the man knows me. I wondered if he had told Joe. It 
 seemed as if I had to do something." 
 
 "The thing you've got to do," Henry said, "for your 
 own peace of mind, is to talk to John. Explain the whole 
 thing; tell him what really happened in the car that day, 
 just as you've told it to me."
 
 376 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 "I can't tell him," she answered desperately. "Not 
 now; he wouldn't believe me. Think how it would look 
 after all these months! He'd think I had fallen in love 
 with Joe, and was trying to shield him. It's idiotic of 
 course, but that 's what he 'd think. Any man would any 
 husband. No, I've told it to you, and you're the only per 
 son I could possibly tell it to. You've got to talk to John 
 yourself. Or to somebody." 
 
 Of course there could be no doubt what "somebody" 
 she meant. Henry was touched by the almost childish 
 naivete of this. He felt frightfully sorry for Violet, but 
 he hadn't at the time taken very seriously her apparent 
 intention to involve him in the matter. She brought this 
 home to him though, two days later when they parted in 
 New York. She was stopping off for a day or two to visit 
 Dorothy at school, while Henry of course was going 
 straight through to Chicago. She prolonged their final 
 handshake to say, "You're a dear, Henry, to come to the 
 rescue with John and Mr. Greer. I've begun sleeping again 
 since you said you'd fix it up for me. I don't care whom 
 you talk to, you knoAV, as long as you tell somebody. I don't 
 deserve to have you kind to me like that. That's the way 
 you are. Good-by. I'll see you in Chicago as soon as I 
 come back." 
 
 She was gone before her cousin, bewildered at first, 
 and then aghast, could utter a disclamatory word. 
 
 4 
 
 It is to be hoped that Violet had slept that night, for 
 Henry in his berth on the Chicago train lay broad awake 
 till morning, thinking anything but kindly thoughts of his 
 confiding cousin. That the thing she, without disguise, 
 expected him to do looked no doubt simple enough to her, 
 was a minor exasperation in his dilemma. 
 
 Violet had not meant to make Joe look like a criminal 
 in her husband's eyes. She had assured him, in fact, that 
 this was not the case; but she hadn't been able to uproot 
 John's misconception. John persisted in regarding Joe
 
 ROMANCE 377 
 
 as an enemy. John was planning to get even with him 
 through the channels of business the precise method of 
 his attack unknown and Joe was to take warning, and 
 look out for himself. This was the substance of what 
 Violet wanted Henry to tell Joe as soon as he reached 
 Chicago. 
 
 Simple enough, as far as Violet could see. "What she 
 couldn't see and her vestigial sense of fair play would 
 never have given her a hint of it was the price Henry 
 would have to pay. To square this procedure with his own 
 obligatory loyalty to John, he would have to go to John 
 and tell him substantially what he had done; acknow 
 ledge, in other words, that he had gone over to the 
 enemy. Such an admission would justify John in calling 
 him a turncoat, a traitor, and an ungrateful whelp. It 
 would justify him, too, in stripping Henry summarily of 
 his job, and chucking him out in a cold world to fend for 
 himself. It was exactly the situation that he had caught 
 a glimpse of one summer night last year, and had shrunk 
 from as a nightmare. 
 
 To Violet, of course, he owed no such sacrifice as this. 
 It would be simple idiocy to make it for her. He would 
 be fully justified in telling her, or in writing her a note to 
 say, that he could not undertake the errand she had 
 charged him with, and that she had mistaken him if she 
 thought he had agreed to do it. There was nothing more 
 to it than that, as far as Violet was concerned. But it 
 wasn't Violet that he was concerned about. It was poor 
 old Joe. 
 
 He had tried often enough, but never successfully, to 
 account for the warmth of affection for Joe that had grown 
 up in him during the past year. It was not based on 
 gratitude. John Williamson was the person he had been 
 grateful to for half his life, while Joe had never gone out 
 of his way appreciably to be of service to him. Still less 
 was it based on congruities of taste and temper. It would 
 hardly be possible to find two men more widely different, 
 if one judged by their surfaces anyhow, than he and Joe.
 
 378 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 Surfaces were perhaps misleading. Henry had often 
 recalled their first talk together, which Joe had begun by 
 asking him to explain John Williamson. Henry could 
 still recall the surprising sensation he had of being under 
 stood, taken at an unwonted value. This sense, though it 
 has ceased to be surprising, had never faded to the point 
 where he was unconscious of it. He had never left Joe, 
 even after the briefest encounter without being aware of 
 an enhanced confidence in himself. Margaret made no 
 bones of calling this feeling of his an infatuation. Joe 
 flattered him, she said, deliberately ; and she sometimes im 
 plied that this was being done for a sinister purpose. 
 
 This, with due deference to Margaret's opinion, Henry 
 knew to be nonsense. Just as unadulterated nonsense as 
 some of the ideas Margaret entertained about Jennie Mae- 
 Arthur. Joe wouldn't take the trouble to flatter anybody. 
 Candor was outstanding among his qualities, and was often 
 carried to outrageous lengths. No, Joe liked him ; was his 
 friend; had been from the day of their first meeting. 
 "Whatever the basis of it, there the thing was not to be 
 explained away. It was unique, too, in Henry 's experience. 
 He had never formed a friendship of just that quality with 
 any other man. 
 
 "Well, this was what the situation boiled down to a 
 choice between technical loyalty to John and his real loy 
 alty to Joe Greer. It wasn't fair to blame Violet for his 
 quandary. She didn't enter into the situation at all. She 
 had told him nothing about John's intentions in their talk 
 on deck that night, that John himself had not made clear 
 to him clear enough at least the night they had heard 
 Thais at Ravinia. For the present, John had said, it 
 wasn't feasible to get rid of Joe. He would be indispen 
 sable to their enterprise, at least for another year. Henry, 
 meanwhile, was to keep on good terms with him, quiet his 
 suspicions, see that he didn't, as John put it, leave the 
 rails. 
 
 And Henry, without spoken protest, had received the 
 instructions! It would be fair to say, he supposed, that
 
 ROMANCE 379 
 
 he had acted upon them. Certainly he had given Joe no 
 intimation of anything amiss. He had worried himself 
 half sick about it, to be sure. But there was no merit in 
 that; none that Joe would be able to see when the mine 
 whatever it was that they were planting under him 
 should be sprung. 
 
 It was a rotten situation. Intolerable, whatever the al 
 ternative consequences should turn out to be. He would 
 put an end to it somehow as soon as he reached Chicago 
 before the annual meeting. Their mine likely enough 
 was timed to go off upon that occasion. That may have 
 been John's reason for packing him off to Europe. A 
 week from now oh, sooner than that ; next Monday morn 
 ing he would be out looking for a job. 
 
 He dared not let himself think about that. When he 
 glanced ahead at that prospect, the plan of action that 
 was crystallizing in his mind seemed not so much terrify 
 ing as sheerly absurd the stuff of a nightmare rather 
 than a sober reality. The shape of his plan derived from 
 something he had said to Violet. The person to talk to, he 
 had told her, was John, himself. He would take a dose 
 of his own medicine. It would be infinitely harder, of 
 course, to defy John than it would be to warn Joe; but 
 easier than it would be to confess to John after he had 
 warned Joe. 
 
 In a moment of weakness a third alternative occurred to 
 him. Suppose instead of going to either of them, he were 
 to consult Jennie? She had been on the ground all the 
 while; she was extraordinarily astute; she might already 
 have seen through the plan, assuming there was a plan, 
 against Joe's fortunes, and warned the boss to be on his 
 guard. Even if she had not, a word or two the most im 
 palpable sort of hint would be enough, because it wasn't 
 as if Henry really knew anything. 
 
 It was with a burst of honest anger that he cast this pu 
 sillanimous project out of his mind. It was no good think 
 ing about it any longer. There was one, and just one, 
 decent thing for him to do and this was to go to John.
 
 380 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 He didn't know just what he would say or how he would 
 begin. That would have to be left to the moment. 
 
 As it turned out, no amount of preparation or rehears 
 ing would have done Henry any good, for John took all 
 the wind out of his sails in the first two minutes. There 
 was no waiting in the outer office this time. The moment 
 his name went in, Rollie Mill came out, and with the cere 
 monious gravity of a good undertaker, took him straight 
 back into the innermost of John's offices. 
 
 "I'm glad you turned up to-day," John said. "I was 
 afraid Violet might have persuaded you to wait and come 
 on with her and I wanted a talk with you as soon as I 
 could get it. Greer's put one over onus, Henry. A smooth 
 first-class job, right under our noses. He'll go into Sat 
 urday's meeting with an absolute voting control of the 
 stock." 
 
 "I hope," Henry said blankly (and quite sincerely too. 
 He was completely disorientated by this kaleidoscopic 
 change in the situation) "I hope it isn't due to something 
 that I have overlooked." 
 
 "Lord, no," John assured him. "It isn't your fault. 
 You voted with us on it. No ; we sawed ourselves off with 
 the limb, while he stood by and told us he wished we 
 wouldn't. Greer's got the stock we issued to that fake 
 inventor." 
 
 He went on, after an interval of purely emotional com 
 ment on the situation, to tell Henry how they had put out 
 a feeler or two to determine whether this stock was in the 
 market. It was only a natural thing to do. If anybody 
 was going to get those shares, they preferred it to be 
 themselves. Something about the way in which their ad 
 vances were received had led them to suspect that there 
 was something beneath the surface; so Gregory Corbett 
 had managed to get in personal touch with the inventor, 
 the pretext being that Gregory wished to discuss some 
 of the technical points about the process with him. "Well, 
 according to Greg, the man didn't understand the process, 
 himself. A rather shrewd sort of hick, he was ! no educa-
 
 ROMANCE 381 
 
 tion at all, and really a little nutty about cornstalks. He 
 hadn't the least glimmer of an understanding of bacteri 
 ology. That made it plain, of course, that, he, himself, 
 never could have invented the process he had patented, and 
 they had paid him for. They looked him up pretty care 
 fully through their local banking connections ; found he had 
 never had any money at all until along last August, when 
 he cashed a Chicago draft for ten thousand dollars. Plain 
 enough where he got it, of course. 
 
 "We had him up here and went after him hammer and 
 tongs to buy that stock. He claimed right up to the last 
 minute that he had the stock, and that he was the inventor 
 of the process we had infringed; but we made him an 
 offer at last that brought the sweat right out on him. 
 Then he caved in and admitted that the shares weren't 
 his any more. He couldn't get them for us, he said, if 
 we offered him all the money in Chicago. So we know 
 where they are, all right. They are locked up in Joe 
 Greer's strong box. 
 
 "But what we don't know is what he is going to do 
 Saturday at the meeting. I wrote him a letter day before 
 yesterday to feel him out. Said we would be very glad to 
 reelect the whole directorate, and asked him if that would 
 be satisfactory to him. I got an answer from him this 
 morning, saying it would; but of course we don't know 
 whether he'll play fair or not. 
 
 "We've got to pretend we think so. The only protection 
 we've got for the present is that he doesn't know that we 
 know he's got that stock at least I don't believe he 
 knows. That dummy inventor of his will be afraid to 
 tell him. As long as Greer thinks we are unsuspicious, he 
 may let things ride for a while. You'll treat him as if 
 nothing had happened, of course. Keep your eyes open, 
 and tell me if he lets anything slip. Have you seen him 
 since you got home?" 
 
 "No," Henry said blankly. "I thought I would come 
 straight to you, first." 
 
 "Glad you did," said John, getting up by way of end-
 
 382 JOSEPH GREEE AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 ing the audience. "But you had better go over and hook 
 up with him as soon as you can. We are depending on 
 you from now on, you know." This was genially, almost 
 humorously, said, but it rattled Henry worse than ever. 
 
 "I don't think you ought to rely on me," he began 
 miserably. 
 
 But John, with a laugh and a thump on the back, cut 
 him short. "Don't you worry about it," he said. "Did 
 you have a good trip ? How 's Violet looking ? She wired 
 me from New York that she was feeling a whole lot 
 better. She's coming home Friday, I believe." 
 
 Evidently she did, for she telephoned Henry Friday 
 night, apparently for the mere cousinly purpose of saying 
 "Hello," and asking how it seemed to be back in Chicago. 
 He suspected she would have liked some report from him 
 upon the mission he was supposed to have undertaken for 
 her; but she didn't ask for anything of the sort, nor too 
 obviously wait for it; She finished their little talk by tell 
 ing him she meant to fulfill to-morrow a promise she had 
 made Margaret to look over his flat and see what condition 
 it was in, after having stood housekeeperless so long. If 
 she came around to-morrow, some time after lunch, would 
 anybody be there to let her in? 
 
 Henry promised that in case the maid was out, as she 
 would be likely to be on Saturday afternoon, he would 
 see that a key was left with the people in the apartment 
 below. It struck him as a little unlike his sister to have 
 asked Violet to go poking about the flat in search of 
 domestic horrors incident to a long period of bachelor oc 
 cupancy, but he gave it no more than a passing thought. 
 He had more important matters on his mind. 
 
 The annual meeting was to be to-morrow afternoon, and 
 Henry was approaching this with all the sensations of a 
 schoolboy going into a hard examination. Where would 
 he be, he wondered what sort of world would he find 
 confronting him to-morrow night? If Joe had any mine 
 of his own to spring, he had certainly given Henry no in 
 timation of it.
 
 ROMANCE 383 
 
 The meeting went off with an appearance of unanimity 
 and good will which Henry found almost farcical in the 
 light of the bitter antagonisms he knew were bristling 
 about *the board. Prosperity of course is a wonderful un 
 guent, and Joe's report was so eloquent of the prospect of 
 it that the development of any friction upon the sur 
 face of things would have been impossible. Nothing short 
 of a volcanic eruption could have broken through and 
 this didn't happen. 
 
 Joe was able to report the organization of forty-two 
 subsidiary companies, since their original four mills had 
 got into productive operation. The normal capactiy of 
 each of these subsidiary units was four thousand tons of 
 straw, which meant that nearly ten per cent, of the en~ 
 tire straw crop of the flax-growing country would be 
 processed next year under their patents. 
 
 The standard organization of these subsidiaries was 
 based upon a local cash subscription of fifty thousand dol 
 lars, twenty thousand of which was to be paid to the 
 parent company for a complete equipment of machinery. 
 Since Corbett & Company was selling this machinery to 
 the Greer Company for fifteen thousand dollars a set, 
 the Greer Company showed a profit here of over two 
 hundred thousand dollars. 
 
 Each of the subsidiary companies paid for its license 
 under the patent by the issuance to the Greer Company of 
 fifty thousand dollars of seven per cent, preferred stock, 
 this being one-half of its preferred capitalization. The 
 common stock in the subsidiaries was all held by the local 
 subscribers to the remainder of the preferred, it being 
 issued to them share for share. The Greer Company 
 would thus receive in lieu of royalty from each of its sub 
 sidiaries, thirty-five hundred dollars a year in dividends 
 on its preferred stock, which figured a total revenue to 
 the parent company of one hundred forty-seven thousand 
 dollars annually. 
 
 The bulk of the profits to be expected, however, would
 
 384 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 derive from the contract into which the Greer Company 
 had entered with the subsidiaries. The Greer Company 
 agreed to buy the entire output of all the subsidiary 
 companies at a price figured upon the sum of an average 
 cost of the straw plus the cost of processing as shown by 
 the four mills in operation, and a twenty per cent, manu 
 facturer's profit. The Greer Company agreed further to 
 pay half of its profits in merchandising this material, pro 
 rated according to tonnage, to the subsidiary companies. 
 It wasn't possible, of course, to compute this profit in ad 
 vance, but with market conditions as they were to-day, it 
 would be very large, indeed. 
 
 It had required, Joe concluded, no skill or effort at per 
 suasion to induce these groups of local capitalists to or 
 ganize. Entlmsiasm there was at a high pitch, and he 
 believed it to be fully warranted. It was his confident 
 expectation that the subsidiaries, out of their share of the 
 profits on one year's crop, would get back the full amount 
 of their investment. Most of them, he thought, would 
 have sufficient working capital left, after building their 
 warehouses and paying for the machinery, to finance 
 themselves comfortably; but in any case, an ample line of 
 credit would be available in the local banks. The im 
 portant thing in the immediate future was to make sure 
 that the plants were properly built, their equipments 
 correctly installed, and the whole job completed in time 
 to be ready for this summer's harvest. With this in mind, 
 he expected to spend most of his time during this spring 
 and summer in the Northwest, supervising the work and 
 speeding it up. 
 
 ' ' If we can get those mills equipped, I believe we '11 have 
 the job done. We know the process by experience now, as 
 well as in theory. We know the stuff is good. We know 
 the linen industry has been starving for years for raw 
 material, and we believe we are going to have thirty-two 
 million pounds of it to offer before a year from now. 
 That's how we stand, and I think we're to be congratu 
 lated. "
 
 ROMANCE 385 
 
 Joe possessed somehow the latchkey to Henry's imagi 
 nation. Whenever he talked consecutively about any 
 thing, he transported Henry to the actual ground, made 
 him see the thing Joe was talking about and feel, too, 
 with a sharper, clearer ring of emotion. There was con 
 veyed to him now an exciting sense of the momentum of 
 this thing Joe had been doing. A year ago when they had 
 been talking possibilities and percentages, millions of dol 
 lars and thousands of tons, it had seemed too unreal for 
 Henry's imagination to kindle at it; and their actual be 
 ginnings had seemed trivial ludicrous compared to the 
 vein they had been talking in. Personally, Joe had fas 
 cinated him, but the present occupation of his days had 
 never seemed to Henry quite worthy of him. 
 
 The presentation now of that multitude of activities ar 
 ticulated into a single accomplishment had an effect upon 
 Henry that fell not far short of awe. It was like seeing 
 a great sail hoisted and burgeoning to the wind. He had 
 been shocked a day or two ago when John had told him of 
 the trick Joe had resorted to for getting control of the 
 company, as well as hurt on his own account that his 
 friend should have deceived him. Now the matter seemed 
 negligible. Joe was entitled to the control of the com 
 pany. His creative energy was the only vital principle 
 in it. It was ludicrous, really, that the unimaginative in 
 telligence of the financiers should have attempted to bar 
 his path to it. Attempting to overreach him, they had 
 found themselves overreached. Gently, humorously 
 rather, he had outwitted them all. Henry could remember 
 now with a smile, his own distress over having to vote 
 against Joe in that memorable matter of the stock pay 
 ment for the patents. 
 
 What if, he wondered fantastically, the others around 
 the table were suddenly to see the thing in the same light ? 
 What if John were to say, "Look here, Joe, we know 
 you've got control of the company, but that's all right. 
 We ought to have given it to you from the first. We are 
 satisfied to let you run the thing. All we want is the
 
 386 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 fun of watching you do it." How natural an outbreak 
 like that would be and how monstrously impossible it 
 was! 
 
 There was no more expression in any of their faces than 
 if they had been playing bridge; but underneath their 
 smooth urbane surface, Henry was aware of an uneasy 
 alertness. What was he trying to do, here, and what did he 
 mean by this ? And for a climax, would he after all break 
 his word, and elect his own board of directors at the end 
 of the meeting? He didn't, of course Henry could have 
 told them hours ago that he would not. 
 
 The formal routine of winding up the business of the 
 meeting was clicked off under Jennie's practised hand as 
 rapidly as possible. As soon as the adjournment was 
 taken, John with Gregory and Frank Crawford went 
 away. There was no disposition on their part to linger 
 for an informal discussion of affairs, or for the bottle of 
 ancient Scotch which Joe offered to produce. They 
 would be having a confab of their own, Henry supposed, 
 and was glad they hadn't invited him to take part in it. 
 There was momentarily a thoughtful look in Joe's eye as 
 he watched their broad top-coated backs receding down the 
 corridor. 
 
 He produced his bottle. Jennie, though invited, de 
 clined to join them over it. She wanted to get her minutes 
 in shape, she said. Henry exclaimed in frank astonish 
 ment at the enormous size of the drink Joe poured for 
 himself an ordinary tumbler it was, and he had filled it 
 more than two-thirds full. And he surprised Henry again 
 by betraying a flash of embarrassment over Henry's call 
 ing attention to it. He drank down the whisky, though, 
 like so much water. He was not in a talkative mood, 
 Henry observed. Not melancholy either, but a little pre 
 occupied. He got up as soon as Henry had done sipping 
 his drink, saying, "If you're going home, I'll drive you 
 up."
 
 ROMANCE 387 
 
 6 
 
 Henry hadn't meant particularly to go home just then. 
 It was only about four o'clock in the afternoon, and 
 momentarily he hesitated. Before he could speak, Joe 
 added, "I'll tell you what. We'll take the bottle along 
 with us up to your place, and sit down with it as long as 
 you like. I want to get out of here, that's all." 
 
 Henry was tickled by this humorous attribution to him 
 of a reluctance to desert a bottle of Scotch, and pleased 
 besides with Joe's offer to pay him a visit, so he was 
 puzzled by a moment of reluctance which he unmistakably 
 felt. Something or other, his conscience it seemed to be, 
 was trying to tell him he ought not take Joe home with 
 him to-day. They were half-way there in Joe's car and 
 he was in the act of saying apologetically that the place 
 looked like the devil with Margaret so long away, when 
 the train of association completed itself. Violet! She 
 had spoken of coming to his flat this afternoon. 
 
 He spent a desperate minute or two in the vain search 
 for a pretext for taking Joe somewhere else. He con 
 templated telling him in so many words that Violet might 
 be there and that he'd better not come in, but this didn't 
 seem a possible thing to do, if for no other reason than that 
 it involved an admission that he knew more of the affair 
 than he was supposed to know. Anyhow, Violet had 
 spoken of running in for a few minutes after lunch, and 
 it was now well after four. Assuming that she'd carried 
 out her intention at all, which was not any too likely, 
 she'd almost certainly have gone by now. He'd have to 
 chance it. 
 
 Oddly enough, after the first horrified moment when he 
 saw the two coming face to face, he was enormously re 
 lieved that it had happened. Joe happened to be stand 
 ing where Violet couldn't see him as she came down the 
 corridor to the sitting-room, and she called gaily to Henry 
 that she had him in her power now. She could black 
 mail him with Margaret to any tune she liked, after this 
 look about the flat.
 
 388 JOSEPH GREER AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 She flushed like a schoolgirl at the sight of Joe, threw 
 him a rather cavalier nod of greeting, and then, seeming 
 to change her mind about it, went deliberately up to him 
 and held out her hand. 
 
 ' ' I wonder if you ever got a message from me, ' ' she said 
 composedly enough but without trying to make the words 
 sound completely casual. "I left one with your butler, 
 one day last winter when you were hurt. I hope you're 
 quite all right again. I've known, the last two or three 
 months, how miserable it is to be ilL" 
 
 Joe remarked, without answering her question, that 
 he'd heard she hadn't been well but that, apparently, her 
 trip had done her good. 
 
 "I don't know whether it was going away or coming 
 back that did it," she said, so lightly and swiftly that 
 Henry was not quite sure whether he'd heard her aright 
 or not. She went straight on, with a good deal more em 
 phasis, to mention tea. She thought she could manage to 
 produce some if they'd like it. 
 
 "I'll make tea in a minute, if you would like some," 
 Henry said. ' ' Joe insists that it 's too stimulating for him, 
 and won't drink it but he brought along a bottle of 
 Scotch." 
 
 This drew, amazingly, a black look from Joe. It was 
 gone in an instant, and he said with a laugh that that 
 bottle of Scotch had been brought along for Henry, and 
 no one else. For himself, he would like a cup of tea as 
 well as anything he could think of. 
 
 Another odd thing happened then. Violet offered to 
 go and make it, naturally enough, since she had been the 
 one who had suggested having it; and Henry, equally of 
 course, insisted on doing it himself. This was his house, 
 and tea-making was his specialty. Even Margaret had 
 been known to admit that he understood it better than she 
 did. He was in the midst of this and on his way to the 
 door when the sudden misgiving assailed him that Violet 
 might not want to be left alone with Joe, and that her in 
 sistence on making the tea had been sincere. He stopped,
 
 ROMANCE 389 
 
 tried, without succeeding, to pick up Violet's eye, took 
 another hesitating step toward the door, and finally 
 wavered into saying, ' ' Of course if you would rather make 
 it, Violet ..." 
 
 She whipped around, and in so doing turned her back 
 squarely on Joe, her face ablaze with an uncontrollable ex 
 asperation. Her voice had a perceptible edge on it, too, 
 though luckily it was not as expressive as her face, as she 
 said, "I've no passion for making tea, Henry, nor even 
 for drinking it if it's any bother." 
 
 Henry said it wasn't, of course, and slunk away pre 
 cipitately to the kitchen. He couldn't wonder that his 
 clumsiness had annoyed her. Floundering about like that, 
 he had heavily underscored whatever difficulty there might 
 have been in the situation for either. But a mere passing 
 flash of irritation would not have produced as deep a 
 detonation as that. He had been the target for them often 
 enough to know. This was like the snapping of a wire 
 that had been drawing tighter and tighter for a long time. 
 It was as if she had endured his presence there in the 
 room to the last possible moment, and had then been con 
 fronted by the possibility that he would not leave it at all. 
 
 Oh, he was exaggerating, of course, the way he always 
 did making mountains out of molehills. Naturally, she 
 had been anxious to get rid of him. Here was an un 
 foreseen chance to clear up a misconception which had 
 been distressing her for months; and she had seen herself 
 in danger of being balked of it by her cousin's sheer in 
 excusable stupidity. He felt horribly foolish out there, 
 somehow, puttering around in the kitchen, not knowing 
 whether to hurry or to delay his tea-making operation. 
 He did both by turns. 
 
 But the really appalling idea that this might be, on the 
 part of both Joe and Violet, a deliberate rendezvous, did 
 not break over him until he was just on the point of bear 
 ing down upon them again with his tray. He set the tray 
 down again upon the kitchen table he was lucky not to 
 have dropped it and sat down himself on a kitchen chair.
 
 390 JOSEPH QUEER AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 It was a crazy notion, of course, utterly unwarranted, 
 outrageous and yet there was a fatal sort of plausibility 
 about it. Violet's telephoning and arranging to get the 
 key, and Joe's impatience the moment the meeting was 
 over to come home with him. Violet had always been a 
 flirt, but she had never, he thought, done anything that 
 went as far as this. He wished, forlornly, that he never 
 thought of things like that; and he went on from there to 
 wish with passionate intensity that when he did think of 
 them, he could make up his mind what to do about it. 
 
