Chapter II: I

By September the United States had welcomed most of its heroes home. Nora, sitting in her history lectures, observed a new group of men, shabby some of them, with army shoes and often the army flannel shirt completing a civilian costume of a shiny coat strained at the shoulders and trousers threatening collapse in the seat. There was sturdiness and hardness about most of these men, as if, having conquered fear, hunger, disease, and vice, they asserted an animal vigor which set them apart from other men. But there were cripples too; legs and arms missing. Crutches and canes tapped in the hallways and lecture rooms. In the faces of some there was strain, suffering, a transparent pallor. They collected in little groups in the rear of Nora’s history classes, talking together in low tones, deliberately closing the exchange of their experiences not only to the women, but equally to the married men and the fledglings fresh from college.

But from the first day, Nora detected a new spirit in the University. Even the professors were changed. The old droning tones had disappeared. They may have been frightened last year or only disheartened. Or were they, like actors roused to play their best before a good audience, conscious of the men sitting in the back rows?

Never before had places of learning been crowded with so serious a student body as in the fall of 1919. Perhaps they never will be again. At last there seemed to be earnest concentration upon education, a hunger for new ideas and enlightenment. Every man returning from France seemed sure of one thing—that for the complications of life, stripped now of its former vapid American idealism, he must know more. In the tensity of the classroom Nora built up these speculations.

Among the history lecturers was Professor Nicholson, with grey hair straggling over a face that had a curious, unconquerable youth. In what the other professors said one found the same new note of radicalism creeping in, subtle generally and evasive, but there for the discerning. They, too, made frequent comparisons with modern events, clarifying and interpreting both old and new. But, in spite of these resemblances, he stood out above them. The first day she could not quite catch the difference. Was it a closer reality he reached, a more intense experience?

The women around Nora whispered that Professor Nicholson had been studying in England when war was declared. At once he offered himself as an ambulance driver. Later he enlisted as a private. He had seen hard fighting in the Argonne drive, been wounded. Nora wondered how much these women knew. He was a small man, slight, almost delicate, and the eyes and sensitive mouth did not suggest ambulances or shell fire. But the nose, large, aggressive, riding over the fine lines of the rest of the face, was not that of a dreamer. One of Nora’s neighbors repeated what a man who had studied under him before the war had told her. He was just the usual scholar then, a good lecturer, but all brilliant theory like the others. The war had changed him.

The opening lectures in a course dealing with nineteenth-century England pictured manufacturing and agricultural England before the Industrial Revolution. The vividness of phrase, the pictorial and dramatic effect, were unforgettable. Miss Steele’s conception of the historian, a kind of recording angel, looking back, seeing in the present both the past and the future, but not a cruel recording angel—pitying, understanding—Professor Nicholson seemed like that.

Behind Nora sat a unique specimen of graduate student, handsome, fashionably dressed, his well-set-up figure and lean muscular frame suggesting a steady programme of games and exercise rather than hard work. From his conversations with his companion Nora pieced together those first days a fairly complete biography. He had been studying at Oxford when the war broke out, offered himself for British service at once, and was later transferred to an American regiment. But he described a machine-gun attack in the style of a tennis match, a polo game, or a drag-hunt. Fighting was the duty of a gentleman, disagreeable sometimes, but a game, an adventure.

In the basement room of the library Nora, snatching a cup of tea, watched a man at the same table turning over the pages of a green paper pamphlet as he sipped coffee. On the chair beside him were crutches. She remembered that he was in one of her classes. As he read here and there, he scowled and muttered to himself, unconscious of her watching him. Something about the peace conference, Nora gathered from a chapter heading.

‘Have you found something good about the war?’ she asked him at last.

He looked up, still scowling. ‘What every one will be thinking five years from now.’

She looked at the author, the most famous of British dramatists. ‘I’d like to get the book,’ she said.

‘I brought it back with me. You can’t get it here.’

‘I’d like to read it,’ she persisted.

‘You wouldn’t like it. No woman would.’

‘Do you think all women have the same opinions?’

‘Well—they’re idealists. They wouldn’t care for this straight stuff. I’ve been home six months.’ He laughed.

‘I don’t pretend to know anything about the war. I’ve heard nothing from any man who was actually there. I watch all of you talking together——’

‘If you’d like to read this—I’m through with it.’

