TIME, AN OCTOBER AFTERNOON

As she got off the train at Reifsville the loafers about the little station and about the General Store across the road divined, without knowing just why, that she was too "different," somehow, to be a "lady agent"; not young enough to be an applicant for the school; and too something-else-quite-indefinable to be a possible visitor to any family of the village. So what was there left for her to be? Why was she here? They did not usually have any difficulty in "sizing up" the few daily arrivals by the train.

As she walked out of the station and up the one street of the village, their sleepy eyes followed her with mild curiosity. That any "female" could be very simply dressed and yet not look poor, but, on the contrary, elegant and prosperous, was puzzling. The trig neatness of her hair, her clothing, her shoes, her gloves, the light grace of her walk (though she was at least middle-aged) her assured bearing, the way she carried her head, all proclaimed her as being, at one and the same time, both too grand and too plain to be classified with any feminine species familiar to Reifsville.

"I got it!" exclaimed Abe Duttonhoffer, his tilted chair falling forward suddenly from the shock of his idea. "She's mebby a-goin' to buy Baursox' house that's fur sale."

"No-p. It's put out, now, that there house can't be solt. The lawyer says it's got to lay till Charles is in his age."

"There ain't no funeral goin' on that she'd be comin' to," speculated Jake Kuntz. "The only funeral due in Reifsville, the party ain't dead yet."

"What party are you got reference to? Hess's Missus, mebby?"

"Yes. Her. I'm to haul fur her, when her funeral is, Mister says."

"It's to be hoped she won't keep you waitin' long fur the job!" said a facetious one, provoking a general laugh.

"It wonders me what that there lady a-goin' up the street there is after out here!" persisted Jake.

"Local colour, mebby," suggested Abe.

"What the hell is local colour?"

"You are, Jake," retorted Abe. "It's what female authors that plans books, runs round after."

"After me! A high-stepper like her?" said Jake with a twirl of his thumb in the direction the lady had taken. "She wouldn't want nothin' to do with me! 'Local colour?'" Jake shook his head. "It's new to me."

"It ain't familiar with me, neither," said another of the loafers.

The mysterious lady had by this time walked beyond the line of their vision.

"It's a wonder, Jake, you didn't schnauffle after her and find out what she's here fur?—you want to know so bad!" said Abe; to which Jake replied, indignantly, "Do you suppose I would'a? Do you suppose you would'a?"

"Say!"—Abe had another bright idea—"Mebby she's one of Susan Schrekengust's swell city friends!"

"Och, Susan she never has none of them tony city friends of hern wisit her out here, 'ceptin' her fellah; that there 'ristocratic dood that comes to set up with her Sa'rdays," said Jake.

"I guess Susan she has ashamed, a little, of her folks—her bein' a grad-yate," suggested one of the men.

"Susan Schrekengust ain't proud!" retorted a young man among the group. "She's wery nice and common—fur all she's so grand educated that way!"

"Yes, Susan she took lessons a'ready in both Wocal and both Instrumental, and still she's wonderful common," Jake Kuntz backed up the other young man's statement. To still be "common"—that is, not haughty—after having studied "both Wocal and both Instrumental," was to be rather more than human.

"Our Katy she says Susan she kin play sich Liszt Ee-toods on the pyannah!"

"That ain't so much! There's others in Reifsville kin play Ee-toods."

Meantime, unconscious of the interest that followed her, the lady walked slowly, almost shrinkingly, through the silent, empty street of the village. The houses she passed looked uninhabited, for every front shutter was closed and bolted to exclude dust, or sunlight which would fade carpets and furniture coverings. Except on Sundays and at funerals the inhabitants of Pennsylvania Dutch villages and farms live in their kitchens. Mrs. Houghton shuddered inwardly as she noted the crudity of the little homes of the place, the flower-beds bordered with oyster shells, the gay colouring of the wood and brick of the houses, the universal cheapness.

