He faltered. "Yes," he said, like a sullen child.

"And I?"

"Well, yes

"No, answer me! And I?" "Yes, but what good am I to you now?"

"What good?-oh, my dear! My dear!"

I heard a sudden tearing of lace, or silk, and I saw that by now the two figures by the window were indistinguishable. "There!" said Alice Carston. "See, I have torn my sleeve! There is my arm. Can you touch it? That is my arm!" There was a little silence. "Do you know what it means, my armall of me?"

"Yes."

"No! No, you don't know what it means. No, you nor any other man. No, you don't know what it means, or you would never think again of what I just now stopped you from doing. No, you don't know what it means. Listen! It is flesh of your flesh, blood of your blood; you have taken it into yourself as if you had been my child, only more, more, for I have taken you into myself as well. And if you die it dies, too, even if it still seems to go on living. Yes, all of me all the body you've loved and the heart you've lain against.

"Don't!" said Carston. "Don't?" She broke into a harsh little laugh. "Why not? Do you think I want you to murder me?" Suddenly her voice grew caressing.

"Put your hand here," she said, "and here. Do you know what you're doing? That is I-I! And you've made me you've made me! Oh, yes, infinitely more than even a mother can make her child." She waited a moment. "Do you understand?" she asked.

"Yes," said Carston slowly and wonderingly.

"I am not changed-nor the world. Listen!"

In the silence the hum of the city, the thrilling nearness of human life that on warm nights pours through open windows, surrounded us.

"Will you kiss me?" said Alice Carston. After a while I saw Carston's figure draw back toward the window, and I made out that he was leaning upon the sill. In a moment or so he spoke.

"Yes," he said, "it is foolish, isn't it? It's always foolish to run away from things. And, after all, there's so much left yes, why not?" When he spoke again there was a little catch in his voice. "I can smell those roses," he said, "and here I've been sitting for two weeks and never knew they were in bloom."

Suddenly he stepped back, reeled, and fell on his knees. His voice reached me, muffled, as if he had hidden his face in the folds of his wife's skirt.

"Oh, my dear! My dear!" he said. "Thank God I can cry now and not be ashamed!"

I left as unnoticed as I had come. I shouldn't have been there at all; but I am very glad I was.

bathroom and kitchen are miracles in white porcelain and sanitation; the maid's room is fit for a queen. A touch of Old World dignity and repose is lent to the dining and living rooms by beamed ceilings. It is these beams that trouble me and give rise to disquieting thoughts, for they are mere hollow counterfeits of good stout oaken beams, made by boxing three strips of oak plank together and attaching the resultant gutter to the ceiling hollow side up. They do not look as bad as that sounds, I admit; indeed, they satisfied me completely until, in a moment of incautious inspection, I stood on a table and detected their mode of construction, stepped down, and saw the trouble with my mode of life. A very little flick of a broom will make way with the cobwebs of the mind and let the light in. I suddenly recalled the house I was born in and grew up in. No, it was not a farmhouse-I am of the younger generationjust a plain, suburban dwelling of ten or twelve rooms in a Northeastern city, but there was land about, and not too jealously guarded lawns adjacent, while fields and woods were only five or ten minutes away. And then I recalled my grandfather's house -a farmhouse this time-with the friendly New England elms drooping over it, and, like Stevenson pondering the freshet of fate that swept him from his fathers' Scotland to an ultimate Pacific island, in my own more inarticulate way I pondered the modern exodus from the American countryside to the city, in which my father joined to some extent, but which I have carried farther. It seemed an excellent example-my father stepping from farm to suburb and I from suburb to city. As it happened, there *My wife just came in.

were beams in some of the rooms of my grandfather's house, an amorphous structure built up from the original germ by many additions-great, solid, oaken beams a foot square, painted white, laid not for design but for utility. In three short generations the family has passed from beams to beams, but my grandfather's house and mine are as different as the beams in them. I think the individuals they housed and house are as different, too.