 He experienced a temporary relief in finding the pair 
 composedly talking commonplaces, when he came in with 
 the tray, and for the twenty minutes or so before Violet 
 went away, the conversation ran easily enough upon no 
 more serious topic than his own sudden emergence upon 
 Violet's horizon, after all these years, as a brilliantly suc 
 cessful bridge player and gambler upon steamer pools. 
 
 She took her leave of Joe informally, without another 
 handshake, upon the vaguely expressed hope that he would 
 come to see them some time. ' ' Though if you 're going to 
 be up north all summer, I don't suppose you will." 
 
 To Henry, she said when he had followed her into the 
 vestibule, "I haven't made up my mind yet what sort of 
 blackmail I'm going to levy on you for not telling Mar 
 garet what this place looks like but when I decide what I 
 want, I'll let you know." 
 
 Could she possibly, mean, Henry wondered; that she 
 didn't want Margaret told about this meeting with Joe? 
 And hadn't the indifference of her parting with Joe been 
 really a little overdone? Henry had something new to 
 worry about,, There wasn't any doubt of that. 
 
 7 
 
 For Joe, that handful of minutes with Violet, while 
 Henry was out in the kitchen making tea, contained one 
 of the most astonishing and revolutionary experiences of 
 his life. 
 
 He had gone to the rendezvous not all all sure whom he
 
 ROMANCE 391 
 
 would find there, nor what the purpose of it was. Clear 
 curiosity was all that had led him to keep it. A note in 
 a plain sealed envelope had been handed him by Anson the 
 night before, delivered, the man said by an A. D. T. 
 messenger. "If you care to go home with Henry Craven 
 after the meeting to-morrow ..." That was all it said, 
 and there was no signature. He wasn't familiar with 
 Violet's handwriting, and he did not at once think of her 
 as a possible author of it. 
 
 He was at first disposed to regard Henry as the person 
 primarily concerned. His manner had struck Joe as not 
 quite natural since his return; and Jennie, to whom he'd 
 mentioned this, confirmed his impression even more em 
 phatically. "He's not a bit like himself, with me," she 
 said. Had he got himself into a scrape of some sort, Joe 
 wondered. You never could tell. But the reference to 
 the meeting limited the zone of conjecture very materially. 
 Barring Jennie and the girls in the office, there weren't 
 many women who knew they were to hold a meeting to 
 morrow afternoon. 
 
 Once he'd thought of Violet a wild enough cast of the 
 imagination, certainly the phraseology of the note pointed 
 to her almost conclusively. He could not even conjecture, 
 though, what could have driven her to an act like this, 
 Panic, one would suppose, but what could she think she 
 had to be afraid of after this lapse of months? And he'd 
 done nothing to cause a sudden recrudescence of her hatred 
 of him. Of course, he'd go and see. He went braced, he 
 supposed, for anything. 
 
 His first look at her mystified him, the sudden bright 
 flush and the emotion which spoke from her wide open 
 eyes; partly fright, it was, but not all. And of the anger 
 he 'd expected, not a trace ! 
 
 What she said was surprising enough; not that she'd 
 sent him a message when he was hurt, but that she'd left 
 it, which meant, if words meant anything, that she had 
 come in person to see him. The fact was new to him now, 
 but this did not impeach the truth of it. He had told
 
 392 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 An son on one of those black days, that he didn't want to 
 be told the names of his visitors. He recognized that it 
 was an amazing thing for her to have done, but the as 
 tonishment he felt now was not over the visit nor even 
 over her admitting that she had paid it, but over the 
 manner in which the admission was made. It was a for 
 mal treaty of peace, an announcement of her new line, 
 presented with reference to their public, Henry. 
 
 But that something very different underlay this public 
 manner, Joe saw and believed she meant him to see. 
 Why the devil couldn't Henry see it and take himself off? 
 (He had got Joe on a raw nerve with that remark, his 
 second that day, about the bottle of Scotch. Joe was de 
 veloping an angry distaste these days for jocular refer 
 ences to his fondness for whisky or the amount of it he 
 consumed. He was beginning to do his serious drinking 
 in solitude.) He held his breath over the way she flared 
 up and swept her cousin out of the room, and he did not 
 move, nor did she, until they heard the flop of the swing 
 door into the kitchen. 
 
 Then she turned and faced him, and he moved a step 
 toward her and stopped. Something the same look was 
 in her face that he had seen just after he had kissed her, 
 the look that had made him think of Beatrice; not a 
 woman's look at all a child's. It was troubled now, and 
 desperately resolute. Her pose was not a woman 's, either ; 
 it was a schoolgirl's. He saw her lips were trembling 
 and felt a lump come into his throat. 
 
 "I must say it quickly," she began, and then for a 
 matter of seconds stood silent. "It was true, what you 
 said in the car that day. It was all true. That's why 
 it made me so angry. I didn't know it till you said it. 
 That's that's one of the things I had to tell you. I 
 didn 't think I 'd ever do it but I haven 't been sleeping very 
 well. And none of the things I tried, to get it out of 
 my head, were any good ... So I thought if I told you 
 . . . You see why, don't you? I mean, you understand 
 it isn't . ."
 
 ROMANCE 393 
 
 "Yes, I understand," he told her hastily. This was 
 quite untrue. In the revulsion of feeling that had swept 
 over him, he was bewildered. The thing to do, he ad 
 monished himself, was to remember every word she said 
 so that he could think out her incredible meaning after 
 ward. They wouldn't have much more time, now. 
 Henry might be coming back any minute. "I wish you'd 
 sit down," he said, and after she had obeyed him, in a 
 sort of entranced docility, he added, "If there's anything 
 you want me to do . . . " 
 
 "There isn't," she interrupted with a gasp; "not a 
 thing. It's just ..." She broke off there and clasped 
 her hands tight in her lap, between her knees. "There's 
 something else I want you to know. I've never told John 
 what really happened that day. But I didn't tell him 
 what you must have thought I did. I said it wasn't any 
 thing. I gave him my word it wasn 't. I just wanted him 
 to let me alone and not ask questions. But of course he 
 thought ..." 
 
 "Yes, of course," Joe assented at random. "That's 
 all right." 
 
 "He was horribly angry," she persisted. "I don't 
 know whether he is yet, or not. He doesn't act that way 
 any more, but perhaps that's just because he doesn't want 
 me to worry about it." 
 
 "Well, that's all right." A gleam of a smile broke 
 through on the words. "You don't need to worry about 
 me, anyhow. I'll look out for myself. I have been, all 
 along for that matter." 
 
 She nodded. "I couldn't bear to have you think, if 
 anything did happen, that I was the one who started it. 
 I knew what you'd think of me. When you'd really been 
 the one who saved me. I didn't suppose men did chival 
 rous things like that. That's what it was. Because it 
 wouldn't have meant anything much, to you." 
 
 "It's all right," he repeated. The poor phrase seemed 
 to be all he could lay his tongue to. After a moment's 
 struggle, not with embarrassment but with the mere stiff-
 
 394 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 ness of his mind, lie added, ' ' There 's nothing more for you 
 to worry about. You can forget all about it." 
 
 She smiled in rueful dissent to that, and he met it with 
 a smile of his own. At last he had something to say. 
 ' ' That was a surprising word you used chivalry. I don 't 
 believe it was ever hooked on to me before. I've never 
 been what you could call a Galahad ..." 
 
 "I know," she broke in. There was a spark of ani 
 mation in her tone, now. She was no longer frozen. "I 
 heard all about that before I ever knew you. I always 
 thought you must be one of the horridest people, that 
 way, I had ever known. I suppose that 's why partly why 
 it got me when you acted the way you did in the 
 car." 
 
 ''I can't see," Joe said, "that there was anything much 
 to that. It was a string we couldn't play out and I said 
 so. Maybe if I hadn't had a good deal of experience, I 
 wouldn't have seen that we couldn't play it out." 
 
 When she spoke again, at the end of a short silence, her 
 manner had stiffened, so that once more it was as if she 
 were trying to recite something. "I suppose I must have 
 been one of the most ignorant people in the world. I 
 didn't think I could tell you this. I don't believe it's a 
 thing you'll be able to believe. But it's true, and it's the 
 only real excuse I have. I thought I knew a lot, as much as 
 most people, but I didn 't. I knew nothing at all. It was 
 all new that day. As if I'd never been married or any 
 thing. You can't believe that, can you?" 
 
 "I knew it then," he said, not looking at her as he 
 spoke. "That was what pulled me up, gave me time to 
 think. ' ' He added a moment later, ' ' It wasn 't what we 
 wanted, either of us." 
 
 He had a strange sensation that this last remark of his 
 went falling, falling, for a long time, like a dislodged rock, 
 down a bottomless canyon, bounding from wall to wall, 
 sending up fainter and more distant echoes, until at last 
 an abysmal silence swallowed it. 
 
 After a while she said, "You wanted to be friends with
 
 ROMANCE 395 
 
 me then. I suppose it's too late for that to be any good 
 to you, now." There was no color of sentimental peni 
 tence in her tone, but she seemed to feel the need of clear 
 ing her meaning of this possible interpretation, and added, 
 "I mean, now that your daughter has married and gone 
 away. ' ' 
 
 "It's too late in a way," he said thoughtfully, ignoring 
 her reference to Beatrice. "I had a fool idea for a while 
 last summer, of settling down, maybe buying a place up at 
 Lake Forest, turning into one of the stall-fed crowd my 
 self, when some of the pile, we're going to make out of 
 this linen process came in. I've got over that." 
 
 "I'm glad you have. You aren't like us. Of course," 
 she added, "we aren't all like ourselves. Not all the time. 
 But you still want to be rich? What will you do with it, 
 if you don 't settle down ? ' ' 
 
 "No trouble about that!" he told her, with a laugh. 
 "The more I have, the bigger a life I can swing. But 
 I've got to hatch some chickens before I can begin count 
 ing 'em. They're already counted, for that matter. 
 Forty-two little flax mills, spotted all over the Northwest. 
 I've got to see to it that they're all built and equipped 
 right and ready for business between now and August. 
 Good fun, that'll be getting out of a white-collar job for 
 a while." 
 
 It was then that Henry Craven came in with the tea. 
 
 8 
 
 As the weeks went by, this experience of Joe Greer's- 
 loomed higher and more mysterious, like a receding moun 
 tain. He found no difficulty in remembering every word 
 Violet had said to him that day. There was hardly a 
 sentence of it that he did not pick up again and again to 
 scrutinize and reinterpret and ponder over. It became a 
 sort of Bible for him, that little interview. 
 
 Prima facie, it was plain enough. She was in love with 
 him. It had been no passion for cold justice that had 
 driven her to the admission of the truth of what he had
 
 396 JOSEPH GREER AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 said to her in the car the day of the cloud-burst and she 
 didn't for a moment pretend that it was. 
 
 Neither had she tried to lead him to believe that th 
 "new" thing she had surrendered to that day had been 
 a mere passing gust of desire. He remembered how that 
 sentence of his, "It wasn't what we wanted, either of us," 
 had gone plunging and echoing down into an abyss of 
 silence. She had not by a word, not even by an acquies 
 cent movement of the head, availed herself of the shelter 
 he had held out to her. It was what she wanted, he was 
 at liberty to think as much to-day as it had been last 
 summer. 
 
 Her anger had been merely the first instinctive weapon 
 of unrequited love. When it had failed to bring him to 
 her, she had come to him. There was nothing in that to 
 have mystified a man of Joe's compendious experience. 
 
 There is, though, a fundamental distinction to be made 
 between Joe and the type of man with whom he is easily 
 confounded. The clue lies in a thing he once said to 
 Jennie MacArthur and, indeed, repeated in substance to 
 his daughter Beatrice. He had said to Jennie, in speaking 
 of Annabel as an exception to this rule, "I had never had 
 anything to do with a woman before and I never have 
 since for that matter who wasn't in love with me 
 crazy about me, for the time being anyhow." And to 
 Trix, "The only woman who ever kissed me without want 
 ing to was your mother.'* 
 
 It is probable that both these statements of Joe's were 
 literally true. He was sensitive, and he was not vain. 
 And thanks to these two qualities, though many of his 
 love-affairs had been temporary and tawdry enough they 
 had always been to some extent redeemed by a genuine 
 mutuality. His insistence upon this had not been a moral 
 attitude, but an instinctive necessity and it had saved 
 him from the emotional bankruptcy which is the fate of 
 the average libertine. He never could greet the passion 
 of any woman, even the corset model or the chorus-girl, 
 with the fatuous dead grin of the gratified conqueror.
 
 ROMANCE 397 
 
 Whatever sort of woman Violet might have been, her rev 
 elation of herself to Joe could not have been wholly a be 
 trayal. 
 
 She was, however, in his experience, a woman of an al 
 together exceptional sort. Her breeding, her fineness 
 of texture, the hard jeweled quality of her, had instantly 
 attracted him. He had, unwarrantably to be sure, taken 
 for granted that she possessed a certain tough honesty of 
 mind which he did not often attribute to women, and had 
 never before attributed to a woman who was sexually at 
 tractive to him. It was here that his disillusionment upon 
 the day of their quarrel had been sharpest. She had re 
 fused to face the facts of their situation. "Aren't you 
 any realer than that ? " he had exclaimed, outraged by her 
 unexpected cowardice. 
 
 Well, she had made amends for that panic-stricken de 
 feat on the day of their rendezvous at Henry Craven's 
 ample, astonishing amends. She had stood before him, 
 trembling to the lips, to acknowledge the true nature of 
 the gift she had offered him, and he had refused. She 
 attributed his refusal to chivalry, and wished him to 
 know that she had not, voluntarily at least, betrayed him 
 to her husband. Here was a courage in fact-facing that 
 took Joe's breath. It thrilled him every time he thought 
 about it. 
 
 He spent hours thinking about her, and his memories 
 and reflections vested her with the attributes of romance. 
 One thing she had told him went to his head like wine. 
 She had been sitting with her clasped hands pressed be 
 tween her knees, and her voice had been dry with the 
 desperate effort she was making to tell him all the truth. 
 "It's the only excuse I have," she said. "I thought I 
 knew a lot, but really I didn't know anything. It was all 
 new, that day." 
 
 This was the amazing paradox. She was a woman of 
 the world, beautiful, clever, experienced, sophisticated 
 and it had remained for him, for Joe Greer, to awaken 
 her. She didn't suppose, she'd said, that he would be
 
 398 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 able to believe that. But lie had never doubted it. The 
 truth declared itself in the very pose of her body, the 
 schoolgirl pose in which she had desperately faced him, 
 that had brought a lump into his throat. 
 
 His own emotions struck him as queer. She had never 
 looked more desirable than when she had thus stood be 
 fore him making her unreserved confession, yet he had 
 not felt even the beginning of an impulse to make love to 
 her. During their whole interview, he hadn't touched 
 her, not even during the silence after he had said fatu 
 ously that ''that" wasn't what either of them wanted, a 
 silence which amounted, on her part, to a denial that it 
 was true. 
 
 Even now, when he realized that on his part it hadn't 
 been true, either, he couldn't imagine himself pulling her 
 up in the sudden embrace which her candor would have 
 warranted. On instinct he'd played his part better. She 
 had come to him to make her confession, still trusting to 
 the "chivalry" that she had attributed to him on the 
 earlier occasion. And she had been safe in trusting him. 
 The quality she had discovered in him was there! 
 
 She meant, he thought, to go on trusting to it. She 
 hadn't invited him, even in the most impalpable way, to 
 ask for opportunities. Apparently it contented her that 
 he should know the truth. Her honesty had, he perceived, 
 lifted the affair to a higher level altogether. He couldn 't 
 even contemplate furtive meetings with her, illicit gratifi 
 cations. She had become for him a finer person than 
 that. He felt a profound pity for her. What a life she 
 had led, w T ith that flaming spirit of hers, among the stall- 
 fed cattle! "We aren't like ourselves," she had said; 
 "not all of us; not all the time." And John Williamson, 
 married to her for twenty years, father of a child by her, 
 had never been able to teach her what love was ! 
 
 There dawned upon Joe a romantic dream. He'd had 
 many a romantic dream before, but never with a single 
 exception about a woman and that exception had been 
 his daughter. His new dream was about Violet. Some
 
 ROMANCE 399 
 
 day, when the harvest of his great idea about flax straw 
 had been stowed away and a new field awaited him, Violet 
 would come to him, to be taught what love was. And 
 marriage. True marriage not the unreal imposture 
 she'd taken on trust and lived half smothered in since 
 girlhood. It would be as new for him as for her. As un 
 like the sensual substitutes he had contented himself with 
 as it would be unlike the pitiful farce of his legal mar 
 riage with Annabel. 
 
 (That, thank heaven, was ended at last. He had re 
 ceived a copy of the final California decree while Henry 
 was in France with his sister and Violet.) 
 
 What a mess of cross-purposes life was! An ox like 
 John Williamson would have been just the man for Anna 
 bel. And she would never have given him a moment's 
 disquiet. Violet must have given him a good many. And 
 some day . . . Poor Williamson! He'd take it hard, of 
 course, a blow like that to his pride. But in the mean 
 time he might rest in peace. Violet wouldn't be flirting 
 with an operatic barytone this summer. The man she 
 loved would be up in the North, getting ready for the 
 flax which was going to increase John's fortune as well 
 as make his own. He didn't begrudge that to Williamson. 
 He'd take no advantage of him, either with Violet or in 
 the business. 
 
 He saw her again before he went north. The meeting 
 came about in a way that was commonplace enough, and 
 in its commonplaceness rather surprising to Joe. She 
 asked him to dinner. The invitation was telephoned by 
 her secretary. "Could Mr. Greer dine with Mr. and Mrs. 
 Williamson Thursday evening at eight?" Joe said he 
 could, and went not knowing what of a wide range of 
 possibilities to expect. It was not a strictly society din 
 ner these usually ran to bridge afterward but a more 
 heterogeneous affair, with a marked leaning toward the 
 musical wing of Bohemia. The Hugh Corbetts were old 
 guard, of course, but they rather conspicuously misrepre 
 sented their type; and the other guests were the com-
 
 400 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 poser, Anthony March, and his wife, who had been Mary 
 Wollaston, the Novellis and Mrs. Novelli's sister. Rose 
 Aldrich, who was available as an odd woman for Joe, 
 since her husband was in "Washington arguing a case be 
 fore the supreme court. 
 
 If Violet had tried to illustrate the truth of her as 
 sertion to Joe that the stall-fed were not like themselves 
 all the time, she could not have done it better. It was a 
 good party, and but for his preoccupation with Violet, 
 Joe might have enjoyed it hugely. Two of the other four 
 men had minds as vivacious and trenchant as his own. 
 And of the five women, four were real personalities, and 
 four again were notably beautiful. But Violet held him 
 all the evening in a state of w y onder. 
 
 Most of the time her manner was simply iinreconcilable 
 with the woman who had come to Henry Craven's apart 
 ment to see him. She treated him comfortably like an 
 old friend; called him, openly, "Joe," even in her hus 
 band's presence. How she could have explained this volte- 
 face to John, he could not imagine, but she must have 
 done it somehow, for there wasn 't a trace of self-conscious 
 ness about either of them. They certainly knew how to 
 keep their faces, that bunch. 
 
 She didn't seat him by her at dinner, and later in the 
 evening when the men came in from the dining-room, he 
 found her intrenched in conversation with Rose, with 
 whom he had pretty well talked himself out, upon the sub 
 ject of the stage, at dinner. So after drifting over in 
 her direction without dislodging Rose, he drifted rather 
 sulkily away again, and sat down by himself. However, 
 when Novelli, by vociferous request, went to the piano and 
 began to play, Violet came quietly and sat down beside 
 him. 
 
 She did not talk to him, even then. Apparently there 
 were enough real musicians in the party to shame the 
 others into silence. The Brahms Rhapsody, which Novelli 
 was playing with an erotic Italian fire that it would have 
 amazed the old Hamburger to discover he had put into it,
 
 ROMANCE 401 
 
 might have stirred Joe profoundly had he been able to 
 feel that Violet, too, was responding to it. But he knew, 
 somehow, she wasn't. She was simply waiting quietly for 
 the music to end; and the knowledge irritated him, not 
 with Violet, but with the music. It did end at last and 
 then there came a change. 
 
 Headed by Novelli and seconded by Hugh Corbett, they 
 gathered round March, demanding that he perform ' ' some 
 thing of his own." He protested with apparent serious 
 ness that they ought to ask him to sing instead, as he did 
 that much better than he played the piano, his wife listen 
 ing to this absurdity in contented amusement. 
 
 Under cover of the diversion, Violet, without turning to 
 look at Joe, nor relinquishing the smile that was bent 
 upon the other group, asked, "Are you going Sunday?" 
 The low tone was charged with emotion that made him 
 catch his breath, and before he could answer, she added, 
 ' ' For all summer ? ' ' 
 
 "I'll come down once or twice, I guess," he said. 
 
 A sudden sense of the portentous thing there was be 
 tween them broke over him in a great surge and all but 
 stifled him. Evidently it was stifling her, too. She man 
 aged a banality or two about what the weather would be 
 like up there. She'd never been in that country. John 
 went somewhere into those parts for ducks, but not of 
 course at this time of year. Would there be anything for 
 him to do in the way of amusements, golf or riding? 
 
 His answers were mere monosyllables. Presently she 
 said, peremptorily and very low, "You'll have to stop 
 looking at me like that. I can't stand it." 
 
 He knew he'd been devouring her, and he told her 
 humbly he was sorry. "I'm trying to play the game," 
 he added, "but I'm not very good at it." 
 
 Either his apology or her own outburst relieved her, for 
 she turned to him, as he turned away from her, and the 
 tension sensibly slackened. "I'm glad you aren't," she 
 said swiftly and after a brief pause went on. "I can 
 see you up there, when you've got out of a white collar.
 
 402 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 It'll be a blue flannel shirt, I suppose, very much unbut 
 toned, and khaki riding breeches, and you'll be swearing 
 horribly at a lot of laborers because they aren't building 
 things fast enough to suit you." 
 
 He laughed at this motion-picture misconception of his 
 summer's activities. The sort of people he'd be having 
 confabs with, he told her, would be the leading local hard 
 ware merchants in this town or that, the banker, a retired 
 farmer or two, contractors and builders. There wouldn't 
 be any sitting around on horseback. They'd meet in hotel 
 parlors and real-estate offices, and he wouldn 't dare swear 
 whole-heartedly at all for fear they'd be shocked. The 
 worst of it would be the evenings, after ten o'clock when 
 everybody but himself had gone to bed. 
 
 "Will you write me a letter now and then, on some 
 of those evenings?" she asked. "I don't mean ... I 
 mean just an ordinary letter, that will tell me where yon 
 are and what you've been doing that day, and what the 
 hotel's like? So I can see you there that's all I mean." 
 
 She left him without having given him time to answer, 
 alert, apparently, to respond to some call which had been 
 imperceptible to him, and did not speak to him again that 
 evening, except for the "Good-by! Good luck!" which 
 she nodded brightly at him when he, along with the other 
 guests, was going. He had thought for a moment that 
 she didn't mean even to shake hands with him, but some 
 one who had been standing in the way drew aside and 
 with a little laugh, like the acknowledgment of an after 
 thought, she did. 
 
 God, what an actress she was ! She was the same woman 
 who had stood before him saying, desperately, "It was all 
 true," and, "It was new that day." 
 
 He did not write to her from the North. His thoughts 
 of her when at the end of a day's toil he was left alone 
 at last in an hotel bedroom were not such as he could 
 entrust to paper. They were made poignant, too, and 
 sometimes half frantic by doubt of her. Which of the
 
 ROMANCE 403 
 
 two women he knew her for would she be as she tore open 
 the flap of a cheap envelope from some small Montana 
 hotel? It wasn't worth risking. Silence would be better. 
 
 He came home for a few days early in July a minor 
 failure in the arrival of the machinery was his excuse 
 on a Saturday morning during the first onslaught of a 
 period of ferociously hot weather, and after having debated 
 with himself at length on the train whether to let her know 
 he was in town or to trust to the information reaching her 
 through her husband or Henry, he telephoned to her Lake 
 Forest house from the station the moment he left the 
 train. 
 
 She asked him out directly for over the week-end, and 
 laughed at his hesitation about accepting. "It's John 
 you've come to see, isn't it and Greg? Well, they'll 
 be here." Then she asked him whether he had ever played 
 bridge with either of them. He told her he had not, where 
 upon she warned him that he didn't play at all, ever. 
 With a laugh, as he caught on, he assented. "I never 
 touch a card of any sort," he assured her. "I've sworn 
 off." 
 
 Thanks to this maneuver, they managed to be together 
 a good deal during the next two days, for play during that 
 house party was almost incessant, and Violet was able to 
 pose as the conscientious hostess looking after the odd 
 guest who did not join in. Her place at the tables was 
 taken by Dorothy, who played with all the obsessed serious 
 ness of the neophyte. 
 
 It was not, however, a satisfactory visit for Joe. 
 Violet's tactics worried him. They were no longer au 
 dacious. She never openly carried him off as she had 
 done at the traps that Sunday morning, the first time she 
 had ever seen him. She never sought, nor for long al 
 lowed, any secure solitude for them. Yet in the fringes of 
 the crowd or at table with no more privacy than derived 
 from the fact that both their neighbors were turned away 
 from them, she would talk to him in a way that brought 
 his heart into his throat. He had always supposed he had
 
 404 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 a talent for keeping his face, but these talks with her kept 
 him in perpetual terror of a betrayal. 
 
 He hated, too, being under John Williamson's roof. 
 The husband's incredible complacency irritated him. He 
 seemed impervious to the warnings of jealousy. It wasn't 
 possible to assume that he had ceased to care for her. His 
 steady-going, considerate affection for her was obvious. 
 What sort of terms were they on, anyhow? How had she 
 explained, and he accepted, her change of attitude toward 
 himself 1 
 
 Violet was not informative on these points, even when 
 he resorted at last to direct questions. She earnestly pro 
 tested herself fond of John immensely. He was an ab 
 solute dear in a lot of ways. In some ways that Joe 
 wouldn't understand, nor believe. "You would never 
 understand him," she asserted, "any more than he would 
 you. ' ' 
 
 "Well, I wish he weren't so damned unsuspicious," Joe 
 said. "He'd make this a lot easier for me if he tried to 
 make it harder." 
 
 She looked at him thoughtfully. "You know," she 
 said, "in a business wav, it's you I worry about; not 
 him." 
 