It was such a shock and disappointment that her son, her only child, hitherto so entirely satisfactory, should have got himself actually engaged to a girl of a Pennsylvania Dutch community like this!—from a home such as these! Mrs. Houghton was on her way now to see the girl; to feel her way to saving Sidney from a mistake so disastrous. It was surely not his true self, but a lower, hitherto unrevealed self that had led her fastidious boy into such a relation! A little "Dutch" school teacher named Schrekengust!—the daughter of an illiterate Mennonite preacher! How such a thing could ever have happened to Sidney, who had always been rather over-sensitive to crudity, to commonness; whose tastes and instincts were so true and fine; who had sometimes seemed to her, for a man, almost too discriminating in his sense of social values——

Even making all due allowance for youth's hot blood and imprudence, how a son of hers could so have forgotten his traditions, his pride, his consideration for his mother, his ambitions (all of which Sidney had always cherished excessively) as to have let himself be carried away against his judgment, against his self-interest (she had never before known Sidney to act against his self-interest), and actually propose marriage to a Pennsylvania Dutch "girl of the people"——

"It would seem that sex is the strongest force in a man's life," she thought. "It will make a man sacrifice anything! Women ought to refuse to bear sons, for between war and love, what good do we get of them?"

It was a most embarrassing and painful errand, this on which she had come here to-day to Reifsville.

"But I'd go through anything to save Sidney from such a marriage!" she told herself, passionately.

She was quite sure that when he recovered from this vulgar infatuation and came to himself he would thank her with all his soul for having rescued him.

It was trying enough to have your only son, to whom you yourself had always been all the world, transfer his devotion to another; but to have him love an impossible person, one whom, with the greatest straining of your charity, you could not take into your heart and life—this was indeed hard to bear.

The straw to which she clung was the fact that Sidney, though very much in love, was not so far gone as not to be as aware as she herself was of the disadvantages of his entanglement.

"I believe he would be ready to break it off if he had not put himself under such great obligations to her—borrowing money from her!—gracious!—how could he do that?" she marvelled for the hundredth time. "To let a self-supporting girl lend him money!—my son!"

If he himself had not admitted it, she never would have believed it possible. But she had surprised him yesterday with a visit at his lodgings at the university town where he was taking a post-graduate course in International Law, and had found his sitting-room furnished in beautiful mahogany, which he had been obliged to acknowledge had been purchased by him and Miss Schrekengust for their future housekeeping, and paid for with her savings of three years. He was meantime using it. Also his new golf outfit—she had loaned him seventy-five dollars for that!

"But where is your pride, Sidney!" she had cried out to him in shocked astonishment. "To let this working-girl give you things you can't afford!"

"She's not a working-girl, Mother," he had protested. "She's a school teacher."

"A village school teacher—named Schrekenbust!"

"Schrekengust—not bust! Don't make it worse than it is! It's bad enough, in heaven's name!"

"Oh, you admit that it's bad enough?" she had hopefully commented.

"Can there be any doubt of it?"

"Don't you see, you poor deluded boy, that this vulgar girl has tried to make sure of you by buying you?"

"She's not vulgar!—though of course I must admit," Sidney had groaned, "that her people are!"

"She can't be so very different from her people—you say she lives with them. I never would have believed it possible, Sidney, that you could fall in love with a common girl!"

"Mother, I've come to see that there's such a lot of difference between common people and just plain, simple people like the Schrekengusts."

"You know you cannot afford to marry out of your class! Remember, Sidney, you are still dependent on me, and if you should marry beneath you I certainly would not deny myself any least comfort in order to help you and your Dutch wife!"

"Mother, dear, you are wasting breath, for I see it all just as you do! But Susanna's got me!"

"Where did you meet her?"

"At one of the university dances a year ago."

"This thing has been going on a whole year and you have never told me!"

"I've been engaged to her only six months. It has seemed impossible to tell you—I knew so well how you'd take it, dear. I hated to worry and distress you."

"But why should you do anything that can worry and distress me? Surely your standards and mine cannot be different, Sidney, such close companions as we have always been! I thought we understood each other so perfectly—and now it seems that I did not really know you!"

"I hate to be such a disappointment to you, Mother—but somehow I can't feel that I have lowered my standards in falling in love with Susanna."

"And yet you are more class-conscious than I am, for you are a Houghton! You can't make that girl happy. Such a name! Schrekengust! Why is her name Schrekengust?" she exclaimed, despairingly. "It seems so unnecessary!"

"That objection to her will fortunately be removed by her marriage to me."

"Where does she live?"

"Reifsville. Five miles from here."

"I shall go to see her."

