A gingham rose

CHAPTER I Hey, rose, just bom

Twin to a thorn.

— Sidney Lanier.

Two girls and two young men were standing on the stair-landing of a New York boarding-house, their heads close together, and chattering like magpies. The occasion was more important than serious. There was to be a bal masque that very night and the final details must be arranged. The dance was to close the spring term of the New York School of Art with a frolic that should deftly tend to make return irresistible.

“Let’s walk; it’s only six blocks. We’ll save the cab-hire for another lark.” The practical suggestion came from one of the girls; a tall, slim, boyish sort of girl she was, with blue eyes, a clear skin that the color played over as the 1 weather-vane points the breeze, and a quantity of smooth black hair, which she wore daringly in two long braids.

“Lovely!” chuckled the other girl, hugging Anne’s arm. “You always have the right idea about things, Nancy.”

' “Um-m,” commented Anne; “think so, Ruthy?” She bestowed a patient smile on the top of Ruth’s fluffy yellow head.

“Are you girls sure you won’t mind walking in your party togs?” asked Victor Stetson, a tall, stoop-shouldered fellow with a thin, attractive face that was written all over with admiration for whatever the black pigtails and blue eyes wanted to do.

The braids tossed. “We can go to a theater for the price of a cab.” That settled the matter, and Ruth decided to endure the walk with a smile.

The other young man was a medical student who lived in their boarding-house and had been asked to go along with them to the dance. Anne had dubbed him the Man-eater. “Be ready on time?” he asked with a glance at his watch, as the two girls started upstairs. Ruth hurried 2 away, but Anne cast a glance of amused scorn over her shoulder and proceeded deliberately to her room.

The still-life studio had been turned over to the girls for a dressing-room. The copper pots and kettles, bits of brass, scarlet peppers and satin-coated onions were put upon the shelf and forced out of focus by the presence of mirrors and make-up stuffs.

“Now, Vic,” said Anne at the dressing-room door when they arrived, “you two go in as soon as you are ready and don’t bother waiting for us. If we go in by ourselves they won’t guess us so easily.”

“Anybody ’d know you anywhere,” said Victor, trying to cover his anxiety to be seen by all the world taking Anne into the room.

“Well, goosey,” she laughed, “that’s no reason why they need to know you too, is it?”

Victor threw up his hands, and with a halfhurt gaze disappeared.

Two big studios had been thrown together, the partition being portable for just such occasions. One end of the room was cut off by a row of boxwood and cedar trees in tubs, and the inclosed 3 space filled with tables and chairs, and lighted with Japanese lanterns. “For the distribution of rations and the furtherance of intrigue,” the committee announced, and certainly the corner served faithfully both its destinies. After some discussion it had been decided to put all the funds into “rations” and, except for the strings of Jap lanterns across the big skylights, to let the artistic atmosphere of the place be its own decoration.

However, some one got in at the last moment and dressed up the old stove. The chest in the costume-class studio was burglarized and a pair of old pink satin stays and a tulle skirt were stretched about the iron ribs to the limit of their capacity. Slippers were put on the three claw feet, two drawn back and the other pulled as far forward as possible, till the old stove seemed about to reel off in a highland fling. A face was painted on the coal-bucket and a picture hat tied on top. The whole effect was fairly simpering. The fiddlers, selected for cheapness and endurance, were enthroned on a model stand. Boys and girls in all sorts of garb and masks floated about the big place incongruously, the color and movement kaleidoscopic, fascinating.

Anne was vivid in the rich, warm light of the place, the excitement like wine to her. She wore a dress of pink that threw a flush over her white skin and made her look like a big fresh rose. “Ruthy,” she whispered, “you never looked so pretty. Just like an angel.”

“Goodness, do IP” laughed Ruth, happily. “I was only intended for a butterfly!”

The Man-eater, lost to identity in a deep purple domino and mask, made faithful background to Ruth’s golden head, white dress and wings. Victor Stetson and John Warren, his best friend and Anne’s only rebel in an otherwise obedient kingdom of slaves, were to take part in a cake-walk and were, accordingly, veritable masterpieces of plain-spoken stripes and beseeching plaids.