 "Well, you needn't," he told her shortly. "He might 
 have got me if I hadn't played a hunch earlier in the 
 game. But I did. I've got my share in the Greer Com 
 pany nailed down, where he can never get it away from 
 me." 
 
 "In the long run," she persisted, "he'll get the bet 
 ter of you. I believe he's already sure of it. That's just 
 a hunch, as you say. He doesn 't talk to me about it any 
 more. ' ' 
 
 He took this soberly, apparently to her surprise. Evi 
 dently she had expected him to laugh at her; and when 
 he didn't, she told him contritely that she hadn't more than 
 half meant it. 
 
 He made no reply to that, and after watching him in 
 tently for a moment, she asked in sudden concern, "Joe,
 
 ROMANCE 405 
 
 has anything begun to go wrong, now? Anything you 
 can see, here or up north?" 
 
 "No, I guess not," he said absently. "Why?" 
 
 "You seem different, somehow," she said. "Oh, I know 
 it's hot, and you've been working horribly hard, but you 
 always seemed like a person who couldn't be tired. And 
 now . . . You don't look quite natural either." 
 
 "I'm not sleeping much," he confessed. "Haven't 
 since I got that crack on the head last winter." 
 
 (Indeed, the amount of whisky it now took to insure 
 him even the beginning of a night's sleep was so great as 
 to have begun whispering an impatiently unheeded warn 
 ing.) 
 
 "Of course," he added, on a new note, "this thing of 
 ours doesn't make it any easier." 
 
 They were really alone for once. It was Sunday night. 
 A big purple storm-cloud, driving up from the southwest 
 had, with a flash or two of lightning and a sudden patter 
 of rain-drops, driven the rest within doors. He and Violet 
 had lingered outside to show the good faith of their com 
 bined prediction that the thing would blow around, as it 
 now showed signs of meaning to do. 
 
 "I'm not trying to make you sorry for me," he went 
 on, "but it is wearing you down, too. I guess it's harder 
 for you than for me. Violet," his voice dealt with the 
 word roughly, "what do you do? How do you manage?" 
 
 * ' My life, you mean ? ' ' she asked. ' c I play bridge . . . ! " 
 
 "I mean about your husband," he interrupted. 
 
 "We're perfectly good friends," she told him, after a 
 silence, "but that's all. There's nothing new about that. 
 It's been that way, practically, for a long time." 
 
 "You said that day at Henry's that it wouldn't have 
 meant much to me what I hadn't done the other time. 
 It would have, but I didn't know it then. This is as 
 new a thing to me as it is to you. It's changed every 
 thing. That means it's got to come out somewhere. 
 You've trusted me, and you can go on trusting me, but 
 we can't stop here and we aren't going into the ditch."
 
 406 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 ' ' I don 't know where we are going, ' ' she said hopelessly. 
 "There's no place we can go." 
 
 The words ended in a sob, and in an instant she was in 
 his arms. He kissed her, too not as he had done on the 
 earlier occasion, but gently, reverently almost. 
 
 "I'll wait," he said. "I think you're the gamest thing 
 in the world; and when the time comes, and you're ready, 
 you '11 do the thing that 's there in front of you to do. 1 11 
 wait till then." 
 
 She rose then, and they walked slowly toward the 
 house. But before they got within the luminous zone from 
 the lighted windows, she stopped, and kissed him fugitively 
 once more. She uttered a little laugh as they moved on 
 again. 
 
 "We're acting like a pair of children," she said. 
 
 It is true one would hardly have expected just this 
 white flame of romance from these ingredients. 
 
 Joe went back to Chicago early the next morning, and 
 left for the North before the end of the week. He didn't 
 see Violet again until October. 
 
 9 
 
 Henry Craven went up to the Williamsons' for the 
 week-end over the first of August. His sister was al 
 ready there. She was practically spending the summer 
 with Violet. Henry came looking forward to a good time. 
 His troubles were in abeyance. The Greer Company was 
 thriving like the scriptural bay tree. Thanks to its profits 
 on the sale of machinery, its bank balance was imposing. 
 Since the meeting in April there had not been a breath of 
 trouble between John and Joe. Apparently John was 
 reconciled to Joe's voting control of the company as long 
 as Joe didn't attempt to exercise it unf airly; and Henry 
 could see no reason w T hy Joe, with his program adopted and 
 his hands left free, should attempt to exercise it unfairly. 
 
 Violet 's emotional stresses seemed to have subsided, too, 
 since she had had that talk with Joe. It had ceased to 
 seem important to Henry whether the meeting between 
 them had been accidental or contrived.
 
 ROMANCE 407 
 
 Even Henry's modest personal affairs were prospering. 
 The directors had raised his salary at the April meeting 
 to twelve thousand a year. Margaret had made enough in 
 commissions upon her highly successful purchases for 
 Portia Novell! in Italy, that spring, to pay her own ex 
 penses, which she was very proudly and delightedly doing. 
 Henry sometimes wondered whether his luck had not really 
 changed in some mysterious and revolutionary way that 
 day at Monte Carlo. 
 
 He bolted the office early, got out to Lake Forest in 
 time for lunch, had the good fortune to find young 
 Dorothy at a loose end, and took her on for tennis. Dodo 
 played a very stylish game, immensely superior in the 
 matter of form to the late Victorian, back court, side arm 
 affair that Henry stuck to. She was the prettiest thing 
 in the courts that it was possible to imagine with her 
 smashing service that didn't often go in, and her lightning 
 rushes on the net. But Henry had a mean chop stroke and 
 a fairly accurate lob, and he beat her two sets in three 
 an achievement of which he was enormously proud, es 
 pecially as Margaret had looked on admiringly during the 
 last set. It looked an exceedingly jolly world to him about 
 five o 'clock that afternoon. He knew he would be horribly 
 lame to-morrow, but that didn't matter. 
 
 He found the evening, though, rather dull. It seemed 
 they had been having a terrific day on the board of trade. 
 December wheat, in which trading had begun on July 
 fifteenth at around two seventy-five, had dropped with a 
 crash to two eleven a bushel, and this portent monopolized 
 the conversation of the men for a solid hour after dinner. 
 The consensus of the group around John's table was that 
 the decline flew in the face of world-wide and invincible 
 economic conditions. There was not enough wheat to 
 feed the world. The war between Russia and Poland was 
 raging furiously; Bolshevik hosts were advancing upon 
 "Warsaw; England could not allow the Poles to be over 
 whelmed; Lloyd George had as good as said so. Those 
 December contracts in wheat were likely to be settled at 
 around three dollars.
 
 408 ^ JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 Henry yawned, and fancied it was so. Three or four 
 of these guests of John's were men whose opinions were 
 regarded by readers of the financial pages of the papers 
 as authoritative. But Henry cared nothing about wheat, 
 and he cared less than nothing about politics, to which the 
 conversation presently drifted. Harding or Cox League 
 or Association of Nations. It looked like Tweedle-dum and 
 Tweedle-dee to Henry. 
 
 The boredom of this didn't avail, however, to overthrow 
 his mood of contentment. He drifted out on the terrace 
 when the sitting adjourned, and philosophically watched 
 the young ones dancing to a phonograph. Dodo nodded 
 him an invitation to cut in, but he smiled and shook his 
 head, indicating by a gesture his feeling of advanced de 
 crepitude since his bout with her on the courts that after 
 noon. 
 
 It was amazing how the kids were growing up ! Young 
 Ellen "Whitney there she couldn't be a day over fifteen, 
 and was going to be a beauty like her mother was carry 
 ing on with Carter Corbett with an audacity of technique 
 which in Henry's day a girl would not have arrived at 
 short of twenty-four. He wandered off with a vague idea 
 of finding Violet. But when he happened upon her in a 
 dark corner with Ellen "Whitney's father, he strolled on 
 without interrupting them. This flirtation was tradi 
 tional. It had been going on quite harmlessly for a dozen 
 years. It occurred to him rather crudely, as he walked 
 away, that it was remarkable also how the old stayed young. 
 There was nothing, though, he felt sure, to that affair of 
 hers with Joe. 
 
 John caught him just as he was on the point of going 
 to bed, and made a date with him for to-morrow morning 
 in the gun-room. There was a little matter he would like 
 to take up with Henry before he went back to town. 
 Henry was feeling so cheerful that he didn't spend 
 more than ten minutes before he went to sleep worrying 
 over what it might be that John wanted to talk to him 
 about.
 
 ROMANCE 409 
 
 It was, however, with an instantly awakened misgiving 
 that he noted, when they sat down together in the gun 
 room after breakfast, John's reluctance, whatever it was 
 he wanted to talk about, to come to the point of it. This 
 was portentously unlike him, and the consequence was that 
 the friendlier and more casual he seemed, the more alarm 
 ing, to Henry, he became. 
 
 He asked how things were going at the office. Oh, he 
 didn't mean business details, precisely he knew all about 
 that but the general feel of it all. Did Greer's letters 
 sound as enthusiastic as ever? He wasn't finding any 
 trouble up there, was he? John knew what good terms 
 Henry was on with Miss MacArthur. Nothing about her 
 well, her manner, to indicate anything in the back 
 ground, he supposed? No, he wasn't inquiring about any 
 thing in particular. Just wanted Henry's general re 
 action on it. It looked good certainly. There was no 
 one like Greer for speeding things up. Greg Corbett had 
 always said that about him. 
 
 Then, for a while, John dropped the flax business al 
 together, and talked about Margaret; the surprising suc 
 cess she had made buying Italian furniture and so on 
 for Mrs. Novelli. That was quite a business she had. Re 
 markable what a big thing she had made of it. And 
 right now, in the impoverished state of Europe, and with 
 exchange what it was, the opportunity was bigger than 
 ever. Margaret really knew a lot about that sort of stuff, 
 didn't she? Period furniture and glass? She'd sure 
 enjoyed the plunge she'd had; excited as a kid about it. 
 It might, John thought, prove a real field for her. She'd 
 marry, some time, no doubt, but meanwhile she'd be hap 
 pier with something to do than sitting around waiting for 
 Henry to get rich out of the flax business. 
 
 "And by the way," John went on. He hesitated there 
 for a moment and Henry 's heart dropped a beat altogether. 
 The lightning was going to strike now, he knew, but he 
 hadn't the faintest premonition of the nature of the bolt. 
 "By the way," John repeated, "I think you had better
 
 410 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 endorse your shares in the Greer Company, and bring them 
 around to me. Then if I decide to dispose of mine, I can 
 sell yours too." 
 
 ''Sell it?" Henry echoed, astounded. 
 
 "Oh, it's like every other business," John went on 
 evenly. "Even this antique business of Mrs. Novelli's. 
 It's a question of getting in and getting out at the right 
 time and usually the time for getting out is damned 
 short. I'd hate to have to go ashore and leave you behind, 
 so it strikes me I had better have the shares just in 
 case, you understand." 
 
 "I don't see . . ." Henry stammered. "Everything 
 has been going better than we hoped, hasn't it? I never 
 really believed it was going to win until this summer. 
 Has anything happened I suppose it must have that 
 I don't know anything about?" 
 
 "Not a thing," John, with a shade of impatience, as 
 sured him. "You know all about that trick Greer played 
 to get control. Well, whenever I find myself in one of 
 these industrials that I don't .control, I always wear a life 
 belt, that 's all. And I think you had better put yours on, 
 too. It's just as you like, of course." 
 
 "Of course I'll bring you the shares," Henry said. 
 "They're really yours, anyhow. I've never paid for 
 them." But he knew he w r asn't disguising his profound 
 unhappiness over John's suggestion. 
 
 "Look here, Henry," John said, after he had lighted a 
 fresh cigar and offered Henry one; "this isn't anything- 
 to get worked up about. We don't contemplate doing 
 anything for the present. It may be weeks or months even 
 or we may never sell it at all. But the farmers and 
 the small fry are still feeling rich. Even that knockout 
 in the wheat pit yesterday won't change that. And be 
 sides, wheat will come back, for a while, anyhow. Up 
 north, they believe in this process of Greer 's, just as much 
 as we do ; and there 's a lot of capital up there that would 
 pay a damn good price for stock in the Greer Company. 
 As far as the control is concerned, twenty-five per cent.
 
 ROMANCE 411 
 
 of the stock is as good as forty-five. So we may decide, 
 to some extent, to cash in. 
 
 "These boom times aren't going to last forever. One 
 of the biggest motor-car companies in the country is in 
 trouble right now. Greer isn't the sort of man we can 
 trust the control to control of anything let alone in 
 mixed-up times like these. He's one of these fellows that 
 runs away with an idea ; and if we see he 's running away 
 with this, we want to be fixed so we can hop off the wagon. 
 That's all." 
 
 ' ' I see, ' ' Henry said. He got up, literally a trifle giddy, 
 and moved toward the door. ''All right," he added, "I'll 
 bring the shares in the morning." 
 
 "There's one important thing," John said, the words 
 checking Henry's hand upon the' latch. "This has got 
 to be kept absolutely quiet. If Greer or Miss MacArthur 
 should catch on to what's in the wind, there would be 
 the devil to pay. Better not speak of it to anybody not 
 even to Margaret or Violet.". Henry nodded, and went 
 out. 
 
 On his way to bed that night Margaret fell in beside 
 him and said she would come into his room for a few 
 minutes for a talk. He meant to go into town on an ea.rly 
 train next morning, and she didn't expect to come down 
 to breakfast. She helped herself to one of his cigarettes, 
 hung fire for a minute while she was getting herself 
 started, and then, rather shyly an unusual manner for 
 Margaret asked him whether John had been talking to 
 him that day. 
 
 Henry admitted lamely that he and John had talked 
 about various matters business mostly. 
 
 "Well, did he talk about me! That's what I want to 
 know. ' ' 
 
 ' ' Oh, yes ! Yes, he did. He said quite a lot about you. ' ' 
 But he couldn't, as it happened, remember just then a 
 word of what John had said about Margaret, and he 
 stopped there, vaguely amiable, but quite blank. 
 
 Margaret looked at him curiously. "What's the mat-
 
 412 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 ter with you, Henry? You've been looking queer all 
 day. Are you trying to act like a half -wit? What I 
 want to know is whether John told you what he's going 
 to do for me ? He 's going to buy in with Portia for me 
 buy me a partnership. Did he tell you that?" 
 
 "Oh, by jove, that's great!" Henry cried. He was 
 sure this was the way he would feel about it when he got 
 his ideas sufficiently straightened out to feel anything. 
 "No, he didn't tell me. I can see now though that he was 
 feeling around the edges of it to see how it would strike 
 me." He went over to her and kissed her probably to 
 her surprise, he was aware. Caresses weren't common 
 between them. "That's simply great, Peg," he repeated. 
 "I wish you all the luck in the world. Sit down and tell 
 me all about it." He was relieved to see that this burst 
 of enthusiasm contented her, and that she was satisfied to 
 attribute his momentary lapse to mere brotherly stupidity. 
 
 She did tell him all about it at length. How it was 
 John's own idea. How he had gone to Portia one day last 
 week, broached the matter himself, gone into details, seen 
 her books practically done the whole thing before tell 
 ing her a word about it. She had talked over the project 
 with Portia herself, but only as a sort of day-dream. She 
 had never thought of John as a possible means of realiz 
 ing it. It would mean, she supposed, going to Europe 
 again this fall, and leaving Henry perhaps for months. 
 But this wouldn't matter. He had got on perfectly well 
 without her, as far as she could see, during her previous 
 absences. It was simply too wonderful to be true. She 
 was going to succeed at it, she knew she was. Henry 
 couldn't remember seeing her glow like this since she had 
 been a girl, and wished himself rid for a few minutes of 
 the weight that was pressing upon his diaphragm, so that 
 lie could share her enthusiasm properly. Of course if she 
 thought he was, it was all right. 
 
 She said, "I don't believe you can realize what it'll 
 mean, Henry, if I do succeed. Real independence of you, 
 and everybody. You've been awfully good and I've
 
 ROMANCE 413 
 
 been rotten to you about half the time. But you see that 
 was because well, because you were so good; because you 
 had to be. You were doing your duty by me, just as you 
 always did it by mother. And whenever I got to thinking 
 about it, it drove me wild. And of course you were the 
 only person I could take my wildness out on. But if it 
 comes out right well, I guess it will make us both more 
 human to each other, I mean." 
 
 Upon this tack, in his present state of confusion, he 
 couldn 't meet her at all, and after a hardly articulate pro 
 test, he scrambled back to the safer ground of details and 
 arrangements. But Margaret couldn't stay on the 
 ground. Her emotions wanted an outlet, and since Henry 
 wouldn't be the target for them, she fell to talking about 
 John ; how inexhaustible his kindness was ; how really fine 
 he was; how superior to many people who made greater 
 pretentious he never made any to the qualities of the 
 spirit. And at last, after a sigh, "Poor old John!" she 
 said. 
 
 She hadn't said much that he would not, in a normal 
 mood, subscribe to, but to-night his mood was not normal, 
 and her enthusiasm had irked him. "Why poor?" he 
 asked captiously. "He doesn't seem very poor to me." 
 
 She stared at him and shrugged her good-looking 
 shoulders. "You can't get away with that, Henry. Not 
 with me. You know well enough. You know more about 
 that, by a good deal, than I do." 
 
 He knew, instantly, what she meant and he was aware, 
 what was worse, that he had betrayed the fact that he 
 knew. This was always the devil of it, with him and 
 Margaret the way they were running upon short cir 
 cuits. He said, stiffly, "I suppose you mean you're feel 
 ing sorry for him about Violet, but you're altogether 
 wrong if you think I know any reason why you should." 
 
 He was lucky to get through with this dignified dis 
 claimer before the possibility flashed across his mind, as it 
 did a moment later, that Violet might have told Margaret 
 something, anyhow, about her meeting with Joe at their
 
 414 JOSEPH GREER AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 flat, for lie couldn't restrain a gasp at the thought of it. 
 His sister had turned away before that happened and was 
 occupied extinguishing her cigarette. When she turned 
 back she said, with heavily underscored stresses : 
 
 "Well, / don't know anything about it. Except that 
 she's let herself go silly about your Mr. Greer. It isn't one 
 of her flirtations; she always crams those down your 
 throat. This thing she's trying to keep dark. She spent 
 hours explaining to me why she invited him out for that 
 week-end that I was at Lake Geneva. She'd made it so 
 horribly difficult for John by getting into a stupid quarrel 
 with the man, and John had been so decent about it, that 
 the only thing she could do had been to make it up. And 
 the amount she's talked about him since not really say 
 ing anything about him just lugging him in! Henry, 
 there have been times when I've felt I'd have to slap her, 
 just for being such a fool!" 
 
 She said this with an intensity that made Henry blink, 
 but he managed a good-humored laugh and acknowledged 
 that Violet was pretty transparent. ' ' About this, though, ' ' 
 he unwisely proceeded, "I've an idea she's really been 
 plucky. She did Joe a serious injustice, I believe, and 
 she's swallowed her pride and tried to make amends. 
 That's just as I see it, of course." 
 
 "Well," Margaret summed up with an elaborate simu 
 lation of patience, "I've always known men were idiots 
 about her, and I ought to be used to it." Then this man 
 ner deserted her. "I wish she would run away with 
 him!" she said furiously, in that monotonous voice Henry 
 dreaded. "Give John a chance to have some one around 
 who'd treat him decently. I wish she'd go so far, just 
 once, that she couldn't come back. She's always trying 
 how near she can go to the edge. And she'd be nicely 
 dished if he happened to be the man she went over with. 
 She doesn't want him. She'd never have looked at him 
 if she hadn't got the idiotic idea that I wanted him, my 
 self." 
 
 He stared at her through this, horrified and helpless, as
 
 ROMANCE 415 
 
 always. But the fear he got from her look, through the 
 short silence that followed, that she'd actually scream at 
 him in another minute, enabled him to wrench his gaze 
 away. The silence spun out a little longer and then he 
 heard her give a short satiric laugh. "Oh, Henry, you're 
 such a fool!" she said. "You know I don't mean any 
 thing! Good night," she added, from the door, and left 
 him. 
 
 10 
 
 He had, of course a diabolically bad night, sleepless save 
 for troubled snatches of slumber during which he dreamed 
 of Joe eloping with Violet, and himself hopelessly mixed 
 up in it in one role after another and always in danger of 
 getting shot by somebody. In his waking hours this lurid 
 suggestion of Margaret's disturbed him very little. 
 
 The thing he had on his mind was the sale of Greer & 
 Company stock by John and his allies, and what this por 
 tended to Joe. His damned conscience was sniping at him 
 again upon the old question of loyalty. Should he turn 
 over his shares to John and profit by the betrayal of Joe? 
 Or should he warn Joe and be a traitor to John? Or 
 should he hang on to the shares and not warn Joe prove 
 his good faith by participating in his ruin? A singularly 
 sterile attitude this would be, he reflected, and appro 
 priately closest to his natural impulses! 
 
 He did drop off, along toward morning, overslept, 
 missed John's sacred train, and by a little careful dodging 
 managed to ride into town all by himself. He decided he 
 would return the shares to John. He 'd said he would, and 
 then, they were John's, anyhow carried for Henry. Did 
 this, he wondered, in any way lighten the burden of his 
 disloyalty to Joe ? No, it didn 't. Not a bit. 
 
 He went straight to the bank from the train it was 
 late enough for that got the shares out of his box and 
 took them up to John's office on the top floor. John had 
 gone out somewhere, so he saw Rollie Mill. Mindful of 
 John's injunction to secrecy, he told Mill, discreetly, hand 
 ing over the envelope, that this was something he had
 
 416 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 brought in for John, who would understand all about 
 it. 
 
 "Oh, the Greer stock?" asked Rollie nonchalantly. 
 "Good! I'll take care of it." 
 
 Well, of course, being John's interior private secre 
 tary, Rollie would know all about it. But what Rollie went 
 on to add was far outside the secretarial domain. 
 
 "We're going to toast that baby a nice golden brown 
 before we get done with him," he prophesied with glee. 
 "Remember that joke he pulled up here one day, before 
 we organized the company, about oubliettes, and getting 
 out the same door he came in by? Well, that's going to 
 be a better joke than he thought it was." . 
 
 Rollie might speak frivolously, but he didn't say things 
 like this at random. So this was all John's assertion that 
 they had no plans were merely playing safe amounted 
 to! Henry didn't want to hear any more. He knew too 
 much, already. He left John's office in haste and plod 
 ded, drearily, across the loop to his own. 
 
 The specific thing he dreaded was a meeting with Jennie 
 MacArthur. He had never felt quite comfortable with her 
 since John had told him on the day of his return from 
 France, the inside facts of Joe's ruse by which he had got 
 control of the majority of the stock in the company. Henry 
 had often gone over in his own mind the part Jennie had 
 played in it. Her bringing to him the warning letter from 
 the patent lawyers, her overriding of his tentative, though 
 audacious, suggestion that they manage some warning to 
 Joe before they told the others. He remembered, too, her 
 look and her manner at the directors' table through those 
 days of discussion. 
 
 If she had known the truth all the while, and Henry 
 could not seriously doubt that this was the case, she had 
 played her part well and just as well before himself in 
 their private talk as before the others. He couldn't blame 
 her for this, but, nevertheless, the conclusion humiliated 
 him. Had the situation been reversed, he could never, 
 he knew, have played his part like that.
 
 ROMANCE 417 
 
 He had come to regard Jennie, long before that time, 
 with a genuine and unreserved affection, and his convic 
 tion had been a very warm and inspiring conviction, too, 
 for Henry that her regard for him was of the same 
 quality. Well, he must have been mistaken about that. 
 If she had really liked him the way he thought she did, 
 she could not, before him, have played her part so skilfully. 
 Some momentary hesitation, some troubled protest, would 
 have betrayed her, however satisfactorily she might have 
 reasoned it out that her duty was to Joe. 
 
 There was no getting away from the logic of this in 
 ference, but his instinct persisted upon making war upon 
 it. The thing he had been wanting with a surprising 
 intensity all those months was a candid talk with her. He 
 wanted to say, "Look here, Jennie, did you know what 
 Joe was up to all the time in that patent infringement' 
 business ? ' ' 
 
 Henry had had a part of his own to play ever since the 
 April meeting, and he was miserably aware that he had 
 played it badly. More than once he had seen Jennie look 
 ing at him curiously, perplexed, and, he thought, troubled 
 by something she found in his manner. 
 
 From now on, of course, that situation was going to be 
 ten times worse. He had committed an overt act in turn 
 ing over those shares to John. He didn't know precisely 
 what John's plans were, to be sure, but there was no mis 
 taking a broad outline of them. He and Corbett and 
 Crawford were going to slip secretly out from under, and 
 then they were going to wreck the Greer Company. Push 
 Joe down the oubliette he had once joked about. 
 
 He went straight into his private office, shut the door 
 behind him, and sat down at his desk. Through the oak 
 partition, he could hear Jennie dictating a letter. He was 
 conscious of the hope that she hadn't heard him come in. 
 He didn't ring for his own stenographer, though 
 there confronted him on his desk two or three stacks of 
 memoranda and letters, the grist of his morning's work. 
 He surveyed them blankly. There was no capacity in
 
 418 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 him for orderly thought. His mind was obsessed by a 
 passionate longing to escape from all this coil, break out 
 into an open space and it wouldn't have to be very wide 
 where he could be free. 
 
 It had been, he ironically remembered, in the hope of 
 obtaining this freedom that he had left the bank, and come 
 to this very office. It was Jennie who had conducted him 
 here, and left him with the injunction to call upon her for 
 anything he wanted. She couldn't give him what he 
 wanted now. 
 
 He heard her dismiss her stenographer. Then, as he 
 had feared, there came a tap on the communicating door. 
 He doubted if she could have heard his almost voiceless 
 "Come in," but she opened the door, any way, and after 
 the moment it took to exchange good mornings, deliberately 
 closed it after her, walked around his desk, and seated 
 herself, facing him. He looked at her hands, lightly 
 clasped upon the plate glass desk top ; but he couldn 't look 
 up at her face. He could feel her steady gaze, though, 
 without meeting it. 
 
 "You don't look very well," she said. "Was Lake 
 Forest too much for you?" 
 
 "I guess it was," he assented. "I played a lot of ten 
 nis Saturday afternoon a foolish thing for a man of my 
 habits to attempt of course. And then last night, for 
 some reason, I couldn't sleep." 
 
 He wondered if that sounded as false to her as it did to 
 him. Apparently it did, for after a protracted silence, 
 she got up (not restlessly though; all her movements were 
 gratefully firm and steady) and went to the window. 
 
