From a Bench in Our Square

Peter (flourish-in-red) Quick (flourish-in-green) Banta (period-in-blue) is the style whereby he is known to Our Square.

Summertimes he is a prop and ornament of Coney, that isle of the blest, whose sands he models into gracious forms and noble sentiments, in anticipation of the casual dime or the munificent quarter, wherewith, if you have low, Philistine tastes or a kind heart, you have perhaps aforetime rewarded him. In the off-season the thwarted passion of color possesses him; and upon the flagstones before Thornsen's élite Restaurant, which constitutes his canvas, he will limn you a full-rigged ship in two colors, a portrait of the heavyweight champion in three, or, if financially encouraged, the Statue of Liberty in four. These be, however, concessions to popular taste. His own predilection is for chaste floral designs of a symbolic character borne out and expounded by appropriate legends. Peter Quick Banta is a devotee of his art.

Giving full run to his loftier aspirations, he was engaged, one April day, upon a carefully represented lilac with a butterfly about to light on it, when he became cognizant of a ragged rogue of an urchin regarding him with a grin. Peter Quick Banta misinterpreted this sign of interest.

"What d'ye think of that?" he said triumphantly, as he sketched in a set of side-whiskers (presumably intended for antennae) upon the butterfly.

"Rotten," was the prompt response.

"What!" said the astounded artist, rising from his knees.

"Punk."

Peter Quick Banta applied the higher criticism to the urchin's nearest ear. It was now that connoisseur's turn to be affronted. Picking himself out of the gutter, he placed his thumb to his nose, and wiggled his finger in active and reprehensible symbolism, whilst enlarging upon his original critique, in a series of shrill roars:

"Rotten! Punk! No good! Swash! Flubdub! Sacré tas de-de-piffle!" Already his vocabulary was rich and plenteous, though, in those days, tainted by his French origin.

He then, I regret to say, spat upon the purple whiskers of the butterfly and took refuge in flight. The long stride of Peter Quick Banta soon overtook him. Silently struggling he was haled back to the profaned temple of Art.

"Now, young feller," said Peter Quick Banta. "Maybe you think you could do it better." The world-old retort of the creative artist to his critic!

"Any fool could," retorted the boy, which, in various forms, is almost as time-honored as the challenge.

Suspecting that only tactful intervention would forestall possible murder, I sauntered over from my bench. But the decorator of sidewalks had himself under control.

"Try it," he said grimly.

The boy avidly seized the crayons extended to him.

"You want me to draw a picture? There?"

"If you don't, I'll break every bone in your body."

The threat left its object quite unmoved. He pointed a crayon at Peter

Quick Banta's creation.

"What is that? A bool-rush?"

"It's a laylock; that's what it is."

"And the little bird that goes to light-"

"That ain't a bird and you know it." Peter Quick Banta breathed hard.

"That's a butterfly."

"I see. But the lie-lawc, it drop-so!" The gesture was inimitable. "And the butterfly, she do not come down, plop! She float-so!" The grimy hands fluttered and sank.

"They do, do they? Well, you put it down on the sidewalk."

From that moment the outside world ceased to exist for the urchin. He fell to with concentrated fervor, while Peter Quick Banta and I diverted the traffic. Only once did he speak:

"Yellow," he said, reaching, but not looking up.

Silently the elder artist put the desired crayon in his hand. When the last touches were done, the boy looked up at us, not boastfully, but with supreme confidence.

"There!" said he.

It was crude. It was ill-proportioned. The colors were raw. The arrangements were false.

But-the lilac bloomed. And-the butterfly hovered. The artist had spoken through his ordained medium and the presentment of life stood forth. I hardly dared look at Peter Quick Banta. But beneath his uncouth exterior there lay a great and magnanimous soul.

"Son," said he, "you're a wonder. Wanta keep them crayons?"

Unable to speak for the moment, the boy took off his ragged cap in one of the most gracious gestures I have ever witnessed, raising dog-like eyes of gratitude to his benefactor. Tactfully, Peter Quick Banta proceeded to expound for my benefit the technique of the drawing, giving the youngster time to recover before the inevitable questioning began.

"Where did you learn that?"

"Nowhere. Had a few drawing lessons at No. 19."

"Would you like to work for me?"

"How?"

Peter Quick Banta pointed to the sidewalk.

"That?" The boy laughed happily. "That ain't work. That's fun."

So the partnership was begun, the boy, whose name was Julien Tennier (soon simplified into Tenney for local use), sharing Peter Quick Banta's roomy garret. Success, modest but unfailing, attended it from the first appearance of the junior member of the firm at Coney Island, where, as the local cognoscenti still maintain, he revolutionized the art and practice of the "sand-dabs." Out of the joint takings grew a bank account. Eventually Peter Quick Banta came to me about the boy's education.

"He's a swell," said Peter Quick Banta. "Look at that face! I don't care if he did crawl outa the gutter. I'm an artist and I reco'nize aristocracy when I see it. And I want him brung up accordin'."

So I inducted the youngster into such modest groves of learning as an old, half-shelved pedagogue has access to, and when the Bonnie Lassie came to Our Square to make herself and us famous with her tiny bronzes (this was before she had captured, reformed, and married Cyrus the Gaunt), I took him to her and he fell boyishly and violently in love with her beauty and her genius alike, all of which was good for his developing soul. She arranged for his art training.

"But you know, Dominie," she used to say, wagging her head like a profound and thoughtful bird; "this is all very foolish and shortsighted on my part. Five years from now that gutter-godling of yours will be doing work that will make people forget poor little me and my poor little figurines."

To which I replied that even if it were true, instead of the veriest nonsense, about Julien Tenney or any one else ever eclipsing her, she would help him just the same!

But five years from then Julien had gone over to the Philistines.

