of the house one of the boards over a
window had been broken and a bird had flown in and become imprisoned.

The presence of the woman frightened the bird. It flew wildly about.
Its beating wings stirred up dust that danced in the air. Elsie stood
perfectly still, also frightened, not by the presence of the bird but
by the presence of life. Like the bird she was a prisoner. The thought
gripped her. She wanted to go outdoors where her niece Elizabeth walked
with the young ploughman through the corn, but was like the bird in the
room--a prisoner. She moved restlessly about. The bird flew back and
forth across the room. It alighted on the window sill near the place
where the board was broken away. She stared into the frightened eyes of
the bird that in turn stared into her eyes. Then the bird flew away,
out through the window, and Elsie turned and ran nervously downstairs
and out into the yard. She climbed over the wire fence and ran with
stooped shoulders along one of the tunnels.

Elsie ran into the vastness of the cornfields filled with but one
desire. She wanted to get out of her life and into some new and sweeter
life she felt must be hidden away somewhere in the fields. After she
had run a long way she came to a wire fence and crawled over. Her hair
became unloosed and fell down over her shoulders. Her cheeks became
flushed and for the moment she looked like a young girl. When she
climbed over the fence she tore a great hole in the front of her dress.
For a moment her tiny breasts were exposed and then her hand clutched
and held nervously the sides of the tear. In the distance she could
hear the voices of the boys and the barking of the dogs. A summer storm
had been threatening for days and now black clouds had begun to spread
themselves over the sky. As she ran nervously forward, stopping to
listen and then running on again, the dry corn blades brushed against
her shoulders and a fine shower of yellow dust from the corn tassels
fell on her hair. A continued crackling noise accompanied her progress.
The dust made a golden crown about her head. From the sky overhead a
low rumbling sound, like the growling of giant dogs, came to her ears.

The thought that having at last ventured into the corn she would never
escape became fixed in the mind of the running woman. Sharp pains shot
through her body. Presently she was compelled to stop and sit on the
ground. For a long time she sat with closed eyes. Her dress became
soiled. Little insects that live in the ground under the corn came out
of their holes and crawled over her legs.

Following some obscure impulse the tired woman threw herself on her
back and lay still with closed eyes. Her fright passed. It was warm and
close in the room-like tunnels. The pain in her side went away. She
opened her eyes and between the wide green corn blades could see
patches of a black threatening sky. She did not want to be alarmed and
so closed her eyes again. Her thin hand no longer gripped the tear in
her dress and her little breasts were exposed. They expanded and
contracted in spasmodic jerks. She threw her hands back over her head
and lay still.

It seemed to Elsie that hours passed as she lay thus, quiet and passive
under the corn. Deep within her there was a feeling that something was
about to happen, something that would lift her out of herself, that
would tear her away from her past and the past of her people. Her
thoughts were not definite. She lay still and waited as she had waited
for days and months by the rock at the back of the orchard on the
Vermont farm when she was a girl. A deep grumbling noise went on in the
sky overhead but the sky and everything she had ever known seemed very
far away, no part of herself.

After a long silence, when it seemed to her that she had gone out of
herself as in a dream, Elsie heard a man's voice calling. "Aho, aho,
aho," shouted the voice and after another period of silence there arose
answering voices and then the sound of bodies crashing through the corn
and the excited chatter of children. A dog came running along the row
where she lay and stood beside her. His cold nose touched her face and
she sat up. The dog ran away. The Leander boys passed. She could see
their bare legs flashing in and out across one of the tunnels. Her
brother had become alarmed by the rapid approach of the thunder storm
and wanted to get his family to town. His voice kept calling from the
house and the voices of the children answered from the fields.

Elsie sat on the ground with her hands pressed together. An odd feeling
of disappointment had possession of her. She arose and walked slowly
along in the general direction taken by the children. She came to a
fence and crawled over, tearing her dress in a new place. One of her
stockings had become unloosed and had slipped down over her shoe top.
The long sharp weeds had scratched her leg so that it was criss-crossed
with red lines, but she was not conscious of any pain.