 "Henry," she asked, "isn't there anything you would 
 like to talk out with me? Something that's been on your 
 mind oh, for a good while, I guess. Personally, I mean, 
 you know; man to man. We have talked like that but 
 not lately." 
 
 He had an appalling sensation of sliding down a smooth 
 slope. His whole moral economy was threatened. She 
 had hit the mark fairly with her first shot, He sat for a
 
 ROMANCE 419 
 
 while in panic-stricken silence ; but she simply waited. At 
 last he said, with a desperate affectation of nonchalance, 
 ''No, I guess not. I do worry a lot, of course, over the 
 business, and so on. I don't suppose there's as worthless 
 a business man at any other executive desk in town. There 
 are times when I forget it and there are times when it 
 comes over me. That's all." 
 
 He thought he heard her catch her breath, and looking 
 up at her for the first time, saw that she had turned a 
 little farther away from him and was gazing out of the 
 window. Then, hastily, he looked back at the meaning 
 less papers upon his desk. Presently, she moved again, 
 toward her own door this time. Her way lay behind his 
 chair, and when she reached that point, she stopped. Then 
 he felt her hands upon his shoulders, holding them 
 strongly. Save that he was trembling all over, he sat per 
 fectly still until he had no idea how long it was she took 
 her hands away, and went back into her own office. 
 
 In an instant he had sprung up and followed her, be 
 fore she had had time to seat herself at her desk. 
 
 "Jennie," he said, "there isn't a single human relation I 
 care about in the world that isn't poisoned for me by this 
 damnable job. I'm not going on like this. It's inhuman 
 and impossible. I can 't talk, man to man, with you or any 
 body, but I 'm going to fix it so I can. Now this morning. ' ' 
 
 He went back into his own office at that, without wait 
 ing for a word or a look by way of reply, caught up his 
 hat, and went out. In a general way, it was in his mind 
 that he would find John, and tell him to go to hell. 
 
 The intention fairly intoxicated him. He had to re 
 strain an impulse to go leaping and singing along Jackson 
 Boulevard as Christian went along the narrow way after 
 the burden of his sins had rolled from his back. Why 
 hadn 't he done this long ago ? Why had he tortured him 
 self all these months? He could get himself some sort of 
 job. It wouldn't have to be much now that Margaret was 
 no longer on his hands. He'd get it of a stranger. Then 
 he'd be beholden to nobody.
 
 420 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 He rode up in the elevator to the top floor of the bank 
 building, ready to face Goliath. 
 
 He was glad, though, to find that John was in and 
 that he needn't wait. He didn't want any of his pre 
 cious virtue to leak out of him. He said at once, without 
 even heeding John's invitation to sit down: 
 
 "I'm going to resign from my job over at the Greer 
 Company. I thought I'd come over here and tell you 
 first." 
 
 "Resign from your job?" John said blankly. "What 
 the devil ..." 
 
 "You see, I like Joe," Henry interrupted. "No, that 
 isn't strong enough. That isn't what I mean. Joe's one 
 of my friends one of my best friends one of the few 
 real friends I've got. You've always thought that I was 
 making up to him for business reasons, because that was 
 what I had been hired to do. Well, it isn't true. Never 
 has been really, from the first day. Now you see, don't 
 you, why I can't stay there, after I know what you're 
 planning to do to him? I'm not going to betray any con 
 fidences of yours, I mean, to him. I won 't tell him why 
 I got out. But if he suspects the reason, I can't help 
 that. That's why I'm telling you first." 
 
 "Sit down," John said again, and he waited in his 
 impassive way until Henry had done so. He took time, 
 too, to light, carefully as he always did, a cigar. "Henry," 
 he said judiciously, "you're a nice fellow, but you're a 
 damned fool. You've been in business all your life, but 
 by George, I believe you get your ideas about it from 
 stories you read in the magazines. You've got an idea 
 we 're going after Joe Greer to ruin him. You think we 're 
 going to sell our stock on purpose to work some skuldug 
 gery that will smash him!" 
 
 "Well," Henry asked bluntly, "aren't you?" 
 
 John shrugged his thick shoulders, and heaved a patient 
 sigh. "You ought to know by this time that we don't 
 do silly things like that not people like Greg and Frank 
 Crawford and me. I never went gunning for anybody in
 
 ROMANCE 421 
 
 my life. I try to make good investments, and when I've 
 made them, I try to protect them. I give you my word I 
 haven't a plan in my head beyond what I told you yes 
 terday morning. 
 
 "If anybody ruins Joe Greer, it'll be Joe Greer himself. 
 He's the sort of man that's liable to do it. We've always 
 known that about him. That's why we wouldn't let him 
 have full control of the company in the first place. He's 
 the sort of fellow that sooner or later bites off more than 
 he can chew. Well, he's got full control of the company 
 now. He got it by a trick as smooth a trick, I'll say, as 
 I ever saw put over. We can't stop him now at the di 
 rectors' table. If we vote him down, he can call a special 
 stockholders' meeting, and chuck us all out. So we're 
 getting ready to stand from under. 
 
 "He may make good after we've got out, thinking he 
 wasn't going to. If he does, it's our loss. Or we may 
 hang on too long, and not be able to get out, and that'll 
 be our loss again. But whatever we do, it won't be Greer 
 we're thinking about. It'll be our investment that we're 
 trying to protect. That ought to be satisfactory, I should 
 think. I 'd like to know, ' ' he concluded reflectively, ' ' what 
 ever put the other idaa into your head ? ' ' 
 
 Henry didn't give Rollie Mill away. "I don't know," 
 he said. He was deeply troubled. He remembered John's 
 impatient admission last summer that Joe would be indis 
 pensable for another year at least, and his own instruc 
 tions to "keep him on the rails." And yet, John wasn't a 
 liar, and John had just given him his solemn word that 
 he was innocent of any plan for a campaign against Joe. 
 
 "I suppose," he said at last, "that if you do stand from 
 under, and Joe isn't able to chew what he has bitten 
 off, there'll be some sort of reorganization." 
 
 John shot a quick look at him. ' ' Well, I '11 say this. I '11 
 make this as a promise to you. If we do have to pick the 
 thing up and reorganize it and of course that may happen 
 we '11 give Greer a perfectly fair chance to come in on the 
 same terms as the rest. How's that? Will that do?"
 
 422 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 ''I haven't any right to dictate terms," Henry protested. 
 "And I realize you've been very patient with me." 
 
 (It was just John's patience that defeated him, lowered 
 his exaltation, destroyed his confidence. He was the old 
 Henry again, trembling a little, horribly in doubt.) 
 
 "I still feel, though, that my position is false over 
 there," he went on. "I am supposed to represent your 
 interests to be on your side ..." 
 
 "Forget that you are on our side," John interrupted. 
 "Your own sense of fair play is good enough for us. Go 
 ahead and be treasurer, without any strings on you at all. 
 You're valuable over there to Greer. You're an impor 
 tant part of his organization. ' ' 
 
 He got up, with a laugh, and slapped his wife's cousin 
 on the back. "Forget it, Henry. Run along back to 
 your office. You must have had a bad night." 
 
 "I did," Henry admitted feebly. "But I've been 
 worrying about this for a great deal longer than that." 
 
 "Well, you've got it off your chest now, anyhow. Sorry 
 I can 't ask you to lunch, but I 've got some people waiting 
 for me." 
 
 Henry walked back to his own office, no longer buoy 
 ant, feeling a fool, wondering what he was going to say 
 to Jennie. 
 
 But this, oddly enough, did not prove difficult. He 
 did not see her till after lunch, and then she met him with 
 a matter upon which she wanted his advice. A man who 
 said he was a special article writer for a popular scien 
 tific magazine had telephoned and asked if he might come 
 over and talk to her with the idea of getting a story. Did 
 Henry think there would be any objection to her seeing 
 him? She was rather curious to find out just what he 
 wanted. Henry didn't see the smallest objection, and 
 said so, whereupon she nodded and went back into her 
 office. 
 
 They had met. Their normal every-day relation was 
 reestablished as if the explosion of the morning had never 
 occurred. But, somehow, he couldn 't feel satisfied to let it
 
 ROMANCE 423 
 
 go at that, and five minutes later he followed her in and 
 sat down on the corner of her desk. 
 
 "I've come back, Jennie," he said. "When I went off 
 this morning, I didn't think I would. I'd misunderstood 
 something John Williamson said yesterday, and it had 
 been preying on my mind. It was the climax, really, of 
 a series of misunderstandings. I'd had the idea that they 
 regarded me as some one well, retained in. their special 
 interest rather than in the company's, a perfectly false 
 position, of course. But John has just assured me that 
 isn't so. They don't consider there are any strings tied to 
 me, at all. I 'm treasurer of this company, and I 'm nothing 
 else. So it's all right. That's what I blew up about. I 
 know I must look well, a good bit of a fool, to you." 
 
 She didn't smile, as his tone at the end had invited her 
 to do, nor look up at him. She sat very still, for a 
 moment, without speaking. Then she said, "I think you 
 are one of the bravest people I've ever known." 
 
 He laughed at that, but not ironically. "It did take a 
 sort of courage to go over and tell John to go to the devil, 
 but it wasn't mine. It came from your hands. I've 
 never been taken hold of like that, not that I can remem 
 ber, in all my life." 
 
 She flushed, and the hands he had spoken of, which had 
 been lying easily on the desk before her, disappeared be 
 neath it. This time she said nothing at all. 
 
 "I'm much obliged, Jennie," he concluded, after a 
 while, and then went back into his own office. 
 
 11 
 
 Jennie's principal concern that summer was the prob 
 lem of marketing the raw flax which they were under 
 contract to buy as it was delivered during the fall and 
 winter by the subsidiary companies. There was going to 
 be a lot of it over thirty million pounds and the only 
 comfortable way to handle it would be by securing in ad 
 vance contracts with jobbers or spinners, under which 
 they could keep it turning over as fast as it came in.
 
 424 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 She and Henry had, as well as they could, attended to 
 the preliminaries of this undertaking. They had sur 
 veyed the whole textile field, more or less. They had made 
 promising follow-up campaigns in all quarters where it 
 seemed likely that an interest in their product could be 
 aroused. The textile world had shown no lack of interest 
 in the Greer process. Engineers came out to visit the 
 laboratory, mills took their samples, letters came in from 
 everywhere. 
 
 The only disquieting phenomenon about all this activity 
 was that it never got beyond the preliminary stage. The 
 experts came and looked, went away and experimented, 
 and made their reports, in the main highly favorable ; but 
 these reports seemed to disappear into some vast inane 
 which gave back nothing, not even a responsive echo. By 
 the middle of September, Jennie was frankly alarmed 
 about it. And in Henrv, this alarm was amplified many 
 fold. 
 
 It troubled them both, too, that they couldn't arouse 
 Joe to the seriousness of the situation. His attitude still 
 seemed to be, as well as they could make it out from his 
 irregular, inadequate letters, that getting out the flax was 
 of paramount importance, just as getting out the gold was 
 of paramount importance if you were operating a gold 
 mine. If they had the only adequate supply of good stuff 
 to meet a real demand, they needn't worry about selling 
 it. The shoe was on the other foot. 
 
 "I can't see," Jennie confided to Henry, "why he's 
 staying around up there. All but two or three of those 
 mills have already got stuff coming through. I've done 
 all I can in the way of writing letters to get him back. He 
 says he'll come about the first of the month. You know, 
 I think somebody, one of us, ought to go up there and talk 
 to him." 
 
 Henry thought this a good idea, but insisted that there 
 was no question about Jennie's being the one to go. "You 
 can talk up to him, which is something I never could do 
 in the world."
 
 ROMANCE 425 
 
 "I've been talking up to him for seven or eight years, 
 off and on," Jennie pointed out. "He's used to me. 
 You've never tried to, and you might have a lot more ef 
 fect." But he looked so acutely miserable over this sug 
 gestion, that Jennie hastily agreed to make the journey. 
 
 She said to Henry when he greeted her on the morning 
 of her return, and asked her what luck she had had with 
 Joe: "We'll have lunch together somewhere, Henry, and 
 then I'll tell you. I don't want to talk about it here." 
 
 That she had come upon something seriously disturbing 
 during her visit, her manner made plain enough, but she 
 gave Henry no clue to the nature of it until they were 
 seated at a corner table in the old Stratford dining-room 
 and had got rid of the waiter. Then, however, she came 
 straight to the point. 
 
 "I didn't get anything out of Joe," she said. "He 
 won't come back to Chicago until the first of October. 
 He's acting queer about that stubborn. Wouldn't listen 
 to reason at all. And even if he did come, I don 't believe 
 he'd be much help to us, the way he is right now." 
 
 "Do you mean there's anything the matter with him? 
 Isn't he well?" 
 
 "He's drinking too much," Jennie answered bluntly. 
 
 Henry made a grimace at that. The picture her words 
 formed in his mind was of nightly bucolic carousals. 
 "How did you find out about it?" he asked after a 
 moment of unhappy meditation. "Did they talk to you 
 about it?" 
 
 "They don't know," she said. "Nobody knows. He 
 doesn't get drunk, Henry. You wouldn't know, unless 
 you'd always known him, that there was anything wrong. 
 He just drinks." 
 
 "Well, but he's always drunk whisky like water," 
 Henry protested. "I never could see that it affected him 
 at all." 
 
 "He doesn't drink it like water now. That is exactly 
 how he used to drink it without thinking anything about 
 it; whenever he was thirsty. But now . . . Oh, it was
 
 426 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 rotten to see him like that. He's ashamed about it. But 
 he needs it. After he's been around with you a while, he 
 makes an excuse for going away by himself to get it, be 
 cause he can't stand it any longer without it. It just 
 happened that I found it out, and when I did it made me 
 sick. No, I didn't say anything to him about it. What 
 would be the use ? It 's been going on a long while, I guess. 
 Since before he went north this spring." 
 
 Henry remembered the drink he'd seen Joe take after 
 the April meeting, and the look Joe had shot at him when 
 he commented on it. Half incredulous as he remained 
 after Jennie's report, he was still horrified. "Something 
 ought to be done about it," he said. "It's ghastly, if it's 
 really as bad as it seemed to you." 
 
 "It is," she asserted. "I'm not mistaken about that. 
 But he's the only person who can do anything about it. 
 "When he gets around to it, I suppose he will. When he's 
 got over the thing that drove him to it. It is ghastly, of 
 course, but I don't believe anything like that will ever get 
 Joe, permanently. I think, perhaps, from things he 's said, 
 that he's been like this before. Never since I've known 
 him, though. Oh, I 've known him to go on horrible sprees, 
 of course. Lasting a whole week sometimes. But he 
 only laughed at them. This is different." 
 
 These revelations were so appalling to Henry that he 
 quite forgot what Jennie's original errand to the North 
 had been, along with the apprehensions which had caused 
 her to undertake it. Not so, Jennie. She came back to flax. 
 
 "They aren't as happy up there as they were when Joe 
 was organizing those subsidiaries," she told Henry. 
 "They're furious over the way wheat's gone down. They 
 think it's all the doings of the speculators. They're wor 
 ried over tight money and the way the banks are shutting 
 down on new credits. They think that's part of a con 
 spiracy, too." 
 
 "Oh, we've all got our troubles, I suppose," Henry re 
 marked from rather far afield ; ' ' and our own always seem 
 like the only ones in the world."
 
 ROMANCE 427 
 
 "These are our troubles I'm talking about," she told 
 him crisply. "That is, they're going to be. You see, 
 practically all those little flax companies borrowed the 
 money that they bought the straw with. It was easy 
 enough to get, then. But now the local banks are wanting 
 those notes paid up, and that means that the subsidiaries 
 won't be able to give us any time at all. They'll draw on 
 us, as soon as they can begin to ship, cash against bills of 
 lading. We'll have to begin meeting those drafts in a 
 couple of weeks. We're all right for a while, of course, 
 but this is going to run into millions, Henry. And the 
 stuff we're going to buy, until we've established a market 
 for it, isn't anything the banks will take for collateral, 
 either." 
 
 A prediction of John Williamson stabbed through 
 Henry's memory like a neuralgia. "Sooner or later, this 
 man Greer will bite off more than he can chew. ' ' Had he 
 already done it? Henry wondered. And then Jennie 
 startled him by mentioning John herself. She suggested 
 that Henry go and talk to him. Not to ask for any 
 thing more than advice, of course, though he might be able 
 to put them in touch with some one who knew the jobbing 
 game better than they did. Bankers had all sorts of con 
 nections like that. Anyhow, Mr. Williamson had not 
 been in the office for several weeks and he ought to be 
 kept informed of the general situation. 
 
 Henry didn't much want to do this. He'd been avoid 
 ing John of late, on instinct rather than from any for- 
 mulable reason, but this wasn't a fact he cared to confess 
 to Jennie, so he said he would go. He telephoned him that 
 same afternoon and John invited him to lunch at the 
 Union League the next day to Henry's relief at getting 
 out of a visit to John's office. He had conceived a posi 
 tive horror of another encounter with Rollie Mill. 
 
 John proved friendly and in the upshot rather reassur 
 ing than otherwise. He seemed to think it natural enough 
 that their progress had been slow with the big jobbers and 
 that nothing much would be gained by trying to hurry
 
 428 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 them. The times were a bit unsettled and nobody wanted 
 to commit himself any sooner than he had to. If Greer 
 was coming back in a fortnight or so (Henry had forborne 
 to mention the fact that Jennie had been up to see him) 
 that would be time enough. He could run down to New 
 York and very likely close up everything in a week. Those 
 things usually happened all at once. 
 
 They talked through the meal in this comfortable vein, 
 and then when they began to smoke John leaned back in 
 his chair and asked Henry where he'd been all this while. 
 They'd seen nothing of him for weeks. Henry leaned 
 back, too, with a sigh of relief as he realized that business 
 was finished and that John was not going to ask any ques 
 tions about Joe nor say anything about the sale of the 
 stock. He answered that he'd been pretty busy, and 
 Margaret, too, with her new job, but that they'd both 
 been meaning to get around for a long while. 
 
 ' ' Violet asks about you every few days, ' ' John told him. 
 "Seems to have you on her mind. Dorothy, too. You're a 
 great favorite with her, Henry. You'll have to come 
 around pretty soon if you're going to see her before she 
 goes away. She's leaving about the first of October." 
 
 "Leaving?" Henry inquired, surprised. "I thought 
 she'd come home to stay for a while." 
 
 ' ' So did I, ' ' said John, in a tone that was nearer angry 
 than one often heard from him, "but it seems we were mis 
 taken. She's going abroad for the winter, to a school in 
 Florence. Violet's got it figured out that she's too young 
 to come out yet, and says she doesn't want her hanging 
 around all the year at a loose end. It sounds reasonable 
 enough when she talks about it, but damn it, I was hoping 
 for a chance to get acquainted with the child myself. 
 After she starts going out to dinners and dances on her 
 own every night, I won't have a look in." 
 
 "What does Dodo say about it herself?" Henry asked. 
 "She want to go?" 
 
 "Says she does. One of her particular friends at 
 Thornycroft is going, and it's a wonderful school, and so
 
 ROMANCE 429 
 
 on ; but I Ve got sort of an idea . . . However, there it is. 
 October first, she goes." 
 
 Henry inquired if Violet were going over with her. 
 
 "No," John said. "The other girl's mother is to take 
 the pair of them. That is unless Margaret's planning to 
 go about that time. I hadn't thought to ask about that, 
 nor Violet either, I guess. How about it?" 
 
 But Margaret, Henry said, had found she wasn't going 
 to be able to get off till after Christmas. 
 
 "I don't know what Violet's planning to do," John 
 added, as they left the table. "She's been so busy lately 
 getting Dodo packed off that I don't believe she's had time 
 to think." 
 
 12 
 
 Between Dorothy's sailing date and Joe's for his return 
 to Chicago there was a direct relation. Back in August 
 he had received this letter from Violet: 
 
 "I asked Henry the other day when you were coming 
 back and he said he thought within two or three weeks. 
 At first I was glad, for it seems a long time since that 
 Fourth of July week-end, but I've come to think I don't 
 want to see you again with Dorothy about. She looks at 
 me, Joe Margaret looks at me, too, as if she'd like to 
 slay me, and I don 't mind a bit. She 's never forgiven me 
 and I suppose never will. Dorothy is as dear as she can 
 be, fond of me, and admires me and all that, but sometimes 
 she makes me feel a fool. I couldn't stand it 
 
 "We've decided she's to go to school for one more year 
 she is too young to come out in Italy and she sails about 
 the first of October, a little late that is but I can't get 
 her ready any sooner. The Hallams, New York people, 
 are putting their girl in the same school and she '11 go over 
 with them. I suppose I shall go to New York and see her 
 off, and then I '11 come home and there won 't be anybody 
 
 ' ' I know if you came to Chicago before that, we 'd be see 
 ing each other and I'd hate it. So I'm hoping you will 
 come then. I wonder if that seems idiotic to you." 
 
 It did not seem idiotic to Joe. It seemed sensitive, high- 
 minded, thoroughbred. It added a glamorous brush-
 
 430 
 
 stroke or two to the romantic portrait of Violet his fancy 
 had been so industriously painting. Also it fed his hopes. 
 He read into its broken sentences admissions which fell but 
 little short of promises. He gave her no hint of this, how 
 ever, in his answer to her letter. It was not so much that 
 he distributed his powers of expression on paper as that 
 he hated to forego, in any matter where the stake was se 
 rious, the uncanny advantage he derived from his sensitive 
 ness to personal contacts. All he told her in his matter-of- 
 fact reply was that he was sure his business would keep 
 him in the North until October first. Another letter of 
 hers furnished him further details, the exact date of sail 
 ing and the name of the ship, when they planned to leave 
 Chicago, and so on, and this had an influence not fully 
 acknowledged to himself in the forming of his own plans. 
 
 Jennie's visit in mid-September accomplished more with 
 him than she supposed. It had seemed to her that he 
 barely listened to her, but his mind, his thinking machine 
 that is to say, unintoxicated either by alcohol or by ro 
 mance, took it all in, set it in order, and summed it up. 
 There wasn 't anything seriously amiss, he decided. It was 
 just that Jennie, with all her clarity of judgment and all 
 her energy, lacked the high-voltage current in her veins 
 that it took to jump a gap, produce a lightning flash, 
 finish a thing up. This lack was about all that kept her 
 from being as good a man as he was. When this was called 
 for, she needed him. 
 
 Within a week of her return to Chicago, Joe conceived 
 an attractive project. He'd go straight to New York from 
 here, by way of the ' ' Soo, ' ' and close his contracts for the 
 year's output of raw linen before he came back October 
 first. It would be fun to see their faces, Jennie's and 
 Henry's, long and solemn enough when he came in, change 
 when he tossed down those papers on his desk before their 
 eyes. That would show them whether he was the old 
 Joe or not! 
 
 The other not quite acknowledged half of the picture 
 was his accidental meeting with Violet after Dorothy's
 
 ROMANCE 431 
 
 boat had sailed. It would be easy enough to manage since 
 he knew the hotel the Williamsons were addicted to in New 
 York; they'd both talked about it. He wouldn't go near 
 her, indeed he'd take pains to avoid a chance meeting, 
 until the child was out of the way, but the possibilities 
 offered by the subsequent handful of hours were breath 
 taking especially if by that time he had his signed con 
 tracts in his pocket. 
 
 He felt no serious doubt of his success in this. On the 
 train east he read all the correspondence between his Chi 
 cago office and the New York houses they had been try 
 ing to land. No, he didn't wonder Jennie had failed. 
 You didn't galvanize people into taking drastic action by 
 writing them pleasantly reasonable letters. You had to 
 exhibit opportunity in such colors and odors and propin 
 quity that their mouths watered for it, and then let them 
 see it slipping away into the clutch of somebody else! 
 
 But from the start, on Monday morning, he met unfore 
 seen difficulties. He found plenty of people who were 
 glad to talk with him but these were the hirelings, experts 
 and such. The big people, to a baffling degree, were in 
 accessible ; physically inaccessible in the first place, and 
 when he had got into their bodily presence, spiritually. 
 Their urbanity disconcerted him and drove him, when he 
 tried to assert himself, to the opposite manner, which, he 
 was aware, only made the abyss between them wider. 
 They were like Williamson, only worse. Before the week 
 was over he was wishing he had John there as an ally. 
 They wouldn't be so damn superior with him! 
 
 There were moments, too, though these only occurred 
 when he needed a drink, when he wondered whether he 
 himself was really the man he'd been a year ago. Would 
 not that man have had a spark in him irresistible enough 
 to have jumped this gap wide as it was ? But a good big 
 drink of whisky or so availed as a rule to wash this agoniz 
 ing question out of his thoughts. 
 
 He spent Saturday morning alone in his room. His 
 week's campaign had ended perforce on Friday when
 
 432 JOSEPH GREER AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 everybody who could be any good to him disappeared, from 
 the haunts of trade at any rate, for the week-end. It had 
 got him nowhere. But hadn't it? No nearer his goal, 
 certainly. Yet he could not quite ignore an impression 
 he had caught from the last man he had talked to. This 
 man, pleasant enough and not too obviously in a hurry to 
 be rid of him, had once or twice, at some assertion of Joe's, 
 permitted himself to smile, faintly and a little impatiently, 
 as if he knew there was nothing to be dreaded from his 
 competitors. "Was this bland non-committal attitude he 
 had been meeting everywhere a thing agreed upon? It 
 was not a pleasant sort of hunch to get. 
 
 Only a corner of his mind, though, was concerned with 
 this question. The rest of it was watching the clock. It 
 was ten o'clock and Violet and Dorothy would be leaving 
 the hotel in a taxi for the pier; ten-thirty, and they 
 would be getting aboard; eleven, and they'd have seen the 
 luggage stowed away, met the other woman and her 
 daughter. The agent of the line would be bustling about 
 arranging special privileges, instructing the purser and 
 the head stewards. Eleven-thirty; the gongs beating "All 
 ashore!" and Violet contentedly ignoring them until the 
 last minute before they began casting off the gangplank 
 lashings. "Would she wait at the pier-head for the last 
 wave of a handkerchief? Joe got restlessly out of his 
 chair and then sat down again. He had considered going 
 down to the gate to the pier at about this time and inter 
 cepting Violet there, where there would be no chance of 
 missing her, but had reluctantly decided against it. There 
 could be no look of accident about an encounter like that 
 and it might be awkward. Suppose, for instance, some of 
 her New York friends had gone along with her to see the 
 girl off. Violet would be furious with him for butting into 
 a party like that. No, it was safer to stick to the hotel and 
 trust to luck. 
 
