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Take a look at photos of him from the season. Packers Green Bay Packers. Jets New York Jets. Packers claim RB Kapri Bibbs. The finish was the same thing. Statement by an NFL spokesperson. Success on the road remains elusive for Packers. Williams on next two games: Matthews, Daniels and Bakhtiari sign autographs for donations to Salvation Army.

Aaron Rodgers surprises area youth at holiday pizza party. Happy Birthday to Eddie Pleasant! Best of Packers-Bears pregame photos. Packers arrive at Soldier Field. Equipment staff preps Packers locker room at Soldier Field. Oh, Dexter, have you forgotten last year? Then, as he turned up the street that led to the residence district, Judy began to cry quietly to herself.

He had never seen her cry before. Its solidity startled him. The strong walls, the steel of the girders, the breadth and beam and pomp of it were there only to bring out the contrast with the young beauty beside him. He sat perfectly quiet, his nerves in wild clamor, afraid that if he moved he would find her irresistibly in his arms.

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Two tears had rolled down her wet face and trembled on her upper lip. A million phrases of anger, pride, passion, hatred, tenderness fought on his lips. Then a perfect wave of emotion washed over him, carrying off with it a sediment of wisdom, of convention, of doubt, of honor. This was his girl who was speaking, his own, his beautiful, his pride. It was strange that neither when it was over nor a long time afterward did he regret that night. Dexter was at bottom hard-minded. The attitude of the city on his action was of no importance to him, not because he was going to leave the city, but because any outside attitude on the situation seemed superficial.

He was completely indifferent to popular opinion. Nor, when he had seen that it was no use, that he did not possess in himself the power to move fundamentally or to hold Judy Jones, did he bear any malice toward her. He loved her, and he would love her until the day he was too old for loving — but he could not have her. So he tasted the deep pain that is reserved only for the strong, just as he had tasted for a little while the deep happiness. He was beyond any revulsion or any amusement.

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He went East in February with the intention of selling out his laundries and settling in New York — but the war came to America in March and changed his plans. He was one of those young thousands who greeted the war with a certain amount of relief, welcoming the liberation from webs of tangled emotion. This story is not his biography, remember, although things creep into it which have nothing to do with those dreams he had when he was young. We are almost done with them and with him now.

There is only one more incident to be related here, and it happens seven years farther on. It took place in New York, where he had done well — so well that there were no barriers too high for him. He was thirty-two years old, and, except for one flying trip immediately after the war, he had not been West in seven years.

A man named Devlin from Detroit came into his office to see him in a business way, and then and there this incident occurred, and closed out, so to speak, this particular side of his life. You know — wife of one of my best friends in Detroit came from your city. I was an usher at the wedding. He had heard, of course, that she was married — perhaps deliberately he had heard no more.

He was possessed with a wild notion of rushing out into the streets and taking a train to Detroit. He rose to his feet spasmodically. Not busy at all. Did you say she was — twenty-seven? No, I said she was twenty-seven. He treats her like the devil. She was a pretty girl when she first came to Detroit.

She was a great beauty. Why, I knew her, I knew her. Dexter looked closely at Devlin, thinking wildly that there must be a reason for this, some insensitivity in the man or some private malice. She has nice eyes. A sort of dulness settled down upon Dexter. For the first time in his life he felt like getting very drunk.

He knew that he was laughing loudly at something Devlin had said, but he did not know what it was or why it was funny. When, in a few minutes, Devlin went he lay down on his lounge and looked out the window at the New York sky-line into which the sun was sinking in dull lovely shades of pink and gold. He had thought that having nothing else to lose he was invulnerable at last — but he knew that he had just lost something more, as surely as if he had married Judy Jones and seen her fade away before his eyes.

The dream was gone. Something had been taken from him. And her mouth damp to his kisses and her eyes plaintive with melancholy and her freshness like new fine linen in the morning. Why, these things were no longer in the world! They had existed and they existed no longer. For the first time in years the tears were streaming down his face. But they were for himself now.

He did not care about mouth and eyes and moving hands. He wanted to care, and he could not care. For he had gone away and he could never go back any more. The gates were closed, the sun was gone down, and there was no beauty but the gray beauty of steel that withstands all time. Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of illusion, of youth, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone. That thing will come back no more.

Parts of New Jersey, as you know, are under water, and other parts are under continual surveillance by the authorities. But here and there lie patches of garden country dotted with old-fashioned frame mansions, which have wide shady porches and a red swing on the lawn. And perhaps, on the widest and shadiest of the porches there is even a hammock left over from the hammock days, stirring gently in a mid-Victorian wind.

