I laid the letter up on the clock-shelf where I could see it while I did my dishes. I needed it there to steady me. I didn't have to write my answer till after dinner, because it wouldn't go out until the four o'clock mail anyway. I kind of left the situation lie around me all the morning so I could sense it and taste it and, you might say, be steeped in it, and get so I could believe.

Me—a kind of guest housekeeper for six months in a beautiful flat in the city—with two young married folks and a little baby to amuse myself with, and the whole world sitting around me, expansive, and waiting for me to enjoy it. It seemed as if the Golden Plan folks always think is going to open up for them had really opened now for me.

How I kept from baking my doughnuts and frying my sponge-cakes in lard, I dunno, but I did—sheer through instinct, I guess. And then I wrote my letter and took it down to the post-office. Go? Wouldn't I go? My letter just said:

    "Ellen dear, you ridiculous child, did you think I could wobble for a single second? I'd made up my mind before[Pg 105] I got down the first page. I'll be there Monday night. Do you care if I wear your table-spread for dress-up, when I get there? All I've got is everyday—or not so much so. And for your wanting me, I'll say thank you when I get there.

    Calliope."

On my way to mail my letter I came on Mis' Toplady and Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, downtown to get something for supper. And I told them all about it.

Mis' Toplady hunched her shawl farther up her back and sighed abundant.

"Ain't that just grand, Calliope?" says she. "To think you're going to do something you ain't been doing all your days."

That was the point, and she knew it.

"I says to Timothy the other night," she went on, "I says, 'Don't you wish I had something to tell you about, or you had something to tell me about, that we both of us didn't know by heart, forward and back?'"

"Eppleby and me, too," says Mis' Holcomb, "I wish to the land we could do something—or be something—that would give a body something to kind of—relate to each other."

"I know," I says. "Husbands and wives is awful simultaneous, I always think."

But I didn't say anything more, being I wasn't married to one; and they didn't say anything more, being they was.

[Pg 106]

Mis' Holcomb waved her cheese at me, cheerful.

"Be gay for us!" says she, and then went home to cook supper for her hungry family.

And so did I, wishing with all my heart that the two of them—that hadn't seen over the rim of home in thirty years—could have had my chance.

When I got to the city that night it was raining—rather, it was past raining and on up to pouring. So I got in a taxi to go up to Ellen's—a taxi that was nothing but an automobile after all, in spite of its foreign name, ending in a letter that no civilized name ought to end in. And never, never, not if I live till after my dying day, will I forget my first look at that living-room of theirs—in the apartment building, as big as a ship, and as lighted up as our church at Christmas-time, which was where Ellen and Russell lived.

A pretty maid let me in. I remember I went in by her with my eyes on her white embroidery cap, perked up on her head and all ironed up, saucy as a blue jay's crest.

"Excuse me," I says to her over my shoulder, "I've read about them, but yours is the first one I ever saw. My dear, you look like a queen in a new starched crown."

She was an awful stiff little thing—'most as stiff as her head-piece. She never smiled.

"What name?" she says, though—and I see she was friendlier than I'd thought.

[Pg 107]

"Why, mine's Calliope Marsh," I says, hearty. "What's yours?"

She looked so funny—I guess not many paid her much attention.

"Delia," she says. "You're expected," she says, and opened the inside door.

The room was long and soft and wine-colored, with a fire burning in the fireplace, and more lamps than was necessary, but that altogether didn't make much more light than one, only spread it out more. The piano was open, and there was a vase of roses—in Winter! They seemed to have them, I found out later, as casual as if there was a combined wedding and funeral in the house all the time. But they certainly made a beautiful picture.

But all this I sort of took in out of my eyes' four corners, while the rest of me looked at what was before the fire.

A big, low-backed chair was there, as fat and soft as a sofa. And in it was Ellen, in a white dress—in Winter! She wore them, I saw after a while, as casual as if she was at a party, perpetual. But there was something else there in a white dress, too, sitting on her lap, with his pink, bare feet stretched out to the blaze. And he was laughing, and Ellen was, too, at Russell, her husband, sitting on the floor, and aiming his head right at the baby's stomach, to hear him laugh out like—oh, like bluebells must be doing in the Spring.

[Pg 108]

"Pretty enough to paint," says I—which was the first they knew I was there.

It was a shame to spoil it, but Ellen and Russell sprang up, and tried to shake hands with me, though I wasn't taking the slightest notice of them. It was the baby I was engaged in. I'd never seen him before. In fact, I'd never seen Ellen and Russell since they were married two years before and went off to Europe, and lived on a peak of the Alps where the baby was born.

