I

IT happens that I twice saw Susan’s mother, one of those soiled rags of humanity used by careless husbands for wiping their boots; but Susan does not remember her. John Stuart Mill studied Greek at three, and there is a Russian author who recalls being weaned as the first of his many bitter experiences. Either Susan’s mental life did not waken so early or the record has faded. She remembers only the consolate husband, her father; remembers him only too well. The backs of his square, angry-looking hands were covered with an unpleasant growth of reddish bristles; his nostrils were hairy, too, and seemed formed by Nature solely for the purpose of snorting with wrath. It must not be held against Susan that she never loved her father; he was not created to inspire the softer emotions. Nor am I altogether certain just why he was created at all.

Nevertheless, Robert Blake was in his soberer hours say, from Tuesdays to Fridays an expert mechanic, thoroughly conversant with the interior lack of economy of most makes of automobiles. He had charge of the repair department of the Eureka Garage, New Haven, where my not-too-robust touring car of those primitive days spent, during the spring of 1907, many weeks of interesting and expensive invalidism. I forget how many major operations it underwent.

It was not at the Eureka Garage, however, that I first met Bob Blake. Nine years before I there found him again, I had defended him in court as it happens, successfully on a charge of assault with intent to kill. That was almost my first case, and not far thank heaven from my last. Bob’s defense, I remember, was assigned to me by a judge who had once borrowed fifty dollars from my father, which he never repaid; at least, not in cash. There are more convenient methods. True, my father was no longer living at the time I was appointed to defend Bob; but that is a detail.

Susan was then four years old. I can’t say I recall her, if I even laid eyes on her. But Mrs. Bob appeared as a witness, at my request it was all but her final appearance, poor woman; she died of an embolism within a week and I remember she told the court that a kinder husband and father than Bob had never existed. I remember, too, that the court pursed its lips and the gentlemen of the jury grinned approvingly, for Mrs. Bob could not easily conceal something very like the remains of a purple eye, which she attributed to hearing a suspicious noise one night down cellar, a sort of squeaking noise, and to falling over the cat on her tour of investigation with various circumstantial minutiae of no present importance.

The important thing is, that Bob went scot-free and was as nearly grateful as his temperament permitted. His assault with an umbrella stand had been upon a fellow reveller of no proved worth to the community, and perhaps this may have influenced the jury’s unexpected verdict.

Of Susan herself my first impression was gained at the Eureka Garage. Bob Blake, just then, was lying beneath my car, near which I hovered listening to his voluble but stereotyped profanity. He had lost the nut from a bolt, and, unduly constricted, sought it vainly, while his tongue followed the line of least resistance. I was marveling at the energy of his wrath and the poverty of his imagination, when I became aware of a small being beside me, in plaid calico. She had eager black eyes terrier’s eyes in a white, whimsical little face. One very long and very thin black pigtail dangled over her left shoulder and down across her flat chest to her waist, where it was tied with a shoe string and ended lankly, without even the semblance of a curl. In her right hand she bore a full dinner pail, and with her left thumb she pointed toward the surging darkness beneath my car.

“Say, mister, please,” said the small being, “if I was to put this down, would you mind telling him his dinner’s come?”

“Not a bit,” I responded. “Are you Bob’s youngster?”

“I’m Susan Blake,” she answered; and very softly placed the dinner pail on the step of the car.

“Why don’t you wait and see your father?” I suggested. “He’ll come up for air in a minute.”

“That’s why I’m going now,” said Susan.

Whereupon she gave a single half skip the very ghost of a skip then walked demurely from me and out through the great door.

II

Bob Blake, in those days, lived in a somewhat dilapidated four-room house, off toward the wrong end of Birch Street. His family arrangements were peculiar. He had never married again; but not very long after his wife’s death a dull-eyed, rather mussy young woman, with a fondness for rouge pots, had taken up her abode with him to the scandal and fascination of the neighborhood. It was an outrage, of course! With a child in the house, too! Something ought to be done about it!

Yet, oddly enough, nothing that much worried Bob ever was done about it, reckoning the various shocked-and-grieved forms of conversation as nothing. As he never tired of asserting, Bob didn’t give a damn for the cackle of a lot of hens. He guessed he knew his way about; and so did Pearl. Let the damned hens cackle their heads off; he was satisfied!

And so, eventually, I am forced to believe, were the hens. In the earlier days of the scandal there was much clitter-clatter of having the law on him, serving papers, and the like; but, as hen cackle sometimes will, it came to precisely naught. Nor am I certain that, as the years passed, the neighborhood did not grow a little proud of its one crimson patch of wickedness; I am reasonably certain, indeed, that more than one drab life took on a little borrowed flush of excitement from its proximity.