She thanked him, and he hobbled away.

The book gave Nora a new boldness. She came to her classes late, the seats in front all filled by the women who strove daily for those closest to the lecturer. A vacant chair was to be found only in the rear of the room. The men were talking. She caught stray words, unintelligible slang, foreign phrases.

‘I can’t—I can’t believe it was for nothing,’ a strained voice said behind her. ‘Being wounded—suffering the way some of us have—all for nothing.’ The other men were silent. ‘I won’t believe it,’ he concluded in the same grey tones.

How could a woman know what these men thought except by the crime of eavesdropping? If she could only talk to them. Between them and her was an invisible wall, stronger than stone and mortar.

Another time she heard; ‘But it all ends the same way. It was hell, but not one of us would have missed it. Nothing in the end. Months wasted. Everything here gone to the bow-wows. But those who didn’t get into the scrap are outside. They know it. They don’t belong to our generation.’

Professor Nicholson had finished his introductory lectures. He was now plunged into the intricacies of a new age, with its machinery in factories, its locomotives and steamships. The classes were set to drawing steam engines and spinning-jennies. When they had recovered from the first bewilderment, they visited a cotton mill in New Jersey, located in a gaunt town where smelly canals, a river stagnant with refuse, and tenement houses built of a gloomy native stone swarmed with the children whose parents were employed in the mill. It was not a cheerful introduction. The mill itself was almost overpowering to those who had never seen the textile industry at first hand. The smells, the terrible heat in some of the rooms, the thundering noises were a revelation of the heights to which human endurance could be stretched. The preparing rooms were the most revolting. American cotton, the dirtiest and the poorest on the market, was a tough proposition, some of the men said. They got together and talked with Professor Nicholson, in spite of the noise, when the foreman walked ahead. Nora tried to push herself near them.

She caught a reference to the steel strike, which now made newspaper headlines. The noise shut out the rest. Men talking together about vital things, the facts without sentimentality, what happened from day to day, and women on the outside exchanging the same twaddle. It was hopeless, unfair, but what could she do about it?

A woman sticking close to her kept repeating: ‘I think it’s dreadful—dreadful. I never knew it was like this. The only mill I’ve ever been in was a flour mill—such a nice clean place.’

In the carding-room cotton fluff drifted like snow over the hair of the girls, their faces stolid, almost inhuman. The atmosphere in which they toiled eight hours daily had a stench like burned salad oil. The air vibrated with the continuous screeching roar of the machinery. But when the foreman’s back was turned, the girls’ lips moved.

Professor Nicholson afterward described the Apex Mill as above the average, with good lighting, a fairly modern ventilating system, and excellent vacuum apparatus for clearing the cotton fluff out of the air. Although it wasn’t ideal, the general management was decent. The problems of shifting foreign labor and competition with the Southern cotton mills, with lax State laws and child labor, complicated the policy of many employers. Nora remembered the reforming zeal of Ellen Standish and her obdurate father. Perhaps Ellen had not been entirely fair with him. The professor seemed to be straining himself for an almost superhuman fairness, a little dark man near Nora remarked.

The lectures on industrial England were soon crowded with men. Extra chairs had to be brought in. Professor Nicholson, his clear voice racing over swift sentences, presented his material by running comments on contemporary problems. He quoted novels Nora had never read, eloquent with the misery of adjustment, the exploitation of the helpless, the greed of capitalists whom the new era had given sudden power. He read lines from a poet Nora thought she knew. This was the stuff men wanted in a university. Some of the women were bewildered by the mechanical terms and scientific conceptions.

‘Is this history?’ one of them inquired of Nora.

At the close of the hour the men in the back seats crowded around the lecture platform. They got very much excited over the discussion of issues raised, their voices loud, their eyes and arms enforcing what they said. From chance phrases one guessed that they were fighting the war all over again. These men transformed all they heard into their own experience. As all roads lead to Rome, so did all history for them speak in what they themselves had seen. And Nora on the outside could only gnash her teeth in silent rage.

Nora sought out Professor Nicholson in his office. She was not satisfied with her courses, she explained. They were too narrow, not giving her the sweep of vision she must have. He listened while she reviewed what she had studied, what she had tried to do the year before.