Justly catalogued, Roberta Holland belonged to the idle rich. She would have objected to the latter classification, averring that, with the rising cost of furs and automobile upkeep, she had barely enough to keep her head above the high tide of Fifth Avenue prices. As to idleness, she scorned the charge. Had she not, throughout the war, performed prodigious feats of committee work, all of it meritorious and some of it useful? She had. It had left her with a dangerous and destructive appetite for doing good to people. Aside from this, Miss Roberta was a distracting young person.

Few looked at her once without wanting to look again, and not a few looked again to their undoing.

Being-done-good-to is, I understand, much in vogue in the purlieus of Fifth Avenue where it is practiced with skill and persistence by a large and needy cult of grateful recipients. Our Square doesn't take to it. As recipients we are, I fear, grudgingly grateful. So when Miss Holland transferred her enthusiasms and activities to our far-away corner of the world she met with a lack of response which might have discouraged one with a less new and superior sense of duty to the lower orders. She came to us through the Bonnie Lassie, guardian of the gateway from the upper strata to our humbler domain, who-Pagan that she is!-indiscriminately accepts all things beautiful simply for their beauty. Having arrived, Miss Holland proceeded to organize us with all the energy of high-blooded sweet-and-twenty and all the imperiousness of confident wealth and beauty. She organized an evening sewing-circle for women whose eyelids would not stay open after their long day's work. She formed cultural improvement classes for such as Leon Coventry, the printer, who knows half the literatures of the world, and MacLachan, the tailor, to whom Carlyle is by way of being light reading. She delivered some edifying exhortations upon the subject of Americanism to Polyglot Elsa, of the élite Restaurant (who had taken upon her sturdy young shoulders the support of an old mother and a paralytic sister, so that her two brothers might enlist for the war-a detail of patriotism which the dispenser of platitudes might have learned by judicious inquiry). And so forth and so on. Miss Roberta Holland meant well, but she had many things to learn and no master to teach her.

Yet when the flu epidemic returned upon us, she stood by, efficient, deft, and gallant, though still imperious, until the day when she clashed her lath-and-tinsel sword of theory against the tempered steel of the Little Red Doctor's experience. Said the Little Red Doctor (who was pressed for time at the moment): "Take orders. Or get out. Which?"

She straightened like a soldier. "Tell me what you want done."

At the end of the onset, when he gave her her release from volunteer service, she turned shining eyes upon him. "I've never been so treated in my life! You're a bully and a brute."

"You're a brick," retorted the Little Red Doctor. "I'll send for you next time Our Square needs help."

"I'll come," said she, and they shook hands solemnly.

Thereafter Our Square felt a little more lenient toward her ministrations, and even those of us who least approved her activities felt the stir of radiance and color which she brought with her.

On a day when the local philanthropy market was slack, and Miss Holland, seated in the Bonnie Lassie's front window, was maturing some new and benign outrage upon our sensibilities, she called out to the sculptress at work on a group:

"There's a queer man making queer marks on your sidewalk."

"That's Peter Quick Banta. He's a fellow artist."

"And another man, young, with a big, maney head like an amiable lion; quite a beautiful lion. He's making more marks."

"Let him make all he wants."

"They're waving their arms at each other. At least the queer man is. I think they're going to fight."

"They won't. It's only an academic discussion on technique."

"Who is the young one?"

"He's the ruin of what might have been a big artist."

"No! Is he? What did it? Drink?"

"Does he look it?"

The window-gazer peered more intently at the debaters below. "It's a peculiar face. Awfully interesting, though. He's quite poorly dressed. Does he need money? Is that what's wrong?"

"That's it, Bobbie," returned the Bonnie Lassie with a half-smile. "He needs the money."

The rampant philanthropist stirred within Miss Roberta Holland's fatally well-meaning soul. "Would it be a case where I could help? I'd love to put a real artist back on his feet. Are you sure he's real?"

On the subject of Art, the Bonnie Lassie is never anything but sincere and direct, however much she may play her trickeries with lesser interests, such as life and love and human fate.

"No; I'm not. If he were, I doubt whether he'd have let himself go so wrong."

"Perhaps it isn't too late," said the amateur missionary hopefully. "Is he a man to whom one could offer money?"

The Bonnie Lassie's smile broadened without change in its subtle quality. "Julien Tenney isn't exactly a pauper. He just thinks he can't afford to do the kind of thing he wants and ought to."

"What ought he to do?"

"Paint-paint-paint!" said the Bonnie Lassie vehemently. "Five years ago I believe he had the makings of a great painter in him. And now look what he's doing!"

"Making marks on sidewalks, you mean?"

"Worse. Commercial art."

"Designs and that sort of thing?"

"Do you ever look at the unearthly beautiful, graceful and gloriously dressed young super-Americans who appear in the advertisements, riding in super-cars or wearing super-clothes or brushing super-teeth with super-toothbrushes?"

"I suppose so," said the girl vaguely.

"He draws those."

"Is that what you call pot-boiling?"

"One kind."

"And I suppose it pays just a pittance."

"Well," replied the Bonnie Lassie evasively, "he sticks to it, so it must support him."

"Then I'm going to help him."

"'To fulfill his destiny,' is the accepted phrase," said the Bonnie Lassie wickedly. "I'll call him in for you to look over. But you'd best leave the arrangements for a later meeting."

Being summoned, Julien Tenney entered the house as one quite at home despite his smeary garb of the working artist. His presentation to Miss Holland was as brief as it was formal, for she took her departure at once.

"Who is she?" asked Julien, staring after her.

"Bobbie Holland, a gilded butterfly from uptown."

"What's she doing here?"

"Good."

"O Lord!" said he in pained tones. "Has she got a Cause?"

"Naturally."

"Philanthropist?"

"Worse."

"There ain't no sich a animile."