I know they should be. I walk on bricks, and my harbinger of spring is usually a cold in the head; my New England forebear heard the whistling wings of northbound wild fowl, the whisper of unsealed streams, and saw the greening grass and foliage. To me summer is a matter of wilted collars and a few hurried weeks at the seashore; to him it meant the sober work of the year, bending the back with nature in the efficient aid of her great task, lightened by the camaraderie of haying-time. I know autumn by her chill; he knew her by her ruddy warmth of fruition in red apple, golden apple, and wigwam shocks of corn. Winter gives me snow and slush; for him the northeaster and blizzard lent an added grace to the homely sitting-room and the quiet family circle. And about him, from cradle to grave, the shuttle of real social intercourse wove its homespun thread. That old life was so neighborly. Not all neighbors were good neighbors; there were bitter and petty hatreds and backbitings; but in the long run of a lifetime a man stood forth to his community pretty much as he was. The twin acid tests of affliction and good fortune were applied to him in broad day; if he flinched or rioted it was known. My worldly goods are a secret bank balance, not patent acres, and I can lose an evil reputation by moving to the next block. I think my grandfather's was the more manly part: he had but the one life and the one chance; he lived the life and did not mar it.

It is possible that he did not know the very little about many unrelated matters that in weak moments I pride myself upon,

but he stood in primary relation to the great natural forces that give us life, and his empirical knowledge of them was complete. He knew, for instance, that bad crops did not mean bad business but diluted starvation; in other words, he thought in primary terms. I have often wondered how much of the sound political sense of our New England forebears was derived from their living on the earth. One thing at least they knew that scarce corn is dear corn and that laws will not make bread.

If I could and should unkindly resurrect the good old gentleman from his quiet slumbers in the shadow of his white New England church, and should establish him here beneath my imitation beams, with only unyielding pavements for his old feet, I think he would speedily die again, and in my pessimistic moments I feel quite sure that whatever of him survives in me is dying

A slanderous accusation, we are apt to say, thinking of the frank and reasonable way in which our own doctor talks to us. Secrecy is not the fashion any longer. It went out with the passing of the little leather case familiar to the childhood of some of us elders, out of which powders were measured on the point of a penknife or liquids dropped from tiny vials. Sometimes, to be sure, even the old-fashioned country doctor did tell us what he was giving us the "leetle bit of Dover powder and leetle bit of Tully powder" prescribed after he had found that one's tongue was "some coated "--but mostly, for all we knew to the contrary, the dose might be either a deadly poison or an innocent bread pill. Nowadays we have a prescription, cabalistic in appearance, but decipherable if we choose to take the trouble. As a matter of fact, however, we don't get much medicine. Our doctors

have gained the courage of their convictions and refuse to pacify the patient with nostrums, especially since, with the advance of science, it has become easy to study us with the X-ray and reasonably safe to cut us open and mend our works from the inside. The woman who always kept a thousand dollars in the bank for the operation which she was sure she would have some day was not so far out of the way.

But when all has been said about modern frankness, one still, now and then, comes across a doctor in whom the instinct of secrecy dies hard. His spiritual ancestor, the Medicine Man, still inhabits him.

"But what," you ask of such a one, "might happen to be the matter? What is there that you can't find out without an X-ray?"

He doesn't know that he is a throw-back, the poor man. He thinks he is all that is most up to date. He settles himself in his chair, puts the tips of his fingers together, throws back his head, and storms your understanding with a list of technical terms, each one meaning some undesirable complication of your insides. "Now," he says, fixing you with a triumphant gaze, "do you understand?"

If you know your English, plus a little Latin, you do understand sufficiently for all practical purposes, but when you say so he looks disappointed. "It's more than some medical students do," he grumbles. And if you are a woman he resents both your curiosity and your intelligence. Moreover, he can give you your come-uppance by allowing the worst possibilities to play about his final diagnosis of your case.