 It was a small hotel as these go in New York, and its 
 plan suited admirably with the stratagem Joe had in mind. 
 There was but one entrance and it was possible to get a
 
 ROMANCE 433 
 
 table in the main restaurant, to the left as you went in, 
 that commanded it. Joe could take a seat here, order his 
 lunch, and await Violet's appearance at his leisure. 
 
 An irritating misadventure befell him soon after he'd 
 chosen his table and given the waiter his indifferent order. 
 Another guest entering the restaurant whom Joe had 
 looked at without seeing stopped suddenly in the act of 
 passing his table, stared at him, slapped him heavily on 
 the shoulder, and called him Joe. If he could have de 
 composed the fellow into his elements with a wish, he 
 would have done so. His memory was at a loss for him at 
 first, and when it got him, it didn't help much. A chap 
 named Snell, he was, whom Joe had known pretty well but 
 regarded little, years ago down in Santiago de Chile. 
 
 But to Snell, unhappily, the encounter was an event to 
 make much of. Ignoring the want of an invitation, he 
 sat down at Joe's table and began pouring out his story of 
 the intervening years. His only regret was that he hadn 't 
 known enough to come to New York sooner. There was 
 no other place like it for easy money. The people down 
 here didn't wait for you to take it away from them; they 
 came and handed it to you. Perfectly straight legitimate 
 business, of course, he was talking about. There was 
 nothing in the crooked stuff ; it wasn 't big enough. 
 
 "What was he in ? Oh, anything that came along. He 'd 
 cleaned up big on one or two moving-picture promotions, 
 but the real standby was the curb. He'd made an enor 
 mous thing in the recent raids on some of the big indus 
 trials. He didn't mind telling Joe that in one week on 
 So-and-So alone he won a quarter of a million dollars. 
 Snell didn't claim any credit particularly, he said, for his 
 success. The system was perfectly simple: you cut your 
 losses and let your winnings ride. All a man needed was 
 nerve and a good hunch. The trouble was that most men 
 who had the nerve lacked the hunch, and most who had 
 the hunch lacked the nerve. 
 
 This would have annoyed Joe more bitterly than it did 
 if he'd half listened to it. He was watching with an in-
 
 434 JOSEPH GREEE AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 tense concentration of his faculties, the slice of the lobby 
 that Violet would have to cross when she came into the 
 hotel. Quarter to one! If she was coming at all, it 
 would be soon. Snell glided on he was sitting sidelong 
 to the table now and leaning confidentially toward Joe 
 to dwell upon the Capuan delights which the city offered 
 its conquerors. Some town ! Why only last night he had 
 been in on a small party where one of the guests had been 
 no less a person than Polly Price herself. Polly Price! 
 The girl that had married four millionaires in three years, 
 and dug into all of them pretty deep at that. Snell dis 
 passionately pronounced that he couldn't see her; didn't 
 know how she got away with it. Certainly she'd never 
 get any hundred thousand dollar "lavaleers" out of him. 
 But there were others, all right, less expensive not that 
 Snell minded that, though and a whole lot better. Joe 
 had once been quite a lady's man himself. If he was in 
 terested . . . 
 
 The words fell on an ear that was at last totally deaf. 
 Joe saw, pausing a moment at the head of the shallow 
 stairway and then turning toward the restaurant, not 
 Violet, but her husband. 
 
 For a moment the sight of him was blankly incredible, 
 and for another after that the wild idea darted about in 
 his brain that Williamson had come suspecting something 
 amiss a rendezvous! Impossible of course. Violet her 
 self had known nothing of Joe's coming to New York. He 
 had himself in hand again, at least as far as appearances 
 went, before John's eye fell upon him, and was able to 
 return his nod composedly enough. John looked surprised 
 to see him there, but not startled. He moved a few steps 
 toward Joe's table, but after a glance at Snell, sheered off 
 and seated himself at the other side of the room. 
 
 An almost unbearable sense of frustration settled upon 
 Joe. Williamson's presence was explicable enough. He'd 
 come down to see his daughter off to Europe, either with 
 his wife or in her stead. Perhaps Violet had after all 
 changed her mind and gone off to Italy with Dorothy. 
 Anyhow the hope of a few untrammeled hours with her,
 
 ROMANCE 435 
 
 which he'd been leaning on, much more heavily than he 
 had realized, was broken. 
 
 After a few minutes of gloomy cogitation it seemed nec- 
 cessary that he talk to John at once. He pushed back his 
 chair and rose. "There's a man just came in," he said 
 to Snell, "that I had a sort of date with for lunch. I 
 guess I'd better go over and join him. Glad I saw you." 
 
 "So 'in I," said Snell heartily. "Look me up some 
 time." He told Joe his address and insisted he write it 
 down. "And," he added confidentially, "if you want 
 to meet any classy girls ..." 
 
 "Or want three or four million dollars?" Joe inter 
 rupted with a dry grin. 
 
 "Well, that wouldn't stump me, either," Snell retorted 
 a little truculently. He twisted his mouth as he spoke as 
 if he were shifting a cigar into one corner of it. "Look 
 me up, anyhow," he concluded cordially. 
 
 Joe said he would, and crossed the room to John Will 
 iamson's table. 
 
 "Sit doAvn," John said cheerfully. "Did you just get 
 in to-day?" 
 
 "Been here all the week," Joe told him. 
 
 John frowned. "Not in this hotel, have you?" 
 
 "No," Joe said. "I happened to be down the street a 
 little way, and I ran in for lunch." 
 
 John explained, too. "I thought I would have bumped 
 into you, that's all, if you had been staying here. I've 
 been here three or four days myself. Just been seeing my 
 daughter off to Europe." 
 
 "Did your wife go with her?" Joe asked. He had 
 spoken out of a dry throat, and the words reverberated 
 harshly in his own ears, but apparently the question 
 sounded casual enough to Williamson. 
 
 "No," he answered. "She's at home." 
 
 "Have you moved into town yet?" Joe inquired. 
 
 John told him they were still out in Lake Forest. They 
 hardly ever came in as early as this. Best month in 
 the year, October was. No time like it for horseback 
 riding.
 
 436 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 Joe began to wonder, fantastically, if John was trying 
 to torment him with this picture of Violet, alone, un 
 guarded, cantering along the bridle paths. Why had John 
 come to New York in her place ? Was the change of plan 
 his doing, or hers ? He certainly looked damned well satis 
 fied with himself, munching away at his thick English 
 chop. 
 
 "By the way," he asked, when he had deliberately 
 disposed of a mouthful, "what luck are you having with 
 your raw linen marketing it, I mean? It seems to have 
 been worrying Henry and Miss Mac Arthur quite a bit." 
 
 "That's what I'm down here on," said Joe. " God, 
 how I hate this town ! " he added. 
 
 John said it wasn't such a bad town when you knew 
 your way about in it. 
 
 "Well, I guess the trouble with me must be that I 
 don't know my way about," Joe admitted. "I've been 
 getting an idea the last day or two that these different 
 people I've been talking to are all in cahoots." 
 
 John stared at him. ' ' Good God, man ! " he said. ' ' Of 
 course they are. Most of the industries that are adminis 
 tered from New York are pretty well tied together inside 
 themselves. But the textiles ! Good lord ! ' ' 
 
 "Well, I don't know anything about that," Joe grum 
 bled. "That's out of my beat, I guess. It looked like a 
 perfectly straight merchandising proposition to me. I 
 had something good that they wanted. But this inside 
 stuff . . . Look here, Williamson, I don't see why this 
 shouldn't be put up to you. Why don't you stay on for 
 two or three days and earn your dividends?" He man 
 aged to throw in a smile with this, but it didn't take off 
 much of the edge of his words. "You can play this pussy 
 foot game. You know all the inside stuff." 
 
 "I'm afraid I can't take it on," John said. "I've got 
 to be home Monday morning for an important meeting." 
 
 The lightness combined with the finality of his tone 
 stung Joe to a flare of temper. "Damn it, Williamson," 
 he said, leaning suddenly forward, half across the table,
 
 ROMANCE 437 
 
 "this is serious. We've got thirty million pounds of that 
 stuff coming in that we've got to buy at an agreed price. 
 It's beginning to come in now. We've got to sell it or 
 we're swamped." 
 
 John moved his chair a few inches back from the table, 
 and leaned back in it. "Do you mean to say," he asked 
 quietly, "that you've committed yourself as deep as that, 
 without having made any arrangement whatever in ad 
 vance for turning the stuff over or for carrying it? 
 You're in a very serious position, if that's the case." 
 
 "You've known that that was the case from the begin 
 ning." Joe was as quiet now as John, and very alert. "You 
 made no criticism of that plan at the April meeting." 
 
 ' ' I certainly assumed that your program involved taking 
 care of your commitments," John assured him steadily. 
 After a moment, he went on. "Times have changed a 
 lot since April. That was the end of a boom. This thing 
 that's on us now is the beginning of a panic, I think. 
 That's the general expectation here in New York, any 
 how. I very much doubt if you can sell that flax here 
 before the first of the year and not then unless times 
 change for the better." 
 
 "Well, if you are right about that," Joe said, after a 
 thoughtful silence, "why, it takes us over into your de 
 partment. ' ' 
 
 "My department?" 
 
 "I mean we'll have to be carried. We'll have to bor 
 row money. A devil of a lot of money, too." 
 
 ' ' I don 't think it 's a banking proposition, if that 's what 
 you mean. The stuff is not collateral, if you can 't sell it. ' ' 
 
 "Whatever you want to call it, it's up to you. It's up 
 to your crowd, I mean. I have carried my end of the 
 load. I've made thirty million pounds of raw linen out 
 of stuff that farmers were burning in the fields. There 
 it is. It's good useful stuff. It's got value. There's no 
 argument about that. And now, I say it's your turn. 
 That's plain enough, isn't it? Hell! We're all in the 
 same boat."
 
 438 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 "If that's your position," John answered mildly, "of 
 course we'll have to take some action on it. It's much too 
 important a matter for me to deal with offhand. I'll have 
 to talk it over with Crawford and Corbett. But you are 
 quite right; it ought to be done soon. "We'll talk it over 
 and let you know say "Wednesday afternoon. Come up 
 to my office then oh, about four o'clock and we'll have 
 something in the way of a program to offer. I've got to 
 run along. I'm taking the Century this afternoon. You 
 aren't taking that train, are you?" 
 
 Joe shook his head. "Waiting over till Monday, I 
 think," he said. "All right. Wednesday afternoon at 
 four, then." 
 
 13 
 
 Joe went back to his hotel, a modest little one in the 
 upper Twenties, withdrew to his own room, where already 
 he had passed the morning, drank the whisky he needed, 
 telegraphed his address to Jennie MacArthur and said she 
 could look for him Tuesday, and then spent most of the 
 afternoon writing a letter to Violet. The intention or 
 better, the necessity of doing this, had imbedded itself 
 in his mind early in the course of his talk with John, and 
 the ultimate turn this talk had taken had in no way 
 shunted him off. 
 
 Williamson's complacent, superior ways had exasper 
 ated Joe ; so had his hollow disclaimer of responsibility for 
 the financial predicament in which the company seemed 
 likely to find itself, and his professional banker's manner 
 of saying he would discuss this serious situation with his 
 friends and let Joe know Wednesday at four o'clock 
 what they thought about it. But none of this had sunk into 
 him very deep. He had caught nothing sinister in John's 
 use of the pronoun you instead of we. He had seen no 
 commenting flicker in John 's eye, upon his ' ' Hell ! We 're 
 all in the same boat." He was still angrier with him for 
 having come to New York in his wife's stead than for 
 anything else John had done or might be planning to do. 
 
 Writing to her was the only balm he could apply to the
 
 ROMANCE 
 
 burning pain of this disappointment. The letter began 
 stiffly it was the first love-letter he had ever written to 
 Violet, or to any woman for that matter but after the 
 first few sentences he ceased to be conscious of it as a 
 thing that must go through the post-office in an envelope, 
 to be read at Lake Forest on Monday morning along with 
 the rest of Violet's mail. It became a simple unmedi- 
 tated release of a coiled spring of emotions which had been 
 wound up by waiting past the breaking point. He re 
 proached her with having spoiled his plan by not coming 
 to New York, and then reproached himself with having, 
 perhaps, spoiled hers by not having come to Chicago. Had 
 it been to wait for him there that she had sent her hus 
 band off with Dorothy? He told her crudely how he 
 wanted her, and how unbearably too hard the waiting had 
 become. Pie didn't want her by crumbs and bits, John 
 Williamson's leavings, even though what John took were 
 nothing that a man a real man, not a fatted ox would 
 want. He might come to Chicago early in the week, or 
 he might not, but in no case would he come to her until 
 she sent for him. She must know her mind by now . . . 
 
 There were sheets and sheets of this. 
 
 The utter recklessness of despatching a missive of this 
 sort to a woman who was living upon any sort of terms 
 with her husband was apparent enough to him, but it suited 
 his mood. He gathered the scrawled and blotted sheets 
 into an envelope, addressed and stamped it, took it out, 
 and dropped it down the chute by the elevator. Then he 
 came back into his room, lay down on the bed, dressed as 
 he was, and almost at once fell deeply asleep. 
 
 He was awakened several hours later by a pounding on 
 his door, and when he opened it and angrily demanded 
 what the devil the row was about, he was told by an ob 
 viously relieved bellboy that Chicago was trying to get him 
 on the telephone. They had rung his bell several times 
 without rousing him. He was still in a half stupefied con 
 dition when he went to the telephone. He made out that 
 it was Jennie MacArthur who was calling him. She had
 
 440 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 been trying to get him, she said, ever since receiving his 
 telegram late that afternoon. The wire was clear enough, 
 but he had trouble making out what she wanted. She 
 was talking about some stock. Had he been selling any? 
 
 ' ' Stock in what ? " he asked. 
 
 "Stock in the Greer Company, Joe," she told him. 
 ' ' Have you been selling any of yours ? ' ' 
 
 He told her she must be crazy to ask him a thing like 
 that. Of course he hadn't. What had put such an idea 
 into her head? 
 
 "Well, there's a lot of it for sale," she told him. "Up 
 in Fargo and other places. There 's a lot of it sold already, 
 I guess. It's the other crowd that's selling it, then." 
 
 He asked her, angrily, what other crowd she meant. 
 
 "I'll write you all I know about it to-night," she told 
 him, in a rather odd-sounding voice. "I'll send it special 
 delivery so you'll get it the first thing Monday morning." 
 He told her this would be all right, he guessed, and at that 
 she hung up. He undressed and went back to bed. 
 
 His memory of this incident when he awakened Sunday 
 morning was, oddly enough, perfectly clear. And of 
 course, now that his mind was working again, the infer 
 ence from what she had told him was clear, too. For a 
 long time he lay contemplating it it and other matters, 
 too, in a sort of crystalline detachment. 
 
 Williamson and Corbett and Crawford had sold out 
 stood from under. They had sold their stock right up 
 there in the flax country, too. Under his own nose. 
 Where belief in the company's great future ran highest, 
 and where they could get the best price. They covered 
 their tracks cleverly, too, never to have attracted his eye. 
 It was queer that they should have been able to do that 
 without ever giving him a hint to put him on his guard. 
 
 But why had they done it? Simply because they fore 
 saw bad times, and they wanted to convert a dubious 
 chance of millions into a sure recovery of their investment ? 
 
 Joe didn't think it likely. They were expecting some 
 thing better than that.
 
 ROMANCE 441 
 
 They were playing him for a fool. "Well, he was one. 
 He had been quite unaccountably a fool for months, 
 blindly unaware of what was going on about him. Will 
 iamson had started back to Chicago under the satisfied 
 conviction that he had been a fool. " It 's your turn now, ' ' 
 Joe had said to him. Well, that was what they thought. 
 That was what they had been waiting for. They'd be 
 talking it over this Sunday afternoon the three of them. 
 Down in Williamson's gun-room, like enough. Smiling 
 over the simplicity of his turning to them to them for 
 help. 
 
 He didn't waste much time trying to forecast the terms 
 of the offer they would have ready for him Wednesday 
 afternoon. The broad outline of the situation was plain 
 enough. In default of selling his flax, he would have to 
 borrow the money to pay for it, and as the price of find 
 ing the money for him, they would exact their pound of 
 flesh ; namely, his share in the enterprise which his imagi- 
 ination had conceived and his energy made real. What 
 particular form of hocus pocus under the polite name of 
 reorganization they resorted to, didn't matter. 
 
 Well he was broad awake now. He knew exactly the 
 task that lay before him. He would have to market his 
 flax, or he would have to find the money to carry it, not 
 only without their help, but against their relentless op 
 position. How long, he wondered, had they been opposing 
 him? How much of the bland indifference he had been 
 chafing at during the past week had been their doing? 
 That, like enough, had been Williamson's business in 
 New York. And Joe, like a gull, had sat there at the 
 lunch table yesterday, babbling of his troubles. 
 
 This was the thing that worried him his own fatuous 
 heedlessness. He had understood these fellows well 
 enough at the beginning; taken his precautions against 
 them. During these past months he had been like a man 
 drugged. Never mind that; he was awake now. 
 
 Perhaps too late but perhaps not. Certainly he would 
 need all his wits to meet this next week. No good wasting
 
 442 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 time going to Chicago to listen to the terms of the bar 
 gain they 'd propose to him. He 'd tell Jennie to go to the 
 meeting. Tell her, too, to keep them in the dark as to 
 where he was and what he was doing. She could play that 
 part of the game all right. She saw things pretty straight, 
 Jennie did. In a sort of way, she had seen this coming. 
 It must have been in her mind when she came all the 
 way to Fargo to talk to him. Damn it, why didn't she 
 talk out? Make him see it. Her manner had struck him 
 as queer on that visit ; as if she was worried about him. He 
 wondered how she had discovered that the other crowd 
 were selling out. It was queer she hadn't mentioned it 
 last night when she talked to him, instead of saying she'd 
 write, and hanging up in that sudden way. 
 
 The semi-somnolent, luminous, disembodied period came 
 to an end when he got out of bed. He wanted a drink. 
 That was the first thing. He went over to the bag where 
 he kept his bottle, but it wasn't there. Then he remem 
 bered, and turned back to the desk where he had sat 
 writing so long. That was yesterday afternoon. There 
 stood the bottle, but it was empty. Queer! It had been 
 practically full when he had opened it on coming in from 
 his lunch with Williamson, and he hadn't been out of the 
 room except to walk down the corridor to mail that letter 
 to Violet. 
 
 The contents of that letter, forgotten until now, began 
 coming back into his mind as he stood staring at the dis 
 ordered desk and the empty whisky bottle. He couldn't 
 remember consecutively what he had said, but phrases and 
 fragments that came back into his mind were unbelievable 
 appalling. He did remember the mere physical bulk of 
 the thing as he had hefted it in his hand on his way to the 
 mail chute. 
 
 He had been drunk when he wrote that letter. No get 
 ting away from that. He had been drunk, too, when Jen 
 nie telephoned and she had known it. That was why her 
 voice had changed in that strange way, and why she had 
 hung up with that mere promise to write. He had got
 
 ROMANCE 443 
 
 drunk without meaning to, and without recognizing hia 
 condition when he was in it. That letter to Violet ! What 
 could he do about it? Telegraph her to return it un* 
 opened, or to destroy it unread? He looked at his watch. 
 Eleven o'clock ten in Chicago. It was too late to risk 
 the comparative publicity of a telegram. Williamson him 
 self would be home before it arrived, and it would as 
 likely as not fall into his hands. Then the fat would be 
 in the fire. He needed a drink. That was all that was the 
 matter with him. He would be able to think after he had 
 had a drink. 
 
 He was on the way to the bell to summon the boy who 
 provided him with liquor, when he stopped short, turned 
 back, and lay down again upon the bed. He was clammy 
 with sweat. His whole body was crying out for the drink 
 he wanted. But the thing that frightened him was the 
 realization, brought home at last, that this was what had 
 been the matter with him for months. In a way, he had 
 known it all along. His shame over the habit gave him 
 away; his careful concealment from his associates of the 
 amount of whisky it took to see him through the day. 
 
 He got up and took the empty bottle and the glass into 
 the bathroom, washed them out thoroughly, and then 
 washed his hands. The only way to quit was to quit. 
 
 There had been nothing in Joe's experience that was 
 comparable with the tortures of the ensuing week, unless 
 it were the unreckoned period of time when he had 
 wandered, starved and consumed by fever, alone in the 
 Amazon jungle, a nightmare that had come to its climax 
 when he had torn aside the curtain of thatch which hung 
 over one gable end of a community hut and staggered 
 within, expecting to be transfixed upon a native spear. 
 
 He was starving now, for food was something he could 
 hardly bring himself to touch; he was consumed by what 
 seemed like thirst, except that no drink he would take 
 could satisfy it; he was dragged down by a heavy lassi 
 tude ; his nervous irritability was that of a man excoriated ; 
 he was utterly and terribly alone. Worst of all and this
 
 444 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 was a thing that had no parallel in his fight with the 
 jungle was the obsession that one drink, even a small 
 drink, of whisky would make him instantly himself again. 
 He asserted to himself that this was a lie ; that at the worst 
 he was a better man than the muzzy-witted fool he had 
 been for the past six months ; but this was an assertion that 
 he had constantly to make anew. 
 
 The only thing that supported him was the other fight 
 he was engaged in, the fight to keep himself and the enter 
 prise which he had made a part of himself out of the 
 waiting clutches of John "Williamson and his friends. 
 
 Jennie's letter when it came on Monday morning made 
 it clear that they must have been waiting and ready for 
 a good while. It was an inquiry from the Blue Sky Com 
 mission in one of the flax-growing states that had revealed 
 to her what had happened. Stock in the Greer Company 
 was being so extensively traded in that the status of the 
 company was a matter of official concern. There was 
 no doubt in Jennie's mind, nor in Joe's that the other 
 crowd were completely unloaded. 
 
 Joe got her at once on the telephone and told her that 
 he was going to keep on trying to market the flax in New 
 York. He was going after a new lot of people. There 
 was no use fooling with the old bunch any more, who were 
 no doubt sewed up by Williamson. He wasn't going to 
 waste time, either, going to Chicago to hear what the 
 banker and his associates had to say. Jennie should go 
 to the meeting and receive their terms, and transmit them 
 to him. Also she was to avoid saying anything about his 
 plans or present whereabouts. He ended the conversa 
 tion by telling her that she wasn 't to feel discouraged. He 
 believed he was going to win out yet. 
 
 It surprised and encouraged him that he could com 
 mand so cheerful and natural a tone. It sounded all right 
 to her, evidently and her relief at it was plain to him. 
 Yet it seemed to him that his own voice was that of another 
 man. He himself, if he could have spoken, would only 
 have cried out in torment. This strange sense of duality
 
 ROMANCE 445 
 
 persisted throughout the week. He himself was there, but' 
 he heard the other man presenting his case. Presenting 
 it well, lucidly, persuasively, while he, Joe Greer, was 
 hardly capable of consecutive thought. 
 
 He had begun, as he told Jennie he meant to do, with a 
 new crowd, none of them as big as the men in the inner; 
 ring; outsiders, but capable of being welded, he thought, 
 into a ring of their own. He worked upon them singly. 
 He drew them into little groups, and after a while felt 
 them coming his way. The evidences straws he would 
 not have been capable of perceiving a week ago were 
 pointing toward success. 
 
 But on Friday, when he had talked to a dozen of them 
 together at a prearranged lunch, this reawakened sensi 
 tiveness of his told him the tide had turned against him. 
 He tried to shout this instinct down, tried to attribute it 
 to his own exhausted condition but it would not do. He 
 worked with them until four o'clock that afternoon, but 
 when they left him with friendliest professions of interest 
 and promises of further consideration, he knew he was 
 beaten. 
 
 He went back to the hotel, and there found Jennie's 
 letter containing in full the terms offered by Williamson, 
 Corbett and Crawford. The mental effort involved in 
 reading the letter was an agony in itself (one drink now 
 one drink, and it would all be easy) and he spent most of 
 the evening mastering the details of it. In the broad out 
 line, however, it was simple enough. The first move had 
 been on Monday morning when the three of them formally 
 tendered their resignations as directors in the Greer Com 
 pany, the reason being offered in each case that they 
 were no longer stockholders in the company. They now 
 proposed to organize a new corporation which would en 
 ter into a five-year contract with the Greer Company to 
 buy the entire output of raw flax which the Greer Com 
 pany was permitted to buy from the subsidiaries, at the 
 price which the Greer Company had paid the subsidiaries 
 plus a broker's commission of one-eighth of one per cent.
 
 446 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 The Greer Company was given thirty days in which to 
 accept this offer. 
 
 Joe grinned savagely over the neatness of the thing. He 
 was to be left undisturbed in control of the Greer Company. 
 The Greer Company was to be saved from bankruptcy, al 
 lowed to collect its meager royalties if it could, and a 
 broker 's commission of one-eighth of one per cent, upon its 
 sales. The subsidiaries, too, would be paid the letter of 
 their bond. They'd get their manufacturer's profit 
 twenty per cent, over the cost of material and labor for 
 processing the flax. In a word, they and the Greer Com 
 pany were to be left holding the bag. All the real pro 
 fits would go to the new corporation. 
 
 And yet, there was nothing, so far as Joe could see, il 
 legal or even unethical about the proposal. Here was a 
 company rescued from impending bankruptcy; all its 
 technical obligations met; its continued functioning as 
 sured. As Joe had once said to Jennie, having the right 
 on their side was one of the best things those fellows did. 
 But the right was more profitable to them than any vul 
 gar wrecking operation could be by just the subsidiaries, 
 one-half share in the profit of merchandising the flax ! 
 
 Well, they hadn't got it yet. He still had thirty days 
 in which to keep on trying to find either a more favorable 
 market for the flax, or credit that would enable him to 
 carry it. He wasn't really angry until the following 
 morning when he received an astonishing note from 
 Williamson, forwarded by Jennie from his office. 
 
 The offer they had made to the Greer Company was 
 the best, John said, that they felt was justified in view 
 of the present bad times and uncertain market conditions. 
 He did not, however, wish to give Greer personally any 
 justification for feeling that he was being squeezed out in 
 the new arrangement. Any amount, therefore, up to three 
 million dollars, that Greer might wish to invest in the 
 new corporation would be accorded its due share in the 
 issuance of the stock. He didn't know, he said, whether 
 Joe's connection with the old company would embarrass
 
 ROMANCE 447 
 
 him in going into the new or not, but this, at any rate, was 
 his own affair. \ 
 
 He did know, of course, damn well, that Joe could not 
 participate in any of the profits derived from a contract 
 like that without being under the gravest imputation of 
 bad faith ; and he also suspected that John knew he hadn 't 
 any money to spare. The smugness of this gesture of fair, 
 play enraged him, and he cursed the banker steadily for 
 half an hour. Then he went out to find Gordon Snell, the 
 man whom New York insisted upon overwhelming with 
 easy money. 
 