"There is. She's a patron of art."

"Wow!"

"Yes. She's going to patronize you."

"Not if I see her first. How do I qualify as a subject?"

"She considered you a wasted life."

"Where does she get that idea?"

The Bonnie Lassie removed a small, sharp implement from the left eye of a stoical figurine and pointed it at herself.

"Do you think that's fair?" demanded the indignant youth.

The Bonnie Lassie reversed the implement and pointed it at him. "Do you or do you not," she challenged, "invade our humble precincts in a five-thousand-dollar automobile?"

"It's my only extravagance."

"Do you or do you not maintain a luxurious apartment in Gramercy Park, when you are not down here posing in your attic as an honest working-man?"

"Oh, see here, Mrs. Staten, I won't stand for that!" he expostulated.

"You know perfectly well I keep my room here because it's the only place

I can work in quietly-"

"And because Peter Quick Banta would break his foolish old heart if you left him entirely," supplemented the sculptress.

Julien flushed and stood looking like an awkward child. "Did you tell all this stuff to Miss Holland?" he asked.

"Oh, no! She thinks that your pot-boiling is a desperate and barely sufficient expedient to keep the wolf from the door. So she is planning to help you realize your destiny."

"Which is?" he queried with lifted brows.

"To be a great painter."

The other winced. "As you know, I've meant all along, as soon as I've saved enough-"

"Oh, yes; I know," broke in the Bonnie Lassie, who can be quite ruthless where Art is concerned, "and you know; but time flies and hell is paved with good intentions, and if you want to be that kind of a pavement artist-well, I think Peter Quick Banta is a better."

"Do you suppose she'd let me paint her?" he asked abruptly.

If statuettes could blink, the one upon which the Bonnie Lassie was busied would certainly have shrouded its vision against the dazzling radiance of her smile, for this was coming about as she had planned it from the moment when she had caught the flash of startled surprise and wonder in his eyes, as they first rested on Bobbie Holland. Here, she had guessed, might be the agency to bring Julien Tenney to his artistic senses; and even so it was now working out. But all she said was-and she said it with a sort of venomous blandness-"My dear boy, you can't paint."

"Can't I! Just because I'm a little out of practice-"

"Two years, isn't it, since you've touched a palette?"

"Give me a chance at such a model as she is! That's all I ask."

"Do you think her so pretty?" inquired the sculptress disparagingly.

"Pretty? She's the loveliest thing that-" Catching his hostess's smile he broke off. "You'll admit it's a well-modeled face," he said professionally; "and-and-well, unusual."

"Pooh! 'Dangerous' is the word. Remember it," warned the Bonnie Lassie. "She's a devastating whirlwind, that child, and she comes down here partly to get away from the wreckage. Now, if you play your part cleverly-"

"I'm not going to play any part."

"Then it's all up. How is a patroness of Art going to patronize you, unless you're a poor and struggling young artist, living from hand to mouth by arduous pot-boiling? You won't have to play a part as far as the pot-boiling goes," added his monitress viciously. "Only, don't let her know that the rewards of your shame run to high-powered cars and high-class apartments. Remember, you're poor but honest. Perhaps she'll give you money."

"Perhaps she won't," retorted the youth explosively.

"Oh, it will be done tactfully; never fear. I'll bring her around to see you and you'll have to work the sittings yourself."

As a setting for the abode of a struggling beginner, Julien's attic needed no change. It was a whim of his to keep it bare and simple. He worked out his pictorial schemes of elegance best in an environment where there was nothing to distract the eye. One could see that Miss Roberta Holland, upon her initial visit, approved its stark and cleanly poverty. (Yes, I was there to see; the Bonnie Lassie had taken me along to make up that first party.) Having done the honors, Julien dropped into the background, and presently was curled up over a drawing-board, sketching eagerly while the Bonnie Lassie and I held the doer of good deeds in talk. Now the shrewd and able tribe of advertising managers do not pay to any but a master-draughtsman the prices which "J.T."-with an arrow transfixing the initials-gets; and Julien was as deft and rapid as he was skillful. Soon appreciating what was in progress, the visitor graciously sat quite still. At the conclusion she held out her hand for the cardboard.

To be a patroness of Art does not necessarily imply that one is an adequate critic. Miss Holland contemplated what was a veritable little gem in black-and-white with cool approbation.

"Quite clever," she was pleased to say. "Would you care to sell it?"

"I don't think it would be exactly-" A stern glance from the Bonnie

Lassie cut short the refusal. He swallowed the rest of the sentence.

"Would ten dollars be too little?" asked the visitor with bright beneficence.

"Too much," he murmured. (The Bonnie Lassie says that with a little crayoning and retouching he could have sold it for at least fifty times that.)

The patroness delicately dropped a bill on the table.

"Could you some day find time to let me try you in oils?" he asked.

"Does that take long?" she said doubtfully. "I'm very busy."

"You really should try it, Bobbie," put in the crafty Bonnie Lassie. "It might give him the start he needs."

What arguments she added later is a secret between the two women, but she had her way. The Bonnie Lassie always does. So the bare studio was from time to time irradiated with Bobbie Holland's youthful loveliness and laughter. For there was much laughter between those two. Shrewdly foreseeing that this bird of paradise would return to the bare cage only if it were made amusing for her, Julien exerted himself to the utmost to keep her mind at play, and, as I can vouch who helped train him, there are few men of his age who can be as absorbing a companion as Julien when he chooses to exert his charm. All the time, he was working with a passionate intensity on the portrait; letting everything else go; tossing aside the most remunerative offers; leaving his mail unopened; throwing himself intensely, recklessly, into this one single enterprise. The fact is, he had long been starved for color and was now satiating his soul with it. Probably it was largely impersonal with him at first. The Bonnie Lassie, wise of heart that she is, thinks so. But that could not last. Men who are not otherwise safeguarded do not long retain a neutral attitude toward such creatures of grace and splendor as Bobbie Holland.