When tourists come to such last-century landmarks they stop their cars and gaze for a while and then mutter: He drives on to his Elizabethan villa of pressed cardboard or his early Norman meat-market or his medieval Italian pigeon-coop — because this is the twentieth century and Victorian houses are as unfashionable as the works of Mrs. There was this afternoon. She was asleep in it and apparently unaware of the esthetic horrors which surrounded her, the stone statue of Diana, for instance, which grinned idiotically under the sunlight on the lawn.

She slept with her lips closed and her hands clasped behind her head, as it is proper for young girls to sleep. Her name, Amanthis, was as old-fashioned as the house she lived in. I regret to say that her mid-Victorian connections ceased abruptly at this point. Now if this were a moving picture as, of course, I hope it will some day be I would take as many thousand feet of her as I was allowed — then I would move the camera up close and show the yellow down on the back of her neck where her hair stopped and the warm color of her cheeks and arms, because I like to think of her sleeping there, as you yourself might have slept, back in your young days.

Then I would hire a man named Israel Glucose to write some idiotic line of transition, and switch thereby to another scene that was taking place at no particular spot far down the road. In a moving automobile sat a southern gentleman accompanied by his body-servant. He was on his way, after a fashion, to New York but he was somewhat hampered by the fact that the upper and lower portions of his automobile were no longer in exact juxtaposition. In fact from time to time the two riders would dismount, shove the body on to the chassis, corner to corner, and then continue onward, vibrating slightly in involuntary unison with the motor.

Except that it had no door in back the car might have been built early in the mechanical age. As the gentleman and his body-servant were passing the house where Amanthis lay beautifully asleep in the hammock, something happened — the body fell off the car. My only apology for stating this so suddenly is that it happened very suddenly indeed. When the noise had died down and the dust had drifted away master and man arose and inspected the two halves.

They glanced up at the Victorian house. On all sides faintly irregular fields stretched away to a faintly irregular unpopulated horizon. At the exact moment when they reached the porch Amanthis awoke, sat up suddenly and looked them over. The gentleman was young, perhaps twenty-four, and his name was Jim Powell. There were supernumerary buttons upon the coat-sleeves also and Amanthis could not resist a glance to determine whether or not more buttons ran up the side of his trouser leg.

But the trouser bottoms were distinguished only by their shape, which was that of a bell. His vest was cut low, barely restraining an amazing necktie from fluttering in the wind. He bowed formally, dusting his knees with a thatched straw hat. Simultaneously he smiled, half shutting his faded blue eyes and displaying white and beautifully symmetrical teeth. For a moment she laughed uncontrollably. Jim Powell laughed, politely and appreciatively, with her. His body-servant, deep in the throes of colored adolescence, alone preserved a dignified gravity.

At this reference to the finer customs of his native soil the boy Hugo put his hands behind his back and looked darkly and superciliously down the lawn. The tourist waved his hand with a careless gesture as if to indicate the Adirondacks, the Thousand Islands, Newport — but he said:. But I been to Atlanta lots of times. Powell by a circular motion of his finger sped Hugo on the designated mission.

Then he seated himself gingerly in a rocking-chair and began revolving his thatched straw hat rapidly in his hands. I got some money because my aunt she was using it to keep her in a sanitarium and she died. And as Hugo retired he confided to Amanthis: When the sandwiches arrived Mr. He was unaccustomed to white servants and obviously expected an introduction.

She shook her head. Powell noted with embarrassed enthusiasm the particular yellowness of her yellow hair. Color — one hundred percent spontaneous — in the daytime anyhow. To be a New York society girl you have to have a long nose and projecting teeth and dress like the actresses did three years ago. Jim began to tap his foot rhythmically on the porch and in a moment Amanthis discovered that she was unconsciously doing the same thing.

This intense discussion was now interrupted by Hugo who appeared on the steps bearing a hammer and a handful of nails. We may be kin to each other, you see, and us Powells ought to stick together. They were now almost at the gate and the tourist pointed to the two depressing sectors of his automobile. Jim looked at her uncertainly. Such a pretty girl should certainly control the habit of shaking all over upon no provocation at all. Amanthis watched while they placed the upper half of the car upon the lower half and nailed it severely into place.

Powell took the wheel and his body-servant climbed in beside him. Convey my respects to your father. Then with a groan and a rattle Mr.



Powell of southern Georgia with his own car and his own body-servant and his own ambitions and his own private cloud of dust continued on north for the summer. She thought she would never see him again. She lay in her hammock, slim and beautiful, opened her left eye slightly to see June come in and then closed it and retired contentedly back into her dreams.