"Don't!" Sidney had exclaimed protestingly; then suddenly, unaccountably, he had laughed. "Really, Mother, dear, I warn you—don't! Susanna'd upset you dreadfully!"

"Why doesn't she upset you, if the bare idea of my meeting her strikes you as so incongruous?"

"She has upset me! Bowled me over!"

Mrs. Houghton had suddenly resolved to say nothing more about going to see the girl. She would take her unawares, as she had taken Sidney to-day.

So here she was in Reifsville, on the very next afternoon, on her way to the home of the Schrekengusts.

It was the last house of the village: a white frame house with green shutters, shaded by great trees. It was really picturesque; the only attractive house in Reifsville. Mrs. Houghton, appraising it while she waited for an answer to her knock on the door (a delightful old-fashioned knocker, no bell), had to admit that by a happy accident the girl's home was, from the outside, very passable.

A typical dialogue between two village women parting from each other at the door of the next house set her nerves on edge at the thought of her son's close association with such people.

"Good-by. Come back again soon. Ain't?"

"Thank you. And you are to come over, mind!"

"Thank you. I will. Good-by. Come over soon, now!"

"Good-by. And don't you forget to come over soon. Ain't, you won't?"

"Thanks; I won't forget. And don't you forget neither to come back."

"Thanks. I won't. I'll be over then again, when it suits. Good-by."

"Good-by. Don't make it too long till——"

Mrs. Houghton was just beginning to wonder whether they ever would succeed in concluding their leavetaking—when the Schrekengusts' door was opened and there stood before her a sweet-faced elderly woman in Mennonite garb who, with mingled shyness and surprise, showed the stranger into the parlour.

And here Mrs. Houghton experienced genuine astonishment. It was not at all the sort of room she had expected to see. Old Sheraton furniture of graceful lines and exquisite inlaid decoration, framed copies of famous paintings, an old woven carpet of the sort the colonists brought over—how had people named "Schrekengust," living in this Pennsylvania Dutch village, come by such things? The room actually showed cultured taste! Could she be mistaken and had Sidney not turned his back on his birth and breeding in choosing this girl——

But that momentary hope was dashed—there was the Mennonite mother who had answered her knock at the door; and Sidney's own admission that his marriage would be disadvantageous and outside his own class.

In a moment Miss Schrekengust appeared in the doorway.

She, too, like the room, was not just what Mrs. Houghton had expected to see. At a first glance one might have made the mistake of taking her, from her dress and manner, for a thoroughbred; indeed, her simplicity and self-possession as, with a slight inquiry in her innocent eyes, she came into the room and offered her hand to the stranger, lent her a certain distinction.

Mrs. Houghton had been prepared graciously to put an awkward country girl at her ease, as a necessary preliminary to convincing her of the undesirability of her marrying Sidney Houghton; but it was she herself who, for a moment, felt confused and at a loss.

"I—you are Miss Schrekengust?"

"Yes?" replied the girl on a questioning note. "Will you sit down?"

Mrs. Houghton pulled herself together to focus her forces upon her purpose to save her son (for however presentable the girl might prove to be superficially, she was nevertheless not of Sidney's world).

"I don't believe she'll be difficult," she thought, noting, as she sat down, the sweetness of the child's mouth, the infantile look of her eyes, the soft drawl of her speech.

"You have something to sell?" inquired Miss Schrekengust, encouragingly.

Mrs. Houghton smiled involuntarily at being taken for a travelling saleswoman. The girl must, after all, be unsophisticated not to recognize——

"I am Mrs. Houghton—Mr. Sidney Houghton's mother. May I," she quickly added in a tone impressively grave and reserved, to check the girl's start of pleased surprise which seemed to threaten to rush at her with a caress, "have a little talk with you?"

Miss Schrekengust's intuitions were evidently not dull; she recovered instantly from her impulsive delight, folded her hands quietly in her lap, and without speaking, her clear young eyes fixed upon Mrs. Houghton's face, waited.

"My son has told me of his—of your—friendship."

"I appreciate your kindness in coming away out here to see me," said Miss Schrekengust, gratefully.

Mrs. Houghton noted that she spoke without the Pennsylvania Dutch accent.