Anne and Ruth were no sooner inside the door than they were surrounded by a flock of clowns, cavaliers, Chinamen, cowboys, war chiefs and princes from all the nations of earth, begging for dances. Not one dance ahead would Anne give to any one. “So much more exciting that way,” she laughed, and shook her head at Ruth, who was hunting a piece of drawing-paper to write down her dances.

Ruth smiled back. “I do wish I had your courage. But it would scare me awfully to be a wall-flower. Feels so safe to have a lot ahead.”

“May I have all you have left?” came a voice from the depths of the purple domino.

“Oh, how nice !” gasped Ruth, with a puzzled glance at the purple mask, her chin showing very pink at the edge of her own white one.

“Silly,” laughed Anne, with a knowing smile at the Man-eater. “Better save some for possibilities.” And she floated away on the arm of a lucky Chinaman, whirling about the big shadowy place like a giddy pink cloud that had somehow lost its parent sunset.

“Isn’t she lovely?” sighed Ruth, watching Anne. “If it weren’t for her black pigtails I’d think we were all wrong about it, and that the angels really dress in pink.”

“ Once I might have agreed with you,” came forth in a deep, purple voice, “but now I know that the old story is right and that they wear 6 white and have golden hair and no pigtails at all. Come, we are losing time!” So the two girls went about having a good time, each after her own heart and habit.

Just before the cake-walk, while the participants were standing around in dusky groups waiting for the signal, Anne suddenly appeared before Victor. He was marvelously got up.

“Really, Victorious, you are a confection!” She made him a sweeping bow. He was fairly submerged in his make-up. A black false-face, a curled-hair wig, a neck-breaking stock, enormous shoes with white “spats,” and clothes that were a dissipation in excess, all topped by a wide panama hat of the most conscious irregularity. The girl came close to him and peered curiously into his mask, then putting her hands together eagerly, she whispered: “Vic, you delicious, hideous thing, if you’ll just beat John out of that cake, I’ll — Vic, I’ll dance three straight dances with you ! Honestly I will !”

“Is you pestahed in you’ mind, honey chile?” drawled Vic, with a lilt that for a moment got the better of the girl’s eagerness. Then she drew herself up and her blue eyes shone.

“Pm awfully mad at John, Vic; honestly I am.”

“And I am to play second fiddle?” asked Victor, with no trace of the “sunny South” in word or manner.

“No, no, not a bit of it ; truly, Vic. I wouldn’t use you that way, Vic; you know I wouldn’t. Truly, I’m in dead earnest.”

“You flattah me, Sistah Preston,” said the boy, with his elaborately gloved hand over his heart. Then he broke into the traditional, explosive, minstrel-show laugh and finished off with an amazing flap of his shoes.

“Oh,” chuckled Anne, looking at the shoes, “they sound like soggy pancakes!”

“Eo’ de Lo’d, Miss Anne, ’f you go a-talkin’ to me ’bout pancakes I won’t be able to swing a foot!” He stood before her with folded arms. “How’d Brothah Warren make you mad, chile?”

Anne laughed to herself and stood looking at Victor, as if doubtful whether to tell, but at that moment John appeared in the doorway. The color rose again and she shrugged her girlish shoulders.

“He called me names,” she smiled; then her 8 face grew so serious that Victor could not tell where the joke and earnest began and left off.

“What!” he shouted in mock horror. “Brothah Warren called you names!” He made an ominous pause while the ridiculous false-face grinned stolidly. “I’ll beat him out o’ dat cake if it paralyzes all ’f me membahs ! I will indeed, Miss Anne.” After another pigeon-wing or two he collapsed. “What’ll you do, Miss Anne, ’f Brothah Warren wins dat cake?”

“I’ll get you expelled for disorderly conduct and dance those three dances with John — Chinaman!” she finished, laughing. “You villain, let go of my braid,” she cried, wheeling just in time to save one of her hair-ribbons from the envious heathen whose rented pigtail was a pale shade by the side of one of hers. She held the ribbon in her hand a moment, considering first the Chinaman and then Victor, then with a crushing look at the yellow heathen and an adorable smile for the black man, she took the scarlet ribbon from his stick and tied the pink one on instead.

