Alice Adams

fter that, she went to her room and sat down before her three-leaved
mirror. There was where she nearly always sat when she came into her
room, if she had nothing in mind to do. She went to that chair as
naturally as a dog goes to his corner.

She leaned forward, observing her profile; gravity seemed to be her
mood. But after a long, almost motionless scrutiny, she began to produce
dramatic sketches upon that ever-ready stage, her countenance: she
showed gaiety, satire, doubt, gentleness, appreciation of a companion
and love-in-hiding--all studied in profile first, then repeated for a
“three-quarter view.” Subsequently she ran through them, facing herself
in full.

In this manner she outlined a playful scenario for her next interview
with Arthur Russell; but grew solemn again, thinking of the impression
she had already sought to give him. She had no twinges for any
underminings of her “most intimate friend”--in fact, she felt that her
work on a new portrait of Mildred for Mr.

Russell had been honest and accurate. But why had it been her instinct
to show him an Alice Adams who didn't exist?

Almost everything she had said to him was upon spontaneous impulse,
springing to her lips on the instant; yet it all seemed to have been
founded upon a careful design, as if some hidden self kept such designs
in stock and handed them up to her, ready-made, to be used for its own
purpose. What appeared to be the desired result was a false-coloured
image in Russell's mind; but if he liked that image he wouldn't be
liking Alice Adams; nor would anything he thought about the image be a
thought about her.

Nevertheless, she knew she would go on with her false, fancy colourings
of this nothing as soon as she saw him again; she had just been
practicing them. “What's the idea?” she wondered. “What makes me tell
such lies? Why shouldn't I be just myself?” And then she thought, “But
which one is myself?”

Her eyes dwelt on the solemn eyes in the mirror; and her lips,
disquieted by a deepening wonder, parted to whisper:

“Who in the world are you?”

The apparition before her had obeyed her like an alert slave, but now,
as she subsided to a complete stillness, that aspect changed to the
old mockery with which mirrors avenge their wrongs. The nucleus of some
queer thing seemed to gather and shape itself behind the nothingness of
the reflected eyes until it became almost an actual strange presence.
If it could be identified, perhaps the presence was that of the hidden
designer who handed up the false, ready-made pictures, and, for unknown
purposes, made Alice exhibit them; but whatever it was, she suddenly
found it monkey-like and terrifying. In a flutter she jumped up and went
to another part of the room.

A moment or two later she was whistling softly as she hung her light
coat over a wooden triangle in her closet, and her musing now was
quainter than the experience that led to it; for what she thought was
this, “I certainly am a queer girl!” She took a little pride in so much
originality, believing herself probably the only person in the world to
have such thoughts as had been hers since she entered the room, and the
first to be disturbed by a strange presence in the mirror. In fact, the
effect of the tiny episode became apparent in that look of preoccupied
complacency to be seen for a time upon any girl who has found reason to
suspect that she is a being without counterpart.

This slight glow, still faintly radiant, was observed across the
dinner-table by Walter, but he misinterpreted it. “What YOU lookin' so
self-satisfied about?” he inquired, and added in his knowing way, “I saw
you, all right, cutie!”

“Where'd you see me?”

“Down-town.”

“This afternoon, you mean, Walter?”

“Yes, 'this afternoon, I mean, Walter,'” he returned, burlesquing
her voice at least happily enough to please himself; for he laughed
applausively. “Oh, you never saw me! I passed you close enough to pull
a tooth, but you were awful busy. I never did see anybody as busy as
you get, Alice, when you're towin' a barge. My, but you keep your hands
goin'! Looked like the air was full of 'em! That's why I'm onto why you
look so tickled this evening; I saw you with that big fish.”

Mrs. Adams laughed benevolently; she was not displeased with this
rallying. “Well, what of it, Walter?” she asked. “If you happen to see
your sister on the street when some nice young man is being attentive to
her----”

Walter barked and then cackled. “Whoa, Sal!” he said. “You got the parts
mixed. It's little Alice that was 'being attentive.' I know the big fish
she was attentive to, all right, too.”