"But I am sorry to tell you, Miss Schrekengust, that I don't approve of my son's relations with you—his owing you money—his using your furniture! He never went into debt in his life before he knew you, Miss Schrekengust; he never thought of buying things he couldn't afford; I didn't think him capable of doing such things!—such things as he confessed to me yesterday!"

"Confessed?"

"Of course he feels the degradation of such a relation!"

"Oh, I beg your pardon—you got a wrong impression—Sidney does not feel that our relation is 'degrading'!"

"I mean his relation of debtor to you. He was horribly ashamed to admit it to me. Never before in his life has he done anything that he was ashamed to tell me, his mother. I can see that he has really deteriorated; and naturally I am distressed and worried."

Mrs. Houghton paused, feeling that she had put it well.

But Miss Schrekengust smiled upon her reassuringly. "That is too bad, for of course you have misunderstood. It's because Sidney and I have such a high ideal of love that these material considerations don't enter in at all, don't affect us."

Mrs. Houghton checked a smile at this youthfully complacent idealism. It was evidently sincere enough in the girl's case, but Mrs. Houghton could not quite see Sidney so uplifted by love or anything else as to be unaffected by "material considerations!"

"An honourable man cannot ignore 'these material considerations,' Miss Schrekengust, and I am very, very sorry that you have encouraged Sidney to do so. You have meant to be generous to him, no doubt, but unfortunately you have led him to forget the standards of a gentleman, and to do what men of his class, Miss Schrekengust, do not do. Of course I'm quite sure that you erred only in—well, in ignorance. But that does not alter the fact that for the first time in his life I am forced to be ashamed of my son!"

"But I am sure you have no real cause to be," Miss Schrekengust pleaded.

"If your traditions and environment had been just what Sidney's have been—if you had been brought up with his standard—you would see it as I do; as he really sees it."

"Don't you think you take it too seriously? It's after all a very small matter."

"I am extremely sorry," said Mrs. Houghton, gravely, "that you have apparently led Sidney to think it 'a small matter.' I am very much afraid, Miss Schrekengust, that your influence on my son's character does not seem to have been of the best. And surely true love should bring out the best of a man; don't you think so?"

"It surely must," the girl assented.

"That is why I cannot believe that Sidney's feeling for you is quite true. I hope I don't hurt you very much by saying so? If I could find him improved by his relation to you instead of deteriorated——"

The girl's soft eyes met Mrs. Houghton's without a flicker. "I'm afraid you flatter me, Mrs. Houghton."

"Flatter you!"

"When you rate the influence of my short eleven months' acquaintance with your son above your twenty-five years in influencing and moulding him; and above those traditions and that environment to which you referred."

Mrs. Houghton caught her breath as she thought of how "kindly and patiently" she had intended to reason with a crude and probably over-awed country girl!

Miss Schrekengust, on her side, was saying to herself, "Sidney is not doing very well by me in the way of a mother-in-law."

"Your parents are Mennonites?" asked Mrs. Houghton rather abruptly.

"Yes."

"And you have always lived here in Reifsville?"

"Yes, except during the four years that I spent at a boarding school."

"And do you know," asked Mrs. Houghton, gently, "what a very, very different background Sidney has had?"

"In Middleburg?"

Was there a note of laughter in the question? Mrs. Houghton could not be quite sure; the girl's face was serious enough. "My son's associations—at home, in college, in society—his inherited tastes and instincts, Miss Schrekengust, from a long line of—— Oh, my child, marriage at best forces one to so much compromising and adapting and adjusting, that it is very necessary, if there's to be any least chance of making a success of it, for the pair to at least start on an equal footing, with as many points of contact in their background as possible. If they start with wide gaps and differences in their experiences and their bringing-up they are doomed to misunderstanding and failure."

Mrs. Houghton again felt she had put it well; strongly though delicately.

But Miss Schrekengust, continuing to gaze at her with unwavering eyes, did not reply.

"Don't you agree with me, Miss Schrekengust?"

"But surely two people who are very essentially different are not apt to fall in love with each other. And the merely superficial differences cannot kill love. I think we can always trust ourselves to love."

"Are you so very much in love with my son that your faith in love is quite boundless?" asked Mrs. Houghton, with a slightly supercilious lift of her brows.

"What seems a more important point to me is that he is very much in love with me," smiled Miss Schrekengust.

"And you think it no drawback at all that you and Sidney come from such different environments?"