Of course no decent, God-fearing woman would ever greet either Bob or Pearl; but every time one passed either of them without a nod or a “How’s things to-day?” it gave one something to talk about, at home, or over any amicable fence.

As for the men, they too were forbidden to speak; but men, most of them, are unruly creatures if at large. You can’t trust them safely five minutes beyond the sound of your voice.

There was even one man, old Heinze, proprietor of the Birch Street grocery store, who now and then cautiously put forth a revolutionary sentiment.

“Dey lifs alvays togedder like man unt vife nod? Vere iss der diffurunz, Mrs. Shay?”

“Shame on you for them words, Mr. Heinze!”

“Aber” with a slow, wide smile “vere iss der diffurunz, Mrs. Shay? I leaf id to you?”

That Pearl and Bob lived always together cannot be denied, and perhaps they also lived as some men and their lawful wives are accustomed to live off toward the wrong end of city streets; and occasionally, no doubt, toward the right end of them as well. Midweek, things wore along dully enough, but over Sunday came drink and ructions. Susan says she has never been able to understand why Sunday happens to be called a day of rest. The day of arrest, she was once guilty of naming it.

Bob’s neighbors, I fear, were not half so scandalized by his week-end drunkenness as by what Mrs. Perkins three doors nearer the right end of Birch Street invariably called his “brazen immorality.” Intoxication was not a rare vice in that miscellaneous block or two of factory operatives. Nor can it be said that immorality, in the sense of Mrs. Perkins, was so much rare as it was nervously concealed. The unique quality of Bob’s sin lay in its brazen element; that was what stamped him peculiarly as a social outlaw.

Bob accepted this position, if sober, with a grim disregard. He had a bitter, lowering nature at best, and when not profane was taciturn. As for Pearl, social outlawry may be said to have been her native element. She had a hazy mind in a lazy body, and liked better than most things just to sit in a rocking-chair and polish her finger nails, as distinguished from cleaning them. Only the guiltless member of this family group really suffered from its low social estate, but she suffered acutely. Little Susan could not abide being a social outlaw.

True, she was not always included in the general condemnation of her family by the grown-ups; but the children were ruthless. They pointed fingers, and there was much conscious giggling behind her back; while some of the daintier little girls the very little girls whom Susan particularly longed to chum with had been forbidden to play with “that child,” and were not at all averse to telling her so, flatly, with tiny chins in air and a devastating expression of rectitude on their smug little faces. At such times Susan would fight back impending cataracts, stick her own freckled nose toward the firmament, and even, I regret to say, if persistently harassed, thrust forth a rigid pink tongue. This, Susan has since informed me, is the embryonic state of “swearing like anything.”

The little boys, on the whole, were better. They often said cruel things, but Susan felt that they said them in a quite different spirit from their instinctively snobbish and Grundyish sisters said them merely by way of bravado, or just for the fun of seeing whether or not she would cry. And then they often let her join in their games, and on those happy occasions treated her quite as an equal, with an impartial and, to Susan, entirely blissful roughness. Susan early decided that she liked boys much better than girls.

There was, for example, Jimmy Kane, whose widowed mother took in washing, and so never had any time to clean up her huddled flat, over Heinze’s grocery store, or her family of four two boys and two girls. No one ever saw skin, as in itself it really is, on the faces of Mrs. Kane’s children, and Jimmy was always, if comparison be possible, the grimiest of the brood. For some reason Jimmy always had a perpetual slight cold, and his funny flat button of a nose wept, winter and summer alike, though never into an unnecessary handkerchief. His coat-sleeve served, even if its ministrations did not add to the tidiness of his countenance.

Susan often wished she might scrub him, just to see what he really looked like; for she idolized Jimmy. Not that Jimmy ever had paid any special attention to her, except on one occasion. It was merely that he accepted her as part of the human scheme of things, which in itself would almost have been enough to win Susan’s affectionate admiration. But one day, as I have hinted, he became the god of her idolatry.

The incident is not precisely idyllic. A certain Joe Giuseppe Gonfarone; aetat. 14 whose father peddled fruit and vegetables, had recently come into the neighborhood; a black-curled, brown-eyed little devil, already far too wise in the manifold unseemliness of this sad old planet. Joe was strong, stocky, aggressive, and soon posed as something of a bully among the younger boys along Birch Street. Within less than a month he had infected the minds of many with a new and rich vocabulary of oaths and smutty words. Joe was not of the unconsciously foul-mouthed; he relished his depravity. In fact, youngster as he was, Joe had in him the makings of that slimiest product of our cities the street pimp, or cadet.