The distraught woman followed the children until she came within sight
of her father's house and then stopped and again sat on the ground.
There was another loud crash of thunder and Tom Leander's voice called
again, this time half angrily. The name of the girl Elizabeth was
shouted in loud masculine tones that rolled and echoed like the thunder
along the aisles under the corn.

And then Elizabeth came into sight accompanied by the young ploughman.
They stopped near Elsie and the man took the girl into his arms. At the
sound of their approach Elsie had thrown herself face downward on the
ground and had twisted herself into a position where she could see
without being seen. When their lips met her tense hands grasped one of
the corn stalks. Her lips pressed themselves into the dust. When they
had gone on their way she raised her head. A dusty powder covered her
lips.

What seemed another long period of silence fell over the fields. The
murmuring voices of unborn children, her imagination had created in the
whispering fields, became a vast shout. The wind blew harder and
harder. The corn stalks were twisted and bent. Elizabeth went
thoughtfully out of the field and climbing the fence confronted her
father. "Where you been? What you been a doing?" he asked. "Don't you
think we got to get out of here?"

When Elizabeth went toward the house Elsie followed, creeping on her
hands and knees like a little animal, and when she had come within
sight of the fence surrounding the house she sat on the ground and put
her hands over her face. Something within herself was being twisted and
whirled about as the tops of the corn stalks were now being twisted and
whirled by the wind. She sat so that she did not look toward the house
and when she opened her eyes she could again see along the long
mysterious aisles.

Her brother with his wife and children went away. By turning her head
Elsie could see them driving at a trot out of the yard back of her
father's house. With the going of the younger woman the farm house in
the midst of the cornfield rocked by the winds seemed the most desolate
place in the world.

Her mother came out at the back door of the house. She ran to the steps
where she knew her daughter was in the habit of sitting and then in
alarm began to call. It did not occur to Elsie to answer. The voice of
the older woman did not seem to have anything to do with herself. It
was a thin voice and was quickly lost in the wind and in the crashing
sound that arose out of the fields. With her head turned toward the
house Elsie stared at her mother who ran wildly around the house and
then went indoors. The back door of the house went shut with a bang.

The storm that had been threatening broke with a roar. Broad sheets of
water swept over the cornfields. Sheets of water swept over the woman's
body. The storm that had for years been gathering in her also broke.
Sobs arose out of her throat. She abandoned herself to a storm of grief
that was only partially grief. Tears ran out of her eyes and made
little furrows through the dust on her face. In the lulls that
occasionally came in the storm she raised her head and heard, through
the tangled mass of wet hair that covered her ears and above the sound
of millions of rain-drops that alighted on the earthen floor inside the
house of the corn, the thin voices of her mother and father calling to
her out of the Leander house.




        WAR


The story came to me from a woman met on a train. The car was crowded
and I took the seat beside her. There was a man in the offing who
belonged with her--a slender girlish figure of a man in a heavy brown
canvas coat such as teamsters wear in the winter. He moved up and down
in the aisle of the car, wanting my place by the woman's side, but I
did not know that at the time.

The woman had a heavy face and a thick nose. Something had happened to
her. She had been struck a blow or had a fall. Nature could never have
made a nose so broad and thick and ugly. She had talked to me in very
good English. I suspect now that she was temporarily weary of the man
in the brown canvas coat, that she had travelled with him for days,
perhaps weeks, and was glad of the chance to spend a few hours in the
company of some one else.

Everyone knows the feeling of a crowded train in the middle of the
night. We ran along through western Iowa and eastern Nebraska. It had
rained for days and the fields were flooded. In the clear night the
moon came out and the scene outside the car-window was strange and in
an odd way very beautiful.

You get the feeling: the black bare trees standing up in clusters as
they do out in that country, the pools of water with the moon reflected
and running quickly as it does when the train hurries along, the rattle
of the car-trucks, the lights in isolated farm-houses, and occasionally
the clustered lights of a town as the train rushed through it into the
west.

The woman had just come out of war-ridden Poland, had got out of that
stricken land with her lover by God knows what miracles of effort. She
made me feel the war, that woman did, and she told me the tale that I
want to tell you.