Between them developed a curious relation. It was hardly to be called friendship; he was not, to Bobbie's recognition, a habitant of her world. Nor, certainly, was it anything more. Julien would as soon have renounced easel and canvas as have taken advantage of her coming to make love to her. In this waif of our gutters and ward of our sidewalk artist inhered a spirit of the most punctilious and rigid honor, the gift, perhaps, of some forgotten ancestry. More and more, as the intimacy grew, he deserted his uptown haunts and stuck to the attic studio above the rooms where, in the dawning days of prosperity, he had installed Peter Quick Banta in the effete and scandalous luxury of two rooms, a bath, and a gas stove. Yet the picture advanced slowly which is the more surprising in that the exotic Bobbie seemed to find plenty of time for sittings now. Between visits she took to going to the Metropolitan Museum and conscientiously studying pictures and catalogues with a view to helping her protégé form sound artistic tastes. (When the Bonnie Lassie heard that, she all but choked.) As for Julien!

"This is all very well," he said, one day in the sculptress's studio; "but sooner or later she's going to catch me at it."

"What then?" asked the Bonnie Lassie, not looking up from her work.

"She'll go away."

"Let her go. Your portrait will be finished meantime, won't it?"

"Oh, yes. That'll be finished."

This time the Bonnie Lassie did look up. Immediately she looked back again.

"In any case she'll have to go away some day-won't she?"

"I suppose so," returned he in a gloomy growl.

"I warned you at the outset, 'Dangerous,'" she pointed out.

They let it drop there. As for the effect upon the girl of Julien Tenny's brilliant and unsettling personality, I could judge only as I saw them occasionally together, she lustrous and exotic as a budding orchid, he in the non-descript motley of his studio garb, serenely unconscious of any incongruity.

"Do you think," I asked the Bonnie Lassie, who was sharing my bench one afternoon as Julien was taking the patroness of Art over to where her car waited, "that she is doing him as much good as she thinks she is, or ought to?"

"Malice ill becomes one of your age, Dominie," said the Bonnie Lassie with dignity.

"I'm quite serious," I protested.

"And very unjust. Bobbie is an adorable little person, when you know her."

"Does Julien know her well enough to have discovered a self-evident fact?"

"Only," pursued my companion, ignoring the question, "she is bored and a little spoiled."

"So she comes down here to escape being bored and to get more spoiled."

"Julien won't spoil her."

"He certainly doesn't appear to bore her."

"She's having the tables turned on her without knowing it. Julien is doing her a lot of good. Already she's far less beneficent and bountiful and all that sort of stuff."

"Lassie," said I, "what, if I may so express myself, is the big idea?"

"Slang is an execrable thing from a professed scholar," she reproved. "However, the big idea is that Julien is really painting. And it's mine, that big idea."

"Mightn't it be accompanied by a little idea to the effect that the experience is likely to cost him pretty dear? What will be left when Bobbie Holland goes?"

"Pooh! Don't be an oracular sphinx," was all that I got for my pains.

Nor did Miss Bobbie show any immediate symptoms of going. If the painting seemed at times in danger of stagnation, the same could not be said of the fellowship between painter and paintee. That nourished along, and one day a vagrant wind brought in the dangerous element of historical personalities. The wind, entering at the end of a session, displaced a hanging above the studio door, revealing in bold script upon the plastering Béranger's famous line:

"Dans un grenier qu'on est bien á vingt ans!"

"Did you write that there?" asked the girl.

"Seven long years ago. And meant it, every word."

"How did you come to know Béranger?"

"I'm French born."

"'In a garret how good is life at twenty,'" she translated freely. "I wouldn't have thought"-she turned her softly brilliant regard upon him-"that life had been so good to you."

"It has," was the rejoinder. "But never so good as now."

"I've often wondered-you seem to know so many things-where you got your education?"

"Here and there and everywhere. It's only a patchwork sort of thing." (Ungrateful young scoundrel, so to describe my two-hours-a-day of brain-hammering, and the free run of my library.)

"You're a very puzzling person," said she And when a woman says that to a man, deep has begun to call to deep. (The Bonnie Lassie, who knows everything, is my authority for the statement.)

To her went the patroness of Art, on leaving Julien's "grenier" that day.

"Cecily," she said, in the most casual manner she could contrive, "who is Julien Tenney?"

"Nobody."

"You know what I mean," pleaded the girl. "What is he?"

"A brand snatched from the pot-boiling," returned the Bonnie Lassie, quite pleased with her next turn, which was more than her companion was.

"Please don't be clever. Be nice and tell me-"

"'Be nice, sweet maid, and let who will be clever,'" declaimed the Bonnie Lassie, who was feeling perverse that day. "You want me to define his social status for you and tell you whether you'd better invite him to dinner. You'd better not. He might swallow his knife."

"You know he wouldn't!" denied the girl in resentful tones. "I've never known any one with more instinctive good manners. He seems to go right naturally."

"All due to my influence and training," bragged the Bonnie Lassie. "I helped bring him up."

"Then you must know something of his antecedents."

"Ask the Dominie. He says that Julien crawled out of a gutter with the manners of a preux chevalier. Anyway, he never swallowed any of my knives. Though he's had plenty of opportunity."

"It's very puzzling," lamented Bobbie.

"Why let it prey like a worm i' the bud of your mind? You're not going to adopt him, perhaps?"

For the moment Bobbie Holland's eyes were dreamy and her tongue unguarded. "I don't know what I'm going to do with him," said she with a gesture as of one who despairingly gives over an insoluble problem.

"Umph!" said the Bonnie Lassie.

And continued sculpting.

