As things turned out, Flora might have seen her "friend" in Payton Street Friday night, had devotion prompted him to call, for the festivity at the camp was postponed for three days. The morning mail brought Frederica a brief line from Howard Maitland; he had found, he said, after he left her office, that he had to run on to Philadelphia. Back Monday morning. If her invitation held good, he'd come out to Lakeville for supper Monday night. The letter ended with some scratched-out words, which looked like, "I may have something to tell you—" The obliterated line made her glow! But the delay was disappointing. Three whole days before she could hear that "something" he wanted to tell her—and she wanted to hear! Well, it would give her more time to fix things up in the cottage. With this in view, she and Zip and Flora went out to Lakeville Sunday morning, and Fred had a silent day to keep an eye on the dusting, and work on her suffrage paper, and jolly Flora, whose plaintive dullness was beginning to be rather trying.
"You must brace up, Flora," she said; "you haven't half dusted the legs of the table! I don't want Mr. Maitland to think we are not good housekeepers, just because we are 'New Women,' you and I!" But Flora did not[Pg 190] brighten. She had telephoned the "reg'ler invitation to the movies" before leaving Payton Street, but the "friend" had only said (she told Frederica) "he'd see 'bout it. He'll write to me, and I'll git it Monday," she said. But it was evident that she had very little hope of an acceptance.
All that pleasant, hazy Sunday Frederica followed the old, old example of her grandmother, the cave-dweller, and decked her little shelter. She went into the woods and brought back an armful of maple leaves and, with Flora's melancholy assistance, fastened them against the walls and over the doors, hiding, to some extent, the frieze of fans and the yellow pennons of the Cause. She even took down the muslin curtains and washed and ironed them herself, and put them up again, crisp and dainty. The little room bloomed with her joy. When she sat down to "polish" her article she kept jumping up every few minutes to move a bowl of flowers, or put an extra book on the mantelpiece.
"I wonder," she thought, "if he can read the titles from that morris chair?" She had decided in what chair he was to sit. She tried the visual possibilities of the chair herself and, by screwing up her eyes, found she could just make out the appallingly learned names on the backs of some of the books. "That will show him what I'm up to!" she said.
It was the old Life Purpose—the eternal invitation! The bird preens itself, the flower pours its perfume, the girl's cheek curves like a shell. A man can almost always see the beckoning of that rosy curve, or of a little curl nestling at the back of a white neck, or of soft, shy eyes;[Pg 191] for so, in all the ages, Life has invited. But it has never beckoned with a German treatise!
Frederica, giving Zip a lump of sugar and making a solitary cup of tea for herself, did not know that she was beckoning....
When, at five o'clock, a motor came chugging along the road, and Arthur Weston opened the door and demanded tea, he, at least, felt the invitation—which was not for him. The white curtains, the open piano, the warmth and fragrance and pleasantness, and, most of all, Frederica, sitting on a little stool by the fire, her face sparkling with welcome. Everything was beckoning!
Standing up, warming his hands at the fire while Fred ran out to the kitchen to make fresh tea for him, the caller read the names of the books lined up in a row between the lighted candles on the mantelpiece, and whistled.
"Is this your light reading?" he said, as she came back with the cream-pitcher. "For Heaven's sake, lay in some funny papers for the simple male mind!" Then he pulled Zip's ears, took his tea, and said he wished he could ever get enough sugar.
"I saw Maitland on Thursday," he said, reaching for another lump.
"Yes, he is on deck," Fred said.
Her man of business made a hopeless, laughing gesture, as if he gave up trying to solve a puzzle. "Are they engaged, or aren't they?" he said to himself. Her way of speaking of the cub was certainly as indifferent as it well could be! "But that doesn't prove anything," he thought, drearily.
[Pg 192]
He stayed a long time; he had a feeling that his call was a sort of last chapter. "In about a week I'll get one of those confounded engagement letters," he told himself. He settled down in the morris chair—the chair in which Howard was to sit the next evening—and started her talking. He did not need to make any replies. Once Frederica "got going" on her own affairs he could watch her in lazy, tender silence.... How soon it would be over—this watching and listening! How soon his plaything would be transformed into a happy, self-absorbed, quite uninteresting wife and mother! For Fred Maitland, he was cynically aware, would cease to interest him, because she would cease to be preposterous; she would be normal. Of course Fred Payton would always be a darling memory; she would never leave his heart. His heart ached at the thought of its own emptiness if he should try to turn Fred Payton out just because Fred Maitland was another man's wife. No, he would not even try to forget his wild, sweet, silly Freddy! She should always remain as, back somewhere in his memory, Kate remained, dark-browed and cruel. The Kate of to-day, whose presence in his heart would be an impropriety, was not even an individual to him! But the old Kate was his. He wondered if Fred would ever become as vague to him as Mrs. Kate——.... "What is her name! Oh, yes—Bailey. When I heard she'd married him, I didn't sleep for two nights; and now I can hardly remember his name! 'Men have died, and worms have eaten them—' ... Fred, almost all the houses out here are boarded up. I only saw a light in one house."
[Pg 193]
"I was telling you of the woman's movement in Sweden," she said, affronted.
"I'd like to see a woman's movement back to town from this cottage! You really ought not to be out here at night, just you and Flora. That one house which is open will be............