I do not remember the beginning of our talk, nor can I tell you of how
the strangeness of my mood grew to match her mood until the story she
told became a part of the mystery of the still night outside the car-
window and very pregnant with meaning to me.

There was a company of Polish refugees moving along a road in Poland in
charge of a German. The German was a man of perhaps fifty, with a
beard. As I got him, he was much such a man as might be professor of
foreign languages in a college in our country, say at Des Moines, Iowa,
or Springfield, Ohio. He would be sturdy and strong of body and given
to the eating of rather rank foods, as such men are. Also he would be a
fellow of books and in his thinking inclined toward the ranker
philosophies. He was dragged into the war because he was a German, and
he had steeped his soul in the German philosophy of might. Faintly, I
fancy, there was another notion in his head that kept bothering him,
and so to serve his government with a whole heart he read books that
would re-establish his feeling for the strong, terrible thing for which
he fought. Because he was past fifty he was not on the battle line, but
was in charge of the refugees, taking them out of their destroyed
village to a camp near a railroad where they could be fed.

The refugees were peasants, all except the woman in the American train
with me, her lover and her mother, an old woman of sixty-five. They had
been small landowners and the others in their party had worked on their
estate.

Along a country road in Poland went this party in charge of the German
who tramped heavily along, urging them forward. He was brutal in his
insistence, and the old woman of sixty-five, who was a kind of leader
of the refugees, was almost equally brutal in her constant refusal to
go forward. In the rainy night she stopped in the muddy road and her
party gathered about her. Like a stubborn horse she shook her head and
muttered Polish words. "I want to be let alone, that's what I want. All
I want in the world is to be let alone," she said, over and over; and
then the German came up and putting his hand on her back pushed her
along, so that their progress through the dismal night was a constant
repetition of the stopping, her muttered words, and his pushing. They
hated each other with whole-hearted hatred, that old Polish woman and
the German.

The party came to a clump of trees on the bank of a shallow stream and
the German took hold of the old woman's arm and dragged her through the
stream while the others followed. Over and over she said the words: "I
want to be let alone. All I want in the world is to be let alone."

In the clump of trees the German started a fire. With incredible
efficiency he had it blazing high in a few minutes, taking the matches
and even some bits of dry wood from a little rubber-lined pouch carried
in his inside coat pocket. Then he got out tobacco and, sitting down on
the protruding root of a tree, smoked and stared at the refugees,
clustered about the old woman on the opposite side of the fire.

The German went to sleep. That was what started his trouble. He slept
for an hour and when he awoke the refugees were gone. You can imagine
him jumping up and tramping heavily back through the shallow stream and
along the muddy road to gather his party together again. He would be
angry through and through, but he would not be alarmed. It was only a
matter, he knew, of going far enough back along the road as one goes
back along a road for strayed cattle.

And then, when the German came up to the party, he and the old woman
began to fight. She stopped muttering the words about being let alone
and sprang at him. One of her old hands gripped his beard and the other
buried itself in the thick skin of his neck.

The struggle in the road lasted a long time. The German was tired and
not as strong as he looked, and there was that faint thing in him that
kept him from hitting the old woman with his fist. He took hold of her
thin shoulders and pushed, and she pulled. The struggle was like a man
trying to lift himself by his boot straps. The two fought and were full
of the determination that will not stop fighting, but they were not
very strong physically.

And so their two souls began to struggle. The woman in the train made
me understand that quite clearly, although it may be difficult to get
the sense of it over to you. I had the night and the mystery of the
moving train to help me. It was a physical thing, the fight of the two
souls in the dim light of the rainy night on that deserted muddy road.
The air was full of the struggle and the refugees gathered about and
stood shivering. They shivered with cold and weariness, of course, but
also with something else. In the air everywhere about them they could
feel the vague something going on. The woman said that she would gladly
have given her life to have it stopped, or to have someone strike a
light, and that her man felt the same way. It was like two winds
struggling, she said, like a soft yielding cloud become hard and trying
vainly to push another cloud out of the sky.

Then the struggle ended and the old woman and the German fell down
exhausted in the road. The refugees gathered about and waited. They
thought something more was going to happen, knew in fact something more
would happen. The feeling they had persisted, you see, and they huddled
together and perhaps whimpered a little.