But one day when the midsummer vines had climbed the precarious sides of the red swing in the lawn, Mr. Jim Powell of Tarleton, Georgia, came vibrating back into her life. They sat on the wide porch as before. But before we got there she made me stop and she got out. Mighty proud lot of people they got up in New York. I got an idea. Further than this he would say nothing. His manner conveyed that she was going to be suspended over a perfect pool of gaiety and violently immersed, to an accompaniment of: Shall I let in a little more excitement, mamm? Three days later a young man wearing a straw hat that might have been cut from the thatched roof of an English cottage rang the doorbell of the enormous and astounding Madison Harlan house at Southampton.

He asked the butler if there were any people in the house between the ages of sixteen and twenty. He was informed that Miss Genevieve Harlan and Mr. Ronald Harlan answered that description and thereupon he handed in a most peculiar card and requested in fetching Georgian that it be brought to their attention.

As a result he was closeted for almost an hour with Mr. It happened to be that of the Clifton Garneaus. Here, as if by magic, the same audience was granted him. He went on — it was a hot day, and men who could not afford to do so were carrying their coats on the public highway, but Jim, a native of southernmost Georgia, was as fresh and cool at the last house as at the first.

He visited ten houses that day. Anyone following him in his course might have taken him to be some curiously gifted book-agent with a much sought-after volume as his stock in trade. There was something in his unexpected demand for the adolescent members of the family which made hardened butlers lose their critical acumen.

As he left each house a close observer might have seen that fascinated eyes followed him to the door and excited voices whispered something which hinted at a future meeting. The second day he visited twelve houses. Southampton has grown enormously — he might have kept on his round for a week and never seen the same butler twice — but it was only the palatial, the amazing houses which intrigued him. On the third day he did a thing that many people have been told to do and few have done — he hired a hall. Perhaps the sixteen-to-twenty-year-old people in the enormous houses had told him to.

It was now abandoned — Mr. Snorkey had given up and gone away and died. We will now skip three weeks during which time we may assume that the project which had to do with hiring a hall and visiting the two dozen largest houses in Southampton got under way.

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The day to which we will skip was the July day on which Mr. James Powell sent a wire to Miss Amanthis Powell saying that if she still aspired to the gaiety of the highest society she should set out for Southampton by the earliest possible train. He himself would meet her at the station. Jim was no longer a man of leisure, so when she failed to arrive at the time her wire had promised he grew restless. He supposed she was coming on a later train, turned to go back to his — his project — and met her entering the station from the street side.

She was quite different from the indolent Amanthis of the porch hammock, he thought. Yes, she would do very well. He was one of my fares. He forgot her, I guess. And he was right worried. What does she do? In my course no lady would be taught to raise a guitar against anybody. My grandfather was a dice. I protect pocketbook as well as person. I teach lots of things. Why, there was one girl she came to me and said she wanted to learn to snap her fingers. She said she never could snap her fingers since she was little.

I gave her two lessons and now Wham! I got it fixed up that you come from very high-tone people down in New Jersey. They were now at the south end of the village and Amanthis saw a row of cars parked in front of a two-story building. The cars were all low, long, rakish and of a brilliant hue.

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Then Amanthis was ascending a narrow stairs to the second story. Here, painted on a door from which came the sounds of music and laughter were the words:. Amanthis found herself in a long, bright room, populated with girls and men of about her own age. The scene presented itself to her at first as a sort of animated afternoon tea but after a moment she began to see, here and there, a motive and a pattern to the proceedings. The students were scattered into groups, sitting, kneeling, standing, but all rapaciously intent on the subjects which engrossed them.

From six young ladies gathered in a ring around some indistinguishable objects came a medley of cries and exclamations — plaintive, pleading, supplicating, exhorting, imploring and lamenting — their voices serving as tenor to an undertone of mysterious clatters. Next to this group, four young men were surrounding an adolescent black, who proved to be none other than Mr. The young men were roaring at Hugo apparently unrelated phrases, expressing a wide gamut of emotion.

Now their voices rose to a sort of clamor, now they spoke softly and gently, with mellow implication. Every little while Hugo would answer them with words of approbation, correction or disapproval. They walked around among the groups. So I can give you only such details as were later reported to me by one of his admiring pupils. During all the discussion of it afterwards no one ever denied that it was an enormous success, and no pupil ever regretted having received its degree — Bachelor of Jazz. The parents innocently assumed that it was a sort of musical and dancing academy, but its real curriculum was transmitted from Santa Barbara to Biddeford Pool by that underground associated press which links up the so-called younger generation.

Invitations to visit Southampton were at a premium — and Southampton generally is almost as dull for young people as Newport. He was making money. His charges were not exorbitant — as a rule his pupils were not particularly flush — but he moved from his boarding-house to the Casino Hotel where he took a suite and had Hugo serve him his breakfast in bed.