It was one fine spring day, three years or so before I met Susan in the Eureka Garage, that Joe, with a group of Birch Street boys, was playing marbles for keeps, just at the bottom of the long incline which carries Birch Street down to the swamp land and general dump at the base of East Rock. Susan was returning home from Orange Street, after bearing her father his full dinner pail, and as she came up to the boys she halted on one foot, using the toe of her free foot meanwhile to scratch mosquito bites upward along her supporting shin.

“H’lo, Susan!” called Jimmy Kane, with his perfunctory good nature. “What’s bitin’ you?”

Then it was his turn to knuckle-down. Susan, still balanced cranelike, watched him eager-eyed, and was so delighted when he knocked a fine fat reeler of Joe’s out of the ring, jumping up with a yell of triumph to pocket it, that she too gave a shrill cheer: “Oh, goody! I knew you’d win!”

The note of ecstasy in her tone infuriated Joe. “Say!” he shrieked. “You getta hell outta here!”

Susan’s smile vanished; her white, even teeth she had all her front ones, she tells me; she was ten clicked audibly together.

“It’s no business of yours!” she retorted.

“You’re right; it ain’t!” This from Jimmy, still in high good humor. “You stay here if you want. You’re as good as him!”

“Who’s as good as me?”

“She is!”

“Her?” Joe’s lips curled back. He turned to the other boys, who had all scrambled to their feet by this time and, instinctively scenting mischief, were standing in a sort of ring. “He says she’s good as me!”

Two of the smallest boys tittered, from pure excitement. Susan’s nose went up.

“I’m better. I’m not a dago!”

Joe leaped toward Susan and thrust his dense, bull-like head forward, till his eyes were glaring into hers.

“Mebbe I live lika you eh? Mebbe I live,” cried Joe, “with a dirty whore!”

There was a gasp from the encircling boys as Susan fell back from this word, which she did not wholly comprehend, but whose vileness she felt, somehow, in her very flesh. Joe, baring gorilla teeth, burst into coarse jubilation.

It was just at this point that Jimmy Kane, younger than Joe by a year or more, and far slighter, jumped on the little ruffian alas, from behind! and dealt him as powerful a blow on the head as he could compass; a blow whose effectiveness, I reluctantly admit, was enhanced by the half brick with which Jimmy had first of all prudently provided himself. Joe Gonfarone went to earth, inert, but bleeding profusely.

There was a scuttling of frightened feet in every direction. Susan herself did not stop running until she reached the very top of the Birch Street incline. Then she looked back, her eyes lambent, her heart throbbing, not alone from the rapid ascent. Yes, there was Jimmy her Jimmy! kneeling in the dust by the still prostrate Joe. Susan could not hear him, but she knew somehow from his attitude that he was scared to death, and that he was asking Joe if he was hurt much. She agonized with her champion, feeling none the less proud of him, and she waited for him at the top of the rise, hoping to thank him, longing to kiss his hands.

But Jimmy, when he did pass her, went by without a glance, at top speed. He was bound for a doctor. So Susan never really managed to thank Jimmy at all. She merely idolized him in secret, a process which proved, however, fairly heart-warming and, in the main, satisfactory.

It took three stitches to mend Joe’s head a fact famous in the junior annals of Birch Street for some years and soon after he appeared, somewhat broken in spirit, in the street again, his parents moved him, Margharita and the sloe-eyed twins to Bridgeport very much, be it admitted, to the relief of Jimmy Kane, who had lived for three weeks nursing a lonely fear of dark reprisals.

III

There was one thing about Bob Blake’s four-room house it exactly fitted his family. The floor plan was simple and economically efficient. Between the monolithic door slab relic of a time when Bob’s house had been frankly “in the country” and the public street lay a walk formed of a single plank supported on chance-set bricks. From the door slab one stepped through the front doorway directly into the parlor. Beyond the parlor lay the kitchen, from which one could pass out through a narrow door to a patch of weed-grown back yard. A ladderlike stair led up from one side of the kitchen, opposite to the single window and the small coal range. At the top of the stair was a slit of unlighted hallway with a door near either end of it. The door toward Birch Street gave upon the bedroom occupied by Bob and Pearl; the rearward door led to Susan’s sternly ascetic cubiculum. No one of these four rooms could be described as spacious, but the parlor and Bob’s bedroom may have been twelve by fifteen or thereabouts. Susan’s quarters were a scant ten by ten.

