Part 28 (1/2)

The crackling of the logs in the grate was the only sound to be heard for many minutes.

With her elbow resting on the arm of her chair, her chin cupped in her hand, her whole body leaning toward the warmth of the fire, she sat gazing into the leaping flames as if she were trying to read in them the riddle of the future.

I patiently waited on her mood. That she would open her heart to me further I knew, but I did not wish to disturb her with either word or movement.

”I might as well begin at the beginning.” There was a note in her voice that all at once made me see the long years of suffering which had been hers. ”Only the beginning is so commonplace that it lacks interest. It is the record of a very mediocre stenographer with aspirations.”

That she was speaking of herself her tone told me, but I was genuinely surprised. Mrs. Underwood was the last woman in the world one would picture as holding down a stenographer's position.

”I can't remember when I didn't have in the back of my brain the idea of learning to draw,” she went on, ”but it took years and years of uphill work and saving to get a chance. I was an orphan, with n.o.body to care whether I lived or died, and nothing but my own efforts to depend on. But I stuck to it, working in the daytime and studying evenings and holidays till at last I began to get a foothold, and then when I had enough to put by to risk it I went to Paris.”

Her voice was as matter of fact as if she were describing a visit to the family butcher shop. But I visualized the busy, plucky years with their reward of Paris as if I had been a spectator of them.

”Of course, by the time I got there I was almost old enough to be the mother, or, at least, the elder sister of most of the boys and girls I met, and I had learned life and experience in a good, hard school.

Some of the youngsters got the habit of coming to me with all their troubles, fancied or real. I made some stanch friends in those days, but never a stancher, truer one than d.i.c.ky Graham.

”Tell me, dear girl, when you were teaching those history cla.s.ses, did any of your boy pupils fall in love with you?”

I answered her with an embarra.s.sed little laugh. Her question called up memories of shy glances, gifts of flowers and fruit, boyish confidences--all the things which fall to the lot of any teacher of boys.

”Well, then, you will understand me when I tell you that in the studio days in Paris d.i.c.ky imagined himself quite in love with me.”

There was something in her tone and manner which took all the sting out of her words for me. All the jealousy and real concern which I had spent on this old attachment of my husband for Mrs. Underwood vanished as I listened to her. She might have been d.i.c.ky's mother, speaking of his early and injudicious fondness for green apples.

”I shall always be proud of the way I managed d.i.c.ky that time.” Her voice still held the amused maternal note. ”It's so easy for an older woman to spoil a boy's life in a case like that if she's despicable enough to do it. But, you see, I was genuinely fond of d.i.c.ky, and yet not the least bit in love with him, and I was able, without his guessing it, to keep the management of the affair in my own hands.

So when he woke up, as boys always do, to the absurdity of the idea, there was nothing in his recollections of me to spoil our friends.h.i.+p.

”Then there came the early days of my struggle to get a foothold in New York in my line. There were thousands of others like me. Six or seven of the strugglers had been my friends in Paris. We formed a sort of circle, ”for offence and defence,” d.i.c.ky called it; settled down near each other, and for months we worked and played and starved together. When one of us sold anything we all feasted while it lasted.

I tell you, my dear, those were strenuous times but they had a zest of their own.”

I saw more of the picture she was revealing than she thought I did.

I could guess that the one who most often sold anything was the woman who was so calmly telling me the story of those early hards.h.i.+ps. I knew that the dominant member of that little group of stragglers, the one who heartened them all, the one who would unhesitatingly go hungry herself if she thought a comrade needed it, was Lillian Underwood.

”And then I spoiled my life. I married.”

”Don't misunderstand me,” she hastened to say. ”I do not mean that I believe all marriages are failures. I believe tremendously in married happiness, but I think I must be one of the women who are temperamentally unfitted to make any man happy.”

Her tone was bitter, self-accusing.

”You cannot make me believe that,” I said stoutly. ”I would rather believe that you were very unwise in your choice of husbands.”

She laughed ironically.

”Well, we will let it go at that! At any rate there is only one word that describes my first marriage. It was h.e.l.l from start to finish.”

The look on her face told me she was not exaggerating. It was a look, only graven by intense suffering.

”When the baby came my feeling for Will changed. He had worn me out.