“Pink is so much more distinguished than red,” she said. “Luck to you, Vic,” she whis- 9 pered. “Make little pieces of John; please do, please !”

Victor laughed and swung away, for the signal had sounded. Anne ran over and sat by Ruth in the midst of a gay group. Victor shuffled and threw out his chest and handled his feet with a dexterity so nearly professional and so altogether amusing that all the contestants except one went in for second place with a cheerful deference to his superiority; but that rosecolored hair-ribbon of Anne’s and this last “misunderstanding,” which, to his mind, was the most unreasonable freak that she had ever been guilty of, goaded John to renewed effort. He watched his chance, then started a mincing step and held it cleverly the length of the studio. Anne’s heart went heavy. Victor stood to one side, shuffling aimlessly and watching behind his grinning mask, then, with a glance at the girl who looked so bewilderingly like a rose, he followed John with the same mincing step, but with a series of variations added that made the old place ring with applause.

The cake was easily Victor’s and was presented by James, — James, whose position has 10 never been defined, but who does everything from building fires to arbitrating civil wars, and without whom the school could scarcely go on. Victor immediately turned and placed the cake, with proud humility, on a stool at Anne’s feet.

“Oh,” she said low, her eyes shining and her color high, “we’ll eat every bite of it when we get home to-night! You are a wonder, Vic — a wonder !”

Victor placed his feet in line and made an uncatalogued bow. “May I have the pleasure of the next three dances, Miss Anne?”

Anne laughed and pointed to his shoes.

“Take off those freight-cars,” she commanded. “I have no wish to be trampled to death;” and with a withering look at John Chinaman she tied the remaining hair-ribbon in Victor’s buttonhole. “I’ll wait over there for you; hurry!” She gave him a nod and went off with the Chinaman for a glass of punch.

In a little while Victor and John came back to the studio arm-in-arm and looking as fresh as though a cake-walk were still undiscovered. They crossed the room together and Anne’s dizzy head was full of triumph for what she saw was 11 bound to happen. John, as she had devoutly hoped he would, stooped over her chair in his own charming way and asked for the next dance. She was silent, letting the good moment sink in ; then with a bright look at Victor, who was standing modestly aside, she said sweetly : “Victor has the next three dances. They go with the cake !”

They danced beautifully together and as they finished the third dance, Anne said: “Vic, let’s go home after this; it’s good enough to stop with. Leave me over there by the door where I can watch things while you hunt up Ruth and the Man-eater. They won’t be hard to find, — at least they’ll be together ! Then bring me my coat here. I’ll wait; I want to look at things a moment. Isn’t it the prettiest sight ever ?”

Victor, drunk with the conspicuousness of having had three dances running with the most fascinating girl alive and filled with a conviction that “the queen can do no wrong,” fell smiling into the trap. He had no more than left the studio when John appeared before Anne. She looked on him with a vast surprise.

“Anne,” he began hesitatingly, “I am sorry if I made you angry to-night. I honestly didn’t 12 mean to. I was only joking. Really I don’t know what I said that you could get into such a fuss about.”

“So much the worse for you!” she answered with her chin in the air.

“But you aren’t being fair. Give a fellow a chance, can’t you? Tell me what I said and I’ll make it right. I know I can because I didn’t mean anything.”

“You said — I was nothing — with all my airs , but a — gingham rose!” The hot color flamed over her shoulders and face.

John gazed at her in amazement.

“But,” and he raised his hands hopelessly, “didn’t you tell me yourself your dress was nothing but gingham? Anybody could tell it was intended for a rose. Besides, it doesn’t mean anything anyway, does it ?”

“Well, John, whether you meant anything or not, after the mean way you have acted lately” — though she bit her lip her eyes filled — “it sounded mighty personal!” She moved the toe of her slipper along a crack in the floor and kept her eyes stubbornly down.

“But, Nancy” — he bent lower and spoke earnestly. At that moment some of the others discovered that Anne was in the studio and not dancing. Such a thing was not to be endured, and there began a mad race over the slippery floor. John saw and spoke with a sudden mastery.

