“I bet you have a lot of men worried about you.”
“Me? I just sit home and twirl my thumbs all day.”
“Yes, you do.”
“Everybody hates me and I return the compliment, so I’m going into a convent or else to be a trained nurse in the war. Will you enlist in the French Army and let me nurse you?”
Her words died away; his eyes, following hers, saw Mrs. McRae and her nephew coming in at the gate. “I’ll go now,” he said quickly. “You wouldn’t have lunch with me if you come to Chicago tomorrow? I’ll take you to a German place with fine food.”
She hesitated; Mrs. McRae’s insincerely tickled expression grew larger on the near distance.
“All right.”
He wrote swiftly on a piece of paper and handed it to her. Then, lifting his big body awkwardly, he gallumped down the tier of seats, receiving a quick but inquisitive glance from Mrs. McRae as he lumbered past her.
II
It was easy to arrange. Josephine phoned the aunt with whom she was to lunch, dropped the chauffeur and, not without a certain breathlessness, approached Hoftzer’s Rathskeller Garten on North State Street. She wore a blue crepe-de-chine dress sprinkled with soft brown leaves that were the color of her eyes.
John Boynton Bailey was waiting in front of the restaurant, looking distracted, yet protective, and Josephine’s uneasiness departed.
He said, “We don’t want to eat in this place. It seemed all right when I thought about it, but I just looked inside, and you might get sawdust in your shoes. We better go to some hotel.”
Agreeably she turned in the direction of a hotel sacred to tea dancing, but he shook his head.
“You’d meet a lot of your friends. Let’s go to the old La Grange.”
The old La Grange Hotel, once the pride of the Middle West, was now a rendezvous of small-town transients and a forum for traveling salesmen. The women in the lobby were either hard-eyed types from the Loop or powderless, transpiring mothers from the Mississippi Valley. There were spittoons in patient activity and a busy desk where men mouthed cigars grotesquely and waited for telephone calls.
In the big dining room, John Bailey and Josephine ordered grapefruit, club sandwiches and julienne potatoes. Josephine put her elbows on the table and regarded him as if to say: “Well, now I’m temporarily yours; make the most of your time.”
“You’re the best-looking girl I ever met,” he began. “Of course you’re tangled up in all this bogus society hokum, but you can’t help that. You think that’s sour grapes, but I’ll tell you; when I hear people bragging about their social position and who they are, and all that, I just sit back and laugh. Because I happen to be descended directly from Charlemagne. What do you think of that?”
Josephine blushed for him, and he grew a little ashamed of his statement and qualified it:
“But I believe in men, not their ancestors. I want to be the best writer in the world, that’s all.”
“I love good books,” Josephine offered.
“It’s the theater that interests me. I’ve got a play now that I think would go big if the managers would bother to read it. I’ve got all the stuff—sometimes I walk along the streets so full of it that I feel I could just sail out over the city like a balloon.” His mouth drooped suddenly. “It’s because I haven’t got anything to show yet that I talk like that.”
“Mr. Bailey, the great playwright. You’ll send me tickets to your plays, won’t you?”
“Sure,” he said abstractedly, “but by that time you’ll be married to some boy from Yale or Harvard with a couple of hundred neckties and a good-looking car, and you’ll get to be dumbbell like the rest.”
“I guess I am already—but I simply love poetry. Did you ever read ‘The Passing of Arthur’?”
“There’s more good poetry being written now right in Chi than during the whole last century. There’s a man named Carl Sandburg that’s as great as Shakspere.”
She was not listening; she was watching him. His sensitive face was glowing with the same strange light as when she had first seen him.
“I like poetry and music better than anything in the world,” she said. “They’re wonderful.”
He believed her, knowing that she spoke of her liking for him. She felt that he was distinguished, and by this she meant something definite and real; the possession of some particular and special passion for life. She knew that she herself was superior in something to the girls who criticized her—though she often confused her superiority with the homage it inspired—and she was apathetic to the judgments of the crowd. The distinction that at fifteen she had found in Travis de Coppet’s ballroom romantics she discovered now in John Bailey, in spite of his assertiveness and his snobbishness. She wanted to look at life through his glasses, since he found it so absorbing and exciting. Josephine had developed early and lived hard—if that can be said of one whose face was cousin to a fresh, damp rose—and she had begun to find men less than satisfactory. The strong ones were dull, the clever ones were shy, and all too soon they were responding to Josephine with a fatal sameness, a lack of temperament that blurred their personalities.