‘You’ve got a big job——nineteenth-century England,’ he commented when she was through.

‘I know—I know very well. But I want to really understand—why England was what she was—the attitude of other countries to her—all of it. I’ve started——’

He advised her to go to literature. English—she knew fairly well. But German and French——

‘Of course I’m outlining a job for life,’ he smiled, the baffling freshness in his face. Freshness—youth—it was ideas, fresh ideas, caring for them more than for life, which made a man look like Professor Nicholson.

‘That’s what I want,’ she gasped eagerly, ‘a real job.’

Nora met the crippled soldier again in the basement refreshment room and returned his book.

‘I agree with you,’ she began.

‘Really?’ His tone was almost rude.

As she was trying to frame a reply, another man sat down beside him. ‘Well, Perkins. How goes it?’

Mr. Perkins attempted an awkward introduction. ‘My friend John Harper.’

‘Nora Deming,’ she helped him. ‘Mr. Perkins and I have been talking about the war.’

‘That’s what he and I talk about, too,’ the stranger said. He had a way of looking straight at one when he talked that was a little disconcerting at first. He was a graduate student in economics like Perkins, he informed her. He had decided when he got out of the army that he didn’t want to go back into business.

‘I was one of these efficiency experts,’ he said. ‘Office manager for the Zenith Rubber Company. I enlisted because I got bored stiff making patriotic speeches.’

He and Perkins laughed, and Nora, after a moment, joined them. Mr. Harper was the first young business man she had ever known. One of the new school strange to her. The business men in Maronac, even Eleanor’s father at the Dry Docks, were leisurely in speech and action. The young man evidently rushed things through. He spoke rapidly, examining his listener with his restless eyes, never entirely serious, however.

Nora came upon the two men in the same place the following day. Mr. Harper was starting a story.

‘I was telling about a German prisoner brought in by some men in our company. He got down on his knees to the captain. A butcher with ten children, he said. Fat as a sausage—middle-aged. We let him go. He started off—looking back at us like a—a rat. Then he began to run. The lines were so close together we could watch him almost up to his own gang. All safe. He turned. Waved to us. His deliverers.’ The story was interrupted by laughter. ‘Then he—he went right up in the air. Blown to bits—pieces of him going straight up. We’d stuck a bomb with a time-fuse in Fritz’s pocket. It went off just the right minute—inside his own lines.’

Both men were laughing.

‘Do you think that’s a funny story?’ Nora inquired in amazement, looking first at one and then at the other.

They were now roaring with laughter. ‘Killing,’ Mr. Harper explained. ‘Let me tell you the game we played with Hun prisoners that jumped on the running-board of our staff car. We stepped on the gas and shot them off like bottles in a row.’

Nora rose. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t learned war humor yet,’ she said.

Evidently a new kind had developed. A man limping across the campus remarked to his companion, ‘They say the main advantage of a wooden leg is that you can hold up your sock with a carpet tack. But even better—I don’t have to change the sock on my game foot. It can be regarded as more or less permanent.’

II

On Sunday afternoon Nora was invited to Professor Nicholson’s to tea. A stuffy, overheated room filled with people, too much furniture, and an overdressed, gushing woman fussing about among her guests. In the confusion Nora discerned two or three graduate students grouped around Professor Nicholson. Mrs. Nicholson at once began describing to Nora her terrible sufferings while her husband was in France.

‘I never thought I’d live through it. The days—the nights worse. Of course he didn’t have to go. But I never complained.’ She finished with a grimace, intended for a smile, which made Nora inwardly shudder. ‘I suppose you’re crazy about my husband. All his students are. It’s all I hear—how wonderful he is.’

She then turned to the woman on the other side, evidently an old friend, and began an exchange of gossip, mentioning some of Nora’s professors, in a high-pitched voice.

Before Nora left, she had a few moments with Professor Nicholson. He expressed regret that he had been unable to talk with her, hoped to see her again soon to hear how she was getting on. Then she left, dismissed with another grimace from her hostess, and a hard throaty sound caricaturing laughter.