Within a week she was known to everyone in the school by her first name. Miss Genevieve Harlan took such a fancy to her that she was invited to a sub-deb dance at the Harlan house — and evidently acquitted herself with tact, for thereafter she was invited to almost every such entertainment in Southampton. Jim saw less of her than he would have liked. Not that her manner toward him changed — she walked with him often in the mornings, she was always willing to listen to his plans — but after she was taken up by the fashionable her evenings seemed to be monopolized. Several times Jim arrived at her boarding-house to find her out of breath, as if she had just come in at a run, presumably from some festivity in which he had no share.

So as the summer waned he found that one thing was lacking to complete the triumph of his enterprise. Despite the hospitality shown to Amanthis, the doors of Southampton were closed to him. Polite to, or rather, fascinated by him as his pupils were from three to five, after that hour they moved in another world.

His was the position of a golf professional who, though he may fraternize, and even command, on the links, loses his privileges with the sun-down. He may look in the club window but he cannot dance. And, likewise, it was not given to Jim to see his teachings put into effect. He could hear the gossip of the morning after — that was all. Perhaps, he thought, there was some real gap which separated him from the rest. Van Vleck was twenty-one, a tutoring-school product who still hoped to enter Yale. Jim had passed these over. He knew that Van Vleck was attending the school chiefly to monopolize the time of little Martha Katzby, who was just sixteen and too young to have attention of a boy of twenty-one — especially the attention of Van Vleck, who was so spiritually exhausted by his educational failures that he drew on the rather exhaustible innocence of sixteen.

It was late in September, two days before the Harlan dance which was to be the last and biggest of the season for this younger crowd. Jim, as usual, was not invited. He had hoped that he would be. The two young Harlans, Ronald and Genevieve, had been his first patrons when he arrived at Southampton — and it was Genevieve who had taken such a fancy to Amanthis.

To have been at their dance — the most magnificent dance of all — would have crowned and justified the success of the waning summer. Hugo, standing beside Jim, chuckled suddenly and remarked:. Jim turned and stared at Van Vleck, who had linked arms with little Martha Katzby and was saying something to her in a low voice. Jim saw her try to draw away. There was an unaccustomed sharpness in his voice and the exercises began with a mutter of facetious protest. With his smoldering grievance directing itself toward Van Vleck, Jim was walking here and there among the groups when Hugo tapped him suddenly on the arm.

Two participants had withdrawn from the mouth organ institute — one of them was Van Vleck and he was giving a drink out of his flask to fifteen-year-old Ronald Harlan. The music died slowly away and there was a sudden drifting over in the direction of the trouble.

An atmosphere of anticipation formed instantly. Despite the fact that they all liked Jim their sympathies were divided — Van Vleck was one of them. Ask him if he wants you to tell him what he can do! Van Vleck did not move. Reaching out suddenly, Jim caught his wrist and jerking it behind his back forced his arm upward until Van Vleck bent forward in agony.

Jim leaned and picked the flask from the floor with his free hand. But no one felt exactly like going on. The spontaneity of the proceedings had been violently disturbed. Someone made a run or two on the sliding guitar and several of the girls began whamming at the leer on the punching bags, but Ronald Harlan, followed by two other boys, got their hats and went silently out the door. Jim and Hugo moved among the groups as usual until a certain measure of routine activity was restored but the enthusiasm was unrecapturable and Jim, shaken and discouraged, considered discontinuing school for the day.

But he dared not. If they went home in this mood they might not come back. The whole thing depended on a mood. He must recreate it, he thought frantically — now, at once! But try as he might, there was little response. He himself was not happy — he could communicate no gaiety to them. They watched his efforts listlessly and, he thought, a little contemptuously. Then the tension snapped when the door burst suddenly open, precipitating a brace of middle-aged and excited women into the room. No person over twenty-one had ever entered the Academy before — but Van Vleck had gone direct to headquarters.

The women were Mrs. Clifton Garneau and Mrs. Poindexter Katzby, two of the most fashionable and, at present, two of the most flurried women in Southampton. They were in search of their daughters as, in these days, so many women continually are. You ghastly, horrible, unspeakable man! I can smell morphin fumes! You have colored girls hidden! Jim was not a little touched when several of them — including even little Martha Katzby, before she was snatched fiercely away by her mother — came up and shook hands with him.

But they were all going, haughtily, regretfully or with shame-faced mutters of apology. And, after all, they were not sorry to go. Outside, the sound of their starting motors, the triumphant put-put of their cut-outs cutting the warm September air, was a jubilant sound — a sound of youth and hopes high as the sun.