The solider and more useful pieces of furniture in the house belonged to the regime of Susan’s mother the great black-walnut bed which almost filled the front bedroom; Susan’s single iron cot frame; the parlor table with its marble top; the melodeon; the kitchen range; and the deal table in the kitchen, upon which, impartially, food was prepared and meals were served. To these respectable properties Pearl had added from time to time certain other objects of interest or art.

Thus, in the parlor, there was a cane rocking-chair, gilded; and on the wall above the melodeon hung a banjo suspended from a nail by a broad sash of soiled blue ribbon. On the drumhead of the banjo someone had painted a bunch of nondescript flowers, and Pearl always claimed these as her own handiwork, wrought in happier days. This was her one eagerly contested point of pride; for Bob, when in liquor, invariably denied the possibility of her ever having painted “that there bouquet.” This flat denial was always the starting point for those more violent Sunday-night quarrels, which had done so much to reduce the furniture of the house to its stouter, more imperishable elements.

During the brief interval between the death of Susan’s mother and the arrival of Pearl, Bob had placed his domestic affairs in the hands of an old negro-woman, who came in during the day to clean up, keep an eye on Susan and prepare Bob’s dinner. Most of the hours during Bob’s absence this poor old creature spent in a rocking-chair, nodding in and out of sleep; and it was rather baby Susan, sprawling about the kitchen floor, who kept an eye on her, than the reverse. Pearl’s installation had changed all that. Bob naturally expected any woman he chose to support to work for her board and lodging; and it may be that at first Pearl had been too grateful for any shelter to risk jeopardizing her good luck by shirking. There seems to be no doubt that for a while she did her poor utmost to keep house but the sloven in her was too deeply rooted not to flower.

By the time Susan was six or seven the interior condition of Bob’s house was too crawlingly unpleasant to bear exact description; and even Bob, though callous enough in such matters, began to have serious thoughts of giving Pearl the slip not to mention his landlord and of running off with Susan to some other city, where he could make a fresh start and perhaps contrive now and then to get something decent to eat set before him. It never occurred to him to give Susan the slip as well which would have freed his hands; not because he had a soft spot somewhere for the child, nor because he felt toward her any special sense of moral obligation. Simply, it never occurred to him. Susan was his kid; and if he went she went with him, along with his pipe, his shop tools, and his set of six English razors his dearest possession, of which he was jealously and irascibly proud.

But, as it happens, Bob never acted upon this slowly forming desire to escape; the desire was quietly checked and insensibly receded; and for this Susan herself was directly responsible.

Very early in life she began to supplement Pearl’s feeble housewifery, but it was not until her ninth year that Susan decided to bring about a domestic revolution. Whether or no hatred of dirt be inheritable, I leave to biologists, merely thumbnailing two facts for their consideration: Susan’s mother had hated dirt with an unappeasable hatred; her nightly, after-supper, insensate pursuit of imaginary cobwebs had been one of Bob’s choicest grievances against her. And little Susan hated dirt, in all its forms, with an almost equal venom, but with a brain at once more active and more unreeling. She had good reason to hate it. She must either have hated it or been subdued to it. For five years, more or less, she had lived in the midst of dirt and suffered. It had seemed to her one of the inexpungable evils of existence, like mosquitoes, or her father’s temper, or the smell of Pearl’s cheap talcum powder when warmed by the fumes of cooking cabbage. But gradually it came upon her that dirt only accumulated in the absence of a will to removal.

Once her outreaching mind had grasped without wordily formulating this physical and moral law, her course was plain. Since the will to removal was dormant or missing in Pearl, she must supply it. Within the scope of her childish strength, she did supply it. Susan insists that it took her two years merely to overcome the handicap of Pearl’s neglect. Her self-taught technique was faulty; proper tools were lacking. There was a bucket which, when filled, she could not lift; a broom that tripped her; high corners she could not reach corners she had to grow up to, even with the aid of a chair. But in the end she triumphed. By the time she was thirteen she was thirteen when I first saw in the Eureka Garage Bob’s four rooms were spotless six and one-half days out of every seven.

Even Pearl, in her flaccid way, approved the change. “It beats hell,” she remarked affably to Bob one night, “how that ugly little monkey likes to scrub things. She’s a real help to me, that child is. But no comp’ny. And she’s a sight.”