On her way back to the dormitory Nora met Mr. Harper, who asked if he might join her. After a few preliminary remarks, he began to talk of himself. In the midst of his economic studies he was trying to get caught up with the new books. His friend Perkins was a great reader. But both he and Perkins floundered in places. In the realm of ideas, the discussion of contemporary problems, they felt safe enough. But all this art stuff——

Nora in a spirit of mischief advised him to read ‘The Tragic Muse.’ ‘James, you know,’ she explained.

‘Is that he-man stuff?’

‘I don’t know. It depends on the man, you see——’

‘All this diagnosis of the soul since the war. I’m not much for that. Wells—in those first books. He started me going—that man.’

‘But did he carry you very far? I like my ideas dished out straight. Not lost in all his verbiage.’

‘Of course Shaw,’ went on Mr. Harper; ‘there’s the giant of the crowd. And I’m reading Tolstoy.’

He hovered at the door of the women’s hall until Nora had to ask him in. He looked around with his appraising glance. She could see that he was amused. He settled himself on the nearest sofa, not quite at ease, but making a pretense of boldness, as the graduate women filed past slowly enough to make an examination of him and Nora sitting there.

‘It was the army that got me out of business,’ he was finally explaining. ‘Queer how it was, too. I was on to all the tricks. They’re the same ones. The only difference is that business is efficient. Things move along. In the army it was an unholy mess. I never wasted time hating the Germans. They were a devilish smart crowd—a lot o’ them. But the colonel of our outfit—when he wasn’t drunk——’

‘I understand,’ Nora said.

‘Well—lugging him out of one scrape after another——Orders one day. All off the next. What my poor men had to stand—I was swearing blue devils most o’ the time. Old Jack we called him—old Jack loved power. To make us hop around just to see us hop—that was the man. I got some of my old stuff handed back to me. Business organization—it means driving men under you. I was good at it. But the army got under my skin. I couldn’t come back and see men scared to death—white-collar slaves—jumping around when I snapped my fingers. If I go into business again—I won’t be a slave-driver. I haven’t got it thought out yet. But in a year here——You ought to hear Doctor Lewis lecture. Industrial Problems. It’s great stuff. The man knows what he’s talking about. He can’t fool me.’

The dinner bell rang, and Mr. Harper rose. ‘D’you ever get out of this place?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Nora assured him.

‘Could you—would you give me the pleasure—a show or something——’

III

Everywhere Nora went she met John Harper, always correctly dressed and with something new to talk over. In the dingy basement room, up in the history stacks where she foraged around for books, and in the reading-room used by economics as well as by history students. His energy carried him everywhere. When she left the library before dinner, he, too, was ready to leave for the day. At first she regarded these encounters as accidental. Then something in the way he looked at her, a new softness in his sharply darting eyes, made her self-conscious and shy.

‘Can’t we have dinner somewhere?’ he suggested, standing on the steps of the dormitory. Inside Nora knew a business meeting was awaiting her.

‘Thanks very much. Yes, I should like to. But I must hurry to my meeting now.’ The closing of the door gave her a sense of relief, of escape.

Three solemn young men on a sofa balancing tea-cups were facing two women in the parlor. Nora, the vice-president of the Women’s History Club, arriving late, was being introduced by Miss Stark, the president, a very energetic woman, to what she learned was the executive committee of the Men’s History Club.

‘I feel so sorry for all these young girls coming to New York and never meeting any of you young men here at Knickerbocker,’ Miss Stark was saying.

One of the young men looked interested, a second cautious, the third, also the president, alarmed.

‘I didn’t come to Knickerbocker to meet young women,’ he declared, with a candor Nora could not help admiring.

As the discussion developed, she had a confused recollection of Miss Stark’s theory that the two societies devoted to historical studies should become one.

‘It doesn’t seem fair for us women to miss the lively discussions you men have,’ the secretary, Miss Fleet, said, with a smile which swept over the trio on the sofa. Miss Fleet in Missouri, Nora suspected, had a way with men.

‘Our meetings are very dull,’ the interested young man observed.

‘Perhaps the young women would liven them up for you,’ Miss Stark ventured.

‘Scholarly discussions are never lively,’ the president remarked, with finality, looking around him as if he wanted to escape.

‘Don’t you think it would be a good idea for the two clubs to join, Miss Deming?’

Nora started. Miss Stark was looking to her support.