What happened is the whole point of the story. The woman in the train
explained it very clearly. She said that the two souls, after
struggling, went back into the two bodies, but that the soul of the old
woman went into the body of the German and the soul of the German into
the body of the old woman.

After that, of course, everything was quite simple. The German sat down
by the road and began shaking his head and saying he wanted to be let
alone, declared that all he wanted in the world was to be let alone,
and the Polish woman took papers out of his pocket and began driving
her companions back along the road, driving them harshly and brutally
along, and when they grew weary pushing them with her hands.

There was more of the story after that. The woman's lover, who had been
a school-teacher, took the papers and got out of the country, taking
his sweetheart with him. But my mind has forgotten the details. I only
remember the German sitting by the road and muttering that he wanted to
be let alone, and the old tired mother-in-Poland saying the harsh words
and forcing her weary companions to march through the night back into
their own country.




        MOTHERHOOD


Below the hill there was a swamp in which cattails grew. The wind
rustled the dry leaves of a walnut tree that grew on top of the hill.

She went beyond the tree to where the grass was long and matted. In the
farmhouse a door bangs and in the road before the house a dog barked.

For a long time there was no sound. Then a wagon came jolting and
bumping over the frozen road. The little noises ran along the ground to
where she was lying on the grass and seemed like fingers playing over
her body. A fragrance arose from her. It took a long time for the wagon
to pass.

Then another sound broke the stillness. A young man from a neighboring
farm came stealthily across a field and climbed a fence. He also came
to the hill but for a time did not see her lying almost at his feet. He
looked toward the house and stood with hands in pockets, stamping on
the frozen ground like a horse.

Then he knew she was there. The aroma of her crept into his
consciousness.

He ran to kneel beside her silent figure. Everything was different than
it had been when they crept to the hill on the other evenings. The time
of talking and waiting was over. She was different. He grew bold and
put his hands on her face, her neck, her breasts, her hips. There was a
strange new firmness and hardness to her body. When he kissed her lips
she did not move and for a moment he was afraid. Then courage came and
he went down to lie with her.

He had been a farm boy all his life and had plowed many acres of rich
black land.

He became sure of himself.

He plowed her deeply.

He planted the seeds of a son in the warm rich quivering soil.

       *       *       *       *       *

She carried the seeds of a son within herself. On winter evenings she
went along a path at the foot of a small hill and turned up the hill to
a barn where she milked cows. She was large and strong. Her legs went
swinging along. The son within her went swinging along.

He learned the rhythm of little hills.

He learned the rhythm of flat places.

He learned the rhythm of legs walking.

He learned the rhythm of firm strong hands pulling at the teats of
cows.

       *       *       *        *       *

There was a field that was barren and filled with stones. In the spring
when the warm nights came and when she was big with him she went to the
fields. The heads of little stones stuck out of the ground like the
heads of buried children. The field, washed with moonlight, sloped
gradually downward to a murmuring brook. A few sheep went among the
stones nibbling the sparse grass.

A thousand children were buried in the barren field. They struggled to
come out of the ground. They struggled to come to her. The brook ran
over stones and its voice cried out. For a long time she stayed in the
field, shaken with sorrow.

She arose from her seat on a large stone and went to the farmhouse. The
voices of the darkness cried to her as she went along a lane and past a
silent barn.

Within herself only the one child struggled. When she got into bed his
heels beat upon the walls of his prison. She lay still and listened.
Only one small voice seemed coming to her out of the silence of the
night.




        OUT OF NOWHERE INTO NOTHING.


        I

Rosalind Wescott, a tall strong looking woman of twenty-seven, was
walking on the railroad track near the town of Willow Springs, Iowa. It
was about four in the afternoon of a day in August, and the third day
since she had come home to her native town from Chicago, where she was
employed.

At that time Willow Springs was a town of about three thousand people.
It has grown since. There was a public square with the town hall in the
centre and about the four sides of the square and facing it were the
merchandising establishments. The public square was bare and grassless,
and out of it ran streets of frame houses, long straight streets that
finally became country roads running away into the flat prairie
country.