 Snell wasn't the sort of New Yorker who goes out of 
 town for week-ends. Saturday night was for him the 
 highest and most brilliantly illuminated spot in the week. 
 Joe found him, in his office, somewhat less expansive than 
 he had been over the lunch table ; and when he had learned 
 the import of his visitor's call, distinctly patronizing. 
 However, he was cordial enough, and professed himself 
 willing to hear Joe's story only not to-day. Not until 
 next week some time. Ah, Monday would be all right 
 Monday or Tuesday. Joe had better call him up on Mon 
 day. Not too early, though. A man could never tell 
 down here in New York where he was going to be or what 
 sort of head he would have Monday morning. 
 
 Eight now, he had to run off had a date for lunch. He 
 had another date for to-night, too, but this wasn't so 
 strictly private an affair. He would like to have Joe 
 come along. Yes, by Heck, Joe had got to come along! 
 No two ways about it. It was going to be a nice little 
 party. They'd have dinner together at the Astor, and 
 look in at one of the shows to pass the time until the party 
 proper was supposed to begin. Up in one of the big new 
 studio buildings in the west Fifties, it was to be. Only 
 no business. Joe had got to give his solemn word for 
 that. Business, Snell 's experience had taught him, was 
 one thing, and pleasure was another; and a man couldn't 
 enjoy getting gently illuminated if there was any danger 
 of his being asked to sign on the dotted line somewhere.
 
 448 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 Joe knew this sort of lack-wit well enough to perceive 
 that these convivial preliminaries were indispensable, and 
 it put him for a moment in a dilemma. Then he said, 
 "I can't get drunk any more, myself. Had to go on the 
 wagon. But I'm good for the dinner and the show, any 
 how; and I won't talk business." 
 
 He was fairly dragged along to the party, too, after 
 ward, and had of course an agonizing experience only 
 just short of unbearable. The rest of the crowd were get 
 ting drunk as fast as they knew how. It was an ironic 
 reflection that once, and not very long ago, this sort of 
 entertainment had been a favorite recreation of his own. 
 He endured it by main strength until about two o'clock 
 Sunday morning; then, reflecting that Snell would never 
 be able to remember afterward whether he had left 
 now or hours later, he bade an unobtrusive good night to 
 his host and slipped away. 
 
 He was nearer discouraged than he had been before. It 
 did not seem likely that a drunken fool like this could be 
 a source of efficacious help and yet he knew of no other. 
 Well, there was no good thinking any more about Snell till 
 Monday morning. 
 
 When he went to the desk in his hotel to get his key, they 
 handed him a telegram. He supposed it was information 
 from Jennie that he'd wired for as to the amount of the 
 drafts that had come in against bills of lading on flax that 
 had already been shipped. He had hardly the heart to 
 open it. 
 
 But the woman's name which was signed to it was not 
 Jennie's. It read: 
 
 "Arriving Pennsylvania station tomorrow morning nine 
 forty-five for few hours only. 
 
 Violet." 
 14 
 
 He was still incredulous when he saw her walking toward 
 him, down the platform. Frightened, and thrilled at the 
 same time, with a sense of great adventure, as he could see 
 she was, she had once more the look of a schoolgirl to him.
 
 ROMANCE 449 
 
 Not merely that; she looked to his enraptured, sleepless 
 eyes like a probationary angel come down to change the 
 whole face of the world. 
 
 Her face brightened joyously when she saw him, then 
 in an instant composed itself into the look of amicably in 
 different recognition appropriate to being met in the sta 
 tion by a man whom her husband might have requested to 
 look after his wife. 
 
 He took her dressing-case from the red-cap, tipped the 
 boy, and said to her, "YouVe just about got time to make 
 the othfr train. We'll go around this way." 
 
 "With a demure gleam of mischief which made him want 
 to kiss her where she stood, she accepted this, contentedly, 
 as a maneuver for getting away at once, out of the Chicago 
 crowd that was pouring along the platform. 
 
 "I don't care where we go," she said, after they had 
 changed levels and were walking down a transverse cor 
 ridor, "only I must be back here in the station at six 
 o 'clock. That 's when I am supposed to be getting in from 
 Chicago." 
 
 "That'll be all right," he assured her. "I'll get you 
 back here on time. You can leave it all to me." For an 
 instant the sense of the furtiveness of their escapade elated 
 him. He gave a short laugh, slid his arm inside hers, and 
 pressed it against his body. She returned the pressure, but 
 at once, with a nervous glance around, released herself. 
 
 "If we're going where we can really be alone for a 
 while, ' ' she said, ' ' there 's no good taking chances here. ' ' 
 
 His mood changed. "Oh, damn it!" he said. "Yes, I 
 suppose you're right." And they walked on in silence. 
 
 She hesitated a moment in clear surprise when she found 
 him showing a pair of tickets and taking her through the 
 gate to one of the Long Island railway trains, but she 
 asked no explanation, and he made none until they were 
 seated in an almost empty coach. 
 
 "This is a little branch line," he said. "It goes down 
 to one of the beaches where there 's nobody about, this time 
 of year. I found it when I was wandering around, just
 
 450 JOSEPH GREEK AND fflS DAUGHTER 
 
 a week ago to-day. Had it all to myself, including a little 
 hotel that a fat man is keeping open because he hasn't 
 anywhere else to go. We can get lunch there, I guess. It 
 was only last Sunday I was there," he added, ''but it 
 seems like the longest year I've ever lived." 
 
 She had stripped off one of her gloves, and nestled her 
 bare hand into his, upon the seat between them. At this 
 confession, though she misunderstood it, she darted a 
 glance around, and perceived that there was no one else 
 in their part of the car not even a brakeman she raised 
 his hand and stroked the hairy back of it with her lips. 
 "Poor old Joe!" she whispered. 
 
 He had a blissful hour before they left the train at the 
 little way-station he had picked out, despite the rattle of 
 the windows, the slamming of the doors, the sudden stops 
 and starts, and the bawling of the brakeman, which kept 
 beating a dreadful tattoo upon his drawn nerves. It 
 would be too hard to talk, she said, and sitting quietly be 
 side him like this, and continuing to hold his hand, she 
 gave him a respite from the thoughts that had been surging 
 through his brain, turning him giddy, elating him and 
 terrifying him ever since he'd read that telegram. 
 
 She was looking around pretty dubiously, he saw, at the 
 surroundings they descended into from the train. 
 
 "It's awfully bright, isn't it?" she said. "I hate a 
 glare like this, especially when I've just spent the night on 
 the train." 
 
 "All the light in the world couldn't hurt your looks," 
 he told her. But she turned away from him with a petu 
 lant laugh. 
 
 "Where are we going?" she asked. "We've got to 
 find some shade somewhere." 
 
 "I don't believe there's any on the beach," he said. It 
 had been his idea that they would sit there side by side, 
 with nothing but the Atlantic Ocean and a peppering of 
 Antilles between them and South America. "There's a 
 veranda on the hotel over there, though, ' ' he added. 
 
 She cast another dubious glance at the shabby little
 
 ROMANCE 451 
 
 gable-roofed building his gesture had pointed out, and 
 for a moment stood still, visibly casting about for an al 
 ternative. Then she started on, he following, along the 
 rickety sidewalk that led to the inn. There were drifts of 
 loose sand across the sidewalk, and over these she walked 
 gingerly. 
 
 "I hate sand, too," she told him, but not unamiably, 
 "when I've got on shoes and stockings like these." 
 
 "I'm afraid there's nothing much here but sand," he 
 remarked, apologetically. Just before they reached the 
 inn, she stopped and faced him. "Joe," she asked, "why 
 did you bring me here?" 
 
 He was taken aback for an answer; couldn't be sure he 
 knew what she meant. "Why," he said, "I was trying 
 to think of some quiet open sort of place where we could 
 talk and decide what we were going to do, and this came 
 into my head. I'm sorry you don't like it." 
 
 "It's all right," she asserted, "only it looks so perfectly 
 (disreputable. ' ' 
 
 "I don't think it's that," Joe said, "but it does look as 
 if it was closed. There used to be some chairs and things 
 standing around on this veranda. ' ' He tried the door and 
 found it locked, but after rattling and knocking upon it for 
 a while, they heard heavy steps within, and presently the 
 fat proprietor came and opened it. He was in his shirt, 
 but the garment was clean and he was freshly shaven. 
 
 "Can we get lunch here?" Joe asked. "There are just 
 the two of us." 
 
 "Why, the hotel is rightly closed," the man said, "but 
 I guess I can cook you up a lunch if you don't mind taking 
 sort of what you can get." 
 
 "Not a bit," Violet assured him cordially, somewhat to 
 Joe's surprise. "It's very nice of you to take so much 
 trouble for us." 
 
 Upon that, he hospitably invited them in and told them 
 to make themselves right at home. The interior made a 
 strong contrast with the outside look of the place. It 
 was unpretentiously but agreeably furnished, and it was
 
 452 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 immaculately neat. There was a wide fireplace flanked 
 with settles, where he said they could have a fire whenever 
 they wanted it. He'd have lunch ready about one, if that 
 would suit them. He took a childlike pleasure in Violet's 
 approval of the place, which she warmly expressed. His 
 daughter had fixed it up, he said, and she was the one who 
 really ran it during the season. Now, however, she was 
 working in New York, and her hours made it inconvenient 
 for her to commute down here. He was just staying 
 around to sort of keep the place from blowing away. 
 "And with my build," he concluded humorously, "I'm 
 pretty good for that. ' ' 
 
 "Willingly, he set about to refurnish the veranda, carry 
 ing out, with Joe's help, a small rattan davenport, two or 
 three chairs, cushions, and striped cotton blankets, gay 
 colored. "Just as easy to make it a bit home-like," he 
 explained, when Violet had protested that these latter ad 
 ditions were superfluous. 
 
 "It's perfect, Joe," Violet said, when at last they were 
 ensconced and their host, with visible reluctance, had left 
 them to themselves. "And that fat old innocent," she 
 added, "is the nicest thing about it. No, not nicer than 
 you. The nicest thing about the place, I said. I suppose 
 he thinks we're a couple of honeymooners. " 
 
 He leaned against the rail, devouring her with burning 
 eyes. She had tucked herself up in a corner of the daven 
 port, taken off her hat, and dropped it, negligently, on the 
 floor beside her. The sense of the incredible perfection of 
 her, in form and texture, in the exquisite fineness of de 
 tail, oppressed his heart with a strange melancholy, and 
 stiffened his throat. 
 
 "You look the part," he said. 
 
 "You don't," she retorted, returning his gaze. "You 
 look horribly tired and ill. Oh, don 't sit away off there. 
 Come here where I can feel you. Wait, though. It's 
 horrid to have to do it, but look up the train first, Joe. 
 See how long we're going to have. I've absolutely got to 
 be back in the Pennsylvania station a little before six."
 
 ROMANCE 453 
 
 He consulted a time card that he had in his pocket. 
 ' ' That means leaving at four fifteen, to be sure of it. ' ' 
 
 Her eyes filled up with tears. "And it's nearly noon 
 now," she cried. "Four hours and I thought it was a 
 whole day." 
 
 ' ' Well, never mind. We won 't waste any of it. ' ' 
 
 He had dropped down on the sofa beside her, but she 
 wasn't content with the way he sat. "You're so tired," 
 she protested. "So deadly tired. Can't you just be 
 happy, and relax for a little while? Lean down on me, 
 like this. No, you're not too heavy not half as heavy 
 as I thought you'd be. Joe, is it all my fault you're like 
 this?" 
 
 "It's not your fault at all," he told her. "And it isn't 
 all your doing either. I've had a hell of a two weeks 
 and there are more of them in sight. But I 'm through the 
 worst of it, I guess. I '11 come out right side up in the end, 
 anyhow. It isn't the first fight I 've had, by a good many." 
 
 She said dryly, "I'd like to see John got the better of 
 for once. Don't you let him beat you, Joe. I'd always 
 think it was my fault." 
 
 "John Williamson?" he asked slowly. "Don't worry 
 about him. He hasn't got me yet." 
 
 She wanted to know, over a little laugh, what John he 
 thought she meant. "I believe you're going to sleep," she 
 added. "You're so tired. Don't try to talk. Keep still, 
 like this. Isn't it ridiculous? I'm the one that's sup 
 posed to be sick. I 'm packed off to Doctor Brown. He 's 
 got a place out here on Long Island for nervous wrecks, 
 where he treats good-for-nothing women like me. A mix 
 ture of Freud and Christian Science he "gives us. It 
 works pretty well, too. I've been to him once or twice for 
 insomnia. Well, I had it all right after I got that letter of 
 yours, Joe. ' ' 
 
 Despite her effort to hold him where he was, he sat 
 erect. "You must have hated me for that," he said. 
 
 "Silly, I adored you for it but it frightened me out 
 of my five wits. It was wild to take a chance like that,
 
 454 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 Joe. John doesn't read my letters, and he doesn't ask 
 questions, but if he had been there when the mail came in 
 and had seen the thickness of that envelope, and your 
 handwriting on it, he'd have had a whole lot to think 
 about. That's just the kind of chances we can't take. 
 But I'm glad you did it once. I never knew what it was 
 before. I felt as if I had to go to you then, without 
 waiting a minute. And of course it got worse during the 
 week, as I found out what John and the others were doing 
 to you. Oh, they didn't tell me anything, but I caught 
 bits of their talk now and then. I was afraid if John tried 
 to talk to me about it, I'd blow up and give everything 
 away; so I didn't dare talk to him at all. Locked myself 
 up, and had a nervous breakdown. It seemed pretty real 
 at the time even to me. But I was all right again as 
 soon as he suggested Doctor Brown. I had to be, or he 
 would have insisted on sending somebody down with me. 
 He suggested Margaret Craven, as it was. I promised to 
 stay with Alice Wentworth instead of going to a hotel, 
 and I told him I'd telegraph her what train to meet me at. 
 I did but it wasn't the one I was on. And that's how I 
 I got our day. It isn't much, is it, for all that? Four 
 hours and already they're slipping away." 
 
 "They're enough, though, if we don't waste them. No, 
 you've got me about half hypnotized now. I haven't any 
 grip on my mind when you hold me like that. We've got 
 to talk this thing through somehow ; find out where we are, 
 and what we're going to do." 
 
 She drew a long sigh. ""What's the use spoiling this, 
 Joe ? That 's all we should do, trying to talk. It '11 be time 
 enough on the train, when we go back, won't it? After 
 all, there can't be very much to say. It's so heavenly 
 still here. Put your head down, where you can see the 
 clouds that make those big purple shadows. Do you know 
 What I wish? I wish Mount Vesuvius was right behind 
 us, here ; and after we 'd been here a long time as long as 
 we wanted, it would all at once smother us with ashes, the 
 way it did those Pompeian people."
 
 ROMANCE 455 
 
 He had yielded to her arms again. "If that's what we 
 wanted, ' ' he said, ' ' we shouldn 't have to depend on Mount 
 Vesuvius. It can be managed more handily than that. 
 But it '11 be a long while before I 'm ready to die, even like 
 this. There's too much left to be lived through. I'd like 
 to sail into the Bay of Naples with you, for one thing, and 
 have a look at that old volcano. Do you remember some 
 thing you said the first time we talked together, about 
 wishing you could be there with me when I had my first 
 look at all that? It's going to work out, sometime, you 
 know. I've known it, in a way, ever since you said it. 
 "We could do it, at that. To-morrow. There's a Dutch 
 boat sailing for Lisbon. Oh, it's all right to laugh, but it's 
 going to happen some day." 
 
 "There isn't a city in Europe, Joe," her voice was 
 somber enough now "where we wouldn't be running into 
 people all the time who knew me. And who'd know what 
 I'd done. Oh, it's a lovely dream, my dear, but it will 
 never come true." 
 
 Again, and this time bruskly, he disengaged himself 
 from her arm. He rose giddily to his feet, pulled up a 
 chair, and sat down on it. ' ' You see, ' ' he said, ' ' we can 't 
 get away from it. It keeps coming back. We've got to 
 talk it out; decide what we're going to do." 
 
 "I don't want to talk!" she said fiercely, at the end of 
 a tight drawn silence. "Talking won't get us anywhere." 
 
 "I guess you're right about that," he agreed. "That's 
 the way I feel about it, too. It's always simplest to do a 
 thing first and save your talking till afterward. This is 
 what we'll do, Violet. There's a Chilean liner sailing for 
 Valparaiso, Saturday. That'll give us time to get our pass 
 ports and anything we need. They know me down there, 
 and they'll take you for granted as my wife without a 
 question. There's nobody who'd think of asking a 
 question. We'd leave all this clean behind. Start fresh, 
 both of us, on a life that is worth living. Something 
 we've never had a chance at. I've never had a wife 
 I haven't even a legal one, now and you've never had a
 
 456 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 husband, either. That's God's truth. You know it, your 
 self; found it out at last. He'd divorce you if you asked 
 him to, and then we could make it all square go anywhere 
 we liked tell anybody to go to hell. And in the mean 
 time ... It's better than mucking around here in this. 
 There won't be anything hard about it, either. Not after 
 you've once said you'll do it. And you will. It's written 
 down in the books that you will!" 
 
 "That's a crazier dream than the other, Joe," she said 
 uneasily. "I wish you wouldn't talk like that." 
 
 "There's not a thing in it," he contradicted her, "that 
 isn't plain common sense;" and he went on for a while to 
 enlarge upon the practicality of it. He had a thousand 
 dollars in his pocket, and ten thousand more which was 
 almost as accessible. He 'd been keeping it handy for years, 
 on the off chance of some emergency that would call for it. 
 That would be enough to give him a start, and a start was 
 all he ever wanted, anywhere. Down in that part of the 
 world opportunities for a man of his profession were thick 
 as dandelions. They went to seed faster than you could 
 pick them. " I 'd never ask you to take a chance with hard 
 ship," he assured her earnestly. "I can keep you as safe 
 from the meannesses of life as John Williamson can." 
 
 Her uncontrollable restlessness as he talked, her frantic 
 attempts to turn him aside from the theme, served only 
 to feed his elation. It was against herself she was strug 
 gling, not against him. He abandoned practical consider 
 ations as something established, and began painting for 
 her the romance of the picture, the paradisaical country, 
 the suavity and the charm of life and manners. 
 
 For that hour he was fully himself again. The lassi 
 tude was conquered, the tortured nerves in tune, the 
 gnawing, obsessing need of alcohol forgotten. He revealed 
 the thing he wanted her to see, not in tame descriptive 
 generalities, but in flashes of concrete reality, fragments 
 of his own experience, illuminative sparks of the most 
 minute detail. He fairly gave her the wine-dry air of 
 that mountain-guarded country to breathe.
 
 ROMANCE 457 
 
 It was she now who resisted his arms, but he won her 
 to them at last and stilled her protests in them ; quieted her 
 trembling. 
 
 "After all," he said, when he had kissed her for the 
 first time, that day, "this is what matters." His voice, 
 harsh as it was with passion, subdued itself to the ear 
 that was so near his lips. "You're in love with me. 
 You've found out what it means at last. You can guess 
 what it will be like. I'm in love with you. And I know 
 what it will mean. I'm not a green boy, guessing nor an 
 ox who has forgotten. You can't go back now, Violet!" 
 
 She did not return his kiss, but she lay unresisting, ac 
 quiescent, in his embrace. She may have thought, during 
 these wild, heedless minutes, that she would go with him. 
 He sensed victory in the air, at least. But when they heard 
 the inn-keeper coming heavily toward the door to tell them 
 their lunch was ready, she struggled erect like one startled 
 out of a dream. 
 
 Before their host, while he was waiting upon them, she 
 amazed Joe though it was a faculty of hers he had often 
 wondered at before by the perfection with which she 
 played her part. She ate her lunch with an appearance of 
 normal appetite, where he could hardly choke down a 
 mouthful. She talked amusedly, where he could hardly 
 find monosyllables to respond, about small items in their 
 common experience, about people they knew. Despite the 
 fact that Joe was powerless to help, she carried him along 
 with her, so that they presented to the fat old inn-keeper 
 a thoroughly plausible picture of a pair of Chicagoans, 
 not too recently married, enjoying a vacation in New York, 
 and a Sunday in the country. 
 
 The only indication she gave to Joe of anything behind 
 all this was by deliberately delaying the old man. She 
 was trying, Joe thought, to prolong her respite. But when 
 at last he did leave them, with a bell to ring when they 
 should be ready for their final course, she turned straight 
 back to their own affair and in an even voice tore his 
 hopes to pieces.
 
 458 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 "It's no good, Joe," she said. "It will never happen 
 that thing you've been talking about. I know you had 
 spoken about it before about the time coming when I'd 
 be ready to go away with you. Break my own life alto 
 gether, and try to hold on by yours. I've let myself 
 dream sometimes that I would, but it's never been any 
 thing but a dream never can be. I suppose if I had any 
 real courage but I haven't, Joe; not a scrap." 
 
 He contradicted her roughly, trying to put a conviction 
 behind the words that was not there. It was her tone 
 that told him the truth, not the things she had been saying. 
 
 "Why," she reminded him, with a wry smile, "I've 
 never even had the sand to tell John that you hadn't 
 taken advantage of me in the car that day not so that 
 he 'd have to believe it. I 'm fond of John, too, ' ' she added. 
 ' ' I wouldn 't hurt him like that for anything in the world. ' y 
 
 He laughed, and then was amazed to see that tears had 
 sprung into her eyes. "I didn't mean to hurt you," he 
 said apologetically, "only it seems to me that in twenty 
 years he has had his chance." 
 
 "I know," she conceded. "I am in love with you, and 
 I 'm not with him never was, I guess. All the same, love 
 isn 't the only thing in the world not for me. ' ' Her voice 
 ran thin, betraying an almost hysterical note. "Why, down 
 in that country Valparaiso, wherever it is those people 
 would all be foreigners, talking a language I don 't know a 
 word of. I wouldn't have anybody but you. I want 
 people around that like me. Joe, it isn't thinkable; that's 
 all. It's simply frantic to talk about asking John ta 
 divorce me. John ! Then there 's Dorothy, too. I didn 't 
 want you to talk about it. I knew you'd spoil this one 
 little day of ours if you did." 
 
 "What did you want this day for?" Joe asked. 
 
 She dried her eyes, and echoed his words with a stare and 
 a slow burning blush. 
 
 "I wanted to see you," she stammered. "I knew you 
 were unhappy, and I was miserable, and I thought ..." 
 She broke off there, and after a moment's silence finished
 
 ROMANCE 459 
 
 with a flash of anger, "There's something beastly about 
 you sometimes, Joe." 
 
 "I guess that's true of most of us," he said dully, "but 
 I didn't mean to be beastly then." 
 
 Her response to his humility was another lightning 
 change of mood. Her hand darted out across the table 
 and rested upon his. "I'm sorry, Joe," she said. "I 
 wish we could be a little happy." Then she rang the 
 bell. "We may as well have the rest of our lunch, any 
 how," she added. 
 
 She told their old host, gaily, how good it had been ; and 
 he, basking in her favor, made an endless business of set 
 ting out the new course. "I could give you better meals 
 than this," he said, "if I knew you were going to be here. 
 If you was to come down here, now, and stay two or three 
 days, I could make you right comfortable. I should think 
 you might like that, too, if you care to have things quiet 
 and simple like." 
 
 Joe said, easily enough, at the end of not more than 
 three seconds of silence, "Well, we'll have to talk about 
 that. We've got to go back to New York to-night, of 
 course, but we'll let you know before we go." 
 
 Down in the buried recesses of his spirit there had been 
 a shattering burst of laughter at himself for a romantic, 
 unbelievable fool. It was that caressing touch of Violet's 
 hand, followed by her ringing of the bell, that seemed 
 somehow to have brought down the whole house of cards. 
 It had happened before the inn-keeper had made his happy 
 suggestion that they come and live here a few days, or he 
 would have been surprised by the momentary gleam in 
 Violet's face with which she responded to it. He had 
 looked for it in her face, knowing it would be there. God, 
 what a fool he had been, with his chivalry and his precious 
 ideals! Well, they understood each other, now! 
 
 They finished their lunch in silence, after their host had 
 withdrawn once more, and then, still without a word, re 
 turned to the veranda. When she had seated herself upon 
 the davenport, he sat beside her, but not very close, and
 
 460 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 with his hands clasped between his knees. She asked him 
 what time it was and he told her, quarter to three. 
 
 "Just a little more than an hour left," she commented 
 forlornly. "Will that be long enough, do you suppose, 
 for you to forgive me in? I don't think I can bear it 
 if you don't." 
 
 "There's nothing to forgive," he said. "You're per 
 fectly right about it about the craziness of my plan, I 
 mean. I've been a fool. And I've times of being what 
 you call a beast." 
 
 "I don't call you that! Except when I'm so frightened 
 I don 't know what I 'm saying. Of myself, Joe, more than 
 of you. I'm the worst coward in the world, that's the 
 truth about me. But I wish I didn't make you so un 
 happy." 
 
 "You don't need to worry about that," he said. 
 "You've been a lot kinder to me than I deserve." 
 
 "But I'm unhappy, too," she sobbed. "Oh, I wish I 
 knew what to do ! " 
 
 He pulled her up, then, in his arms and kissed her, and 
 she, with a deep drawn sigh returned the kiss. ""We've 
 still got an hour, ' ' he said, and for a long while after that 
 they spoke of nothing more to the purpose than the sailing 
 gulls and the sheets of silver left by the receding tide. 
 
 She asked him, though, at the end of a protracted 
 silence, what he was thinking about. 
 
 "I've been trying not to think about it," he confessed. 
 "But I am a beast, and I can't get it out of my head." 
 
 She neither spoke nor stirred until he went on. 
 
 "It isn't as if we'd tried to plan it out, you see. But 
 there it is. That simple old chap takes us for granted, 
 absolutely. "We could have those two or three days . . . 
 If you telephoned your doctor that you weren't coming 
 till Wednesday ... I don't suppose he'd see anything 
 funny in that, would he? Unless your friend in New 
 York should take it into her head to run over and pay you 
 ,a visit; or try to telephone ..." 
 