As to specialists, there are specialties and specialties. No one would think of going to a general practitioner for such outlying organs as eyes or ears; and it is just as well to have an expert for injuries and abnormalities of the bony structure on and in which we live and move and have our being. It would seem, by the way, as if this latter specialist must have been, from the outset, unconsciously in training for this war, so much is he able to do to repair the inhuman injuries of battle. And, when one comes to think of it, there are other desirable specialties. But when it has to do with internal organs which have to live in harmony if they are to live at all, it seems as if the clever general practitioner might be a wiser guide than the type

of specialist who, to all appearance, looks upon these vital organs of the body as, let us say, tenants of different apartments in an apartment-house, having nothing to say to each other and not necessarily on speaking terms.

"You mean," you say to that specialist whom I have already mentioned and you are careful to speak with a proper amount of deference, since he is for the moment in power "you mean that this régime will also be good for my unsound heart?"

"I am not taking your heart into account at all," he replies.

One trouble with the man of mystery is I that he does not seem to treat his patients individually. Neither, I suppose, does the Medicine Man of the North American Indian. As I have said, he resents intelligence, particularly in a woman; and he cannot see that the manner which he has cultivated for his lady patients will not be equally pleasing to each and all of them. But really, my dear sir, there are women who hate to be patted on the back or stroked on the arm.

N

OT of the bachelor maid or of the new woman, but of just the ordinary oldfashioned spinster variety, thirtyeight years old, who stays at home with mother, while two sisters and two brothers marry and settle in the four corners of the The Plaint

of the Spinster

earth: Julia in Nova Scotia, Mary in Louisiana, Joe in Colorado, and Jim in Connecticut. I could have gone to Nova Scotia if I'd wanted to-Albert invited me before he asked Julia-but studying sociology looked more pleasing in my eyes than the man, and I declined. Neither Albert nor I ever told Julia about it, of course, and she sits undisturbed on her patronizing height whence a married woman looks pityingly down on an unmarried.

I'm sure I don't see why she should. I've chosen my life as deliberately as all of my sisters and brothers have chosen theirs. But a spinster never gets any credit for a choice; she never gets any credit for a sacrifice; she never gets any credit for her meek submission to the interruptions of her chosen plans. For instance, Julia went away, and people said she had made a good match, even if it did carry her to Nova Scotia. Mary, they said, was fitted for a minister's wife and would do great good in her Louisiana par

ish. Not one word, mind you, about leaving mother bereft of her daughters.

And then I asked mother if she could do with Cousin Jerusha as company for three months while I made my studies in sociology practical by a winter in a Boston settlement. She said yes, but, my, what a view-halloo from the four quarters! The whole pack was on its hind legs. "Leave your mother a whole winter," from Nova Scotia. "It is your duty to stay with your mother," from Louisiana. "I think your place is at home," from Colorado. "I have no patience with these new-fangled ideas," from Connecticut.

If I had been going to marry a missionary and go to China and leave mother forever, Cousin Jerusha would have been a matter of course, and I, laden with presents and blessings, should have started out on a noble career-attached to a noble man. But trying in single-maidenhood to help your fellow creatures in the aggregate is, of course, a much less commendable task than assuming a missionary.

I went to Boston, but all that winter I was an outcast and a heathen. Mother loves me just the same, and the family are magnanimously endeavoring now to forgive and forget, but there is still a little slant in their regard on account of that winter in Boston.

The next year I tried to stiffen my neck for another three months in the settlement, but when it came to the point I actually hadn't the nerve to face that storm two years running, and I stayed at home. I studied food values and read my economic books and started a boys' club. It was a good club, too, and swinging along at a fine gait, when a telegram came from Julia: "Twins down with measles. I'm worn out. Can you come?"

No word of mother left alone now; no thought of the fate of my fifty club boys; no consideration of my personal wishes. The glow of the privilege of helping my married sister would keep me warm in a Nova Scotia winter; the salvation of fifty ragamuffins was not to be weighed in the balance with the comfort of Julia's two little tykes; and mother could easily get along with Cousin Jerusha so long as I was in my proper woman's sphere. It would never occur to anybody that I had chosen not to go to Nova Scotia once already.