"We shouldn't dream of letting such nonsense interfere with our love, Mrs. Houghton. If we did we'd be unworthy of it! It's a gift of the gods!—and not to be treated lightly or sordidly."

"But 'such nonsense' will interfere with your love! 'Such nonsense' makes it quite impossible that you should have the same outlook upon life, the same instincts, the same friends, the same prestige. You would differ at all points!"

"You predict a lively time for us!" smiled Miss Schrekengust.

Mrs. Houghton stared. Was it impossible to upset the girl's serenity?

"I suppose Sidney has told you, Miss Schrekengust, that, after he has finished his work at the university next May his Uncle George Houghton of New York is going to secure for him a diplomatic appointment?—his uncle being a man of influence and in close touch with the Administration."

"Yes, of course I know of Sidney's prospects."

"But don't you see," Mrs. Houghton earnestly argued, "that Sidney being, as you know, quite poor, can't marry a girl with no money—the diplomatic salaries are too small; and Sidney's tastes are not simple. And besides——"

"Yes?" Miss Schrekengust prompted as Mrs. Houghton hesitated.

"Besides," she plunged in, courageously, "the education of a wide social experience is surely a prerequisite for being the wife of a diplomat to a foreign country. A foreign diplomat, more than most men, needs a real helpmate, a partner, in a wife. Do you feel that you would be equal to filling such a social position, Miss Schrekengust?"

"Well," Miss Schrekengust thoughtfully replied in her soft drawl, "I don't believe the foreign governments will find me any worse than I shall find them."

"But I am serious, Miss Schrekengust! I am sure that you and Sidney are making a terrible mistake in thinking that you could possibly pull together, when your rearing and inheritance have been so widely different!"

"I know Sidney's ideals and principles are not quite so severe as mine—but I have hopes for him."

"His marriage would drag him down!" exclaimed Mrs. Houghton, losing a bit the restraint which thus far she had tried hard to exercise. "His engagement has already done so! Sidney admits as much!"

"Oh, but I am sure you do him injustice," said Miss Schrekengust, serenely.

"But the financial side of it? Sidney has nothing of his own—not a dollar except what I choose to give him. If he should marry out of his class, I shouldn't dream of helping him."

"Then I'm afraid I think it would be a very good thing for him to 'marry out of his class,' for it's time he stood on his own feet."

"He could not possibly support a wife on a diplomat's salary."

"I've always been able to live on anything I've had to live on."

"But Sidney's tastes are not so simple."

"I know he's inclined to be luxurious; but I'm sure I shall be able to hold him in, never fear," said Miss Schrekengust, again speaking reassuringly.

"Has he told you that he and his half-brother are the only natural heirs of their Uncle George Houghton?—and that Mr. Houghton is a very eccentric as well as a very rich old man who wouldn't leave a cent of his money to any one who displeased him? Mr. Houghton has a great deal of family pride and he is very ambitious for Sidney, and it would certainly displease him excessively to have Sidney marry disadvantageously; so much so that he would undoubtedly leave all his money to my step-son, though he has always disliked Joe and been very fond of Sidney. So you see, Miss Schrekengust, you have Sidney's welfare in your hands; his undoing or his salvation."

"And you are quite sure that Mr. George Houghton would classify Sidney's marriage to me under that head—'disadvantageous'?"

"I think I have made it clear to you why he would do to."

"I'm afraid you haven't. You have spoken of backgrounds, environments, incomes—but Sidney and I know that a great passion, any big emotional experience, is not to be measured against such cheap things as those. We are not so stupid as to give such false values to the real things of life!"

"Do you really think you would be worth more to Sidney than all the things he would lose by marrying you?"

"Heaps and oodels more!"

"It is nice," said Mrs. Houghton in a hushed tone which would have been rather crushing to a timid soul, "to have such a high opinion of one's value!"

"It is not so much a high opinion of my own value as a low opinion of the values you would measure against me."

"Then, Miss Schrekengust," said Mrs. Houghton, rising and looking pale and cold, "in spite of all I have said to you, you refuse to give up my son?"

"He has not asked me to give him up, Mrs. Houghton," replied Miss Schrekengust, also rising.

"I have asked you and have shown you clearly why your marriage to him would be bad for you both. If you love him you will release him!"