Although she had told everyone that she had merely come home for a
short visit because she was a little homesick, and although she wanted
in particular to have a talk with her mother in regard to a certain
matter, Rosalind had been unable to talk with anyone. Indeed she had
found it difficult to stay in the house with her mother and father and
all the time, day and night, she was haunted by a desire to get out of
town. As she went along the railroad tracks in the hot afternoon
sunshine she kept scolding herself. "I've grown moody and no good. If I
want to do it why don't I just go ahead and not make a fuss," she
thought.

For two miles the railroad tracks, eastward out of Willow Springs, went
through corn fields on a flat plain. Then there was a little dip in the
land and a bridge over Willow Creek. The Creek was altogether dry now
but trees grew along the edge of the grey streak of cracked mud that in
the fall, winter and spring would be the bed of the stream. Rosalind
left the tracks and went to sit under one of the trees. Her cheeks were
flushed and her forehead wet. When she took off her hat her hair fell
down in disorder and strands of it clung to her hot wet face. She sat
in what seemed a kind of great bowl on the sides of which the corn grew
rank. Before her and following the bed of the stream there was a dusty
path along which cows came at evening from distant pastures. A great
pancake formed of cow dung lay nearby. It was covered with grey dust
and over it crawled shiny black beetles. They were rolling the dung
into balls in preparation for the germination of a new generation of
beetles.

Rosalind had come on the visit to her home town at a time of the year
when everyone wished to escape from the hot dusty place. No one had
expected her and she had not written to announce her coming. One hot
morning in Chicago she had got out of bed and had suddenly begun
packing her bag, and on that same evening there she was in Willow
Springs, in the house where she had lived until her twenty-first year,
among her own people. She had come up from the station in the hotel bus
and had walked into the Wescott house unannounced. Her father was at
the pump by the kitchen door and her mother came into the living room
to greet her wearing a soiled kitchen apron. Everything in the house
was just as it always had been. "I just thought I would come home for a
few days," she said, putting down her bag and kissing her mother.

Ma and Pa Wescott had been glad to see their daughter. On the evening
of her arrival they were excited and a special supper was prepared.
After supper Pa Wescott went up town as usual, but he stayed only a few
minutes. "I just want to run to the postoffice and get the evening
paper," he said apologetically. Rosalind's mother put on a clean dress
and they all sat in the darkness on the front porch. There was talk, of
a kind. "Is it hot in Chicago now? I'm going to do a good deal of
canning this fall. I thought later I would send you a box of canned
fruit. Do you live in the same place on the North Side? It must be nice
in the evening to be able to walk down to the park by the lake."

       *       *       *       *       *

Rosalind sat under the tree near the railroad bridge two miles from
Willow Springs and watched the tumble bugs at work. Her whole body was
hot from the walk in the sun and the thin dress she wore clung to her
legs. It was being soiled by the dust on the grass under the tree.

She had run away from town and from her mother's house. All during the
three days of her visit she had been doing that. She did not go from
house to house to visit her old schoolgirl friends, the girls who
unlike herself had stayed in Willow Springs, had got married and
settled down there. When she saw one of these women on the street in
the morning, pushing a baby carriage and perhaps followed by a small
child, she stopped. There was a few minutes of talk. "It's hot. Do you
live in the same place in Chicago? My husband and I hope to take the
children and go away for a week or two. It must be nice in Chicago
where you are so near the lake." Rosalind hurried away.

All the hours of her visit to her mother and to her home town had been
spent in an effort to hurry away.

From what? Rosalind defended herself. There was something she had come
from Chicago hoping to be able to say to her mother. Did she really
want to talk with her about things? Had she thought, by again breathing
the air of her home town, to get strength to face life and its
difficulties?

There was no point in her taking the hot uncomfortable trip from
Chicago only to spend her days walking in dusty country roads or
between rows of cornfields in the stifling heat along the railroad
tracks.

"I must have hoped. There is a hope that cannot be fulfilled," she
thought vaguely.

