LITMIR.BIZ

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I finish a piece of writing. I’ve seen your uncle about it. I’ll work here, and board at the new house. But this is confidential. If it were noised about, people might begin to say that Mrs. St. Peter and I had—how do they put it, parted, separated?”

      Augusta dropped her eyes in an indulgent smile. “I think people in your station would say separated.”

      “Exactly; a good scientific term, too. Well, we haven’t, you know. But I’m going to write on here for a while.”

      “Very well, sir. And I won’t always be getting in your way now. In the new house you have a beautiful study downstairs, and I have a light, airy room on the third floor.”

      “Where you won’t smell smoke, eh?”

      “Oh, Professor, I never really minded!” Augusta spoke with feeling. She rose and took up the black bust in her long arms.

      The Professor also rose, very quickly. “What are you doing?”

      She laughed. “Oh, I’m not going to carry them through the street, Professor! The grocery boy is downstairs with his cart, to wheel them over.”

      “Wheel them over?”

      “Why, yes, to the new house, Professor. I’ve come a week before my regular time, to make curtains and hem linen for Mrs. St. Peter. I’ll take everything over this morning except the sewing-machine—that’s too heavy for the cart, so the boy will come back for it with the delivery wagon. Would you just open the door for me, please?”

      “No, I won’t! Not at all. You don’t need her to make curtains. I can’t have this room changed if I’m going to work here. He can take the sewing-machine—yes. But put her back on the chest where she belongs, please. She does very well there.” St. Peter had got to the door, and stood with his back against it.

      Augusta rested her burden on the edge of the chest.

      “But next week I’ll be working on Mrs. St. Peter’s clothes, and I’ll need the forms. As the boy’s here, he’ll just wheel them over,” she said soothingly.

      “I’m damned if he will! They shan’t be wheeled. They stay right there in their own place. You shan’t take away my ladies. I never heard of such a thing!”

      Augusta was vexed with him now, and a little ashamed of him. “But, Professor, I can’t work without my forms. They’ve been in your way all these years, and you’ve always complained of them, so don’t be contrary, sir.”

      “I never complained, Augusta. Perhaps of certain disappointments they recalled, or of cruel biological necessities they imply—but of them individually, never! Go and buy some new ones for your airy atelier, as many as you wish—I’m said to be rich now, am I not?—Go buy, but you can’t have my women. That’s final.”

      Augusta looked down her nose as she did at church when the dark sins were mentioned. “Professor,” she said severely, “I think this time you are carrying a joke too far. You never used to.” From the tilt of her chin he saw that she felt the presence of some improper suggestion.

      “No matter what you think, you can’t have them.” They considered, both were in earnest now. Augusta was first to break the defiant silence.

      “I suppose I am to be allowed to take my patterns?”

      “Your patterns? Oh, yes, the cut-out things you keep in the couch with my old note-books? Certainly, you can have them. Let me lift it for you.” He raised the hinged top of the box-couch that stood against the wall, under the slope of the ceiling. At one end of the upholstered box were piles of notebooks and bundles of manuscript tied up in square packages with mason’s cord. At the other end were many little rolls of patterns, cut out of newspapers and tied with bits of ribbon, gingham, silk, georgette; notched charts which followed the changing stature and figures of the Misses St. Peter from early childhood to womanhood. In the middle of the box, patterns and manuscripts interpenetrated.

      “I see we shall have some difficulty in separating our life work, Augusta. We’ve kept our papers together a long while now.”

      “Yes, Professor. When I first came to sew for Mrs. St. Peter, I never thought I should grow grey in her service.”

      He started. What other future could Augusta possibly have expected? This disclosure amazed him.

      “Well, well, we mustn’t think mournfully of it, Augusta. Life doesn’t turn out for any of us as we plan.” He stood and watched her large slow hands travel about among the little packets, as she put them into his waste-basket to carry them down to the cart. He had often wondered how she managed to sew with hands that folded and unfolded as rigidly as umbrellas—no light French touch about Augusta; when she sewed on a bow, it stayed there. She herself was tall, large-boned, flat and stiff, with a plain, solid face, and brown eyes not destitute of fun. As she knelt by the couch, sorting her patterns, he stood beside her, his hand on the lid, though it would have stayed up unsupported. Her last remark had troubled him.

      “What a fine lot of hair you have, Augusta! You know I think it’s rather nice, that grey wave on each side. Gives it character. You’ll never need any of this false hair that’s in all the shop windows.”

      “There’s altogether too much of that, Professor. So many of my customers are using it now—ladies you wouldn’t expect would. They say most of it was cut off the heads of dead Chinamen. Really, it’s got to be such a frequent thing that the priest spoke against it only last Sunday.”

      “Did he, indeed? Why, what could he say? Seems such a personal matter.”

      “Well, he said it was getting to be a scandal in the Church, and a priest couldn’t go to see a pious woman any more without finding switches and rats and transformations lying about her room, and it was disgusting.”

      “Goodness gracious, Augusta! What business has a priest going to see a woman in the room where she takes off these ornaments—or to see her without them?”

      Augusta grew red, and tried to look angry, but her laugh narrowly missed being a giggle. “He goes to give them the Sacrament, of course, Professor! You’ve made up your mind to be contrary today, haven’t you?”

      “You relieve me greatly. Yes, I suppose in cases of sudden illness the hair would be lying about where it was lightly taken off. But as you first quoted the priest, Augusta, it was rather shocking. You’ll never convert me back to the religion of my fathers now, if you’re going to sew in the new house and I’m going to work on here. Who is ever to remind me when it’s All Souls’ day, or Ember day, or Maundy Thursday, or anything?”

      Augusta said she must be leaving. St. Peter heard her well-known tread as she descended the stairs. How much she reminded him of, to be sure! She had been most at the house in the days when his daughters were little girls and needed so many clean frocks. It was in those very years that he was beginning his great work; when the desire to do it and the difficulties attending such a project strove together in his mind like Macbeth’s two spent swimmers—years when he had the courage to say to himself: “I will do this dazzling, this beautiful, this utterly impossible thing!”

      During the fifteen years he had been working on his Spanish Adventures in North America, this room had been his centre of operations. There had been delightful excursions and digressions; the two Sabbatical years when he was in Spain studying records, two summers in the Southwest on the trail of his adventurers, another in Old Mexico, dashes to France to see his foster-brothers. But the notes and the records and the ideas always came back to this room. It was here they were digested and sorted, and woven into their proper place in his history.

      Fairly considered, the sewing-room was the most inconvenient study a man could possibly have, but it was the one place in the house where he could get isolation, insulation from the engaging drama of domestic life. No one was tramping over him, and only a vague sense, generally pleasant, of what went on below came up the narrow stairway. There were certainly no other advantages. The furnace heat did not reach the

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