I went, of course, and nursed the twinsthey were adorable-through the measles and stayed to cuddle Julia back to health. We are the best of chums, really. I'd like being with her if I hadn't been so taken for granted.

Then I came home. It was too late in the season to resume the boys' club or solid work. All that impetus was lost and the rest of the year was a backwater. I started again the next winter, and things went even better than the first, until there came a bruised-soul letter from Mary.

In the three years she had been in Louisiana I had never been to see her. If I could go to Nova Scotia, why could I not come to Louisiana? She was so far away, bereft of her family, alone in a strange land! She did think her sister, who had no ties of any sort, might spend a winter with her; mother got on so well with Cousin Jerusha.

There was logic for you! They could leave mother when a man beckoned; I could leave her when they beckoned; but to leave her to fill what I felt was my place in lifeoh, dear, no! World-wide interests were exceedingly sinful in a spinster. She should keep her eyes close at home where a spinster's eyes belonged. And I was her sister with no ties; man of the house though I was, housekeeper, church worker, daughter, mother to fifty boys. But still I was not an individual. I was on tap for any family use, for-forsooth-I was unmarried.

I wrote Mary just what I thought, setting before her that she had chosen Frank and gone off with him blissfully to run his parish; that no one asked her to leave her family and go to the ends of the earth. But of course I tore that letter up and went. I had a good time there, too; they were lovely to me, but the long visit ravelled a big hole in my plans and in my time and in my purse.

While I was in Louisiana there came a letter from Joe in Colorado. His wife had to go to a sanitarium and he was lonely. He turned to me because I was the only one with no ties. I gnashed my teeth at the family shibboleth. No ties!-when all my brothers and sisters were helping forge chains for me? But Joe was always my pal. I went, and we had a beautiful time togethWhen Edna returned, however, and I went back to mother, the ravelled holes had

er.

grown so large that I simply couldn't pick up the stitches.

It was Jim next, and then time for Julia to begin again. I handed over my boys' club to less competent hands and hung out my sign: "Unattached! Ready at any moment to fill any hole in anybody's life!"

And it isn't right. I chose as intelligently as either of my sisters what I wanted to do with my life, and I have a right to do it. But it seems there's no real anchor but a man; without a man you turn your sail to any wind that blows and voyage where it listeth.

I love my mother. I love my brothers and sisters. I believe in home. I think family love is the finest thing created. I am sure that no intellectual achievement-be it with brush, pen, or voice-can ever make up for the desertion of home ties. I want to stay with mother. But I don't want to be tied to her with cart ropes just because I'm unmarried. And I don't want to be hauled to the others with cart ropes just because I'm unmarried. I demand a single standard of family morals for married and unmarried. If it's right for Mary and Julia to leave mother, it's just as right for me to leave her. If it's right for me to drop everything to go to help Julia, it's right for her to drop everything and come to help me. But she'd think me a lunatic if I asked her to leave her twins to come home to advise me how to discipline my young imps for stealing apples. But aren't fifty boys as important as two? And isn't stealing as serious as measles?

That's the plaint! Not at being a spinster, for I chose to be one; but, first, at the casual way the work I have chosen is set aside while I'm filling in holes in the work other people have chosen; and, secondly, the double standard of morals for married and unmarried daughters. That's all. I want to be a spinster, and I want to be a good one; not an opinionated, dried-up, selfish, narrow creature. I rejoice in having mother to love and in having sisters and brothers and sisters-in-law and brothers-inlaw and dear, little, soft-armed babies to call me Aunt Hes. But, because I'm unmarried, can I never be an individual? Must I go on all my years feeling myself a brute if I refuse to ravel my life into holes to get the threads to fill up other lives? When all is said and done, is it fair? Answer me that!