Willow Springs was a rather meaningless, dreary town, one of thousands
of such towns in Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Kansas, Iowa, but her
mind made it more dreary.

She sat under the tree by the dry bed of Willow Creek thinking of the
street in town where her mother and father lived, where she had lived
until she had become a woman. It was only because of a series of
circumstances she did not live there now. Her one brother, ten years
older than herself, had married and moved to Chicago. He had asked her
to come for a visit and after she got to the city she stayed. Her
brother was a traveling salesman and spent a good deal of time away
from home. "Why don't you stay here with Bess and learn stenography,"
he asked. "If you don't want to use it you don't have to. Dad can look
out for you all right. I just thought you might like to learn."

       *       *       *       *       *

"That was six years ago," Rosalind thought wearily. "I've been a city
woman for six years." Her mind hopped about. Thoughts came and went. In
the city, after she became a stenographer, something for a time
awakened her. She wanted to be an actress and went in the evening to a
dramatic school. In an office where she worked there was a young man, a
clerk. They went out together, to the theatre or to walk in the park in
the evening. They kissed.

Her thoughts came sharply back to her mother and father, to her home in
Willow Springs, to the street in which she had lived until her twenty-
first year.

It was but an end of a street. From the windows at the front of her
mother's house six other houses could be seen. How well she knew the
street and the people in the houses! Did she know them? From her
eighteenth and until her twenty-first year she had stayed at home,
helping her mother with the housework, waiting for something. Other
young women in town waited just as she did. They like herself had
graduated from the town high school and their parents had no intention
of sending them away to college. There was nothing to do but wait. Some
of the young women--their mothers and their mothers' friends still
spoke of them as girls--had young men friends who came to see them on
Sunday and perhaps also on Wednesday or Thursday evenings. Others
joined the church, went to prayer meetings, became active members of
some church organization. They fussed about.

Rosalind had done none of these things. All through those three trying
years in Willow Springs she had just waited. In the morning there was
the work to do in the house and then, in some way, the day wore itself
away. In the evening her father went up town and she sat with her
mother. Nothing much was said. After she had gone to bed she lay awake,
strangely nervous, eager for something to happen that never would
happen. The noises of the Wescott house cut across her thoughts. What
things went through her mind!

There was a procession of people always going away from her. Sometimes
she lay on her belly at the edge of a ravine. Well it was not a ravine.
It had two walls of marble and on the marble face of the walls strange
figures were carved. Broad steps led down--always down and away. People
walked along the steps, between the marble walls, going down and away
from her.

What people! Who were they? Where did they come from? Where were they
going? She was not asleep but wide awake. Her bedroom was dark. The
walls and ceiling of the room receded. She seemed to hang suspended in
space, above the ravine--the ravine with walls of white marble over
which strange beautiful lights played.

The people who went down the broad steps and away into infinite
distance--they were men and women. Sometime a young girl like herself
but in some way sweeter and purer than herself, passed alone. The young
girl walked with a swinging stride, going swiftly and freely like a
beautiful young animal. Her legs and arms were like the slender top
branches of trees swaying in a gentle wind. She also went down and
away.

Others followed along the marble steps. Young boys walked alone. A
dignified old man followed by a sweet faced woman passed. What a
remarkable man! One felt infinite power in his old frame. There were
deep wrinkles in his face and his eyes were sad. One felt he knew
everything about life but had kept something very precious alive in
himself. It was that precious thing that made the eyes of the woman who
followed him burn with a strange fire. They also went down along the
steps and away.

Down and away along the steps went others--how many others, men and
women, boys and girls, single old men, old women who leaned on sticks
and hobbled along.

In the bed in her father's house as she lay awake Rosalind's head grew
light. She tried to clutch at something, understand something.

She couldn't. The noises of the house cut across her waking dream. Her
father was at the pump by the kitchen door. He was pumping a pail of
water. In a moment he would bring it into the house and put it on a box
by the kitchen sink. A little of the water would slop over on the
floor. There would be a sound like a child's bare foot striking the
floor. Then her father would go to wind the clock. The day was done.
Presently there would be the sound of his heavy feet on the floor of
the bedroom above and he would get into bed to lie beside Rosalind's
mother.