Down to the ocean, to roll in the waves and forget — forget him and their discomfort at his humiliation. They were gone — he was alone with Hugo in the room. He sat down suddenly with his face in his hands. Autumn had come early. Jim Powell woke next morning to find his room cool, and the phenomenon of frosted breath in September absorbed him for a moment to the exclusion of the day before.

Then the lines of his face drooped with unhappiness as he remembered the humiliation which had washed the cheery glitter from the summer. There was nothing left for him except to go back where he was known, where under no provocation were such things said to white people as had been said to him here. After breakfast a measure of his customary light-heartedness returned. He was a child of the South — brooding was alien to his nature. He could conjure up an injury only a certain number of times before it faded into the great vacancy of the past.

Usually a few words from Jim were enough to raise him to an inarticulate ecstasy, but this morning there were no words to utter. For two months Hugo had lived on a pinnacle of which he had never dreamed. He had enjoyed his work simply and passionately, arriving before school hours and lingering long after Mr. The day dragged toward a not-too-promising night. Amanthis did not appear and Jim wondered forlornly if she had not changed her mind about dining with him that night.

Perhaps it would be better if she were not seen with them. Jim had lived in state, and he realized that financially he would have nothing to show for the summer after all. When he had finished he took his new dress-suit out of its box and inspected it, running his hand over the satin of the lapels and lining. This, at least, he owned and perhaps in Tarleton somebody would ask him to a party where he could wear it. Some of those boys round the garage down home could of beat it all hollow. He surveyed his purchase with some pride.

He knew that no girl at the Harlan dance would wear anything lovelier than these exotic blossoms that leaned languorously backward against green ferns. She came down wearing a rose-colored evening dress into which the orchids melted like colors into a sunset. At their table, looking out over the dark ocean, his mood became a contended sadness.

They did not dance, and he was glad — it would have reminded him of that other brighter and more radiant dance to which they could not go.

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After dinner they took a taxi and followed the sandy roads for an hour, glimpsing the now starry ocean through the casual trees. She gave the chauffeur a direction and a few minutes later they stopped in front of the heavy Georgian beauty of the Madison Harlan house whence the windows cast their gaiety in bright patches on the lawn. There was laughter inside and the plaintive wind of fashionable horns, and now and again the slow, mysterious shuffle of dancing feet. They walked toward the house, keeping in the shadow of the great trees.

They moved closer till they could see first pompadours, then slicked male heads, and high coiffures and finally even bobbed hair pressed under black ties. They could distinguish chatter below the ceaseless laughter. Two figures appeared on the porch, gulped something quickly from flasks and returned inside. But the music had bewitched Jim Powell.

His eyes were fixed and he moved his feet like a blind man. Pressed in close behind some dark bushes they listened. A breeze from the ocean blew over them and Jim shivered slightly.

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Then, in a wistful whisper:. He held out his arm to her but instead of taking it she stepped suddenly out of the bushes and into a bright patch of light. She seized his arm and though he drew back in a sort of stupefied horror at her boldness she urged him persistently toward the great front door. The great doors swung open and a gentleman stepped out on the porch. In horror Jim recognized Mr. He made a movement as though to break away and run. But the man walked down the steps holding out both hands to Amanthis.

New Jersey was warm, all except the part that was under water, and that mattered only to the fishes. All the tourists who rode through the long green miles stopped their cars in front of a spreading old-fashioned country house and looked at the red swing on the lawn and the wide, shady porch, and sighed and drove on — swerving a little to avoid a jet-black body-servant in the road. A girl with yellow hair and a warm color to her face was lying in the hammock looking as though she could fall asleep any moment.

Near her sat a gentleman in an extraordinarily tight suit. They had come down together the day before from the fashionable resort at Southampton. Harlan had tried to present him with a check. They reached the automobile just as Hugo drove in his last nail. Jim opened a pocket of the door and took from it an unlabeled bottle containing a whitish-yellow liquid. He looked for a moment at her yellow hair and her blue eyes misty with sleep and tears. Then he got into his car and as his foot found the clutch his whole manner underwent a change. The gesture of his straw hat indicated Palm Beach, St.

His body-servant spun the crank, gained his seat and became part of the intense vibration into which the automobile was thrown. It was almost a lullaby, as he said it. Then they were gone down the road in quite a preposterous cloud of dust. Just before they reached the first bend Amanthis saw them come to a full stop, dismount and shove the top part of the car on to the bottom pan.

They took their seats again without looking around. Then the bend — and they were out of sight, leaving only a faint brown mist to show that they had passed. The sidewalks were scratched with brittle leaves, and the bad little boy next door froze his tongue to the iron mail-box. Snow before night, sure.

Then he let himself hurriedly into the house, and shut the subject out into the cold twilight. Roger turned on the hall-light and walked into the living-room and turned on the red silk lamp. He put his bulging portfolio on the table, and sitting down rested his intense young face in his hand for a few minutes, shading his eyes carefully from the light.

