K Part 3

"And b.u.t.tons?"

"Use safety-pins. When they're closed one can b.u.t.ton over them as well as--"

"I think," said Sidney, "that it is quite time some one took a little care of you. If you will give Katie, our maid, twenty-five cents a week, she'll do your was.h.i.+ng and not tear your things to ribbons. And I'll mend them."

Sheer stupefaction was K. Le Moyne's. After a moment:--

"You're really rather wonderful, Miss Page. Here am I, lodged, fed, washed, ironed, and mended for seven dollars and seventy-five cents a week!"

"I hope," said Sidney severely, "that you'll put what you save in the bank."

He was still somewhat dazed when he went up the narrow staircase to his swept and garnished room. Never, in all of a life that had been active,--until recently,--had he been so conscious of friendliness and kindly interest. He expanded under it. Some of the tired lines left his face. Under the gas chandelier, he straightened and threw out his arms.

Then he reached down into his coat pocket and drew out a wide-awake and suspicious Reginald.

"Good-night, Reggie!" he said. "Good-night, old top!" He hardly recognized his own voice. It was quite cheerful, although the little room was hot, and although, when he stood, he had a perilous feeling that the ceiling was close above. He deposited Reginald carefully on the floor in front of the bureau, and the squirrel, after eyeing him, retreated to its nest.

It was late when K. Le Moyne retired to bed. Wrapped in a paper and securely tied for the morning's disposal, was considerable masculine underclothing, ragged and b.u.t.tonless. Not for worlds would he have had Sidney discover his threadbare inner condition. "New underwear for yours tomorrow, K. Le Moyne," he said to himself, as he unknotted his cravat.

"New underwear, and something besides K. for a first name."

He pondered over that for a time, taking off his shoes slowly and thinking hard. "Kenneth, King, Kerr--" None of them appealed to him.

And, after all, what did it matter? The old heaviness came over him.

He dropped a shoe, and Reginald, who had gained enough courage to emerge and sit upright on the fender, fell over backward.

Sidney did not sleep much that night. She lay awake, gazing into the scented darkness, her arms under her head. Love had come into her life at last. A man--only Joe, of course, but it was not the boy himself, but what he stood for, that thrilled her had asked her to be his wife.

In her little back room, with the sweetness of the tree blossoms stealing through the open window, Sidney faced the great mystery of life and love, and flung out warm young arms. Joe would be thinking of her now, as she thought of him. Or would he have gone to sleep, secure in her half promise? Did he really love her?

The desire to be loved! There was coming to Sidney a time when love would mean, not receiving, but giving--the divine fire instead of the pale flame of youth. At last she slept.

A night breeze came through the windows and spread coolness through the little house. The ailanthus tree waved in the moonlight and sent sprawling shadows over the wall of K. Le Moyne's bedroom. In the yard the leaves of the morning-glory vines quivered as if under the touch of a friendly hand.

K. Le Moyne slept diagonally in his bed, being very long. In sleep the lines were smoothed out of his face. He looked like a tired, overgrown boy. And while he slept the ground-squirrel ravaged the pockets of his shabby coat.

CHAPTER II

Sidney could not remember when her Aunt Harriet had not sat at the table. It was one of her earliest disillusionments to learn that Aunt Harriet lived with them, not because she wished to, but because Sidney's father had borrowed her small patrimony and she was "boarding it out."

Eighteen years she had "boarded it out." Sidney had been born and grown to girlhood; the dreamer father had gone to his grave, with valuable patents lost for lack of money to renew them--gone with his faith in himself destroyed, but with his faith in the world undiminished: for he left his wife and daughter without a dollar of life insurance.

Harriet Kennedy had voiced her own view of the matter, the after the funeral, to one of the neighbors:--

"He left no insurance. Why should he bother? He left me."

To the little widow, her sister, she had been no less bitter, and more explicit.

"It looks to me, Anna," she said, "as if by borrowing everything I had George had bought me, body and soul, for the rest of my natural life.

I'll stay now until Sidney is able to take hold. Then I'm going to live my own life. It will be a little late, but the Kennedys live a long time."

The day of Harriet's leaving had seemed far away to Anna Page. Sidney was still her baby, a pretty, rather leggy girl, in her first year at the High School, p.r.o.ne to saunter home with three or four knickerbockered boys in her train, reading "The d.u.c.h.ess" stealthily, and begging for longer dresses. She had given up her dolls, but she still made clothes for them out of sc.r.a.ps from Harriet's sewing-room. In the parlance of the Street, Harriet "sewed"--and sewed well.

She had taken Anna into business with her, but the burden of the partners.h.i.+p had always been on Harriet. To give her credit, she had not complained. She was past forty by that time, and her youth had slipped by in that back room with its dingy wallpaper covered with paper patterns.

On the day after the arrival of the roomer, Harriet Kennedy came down to breakfast a little late. Katie, the general housework girl, had tied a small white ap.r.o.n over her generous gingham one, and was serving breakfast. From the kitchen came the dump of an iron, and cheerful singing. Sidney was ironing napkins. Mrs. Page, who had taken advantage of Harriet's tardiness to read the obituary column in the morning paper, dropped it.

But Harriet did not sit down. It was her custom to jerk her chair out and drop into it, as if she grudged every hour spent on food. Sidney, not hearing the jerk, paused with her iron in air.

"Sidney."

"Yes, Aunt Harriet."

"Will you come in, please?"

Katie took the iron from her.

"You go. She's all dressed up, and she doesn't want any coffee."

So Sidney went in. It was to her that Harriet made her speech:--

"Sidney, when your father died, I promised to look after both you and your mother until you were able to take care of yourself. That was five years ago. Of course, even before that I had helped to support you."

"If you would only have your coffee, Harriet!"

Mrs. Page sat with her hand on the handle of the old silver-plated coffee-pot. Harriet ignored her.

"You are a young woman now. You have health and energy, and you have youth, which I haven't. I'm past forty. In the next twenty years, at the outside, I've got not only to support myself, but to save something to keep me after that, if I live. I'll probably live to be ninety. I don't want to live forever, but I've always played in hard luck."

Sidney returned her gaze steadily.

"I see. Well, Aunt Harriet, you're quite right. You've been a saint to us, but if you want to go away--"

"Harriet!" wailed Mrs. Page, "you're not thinking--"

"Please, mother."

Harriet's eyes softened as she looked at the girl

"We can manage," said Sidney quietly. "We'll miss you, but it's time we learned to depend on ourselves."

After that, in a torrent, came Harriet's declaration of independence.

And, mixed in with its pathetic jumble of recriminations, hostility to her sister's dead husband, and resentment for her lost years, came poor Harriet's hopes and ambitions, the tragic plea of a woman who must subst.i.tute for the optimism and energy of youth the grim determination of middle age.

"I can do good work," she finished. "I'm full of ideas, if I could get a chance to work them out. But there's no chance here. There isn't a woman on the Street who knows real clothes when she sees them. They don't even know how to wear their corsets. They send me bundles of hideous stuff, with needles and s.h.i.+elds and imitation silk for lining, and when I turn out something worth while out of the mess they think the dress is queer!"

Mrs. Page could not get back of Harriet's revolt to its cause. To her, Harriet was not an artist pleading for her art; she was a sister and a bread-winner deserting her trust.