Mayme Mccartney was a bad little good girl. She inspired (I trust) esteem for her goodness. But it was for her hardy and happy impudence, her bent for ingenious mischief, her broad and catholic disrespect for law, conventions, proprieties and persons, and the glint of the devil in her black eyes that we really loved her. Such is the perversity of human nature in Our Square. I am told that it is much the same elsewhere.

She first came into public notice by giving (unsolicited) a most scandalous and spirited imitation of old Madame Tallafferr, aforetime of the Southern aristocracy, in the act of rebuking her landlord, the insecticidal Boggs ("Boggs Kills Bugs" in his patent of nobility), for eating peanuts on his own front steps. She then (earnestly solicited by a growing audience) put on impromptu sketches of the Little Red Doctor diagnosing internal complications in a doodle-bug; of MacLachan (drunk) singing "The Cork Leg" and MacLachan (sober) repenting thereof; of Bartholomew Storrs offering samples of his mortuary poesy to a bereaved second-cousin; and, having decked out her chin in cotton-batten whiskers (limb of Satan!), of myself proffering sage counsel and pious admonitions to Our Square at large. Having concluded, she sat down on a bench and coughed. And the Little Red Doctor, who, from the shelter of a shrub had observed her presentation of his little idiosyncrasies, drew nearer and looked at her hard. For he disliked the sound of that cough. He suspected that his old friend and opponent, Death, with whom he fought an interminable campaign, was mocking him from ambush. It wasn't quite fair play, either, for the foe to use the particular weapon indicated by the cough on a mere child. With her lustrous hair loose and floating, and her small, eager, flushed face, she looked far short of the mature and self-reliant seventeen which was the tally of her experienced years.

"Hello," greeted the Little Red Doctor, speaking with the brusque informality of one assured of his place as a local celebrity. "I don't know you, do I?"

Mayme lifted her eyes. "If you don't," she drawled, "it ain't for lack of tryin'. Is your hat glued on?"

"Good Lord!" exclaimed the Little Red Doctor indignantly. "Do you think

I'm trying to flirt with you? Why, you're only a kid."

"Get up to date," advised Mayme. "I'm old enough to be your steady.

Only, I'm too lucky."

"That's a bad cough you've got," said the Little Red Doctor hastily.

"I've got a better one at home. Like to hear it some day?"

"Bring it over to my office and let's look at the thing," suggested the

Little Red Doctor, smiling.

As Mayme McCartney observed that smile with the shrewd judgment of men which comes early, in self-protection, to girls of her environment, the suspicion and impudence died out of her face, which became wistful.

"D'you think it means anything?" she asked.

"Any cough means something. I couldn't tell without examination."

"How much?" inquired the cautious Mayme.

The Little Red Doctor is a willing liar in a good cause. "No charge for first consultation. Come over to my office."

When the test was finished, the Little Red Doctor looked professionally non-committal. "Live with your parents?" he asked.

"No. With my aunt. 'Round in the Avenue."

"Where do you work?"

"The Emporium," answered the girl, naming the great and still fashionable downtown department store, half a mile to the westward.

"You ought to quit. As soon as possible."

"And spoil my delicate digestion?"

"Who said anything about your digestion?"

"I did. If I quit workin', I quit eatin'. And that's bad for me. I tried it once."

"I see," said the Little Red Doctor, recognizing a condition by no means unprecedented in local practice. "Couldn't you get a job in some better climate?"

"Where, for instance?"

"Well, if you knew any one in California."

"How's the walkin'?" asked Mayme.

"It's long," replied the Little Red Doctor, "seeing" again. "Anyway, you've got to have fresh air."

"They serve it fresh, every morning, right here in Our Square," Mayme pointed out.

"Good idea. Get up early and fill your lungs full of it for an hour every day." He gave some further instructions.

Mayme produced a dollar, and delicately placed it on the mantel.

"Take it away," said the Little Red Doctor. "Didn't I tell you-"

"Go-wan!" said Mayme. "Whadda you think you are; Bellevue Hospital? I pay as I go, Doc."

The Little Red Doctor frowned austerely.

"What's the matter? Face hurt you?" asked the solicitous Mayme.

"People don't call me 'Doc,'" began the offended practitioner in dignified tones.

"Oh, that's because they ain't on to you," she assured him. "I wouldn't call you 'Doc' myself if I didn't know you was a good sport back of your bluff."

The Little Red Doctor grinned, looking first at Mayme and then at the dollar. "You aren't such a bad sport yourself," he admitted. "Well, we'll call this a deal. But if I see you in the Square and give you a tip about yourself now and again, that doesn't count. That's on the side. Understand?"

She considered it gravely. "All right," she agreed at length. "Between pals, yes? Shake, Doc."

So began the quaint friendship between our hard-worked, bluff, knightly-hearted practitioner, and the impish and lovable little store-girl. Also another of the innumerable tilts between him and his old friend, Death.

"He's got the jump on me, Dominie," complained the Little Red Doctor to me. "But, at that, we're going to give him a fight. She's clear grit, that youngster is. She's got a philosophy of life, too. I don't know where she got it, or just what it is, but it's there. Oh, she's worth saving, Dominie."

"If I hadn't reason to think you safeguarded, my young friend," said I,

"I'd give you solemn warning."

"Why, she's an infant!" returned the Little Red Doctor scornfully. "A poor, little, monkey-faced child. Besides-" He stopped and sighed.