Then he lit a cigarette, squashed it out, and going to the foot of the stairs called for his wife. He had trouble every day at this hour in adapting his voice from the urgent key of the city to the proper casualness for a model home. But tonight he was deliberately impatient. They kissed — lingered over it some moments. They had been married three years, and they were much more in love than that implies. It was seldom that they hated each other with that violent hate of which only young couples are capable, for Roger was still actively sensitive to her beauty.

His wife, a bright-coloured, Titian-haired girl, vivid as a French rag doll, followed him into the living room. Her hand, palm upward, was extended towards him. In his impatience it seemed incredible that she should ask for matches, but he fumbled automatically in his pocket. After all, she had done no more than light a cigarette; but when he was in this mood her slightest positive action irritated him beyond measure. She was a Southern girl, and any question that had to do with getting ahead in the world always tended to give her a headache.

He smiled airily as if it were a new game they were going to play. Then, as Gretchen was silent, his smile faded, and he looked at her uncertainly. You do enough work as it is. Somewhat to his annoyance the conversation abruptly ended. Gretchen jumped up and kissed him sketchily and rushed into the kitchen to light the hot water for a bath. With a sigh he carefully deposited his portfolio behind the bookcase — it contained only sketches and layouts for display advertising, but it seemed to him the first thing a burglar would look for. They had no automobile, so George Tompkins called for them at 6.

Tompkins was a successful interior decorator, a broad, rosy man with a handsome moustache and a strong odour of jasmine. He and Roger had once roomed side by side in a boarding-house in New York, but they had met only intermittently in the past five years. Roger stared moodily around the stiff, plain room, wondering if they could have blundered into the kitchen by mistake. I think the movies are atrocious. My opinions on life are drawn from my own observations.

I believe in a balanced life. Would that seem horribly egotistic? Do you take a daily cold bath? A horrified silence fell. Tompkins and Gretchen exchanged a glance as if something obscene had been said. Then a good snappy game of bridge until dinner. Dinner is liable to have something to do with business, but in a pleasant way. Or maybe I sit down with a good book of poetry and spend the evening alone. At any rate, I do something every night to get me out of myself. Let me tell you, every private hospital in New York is full of cases like yours. You just strain the human nervous system a little too far, and bang!

The saddest thing about women is that, after all, their best trick is to sit down and fold their hands. When Tompkins dropped them in front of their house at eleven Roger and Gretchen stood for a moment on the sidewalk looking at the winter moon. There was a fine, damp, dusty snow in the air, and Roger drew a long breath of it and put his arm around Gretchen exultantly. If I could only sleep for forty days. Then he turned around defiantly. From eight until 5. Then a half-hour on the commuting train, where he scrawled notes on the backs of envelopes under the dull yellow light.

At twelve there was always an argument as to whether he would come to bed. He would agree to come after he had cleared up everything; but as he was invariably sidetracked by half a dozen new ideas, he usually found Gretchen sound asleep when he tiptoed upstairs.

Christmas came and went and he scarcely noticed that it was gone. But the world outside his business became a chaotic dream. He was aware that on two cool December Sundays George Tompkins had taken Gretchen horseback riding, and that another time she had gone out with him in his automobile to spend the afternoon skiing on the country-club hill.

A picture of Tompkins, in an expensive frame, had appeared one morning on their bedroom wall. And one night he was shocked into a startled protest when Gretchen went to the theatre with Tompkins in town. But his work was almost done. Daily now his layouts arrived from the printers until seven of them were piled and docketed in his office safe. He knew how good they were.

December tumbled like a dead leaf from the calendar. There was an agonizing week when he had to give up coffee because it made his heart pound so. On Thursday afternoon H. Garrod was to arrive in New York. On Wednesday evening Roger came home at seven to find Gretchen poring over the December bills with a strange expression in her eyes. I love you, Gretchen. Say you love me — quick! The quarrel was averted, but there was an unnatural tenseness all through dinner. It came to a climax afterwards when he began to spread his working materials on the table.

It occurred to him to send them both to the movies, but somehow the suggestion stuck on his lips. He did not want her at the movies; he wanted her here, where he could look up and know she was by his side. We can stand so much, and then — bang! When Roger had spread out his materials on the bed upstairs he found that he could still hear the rumble and murmur of their voices through the thin floor. He began wondering what they found to talk about.

As he plunged deeper into his work his mind had a tendency to revert sharply to his question, and several times he arose and paced nervously up and down the room. The bed was ill adapted to his work. Several times the paper slipped from the board on which it rested, and the pencil punched through.