“This is my dance;” and before she knew it they were moving smoothly away while the race broke, like the bubble it was, and each mask rushed instinctively after some other girl. Anne and John, in the fascination of music, movement, the rhythm of the hour, being still young in spite of all their serious differences, forgot the storm as easily as if it had all happened a thousand years before. After an uncounted time, Victor appeared in the doorway with Anne’s wrap on his arm. They saw him and slowly moved across the floor toward him.

“Is it all right, Anne?” John persisted.

“Why, yes, for this time,” she hesitated.

“You know very well I wouldn’t have said anything of that sort,” he urged.

A look, older and too wise, crossed the girl’s up-turned face. “Smart people never know anything in this world,” she smiled.

The boy’s arm tightened about her waist. “I truly did not think, Anne.”

“That was just the trouble, John,” she smiled. “People always speak the truth when they do not stop to think. Good night,” she finished, suddenly raising her eyes to his.

* * *

The next morning Anne stood before a long mirror in her night-dress, combing her hair and humming a tune.

“Sing before breakfast,” quoted Ruth, pulling the covers high over her ears.

“Couldn’t cry if I wanted to,” answered Anne, looking into her own clear eyes in the mirror as she trailed the comb through her black hair, the silver gleaming against the dusk of it. She went on talking to herself. “Do you know, you glass-girl, if it wasn’t for daddie I’d go in for regular larks, — I would. I’d about as soon hurt Ruth’s feelings, or — anybody’s — except daddie’s. The trouble is that he has real feelings; he never told me so — that is why I know. Did you know, you glass-girl, that the only things that are so are the things you have never been told? No use telling that to Ruth, though.

She’s awfully young; she’s just a pup, is Ruth! You were born to laziness. But I’ll tell you a secret, Ruthy. One of these days I’m going to have to make my own money. That’s one of the things I feel in my bones, you know.” Ruth was too sleepy to be alarmed by any idle prophecy and made no comment. “I say, my pigtails are pretty stunning, aren’t they? I’d be rather good-looking if I could just persuade myself to go in for growing sideways a while. Miss Sleepyhead, wouldn’t it be great never to do one’s hair high at all, but to grow up to long-tailed frocks, diamond sunbursts, old-young men, and things, and stick like ‘Le Page’s Best,’ to pigtails? Make a hit, wouldn’t it?”

“Crazy!” groaned Ruth, sitting up and rubbing the sleep out of her eyes and yawning prodigiously. “Have you got your French ? What time is it?”

“Of course not; — wish you’d drop the ‘got.’ Fifteen to eight.”

“Wish I had your conscience,” sighed Ruth.

“You’d be lonesome and I’d never miss it.” Anne smiled curiously at herself in the glass and tied her hair-ribbon with elaborate detail.

“What are you getting up so early for when you have nothing to do for hours?” and Ruth blinked solemnly at Anne.

“Because of that conscience you were wishing you had, maybe,” said Anne. “Better hold tight to your own and take another nap. I’ll bring your breakfast up to you,” she said suddenly, her eyes taking Ruth in as if with a new idea. She envied Ruth and she was wondering why.

At about the same hour John Warren was brushing his smooth brown hair before a little square mirror and resenting the uncomfortable morning light. He was wondering if talking right out to Anne Preston would bring her to see that she was rather careless about certain little things a fellow does not like best in the girls he likes best. He wondered what he did, really, like best in girls.

John was ambitious. But he had nearly made up his mind to keep away from girls, especially Anne. She was an insistent, troublesome kind of girl and wouldn’t let any one take things easily. He wanted his own hand on the rudder, and no one could guess what such a girl would do next. Carefully he poured a mug of fresh water over 17 the roots of a scarlet geranium that grew in an Indian red crock on his window ledge. He took great care, absently, not to spill one drop of water. He tweaked off a dry brown leaf with a precision fine enough to be almost cruel, then stood fingering the leaf and taking in its veining.