"Yes; I know," I assented. There was at that time a "Besides" in the Little Red Doctor's sorrowful heart which bulked too large to admit of any rivalry. "Nevertheless," I added, "you needn't be so scornful about the simian type in woman. It's a concentrated peril to mankind. I've seen trouble caused in this world by kitten faces, by pure, classic faces, by ox-eyed-Juno faces, by vivid blond faces, by dreamy, poetic faces, by passionate Southern faces, but for real power of catastrophe, for earthquake and eclipse, for red ruin and the breaking up of laws, commend me to the humanized, feminized monkey face. I'll wager that when Antony first set eyes on Cleopatra, he said, 'And which cocoa palm did she fall out of?' Phryne was of the beautified baboon cast of features, and as for Helen of Troy, the best authorities now lean to the belief that the face that launched a thousand ships and fired the topless towers of Ilium was a reversion to the arboreal. I tell you, man that is born of woman cannot resist it. Give little Mayme three more years-"

"I wish to God I could," said the Little Red Doctor.

"Can't you?" I asked, startled. "Is it as bad as that?"

"It isn't much better. How's your insomnia, Dominie?"

"Insomnia," said I, "is a scientific quibble for unlaid memories. I take mine out for the early morning air at times, if that's what you mean."

"It is. Keep an eye on the kid, and do what you can to prevent that busy little mind of hers from brooding."

In that way Mayme McCartney and I became early morning friends. She adopted for her special own a bench some rods from mine under the lilac near the fountain. After her walk, taken with her thin shoulders flung back and the chest filling with deep, slow breaths, she would pay me a call or await one from me and we would exchange theories and opinions and argue about this and other worlds. Seventy against seventeen. Fair exchange, for, if mine were the riper creed, hers was the more vivid and adventurous. Who shall say which was the sounder?

On the morning of the astonishing Trespass, I was late, being discouraged by a light rain. As she approached her bench, she found it occupied by an individual who appeared to be playing a contributory part in the general lamentation of nature. The interloper was young and quite exquisite of raiment, which alone would have marked him for an outlander. His elbows were propped on his knees, his fists supported his cheekbones, his whole figure was in a slump of misery. Scrutinizing him with surprise, Mayme was shocked to see a glistening drop, detached from his drooping countenance, fall to the pavement, followed by another. At the same time she heard an unmistakable and melancholic sound.

The benches in Our Square have seen more life than most. They have cradled weariness of body and spirit; they have assuaged grief and given refuge to shaking terror, and been visited by Death. They have shivered to the passion of cursing men and weeping women. But never before had any of their ilk heard grown young manhood blubber. Neither had Mayme McCartney. It inspired her with mingled emotions, the most immediate of which was a desire to laugh.

Accordingly she laughed. The intruder lifted a woeful face, gave her one vague look, and reverted to his former posture. Mayme stopped laughing. She advanced and put a friendly hand on one of the humped shoulders.

"Cheer up, Buddy," she said. "It ain't as bad as you think it is."

"It's worse," gulped a choky voice. Then the head lifted again. "Who are you?" it demanded.

"I'm your big sister," said Mayme reassuringly. "Tell a feller about it."

The response was neither polite nor explanatory. "D--n sisters!" said the bencher.

"Oh, tutt-tutt and naughty-naughty!" rebuked Mayme. "Somebody's sister been puttin' somethin' over on poor little Willy?"

"My own sister has." He was in that state of semi-hysterical exhaustion in which revelation of one's intimate troubles to the first comer seems natural. "She's gone and got arrested," he wailed.

Mayme's face became grave and practical.

"That's different," said she. "What's her lay?"

"Lay? I don't know-"

"What's her line? What's she done to get pinched?"

"Shoplifting. At the special night sale of the Emporium."

"You're tellin' me! In the silks, huh?"

"What do you know about it? My God! Is it in the papers already?"

"Keep your hair on, Buddy. I work there, and I heard about that pinch. Swell young married lady. Say," she added, after a thoughtful pause: "has she got somethin' comin'?"

"Something coming? How? What?"

"Don't be dumb. A kid."

He stared. She was looking at him with unabashed frankness. Those who live in the close, rough intimacy of the slums do not cherish false shame about the major facts of life.

"Suppose she has?" queried the youth sulkily.

"Why, that'll be all right, you poor boob," returned the kindly Mayme.

"The judge'll let her off with a warning."

"How do you know?"

"They always do. Those cases are common. Dolan ought to be canned for makin' a pinch of a lady in the fam'ly way."

"What if they do let her off?" lamented the youth. "It'll be in all the papers and I'll be ruined. My life's spoiled. I might as well leave the city."

"Ah, don't do a mean trick like that to the old town!" besought the sardonic Mayme. "Where do you come in to get hurt?"

He burst into the hectic grievances of the pampered and spoiled child. His family was just getting a foothold in Society (with an almost holy emphasis on the word) and now they were disgraced. All was up. Their new, precariously held acquaintances would drop them. In his petulant grief he did an amazing thing; he produced a bunch of clippings from the local society columns, setting forth, in the printed company of the Shining Ones, the doings (mostly charitable) of Mrs. Samuel Berthelin, her daughter, Mrs. Harris, and her son, David, referred to glowingly as "the scion of the wealth and position of the late lamented financier."

Mayme was impressed. Like most shop-girls she was a fervent reader of society news. (If shop-girls did not read this fine flower of American democracy, nobody would, except those who wait eagerly and anxiously for their names to appear.) She perceived-not knowing that the advertising leverage of the Berthelin Loan Agency had forced those insecure portals of print for the entry of Mrs. Berthelin and her progeny-that she was in the presence of the Great. Capacity for awe was not in Mayme's independent soul. But she was interested and sympathetic. Here was a career worth saving!

"Let's go over to the station-house," said she. "I know some of the cops."

To the white building with the green lanterns they went. The shoplifting case, it appeared, had already been bailed out. Furthermore, everything would be all right and there was little fear of publicity; the store itself would see to that. Vastly relieved and refreshed in spirit, David Berthelin began to take stock of his companion with growing interest. She was decidedly not pretty. Just as decidedly she was quaint and piquant and quite new to his jejune but also somewhat bored experience. From the opening passage of their first conversation he deduced, lacking the insight to discriminate between honest frankness and immodesty, that she was a "fly kid." On that theory he invited her to breakfast with him. Mayme accepted. They went to Thomson's élite Restaurant, on the corner, where David roused mingled awe and misgivings in the breast of Polyglot Elsa, the cashier, by ordering champagne, and Mayme reassured her by declining it.