They took me to a gray little room that was to be mine, and I put on a fresh lace collar and my cameo pin and my best back comb. And then dinner was ready—a little, round white table with not one living thing on it but lace and roses and glass and silver.

"Why," says I, before I got through with my melon that came first, "why, you two must be perfectly happy, ain't you?"

And Ellen says, looking over to him:

"Perfectly, absolutely, radiantly happy. Yes, I am."

And this is what Russell done. He broke his bread, and nodded to both of us promiscuous, and he says:

"Considerable happier than any decent man has a right to be, I'm thinking."

I noticed that incident particular. And when I look back on it now, I know that that very first [Pg 109]evening I begun noticing other things. I remember the talk went on about like this:

"Ellen," says Russell, "the dog show opened yesterday. They've got some great little pups, I hear. Aren't you going in?"

"Why—I am if you are," says Ellen.

"Nonsense," says Russell, "I can run in any time, but I can't very well meet you there in the middle of the day. You go in yourself."

"Well, I only enjoy it about a third as much to go alone," says she.

"The dogs don't differ when I'm along, you know, lady," says he, smiling.

"You know that isn't what I mean," she says.

And she looked over at him, and smiled at his eyes with her eyes. But I saw that he looked away first, sort of troubled. And I thought:

"Why, she acts as if not enjoying things when he ain't along is a kind of joyful sacrifice, that would please any man. I wonder if it does."

It happened two-three times through dinner. She hadn't been over to see some kind of a collection, and couldn't he come home some night early and take her? He couldn't promise—why didn't she go herself and tell him about it?

"You wouldn't have said that three years ago," she says, half fun, half earnest, and waited for him to deny it. But he didn't seem to sense what was expected of him, and he just et on.

[Pg 110]

Ain't it funny how you can sort of see things through the pores of your skin? By the time dinner was over, I knew most as much about those two as if I had lived in the house with them a week.

He was wonderful tender with her, though. I don't mean just in little loverlike ways, saying things and calling her things and looking at her gentle. I mean in ways that don't have to be said or called or looked, but that just are. To my mind they mean a thousand times more. But I thought that in her heart she sort of hankered for the said and called and looked kind. And of course they are nice. Nice, but not vital like the other sort. If you had to get along without one, you know which one would be the one.

When we went into the other room, Ellen took me to look at the baby, in bed, asleep, same as a kitten and a rosebud and a little yellow chicken, and all the things that you love even the names of. And when we went back, Ellen went to the piano and begun to play rambley things but low so's you could hardly hear them across the room, on account of the baby. I sank down and was listening, contented, and thinking of the most thinkable things I knew, when she looked over her shoulder.

"Russell," she says, "if you'll come and turn the music, I'll do that new Serenade."

Russell was on a couch, stretched out with a newspaper and his pipe, and I dunno if I ever seen a man[Pg 111] look more luxurious. But he got up, sort of a one-joint-at-a-time fashion, and came slumping over, with his hair sticking out at the back. He stood and turned the music, with his pipe behind him. And when she'd got through, he says:

"Very pretty, indeed. Now I'll just finish my article, I guess, dear."

He went back to his couch. And she got up, kind of quick, and walked over and stared into the fire. And I got up and went over and stared out the window. It seemed kind of indelicate to be looking, when I knew so well what was happening in that room.

For she'd forgot he was a person. She was thinking that he was just another one of her. And that seems to me a terrible thing for any human being to get to thinking about another, married to them or not though they be.

When I looked out the window, I needed new words. I hadn't realized the elevator had skimmed up so high with me—and done it in the time it would have taken the Emporium elevator, home, to go the two stories. But we were up ten, I found afterward. And there I was looking the city plain in the face. Rows and rows and fields of little lights from windows that were homes—and homes—and homes. I'd never seen so many homes in my life before, at any one time. And it came over me, as I looked, that in all the hundreds of them I was [Pg 112]looking at, and in the thousands that lay stretched out beyond, the same kind of thing must have gone on at some time or other, or be going to go on, or be going on now, like I saw clear as clear was going on with Ellen and Russell.

It was the third night I was there that the thing happened. I was getting along fine. I did the ordering and the managing and took part care of the baby and mended up clothes and did the dozens of things that Ellen wasn't strong enough to do. Delia and I had got to be real good friends by the second day.

Russell came home that third night looking fagged out. He was never nervous or impatient—I noticed that about him. I'd never once seen him take it out in his conversation with his wife merely because he had had a hard day. We'd just gone in from the dining-room when Russell, instead of lighting his pipe and taking his paper, turned round on the rug, and says:

"Dear, I think I'll go over to Beldon's a while to-night."

