Joan and Co.
factory, to road, to office. It was so that Burnett had wished his son
to learn it; but, as the latter observed, with some point:
“What’s the use, Dad?”
“The use?” snorted Burnett. “How else will you learn it?”
“I don’t want to learn it.”
“Eh?”
“I’d rather let George do it.”
“George?”
“He being any one who is obliged to do it for the sake of earning
a living,” explained Dicky. “I _could_ do it, I could go into the
factory and wallow around in sticky black stuff, if it were necessary.
I could go out on the road and sell and sit round between times in
hotel offices. But thank the Lord it isn’t necessary. So what’s the
use? You did all those things yourself, I know. But that is just the
reason why no one else in the family should have to do them all over
again. Besides, there are plenty of men looking for that chance. Like
Forsythe; he ate up that kind of work for years, and enjoyed it. Now
he eats up all this office, and enjoys it. And you—you ought to be out
playing golf—that’s all.”
It was a matter of family pride that led Burnett, in spite of this
attitude, to elect the boy a second vice-president; and it was merely
the obligation the boy felt he owed his father that made him accept
it. And Dicky let it go at that. He came down nearly every morning,
and sat around until lunch-time mostly for the sake of seeing that his
father did not duck into an alley somewhere and bolt a cup of coffee
and a doughnut. At twelve o’clock he broke in upon the sanctity of
Burnett’s private office, removed his hat and coat from the hat-rack,
and stood by the roll-top desk until his father rose with a scowl and
put his arms through the sleeves. Then Dicky led him round the block to
a decent hotel, where he made him eat slowly and deliberately a plate
of soup, an omelet, and whole wheat bread without butter. With equal
insistence he refused to allow him to eat apple pie, squash pie, mince
pie, cream pie, or crullers. Dicky generally postponed his own lunch
until later.
“Then you’ll go and eat what you please,” his father hinted darkly as
he finished.
“Yes, Dad.”
“Why in thunder, then, can’t you let me alone?”
“You aren’t as young as I am. Besides, if you’re going to work as hard
as you do, you must look after yourself.”
Burnett senior bit off the end of his stogie with a vicious snap and,
lighting it, sat back. He was shorter and stockier than his son.
His features were less finely moulded. It was as though he had been
chiseled out of oak with coarse tools, while the boy had been carefully
carved with keen-bladed instruments. That was what the mother had done
for him. She was a Cleaves of Portland—a fine, gentle soul who in her
day had been considered a beauty. She had her days, even now.
Burnett could not help being proud of the boy. When he came into a
place like this, he saw people glance at him approvingly. And nothing
gave him more satisfaction than to introduce him to some old friend or
new business acquaintance with a dignified:
“My son.”
But in the end he generally paid for this by being forced to listen to
some such remark as:
“Ah, in business with you?”
As a rule, Dicky himself furnished the reply:
“I have the honor of being a vice-president of the company.”
And the boy did not know a vici dressing from ordinary shoe blacking!
“Look here,” his father said to him on this the 10th day of January,
“you’ve been out of college some six months now.”
“Right.”
“It seems as though you ought to be doing something more than just
hanging round.”
“I’m thinking of doing something,” Dicky informed him.
Burnett sat up straighter in his chair.
“Now, that sounds better.”
“I’m thinking of getting married,” went on Dicky.
“Married?” exclaimed Burnett.
“Married,” Dicky nodded seriously.
Burnett frowned.
“You haven’t got mixed up with—”
“Nothing of that sort,” Dicky cut in. “You ought to know me better.”
Burnett flushed. He did. He spoke more carefully:
“Who is it, boy?”
“I can’t tell you yet, Dad, because I haven’t asked her. I’m going to
ask her to-day.”
“Any one I know?”
“Some one you’d like.”
Dicky leaned across the table and, with his arms folded, talked
straight into his father’s gray eyes.
“She’s very beautiful, Dad, with a sort of beauty that—that makes
you hold your breath. She’s slight and not very tall; but sometimes
she looks so tall that I feel like a kid beside her. And she has
dead-honest black eyes that think a good deal. And she makes you feel
as though you ought to be a prince or a caliph to be worthy of her.
That’s the trouble.”
Burnett had been studying his son. What he saw there now warmed his own
eyes.
“What’s the trouble?” he demanded.
“She’s one of the choice things of the world, and ought to be
surrounded by nothing but choice things.”
Burnett’s face hardened a trifle.
“You mean you want to buy her some jewels?”
“I wasn’t thinking of that—though she could wear jewels. I don’t
remember, though, that I’ve ever seen her with many. You wouldn’t
notice them, anyway, if she had them on. I don’t know what you _would_
get her that she hasn’t already.”
Burnett threw away his stogie. He had never seen the boy so much in
earnest. It put something into the lad’s eyes and mouth that he was
glad to find there. He glanced around. There was no one near to observe
his weakness, so he reached over and placed his big hand on his son’s.
“Dick,” he said slowly, “you know that what’s mine is yours.”
Dicky Burnett felt something squeezing his Adam’s apple.
