Their daughter, however, was able to find a strange wonder in the fact that she, Janie Chiddix, was there. But, as everybody said, she had always been an extraordinary child-so extraordinary that, fully capable as she was of interminable, excited, shiningeyed chatter, she almost never spoke. "She don't seem to get on with anybody but strangers," Mrs. Chiddix would say.

"It's awful," Janie would be thinking, and nobody ever knew what she thought,-"but I won't have to stand it forever." She had quietly made up her mind to endure being extraordinary. That was, perhaps, the most extraordinary thing about her.

Just now she was walking about the circle with a young Frenchman who was not quite so tallowy about the neck or so moth-eaten about the chin as the general run of French adolescents. "Such a nice boy!" said Mrs.

Chiddix. Chiddix. But Mrs. Chiddix could not understand French.

Janie could; perfectly. It was to her a continual exhilarating astonishment how readily she grasped phrases she had never read in books, and Janie had read all sorts of books. Consequently, she did not particularly like her young Frenchman. What he wanted was not what Janie wanted. If it had been, even if he had been more like the general run of French adolescents than he was, nothing would have stopped this clear-eyed girl.

But Janie was gathering information. The people among whom she had grown up had told her only what fadged with the rules of life they unquestioningly accepted, or had dressed down what they told her until it did. "When all you have to do is look at them," Janie would consider in amazement, "to see that their rules have n't worked for them" especially in the case of her parents. Janie was not going to do anything until she was sure. She was determined never to look like her parents.

As she allowed her mother to sit on the terrace and watch her appear and reappear with her young Frenchman among the clumps of shrubbery, it amused her a little to know that her mother considered herself a chaperon.

The young Frenchman, forbidden to make love, was evading Janie's edict

by talking of lovers. He was slightly vain of the fact that he had been in the house of one couple in particular, who were in a way celebrities of the neighborhood, and lived in a shabby little villa on the other side of the lake. It added to his masculinity. Men can go anywhere.

"They are compatriots of yours,"he had a very important little manner of speaking,-"from the United States. From the State of Tennessee, which is somewhere near the Great Lakes."

"From Tennessee!" cried Janie. She did not quite know why it was so startling to find that, of the dwellers in a spot inhabited by people from all quarters of the earth, two happened to be from Tennessee. "Why, I'm from Tennessee!"

"Then perhaps you know who they are. Nobody does. And I tell you quite frankly that they intrigue me enormously. They seem like people who were très bien in their country. Her first name, however, is Sophronie, which sounds like a servant's."

Janie caught her breath. This was information with a vengeance. The woman was an American, she was from Tennessee, her first name was "Sophronie"-rapidly Janie mustered a sufficient force of thoughts to police her tongue.

Then she said politely:
"And her last name?"

"Betz," said the young man"Sophronie Betz."

Janie's cry was silent, quite inside her. She had through all these years been compelled to wait until the chance advent of this young Frenchman who had made her acquaintance by picking up her mother's handkerchief in the foyer of the Grand Hôtel de l'Europe at Aix-les-Bains. But at last she was

to know, really to know, about her Aunt Sophronia Bates.

"No," she found the strength to say

"no, I don't think I 've ever heard of them."

It was not merely because "poor Sophronia" and "poor Soph's calamity" were the most strictly forbidden of all the forbidden subjects in the Chiddix household that her Aunt Sophronia, whom she had never seen, interested Janie more than any other person in all the world. But Aunt Sophronia was the one person with the reality of being a connection of Janie's who had ever dared to break loose.

To King's Ferry, of course, it had been a calamity. No matter what or how many the extenuating circumstances, the result of a woman's allowing herself to be run away with by another woman's husband must be inevitably wretched, miserable disaster. And in the case of Aunt Sophronia there had been no extenuating circumstances. But, in Janie's eyes, King's Ferry went on, apparently forever, never doing what it wanted to do, unless furtively and secretly; doing only what it believed it ought to do, what other people believed it ought to do, what was respectable, and ascribing evil consequences to whatever lines of conduct it had never had the courage openly to try out.

But somewhere, Janie had known all her life, was happiness; and somewhere somebody had found it. And all her life chiefly because in her resentment of King's Ferry she had included all its beliefs in one overwhelming sweep of unbelief-Janie had believed that "poor Sophronia" was one of the few people who had.

Her pulses were racing, her mind was struggling with that curious sense of

unreality which swoops upon all moments of consummation, and she could scarcely restrain her voice to normal as she asked the question a trustworthy answer to which she had waited all these years to get; but Janie had already successfully defended her soul over so long a period that she managed to ask it quite as if she had been politely making conversation.

"Tell me some more about them," she said. "Are they are they happy?"

"I shall tell you what my friend Georges Naudin says of them. He is a very great poet, and, bien entendu, a pessimist. He says that they are the only really happy people he has ever known."

Janie had become preoccupied.

"He is studying them now-to analyze their happiness in a play."

Then he noted her preoccupation, and, of course, misread it. This young man had never known a girl like Janie. A little under the spell he was himself trying to create, he lowered his mouth very close to her ear, where spun the quick fine tendrils of a young girl's hair, and made his voice beautiful.

"It 's nice to be like that," the words were low, vibrant, seductive,"lovers, you know."

But Janie did not even hear him. She was at that moment coming to the decision which was to shatter the sacred boredom of a respectable American family for nearly a week.

"Where did you say they lived?" she said.

$2

Though her eyes followed her daughter mechanically around and around the circle, Mrs. Chiddix's heart was not in her chaperonage. Her mouth

was twitching nervously, and now and then she would make a slight movement forward, catch herself up involuntarily, and thrill with relief that her husband had not noticed.

