"Flora thinks her beau won't go out there to see her," Miss Carter explained.
"Nonsense!" Fred said. "If he wants to see her he'll come, and if he doesn't want to see her she'd better find it out now." But she was not entirely unsympathetic, and told Flora there would be a piano in the cottage so that the music lessons could be continued—which raised the cloud a little.
A day or two later Mrs. Holmes called at No. 15 to bid Mrs. Payton good-by for the summer, and the next week the Childses dropped in, in the evening, for the same purpose. They all made their annual remark: "How can you stay in town in the hot weather?" And Mrs. Payton made her annual reply: "I hate summer resorts. I'm much more comfortable in my own house." Nobody asked the real question, "How can you stay here with Morty?" And Mrs. Payton never gave the real explanation: "My life is perfectly empty except for Mortimore; that's why I stay with him."
When they had all left town Mrs. Payton, who changed[Pg 146] her under-flannels and packed up her winter blankets by the calendar, put the stuffed furniture into linen covers, and told Anne to keep the shutters bowed all over the house—except in the ell; the sun was never shut out of the room with the iron bars over the windows. Then summer sleepiness took possession of the household. No one disturbed the quiet except when, occasionally, Arthur Weston, bored and kindly, dropped in to ask for a cup of tea. He told himself once, after a dull hour of drinking very hot tea and listening to plaintive details of Freddy's behavior, that he was going to leave directions in his will to have inscribed upon his tombstone, "He seen his duty, and he done it." It occurred to him that he would not wait for the tombstone to suggest that same duty to Frederica....
As the Payton house fell into somnolence, Payton Street woke up. The air, stagnant between sun-baked brick walls, was a medley of noises that sometimes sank to a rumbling diapason, or sometimes stabbed the ear in single discords: the jangle of mule-bells, the bumping of the car on the switch, the jolt of milk-wagons over the cobblestones. In the provision-store all day long a parrot vociferated; from the livery-stable came the monotonous pounding of hoofs, or, when Mr. Baker sent out a hearse and some funeral hacks, the screech of grating wheels. Hand-organs came and went. Fruit-dealers cried their wares—"Strawberries! Strawberries! Strawb—" The ailanthus-shaded pavements swarmed with shrill-voiced children; they summoned one another to pull the parrot's tail or to look at the hearse; they assailed the ice-carts,[Pg 147] reveling in the drip from the tail-boards and sucking what bits of ice they could scrape up. Sometimes they squabbled raucously, sometimes wept; sometimes, hushing their betraying giggles, crept into Mrs. Payton's front yard and climbed up on the iron dog "to play circus"—until Mrs. Payton, always on the watch, discovered them and sent Miss Carter down to drive them away.
Except for skirmishes with the marauding children, Mrs. Payton's days were very placid. She worked out new puzzles and dozed through stories in the magazines. She wrote twice a week dutiful letters to her mother, pausing occasionally to think of something to say or to listen, absently, to the swish of the watering-cart along the street; she liked the wet smell of the watered cobblestones mingling with the heavy odor of the blossoming ailanthus. There never seemed to be anything to tell Mrs. Holmes, except that she had been dreadfully busy, and that the "accommodating" waitress didn't keep her sink clean, and that the barber's children were very trying. Every fine afternoon, sitting opposite Miss Carter and Morty, she drove out to the park and home again. Once she summoned up all her energy and went to Lakeville to spend a day with Fred. She thought that if she didn't go, Freddy would believe she preferred to stay with Morty. ("Oh, if I only hadn't told her I loved him best!" she used to reproach herself.) It was a bitter thing to Mrs. Payton to pass through Laketon and see the place where a Payton girl ought to be, "instead of living with all kinds of people in Lakeville!" When Fred met her at the station and brought her to the ugly little cottage—its garish interior[Pg 148] vivid, now, with yellow pennons—she tried, for the sake of peace, to restrain her disapproval of everything she saw, but she couldn't help saying she wondered how Fred could stand the solferino lamp-shade.
"Hideous," Frederica said, carelessly, "so why look at it? I never look at our Iron Virgin."
"There is some difference in value," Mrs. Payton reproved her.
"No, only in cost," her daughter said; then saw the color mount into her mother's face, and gritted her teeth. ("I needn't have said that—but it's true! Darn it, I am like him!") After that she tried to think of something pleasant to say, but what was there to talk about?—only the waitress, and the heat, and the barber's dirty children. Indeed, it would have been difficult to decide which found that visit to the bungalow the most trying, the mother or the daughter. Certainly it was a relief to both of them when it was over.