‘I—I hadn’t thought of it before. I don’t know. But the men don’t seem to want it.’ Her glance was directed toward the president. He appeared a little flustered.

Miss Stark drew herself up proudly in her high-backed chair. ‘I never knew before there was sex in history.’

‘There’s sex in everything,’ the president said firmly. Then, reaching for a battered hat, he rose and shook hands solemnly with Miss Stark, concluding with a stiff jerk of a bow. The cautious young man was beside him. The enthusiastic young man was still talking to Miss Fleet about the book he was writing, but, when they were close to the door, he, too, scuttled away.

‘Why didn’t you help me out?’ Miss Stark turned upon Nora.

The women’s club was stupid enough. But whether the addition of men would help it any was uncertain. An unwieldy organization, trying clumsily to be wise, or, better still, according to Miss Stark, to be sociable, did not attract Nora.

It was clear enough the men didn’t want the women. Men serious about their work usually preferred to keep to themselves. They could be violent with their own sex, if they had to be. But with women—that outworn chivalry. It would always keep men and women apart. Chivalry may have gone along well enough when fair ladies kept to their bowers behind castle walls. But now, when women were getting into everything, a man had to look out. If he could fight her like another man——But he could only despise her and wish she’d stay in her place.

And what women studying history at Knickerbocker had anything to contribute to the men’s discussions? Was there anything that they really yearned to have dragged out into the fierce light of real mental combat? Around Nora daily buzzed girls from every State in the Union, many of them, as Miss Stark had hinted, crazy to meet young men. They were open about declaring, for any one to hear, just why they had come to Knickerbocker University. Studying was an excuse for being in New York. New York was crowded with young men, they had thought back home. But once in the great city, tucked away in a woman’s hall, with the matron’s experienced eye upon them, existence had no immediate flame. They joked before Nora about sitting beside the good-looking men at lectures. They asked them the time, borrowed their newspapers, appealed to them when their fountain pens went dry. But graduate students were nuts—most of them—and even the handsomer ones hadn’t a cent. Far more alluring the hall just across the street, that wide, relentless barrier. The girls had recently been experimenting with lamp signals. Two or three gathered in one room. Then they began turning a study-lamp off and on in a new kind of wig-wagging game. A quick response from Knickerbocker undergraduates. Between them a code was developed. Meetings were arranged on near-by corners. One girl returned from a Greenwich Village dance at six in the morning. The matron was growing suspicious. The older women in the dormitory must have told tales.

Women past their first youth have so little sympathy with the adventures of their own sex. There was Miss Johnston on Nora’s corridor. She had become a joke, a kind of tradition. No one knew how many years she had been studying at Knickerbocker. She had long ago taken every course offered by the history department. A new series of lectures roused her like a small boy hearing a fire-engine. Off once more. One more subject to conquer. She was engulfed in some vast scheme in which she wandered over anthropological wastes and historic dawns to prove her theory. Her book, when it was done, might run into three volumes. Once she had hoped to crowd it down into two. In all this she was supported by the earnings of an elderly uncle, who had once dreamed of scholarship and had got stranded in business. His niece read on year after year—miles and miles of books—and told him all about her latest and best conclusion.

Then there was Anna Downing, waiting day by day for the arrival of her brother’s body from France. He had been a captain, a much-loved older brother. Her face fell into deeper grey lines, she drank more cups of coffee, and her eyes glittered uncomfortably for those who talked to her. Only last year she had been the wittiest of Nora’s neighbors.

Alice Conway was a poet. At least she wrote verse and studied philosophy, a not infrequent combination. She had recently got the notion that the dormitory women were making derogatory remarks behind her back—saying her mind was affected. She wanted them to know she was as sane as anybody. If she found the person who started the story about her not being quite right——

All of the women Nora knew studied too much, with the conscientiousness they should have outgrown with pigtails. Their chief satisfaction was in recounting how many pages they read daily, how many consecutive hours they toiled in the library, how late they sat up over their work. They admitted that they were always tired—nothing seemed worth while. If they went to a symphony concert, the music shot nervous pains all through their bodies, like an electric shock. And the theatre—what they had looked forward to more than anything else—probably they had been too tired to go.

