"there was n't a nickel." That was all, but there needed no more. Those older children and that husband were banned, removed forever from all human respect.

Scheherazade is of those who reverence the mother. Her own has an unlined, strong, happy face, and is housekeeper and unquestioned queen in the house her daughters have bought for her out of their wages. I doubt if more

"She may not have stuck to the truth... when they asked her how old she was"

than one was old enough to satisfy the labor laws when their father died, certainly not more than two, and the children were many. But they did it, Scheherazade chiefly. She may not have stuck to the truth for a while when they asked her how old she was, but she was tall for her years.

She had to be man of the family; there were no sons. Peter died two years before his father. I saw his picture hanging on the wall, a keen, humorous boy's face, and I know his going must have made a great ache of silence in that household. She was sitting by my desk when she told me the story, my teller of tales, somewhat tired, in the late afternoon, and lingering in that dull, cement-walled corner before she turned the door-knob and plunged into the inmost whir of the factory again. I watched the blank, gray wall melt before her as she talked till she sat leaning forward, looking out with fixed gaze on an unfinished house and three children playing about it one spring afternoon. Peter had gone out walking, taking two of the little sisters. When the storm came, they went inside a house, one that was just being built and had no doors and windows. An unlucky house; it drew the lightning, she said. There were some other people

struck who were working there, and Sophy was holding Peter's hand, and she was struck lightly down one side. But Peter- "It tore his heart out of him," said Scheherazade. "It struck him right here"-between his eyes. "When they came they found there was n't no life in him."

She was at home, and there was one strange thing that happened, there are often glints like this in her stories, OldWorld consciousness of the something beyond and enveloping the things we know in natural ways,-Peter's watch was hanging on the wall, and their mother happened to look up at it.

"Oh, my God!" she said, "Peter's watch has stopped! I hope nothing has n't happened to Peter."

It was two hours after that that a cab came from the hospital bringing the two little sisters.

"My mother went right down," said Scheherazade; her father went, too. It was his one son among many daughters, and even gallant daughters could not take that desolated place. He had been ailing before, and after that he could not get back.

"We had to move away from that place," she said. "My father could n't walk much, and he wanted to walk all the time to the cemetery." Nearly two years he lived-I suppose those were the years that explain why there was n't a nickel and then he went, too. "In two weeks it would have been two years since my brother died."

The scene enacting beyond that blank wall shifted before Scheherazade's wide eyes, though its coloring was still somber. It was Austria now, before they came to America, and it was the time when the baby died-the strong, big baby, their flower. She was five months old and so big! She held on to the sides and sat up in her crib, and said "Dada"; she was too bright for her age. Scheherazade remembered the day she was born. Her mother had been making a cake, and Scheherazade and the other children went out somewhere and left her putting it in the oven, and when they came back the midwife was just going in. It was only two hours after that.

Then when the baby was five months

old there was something the matter. Their mother was sure she would be well if they could take her to Bohemia. There were five children then, none of them very big, and it was not easy. But at last their father said the mother had better go, and she did, and took the baby and the next oldest; the other three stayed with him. Just two weeks made all the difference. The mother was right; it was Bohemia the baby needed. When they came back she was so big, so well! Then the father went away for a day or two, and when he came home the baby was dead.

"The doctor gave her too strong medicine," said Scheherazade. "My mother had thought she was n't so sick, see? She was SO strong! When my mother saw she was dead she took him by

condemn me for my narrow-minded provincialism. I think even in her thoughts she does n't. She has lived largely. She knows that different environments, different experiences, make different points of view. None of us is particularly responsible or to blame.

"I suppose it looks that way to you," she said. Presently she drifted into further talk. "I never saw anything like this town," she said. "You don't make friends. I don't like to go to a dance unless I go with a fellow. In New York two girls can go with each other, and they start dancing together, see, and two fellows 'll ask them, 'Do you care to break?' Then, if they want to, they finish the dance with the fellows, and if they like them, they go and sit down at a table, see? Or, if they

the back of the collar. People have their feelings. The doctor had come in a cab, see? My mother shook him out to his cab. People have their feelings." Her gaze came slowly back from the old country to the clattering factory. The wall grew substantial again and closed in her vista, and she got up.

"Well, that's a long time ago now," she said. "When trouble comes, it comes in bunches."

When I heard about the factory dance it chilled me me, with my puritanical limitations. It was n't the having a dance that disturbed me, not that, of course; but because they had arranged to have it in one of the establishments euphemistically called hotels, whose chief reason for existing is also the chief reason for its being regarded as a commodious place for dances: there is something to drink down-stairs.

"Yes?" said Scheherazade when I spoke my misgivings.

She is very tolerant. She does n't

don't like the fellows, they go back and dance the next dance with each other. If a fellow does n't ask a girl to have something to drink, she thinks he 's cheap, see?"

As Scheherazade suggests, it is a different point of view.