"Mother came out to the camp and I wasn't a bit nice to her," Fred bemoaned herself, one day, to Arthur Weston, when he met her entering No. 15 just as he was leaving it. He turned back and followed her into the parlor.
"And nobody can be so un-nice as you, when you put your mind on it," he said, genially.
She laughed. "You never talk through your hat to me; you're straight. That's why I like you."
"Then you'll like me more, for I'm going to be very straight," he warned her. He looked about for any kind of a cool seat, but subsided into a linen-covered feather-bed of a chair, close to the bust of Mr. Andrew Payton;[Pg 149] his eye-glasses on their black ribbon dangling in a thread of sunshine, sent faint lights back and forth on the ceiling. "Life is very dull for your mother," he said, fanning himself with his hat; "why don't you come in oftener?"
Frederica, on the piano-stool, struck a careless octave. "Life dull? Why, I think it's wildly exciting! As for coming in, I'm too busy."
"Reforming the world? You might begin the reformation by making things happier here. Happiness is a valuable reformatory agent. You could cheer Mrs. Payton up, but you prefer 'being busy.'"
Fred colored. He had spoken to her once before in this same peremptory way, and she had been angry; now she was embarrassed. "I'm on my job. I've started a suffrage league—"
"There are other people who can start leagues. There is only one person who can make your mother happy."
"Mr. Weston, the relative value of picture puzzles and the emancipation of women—"
That made him really indignant; he stopped fanning himself and looked at her with hard eyes. "The doing of the immediate duty by each individual woman will emancipate the sex a good deal quicker than talking! You needn't stop your suffrage work to do your duty as a daughter. Did you ever hear anything about bearing one another's burdens?"
"Sounds like the Bible," Fred said.
"It is. I commend the book as a course in sociology."
"But," she defended herself, "I do come home quite[Pg 150] often. I'm going to be here to-night. I'm going to a dinner dance at the Country Club, and I'm coming back here to stay all night."
"Yes, you will come for your own convenience, not your mother's pleasure. See here, Fred! You once asked me if you were like your father,"—involuntarily she raised her hand, as if to fend off a blow—"I had great respect for Mr. Payton in many ways, but he had the selfishness of power. So have you. Whew!" he ended, rising, "I believe it's a hundred in the shade!"
Fred was silent.
"I am coming out to Lakeville in a day or two. Got my new car yesterday, and I am burning to display it."
Still she was silent. A watering-cart lumbered by and some children squealed in a sudden cold splash.
"Until now," he said, "I have believed that you were a good sport."
"And now you think I'm not?"
"You don't seem to know what the word Duty means;—which is another way of saying that you don't play the game."
"If the game is to make things pleasant for Mortimore, and put picture puzzles together, I don't care to play it," she said, cockily. She followed him to the front door and stood there as he went down the steps. But when he reached the gate she darted after him and clapped a frank hand on his shoulder. "You're a dead game sport! I don't know any other man who'd have biffed me right in the face like that."
"I skinned my own knuckles," he admitted, with a[Pg 151] droll gesture of rubbing a bruised hand. "Still, I don't mind, if it does you good."
"Cheer up! Maybe it will," she said, and, laughing, threw a kiss to him and vanished into the house. He laughed, too—then frowned. "She wouldn't have kissed her hand to Maitland. I don't count," he thought. As he walked off, hugging the shady side of the street, he added, "I am a fool!"
Frederica had not the slightest intention of becoming immediately domestic, but as she went up-stairs to dress she happened to glance down the little corridor in the ell, and there, outside Morty's door, was poor, faithful Miss Carter. Her one night off a week, when Mrs. Baker, from the livery-stable, took her place, did not suffice to lessen very much the burden of Morty's perpetual society, and that and the heat had obviously worn upon her.
"Miss Carter, why don't you go to the theater?" Frederica called to her, impulsively. "I'll stay with Morty to-night. I suppose we can't get Mrs. Baker on such short notice?"
"No, she can't come except on her regular night; and you are going to a dance, Miss Freddy," the tired woman objected, rather faintly.
"Nonsense! I don't care about dancing. Go ahead. Get a ticket for 'Heels and Toes.' It's corking."
Her mother followed her into her room to thank her. "That's very sweet of you, Freddy. Not that Morty needs anybody when he once gets to sleep; so far as that goes, I don't need to go to the expense of having Mrs.[Pg 152] Baker here on Miss Carter's evenings out; but I like to feel there's some one near, you know."
"It's less lonely for you," Fred said, with unwonted insight.
"Yes," Mrs. Payton agreed, wistfully. "She's somebody to talk to. You needn't sit in Morty's room; outside the door will do. And I'll sit with you."
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