sure you will.”
“Thank you,” he smiled. “My friends tell me I’ve got it in me. I have one friend in particular – the Princess Mistchenka – who has all kinds of confidence in my future. When I’m blue she bolsters me up. She’s quite wonderful. I owe her a lot for asking me to her Sunday nights and for giving me her friendship.”
“A – a princess?” whispered the girl, who had drawn pictures of thousands but was a little startled to realise that such fabled creatures really exist.
“Is she very beautiful?” she added.
“She’s tremendously pretty.”
“Her – clothes are very beautiful, I suppose,” ventured Rue.
“Well – they’re very – smart. Everything about her is smart. Her Sunday night suppers are wonderful. You meet people who do things – all sorts – everybody who is somebody.”
He turned to her frankly:
“I think myself very lucky that the Princess Mistchenka should be my friend, because, honestly, Miss Carew, I don’t see what there is in me to interest such a woman.”
Rue thought she could see, but remained silent.
“If I had my way,” said Neeland, a few moments later, “I’d drop illustrating and paint battle scenes. But it wouldn’t pay, you see.”
“Couldn’t you support yourself by painting battles?”
“Not yet,” he said honestly. “Of course I have hopes – intentions–” he laughed, drew his reins; the silvery chimes clashed and jingled and flashed in the moonlight; they had arrived.
At the door he said:
“I hope some day you’ll have a chance to take lessons. Thank you for dancing with me… If you ever do come to New York to study, I hope you’ll let me know.”
“Yes,” she said, “I will.”
He was halfway to his sleigh, looked back, saw her looking back as she entered the lighted doorway.
“Good night, Rue,” he said impulsively, warmly sorry for her.
“Good night,” she said.
The drop of Irish blood in him prompted him to go back to where she stood framed in the lighted doorway. And the same drop was no doubt responsible for his taking her by the waist and tilting back her head in its fur hood and kissing her soft, warm lips.
She looked up at him in a flushed, bewildered sort of way, not resisting; but his eyes were so gay and mischievous, and his quick smile so engaging that a breathless, uncertain smile began to edge her lips; and it remained stamped there, stiffening even after he had jumped into his cutter and had driven away, jingling joyously out into the dazzling moonshine.
In bed, the window open, and the covers pulled to her chin, Rue lay wakeful, living over again the pleasures of the evening; and Neeland’s face was always before her open eyes, and his pleasant voice seemed to be sounding in her ears. As for the kiss, it did not trouble her. Girls she went with were not infrequently so saluted by boys. That, being her own first experience, was important only in that degree. And she shyly thought the experience agreeable. And, as she recalled, revived, and considered all that Neeland had said, it seemed to her that this young man led an enchanted life and that such as he were indeed companions fit for princesses.
“Princess Mistchenka,” she repeated aloud to herself. And somehow it sounded vaguely familiar to the girl, as though somewhere, long ago, she had heard another voice pronounce the name.
CHAPTER V
EX MACHINA
After she had become accustomed to the smell of rancid oil and dyestuffs and the interminable racket of machinery she did not find her work at the knitting mill disagreeable. It was like any work, she imagined, an uninteresting task which had to be done.
The majority of the girls and young men of the village worked there in various capacities; wages were fair, salaries better, union regulations prevailed. There was nothing to complain of.
And nothing to expect except possible increase in wages, holidays, and a disquieting chance of getting caught in the machinery, which familiarity soon discounted.
As for the social status of the mill workers, the mill was Gayfield; and Gayfield was a village where the simpler traditions of the Republic still survived; where there existed no invidious distinction in vocations; a typical old-time community harbouring the remains of a Grand Army Post and too many churches of too many denominations; where the chance metropolitan stranger was systematically “done”; where distrust of all cities and desire to live in them was equalled only by a passion for moving pictures and automobiles; where the school trustees used double negatives and traced their ancestry to Colonial considerables – who, however, had signed their names in “lower case” or with a Maltese cross – the world in miniature, with its due proportion of petty graft, petty squabbles, envy, kindness, jealousy, generosity, laziness, ambition, stupidity, intelligence, honesty, hypocrisy, hatred, affection, badness and goodness, as standardised by the code established according to folk-ways on earth – in brief, a perfectly human community composed of the usual ingredients, worthy and unworthy – that was Gayfield, Mohawk County, New York.
Before spring came – before the first robin appeared, and while icy roads still lay icy under sunlit pools of snow-water – a whole winter indoors, and a sedentary one, had changed the smoothly tanned and slightly freckled cheeks of Rue Carew to a thinner and paler oval. Under her transparent skin a tea-rose pink came and went; under her grey eyes lay bluish shadows. Also, floating particles of dust, fleecy and microscopic motes of cotton and wool filling the air in the room where Ruhannah worked, had begun to irritate her throat and bronchial tubes; and the girl developed an intermittent cough.
When the first bluebird arrived in Gayfield the cough was no longer intermittent; and her mother sent her to the village doctor. So Rue Carew was transferred to the box factory adjoining, in which the mill made its own paper boxes, where young women sat all day at intelligent machines and fed them with squares of pasteboard and strips of gilt paper; and the intelligent and grateful machines responded by turning out hundreds and hundreds of complete boxes, all neatly gilded, pasted, and labelled. And after a little while Ruhannah was able to nourish one of these obliging and responsive machines. And by July her cough had left her, and two delicate freckles adorned the bridge of her nose.
The half-mile walk from and to Brookhollow twice a day was keeping her from rapid physical degeneration. Yet, like all northern American summers, the weather became fearfully hot in July and August, and the half-mile even in early morning and at six in the evening left her listless, nervously dreading the great concrete-lined room, the reek of glue and oil, the sweaty propinquity of her neighbours, and the monotonous appetite of the sprawling machine which she fed all day long with pasteboard squares.
She went to her work in early morning, bareheaded, in a limp pink dress very much open at the throat, which happened to be the merciful mode of the moment – a slender, sweet-lipped thing, beginning to move with grace now – and her chestnut hair burned gold-pale by the sun.
There came that movable holiday in August, when the annual shutdown for repairs closed the mill and box factory during forty-eight hours – a matter of prescribing oil and new bearings for the overfed machines so that their digestions should remain unimpaired and their dispositions amiable.
It