"In New York," she commented, "a girl like that would n't be allowed in a dance-hall." She meant a little sixteenyear-old who was passing by. "A girl's got to be able to take care of herself. One night I went with a fellow, and the man that takes the tickets said, 'How old 's the young lady?' I was nineteen. They won't let you in if you 're under eighteen."

Sometimes Scheherazade's face sharpens, and her eyes smolder with longing for New York. Her whole vivid personality craves the gaiety, the beauty, the glitter, the something going on, the fire of temperament, that is New York. We are a million miles away from it here. So little, so little goes on! For

the electric glitter of a city night we have one candle, burning smokily. For the gay excitement of wide streets we have broken pavements, the jostling of throngs still in their factory grime, a murk doorway, and grim flights of stairs to the municipal recreation-hall.

can

Scheherazade dances extremely well. It is a delight to watch her slim body, grown unfalteringly graceful as the music takes it, moving through the heterogeneous throngs the recreationhall invites. It is possible to dance very badly. People be amazingly awkward to music, painfully worse than awkward, some kinds of girls. There is an essential dignity about her way. Dancing even to a jazz-band in a public dancehall is relifted

even though false gods. Scheherazade says that it may turn out all right, that sometimes it does. But as for herself, she chooses the factory. She chooses so because she definitely and permanently prefers it, not applying any invidious terms to any girl who makes the other choice.

When she has finished the dance with a girl it has been because she prefers that, too. Her path through life has had a liberal attendance of young men,

to an art, and I cure the hurts the sight of some of the rest has inflicted on me by looking at her. If she had chosen, she might have accepted an invitation to be dancing teacher in a hall not municipal and not at all chaperoned, she told me about that one day, but she saw with complete clarity the whole way of life therein implied. The functions of such a "teacher" are not accurately implied in that word, but are such as give her opportunity to dance a long way down. the primrose path with young gentlemen of cosmopolitan expensiveness and tastes not puritanical, and ultimately make it difficult to return. Scheherazade prefers the factory. She has no stones to throw at any young woman who chooses otherwise. She knows one. They used to be very good friends, and Scheherazade would n't disown her now; but she went one way, and Scheherazade the other. She wears expensive clothes and lives very gaily, and thought Scheherazade a foolish person not to take the goods the gods provided,

I think. They have stepped briefly into and out of her stories a number of times, and I never yet have recognized the same one twice. Indeed, I have her word for it. "That 's four years ago," she concluded one day. She had been telling me how her sud

den ire descended upon one "fellow" and shriveled him to ashes. "I never have heard that he went with any girl since." In the factory doorway she turned for an instant. "I've went with lots," she tossed back, and disappeared.

One came into sight down a sudden vista of her talk one day, and I hoped I recognized him as the one of destiny. If he is, I am sure he does n't know it from her; and yet I fancied a different manner in my Scheherazade that day. If he is, I hope he 'll find it out, and I hope it has n't blunted the edge of his ardor to have traveled overseas and to have been in the storm of the World War without knowing. But neither has he appeared a second time any more than the others, so I do not know. I do not know, either, how her family could spare her to any returning soldier the head of the family, who has filled the larder and brought up her sisters and straightened out their love-affairs when they got snarled and suffered through their illnesses and bought the tickets for the movies and stood by to

spare her mother all avoidable distress. I don't know how they would do without her in the immediate captaincy, even though there are several husbands in the family now, and the babies are multiplying, and there is only the beloved, sheltered youngest left at home. The others came back to have their babies where their wise mother and Scheherazade are, and it is only to the outsider that the lovely, beloved youngest seems as if she were already grown up.

He

Her

A baby is n't a hospital event. comes at home, welcomed by his own efficient family, and three days afterward his mother is up. This is a degenerate age, however, in comparison with what Scheherazade tells me. grandmother in the old country had business in the village, and, having business, went. It was a long walk, and half-way home her baby arrived, and she alone there. But she wrapped the baby in her apron, and walked on home, and the baby grew up and thrived. That was Scheherazade's aunt, and her grandmother lived to be an old woman.

"That was in the old country," said Scheherazade. "She was a strong woman. People ain't like that here."

I believe Scheherazade is, though. I

believe she is the true descendent of her grandmother. Not in physical frame, but in the valiant spirit. I believe, like her grandmother, she could make her body do anything she chose. I wish I could really get her into sentences. You can't put a vital force on paper. You can't pin down a butterfly; only the dead apparatus that one used. You can't catch a thunder-clap or take hold of a rainbow. I have n't even said she swear. She can quite efficiently and rather proudly. To some people it seems a distasteful accomplishment. She lives in a working world, and regards it as a necessary tool without which she would not always be able to do the rough things that are to be done. I myself have never felt the necessity; but, then, I do not do the things she does. How do I know?

can

I hope Scheherazade will have all the things she wants in life, and also that her fount of stories may never run dry or lose its rainbow play of color. I can't help hoping, too, that there is a soldier coming home from the wars for her particularly, and that he is quite as admirable a soldier as those that Heaven has bestowed upon her sisters one by one under her keen and guarding eye.