She was crossing the floor, and I remember how she turned and looked at him.

"Beldon's?" she said. "Have—have you some business?"

"No," Russell says. "He wanted me to come in and have a game of billiards."

[Pg 113]

"Very well," she says only, and she went and sat down by the fire.

He got into his coat, humming a little under his breath, and then he came over and stooped down and kissed her. She kissed him, but she hardly turned her head. And she didn't turn her head at all as he went out.

When he'd gone and she heard the apartment door shut, Ellen fairly frightened me. She sank down in the big chair where I had first seen her, and put her head on its arm, and cried—cried till her little shoulders shook, and I could hear her sobs. "Ellen," I says, "what is it?" Though, mind you, I knew well enough.

She put her arms round my neck as I kneeled down beside her. "Oh, Calliope, Calliope!" she says. "It's the end of things."

"End," says I, "of what?"

She looked in my face, with the tears streaming down hers. "Didn't you realize," she says, "that that is the first time my husband ever has left me in the evening—when he didn't have to?"

I saw that I had to be as wise as ten folks and as harmless as none, if I was to help her—and help him. And all at once I felt as if I was ten folks, and as if I'd got to live up to them all.

Because I didn't underestimate the minute. No woman can underestimate that minute when it comes[Pg 114] to any other woman. For out of it there are likely to come down onto her the issues of either life or death; and the worst of it is that, ten to one, she never once sees that it's in her power, maybe, to say whether it shall be life or death that comes.

"What of it?" I says, as calm as if I didn't see anything at all, instead of seeing more than she saw, as I know I did.

She stared at me. "Don't you understand," she says, "what it means?"

"Why, it means," says I, "that he wants a game of billiards, the way any other man does, once in a while."

She shook her head, mournful.

"Three years ago this Winter," says she, "only three short years ago, every minute of the world that Russell had free, he wanted to spend with me. That Winter before we were married, do you suppose that anybody—anybody could have got him to play billiards with him if he could have been with me?"

I thought it over. "Well," I says, "no. Likely not. But then, you see, he couldn't be with you every evening—and that just naturally give him some nights off."

"'Some nights off,'" she says. "Oh, if you think that is the way he looks at it—There is no way in this world that I would rather spend my evenings," she says, "than to sit here with my husband."

"Yes," I says, "I s'pose that's true. I s'pose[Pg 115] that's true of most wives. And it's something they've got to get over thinking is so important."

She gasped. "Get over—" she says. "Then," says she, "they'll have to get over loving their husbands."

"Oh, dear, no, they won't—no, they won't," says I. "But they'll have to get over thinking that selfishness is love—for one thing. Most folks get them awful mixed—I've noticed that."

But she broke down again, and was sobbing on the arm of the chair. "To think," she says over, "that now it'll never, never be the same again. From now on we're going to be just like other married folks!"

That seemed to me a real amazing thing to say, but I saw there wasn't any use talking to her, so I just let her cry till it was time to go and feed the baby. And then she sat nursing him, and breathing long, sobbing breaths—and once I heard her say, "Poor, poor little Mother's boy!" with all the accent on the relationship.

I walked back into the middle of the long, soft, wine-colored room, trying to think if I s'posed I'd got so old that I couldn't help in a thing like this, for I have a notion that there is nothing whatever that gets the matter that you can't help some way if you're in the neighborhood of it.

Delia was just shutting the outside door of the apartment. And she came trotting in with her little, formal, front-door air.

[Pg 116]

"Two ladies to see you, Miss Marsh," she says. "Mis' Toplady and Mis' Holcomb."

No sooner said than heard, and I flew to the door, all of a tremble.

"For the land and forevermore," says I. "Where from and what for?"

There they stood in the doorway, dressed, I see at first glance, in the very best they'd got. Mis' Holcomb, that is the most backward-feeling of any of our women, was a step behind Mis' Toplady, and had hold of her arm. And Mis' Toplady was kind of tiptoeing and looking round cautious, to see if something not named yet was all right.

"There ain't any company, is there?" she says, in a part-whisper.

"No," says I, "not a soul. Come on in."

"Well," says she, relaxing up on her bones, "I asked the girl, and she says she'd see. What's the use of being a hired girl if you don't know who you've let in?"

"Sit down," says I, "and tell me what you're doing here, and why you've come. Is anything the matter? I see there ain't, though—with you in your best clothes. Throw off your things."
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