“Well,” growled Bob, “she comes by that honest. So was the old woman.” They were annoyed when Susan, sitting by them, for the first time within their memory burst into flooding, uncontrollable tears.

IV

I should probably, in my own flaccid way, have lost all track of Susan, if it had not been for certain ugly things that befell in Bob’s four-room house one breathless evening June twentieth of the year 1907. It is a date stamped into my consciousness like a notarial seal. For one thing it happened to be my birthday my thirty-third, which I was not precisely celebrating, since it was also the anniversary of the day my wife had left me, two years before. Nor was I entirely pleased to have become, suddenly, thirty-three. I counted it the threshold of middle-age. Now that eleven years have passed, and with them my health and the world’s futile pretense at peace, I am feeling younger.

This book is about Susan, but it will be simpler if you know something, too, concerning her scribe. Fortunately there is not much that it will be needful to tell.

I was in those bad, grossly comfortable old days that least happy of Nature’s experiments, a man whose inherited income permitted him to be an idler, and whose tastes urged him to write precious little essays about precious little for the more precious reviews. My half-hearted attempt to practice law I had long abandoned. I lived in a commodious, inherited mansion on Hillhouse Avenue an avenue which in all fairness must be called aristocratic, since it has no wrong end to it. It is right at both ends, so, naturally, though broad, it is not very long. My grandfather, toward the end of a profitably ill-spent life, built this mansion of sad-colored stone in a somewhat mixed Italian style; my father filled it with expensive and unsightly movables the spoils of a grand European tour; and I, in my turn, had emptied it of these treasures and refilled it with my own carefully chosen collection of rare furniture, rare Oriental carpets, rare first editions, and costly objets d’art. This collection I then anxiously believed, and do still in part believe, to be beautiful though I am no longer haunted by an earlier fear lest the next generation should repudiate my taste and reverse my opinion. Let the auction rooms of 1960 decide. Neither in flesh nor in spirit shall I attend them.

The tragi-comedy of my luckless marriage I shall not stop here to explain, but its rather mysterious ending had at first largely cut me off from my old family friends and my socially correct acquaintances. When Gertrude left me, their sympathies, or their sense of security, went with her. I can hardly blame them. There had been no glaring scandal, but the fault was inferentially mine. To speak quite brutally, I did not altogether regret their loss. Too many of them had bored me for too many years. I was glad to rely more on the companionship of certain writers and painters which my scribbling had quietly won for me, here and in France. I traveled about a good deal. When at home, I kept my guest rooms filled often, in the horrid phrase, with “visitors of distinction.”

In this way I became a social problem, locally, of some magnitude. Visitors of distinction even when of eccentric distinction cannot easily be ignored in a university town. Thus it made it a little awkward, perhaps, that I should so often prove to be their host; a little less, on the whole, than one would suppose. Within two years just following Ballou’s brief stay with me, on his way to introduce that now forgotten nine-days wonder, Polymorphous Prose, among initiates of the Plymouth Rock Poetry Guild, at Boston my slight remaining ineligibility was tacitly and finally ignored. The old family friends began to hint that Gertrude, though a splendid woman, had always been a little austere. Possibly there were faults on both sides. One never knew.

And it was just at this hour of social reestablishment that my birthday swung round again, for the thirty-third time, and brought with it a change in my outer life which was to lead on to even greater changes in all my modes of thinking and feeling. Odd, that a drunken quarrel in a four-room house toward the wrong end of Birch Street could so affect the destiny of a luxurious dilettante, living at the very center of bonded respectability, in a mansion of sad-colored stone, on a short broad avenue which is right at both ends!

V

“Never in this (obviously outcast) world!” grumbled Bob Blake, bringing his malletlike fist down on the marble top of the parlor table.

The blow made his half-filled glass jump and clinkle; so he emptied it slowly, then poured in four fingers more, forgetting to add water this time, and sullenly pushed the bottle across to Pearl. But Pearl was fretful. Her watery blue eyes were fixed upon the drumhead of the banjo, where it hung suspended above the melodeon.

“I did so paint them flowers. And well you know it. What’s the good of bein’ so mean? If you wasn’t heeled you’d let me have it my way. Didn’t I bring that banjo with me?”

“Hungh! Say you did. What does that prove?”

“I guess it proves somethin’, all right.”

“Proves you swiped it, likely.”

“Me! I ain’t that kind, thanks.”

“The hell you ain’t.”

“If you’re tryin’ to get gay, cut it out!”

“Not me.”

“Well, then quit!”