His attention to detail was fairly Japanese in persistence. All things, no matter how trivial, that came beneath his eyes or his sensitive fingers were absorbed and made his very own, photographed and stored away safely in his susceptible brain — a kind and degree of economy certain to prove either of great and good use or to lead to a sort of egotistical covetousness and selfblindness. He glanced out of the window to see the kind of day, put his hat on with care, ever so little “out of plumb,” — how exquisitely the talented sons and daughters of Eve — and Adam — dissemble! — and then realized acutely that he wanted his breakfast.

CHAPTER II 'A good stick is a good reason

— Rudyard Kipling.

An ugly gale off Lake Michigan was driving stray bits of paper and stinging venturesome humanity to pell-mell speed. The inner voice of outspoken Chicago was frozen to a whisper, driven to cover like a hunted thing.

Two young men were swept along on the current, their purpose almost entirely absorbed in the very present fight for a footing. They turned down a side street, the mad wind taking them circle-wise, then plunged down a basement stairway into the well of glow and warmth of Rector’s, where the gay throng comes and goes, God knows how and why, in spite of, or because of, the cold and gale outside. The polished white marble walls, the tall mirrors, the frosted light of the electric globes were all blurred in the pinkish gray haze of heat and smoke. There were soft-feathered and flowered hats, laces and 19 furs touched richly into strength by the ample spotting of men in black.

“Who was the girl you bowed to, Stetson? She seemed glad to see you.”

“She is glad, bless her. Her name is Preston — Anne Preston.” The five years that had gone by had, seemingly, but increased the enthusiasm and loyalty the boy had felt for the girl.

Victor Stetson had settled in Chicago and was now the art-editor of a fin-de-siecle publication of art and literature: the kind of production that Chicago’s present state of mental digestion feeds on frantically for a day and a night, — then, in frenzy of self-disgust, turns on and kills. The man with him was of the literary staff.

“Fine eyes,” remarked the man. “Looks as though she might know things. The usual American bluff?”

“Not much,” said Victor, emphatically. “She can reel off clever stuff in half a dozen mediums with a facility that gives a grind like me insomnia. Because it is so easy for her she can’t see its value. I knew her first at Chase’s in New York, you know. We lived in the same boarding-house two winters; good times, I tell you.

Nancy must be as much as twenty-two now. Isn’t it awful?” he smiled.

“I have known worse,” laughed the literary man, dryly. “Live here?” he asked absently, lighting one cigarette at the end of another.

“Yes, her father was Lambert Preston. He was thought to have a lot of money, but I fancy things were in a mess when he died. It looks as if Anne would have to turn clever in earnest.”

“Ugly thing to have to do,” and the literary man yawned.

“That’s so,” answered Victor. “But it may bring the best of her to the surface. She has a little start — writing, you know.”

The literary man shone with sarcasm. “Women all write now. They want something to do between times, I suppose.”

Victor laughed. “You don’t know the girl. She could make a go of illustration, but she has ideas about it; thinks it a losing, negative kind of art. Besides, she knows a lot of illustrators; there were no end of clever fellows at Chase’s in our day, and she has no illusions about the kind of life it is. It’s a dog’s ‘catch and go’ existence for a man.”

A GINGHAM HOSE

“Any sort of ‘demnition grind’ is hard for a woman, isn’t it?” asked the literary man, testily. “I wrote a novel about it once, and, if I remember rightly, I took that point of view. Maybe it was the critics, come to think of it.” He wrinkled his brows. “Whoever it was, that is what I think about it. It is so much easier to be windy about what you don’t think.”

“I wish none of ’em had to work,” sighed Victor. “But Anne is a funny sort of girl, and has more temperament than any man I ever knew. Work is the only thing for her. She has changed a lot in the last three years, in a vague, indefinable sort of way. She is a lonesome little beggar ; one gets nowhere near her. She seemed to freeze up after her father died. I couldn’t stand a square look at her then. Mighty glad to see her out again. She likes places of this sort just the way a man does. They don’t touch her ; she comes because they are comfortable.”

“Know the man with her?” asked the builder of fiction.

“Never saw him before, but that’s nothing; she knows men by the score, and takes them about as seriously as she takes her surroundings.