Why do women cling to the phantom—that most deceptive phantom—the joy one finds in the play of the mind? They cling to it long after all other hopes are gone. Happiness or intelligence in women—which is rarer? Do any women have both? The Brontë sisters—genius and wretchedness. What they did—walled around with the stony barriers of a limited experience. Elizabeth Barrett—but was she really intelligent? George Eliot—getting revenge for the stiff provincial conscience of Marian Evans by tormenting poor little Hetty Sorrel. And the women of power. Catharine of Russia—Queen Elizabeth in England—giants both of them—relentless—using men for their own determined ends. But when were they happy?

The little blonde girl from Tennessee worked harder than any one. At least the strain bore down upon her more. She had gone to a very poor college. She realized that now. Most of the time she didn’t know what the professor was talking about—just chaos. She read sentences in reference books again and again, but she couldn’t make them out. What was the matter with her? She appealed to Nora. At night her throat ached so. She couldn’t sleep. Maybe she ought to go home. But no, she couldn’t do that.

One night all of Nora’s floor was roused past midnight. People rushing back and forth. The poor little thing from Tennessee had jumped out of her window. She was dead when they found her on the pavement below.

IV

John Harper said women couldn’t stand the strain of too much study—at least not many of them.

‘They go straight off,’ he said, seated across the table from Nora in an Italian restaurant south of the Square, not unlike the one where Nora and Mary Howe listened to the poetic raptures of Eddie Gaston that night so long ago. ‘The reason, clearly enough, is that they don’t really want to study. Now if you force yourself to do a thing—put on the screws tight—there’s trouble. Like this poor girl you told me about. Collapse.’ Mr. Harper, with none of Helen’s agile psychological terms, had the latest theories.

‘Yes,’ Nora agreed, ‘but what about the women who really prefer the intellectual life to everything else—their professional career whatever it may be? What of them?’

‘Let them have it,’ he declared generously. ‘They’re the minority.’ He looked across at Nora with his disconcerting directness. ‘Is that what you prefer?’

Nora blushed, looked down at her plate. ‘I—I don’t know. But my friends—several of them who have already done splendid work—it’s the first rank—competing with men——’

‘Women in business—really good ones—I met them once in a while. But they were hard. And at Knickerbocker—well——’

‘The good ones are there. Not many, of course. But how many really good men are there either?’

Nora took John Harper one Sunday afternoon to have tea with Helen Spring. They got on famously together.

‘He’s a real man,’ Helen observed to Nora afterward. ‘I like him. I’m glad you’re meeting men up there at the University.’ She sighed. ‘After a whole week of women——But, of course, that’s my job.’

Helen had taken her first position, a good one she was told by her superiors, in a home for fallen girls, concealed under the euphemistic name ‘Rest Cottage.’ But its inmates never rested. They were like caged lionesses waiting to escape back to their old life. They put on the proper conversions. They told Helen sobbing stories of early temptations, cruel parents, poverty. All that was true enough. But their emotion didn’t conceal their hatred of the peace of Rest Cottage, where they were safe, well fed, and employed in tasks designed to be unexciting and corrective.

To a scientist convinced that the new psychology will immediately minister to a mind diseased, Rest Cottage was discouraging. But one found there every form of mental variety. It was a remarkable laboratory. The inmates, properly pigeonholed by the staff of psycho-analysts, were a most satisfying group of individuals for scientific purposes.

Helen’s speech during the first experiments in her new job was an almost unintelligible jargon to laity like Nora. Simple introverts and extraverts, objective extraverts and introverts, emotional introverts and subjective extraverts. It was as bad as old Polonius and his classification of plays. ‘“Pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral,”’ jeered Nora. ‘“Manics, dementia præcox, paranoiacs,”’ she recited.

‘You keep quiet,’ Helen threatened, starting off next on libidos, which were equally various—collective, unconscious, desexualized, introverted, extraverted, excessive—many more.

But gradually the job got hold of Helen. She wanted to cure those poor creatures. When all the analyzing was done, what next? They didn’t want to be different. Gradually Helen suspected what they did want. The husband of one of the psychologists knew what they wanted most. To the pretty, lively ones, he gave it. One of Helen’s patients confided that he felt sorry for the girls. He was such an affectionate man, she added. All the time he encouraged his wife to go on with her remarkable cures. It was a terrible mess. And Helen, knowing all that horror, had to keep quiet.