This was shortly after supper. It was an unusually hot, humid evening; doors and windows stood open to no purpose; and Susan was sitting out on the monolithic door slab, fighting off mosquitoes. She found that this defensive warfare partly distracted her from the witless, interminable bickering within. Moreover, the striated effluvia of whisky, talcum powder, and perspiration had made her head feel a little queer. By comparison, the fetid breath from the exposed mud banks of the salt marsh was almost refreshing.

Possibly it was because her head did feel a little queer that Susan began presently to wonder about things. Between her days at the neighboring public school and her voluntary rounds of housework, Susan had not of late years had much waking time to herself. In younger and less crowded hours, before her father had been informed by the authorities that he must either send his child to school or take the consequences, Susan had put in all her spare moments at wondering. She would see a toad in the back yard, for example, under a plantain leaf, and she would begin to wonder. She would wonder what it felt like to be a toad. And before very long something would happen to her, inside, and she would be a toad. She would have toad thoughts and toad feelings.... There would stretch above her a dim, green, balancing canopy the plantain leaf. All about her were soaring, translucent fronds the grass. It was cool there under the plantain leaf; but she was enormously fat and ugly, her brain felt like sooty cobwebs, and nobody loved her.

Still, she didn’t care much. She could feel her soft gray throat, like a blown-into glove finger, pulsing slowly which was almost as soothing a sensation as letting the swing die down. It made her feel as if Someone some great unhappy cloudlike Being were making up a song, a song about most everything; chanting it sleepily to himself or was it herself? somewhere; and as if she were part of this beautiful, unhappy song. But all the time she knew that if that white fluffy restlessness that moth miller fluttered only a little nearer among those golden-green fronds, she knew if it reached the cool rim of her plantain shade, she knew, then, that something terrible would happen to her knew that something swift and blind, that she couldn’t help, would coil deep within her like a spring and so launch her forward, open-jawed. It was awful awful for the moth miller but she couldn’t not do it. She was a toad....

And it was the same with her father. There were things he couldn’t not do. She could be sitting very still in a corner be her father, when he was angry; and she knew he couldn’t help it. It was just a dark slow whirling inside, with red sparks flying swiftly out from it. And it hurt while it lasted. Being her father like that always made her sorry for him. But she wished, and she felt he must often wish, that he couldn’t be at all. There were lots of live things that would be happier if they weren’t live things; and if they weren’t, Susan felt, the great cloudlike Being would be less unhappy too.

Naturally, I am giving you Susan’s later interpretations of her pre-schoolday wonderings; and a number of you would gasp a little, knowing what firm, delicate imaginings all Susan Blake’s later interpretations were, if I should give you her pen name as well which I have promised myself not to do. This is not an official study of a young writer of peculiar distinction; it is merely an unpretending book about a little girl I knew and a young married woman I still know one and the same person. It is what I have named it that only: The Book of Susan.

Meanwhile, this humid June night to the sordid accompaniment of Bob and Pearl snarling at each other half-drunkenly within Susan waits for us on the monolithic door slab; and there is a new wonder in her dizzy little head. I can’t do better than let her tell you in her own words what this new wonder was like.

“Ambo, dear” my name, by the way, is Ambrose Hunt; Captain Hunt, of the American Red Cross, at the present writing, which I could date from a sleepy little village in Southern France “Ambo, dear, it was the moon, mostly. There was a pink bud of light in the heat mist, way off beyond East Rock, and then the great wild rose of the moon opened slowly through it. Papa, inside, was sounding just like a dog when he’s bullying another dog, walking up on the points of his toes, stiff legged, round him. So I tried to escape, tried to be the moon; tried to feel floaty and shining and beautiful, and and remote. But I couldn’t manage it. I never could make myself be anything not alive. I’ve tried to be stones, but it’s no good. It won’t work. I can be trees a little. But usually I have to be animals, or men and women and of course they’re animals too.