The club sandwiches arrived and absorbed them; there was activity from an orchestra placed up near the ceiling in the fashion of twenty years before. Josephine, chewing modestly, looked around the room; just across from them a man and woman were getting up from table, and she started and made one big swallow. The woman was what was called a peroxide blonde, with doll’s eyes boldly drawn on a baby-pink face. The sugary perfume that exuded from her garish clothes was almost visible as she preceded her escort to the door. Her escort was Josephine’s father.
“Don’t you want your potatoes?” John Bailey asked after a minute.
“I think they’re very good,” she said in a strained voice.
Her father, the cherished ideal of her life—handsome, charming Herbert Perry. Her mother’s lover—through so many summer evenings had Josephine seen them in the swinging settee of the veranda, with his head on her lap, smoothing his hair. It was the promise of happiness in her parents’ marriage that brought a certain purposefulness into all Josephine’s wayward seeking.
Now to see him lunching safely out of the zone of his friends with such a woman! It was different with boys—she rather admired their loud tales of conquest in the nether world, but for her father, a grown man, to be like that. She was trembling; a tear fell and glistened on a fried potato.
“Yes, I’d like very much to go there,” she heard herself saying.
“Of course, they are all very serious people,” he explained defensively. “I think they’ve decided to produce my play in their little theater. If they haven’t I’ll give one or two of them a good sock on the jaw, so that next time they strike any literature they’ll recognize it.”
In the taxi Josephine tried to put out of her mind what she had seen at the hotel. Her home, the placid haven from which she had made her forays, seemed literally in ruins, and she dreaded her return. Awful, awful, awful!
In a panic she moved close to John Bailey, with the necessity of being near something strong. The car stopped before a new building of yellow stucco from which a blue-jowled, fiery-eyed young man came out.
“Well, what happened?” John demanded.
“The trap dropped at 11:30.”
“Yes?”
“I wrote out his farewell speech like he asked me to, but he took too long and they wouldn’t let him finish it.”
“What a dirty trick on you.”
“Wasn’t it?… Who’s your friend?” The man indicated Josephine.
“Lake Forest stuff,” said John, grinning. “Miss Perry, Mr. Blacht.”
“Here for the triumph of the Springfield Shakspere? But I hear they may do Uncle Tom’s Cabin instead.” He winked at Josephine. “So long.”
“What did he mean?” she demanded as they went on.
“Why, he’s on the Tribune and he had to cover a hanging this morning. What’s more, he and I caught the fellow ourselves… Do you think these cops ever catch anybody?”
“This isn’t a jail, is it?”
“Lord, no; this is the theater workshop.”
“What did he mean about a speech?”
“He wrote the man a dying speech to sort of make up for having caught him.”
“How perfectly hectic!” cried Josephine, awed.
They were in a long, dimly lit hall with a stage at one end; upon it, standing about in the murkiness of a few footlights, were a dozen people. Almost at once Josephine realized that everybody there except herself was crazy. She knew it incontrovertibly, although the only person of outward eccentricity was a robust woman in a frock coat and gray morning trousers. And in spite of the fact that of those present seven were later to attain notoriety, and four, actual distinction, Josephine was, for the moment, right. It was their intolerable inadjustability to their surroundings that had plucked them from lonely normal schools, from the frame rows of Midwestern towns and the respectability of shoddy suburbs, and brought them to Chicago in 1916—ignorant, wild with energy, doggedly sensitive and helplessly romantic, wanderers like their pioneer ancestors upon the face of the land.
“This is Miss——,” said John Bailey, “and Mrs.—— and Caroline —— and Mr.—— and ——”
Their frightened eyes lifted to the young girl’s elegant clothes, her confident, beautiful face, and they turned from her rudely in