Then Zoe Ryder refused to go on any more cases. She’d starve first. But before beginning the process of starvation, described as painless by those who have tried its early stages, Zoe borrowed money of all her friends. The money she used for her new business venture of making lamp-shades. Out of scraps of silk she contrived boudoir lamps of every color and design—as delicate as flowers. Parchment and paper, cretonnes, chintzes—she contrived an endless variety. They were all charming. Before Christmas she had more orders than she could fill. But sitting in a little back room in Greenwich Village making lamp-shades got tiresome long before spring. For a change Zoe lived in luxury and ease, sat in Washington Square, and began to write a play, with all the neighborhood Italian children swarming around her. A friend got her the offer of being a permanent nurse to a delicate child, but Zoe would not listen to flattery about her magic ways with children. She made the rounds of her friends a second time, less successfully, but still she got enough to keep the play going. She would never make another lamp-shade. She quarrelled with Helen, who made the suggestion. A tea-room in the Village, where only creative artists came, was now her great ambition. If she could get the necessary capital——In the meantime actors were begging her for parts in her new play. She was a pathological case, Helen stated, scolding Amelia for lending her more money.

Vicky’s Lady Needleworkers had been out on strike all winter. Vicky told them to hold firm. They hung on, eating less and less, trying to stretch out the union relief fund to the utmost of its capacity. Then they came to Vicky, who had been leading their fight so valiantly. They couldn’t pay her salary. They reminded her that last year they paid every cent. Three thousand dollars. But Vicky couldn’t live without money. She would have to resign. Her mother and brother, still keeping guard from the windows of a Park Avenue apartment hotel, might have tided her over. But that would have meant the regular life appropriate to those regions. The needleworkers were sorry. She had lent elegance to their cause—a real lady and all. It was too much to expect she’d keep on with them. But they’d hoped——

Amelia was furious at Vicky’s desertion of these plucky fighters.

‘She’ll never get another job at three thousand dollars a year because she was born a lady,’ commented Helen sagely. ‘She’s lazy—untrained.’

‘And dishonest,’ added Amelia. ‘She’s tried to conceal the fact that she’s been living with Max Goldberg all winter. If she’d been honest about it——’

‘Well,’ Helen excused her, ‘she knew he’d tire of her soon. He generally demands more intelligence than she’s got to show. Don’t be too hard, Amelia.’

When Nora told John Harper about Miss Hamilton’s treachery to the needleworkers, he was much amused.

‘What else did you expect? There’s no one so keen about money as those who have had it. Your friend is a good business woman. No nonsense about her. I respect her. She’ll come out on top. And the needleworkers—when the trades get rid of their snobbery and sentiment, they won’t need ladies to manage their scraps for ’em.’

There was something hard and relentless about John Harper. Was it only masculinity? Nora had known too few men to be sure. If only—something about him—not quite. How disgusting she was! How narrow and stupid! She revolted from her own thoughts.

While Vicky looked for a new job, Amelia used the bits of leisure left her by the Labor College in getting Tony married off to somebody. She was bored with Tony—not only Tony, but all Italians. They were materialistic—at least on American soil. The Russians were her next hope—the only people who in the twentieth century still have souls.

‘Well,’ sighed Amelia as the sixteen-year-old bride of Antonio d’Angelo floated out of the church under a canopy of bridal veil and orange blossoms beside her beautiful new husband, ‘I kept him out of the gang. She can take care of him now.’

Amelia was busy soliciting funds for a new colony of rare spirits to be started in the country, providing a combination of intellectual and manual labor, and in connection a school for the poor, Russians preferred.

‘Hasn’t that been tried before?’ asked Nora. ‘Some of the colony don’t work. Others get tired of one another and start fighting.’

‘All of us will dress in grey—a neutral shade,’ Amelia persisted, thinking only of her newest enterprise.

When the news of Garrison Smith’s marriage to an English socialist came, Amelia had just been informed that the son of a fabulously rich father had inherited more than a million dollars to lay at the feet of the colony. Amelia had no time for anything else. Garrison was hardly mentioned.

‘It’s a blessing she’s got this other thing,’ breathed Helen. ‘Don’t say anything against her colony, Nora. You’ve got your young man caught. I can see that.’