“So I began wondering why I liked the moon, why just looking at it made me feel happy. It couldn’t talk to me; or love me. All it could do was to be up there, sometimes, and shine. Then I remembered about mythology. Miss Chisholm, in school, was always telling us about gods and goddesses. She said we were children, so we could recreate the gods for ourselves, because they belonged to the child age of the world. She talked like that a lot, in a faded-leaf voice, and none of us ever understood her. The truth is, Ambo, we never paid any attention to her; she smiled too much and too sadly, without meaning it; and her eyelashes were white. All the same, that night somehow I remembered Artemis, the virgin moon goddess, who slipped silently through dark woods at dusk, hunting with a silvery bow. Being a virgin seemed to mean that you didn’t care much for boys. But I did always like boys better than girls, so I decided I could never be a virgin. And yet I loved the thought of Artemis from that moment. I began to think about her oh, intensely! always keeping off by herself; cool, and shining, and and detached. And there was one boy she had cared for; I remembered that, too, though I couldn’t remember his name. A naked, brown sort of boy, who kept off by himself on blue, distant hills. So Artemis wasn’t really a virgin at all. She was just awfully particular. She liked clean, open places, and the winds, and clear, swift water. What she hated most was stuffiness! That’s why I decided then and there, Ambo, that Artemis should be my goddess, my own pet goddess; and I made up a prayer to her. I’ve never forgotten it. I often say it still....

Dearest, dearest Far-Away,
Can you hear me when I pray?
Can you hear me when I cry?
Would you care if I should die?
No, you wouldn’t care at all;
But I love you most of all.

“It isn’t very good, Ambo, but it’s the first rhyme I ever made up out of my own head. And I just talked it right off to Artemis without any trouble. But I had hardly finished it, when ”

What had happened next was the crash of glassware, followed by Bob’s thick voice, bellowing: “C’m ba’ here! Damned slut! Tell yeh t’ c’m ba’ an’ an’ ’pol’gize!”

Susan heard a strangling screech from Pearl, the jar of a heavy piece of furniture overturned. The child’s first impulse was to run out into Birch Street and scream for help. She tells me her spine knew all at once that something terrible had happened or was going to happen. Then, in an odd flash of hallucination, she saw Artemis poised the fleetingest second before her beautiful, a little disdainful, divinely unafraid. So Susan gulped, dug her nails fiercely into her palms, and hurried back through the parlor into the kitchen, where she stumbled across the overturned table and fell, badly bruising her cheek.

As she scrambled to her feet a door slammed to, above. Her father, in a grotesque crouching posture, was mounting the ladderlike stair. On the floor at the stair’s foot lay the parchment head of Pearl’s banjo, which he had cut from its frame. Susan distinctly caught the smudged pinks and blues of the nondescript flowers. She realized at once that her father was bound on no good errand. And Pearl was trapped. Susan called to her father, daringly, a little wildly. He slued round to her, leaning heavily on the stair rail, his face green-white, his lips held back by some evil reflex in a fixed, appalling grin.

It was the face of a madman.... He raised his right hand, slowly, and a tiny prismatic gleam darted from the blade of an opened razor one of his precious set of six. He had evidently used it to destroy the banjo head, which he would never have done in his right mind. But now he made a shocking gesture with the blade, significant of other uses; then turned, crouching once more, to continue upward. Susan tried to cry out, tried to follow him, until the room slid from its moorings into a whirlpool of humming blackness....

That is all Susan remembers for some time. It is just as well.

VI

What Susan next recalls is an intense blare of light, rousing her from her nothingness, like trumpets. Her immediate confused notion was that the gates of hell had been flung wide for her; and when a tall black figure presently cut across the merciless rays and towered before her, she thought it must be the devil. But the intense blare came from the head lights of my touring car, and the tall black devil was I. A greatly puzzled and compassionate devil I was too! Maltby Phar that exquisite anarchist was staying with me, and we had run down to the shore for dinner, hoping to mitigate the heat by the ride, and my new sensation of frustrate middle-age by broiled live lobsters. It was past eleven. I had just dropped Maltby at the house and had run my car round to the garage where Bob worked, meaning to leave it there overnight so Bob could begin patching at it the first thing in the morning. It had been bucking its way along on three cylinders or less all day.

Bob’s garage lay back from the street down a narrow alley. Judge, then, of my astonishment as I nosed my car up to its shut double doors! There, on the concrete incline before the doors, lay a small crumpled figure, half-curled, like an unearthed cut-worm, about a shining dinner pail. I brought the car to a sudden dead stop. The small figure partly uncrumpled, and a white, blinded little face lifted toward me. It was Bob’s youngster! What was she up to, lying there on the ribbed concrete at this time of night? And in heaven’s name why the dinner pail? I jumped down to investigate.

“You’re Susan Blake, aren’t you?”

“Yes” with a whispered gasp “your Royal Highness.”

Susan says she doesn’t know just why she addressed the devil in that way, unless she was trying to flatter him and so get round him.

“I’m not so awfully bad,” she went on, “if you don’t count thinking things too much!”