 "Doctor Brown won't let any one see his patients; not
 
 ROMANCE 461 
 
 till after the first three or four days, anyhow, when he's 
 had a chance to see how bad they are. Nor telephone them, 
 either." She said it simply, like a child, and despite him 
 self, a feeling deeper than mere sensual excitement caught 
 him by the throat. 
 
 "Well, then," he went on raggedly, "there's nothing 
 that could happen. All you 'd have to do to-morrow would 
 be to keep your Mrs. Wentworth from actually putting you 
 on the train. You come down to the same station, but you 
 take our little train, instead. And I'm on it. And we 
 come out here and have our little holiday. Two days, 
 out of a life-time. Oh, I know it's impossible. But you 
 asked what I was thinking about, and that was it." 
 
 "Do you want me to do it, Joe?" 
 
 The simplicity of the question, and the intensity of the 
 emotion that propelled it, literally, for an instant, stopped 
 the beat of his heart. His eyes filled with tears, but 
 through the blur he could see hers, wide with a sense of 
 great adventure, gazing up at him. 
 
 "I don't know," he said. "I don't know whether I 
 want you to or not." 
 
 Her arms tightened about him and she uttered a shaky 
 laugh. "I love you for saying that. I'll come, Joe. I 
 won't welsh altogether. I'll give you those two days. 
 We've got to be starting back now. You go find the man 
 and tell him. He'd better not see me like this." 
 
 Joe made his arrangements and they caught the traia 
 and contrived, very tidily, how her meeting with Alice 
 Wentworth at six should be made plausible. It was not 
 till hours after he had left her that a deeply submerged 
 cavern in him caught the gleam of an avenging grin at 
 John Williamson. 
 
 15 
 
 Violet managed her meeting with Alice Wentworth with 
 entire success. The reason why Alice hadn't actually seen 
 her coming out through the gate was sufficiently suggested 
 by a casual half -sentence and a gesture, and was never; 
 thought of again.
 
 462 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 Alice made her jump, though, by saying, holding her 
 off in both hands for a good look, "You've been deceiving 
 John, Violet. I don't believe in your Doctor Brown for 
 one minute. A nice-looking nervous wreck you are ! What 
 did you come on for, really?" 
 
 A moment later, as she saw her friendly bit of badinage 
 had not prospered, she explained, "I was only trying to 
 say, Vi, that I'd never seen you looking prettier. Or any 
 younger, hardly, since I was your bridesmaid. And since 
 I'd been wondering whether I oughtn't get a wheel-chair 
 for you, it was such a relief I tried to be funny. I ought 
 to have known better at my age, but I didn't," she con 
 cluded, in obvious chagrin. "Violet, if you give another 
 thought to that silly joke, I shall weep right here in public. 
 Come along. It's miles to the car. Have your red-cap 
 give your bag to Wrenn ; and give him your trunk checks, 
 too." 
 
 "My trunks!" Violet caught her breath. The disposal 
 of them did not offer, it was likely, any insoluble problem, 
 but she hadn't thought of it before, nor, apparently, had 
 Joe, and the omission rattled her. How many more sunken 
 reefs of this sort might there be? 
 
 "You poor dear!" Alice cried. "What does it matter 
 whether you send them up or leave them here? You said 
 in your wire you might stay with us a day or two ; that 's 
 all. But if you want to go straight on to-morrow, it's 
 perfectly easy." She possessed herself, by good-humored 
 violence, of the checks and handed them over to the grave 
 kindly-looking servant. "Now we 're all right, at last, ' ' she 
 said encouragingly, and Violet had to suppress an hyster 
 ical desire to laugh wildly. Anyhow, Alice w r as no longer 
 skeptical about her need of going to Doctor Brown's! 
 
 Save for panicky flashes of elation and terror, about 
 equally combined, when she thought of to-morrow's ad 
 venture, she was near enough her natural self by the time 
 the drive to the big brown house in the East Eighties was 
 accomplished. Of course she'd come down to dinner, and 
 she'd love a rubber or two of bridge afterward. There
 
 ROMANCE 463 
 
 was nothing the matter with her, really, except that she 
 couldn't sleep. 
 
 "I guess you'd better telephone John if you feel equal 
 to it," Alice said, when she'd come up with her to her 
 room. "He seems to be rather jumpy about you. At 
 least he sounded that way to me this afternoon when he 
 telephoned." 
 
 "What was he telephoning to you about!" Violet heard 
 herself ask, in a voice that sounded natural enough only 
 rather far away. She didn't as yet quite see why she 
 should be frightened, but she was, horribly. 
 
 "Lie down a minute," Alice commanded quietly, after 
 a look at her. "It's all right. There hasn't anything 
 happened. He tried to telephone to you, that was all, 
 and when they told him you weren't here, he asked for 
 me. He seemed to have the idea that you'd get here this 
 morning, and couldn't quite get it through his head when 
 I told him we weren't expecting you till six. That's why 
 it struck me he was having nerves about you." 
 
 "Did he tell you why he wanted to talk to me?" 
 Violet was a long time getting the words out, and she 
 didn't know whether they were audible or not. 
 
 "Why it wasn't anything that mattered," Alice told 
 her. "Something, I believe, that your cousin, Margaret 
 Craven, had meant to ask you about before you went away ; 
 somebody's address, or such a matter. She was having 
 lunch with him and he said he'd telephone and find out 
 for her. It's absolutely nothing to bother about, you 
 see." 
 
 There was a long silence. Finally Violet said, "I see 
 what happened. John thought I was coming on the 
 Broadway. I was, but I missed it. And he always laughs 
 at me for missing trains, so I didn't call him up and 
 tell him. I suppose I ought to telephone him now ..." 
 
 "My dear," said Alice, "you can't talk across the 
 room to me, let alone to Chicago. I'll wire John that 
 you've got here all right or telephone, if you'd rather." 
 
 "No. Wire is better," Violet murmured.
 
 464 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 Despite their protests, she did come down to dinner and 
 played bridge furiously all the evening. It was her last 
 night out, she told them, and the only thing in the world she 
 dreaded was going to bed. Doctor Brown could make her 
 do it, but nobody else could. And, indeed, when she knocked 
 on Alice's door, about five in the morning, she was not un 
 dressed beyond a negligee, nor had she lain in her bed. 
 
 She was beaten, by them. The night had been too 
 much for her. She had kept up the fight Joe's fight, 
 she put it as long as she could. Her terrors had abated 
 her desire for him, and even made her believe at moments 
 that she whole-heartedly hated him, but they did not rid 
 her of him. She trembled at the thought of his rage if she 
 were to fail to meet their rendezvous. What would he 
 do? "What mightn't he do a man like that! She told 
 herself she wouldn't be safe from him for years never 
 if she disappointed him that morning. 
 
 But, even so, she was less afraid of him than she was of 
 Margaret Craven. Margaret had never liked her much, 
 and had for years been distinctly romantic about John. 
 She took John's part in their small quarrels and lectured 
 her by implication about her duties to him. John spoiled 
 her was forever doing things for her. Whenever, in 
 Violet's absence, he needed a hostess, he called her in. 
 Lunching with him, to-day ! of course she was ! 
 
 It had never, though, until now occurred to her to 
 regard Margaret seriously. In the matter of Joe Greer, 
 she had from the beginning taken Margaret 's enmity light- 
 heartedly enough. She had written to Joe back in August, 
 " Margaret looks at me as if she would like to slay me, 
 and I don't mind a bit." Up to now she had considered 
 herself impregnable. That was the amount of it. 
 
 But to-night her vision of that lunch, Margaret talk 
 ing about her with pretended affection and concern, egg 
 ing John on to telephone to her, awakened a horrifying 
 surmise. Violet had been careless about Joe before Mar 
 garet, last summer. She had talked about him unneces 
 sarily. Margaret might have guessed a good deal.
 
 ROMANCE 465 
 
 And then, there was Henry. Henry more than guessed ; 
 he knew. He wouldn't have betrayed her wilfully, but 
 he was helpless in Margaret's hands. If he let her get 
 hold of an end of a thread to work on, she 'd have unraveled 
 pretty much the whole thing. 
 
 Mightn't she, then, have suspected this New York trip 
 from the first? And wasn't that why she had made John 
 telephone T Well, the trick had worked. The alibi was 
 exploded. (What a fool Alice had been to give her away 
 like that!) Violet could see John's face, perplexed but 
 still unsuspicious John was a dear, that way as he came 
 back to Margaret from the telephone. "It's a funny 
 thing," he would have said. "They aren't expecting her 
 until the six o'clock train to-night." 
 
 How would Margaret have played that handT Would 
 she have laid down her cards ? ' ' Poor old John, don 't you 
 know who it was she went to New York to see ? " Or had 
 she been subtler than that? Whipped up his alarm over 
 Violet's safety? Aphasia or amnesia or whatever they 
 call it that people disappear with. Had she already 
 started him to New York to find her? 
 
 It would work out to a handsome revenge for Margaret 
 if she had persuaded him to do that. But was revenge 
 what Margaret wanted? Or was it Violet's own place 
 her secure place with John, long coveted, that she thought 
 she saw a chance to get? 
 
 It was when her thoughts reached this destination that 
 she knocked on Alice Wentworth's door. One of her 
 random reflections during the night had been that Alice, 
 if she had ever looked at the sending point of her tele 
 gram, must have perceived that she had lied about the 
 trains. But this was the merest incidental. She had no 
 fear left for anybody after Joe and Margaret had taken 
 their respective shares. She told Alice, in a manner of 
 the most intense calm, that she must go back to Chicago at 
 once on the very next train that left. She didn't care 
 what road only not on the Pennsylvania. 
 
 She gave John, who met her in the LaSalle Street station
 
 466 JOSEPH GREER AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 at seven o'clock the next morning, the most electrifying 
 surprise he had experienced since she had told him, twenty 
 years before, that she would marry him. The sort of hug 
 and kiss she bestowed upon him on the platform was un 
 usual enough, but nothing to what followed. She made 
 light of her illness, as they walked through the station to 
 the car in which he'd driven down from Lake Forest to 
 meet her. She'd had a silly attack of the flutters, had 
 got over it, and had come home as quickly as she could to 
 reassure him that she was all right. He'd have found 
 this rather hard to believe had not her looks completely 
 borne her out. 
 
 After they were seated in the car, with the chauffeur 
 waiting to be told where they wanted to go, he asked her 
 jocularly, so that it would be easy for her to refuse 
 if she'd like to have breakfast at the club with him before 
 she drove home. 
 
 "Can't you come home to breakfast with me, John?" 
 she asked. "Just for the ride and the visit?" And be 
 hind Jeffrey's statuesque back, as they rolled up Sheridan 
 Road, she sat close to him and held his hand! 
 
 Three or four miles from home he told her he had 
 Margaret out there to look after her and stave things off 
 that she mightn't want to bother with. 
 
 "That's all right if she doesn't stave you off," Violet 
 said, with a small nervous laugh. 
 
 "As long as she's there," she went on a moment later, 
 "I think I'll tell you something now. Because she makes 
 it hard, somehow this is what I meant just now for me 
 to talk to you. Well, that 's all it is, really. I don 't want 
 you staved off, John, by anybody. I don't want to be 
 let alone. To go my own ways. That sort of thing. I 
 know I've made you think I did. That's a trick most 
 women have, I guess. But they don't mean it. At least 
 I don't. Not any more. I'd like to have you with me 
 all the time. Day and night." 
 
 He looked at her gravely ; almost if that had been pos 
 sible for John suspiciously. "Violet," he asked, "have
 
 ROMANCE 467 
 
 you been frightened by anything? Or anybody? Are 
 you afraid of anything, now?" 
 
 She met his look steadily. "There isn't a thing. 
 There's only one thing. And that is that some day you 
 may get tired of me." At the look this drew from him she 
 uttered a sobbing laugh and flung herself upon him. "It 
 isn't a nightwatchman I want you for," she said. 
 
 16 
 
 From the ninth of October, when Joe telegraphed Jen 
 nie for information on the totals of the drafts that were 
 coming in, his office heard no word of him until within 
 a week of the expiration of Williamson 's offer. It was an 
 anxious time for Jennie, saved from being desperate only 
 by a continual asseveration of her faith that Joe would 
 turn up in time, bringing some sort of means of salvation 
 with him. 
 
 But on Tuesday, the second of November election day, 
 that was just as she was getting ready to leave the office 
 at the end of the afternoon, a boy from the Stratford Hotel 
 brought her a note written in lead pencil, in a hand so 
 little like Joe's that momentarily she doubted the signa 
 ture. It asked her simply to come up and see him as soon 
 as she could, telling her the number of the room he was 
 in. He had scribbled the words, "It's all right," after 
 signing, but this she took as referring merely to the pro 
 priety of her visit. 
 
 With a heart-sickening premonition that everything that 
 mattered had utterly gone wrong, she went along with the 
 bellboy to the hotel and had him show her up to Joe's 
 room. 
 
 He called in answer to her knock, "Come in, Jennie, if 
 that's you." 
 
 It was then nearly six o'clock, fully dark long since, 
 out-of-doors, yet his room was unlighted save by a small 
 night lamp upon the bed-stand. Joe, all alone, was sit 
 ting in an easy chair that had been drawn up to one of 
 the windows, a rug across his knees. He looked round at
 
 468 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 her and nodded toward another chair that shared the 
 embrasure, but made no other move. 
 
 ' ' And they call this an election night ? " he said, looking 
 out over the boulevard and away from her. "Why, in 
 the town I grew up in, they could get up more excitement 
 than this over a dog fight!" 
 
 It was all she could do not to weep. It did not seem 
 possible that the six weeks since she had last seen him, in 
 Fargo, could have made such devastating changes in the 
 man she knew. He was shrunken, chilly huddled under 
 his rug ; the hand he finally offered her was slack and his 
 voice spiritless, despite the pitiable effort he made at his 
 familiar manner. She stood speechless, holding the limp 
 hand he had given her in both her own. 
 
 "Oh, hell, let's get it over with!" he exclaimed at last. 
 "Sit down. You want to know what's happened, I sup 
 pose. I'm licked that's the short of it." 
 
 "You're sick," she retorted. "That's the main 
 trouble." 
 
 "See that in the dark, can you?" he asked, with a 
 drawn grin. "Well, you're wrong. What you see is only 
 a by-product of the damnedest big drunk I ever had, I 
 guess it must have been. I wasn't there, except at the 
 start, till after it was all over, but that's my best judg 
 ment on it." 
 
 In this mocking tormenting humor he was perfectly in 
 tractable, she knew. All you could do was to follow along, 
 keeping back the tears as well as you could, till he changed. 
 
 "Celebrating something, were you?" she asked. 
 
 "You might say I was, in a way. It wasn't over hav 
 ing sold our flax, though, nor borrowed the money to pay 
 for it. Not a pound nor a dollar. But celebration isn't 
 a bad word for it, at that." 
 
 "They've really beaten us, then, have they, Joe?" 
 
 Even then she half expected his great laugh and a com 
 mand to look in some drawer or pocket for the evidence of 
 his triumph. It didn't come. There was a long-stretched 
 silence instead.
 
 ROMANCE 469 
 
 "It wasn't they that beat me," he said at last. "They 
 couldn't have done it. It was the other thing. I guess 
 you know that, don't you? Didn't you see anything 
 queer when you came up to Fargo, in September? Not 
 about them; about me?" 
 
 She nodded. "Whisky, you mean?" 
 
 "I give you my word I didn't know it then, Jennie. I 
 thought I was all right. I knew I needed an ungodly 
 amount of it, and I didn't want a lot of meddlers buzzing 
 about it, so I kept it dark. I honestly thought there was 
 no more harm in it, for me, than there was in my mother's 
 milk. I'd happened to find out that it did stop that 
 damned headache of mine, if I drank enough of it, and 
 so far as I could see that was all it did. Damned fool of 
 course. I must have been doped with it, for weeks up 
 there, not to have seen what Williamson's crowd was do 
 ing. I didn 't find out what was the matter with me until 
 the night you telephoned and hung up on me." 
 
 "And of course, you couldn't quit then," she com 
 mented; "right in the middle of everything." 
 
 "I did though. I stopped dead. Didn't have a single 
 drop of whisky or any other sort of hootch all that week. 
 It was funny about that. My body was crazy, but my 
 mind must have been damned near right. I all but landed 
 that Carberry bunch. I could feel 'em coming right 
 along. But they must have had a talk with their bankers, 
 because on Friday afternoon they began to blow cold. I 
 dropped them right there and went to Snell. He took me 
 to a late studio party Saturday night, and I didn't even 
 take a drink then. Left him with a date for Tuesday, I 
 think it was. Or it may have been Monday. The same 
 day. I guess that was it. Along in the afternoon." 
 
 She was puzzled by the phrase "the same day" but 
 nothing would have induced her to ask him what he meant. 
 She could see his eyes glowing in the dusk of the room. 
 In the silence between them she heard, coming up faintly 
 from the boulevard, a few hoarse shouts and the bleat of 
 horns. She saw the horizontal sweep of the beam of a
 
 470 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 searchlight, and some area of her mind recalled the fact 
 that this meant Harding 's election to the presidency of the 
 United States. How could they know so soon? And 
 what did it matter? 
 
 "I had a funny week-end, Jennie," Joe went on, at 
 last. "Damned funny. I'm glad I didn't murder any 
 body. I'd run amuck, no doubt of that. Part of me had. 
 But part of me must have been all right ; clearer than ever 
 that I* had to get that money from Snell. I kept my ap 
 pointment with him on the dot. 
 
 ' ' The queer thing was, I didn 't want a drink. I re 
 member it struck me I was cured of that, anyhow. What 
 I couldn't stand about Snell was that he was so slow. 
 His body as well as his wits. He couldn't seem even to 
 put his hands where he wanted them to go without fum 
 bling. And his brains seemed made of leather. I thought 
 I'd go crazy waiting for him to catch up. I didn't let him 
 see that, though. I was making a pretty good start with 
 him; getting him warm. Of course I didn't know, except 
 from his say-so, that he had any real money enough to 
 do me any good but I was going to get him anyway. 
 
 ' ' I don 't know where the bottle of hootch came from. I 
 suppose he got it out of his desk. I'd forgotten all about 
 it. Forgotten I wasn't drinking, see? I guess I poured 
 out that first little drink without noticing just as you'd 
 light a cigarette. Drank it the same way. And then I 
 remember the queer look there was in his face when he 
 watched me pour out my first real drink. 
 
 "I can't remember much beyond that, except in bits. 
 I think we kept on talking business for a while. And then 
 we went to places. Different places. I don't know when 
 he left me that night or later. I remember talking to a 
 girl, a serious poor devil of a girl, with a scar on her 
 upper lip, for hours. Quite a talk, that was, I'll bet. 
 Would have made a good added book for the Old Testa 
 ment. And then sometime later that week, or it may have 
 been the next Sunday it seemed like Sunday I found I 
 was pretty sick, and seeing things, so I took myself in a
 
 ROMANCE 471 
 
 taxi up to Bellevue Hospital. I don't believe I'd have 
 come to that if I hadn't quit for a week. However, there 
 it was. They kept me f there till yesterday. Then I had 
 'em telegraph Bennett and send me out here. Got in this 
 afternoon about three o'clock. I had to get here to fix 
 things up with you, and I wasn't sure when our option 
 on Williamson's offer ran out. There's still a day or two, 
 isn't there?" 
 
 She nodded, a little absently. "Yes, that's all right. 
 We have till Friday." She sat for a while very still, 
 weeping quietly and trusting to the dark that he shouldn't 
 see. Then she reached for both his hands and held them 
 in a tight clutch. 
 
 "If there's anything, Joe anything in the world, that 
 I can do to help you, tell me, and I'll do it." 
 
 "Why, there's quite a lot," he said, rather flatly. 
 
 At his tone she snatched her hands away and caught 
 back a sob. In a moment, though, in a cheerful almost 
 secretarial voice she managed to say, "All right. Tell 
 me everything you can think of. I don't believe I'll for 
 get anything." He did not begin, however; sat a long 
 while in what she took to be meditation. Finally he gave 
 a weak, distressful laugh. "I can't seem to remember any 
 of 'em. Non compos by streaks, that 's what it amounts to. 
 Wait a minute ! I 've got the gist of it. Nathan 's coming 
 round pretty soon with a power of attorney, just as broad 
 as he can draw it, for you. I'll sign it, and then you can 
 act for me in everything, see? Say what you like to 
 Williamson. Make any sort of damn bargain you please. 
 Don't have to bother with details after that." 
 
 She was appalled by the prospect of assuming, single- 
 handed, so great a responsibility, and for a while she pro 
 tested against being saddled with it. 
 
 ' ' You said you 'd do anything, didn 't you ? " he reminded 
 her irritably. ' ' Consult any one you like, of course. Only 
 you'll be the boss." 
 
 She must have, she insisted, some inkling of what Joe 
 wanted done with Williamson's offer. She couldn't hope
 
 472 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 to better it materially. Was she authorized to accept it as 
 it stood? 
 
 At this there was a flare of something that looked like 
 the old Joe. "I'd see 'em damned before they got a pound 
 of our flax on those terms. I 'd pull the whole thing down. 
 Put the company in bankruptcy. Samson and the pil 
 lars, by God! And then I'd start in and design around 
 our old patents and make the process public property. 
 Like the Babcock separator. See how they'd look, then!" 
 
 "If we go into bankruptcy," she pointed out to him, 
 "most of the subsidiaries will go too, and then "William 
 son's crowd will be able to get the flax for practically 
 whatever they choose to pay for it." 
 
 The flare died down as suddenly as it had sprung up. 
 Joe heaved a long sigh. "You're right about that, I 
 guess," he said. "You'll just have to do whatever seems 
 best to you. I'm through, Jennie. For this round any 
 how." 
 
 She caught eagerly at the hint in that last phrase. It 
 was only his illness that made him feel he was beaten, and 
 it wouldn't last long. All he had to consider was the 
 quickest way of getting well. Doctor Bennett, she sup 
 posed, had the cure in charge. 
 
 "Oh, yes," he said. "Bennett's got a place in mind 
 where they've got a system for treating my complaint. 
 Going down there with me to-morrow. Turns 'em out as 
 good as new, they say." 
 
 There was nothing but a tolerant skepticism in his voice, 
 but Jennie thought she had seen the merest gleam of some 
 thing else go across his face a faint reminder of his old 
 boyish grin. 
 
 Presently he spoke again. "There's one thing I was 
 forgetting. I want some money. About a hundred and 
 fifty dollars in currency. Bring it around to-morrow 
 morning, early, will you? Bring it yourself and see that 
 I get it." 
 
 Evidently it was a relief to him that he'd succeeded in 
 remembering this. This concluded the business and now
 
 ROMANCE 473 
 
 he relaxed. He didn't want her to go. He wanted to 
 talk. Let Jennie ring up the dining-room and order her- 
 Belf some dinner. He had his own meals at nursery hours. 
 ^Nursery meals, too. But these weren't reasons for starv 
 ing her. 
 
 She didn 't feel much like eating, but she did as he asked 
 and was rewarded by the pleasure he took in the convivial 
 atmosphere which her tray when it arrived, created. He 
 mocked himself, but not bitterly. "I never thought I'd be 
 asking a lady to dinner with me like this," he observed. 
 
 ' ' It 's funny how things hang together, ' ' he added, after 
 a thoughtful pause. "That gang would never have got 
 the jump on me the way they did if I hadn't been saturated 
 with whisky. And I 'd never have got saturated except for 
 my headache. And I wouldn't have had the headache if 
 I hadn't got hit by that automobile. And I suppose, if 
 the chauffeur who drove it hadn't been thinking about 
 'his best girl or some such nonsense, he wouldn't have hit 
 me." 
 
 The gleam died out of his eyes. She tried desperately 
 to think of something light-hearted to say, but found her 
 self speechless. She knew only too well the connotation he 
 had stumbled upon in those last words about a chauffeur 
 and his best girl. 
 
 ''You're thinking farther back than that," he went 
 on, in a darker tone. "You're thinking that if I'd taken 
 your advice, another time we had dinner together, about a 
 letter I wanted to write to Pasadena, I wouldn 't have been 
 wandering around the streets, seeing red. Well, I give it 
 to you. You were right about that, Jennie." 
 
 She gathered up her courage and plunged. "I don't 
 think you 'd say that, Joe, if you could see Beatrice as she 
 is now." 
 
 "You've been seeing her?" he asked. 
 
 "Once in a while. Not often. She came into the of 
 fice two or three weeks ago, on her way through Chicago.*' 
 
 "Hasn't been coming to you for money, has she? Jen 
 nie, by God, if you've given her any ..."
 
 "She's never asked for any. I'm going to tell you 
 something, Joe. I guess I ought to have done it long ago. 
 She sent back that thousand dollars you gave George when 
 you discharged him. He insisted on it, she said. She 
 sent a check for it in that letter you had me tear up, un 
 opened. But when I told her we'd torn up the letter,, 
 she said she'd let that settle it." 
 
 He surprised Jennie by laughing at this. "That's like 
 Trix," he remarked. Jennie had plenty more to say now, 
 but decided to wait and let the silence work. After a 
 while he said, "I suppose she's got a baby by now." 
 
 "No," she told him. "No signs of one yet." 
 
 She was puzzled by the way he took this, and astonished 
 at the question it presently led to. "Jennie," he de 
 manded harshly, "do you believe she ran straight with 
 that fellow up to the time he married her? She told me 
 she did. Do you suppose it was true?" 
 
 "Well, there's certainly no reason for doubting it." 
 But she saw he took this for an evasion which indeed it 
 was. "Joe," she cried, "what possible difference does 
 it make? She's been married to him now, happily, for 
 almost a year." 
 
 "It makes this difference," he insisted; "if she was 
 straight with him, he may stick to her. If she wasn't, 
 he'll leave her. He'll always be suspicious, if she was too 
 free with him, that she will be again, some time, with 
 somebody else." 
 
 There was nothing to be gained by arguing a point like 
 this, anyhow. ' ' Trix has developed a lot in this last year, ' ' 
 she told him. "I said she was happily married, and I 
 think she is, but even if it doesn't work out any too well, 
 she won't be smashed by it. She's been studying hard; 
 learning a whole lot of things. She 's found a way of earn 
 ing money, quite a lot of money. It's a funny way but 
 she 's as proud of it as can be. ' ' 
 
 She broke off there, thinking if she waited she could 
 make him ask, but he did not speak. The silence sud 
 denly took on the quality of granite.
 