“I wasn’t telling you this for—that,” he choked.
“I know,” Burnett put in quickly. “I know. But go after her. Get her.
If she’s all you say she is, by God, I’ll make a prince of you, if
that’s what she wants.”
Dicky smiled mistily.
“If you were thirty years younger you’d get her yourself,” he said.
CHAPTER II
JOAN IS BORED
Joan Fairburne sat before the long cheval mirror while Henriette did up
her rich black hair. If Dicky Burnett could have seen her expression
at this moment, he would have known—and felt relieved to know—that
whatever was the cause of her boredom, it was not he, because he was
not about. In fact, the only person she could see—with the exception of
Henriette, who did not count—was herself. The logical deduction, then,
was that she must have been bored with herself. Yet if this were true
it was some development of the last year. Up to six months before she
graduated she had been gay enough, and then—something had happened.
Perhaps several things had happened.
First of all, she had a sense of being about to be graduated, and
somehow that set her to thinking—really thinking. Probably, too, it
was the culmination of the work she had been doing and the life she
had been leading; for both in her studies and her associates she had
been extremely democratic. At the end of the first year she had escaped
from the clique which naturally claimed her for their own and had
mingled with all sorts of interesting girls—girls from the West, and
girls from the country, and girls who were working their way through,
and girls who had just barely enough money to squeeze through and who
were looking forward to earning their own livelihood afterward. It was
for her like getting into a new world, for until then she had lived
as though surrounded by a high wall. It was a very ancient wall and a
very beautiful wall and a protecting wall, but it was so high no one
could see over it. As long, however, as she knew nothing of what lay
beyond—except vaguely that the country roundabout was very dangerous
land for young girls—she did not mind her seclusion. Indeed, she was
even grateful and followed where her elders led as meekly as a young
girl should. It was so her mother before her had done, although instead
of going to college—for young ladies did not then go to college—she had
married John Fairburne, one of the old New York Fairburnes. “And that,
my dear,” her mother explained, “has been quite the equivalent of a
liberal education.”
But Joan was beginning to see that this sort of education had kept
her mother all these years behind the same old wall. The area bounded
had, to be sure, been considerably enlarged after her marriage and
especially after the birth of her only child, but the barrier remained.
The Fairburne world was like a little monarchy, or still more like one
of those ancient walled cities one reads of in Roman history.
During her first year at Wellesley, Joan believed that the kingdom
extended even as far as there. Several girls of her social set entered
with her and they quickly found other girls of similar social sets from
Boston and Chicago and St. Louis and San Francisco who, except for
slight differences of speech, were alike as peas in a pod.
That summer she returned to New York and Newport and the old crowd she
had left. But in her sophomore year Joan met Mildred Devons—a mouse
of a girl who had been brought up on a ranch in the West, and who had
taught school for three years and served as waitress in a summer hotel
in order to save enough to come East for this. There had never been any
wall around her life and she had seen many strange things.
It was Joan who introduced herself as the two sat studying on the
shores of the lake one June afternoon.
“Aren’t we classmates?” she asked.
“Yes,” Miss Devons answered, with an expression of guarded surprise.
“I think it must be because you study so hard that we’ve never met,”
Joan continued.
“I study as hard as I know how,” Miss Devons answered seriously. “Don’t
you?”
“I’m afraid not. I don’t think I like to study.”
So the conversation began, and as the days went on, and next year as
the months went by, each girl revealed herself a little more fully
to the other. And though in all their past, their present, and their
future they differed so radically, a curious sort of friendship
developed that had its effect upon them both. Somewhere below the
surface of things they found a common bond.
When, in her senior year, Miss Devons was taken ill as a result of
overstudy and undernourishment, it was Joan who stood by to the
end—Joan and a cousin of Mildred from Technology—one Mark Devons. He
was a slight, pale-faced young man with eager black eyes and thin lips
that came together in a straight line. Joan never met him outside of
the infirmary; but there, on either side of the bed, they both did
their best to encourage the fragile girl who faded before their eyes.
Joan was with her alone when she died. One evening Mildred reached out
her thin hand and sought Joan’s.
“I’m going,” she said quietly. “I haven’t let them tell the folks at
home. Will you make it—easy as you can? I guess they—they’ll sort of
miss me.”
“Oh, I shall too,” Joan sobbed. “Please—please don’t go!”
Mildred’s eyes brightened, and for a little while she rallied; but not
for long.
When this Mark Devons came that night, it was Joan who met him and told
him. His face grew dark, as though in challenge of some mysterious
enemy.
“It isn’t right!” he exclaimed.
Joan did not understand.
“There are plenty here who aren’t needed,” he broke out. “Why—”
Joan drew back a little. For a second she felt guilty. Impulsively
Devons thrust forward his hand.
“Good-bye,” he said simply.
So he went out of her life almost as completely as did Mildred. Yet it
was not true that either of them had gone out of her life.
It was her first intimate experience with death, and at the beginning
she had been impressed only with the abrupt finality of it. But when
she began to write the letters to those back at home—there was a mother
and a sister—she found herself writing, not as of one dead, but as of