“Yes,” his sister retorted, quietly. “I should think you might have
recognized him, Walter.”

Walter looked annoyed. “Still harpin' on THAT!” he complained. “The kind
of women I like, if they get sore they just hit you somewhere on the
face and then they're through. By the way, I heard this Russell was
supposed to be your dear, old, sweet friend Mildred's steady. What you
doin' walkin' as close to him as all that?”

Mrs. Adams addressed her son in gentle reproof, “Why Walter!”

“Oh, never mind, mama,” Alice said. “To the horrid all things are
horrid.”

“Get out!” Walter protested, carelessly. “I heard all about this Russell
down at the shop. Young Joe Lamb's such a talker I wonder he don't ruin
his grandfather's business; he keeps all us cheap help standin' round
listening to him nine-tenths of our time. Well, Joe told me this
Russell's some kin or other to the Palmer family, and he's got some
little money of his own, and he's puttin' it into ole Palmer's trust
company and Palmer's goin' to make him a vice-president of the company.
Sort of a keep-the-money-in-the-family arrangement, Joe Lamb says.”

Mrs. Adams looked thoughtful. “I don't see----” she began.

“Why, this Russell's supposed to be tied up to Mildred,” her son
explained. “When ole Palmer dies this Russell will be his son-in-law,
and all he'll haf' to do'll be to barely lift his feet and step into
the ole man's shoes. It's certainly a mighty fat hand-me-out for this
Russell! You better lay off o' there, Alice. Pick somebody that's got
less to lose and you'll make better showing.”

Mrs. Adams's air of thoughtfulness had not departed. “But you say this
Mr. Russell is well off on his own account, Walter.”

“Oh, Joe Lamb says he's got some little of his own. Didn't know how
much.”

“Well, then----”

Walter laughed his laugh. “Cut it out,” he bade her. “Alice wouldn't run
in fourth place.”

Alice had been looking at him in a detached way, as though estimating
the value of a specimen in a collection not her own. “Yes,” she said,
indifferently. “You REALLY are vulgar, Walter.”

He had finished his meal; and, rising, he came round the table to her
and patted her good-naturedly on the shoulder. “Good ole Allie!” he
said. “HONEST, you wouldn't run in fourth place. If I was you I'd never
even start in the class. That frozen-face gang will rule you off the
track soon as they see your colours.”

“Walter!” his mother said again.

“Well, ain't I her brother?” he returned, seeming to be entirely serious
and direct, for the moment, at least. “I like the ole girl all right.
Fact is, sometimes I'm kind of sorry for her.”

“But what's it all ABOUT?” Alice cried. “Simply because you met me
down-town with a man I never saw but once before and just barely know!
Why all this palaver?”

“'Why?'” he repeated, grinning. “Well, I've seen you start before, you
know!” He went to the door, and paused. “I got no date to-night. Take
you to the movies, you care to go.”

She declined crisply. “No, thanks!”

“Come on,” he said, as pleasantly as he knew how.

“Give me a chance to show you a better time than we had up at that
frozen-face joint. I'll get you some chop suey afterward.”

“No, thanks!”

“All right,” he responded and waved a flippant adieu. “As the barber
says, 'The better the advice, the worse it's wasted!' Good-night!”

Alice shrugged her shoulders; but a moment or two later, as the jar of
the carelessly slammed front door went through the house, she shook her
head, reconsidering. “Perhaps I ought to have gone with him. It might
have kept him away from whatever dreadful people are his friends--at
least for one night.”

“Oh, I'm sure Walter's a GOOD boy,” Mrs. Adams said, soothingly; and
this was what she almost always said when either her husband or Alice
expressed such misgivings. “He's odd, and he's picked up right queer
manners; but that's only because we haven't given him advantages like
the other young men. But I'm sure he's a GOOD boy.”

She reverted to the subject a little later, while she washed the dishes
and Alice wiped them. “Of course Walter could take his place with the
other nice boys of the town even yet,” she said. “I mean, if we could
afford to help him financially. They all belong to the country clubs and
have cars and----”

“Let's don't go into that any more, mama,” the daughter begged her.
“What's the use?”