 ROMANCE 475 
 
 She uttered, at last, a forlorn laugh. "Trix won't ask 
 about you, either," she explained. "She is like you, Joe. 
 Getting more like you every day. Oh, it's a crime, that's 
 what it is! When two people adore each other the way 
 you do." She turned on him with an impetuous gesture 
 of appeal. "Joe, she isn't far away. She'll come to 
 you like a like a bird if you'll just let me send her a ten- 
 word telegram." 
 
 His response to this was a veritable snarl of anger, like 
 that of a wounded beast. "None of that, Jennie. Drop 
 it, and drop it quick. Ask her to come and see me like 
 this!" He was panicky about it, too; would not be con 
 tent with less than an unequivocal promise that the girl 
 should be told nothing. "When Jennie had given him this, 
 he quieted down again. 
 
 "I'll see her again some time," he said. "But it'll be 
 when I'm up; not when I'm down like this. I'll be sit 
 ting on the world again some day, Jennie, and then we'll 
 see what Trix has to say. She had her last shot at me 
 when I was flat on my back, and what she did to me was 
 a plenty. Next time it's going to be different." 
 
 This brought him round to the old refrain, his defeat 
 by Williamson's crowd and how it had come about. How 
 it would never have come about if he had been in full 
 possession of his faculties. She was hard put to it not to 
 let him see how she flinched from this. He would have 
 seen in a flash, of course, if he 'd been the old Joe. 
 
 "I've been wondering," he said, "what it was gave 'em 
 the idea of selling out in the first place. I suppose they 
 must have got on, somehow, back in August or so, to the 
 fact that I controlled the majority of the stock, and that 
 made 'em think about getting from under. Well, they 
 know how to keep their faces, that bunch ! ' ' 
 
 "They'd known it longer than that," she told him. 
 "Since before the April meeting." 
 
 "Like hell they had!" he exclaimed, staring at her. 
 "What makes you think so?" 
 
 "Oh, Henry made it pretty plain from something he
 
 476 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 said the other day. ' ' She wished, uneasily, that she hadn 't 
 started this, but it was too late to stop now. 
 
 "Do you mean Henry himself knew about it then?" he 
 persisted, and she nodded a reluctant assent. 
 
 "How about Henry's own stock?" he asked. "Did he 
 sell that out along with the rest?" 
 
 "Why, I guess it never was really his. Williamson 
 carried it for him, I suppose. I don't believe he sold it 
 all, or Henry would have resigned from the directorate 
 when the others did. But probably most of it went with 
 the rest. I don't actually know anything much. He and 
 I don't talk things over, these days." 
 
 She perceived, to her great distress, that in giving Joe 
 this piece of information she had somehow dealt him a 
 heavy blow. "Henry Craven," he repeated blankly. 
 *' Henry Craven, my God! Why, Jennie, I'd have sworn 
 I knew everything that went on behind that little man's 
 eye-glasses. And he's known, you say, ever since way 
 back last winter what that bunch was cooking for me? 
 He liked me, too. He liked both of us. And he never 
 cared a damn for them. I know he didn't." 
 
 ' ' He 's loyal, though, ' ' she said. " He 's the most scrupu 
 lous man I've ever known. His duty was to them, of 
 course. ' ' 
 
 "Hell, I didn't expect him to tell me anything," Joe 
 explained. "I thought I'd see it in his looks." 
 
 "He's been looking ghastly, these last two weeks," she 
 told him, but this fact no longer interested Joe. 
 
 "They're a different breed, Jennie," he said at last. 
 "They're a herd. Locking horns and shoving among 
 themselves until an outsider comes along, and then they all 
 face the same way and put down their heads. They know 
 how to wait, too. They're in no hurry. They know a 
 man '11 be down, sometime. They don't have to try to trip 
 him. Wait for him, that's all they do. I made good on 
 my process; made thirty million pounds of valuable stuff 
 out of something that had always been thought worthless, 
 but they got me. This time."
 
 ROMANCE 477 
 
 Nathan came in about then with the power of attorney, 
 and by the time it had been read and talked over and 
 signed, Doctor Bennett appeared and made no secret of his 
 disapproval of their business with his patient. So Jennie, 
 as soon as it was possible, took her leave. 
 
 Joe stopped her on the way to the door with a last re 
 minder. "Don't forget that errand I gave you. And be 
 sure to come back first thing to-morrow morning and tell 
 me about it." 
 
 ' ' I won 't forget, ' ' she promised, but she went away with 
 a sadly divided mind. He had made it plain that the 
 hundred and fifty dollars he had asked her to get him was 
 not going to be mentioned to Doctor Bennett. "Wasn't it 
 her duty, in the light of Joe's condition, to tell? She 
 demolished this question with a violent negative. Joe was 
 still her boss, and he knew what he wanted better than all 
 the doctors in Chicago. 
 
 There ran in her mind that night, as she vainly tried to 
 sleep, an episode in one of Kipling's jungle stories, about 
 a tiger not a completely admirable tiger, either who 
 was charged and trampled by a herd of buffalo. The 
 thought of that beautiful lithe thing beaten down into 
 the mire under those heavy insensate hoofs was unbear 
 ably tragic. 
 
 They had got him, indeed, as Joe said. "This time." 
 "Was it believable that there could be a next time? Dur 
 ing the dark of that night, at least, this was beyond the 
 capacity of Jennie Mac Arthur's faith.
 
 THERE has not been, and of course there never will be, 
 a "next time" for Joe Greer, if one means by the phrase 
 a return match with John Williamson and his allies. This 
 story which began if a story can be said to begin on the 
 April day in 1919 when they organized the company, 
 ended on the Friday after Harding 's election when Jennie 
 went to Williamson's office and signed, under Joe's power 
 of attorney, the contract the financiers offered her. They 
 were completely and finally the victors ; the spoils of Joe 's 
 process for making linen of the straw that had once been 
 burned in the fields belonged to them; not to Joe whose 
 imagination had conceived the process, nor to the small 
 careful modestly prosperous folk who built the mills, nor 
 to the farmers who grew the flax. 
 
 Reluctantly one concedes the improbability of any other 
 outcome, even if Joe had never summoned his disturbing 
 daughter from California to live with him, nor sustained a 
 concussion of the brain and resorted to alcohol as a cure, 
 nor fallen in love with his antagonist's wife. Unimagi 
 native, soft, irresolute, kindly, as these stall-fed folk seemed 
 to him to be, their qualities are more than he can cope with. 
 They are truly gregarious; they are, by tradition and 
 temper, collectors, harvesters, stowers-away, and a man like 
 Joe, who has no real interest in property beyond the dy 
 namic use of it as a part of the processes of getting some 
 thing done, stands little chance against them. 
 
 There's another side to the thing, though. If John Will 
 iamson's jolly little daughter Dorothy is ever swept from 
 her moorings by some storm of passion, as Beatrice was 
 
 478
 
 BELOW THE FALLS 479 
 
 swept, into an alien world, that experience will be deter 
 minative for the rest of her life. And if ever you find 
 John huddled under a rug, shuddering from the exhaustion 
 of alcoholic excesses, defeated, abdicating under the broad 
 est power of attorney his lawyers know how to draw, you 
 will be safe in prophesying that this is the end of John 
 Williamson. But Joseph Greer and his daughter are ac 
 tuated by a livelier principle, kinetic, not static ; the river, 
 not the reservoir. They may come crashing down over 
 the falls but they make their way. 
 
 Something about like this, though not formulated in 
 quite these terms, was the conviction Henry Craven found 
 Jennie abiding in when he talked with her about Joe for 
 the first time after the capitulation. This was not until 
 the very end of November. He'd been seriously ill with 
 bronchitis and glad to be for three weeks. It was not 
 upon Joe, however, that their conversation began. 
 
 She had greeted him with a double handshake and a 
 spontaneous revelation of her pleasure in seeing him about 
 again, and her concern over his illness. He flushed at her 
 friendliness and said as he took the armchair she pulled up 
 for him, "I ought to have said my say before I let you 
 shake hands with me. Before I 've finished you may want 
 to take it back." He wouldn't be laughed out of this, 
 either. 
 
 He took three envelopes from his pocket ; one of them he 
 told her was his resignation of his office as treasurer, and 
 one his resignation as director. These he passed over to 
 her. The third he kept in his hand. "About the direc 
 torate, I don 't care, ' ' he said. ' ' I '11 leave it with you and 
 if you want to keep me on for a while, to avoid having only 
 a minority of the board left, why I'll be glad to serve. 
 Whenever you want to make up a new board, you can just 
 fill in the date. But the other resignation, as treasurer, 
 I've dated as of November first, and that you must ac 
 cept. I'd have got out before if I'd been free to do so." 
 
 Really there was no room for argument about this; the 
 company in its clip-winged condition couldn't afford a
 
 480 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 treasurer at a thousand dollars a month. She was hor 
 ribly unhappy about it, all the same, and after a troubled 
 moment of hesitation she broke out : 
 
 ' ' Henry, don 't mind, please, but what are you going to 
 do?" 
 
 He smiled rather dryly, after telling her he didn 't mind. 
 "I thought for a while that I was going to have the satisfac 
 tion of doing something decent at my own expense, but it 
 doesn't seem to be coming out that way. Mr. McGregor 
 he 's the president of our bank, you know, came to see me on 
 his own hook night before last, to see if I wanted to come 
 back to my old job with them. The succession's rather 
 broken down, it seems, with poor Baxter's death and Lar- 
 sen going to New York, and they don't see any one to put 
 in. 
 
 ' ' It was Mac 's own idea, you see. John didn 't even know 
 he meant to ask me. Mac 's just a professional banker, and 
 he 'd never have come to me unless he 'd thought I was as 
 good as he could get. So I said I 'd take it, then and there. 
 
 "John was surprised and seemed a little annoyed 
 when I told him about it. He said their idea had been to 
 give me the same job I 'd had here, in the new company. I 
 guess I made it plain to him though it 's very hard for me 
 to say some things to John that I didn 't want anything to 
 do with the new company. Anyhow, he asked me, with that 
 smile of his, you know, if that applied to owning stock in it. 
 I I suppose you'll find it hard to believe, but I had to 
 ask him what he meant by that. 
 
 "He said he'd put the proceeds of the sale of my stock 
 in the old company all but five shares so that I could 
 stay on here as director into the new, but that of course 
 I needn't go in unless I liked. I told him I didn't, and 
 thought that was the end of it. At least . . . 
 
 "Jennie, when a man's been kind to you for half your 
 life the kindest person you've ever known, and that's 
 John, you can't say things to him as you'd say them on 
 general principles. I tried to make myself believe he un 
 derstood. But this morning, in the mail, I got John 's check
 
 BELOW THE FALLS 481 
 
 for thirty-seven thousand dolla7-s, with a letter from Rollie 
 Mill saying it was what was due me from the sale of my 
 stock in the Greer Company. I went round to his office 
 but I couldn't even see him. All I could get out of Rollie 
 was that it was perfectly straight bookkeeping ; he 'd figured 
 it out for himself. 
 
 ""Well, that's what's in this other envelope, Jennie. I 
 feel as if it was blood-money. Something I'd sold Joe 
 for. And if there's any way it can be used for him, I want 
 you to take it and use it. ' ' 
 
 She told him, terribly embarrassed by a fear she'd break 
 down and weep over him, that there was no such use for it. 
 ' ' Joe isn 't broke, ' ' she assured him. ' ' He '11 even get quite 
 a decent little income out of the Greer Company, and he's 
 got more or less besides in various things. You take that 
 check, first thing to-morrow morning, and buy liberty 
 bonds with it ! 
 
 "And don't go on feeling guilty about it, either. You 
 didn't sell him out. He said to me, when I saw him, elec 
 tion night, that he had never expected you to tell him any 
 thing. ' ' And after spending a few minutes more upon him 
 in argument and reassurance, she exclaimed, out of a full 
 heart, ' ' Oh, Henry, I 'm glad you 're back in the bank ! It 
 makes one less person I have to worry about, anyhow." 
 
 He had begun to smile over the touch of exasperation 
 which was unmistakably mingled with her good will for 
 him, when he saw in a flash that she w r as seriously worrying 
 over some one else. He recalled the look he had sur 
 prised in her face the instant before she greeted him. It 
 was not hard to guess who this other was. 
 
 "Is it something new about Joe?" he asked. "Some 
 thing worse?" 
 
 It was a long while before she spoke, and then she did not 
 answer his question. "I'm glad you came in, Henry. I 
 guess you're the one person I can talk this over with. I'm 
 going to have dinner to-night with Trix and her husband. 
 They're in town and it's their wedding anni 
 versary. I've got to make up my mind what to say to her
 
 482 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTEE 
 
 about it, or whether to say anything. Of course he's her 
 father, and . . . 
 
 "You see, Joe's disappeared from that place Doctor 
 Bennett took him for his cure. Just vanished. With 
 out leaving a trace. Well, of course, that's the way Joe 
 would do it if he did it at all." 
 
 "How long ago?" Henry asked. 
 
 "Tuesday; after breakfast, some time. They notified 
 Doctor Bennett that night, and he came straight around 
 to me. Four days ago, that is, you see." 
 
 "Four days," Henry repeated somberly. "He couldn't 
 vanish, could he? You'd think somebody would have 
 seen him in that time, unless oh, I suppose you must have 
 thought of it, too. There's a lake right near that place, 
 isn't there, Jennie?" 
 
 "Thought of his having killed himself, you mean? 
 That's what Doctor Bennett is nearly out of his head 
 about. That's one of the things. He never did that, 
 Henry. I'm perfectly sure he didn't. No, that isn't 
 feminine intuition. I knew he meant to do this before he 
 started. He had me bring him a hundred and fifty dol 
 lars in currency that morning, on the quiet." 
 
 "It strikes me as rather funny you did that," Henry 
 remonstrated. 
 
 She gave a short laugh. "It didn't strike Bennett as 
 funny. He pretty near took off my head. But I'd like 
 to know why I shouldn't have done it. Joe's not a crim 
 inal nor a maniac. He wouldn't have gone to that place 
 at all if he hadn't been too tired to argue about it. He 
 can cure himself in his own way. Why, Henry, he quit 
 drinking for a whole week down there in New York, right 
 in the thick of everything. Then something happened to 
 him he didn't tell me what and he began again. I 
 think he's gone away to cure himself now. Anyhow, 
 he'd never have taken a hundred and fifty dollars if he'd 
 meant to jump into the lake. You can see that." 
 
 "What's being done to find him?" Henry asked. 
 
 The muscle in Jennie's jaw defined itself. "Not a
 
 BELOW THE PALLS 483 
 
 thing," she said. "That's what Bennett and I have been 
 fighting about. I won't have it, Henry! If he wants to 
 disappear, it's his own business. There's none of us has 
 a right to start a hue and cry after him. He can go where 
 he likes, and come back when he gets ready. Of course 
 it 's hard for the people who are fond of him, but he never 
 did think much about things like that. For all I know, 
 there may be a few people that he wouldn't mind having 
 believe he'd drowned himself. There's a streak of that 
 in Joe. He isn't perfect. But it would never occur to 
 him that you or I or Trix would think he had done that ; 
 and the only thing for us to do is to wait until he comes 
 back." 
 
 "What does Beatrice think about it?" Henry asked 
 dubiously. "Of course if she agrees with you, there's 
 nothing to be said." 
 
 "Well, there you are," Jennie confessed miserably. 
 "That's why I hate to go to dinner with them to-night. 
 You see, Trix doesn't know. She doesn't know anything, 
 I mean. About Joe's breakdown, or what happened to the 
 business, or the sanitarium." 
 
 "You can't mean to go on keeping her in the dark!" 
 The idea horrified Henry. "Anyhow, you couldn't if you 
 wanted to. She's sure to find out." 
 
 ' ' Doctor Bennett would tell her in a minute, of course, ' ' 
 Jennie admitted. "And she could give him all the au 
 thority he needs for starting a search. But he doesn't 
 know where she is. That made-up name she uses when 
 she does exhibition flying at fairs and things wouldn't 
 mean anything to him, if he happened to see it. And 
 she's going to California in a day or two. She's got a 
 contract to do some stunts for the movies." 
 
 She went thoughtfully on, overriding Henry's hardly 
 articulate protest : " If I could be sure I could make her 
 see it my way, and that she'd go ahead as if nothing had 
 happened, I'd tell her. But I can't be sure. When Trix 
 takes the bit in her teeth, she's just as hard to manage as 
 Joe himself. She adores him, and if she got the idea that
 
 484 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 he was down and out wandering around, like a lost dog, 
 you know ..." 
 
 Her voice broke over that and the tears came up into 
 her eyes, but she went resolutely on. "If she got that 
 idea, she'd drop everything and try to find him; and the 
 worst of it is, she'd most likely succeed. It would be 
 about the worst thing that ever happened to Joe, if she 
 did. He made me promise I wouldn't tell her, too. I 
 guess that settles it." She drew a long breath and 
 leaned back in her chair. "Well, I have talked it through, 
 anyhow, Henry," she concluded. "Much obliged." 
 
 She came back to Henry's own affairs when he rose to 
 go, gave him both hands again, and wished him luck. 
 "This office won't seem like the same place without you," 
 she said. 
 
 ""Well, that," he confessed, with one of his funny 
 flashes of audacity, "has been a consideration that helped 
 reconcile me to the change." 
 
 "You mean," she asked, not quite so surprised as she 
 pretended to be, "that you are glad of a chance to get away 
 from me?" 
 
 "Yes," he said boldly. "From you in your official 
 capacity. I think perhaps seeing me out of office hours 
 exclusively, you will begin to forget what a preposterously 
 poor business man I am." 
 
 She told him bruskly that this was nonsense ; but he had 
 the satisfaction of seeing her blush. 
 
 That was a dreary winter for Jennie, and would have 
 been hardly endurable but for the companionship, out of 
 office hours, of Henry Craven. They were much together, 
 especially after Margaret returned to Italy in January. 
 They went to most of that season's plays together; dined 
 at least as often as once a week, sometimes in odd little 
 restaurants, sometimes in Jennie's flat. They talked life 
 over endlessly; ideas, people, their own experiences 
 and states of mind. Sometimes, but not often, they talked 
 of Joe, of whom in all those months nothing had been 
 heard.
 
 BELOW THE FALLS 485 
 
 Finally, along in the spring, Henry asked her to marry 
 him. 
 
 He did it out of a clear sky rather, a little desperately 
 (perhaps the expectation of his sister Margaret's return 
 from Italy within a fortnight nerved him against fur 
 ther procrastination), one night as Jennie was driving him 
 home in her Ford from a play. It was a comedy which 
 Jennie hadn't enjoyed very much her sense of humor was 
 not her strongest point about an abysmally stupid woman 
 who by dint of industrious meddling and doing everything 
 wrong, miraculously brought everything out right for her 
 distracted husband. 
 
 "I suppose," Jennie said indignantly, as they drove 
 over the bridge, "there are plenty of successful busi 
 ness men who would be just as infatuated over a fool of 
 a woman like that as he was. ' ' 
 
 "Well," Henry said, "I'm not a successful business 
 man. You've got to admit that. So I ought not to be 
 suspect." He didn't say another word until after they 
 had crossed Chicago Avenue. Then he declared, "Yon 
 know what I'm trying to say, Jennie. I want you to 
 marry me. Do you think you could make up your mind 
 to that?" 
 
 "Oh, wait!" she cried, with a gasp. And, indeed, it 
 was not the sort of question to ask a lady who w r as driv 
 ing through that pelting traffic. 
 
 He told her in his kindest way, not to mind. There was 
 no hurry. 
 
 She threaded the little car through the south-bound 
 stream at the mouth of his street, and pulled up at the 
 curb before his door. Then she folded her arms over the 
 wheel and for a moment put her head down upon them. 
 "I'm all right," she told him. "Only, you gave me sort 
 of a shock, Henry." 
 
 "Why, I've been getting round to it for months," he 
 protested. "You must have seen that!" 
 
 She owned she 'd thought of it once or twice. ' ' But only 
 as a thing that couldn't possibly happen. I guess I'm as 
 great a fool about this sort of thing as . . . "
 
 486 
 
 "As I am about business. Well, then, that's all 
 right." 
 
 She said indignantly this wasn't what she meant. It 
 was the woman in the play she had been thinking of. "All 
 tke same," she went on, getting herself together, "I think 
 I'm right about this. You've never had much well, ro 
 mance. You've had no chance for it. Not since you were 
 a boy and fell in love with your cousin Violet. Now, with 
 your sister making money hand over fist, and your own 
 income, and your job at the bank, you're free. You ought 
 to fall in love with somebody ten or fifteen years younger 
 than I am; pretty and mysterious and exciting and all 
 that." 
 
 He laughed. "When it comes to mystery for me 
 you leave this crop of flappers nowhere. You're the most 
 wonderful person I've ever known, Jennie." 
 
 She caught her breath at that, and laughed in turn, but 
 he did not continue on this tack. His own feelings were 
 clear enough, he said. He knew what he wanted. But 
 the point was, what did she want. How did she feel about 
 him? 
 
 "I don't know," she said soberly. "I like this pretty 
 well as it is. I don't believe I could ever want anything 
 very different unless well, unless I was sure you did. 
 Unless you wanted something different terribly." 
 
 "I don't believe I'll have any trouble convincing you, 
 Jennie, ' ' he told her. And then, with his familiar con- 
 siderateness, since he saw she was shaken and distressed by 
 doubts, he covered her hands with his, and said she wasn 't 
 to worry about it, anyhow. She could have all the time 
 she wanted for making up her mind. 
 
 "You're a dear, Henry," she said, with a catch in her 
 voice. "If I ever marry anybody, it will be you." 
 
 He was well pleased with the beginning he had made, 
 and he looked forward to going up to her flat to lunch 
 with her the following Sunday, in the fearful hope that 
 the matter might be explicitly and finally settled after 
 all, before Margaret got home. But on Saturday after-
 
 BELOW THE FALLS 487 
 
 noon, within a few minutes of his homecoming from the 
 bank, she amazed him by appearing, in a radiance of un- 
 suppressed excitement, at his own door. 
 
 "I couldn't wait for to-morrow," she said. "I could 
 hardly wait to get here. I almost spoiled it by telephoning. 
 Henry, I 've heard from Joe a long letter. He 's all right 
 again; just as I've always said he'd be." 
 
 It was strange that Henry's heart should have sunk at 
 that, but it did. "Oh, that's wonderful!" he said. 
 "Come in and sit down, and tell me about it." 
 
 "I don't believe I can sit down," she confessed. But 
 she made him do so, in an easy chair, and light his pipe. 
 Impatiently, she squeezed the tears out of her eyes. "I 
 don't know if I can talk either. You see, he's the old Joe 
 again, as he hasn't been oh, hardly since you've known 
 him, Henry. That letter, it was like a boy's letter a 
 schoolboy's. Some of the things in it, you don't know 
 whether to believe or not. He never cared whether you 
 did believe him or not. Only laughed. 
 
 "He told me the way he disappeared from that place 
 where Doctor Bennett took him. He was walking around 
 the grounds, thinking he would just walk away as he was 
 he had that money with him, of course when he heard 
 a couple of men on the other side of a clump of bushes 
 talking Spanish a sort of Spanish and he sat down and 
 talked with them. They were part of a gang that was 
 building a road, a concrete road, right by the sanitarium. 
 They were being worked awfully hard, trying to finish 
 that stretch before frost. 
 
 "One of them didn't like it and said he was going to 
 quit. Joe gave him some money, and promised him some 
 more, to go to the village and buy him some common clothes 
 and a razor, and things, and bring them back there. And 
 then he shaved off his beard and dressed in the working 
 clothes, and went out and got a job with the gang, having 
 everything interpreted for him into Spanish before he 
 would understand it. He was right there through all the 
 excitement over his having disappeared. He must have
 
 488 JOSEPH GREEK AND HIS DAUGHTER 
 
 enjoyed that though the work pretty near killed him, he 
 said. 
 
 "It only lasted three or four weeks before they had to 
 stop on account of the frost, but he got interested in roads 
 by that time. Thinking about them. Thinking about get 
 ting something that would be better than concrete. So he 
 went down to New Jersey to some of the big chemical 
 plants there, and looked around and asked questions. Joe 
 can get anybody to tell him anything, of course. And 
 then he began to get an idea. 
 
 "He has set up a little laboratory of his own I don't 
 know where he got the money, but he always kept some 
 handy and he thinks he's on the trail of what he is looking 
 for. Something that will be cheaper than concrete, and 
 just about as easy to lay when you know how to do it; 
 and as good for horses as it is for motor-cars. He 's almost 
 ready, he says, to go at it in a big way. If he gets it, it 
 will be about the bigge.st thing there is. He says his name 
 is going to be spelled with a small letter some day, just the 
 same as Macadam's was." 
 
 "You don't suppose he has got hold of a thing like that, 
 do you?" Henry asked. 
 
 She turned upon him sharply. "When he says he has 
 it, he'll have it," she retorted. "It will be all there, from 
 beginning to end and it'll work. His flax process 
 worked, didn't it?" 
 
 Henry blinked, and acknowledged that it did. Then 
 he laid down his pipe, and clasped his hands. Jennie was 
 no longer looking at him. 
 
 ' ' Oh, I don 't care whether it works or not, as long as he 
 does his mind, I mean in the old way. If that doesn't 
 turn out right, he'll find something else. He says that by 
 fall, he thinks, he'll need me down there. He will when 
 we really get going, anyway." 
 
 It was then she looked around at Henry Craven, sitting 
 very still in his easy chair, his hands between his knees. 
 She uttered a little cry of dismay, stood gazing at him for 
 a moment without moving, and then as the tears came, 
 she went over to him without a word and kissed him.
 
 BELOW THE FALLS 489 
 
 " Oh, I understand, ' ' he told her. ' ' Please don 't feel un 
 happy about it. I haven't a doubt you're right. And 
 nothing is spoiled that we've got." 
 
 "I love you better than I do him," she said, turning 
 away again. ' ' At least I think I do. I 've never dreamed 
 of marrying him, and never would even if he wanted me 
 to. But in another way a sort of office way I've been 
 married to him, all along. And now he ' coming back, and 
 wants me again ..." 
 
 Once more he told her in his kindly reassuring voice that 
 it was all right and that he understood, but something in 
 his look filled her with panic, and she said with great 
 emphasis that she must be running on at once. He made 
 no effort to detain her, but at the door, as he held it open, 
 he asked: 
 
 "How about lunch, to-morrow? Am I still invited on 
 the old terms?" 
 
 ' ' Of course ! ' ' she said, and he shut the door behind her 
 rather quickly. 
 
 THE END
 
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