The right cheek of her otherwise delicately modeled child’s face was a swollen lump of purple and green. I dropped down on one knee beside her.

“Why, you poor little lady! You’re hurt!”

Instantly she sprang to her feet, wild-eyed.

“No, no! It’s not me it’s Pearl! Oh, quick please! He had a razor!”

“Razor? Who did?” I seized her hands. “I’m Mr. Hunt, dear. Your father often works on my car. Tell me what’s wrong!”

She was still half dazed. “I I can’t see why I’m down here with papa’s dinner pail. Pearl was upstairs, and I tried to stop him from going.” Then she began to whimper like a whipped puppy. “It’s all mixed. I’m scared.”

“Of course of course you are; but it’s going to be all right.” I led her to the car and lifted her to the front seat. “Hold on a minute, Susan. I’ll be back with you in less than no time!”

I sounded my horn impatiently. After an interval, a slow-footed car washer inside the garage began trundling the doors back to admit me. I ran to him.

No. Bob, he left at six, same as usual. He hadn’t been round since.... His kid, eh? Mebbe the heat had turned her queer. Nuff to addle most folks, the heat was....

I saw that he knew nothing, and snapped him off with a sharp request to crank the car for me. As he did so, I jumped in beside Susan.

“Where do you live, Susan? Oh, yes, of course Birch Street. Bob told me that.... Eh? You don’t want to go home?”

“Never, please. Never, never! I won’t!” Proclaiming this, she flung Bob’s dinner pail from her and it bounced and clattered down the asphalt. “It’s too late,” she added, in a frightened whisper: “I know it is!”

Then she seized my arm thereby almost wrecking us against a fire hydrant and clung to me, sobbing. I was puzzled and yes alarmed. Bob was a bad customer. The child’s bruised face ... something she had said about a razor ? And instantly I made up my mind.

“I’ll take you to my house, Susan. Mrs. Parrot” Mrs. Parrot was my housekeeper “will fix you up for to-night. Then I’ll go round and see Bob; see what’s wrong.” I felt her thin fingers dig into my arm convulsively. “Yes,” I reassured her, taking a corner perilously at full speed, “that will be much better. You’ll like Mrs. Parrot.”

Rather recklessly, I hoped this might prove to be true; for Mrs. Parrot was a little difficult at times....

It was Maltby Phar who saw me coming up the steps with a limp child in my arms, and who opened the screen door for me. “Aha!” he exclaimed. “Done it this time, eh! Always knew you would, sooner or later. You’re too damned absent-minded to drive a car. You ”

“Nonsense!” I struck in. “Tell Mrs. Parrot to ring up Doctor Stevens. Then send her to me.” And I continued on upstairs with Susan.

When Mrs. Parrot came, Susan was lying with closed eyes in the middle of a great white embroidered coverlet, upon which her shoes had smeared greasy, permanent-looking stains.

“Mercy,” sighed Mrs. Parrot, “if you’ve killed the poor creature, nobody’s sorrier than I am! But why couldn’t you have laid her down on the floor? She wouldn’t have known.”

In certain respects Mrs. Parrot was invaluable to me; but then and there I suspected that Mrs. Parrot would, in the not-too-distant future, have to go.

Within five minutes Doctor Stevens arrived, and, after hurried explanations, Maltby and I left him in charge and then made twenty-five an hour to Birch Street.

However, Susan’s intuitions had been correct. We found Bob’s four-room house quite easily. It was the house with the crowd in front of it.... We were an hour too late.

“Cut her throat clean acrost; and his own after,” shrilled Mrs. Perkins to us Mrs. Perkins, who lived three doors nearer the right end of Birch Street. “But it’s only what was to be looked for, and I guess it’ll be a lesson to some. You can’t expect no better end than that,” perorated Mrs. Perkins to us and her excited neighbors, while her small gray-green eyes snapped with electric malice, “you can’t expect no better end than that to sech brazen immorality!”

“My God,” groaned Maltby, as we sped away, “How they have enjoyed it all! Why, you almost ruined the evening for them when you told them you’d found the child! They were hoping to discover her body in the cellar or down the well. Ugh! What a world!

“By the way,” he added, as we turned once more into the dignified breadth of Hillhouse Avenue, “what’ll you do with the homely little brat? Put her in some kind of awful institution?”

The bland tone of his assumption irritated me. I ground on the brakes.

“Certainly not! I like her. If she returns the compliment, and her relatives don’t claim her, she’ll stay on here with me.”

“Hum. Bravo.... About two weeks,” said Maltby Phar.