Then abruptly into the silence,— The maddening sounds of the orchestra, of the laughter, of the clicking of high heels on the pavement, did not count; the two of them were in a world of silence of their own. Marriage, in spite of everything, remains a thing apart, then abruptly into the silence, she heard her own voice say, quite as if it had been somebody else speaking, and even more calmly than if it had said, "Here 's your collarbutton":

"Egbert, they 're here."

Though she was not perfectly sure that he had understood her, she knew that he had heard her speak. He looked a little annoyed. He was not annoyed. He simply made himself superior to any information a person who was only his wife had to offer. It was part of his system.

But whether he had fully understood her or not, she had spoken, and her first fright was over. She waited.

"Here," she repeated at last"here, at Aches lee Bane!"

He turned on her. It was as if he had suddenly lowered a curtain of dark gauze from his brows. It was an effect, she knew, which he could switch on and off as easily as if it had been projected from a stereopticon under his control; but it had never ceased to send her taut throughout the interior of her body.

"I-I thought I ought to tell you—” But she did not add that she had been trying to tell him every enduring moment lived through since half past five that afternoon.

screwed it into one corner with a motion of his hard, blue lips. The movement made his mustache bristle. This also was part of his system. Then he relaxed. The episode, he knew, was at an end.

"Good God!" he exclaimed, stag

gered into honesty.

The orchestra, the laughter, the clicking heels stole over them, swept over them, carried them away into individual worlds. In his satisfaction

"I saw them. It was down at the lake. Janie wanted to have tea under the trees down at the lake. They came in and sat down right next to us." "You spoke to her, I reckon! And with Janie there! You'll be going to see her next. You'll be wanting to let my daughter go around with that -" He stopped before the word he had not yet dared to say; and people, if they are married to each other, will dare to say almost anything when sufficiently righteous. Marriage, in spite of everything, remains a thing apart

"Janie had her back to them!" Mrs. Chiddix's double chin went up defiantly. “And I did n't speak to her. Janie wanted to know if the sun hurt my eyes." Then she said: "She looked straight at me, and she did n't know me! Her own sister. I ought to have spoken to her. It was n't right. If Janie had n't been there-Egbert! It's terrible! She's my own sister—”

"We 'll pack to-night. We'll take the train to Lions"—so he pronounced it-"to-morrow morning."

"I ought to go to see her, Egbert. It's not right. My own sister”

He made no answer, but she knew that she would pack that night. He

gotten her. She, too, for the moment, had forgotten him. Her eyes looked down blankly upon the circle where people of fashion, people of no fashion, tourists, demi-reps, and her daughter, an American girl, were flashing in and out in the electric light.

"Egbert," she said suddenly, "she looked-she looked-happy.”

If he had seen the look on her face at that moment, and could have understood it, Mr. Chiddix, even Mr. Chiddix, might have wept.

Janie came up on the terrace. Her young Frenchman, who was bravely trying not to look wilted, said good night to Mr. and Mrs. Chiddix. “A demain?" he added politely to Janie. His eyes, she noted, were not enthusiastic, but she would have liked a game of tennis on the smart courts at the tennis club, and he was the only person she knew. It was worth trying, at any rate.

"How about the tennis club," she suggested, "early?" He regretted something-not-too-distinctly-pronounced infiniment. He was very young, but continentals are born with the knowledge that life is very brief. Janie did not care. He had already given her enough.

"We are leaving to-morrow morning," said her father, who through the silly language of another country suspected "dates."

"I'm not," said Janie, clearly. "I'm going to see my Aunt Sophronia to-morrow afternoon."

The only thing that saved them was the fact that it is morally impossible to make a scene in a place as public as the terrace of the casino at Aix-lesBains, even if all the people are foreigners.

84

It was at the hotel that the row really began. Janie quietly, but none the less flatly, refused to pack.

Mr. Chiddix's argument was that a man was the head of his house and must be obeyed, though with women smoking cigarettes and voting and swearing in public, one was ready to believe that the end of civilization had come. Mrs. Chiddix's argument, sustained with tears, was that Janie really ought to remember that, whatever happened, her mother would be, as usual, to blame. Janie had no argument. She wanted to see the thing she had waited all her life to see, and she simply said again that she was going.

"But, Janie," exploded Mr. Chiddix, "you don't seem to realize that they 're not married!"

neered tables to apportion the races of the earth, the argument which won was the only one which was never stated. They could not take Janie away from Aix-les-Bains in chains, they could not leave her in a French resort unprotected, to lock her up in a strange hotel would create a scandal, and she had enough money in her pocket-book to hire a boat.

Although to outward appearances nothing had altered in the even domesticity of the Chiddix family, and in fact all oral argument had ceased, at four o'clock the following afternoon the row was still in progress. Mrs. Chiddix had been perfectly right: she was, as usual, to blame; but they had not taken the train for Lyons that morning, and Janie was more than half-way across the lake on her way to her Aunt Sophronia's.

"I wonder why I 'm not more excited," thought Janie, idly trailing her hand in the incredible clarity of the lake. "If only I thought they were wickeder than I do, it might be more fun."

As a matter of fact, without words, the row had reached such a pitch that even her conclusive winning of her point by marching off to hire the boat she was in had been anticlimax. Janie loathed rows. "But,' she thought, "I can still hope it 's

The boat began to nose in toward a very dilapidated boat-landing, beyond which stretched an unkempt path leading beneath some trees to a stark red-brick villa with corners of plaster which, before it began to chip off, had imitated stone. The grass grew rank, but in the deep shadows was starry with the crocuses, which grow wild in that locality and bloom at all seasons.