He looks professional, doesn’t he? They generally are. She says a profession implies having thought of being something at least once. She always hits it off with clever men, — stupid ones too, for the matter of that. She hit me right between the eyes. Used to wear her hair in pigtails, has yards of it, fine black, too; trim little head and nice jaw, hasn’t she? I never had a bit of show in the running; couldn’t hide my feelings, and she made fun of me. I’ve rather let her be since her father’s death and the trouble, for I knew she didn’t feel like making fun, and I couldn’t stand her taking me seriously. She certainly did have us all going to any tune she liked — even John Warren.”

Warren? She knew him? He does good work.”

“I should say he does,” said Victor, with the best generosity. “But he was an old youngster, so damned opinionated; stubborn as a mule and a good deal of a fraud, except in his work. He gave Anne an awful snubbing, though I think he was rather fond of her, in a way,” he smiled. 66 Warren is engaged to my cousin, Catherine Gage,” he added absently.

“The deuce he is !” said the literary man, characteristically crisp. “That is a risky thing. A painter is not a domestic animal by birth ; tamed, he can’t do his tricks, or won’t ; same result, they don’t get done. Women are vampires at the throat of a man’s talent, anyway. They exhaust his accidentals and his sparkles ; that’s why they like him. Once in a million years there is one with more sense. She is really worth the risk. If woman there must be, I hope she is that one. The man is worth the time it takes to talk about him. I like his work, — that is why I think it good. Of course, I don’t really know.” He grinned at his own expense.

An attack of ugly coughing kept Stetson from answering for a moment. Anne looked over her shoulder anxiously.

“Better take care of that cough,” said the literary man, with a keen look at Victor’s sloping shoulders and at the new lines about his mouth and eyes. “This is the devil’s chosen climate.”

Victor ignored the diversion and smiled at Anne reassuringly. “To be frank,” he continued after a moment, “I’ve always been a little afraid for Catherine and John. I’ve never talked 24 it over. It’s a family affair, and one doesn’t talk things over with one’s family very much. The girl has been brought up with a wall about her, not even a look outside that I know of, except from her aunt’s apron strings, and that does not mean scope. She adores John in a pitiful, blind sort of way, but she hasn’t the least understanding of his work. She likes ‘stylish art.’ In her good little heart, I am nearly sure she wishes he’d draw golf-girls and get into Armour’s calendars. There is golden prosperity in ‘girls,’ you know.”

“They’d both do well to cut it,” said the man, laconically.

“It’s a bit late to find that out.”

“The last minute is better than a post-mortem.”

“I say, cheer up,” laughed Stetson. “What an old croaker you are! It will never come to that; they both have common sense.”

“Common sense is the straightest highway to the crossroads,” grunted the literary man.

Victor looked slightly annoyed. “Anne and Johnny are good friends now ; that is one of her clever ways. She can bring a fellow safely 25 through the ‘softy period’ and land him a lasting friend. I know,” he laughed, “because I am a lasting friend.”

“It seems to an untrained eye that you are not altogether out of the ‘softy period,’ ” smiled the man of detail.

*‘Well, she is worth the trouble,” said Stetson.

They finished their drinks in silence and got into their overcoats to go back to the office. Victor stopped a minute by Anne’s chair, and the literary man leaned against a pillar with folded arms, looking over and keenly appraising the human show.

“I am going back to New York,” said Anne, giving him her hand. “I just can’t endure it out here any longer. I had a letter from Ruth to-day and am to have a room in the same house with them.”

“That’s well enough for them, — but poor me!”

“Oh, you’ll manage somehow,” she smiled.

“Heard from John lately?”

“Yes; he thinks I am right to come to New York. There is not much chance for me here, and no one I really know well — except Vic,” she 26 smiled. As she turned her face back so that the light fell on her strongly, Victor was shocked at the change in her.

“Odd, thinking of Ruth and the Man-eater married, isn’t it?” he reflected absently.

“Are you doing anything for your cold ?” she asked. “Come in to tea to-morrow and give an account of yourself ; there are dozens of things I want to talk to you about.”