The night noises of her father's house had been in some way terrible to
the girl in the years when she was becoming a woman. After chance had
taken her to the city she never wanted to think of them again. Even in
Chicago where the silence of nights was cut and slashed by a thousand
noises, by automobiles whirling through the streets, by the belated
footsteps of men homeward bound along the cement sidewalks after
midnight, by the shouts of quarreling men drunk on summer nights, even
in the great hubbub of noises there was comparative quiet. The
insistent clanging noises of the city nights were not like the homely
insistent noises of her father's house. Certain terrible truths about
life did not abide in them, they did not cling so closely to life and
did not frighten as did the noises in the one house on the quiet street
in the town of Willow Springs. How often, there in the city, in the
midst of the great noises she had fought to escape the little noises!
Her father's feet were on the steps leading into the kitchen. Now he
was putting the pail of water on the box by the kitchen sink. Upstairs
her mother's body fell heavily into bed. The visions of the great
marble-lined ravine down along which went the beautiful people flew
away. There was the little slap of water on the kitchen floor. It was
like a child's bare foot striking the floor. Rosalind wanted to cry
out. Her father closed the kitchen door. Now he was winding the clock.
In a moment his feet would be on the stairs--

There were six houses to be seen from the windows of the Wescott house.
In the winter smoke from six brick chimneys went up into the sky. There
was one house, the next one to the Wescott's place, a small frame
affair, in which lived a man who was thirty-five years old when
Rosalind became a woman of twenty-one and went away to the city. The
man was unmarried and his mother, who had been his housekeeper, had
died during the year in which Rosalind graduated from the high school.
After that the man lived alone. He took his dinner and supper at the
hotel, down town on the square, but he got his own breakfast, made his
own bed and swept out his own house. Sometimes he walked slowly along
the street past the Wescott house when Rosalind sat alone on the front
porch. He raised his hat and spoke to her. Their eyes met. He had a
long, hawk-like nose and his hair was long and uncombed.

Rosalind thought about him sometimes. It bothered her a little that he
sometimes went stealing softly, as though not to disturb her, across
her daytime fancies.

As she sat that day by the dry creek bed Rosalind thought about the
bachelor, who had now passed the age of forty and who lived on the
street where she had lived during her girlhood. His house was separated
from the Wescott house by a picket fence. Sometimes in the morning he
forgot to pull his blinds and Rosalind, busy with the housework in her
father's house, had seen him walking about in his underwear. It was--
uh, one could not think of it.

The man's name was Melville Stoner. He had a small income and did not
have to work. On some days he did not leave his house and go to the
hotel for his meals but sat all day in a chair with his nose buried in
a book.

There was a house on the street occupied by a widow who raised
chickens. Two or three of her hens were what the people who lived on
the street called 'high flyers.' They flew over the fence of the
chicken yard and escaped and almost always they came at once into the
yard of the bachelor. The neighbors laughed about it. It was
significant, they felt. When the hens had come into the yard of the
bachelor, Stoner, the widow with a stick in her hand ran after them.
Melville Stoner came out of his house and stood on a little porch in
front. The widow ran through the front gate waving her arms wildly and
the hens made a great racket and flew over the fence. They ran down the
street toward the widow's house. For a moment she stood by the Stoner
gate. In the summer time when the windows of the Wescott house were
open Rosalind could hear what the man and woman said to each other. In
Willow Springs it was not thought proper for an unmarried woman to
stand talking to an unmarried man near the door of his bachelor
establishment. The widow wanted to observe the conventions. Still she
did linger a moment, her bare arm resting on the gate post. What bright
eager little eyes she had! "If those hens of mine bother you I wish you
would catch them and kill them," she said fiercely. "I am always glad
to see them coming along the road," Melville Stoner replied, bowing.
Rosalind thought he was making fun of the widow. She liked him for
that. "I'd never see you if you did not have to come here after your
hens. Don't let anything happen to them," he said, bowing again.

For a moment the man and woman lingered looking into each other's eyes.
From one of the windows of the Wescott house Rosalind watched the
woman. Nothing more was said. There was something about the woman she
had not understood--well the widow's senses were being fed. The
developing woman in the house next door had hated her.