Everything was wrong tonight. Letters and figures blurred before his eyes, and as an accompaniment to the beating of his temples came those persistent murmuring voices. At ten he realized that he had done nothing for more than an hour, and with a sudden exclamation he gathered together his papers, replaced them in his portfolio, and went downstairs. They were sitting together on the sofa when he came in. She got up from the sofa, and very deliberately looked at her flushed, tear-stained face in the mirror.

Then she ran upstairs and slammed herself into the bedroom. Automatically Roger spread out his work on the living-room table. The bright colours of the designs, the vivid ladies — Gretchen had posed for one of them — holding orange ginger ale or glistening silk hosiery, dazzled his mind into a sort of coma. His restless crayon moved here and there over the pictures, shifting a block of letters half an inch to the right, trying a dozen blues for a cool blue, and eliminating the word that made a phrase anaemic and pale.

Half an hour passed — he was deep in the work now; there was no sound in the room but the velvety scratch of the crayon over the glossy board. After a long while he looked at his watch — it was after three. The wind had come up outside and was rushing by the house corners in loud, alarming swoops, like a heavy body falling through space. He stopped his work and listened. He put his hands to his head and felt it all over.

It seemed to him that on his temple the veins were knotty and brittle around an old scar. Suddenly he began to be afraid. A hundred warnings he had heard swept into his mind. People did wreck themselves with overwork, and his body and brain were of the same vulnerable and perishable stuff. He arose and began pacing the room in a panic. He rubbed his hand over his eyes, and returned to the table to put up his work, but his fingers were shaking so that he could scarcely grasp the board.

The sway of a bare branch against the window made him start and cry out. He sat down on the sofa and tried to think. Why, there was the wolf at the door now! He could hear its sharp claws scrape along the varnished woodwork. He jumped up, and running to the front door flung it open; then started back with a ghastly cry. An enormous wolf was standing on the porch, glaring at him with red, malignant eyes. As he watched it the hair bristled on its neck; it gave a low growl and disappeared in the darkness. Then Roger realized with a silent, mirthless laugh that it was the police dog from over the way.

Dragging his limbs wearily into the kitchen, he brought the alarm-clock into the living-room and set it for seven. Then he wrapped himself in his overcoat, lay down on the sofa and fell immediately into a heavy, dreamless sleep. When he awoke the light was still shining feebly, but the room was the grey colour of a winter morning. He got up, and looking anxiously at his hands found to his relief that they no longer trembled. He felt much better. Then he began to remember in detail the events of the night before, and his brow drew up again in three shallow wrinkles.

There was work ahead of him, twenty-four hours of work; and Gretchen, whether she wanted to or not, must sleep for one more day. The general housework girl had just arrived and was taking off her hat. For he set it down on the dining room table and put into the coffee half a teaspoonful of a white substance that was not powdered sugar.

Then he mounted the stairs and opened the door of the bedroom. Gretchen woke up with a start, glanced at the twin bed which had not been slept in, and bent on Roger a glance of astonishment, which changed to contempt when she saw the breakfast in his hand. She thought he was bringing it as a capitulation. Roger discreetly deposited the tray on a table beside the bed and returned quickly to the kitchen. So you just put on your hat and go home. He looked at his watch. It was ten minutes to eight, and he wanted to catch the 8. She was sound asleep. The coffee cup was empty save for black dregs and a film of thin brown paste on the bottom.

He looked at her rather anxiously, but her breathing was regular and clear. From the closet he took a suitcase and very quickly began filling it with her shoes — street shoes, evening slippers, rubber-soled oxfords — he had not realized that she owned so many pairs. When he closed the suitcase it was bulging.

He hesitated a minute, took a pair of sewing scissors from a box, and following the telephone-wire until it went out of sight behind the dresser, severed it in one neat clip. He jumped as there was a soft knock at the door. It was the nursemaid. He had forgotten her existence. Back in the room, a wave of pity passed over him. Gretchen seemed suddenly lovely and helpless, sleeping there. It was somehow terrible to rob her young life of a day. He touched her hair with his fingers, and as she murmured something in her dream he leaned over and kissed her bright cheek. Then he picked up the suitcase full of shoes, locked the door, and ran briskly down the stairs.

Garrod at the Biltmore Hotel. He was to give a decision next morning. Mr Golden came directly to the point. If Mr Halsey intended to keep the office any longer, the little oversight about the rent had better be remedied right away. Mr Golden looked at the tenant uneasily. Young men sometimes did away with themselves when business went wrong. Then his eye fell unpleasantly on the initialled suitcase beside the desk. Well, Mr Halsey, just to prove that you mean what you say, suppose you let me keep that suitcase until tomorrow noon.