“It COULD be of use,” Mrs. Adams insisted. “It could if your father----”

“But papa CAN'T.”

“Yes, he can.”

“But how can he? He told me a man of his age CAN'T give up a business
he's been in practically all his life, and just go groping about for
something that might never turn up at all. I think he's right about it,
too, of course!”

Mrs. Adams splashed among the plates with a new vigour heightened by an
old bitterness. “Oh, yes,” she said. “He talks that way; but he knows
better.”

“How could he 'know better,' mama?”

“HE knows how!”

“But what does he know?”

Mrs. Adams tossed her head. “You don't suppose I'm such a fool I'd
be urging him to give up something for nothing, do you, Alice? Do you
suppose I'd want him to just go 'groping around' like he was telling
you? That would be crazy, of course. Little as his work at Lamb's brings
in, I wouldn't be so silly as to ask him to give it up just on a CHANCE
he could find something else. Good gracious, Alice, you must give me
credit for a little intelligence once in a while!”

Alice was puzzled. “But what else could there be except a chance? I
don't see----”

“Well, I do,” her mother interrupted, decisively. “That man could make
us all well off right now if he wanted to. We could have been rich long
ago if he'd ever really felt as he ought to about his family.”

“What! Why, how could----”

“You know how as well as I do,” Mrs. Adams said, crossly. “I guess you
haven't forgotten how he treated me about it the Sunday before he got
sick.”

She went on with her work, putting into it a sudden violence inspired by
the recollection; but Alice, enlightened, gave utterance to a laugh
of lugubrious derision. “Oh, the GLUE factory again!” she cried. “How
silly!” And she renewed her laughter.

So often do the great projects of parents appear ignominious to their
children. Mrs. Adams's conception of a glue factory as a fairy godmother
of this family was an absurd old story which Alice had never taken
seriously. She remembered that when she was about fifteen her mother
began now and then to say something to Adams about a “glue factory,”
rather timidly, and as a vague suggestion, but never without irritating
him. Then, for years, the preposterous subject had not been mentioned;
possibly because of some explosion on the part of Adams, when his
daughter had not been present. But during the last year Mrs. Adams had
quietly gone back to these old hints, reviving them at intervals and
also reviving her husband's irritation. Alice's bored impression was
that her mother wanted him to found, or buy, or do something, or
other, about a glue factory; and that he considered the proposal so
impracticable as to be insulting. The parental conversations took place
when neither Alice nor Walter was at hand, but sometimes Alice had come
in upon the conclusion of one, to find her father in a shouting mood,
and shocking the air behind him with profane monosyllables as he
departed. Mrs. Adams would be left quiet and troubled; and when Alice,
sympathizing with the goaded man, inquired of her mother why these
tiresome bickerings had been renewed, she always got the brooding and
cryptic answer, “He COULD do it--if he wanted to.” Alice failed to
comprehend the desirability of a glue factory--to her mind a father
engaged in a glue factory lacked impressiveness; had no advantage over
a father employed by Lamb and Company; and she supposed that Adams knew
better than her mother whether such an enterprise would be profitable
or not. Emphatically, he thought it would not, for she had heard him
shouting at the end of one of these painful interviews, “You can keep up
your dang talk till YOU die and I die, but I'll never make one God's
cent that way!”

There had been a culmination. Returning from church on the Sunday
preceding the collapse with which Adams's illness had begun, Alice
found her mother downstairs, weeping and intimidated, while her father's
stamping footsteps were loudly audible as he strode up and down his room
overhead. So were his endless repetitions of invective loudly audible:
“That woman! Oh, that woman; Oh, that danged woman!”

Mrs. Adams admitted to her daughter that it was “the old glue factory”
and that her husband's wildness had frightened her into a “solemn
promise” never to mention the subject again so long as she had breath.
Alice laughed. The “glue factory” idea was not only a bore, but
ridiculous, and her mother's evident seriousness about it one of those
inexplicable vagaries we sometimes discover in the people we know best.
But this Sunday rampage appeared to be the end of it, and when Adams
came down to dinner, an hour later, he was unusually cheerful. Alice
was glad he had gone wild enough to settle the glue factory once and for
all; and she had ceased to think of the episode long before Friday of
that week, when Adams was brought home in the middle of the afternoon by
his old employer, the “great J. A. Lamb,” in the latter's car.