       *       *       *       *       *

Rosalind jumped up from under the tree and climbed up the railroad
embankment. She thanked the gods she had been lifted out of the life of
the town of Willow Springs and that chance had set her down to live in
a city. "Chicago is far from beautiful. People say it is just a big
noisy dirty village and perhaps that's what it is, but there is
something alive there," she thought. In Chicago, or at least during the
last two or three years of her life there, Rosalind felt she had
learned a little something of life. She had read books for one thing,
such books as did not come to Willow Springs, books that Willow Springs
knew nothing about, she had gone to hear the Symphony Orchestra, she
had begun to understand something of the possibility of line and color,
had heard intelligent, understanding men speak of these things. In
Chicago, in the midst of the twisting squirming millions of men and
women there were voices. One occasionally saw men or at least heard of
the existence of men who, like the beautiful old man who had walked
away down the marble stairs in the vision of her girlhood nights, had
kept some precious thing alive in themselves.

And there was something else--it was the most important thing of all.
For the last two years of her life in Chicago she had spent hours, days
in the presence of a man to whom she could talk. The talks had awakened
her. She felt they had made her a woman, had matured her.

"I know what these people here in Willow Springs are like and what I
would have been like had I stayed here," she thought. She felt relieved
and almost happy. She had come home at a crisis of her own life hoping
to be able to talk a little with her mother, or if talk proved
impossible hoping to get some sense of sisterhood by being in her
presence. She had thought there was something buried away, deep within
every woman, that at a certain call would run out to other women. Now
she felt that the hope, the dream, the desire she had cherished was
altogether futile. Sitting in the great flat bowl in the midst of the
corn lands two miles from her home town where no breath of air stirred
and seeing the beetles at their work of preparing to propagate a new
generation of beetles, while she thought of the town and its people,
had settled something for her. Her visit to Willow Springs had come to
something after all.

Rosalind's figure had still much of the spring and swing of youth in
it. Her legs were strong and her shoulders broad. She went swinging
along the railroad track toward town, going westward. The sun had begun
to fall rapidly down the sky. Away over the tops of the corn in one of
the great fields she could see in the distance to where a man was
driving a motor along a dusty road. The wheels of the car kicked up
dust through which the sunlight played. The floating cloud of dust
became a shower of gold that settled down over the fields. "When a
woman most wants what is best and truest in another woman, even in her
own mother, she isn't likely to find it," she thought grimly. "There
are certain things every woman has to find out for herself, there is a
road she must travel alone. It may only lead to some more ugly and
terrible place, but if she doesn't want death to overtake her and live
within her while her body is still alive she must set out on that
road."

Rosalind walked for a mile along the railroad track and then stopped. A
freight train had gone eastward as she sat under the tree by the creek
bed and now, there beside the tracks, in the grass was the body of a
man. It lay still, the face buried in the deep burned grass. At once
she concluded the man had been struck and killed by the train. The body
had been thrown thus aside. All her thoughts went away and she turned
and started to tiptoe away, stepping carefully along the railroad ties,
making no noise. Then she stopped again. The man in the grass might not
be dead, only hurt, terribly hurt. It would not do to leave him there.
She imagined him mutilated but still struggling for life and herself
trying to help him. She crept back along the ties. The man's legs were
not twisted and beside him lay his hat. It was as though he had put it
there before lying down to sleep, but a man did not sleep with his face
buried in the grass in such a hot uncomfortable place. She drew nearer.
"O, you Mister," she called, "O, you--are you hurt?"

The man in the grass sat up and looked at her. He laughed. It was
Melville Stoner, the man of whom she had just been thinking and in
thinking of whom she had come to certain settled conclusions regarding
the futility of her visit to Willow Springs. He got to his feet and
picked up his hat. "Well, hello, Miss Rosalind Wescott," he said
heartily. He climbed a small embankment and stood beside her. "I knew
you were at home on a visit but what are you doing out here?" he asked
and then added, "What luck this is! Now I shall have the privilege of
walking home with you. You can hardly refuse to let me walk with you
a