"I know I would if I were the heroine of a melodrama. At this point in the play I would tragically and idiotically give up my true love for his best good, and mysteriously disappear! But if I do that——"

Miss Schrekengust paused, looking very thoughtful; and Mrs. Houghton, unable to repress the eagerness born of this hopeful pause, urged her on with a rather breathless, "Well?"

"If I do renounce Sidney," the girl sighed, "I suppose I shall then seriously consider accepting another proposal of marriage," she astoundingly announced, "which I am afraid might injure Sidney's financial prospects even more than his marriage with me would do."

"I don't quite follow you," said Mrs. Houghton, repressing her eagerness. "How could your marriage with any one else affect Sidney's financial prospects?"

"My marriage with Mr. George Houghton might quite seriously affect Sidney. For you see, I'd be Sidney's Aunt Susan instead of his wife. I think that would affect Sidney quite disagreeably."

Mrs. Houghton stared. "You—you know Mr. George Houghton?—and he—he wants to marry you! But he—why, his——"

Her astonishment choked her. She could not speak. Her brother-in-law's family pride was almost an obsession With him! He had remained a bachelor all his life because he had never found a woman he considered quite worthy to marry a Houghton! That proud old man to have become infatuated with a young girl like this!—a village nobody!

"He's in his dotage!" she exclaimed.

"Oh!" breathed Miss Schrekengust, "thanks!"

"I mean, Miss Schrekengust, that you are such a child—and Mr. Houghton is over seventy! And his family pride—he is such a—a——"

"Snob?" Miss Schrekengust suggested.

"A year ago George Houghton would have thought he was stooping if he'd been marrying a duchess!"

"A year ago," said Miss Schrekengust quite truthfully, "he had not met me."

Again Mrs. Houghton stared helplessly. Anything more extraordinary than this girl's complacency she had never encountered.

"But I promise you," added the girl, "that I'm not going to marry Mr. George Houghton."

"But, Miss Schrekengust, if Sidney takes you from his uncle, then his uncle will have a double reason for disinheriting him! This is really a dreadful situation!"

"Isn't it! I thought you would find it so."

"But what shall we do about it?" cried Mrs. Houghton, desperately.

"We? You mean you and I?"

"Surely, Miss Schrekengust, I can hardly believe you would be so blind to your own interests as to choose a penniless boy like Sidney if you can marry his uncle!"

"But doesn't love enter at all into your ideas of marriage, Mrs. Houghton? I love Sidney and I do not love his Uncle George. I don't love his Uncle George at all!"

"Then you have already refused to marry Mr. George Houghton?" Mrs. Houghton wonderingly asked.

"I shouldn't think of marrying a man seventy years old. Unless, of course," she quickly added, "I were driven to recklessness by losing the man I love."

"But how on earth did old George Houghton ever take it, being refused by a—well, a girl without either great fortune or great position?" cried Mrs. Houghton, her amazed curiosity quite upsetting her dignity.

"Oh, I'm sure he knows, as any other old man would know, that he can't expect to be wildly attractive to a young girl of eighteen. Even a Houghton must know that he has become a little slow at seventy."

"Well!" Mrs. Houghton exclaimed, unexpectedly, "I do hope it has taken some of the conceit out of him! George Houghton refused!—and by—— But I must say, Miss Schrekengust, I think you are extremely foolish! He can't live long."

"That, of course, is an inducement. And yet—well, you see, I love Sidney."

"You must love him very, very much!" admitted Sidney's mother, almost softened.

"I do, Mrs. Houghton."

Mrs. Houghton quickly reflected, "If she marries George, Sidney's certain not to get any of his money. If she marries Sidney there's at least a chance——"

Her glance swept the girl from head to foot. She really was attractive, and more than presentable; not at all what she had expected to find; although of course her family would prove very embarrassing——

Mrs. Houghton suddenly held out her hand. "If you love him enough to refuse a great fortune and a great position for his sake, I suppose you must, after all, be the girl he ought to marry."

"I'm sure I am," Miss Schrekengust said as she took the offered hand.

When Mrs Houghton had gone, the young girl collapsed helplessly in a little heap upon the old davenport before the fire. "If only I see Sidney before she does!—else what on earth will he think of my yarn about his old uncle's wanting to marry me!"