Thus began an acquaintanceship which swiftly ripened into a queer sort of intimacy, more than a little disturbing to us of Our Square who were interested in Mayme. Young Berthelin's over-ornate roadster lingered in our quiet precincts more often than appeared to us suitable or safe, and black-eyed Mayme, looking demure and a little exalted, was whirled away to unknown worlds, always returning, however, at respectable hours. When the Little Red Doctor remonstrated with her ostensibly on the score of her health, she reminded him in one breath that he hadn't been invited to censor her behavior which was entirely her own affair, and in the next-with his hand caught between hers and her voice low and caressing-declared that he was the best little old Doc in the world and there was nothing to worry about, either as to health or conduct. Indeed, her condition seemed to be improving. I dare say young Mr. Berthelin's expensive food was one of the things she needed. Furthermore, she ceased to be the raggle-taggle, hoydenishly clad Mayme of the cash department, and, having been promoted to saleswoman, quite went in for dress. On this point she sought the advice of the Bonnie Lassie. The result went far to justify my prophecy that Mayme's queer little face might yet make its share of trouble in an impressionable world. But the Bonnie Lassie shook her bonnie head privately and said that the fine-feathers development was a bad sign, and that if young Berthelin would obligingly run his seventeen-jeweled roadster off the Williamsburgh Bridge, with himself in it, much trouble might be saved for all concerned.

If little Mayme were headed for trouble, she went to meet it with a smiling face. Never had she seemed so joyous, so filled with the desire of life. This much was to be counted on the credit side, the Little Red Doctor said. On the debit side-well, to me was deputed the unwelcome task of conveying the solemn, and, as it were, official protest and warning of Our Square. Of course I did it at the worst possible moment. It was early one morning, when Mayme, on her bench, was looking a little hollow-eyed and disillusioned. I essayed the light and jocular approach to the subject:

"Well, Mayme; how is the ardent swain?"

She turned to me with the old flash in her big, shadowed eyes: "Did you say swain or swine, Dominie?"

"Ah!" said I. "Has he changed his r?le?"

"He's given himself away, if that's what you mean."

"I thought that would come."

"He-he wanted me to take a trip to Boston with him."

I considered this bit of information, which was not as surprising or unexpected as Mayme appeared to deem it. "Have you told the Little Red Doctor?"

"Doc'd kill him," said Mayme simply.

"What better reason for telling?"

"Oh, the poor kid: he don't know any better."

"Doesn't he? In any case I trust that you know better, after this, than to have anything more to do with him."

"Yep. I've cut him out," replied Mayme listlessly. "I figured you and Doc were right, Dominie. It's no good, his kind of game. Not for girls like me." She looked up at me with limpid eyes, in which there was courage and determination and suffering.

"My dear," I murmured, "I hope it isn't going to be too hard."

"He's so pretty," said Mayme McCartney wistfully.

So he was, now that I came to think of it. With his clear, dark color, his wavy hair, his languishing brown eyes, his almost girlishly graceful figure, and his beautiful clothes, he was pretty enough to fascinate any inexperienced imagination. But I cannot say that he looked pretty when, a few days later, he invaded Our Square in search of a Mayme who had vanished beyond his ken (she had kept her tenement domicile a secret from him), and, addressing me as "you white-whiskered old goat," accused me of having come between him and the girl upon whom he had deigned to bestow his lordly favor. Unfortunately for him, the Little Red Doctor chanced along just then and inquired, none too deferentially, what the Scion of Wealth and Position was doing in that quarter.

"What business is it of yours, Red-Head?" countered the offended visitor.

He then listened with distaste, but perforce (for what else could he do in the grasp of a man of twice his power?), to a brilliant and convincing summary of his character, terminating in a withering sketch of his personal and sartorial appearance.

"I didn't mean the kid any harm," argued the Scion suavely. "I-I came back to apologize."

"Let me catch you snooping around here again and I'll break every bone in your body," the Little Red Doctor answered him.

"I guess this Square's free to everybody. I guess you don't own it," said the youth, retreating to his car.

Notwithstanding the unimpeachable exactitude of this surmise, he was seen no more in that locality. Judge, then, of our dismay, locally, at learning, not a fortnight later, from a fellow employee of Mayme's, that she had been met at closing time by a swell young guy in a cherry-colored rattler, who took her away to dine with him. Catechized upon the point, later on, by a self-appointed committee of two consisting of the Little Red Doctor and myself, Mayme said vaguely that it was all right; we didn't understand. This is, I believe, the usual formula. The last half of it at least, was true.

About that time we, in common with the rest of the Nation, took that upon our minds which was even more important than Mayme McCartney's love affair. War loomed imminently before us. It was only a question of the fitting time to strike; and Our Square was feverishly reckoning up its military capacity. The great day of the declaration came. The Nation had drawn the sword. In the week following, Our Square was invaded.