During the long illness the “glue factory” was completely forgotten, by
Alice at least; and her laugh was rueful as well as derisive now, in the
kitchen, when she realized that her mother's mind again dwelt upon this
abandoned nuisance. “I thought you'd got over all that nonsense, mama,”
she said.

Mrs. Adams smiled, pathetically. “Of course you think it's nonsense,
dearie. Young people think everything's nonsense that they don't know
anything about.”

“Good gracious!” Alice cried. “I should think I used to hear enough
about that horrible old glue factory to know something about it!”

“No,” her mother returned patiently. “You've never heard anything about
it at all.”

“I haven't?”

“No. Your father and I didn't discuss it before you children. All you
ever heard was when he'd get in such a rage, after we'd been speaking of
it, that he couldn't control himself when you came in. Wasn't I always
quiet? Did I ever go on talking about it?”

“No; perhaps not. But you're talking about it now, mama, after you
promised never to mention it again.”

“I promised not to mention it to your father,” said Mrs. Adams, gently.
“I haven't mentioned it to him, have I?”

“Ah, but if you mention it to me I'm afraid you WILL mention it to him.
You always do speak of things that you have on your mind, and you
might get papa all stirred up again about--” Alice paused, a light of
divination flickering in her eyes. “Oh!” she cried. “I SEE!”

“What do you see?”

“You HAVE been at him about it!”

“Not one single word!”

“No!” Alice cried. “Not a WORD, but that's what you've meant all along!
You haven't spoken the words to him, but all this urging him to change,
to 'find something better to go into'--it's all been about nothing on
earth but your foolish old glue factory that you know upsets him, and
you gave your solemn word never to speak to him about again! You didn't
say it, but you meant it--and he KNOWS that's what you meant! Oh, mama!”

Mrs. Adams, with her hands still automatically at work in the flooded
dishpan, turned to face her daughter. “Alice,” she said, tremulously,
“what do I ask for myself?”

“What?”

“I say, What do I ask for myself? Do you suppose I want anything?
Don't you know I'd be perfectly content on your father's present income
if I were the only person to be considered? What do I care about any
pleasure for myself? I'd be willing never to have a maid again; I
don't mind doing the work. If we didn't have any children I'd be glad to
do your father's cooking and the housework and the washing and ironing,
too, for the rest of my life. I wouldn't care. I'm a poor cook and a
poor housekeeper; I don't do anything well; but it would be good enough
for just him and me. I wouldn't ever utter one word of com----”

“Oh, goodness!” Alice lamented. “What IS it all about?”

“It's about this,” said Mrs. Adams, swallowing. “You and Walter are a
new generation and you ought to have the same as the rest of the new
generation get. Poor Walter--asking you to go to the movies and a
Chinese restaurant: the best he had to offer! Don't you suppose I see
how the poor boy is deteriorating? Don't you suppose I know what YOU
have to go through, Alice? And when I think of that man upstairs----”
The agitated voice grew louder. “When I think of him and know that
nothing in the world but his STUBBORNNESS keeps my children from having
all they want and what they OUGHT to have, do you suppose I'm going to
hold myself bound to keep to the absolute letter of a silly promise he
got from me by behaving like a crazy man? I can't! I can't do it! No
mother could sit by and see him lock up a horn of plenty like that in
his closet when the children were starving!”

“Oh, goodness, goodness me!” Alice protested. “We aren't precisely
'starving,' are we?”

Mrs. Adams began to weep. “It's just the same. Didn't I see how flushed
and pretty you looked, this afternoon, after you'd been walking with
this young man that's come here? Do you suppose he'd LOOK at a girl like
Mildred Palmer if you had what you ought to have? Do you suppose he'd be
going into business with her father if YOUR father----”

“Good heavens, mama; you're worse than Walter: I just barely know the
man! DON'T be so absurd!”