‘Helen!’ warned Nora, turning crimson. Nora had brought Mr. Harper down to tea again. ‘Don’t you say that. If you do, I’ll never—never see him again.’

‘Don’t be a fool, my child.’

The rush of events warned Nora that John Harper must soon be reckoned with. This determined young man, who had been successful in everything else he had undertaken, was in love with Nora. Any one could see it. It burst out of him everywhere like a riotous flood, Helen, looking straight at Nora with a defiant air, told her.

Nora began placing obstacles in the way of his frequent invitations, but somehow he climbed over them. Often she was relieved when he did. Dinners in quiet restaurants away from the noise and the smell of the cafeteria, surrounded by people without the scars of intellectual struggles, examining a menu card with no thrifty eyes on the price list, spinning away from dinner to the theatre in a taxi without watching the expensive revolutions of the metre, enjoying a play or a concert unhampered by the cramped discomfort of balcony heights—were luxuries Nora had come to count upon during the winter. More than that was the stimulation of talking to a man with vigorous opinions, whose prejudices, even if they were irritating, were at least never feminine. There was the new sensation of not having to look out for one’s self, to cross the street with no fear of cars darting out of unexpected corners, to walk along a dark passage without even a shiver of trepidation, to escape in companionship one’s own doubts.

‘But you can’t go on this way forever,’ warned Helen, who had studied all of the uncertain ways of men and women.

Nora and John Harper, walking home briskly from the theatre, crossed the park. Under the trees, with their lacy shadows over the path, there was escape from the glare of the lights and the steady traffic, a thin quietness with a lazy, pleasant hum beneath it. Nora did not see the lovers on the benches locked in heavy, passionate embraces, nor the homeless men slinking off to a dark corner to find a bed away from the policeman’s beat. She paused close to the Japanese cherry trees in the height of blossoming.

‘How sweet—sweet,’ she murmured, turning to her companion.

They stood breathing in the scented spring air. She took a step forward, but strong arms held her back, enclosed her.

‘At last—my darling,’ he breathed close to her cheek. He was crushing her against him with his rough, masculine strength, outraging some blind fighting instinct in her.

‘No—no!’ She tried to free herself, trembling with rage.

‘I love you,’ he went on, not releasing her, pressing his lips against hers. ‘My proud little girl.’

‘No,’ she repeated, pulling herself away with a quick wrench, clenching her lips against the sobs in her throat.

‘You mean you don’t care for me?’

She began to walk rapidly, faster and faster, gathering speed, almost running over the ground. If she could get back on the crowded pavements, with people passing and lights, she would be safe.

‘You don’t need to be afraid of me,’ the voice beside her was saying.

They went the rest of the way in silence, she still sweeping over the terrifying stretch of streets like a home-bound swallow, he stalking beside her with hard, pounding strides. At the door of the women’s dormitory, she said a quick good-night.

In her room she was eager to turn out her light, to hide herself away in the darkness. How dared he? she kept repeating to herself. Lying in bed, she trembled all over. A chill seized her, coming out in icy drops on her forehead, making her lips chatter, her fingers stiffen, her feet dead weights. Then she was burning up with fever. This man had done something to her—battered down the outer fortifications of her woman’s world, made her, for the first time, afraid—afraid because she was a woman.

She knew now why she had run away—locked herself up in this room high above the city streets. She must save herself. If he had urged her—held out against her battling opposition—something inside might have crumpled, and she——That was what it meant to be a woman—weak, surrendering to brute force.

But she had saved herself. They didn’t match. She knew. They didn’t belong to each other.

Toward morning, with the dawn making timid grey shadows in her room, Nora was calm enough to go back over everything. There had been doubts from the start. He was too well dressed, too sure of himself, too self-consciously correct. And too—too hard. Almost the first time she met him he affected her like shiny new furniture in shop windows. She had tried to remember his finer qualities, his kindness and generosity. But those things dear to her, which made the delicate flavor to life, did not exist for him. No—no—they could never belong to each other.

The morning light danced over the white paper on Nora’s study table, the cover on the bureau, the expanse of mirror, the walls. There were flickers of dawn, then the sunshine at last in her face. Drawing up the covers, she hid herself away from the hard brightness of the day, and wept.