She descended upon us from the somber sumptuousness of a gigantic limousine, the majestic, the imposing, the formidable, the authoritative Mrs. S. Berthelin. We knew at once who she was, because she led, by the ear, as it were, her hopeful progeny, young David. I do not mean that she had an actual auricular grip on him, but the effect upon his woe-begone and brow-beaten person was the same. He suggested vividly a spoiled and pretty lapdog being sternly conveyed to a detested bath. She suggested a vivified bouquet of artificial flowers. We hastily rallied our forces to meet her; the Little Red Doctor, the Bonnie Lassie, and myself. Mrs. Berthelin opened her exordium in a tone of high philippic, not even awaiting the formalities of introduction. But when I insisted upon these, and she learned that the Bonnie Lassie was Mrs. Cyrus Staten, she cringed. Despite a desire to keep out of the society columns quite as genuine as that of Mrs. Berthelin's to get in, the Cyrus Statens frequently figure among the Shining Ones, a fact almost painfully appreciated by our visitor. After that it was easy to get her into the Bonnie Lassie's house, where her eloquence could not draw a crowd. To get young David there was not quite so easy. He made one well-timed and almost successful effort to bolt, and even evinced signs of balking on the steps.

His punishment was awaiting him. No sooner were we all settled in the Bonnie Lassie's studio than the mother proceeded to regale us with a history and forecast of his career, beginning with his precocious infant lispings and terminating with his projected, though wholly indefinite, marriage into the Highest Social Circles. To do David justice, he squirmed.

"Have you got him a job as a general in the army yet, ma'am?" inquired the Little Red Doctor suavely.

It was quite lost upon Mrs. Berthelin. She informed us that a commission as Captain in the Quartermaster's Department was arranged for, and she expected to have the young officer assigned to New York so that he could live at home in the comfort and luxury suitable to his wealth and condition. And what she wanted us to understand clearly was that no designing little gutter-snipe was to be allowed to compromise David's future. She concluded with an imaginative and most unflattering estimate of Mayme McCartney's character, manners, and morals, in the midst of which I heard a gasp.

It came from Mayme, standing, wide-eyed and white, in the doorway. The front door had been left ajar, and, seeing the Berthelins' monogrammed car outside, she had come in. The oratress turned and stared.

"That's a lie," said Mayme McCartney steadily. "I'm as straight a girl as your own daughter. Ask him."

She pointed to the stricken David. Pointing may not be ladylike, but it can be extremely effective. David's head dropped into his hands.

"Oh, Ma!" he groaned.

"Don't call me 'Ma,'" snapped the goaded Mrs. Berthelin. "And this is the girl?" She looked Mayme up and down. Mayme did the same by her and did it better.

"I could give you a lorny-yette and beat you at the frozen-stare trick," said the irrepressible Mayme at the conclusion of the duel which ended in her favor.

The Little Red Doctor gurgled. I saw the Bonnie Lassie's eyelids quiver, but her face was cold and impassive as she turned to the visitor.

"Mrs. Berthelin," said she, "you have made some very damaging statements, before witnesses, about Miss McCartney's character. What proof have you?"

"Why, he wants to marry her!" almost yelled the mother. "She's trapped him."

"That's another lie," said Mayme.

"He told me himself that he was going to marry you."

"Did he? Then he's wrong. I wouldn't marry him with a brass ring," asserted Mayme.

"You wouldn't mar-You wouldn't what?" demanded the mother, outraged and incredulous.

"You heard me. He knows it, too. I don't like the family-what I've seen of them," observed Mayme judicially. "Besides, he's yellow."

David's shamed face emerged into view. "I'm not," he gulped. "She-she made me."

"Captain!" said Mayme with a searing scorn in her voice. "Quartermaster's Department! Safety first! When half the little fifteen-per tape-snippers in the Emporium are breakin' their fourteen-inch necks volunteerin' early and often to get where the fightin' is."

David Berthelin stood on his feet, and his pretty face wore an ugly expression.

"Let me out of here," he growled.

"David!" said his mother. "Where are you going?"

"To enlist."

"Davey!" It was a shriek. "You shan't."

"I will."

"I won't let you."

"You can go to-"

"Buddy!" Mayme's voice, magically softened, broke in. "Cut out the rough stuff. You better go home and think it over. Bein' a private is no pink-silk picnic."

"I'd rather see a son of mine dead than a common soldier!" cried Mrs.

Berthelin.

The Bonnie Lassie, very white, rose. "You must leave this house," she said. "At once. Think yourself fortunate that I cannot bring myself to betray a guest. Otherwise I should report you to the authorities."

Young David addressed Mayme in the words and tone of a misunderstood and aggrieved pet. "You think I'm no good. I'll show you, Mayme. Wait till I come back-if I ever do come back-and you'll be sorry."

"Hero stuff," commented the Little Red Doctor. "It'll all have oozed out of his fingertips this time to-morrow."

"Will you show me a place to enlist?" challenged the boy. "And," he added with a malicious grin, "will you enlist with me?"

"Sure!" said the Little Red Doctor. "I'll show you. But they won't take me." He bestowed a bitter glance on his twisted foot. "Come along."

They went off together, while Mrs. Berthelin scandalized Our Square by an exhibition of hysterics involving language not at all in accord with the rich respectability of her apparel and her limousine.

We waited at the Bonnie Lassie's for the Little Red Doctor's return. He came back alone. I thought that I detected a pathetic little gleam of disappointment in Mayme's deep eyes.

"He's done it," said the Little Red Doctor. And I was sorry for him, so much was there of tragic envy in his face.

"Did you give him your blessing?" I asked.

"I did. He shook hands like a man. There's maybe something in that boy, if it weren't for the old hell-cat of a mother. However, she won't have much chance. He's off to-morrow."

"Will he write?" said Mayme in a curious, strained voice.

"He will. He'll report to me from time to time."

"Didn't he-wasn't there any message?"

"Just good-bye and good luck," answered the Little Red Doctor, censoring ruthlessly.

The Bonnie Lassie went over and put her arms around Mayme McCartney.

"My dear," she said softly. "It wouldn't do. It really wouldn't. He isn't worth it. You're going to forget him."

"All right." Suddenly Mayme looked like a very helpless and sorrowful little girl. "Only, it-it isn't goin' to be as easy as you think. He was so pretty," said Mayme McCartney wistfully.