“Yes, I'm always 'absurd,'” Mrs. Adams moaned. “All I can do is cry,
while your father sits upstairs, and his horn of plenty----”

But Alice interrupted with a peal of desperate laughter. “Oh, that
'horn of plenty!' Do come down to earth, mama. How can you call a GLUE
factory, that doesn't exist except in your mind, a 'horn of plenty'? Do
let's be a little rational!”

“It COULD be a horn of plenty,” the tearful Mrs. Adams insisted. “It
could! You don't understand a thing about it.”

“Well, I'm willing,” Alice said, with tired skepticism. “Make me
understand, then. Where'd you ever get the idea?”

Mrs. Adams withdrew her hands from the water, dried them on a towel,
and then wiped her eyes with a handkerchief. “Your father could make a
fortune if he wanted to,” she said, quietly. “At least, I don't say a
fortune, but anyhow a great deal more than he does make.”

“Yes, I've heard that before, mama, and you think he could make it out
of a glue factory. What I'm asking is: How?”

“How? Why, by making glue and selling it. Don't you know how bad most
glue is when you try to mend anything? A good glue is one of the rarest
things there is; and it would just sell itself, once it got started.
Well, your father knows how to make as good a glue as there is in the
world.”

Alice was not interested. “What of it? I suppose probably anybody could
make it if they wanted to.”

“I SAID you didn't know anything about it. Nobody else could make it.
Your father knows a formula for making it.”

“What of that?”

“It's a secret formula. It isn't even down on paper. It's worth any
amount of money.”

“'Any amount?'” Alice said, remaining incredulous. “Why hasn't papa sold
it then?”

“Just because he's too stubborn to do anything with it at all!”

“How did papa get it?”

“He got it before you were born, just after we were married. I didn't
think much about it then: it wasn't till you were growing up and I saw
how much we needed money that I----”

“Yes, but how did papa get it?” Alice began to feel a little more
curious about this possible buried treasure. “Did he invent it?”

“Partly,” Mrs. Adams said, looking somewhat preoccupied. “He and another
man invented it.”

“Then maybe the other man----”

“He's dead.”

“Then his family----”

“I don't think he left any family,” Mrs. Adams said. “Anyhow, it belongs
to your father. At least it belongs to him as much as it does to any one
else. He's got an absolutely perfect right to do anything he wants to
with it, and it would make us all comfortable if he'd do what I want him
to--and he KNOWS it would, too!”

Alice shook her head pityingly. “Poor mama!” she said. “Of course he
knows it wouldn't do anything of the kind, or else he'd have done it
long ago.”

“He would, you say?” her mother cried. “That only shows how little you
know him!”

“Poor mama!” Alice said again, soothingly. “If papa were like what you
say he is, he'd be--why, he'd be crazy!”

Mrs. Adams agreed with a vehemence near passion. “You're right about him
for once: that's just what he is! He sits up there in his stubbornness
and lets us slave here in the kitchen when if he wanted to--if he'd so
much as lift his little finger----”

“Oh, come, now!” Alice laughed. “You can't build even a glue factory
with just one little finger.”

Mrs. Adams seemed about to reply that finding fault with a figure
of speech was beside the point; but a ringing of the front door bell
forestalled the retort. “Now, who do you suppose that is?” she wondered
aloud, then her face brightened. “Ah--did Mr. Russell ask if he
could----”

“No, he wouldn't be coming this evening,” Alice said. “Probably it's the
great J. A. Lamb: he usually stops for a minute on Thursdays to ask how
papa's getting along. I'll go.”

She tossed her apron off, and as she went through the house her
expression was thoughtful. She was thinking vaguely about the glue
factory and wondering if there might be “something in it” after all. If
her mother was right about the rich possibilities of Adams's secret--but
that was as far as Alice's speculations upon the matter went at this
time: they were checked, partly by the thought that her father probably
hadn't enough money for such an enterprise, and partly by the fact that
she had arrived at the front door.