Spring had sauntered very slowly up the Ohio Valley that year. During a cold and slushy April, Frederica paid her advertising bills, and was assured that the Misses Graham would want her to engage an apartment for them in the autumn. Also, she found a flat for a lady with strikingly golden hair, who later departed without paying her rent. This created a disgruntled landlord and instructed the real-estate agent in the range of adjectives disgruntled landlords can use. In May she was almost busy in finding houses on the lake and in the mountains for summer residents; but her traveling expenses to and from the various localities were so large that she had to apply to her man of business for an advance from her allowance.

"Look here, Fred," he said, "you can't live on your future commission from Cousin Eliza. Don't you think you've had about enough of this kind of thing?"

"I do not!" she said. "You can sponge my head between rounds, but you can't stop the mill. I don't pull off the gloves till I see it through. And I'm twenty-two dollars ahead of last month!"

She had induced him to go with her and Zip to see the tiny furnished cottage she had hired for the summer[Pg 136] in Lakeville—the cheerfully vulgar suburb of Laketon where persons of her own sort played at farming. Lakeville was only a handful of flimsy frame houses scattered along under the trees close to the sedgy edge of the lake. Wooden piers ran out into deep water, and, when the season opened, collected joggling fleets of skiffs and canoes about their slimy piles. As yet, the houses were unoccupied, but the spirit of previous tenants, as indicated by names painted above the doors—"Bide-a-Wee," and "Herestoyou"—had been very social. Sentimental minds were confessed in "Rippling Waves," and "Sweet Homes." Fred's "bungalow," its shingled sides weathered to an inoffensive gray, was labeled, over its tiny piazza, "Sunrise Cottage."

"I think that's why I took it," she told Mr. Weston, when, having inspected its shoddy interior and paused on the porch to look at the far-off church spire of Laketon, they wandered down to a ledge of rock that jutted out into the lake; "women are going to raise the sun of freedom!"

"I hope they won't, accidentally, raise Cain," he murmured. "Fred, the lamp on your center-table almost put my eyes out! Do the Lakevillians really think that kind of junk beautiful?"

"They do. But don't be cocky; we thought it beautiful ourselves not so very long ago—if it was only expensive enough! Look at the parlor in Payton Street."

"That magenta shade with the autumn leaves on it is the most horrible thing I ever saw," he said, shuddering.

[Pg 137]

"I shall have lots of candles and a student's lamp to mitigate it," she comforted him.

They had settled down on the rock, Zip dozing against Fred's knee. It was an exquisite May afternoon. Everything was very still; once a bird fluted in the distance, and once, on the piazza of a boarded-up cottage, a chipmunk scurried through the drift of last year's leaves. A haze of heat lay on the water that crinkled sometimes under a cat's-paw of wind, and then lapped faintly in the sedges. The woods, crowding close to the shore, were showing the furry grayness of young oak leaves, and here and there a maple smoldered into flame. Frederica, absently poking a twig under patches of lichen and flaking them off into the water, was saying to herself that in about six months Howard Maitland would be at home.

"Lakeville is so unnecessarily hideous," Mr. Weston meditated; "I can't see why you should like it."

"Because my friends come here—people who work! I'm going to start a suffrage club for them."

"How grateful they will be!" he said. His amiability when he was bored was very marked.

"But I had to cave," Fred said, "about having Flora here when I stay all night. The Childs family felt they would be compromised if people in Laketon knew that Billy-boy's niece flocked by herself in Lakeville. The Childses are personages in Laketon! Aunt Bessie is the treasurer of the antis, and runs a gambling-den on Thursday afternoons—she calls it her Bridge Club. And Billy-boy has a Baconian Club, Saturday nights. My, how useful they are! As my unconventionality would injure[Pg 138] their value to society, I said I would hold Flora's hand. How much use do you suppose Flora would be if thieves broke in to steal?"

"She would be another scream. And you'll like to have her wash the dishes for you."

"Flora is too much in love to wash dishes well," Fred said. "Besides, I don't mind washing 'em, and I do it well. The idea that women who think can't do things like that is silly. We do housework, or any other work, infinitely better than slaves."

"'Slaves' being your mothers and grandmothers?"

Frederica nodded, prying up a piece of moss and snapping the twig off short.

"Oh, Fred, you are very funny!"

"Glad I amuse you. Pitch me that little stick under your foot."

He handed it to her, and she began to dig industriously into the cracks and crevices of the old gray rock. "The idea of calling Mrs. Holmes a slave is delightful," he said.

"She is a slave to her environment! Do you think she would have dared to do the things I do?"

"She wouldn't have wanted to."

"You evade. Well, I suppose you belong to another generation." Arthur Weston winced. "Don't you think it's queer," she ruminated, "that a man like Howard Maitland is satisfied to fool around with shells?" Whenever she spoke of Howard, a dancing sense of happiness rose like a wave in her breast. "Why doesn't he get into politics, and do something!" she said. Her voice was disapproving, but her eyes smiled.

[Pg 139]

"Perhaps he likes to keep his hands clean."

"Oh," she said, vehemently, "that's what I hate about men. The good ones, the decent ones, are so afraid of getting a speck of dirt on themselves! That's where women—not Grandmother's kind—are going to save the world. They won't mind being smirched to save the race!"

"Frederica," her listener said, calmly, "when that time comes, may God have mercy on the race. Your grandmother (I speak generically) thought she saved the race by keeping clean."

"And letting men be—" she paused to find a sufficiently vehement word. "It's the double standard that has landed us where we are; it has made men vile and kept women weak. We'll go to smash unless we have one standard."

"Which one?" he asked; "yours or ours?"

"You know perfectly well," she said, for once affronted.

"I only asked for information. There's no denying that there are members of your sex who rather incline to our poor way of doing things. Oh, not that we are not a bad lot; only, to be our equals, it isn't necessary to sit in the gutter with us. Continue to be our sup—"

"............