He slept in the office that night on a sofa beside his desk. It was then 6. When his two artists arrived he was stretched on the couch in almost physical pain. The phone rang imperatively at 9. We want all of it and as much more as your office can do. But he was talking to nobody. The phone had clattered to the floor, and Roger, stretched full length on the couch, was sobbing as if his heart would break. At the sound of his footsteps she started awake.

Then, after a pause: This account alone will bring us in forty thousand a year. With a bewildered look on her face she got out of bed and began searching for her clothes. Roger went into the bathroom to shave. A minute later he heard the springs creak again. Gretchen was getting back into bed. First that newspaper, and now all my shoes. Take care of me, Roger. He worked pretty hard at it, you know.

Memorable Stories With A Message

Roger turned away quickly to conceal his smile — winked forty times, or almost forty times, at the autographed picture of Mr George Tompkins, which hung slightly askew on the bedroom wall. There was once a priest with cold, watery eyes, who, in the still of the night, wept cold tears.

He wept because the afternoons were warm and long, and he was unable to attain a complete mystical union with our Lord. He passed that way when he returned from hearing confessions on Saturday nights, and he grew careful to walk on the other side of the street so that the smell of the soap would float upward before it reached his nostrils as it drifted, rather like incense, toward the summer moon.

From his window, as far as he could see, the Dakota wheat thronged the valley of the Red River. The wheat was terrible to look upon and the carpet pattern to which in agony he bent his eyes sent his thought brooding through grotesque labyrinths, open always to the unavoidable sun. One afternoon when he had reached the point where the mind runs down like an old clock, his housekeeper brought into his study a beautiful, intense little boy of eleven named Rudolph Miller.

The little boy sat down in a patch of sunshine, and the priest, at his walnut desk, pretended to be very busy. This was to conceal his relief that some one had come into his haunted room. Presently he turned around and found himself staring into two enormous, staccato eyes, lit with gleaming points of cobalt light. For a moment their expression startled him — then he saw that his visitor was in a state of abject fear. The boy — Father Schwartz recognized him now as the son of a parishioner, Mr.

Miller, the freight-agent — moved his hand reluctantly off his mouth and became articulate in a despairing whisper. The little boy shook his head miserably. Father Schwartz cleared his throat so that he could make his voice soft and say some quiet, kind thing. In this moment he should forget his own agony, and try to act like God. He repeated to himself a devotional phrase, hoping that in return God would help him to act correctly.

The little boy looked at him through his tears, and was reassured by the impression of moral resiliency which the distraught priest had created. Abandoning as much of himself as he was able to this man, Rudolph Miller began to tell his story. And he yelled after me: Behind the curtain an immortal soul was alone with God and the Reverend Adolphus Schwartz, priest of the parish.

Sound began, a labored whispering, sibilant and discreet, broken at intervals by the voice of the priest in audible question. Rudolph Miller knelt in the pew beside the confessional and waited, straining nervously to hear, and yet not to hear what was being said within. The fact that the priest was audible alarmed him. His own turn came next, and the three or four others who waited might listen unscrupulously while he admitted his violations of the Sixth and Ninth Commandments. In comparison he relished the less shameful fallings away — they formed a grayish background which relieved the ebony mark of sexual offenses upon his soul.

He had been covering his ears with his hands, hoping that his refusal to hear would be noticed, and a like courtesy rendered to him in turn, when a sharp movement of the penitent in the confessional made him sink his face precipitately into the crook of his elbow.

Fear assumed solid form, and pressed out a lodging between his heart and his lungs. He must try now with all his might to be sorry for his sins — not because he was afraid, but because he had offended God. He must convince God that he was sorry and to do so he must first convince himself. After a tense emotional struggle he achieved a tremulous self-pity, and decided that he was now ready. If, by allowing no other thought to enter his head, he could preserve this state of emotion unimpaired until he went into that large coffin set on end, he would have survived another crisis in his religious life.

For some time, however, a demoniac notion had partially possessed him. He could go home now, before his turn came, and tell his mother that he had arrived too late, and found the priest gone. This, unfortunately, involved the risk of being caught in a lie. As an alternative he could say that he had gone to confession, but this meant that he must avoid communion next day, for communion taken upon an uncleansed soul would turn to poison in his mouth, and he would crumple limp and damned from the altar-rail.

The words blurred to a husky mumble, and Rudolph got excitedly to his feet. He felt that it was impossible for him to go to confession this afternoon. Then from the confessional came a tap, a creak, and a sustained rustle. The slide had fallen and the plush curtain trembled. Temptation had come to him too late. I confess to Almighty God and to you, Father, that I have sinned.

Since my last confession it has been one month and three days. I accuse myself of — taking the Name of the Lord in vain.