Alice Adams

fact, the agitation of Mrs. Adams was genuine, but so well under her
control that its traces vanished during the three short steps she
took to cross the narrow hall between her husband's door and the one
opposite. Her expression was matter-of-course, rather than pathetic, as
she entered the pretty room where her daughter, half dressed, sat before
a dressing-table and played with the reflections of a three-leafed
mirror framed in blue enamel. That is, just before the moment of
her mother's entrance, Alice had been playing with the mirror's
reflections--posturing her arms and her expressions, clasping her hands
behind her neck, and tilting back her head to foreshorten the face in a
tableau conceived to represent sauciness, then one of smiling weariness,
then one of scornful toleration, and all very piquant; but as the door
opened she hurriedly resumed the practical, and occupied her hands in
the arrangement of her plentiful brownish hair.

They were pretty hands, of a shapeliness delicate and fine. “The best
things she's got!” a cold-blooded girl friend said of them, and meant
to include Alice's mind and character in the implied list of possessions
surpassed by the notable hands. However that may have been, the rest
of her was well enough. She was often called “a right pretty
girl”--temperate praise meaning a girl rather pretty than otherwise,
and this she deserved, to say the least. Even in repose she deserved
it, though repose was anything but her habit, being seldom seen upon
her except at home. On exhibition she led a life of gestures, the unkind
said to make her lovely hands more memorable; but all of her usually
accompanied the gestures of the hands, the shoulders ever giving them
their impulses first, and even her feet being called upon, at the same
time, for eloquence.

So much liveliness took proper place as only accessory to that of the
face, where her vivacity reached its climax; and it was unfortunate that
an ungifted young man, new in the town, should have attempted to define
the effect upon him of all this generosity of emphasis. He said that
“the way she used her cute hazel eyes and the wonderful glow of her
facial expression gave her a mighty spiritual quality.” His actual
rendition of the word was “spirichul”; but it was not his pronunciation
that embalmed this outburst in the perennial laughter of Alice's girl
friends; they made the misfortune far less his than hers.

Her mother comforted her too heartily, insisting that Alice had “plenty
enough spiritual qualities,” certainly more than possessed by the other
girls who flung the phrase at her, wooden things, jealous of everything
they were incapable of themselves; and then Alice, getting more
championship than she sought, grew uneasy lest Mrs. Adams should repeat
such defenses “outside the family”; and Mrs. Adams ended by weeping
because the daughter so distrusted her intelligence. Alice frequently
thought it necessary to instruct her mother.

Her morning greeting was an instruction to-day; or, rather, it was
an admonition in the style of an entreaty, the more petulant as Alice
thought that Mrs. Adams might have had a glimpse of the posturings to
the mirror. This was a needless worry; the mother had caught a thousand
such glimpses, with Alice unaware, and she thought nothing of the one
just flitted.

“For heaven's sake, mama, come clear inside the room and shut the door!
PLEASE don't leave it open for everybody to look at me!”

“There isn't anybody to see you,” Mrs. Adams explained, obeying. “Miss
Perry's gone downstairs, and----”

“Mama, I heard you in papa's room,” Alice said, not dropping the note of
complaint. “I could hear both of you, and I don't think you ought to get
poor old papa so upset--not in his present condition, anyhow.”

Mrs. Adams seated herself on the edge of the bed. “He's better all the
time,” she said, not disturbed. “He's almost well. The doctor says so
and Miss Perry says so; and if we don't get him into the right frame
of mind now we never will. The first day he's outdoors he'll go back to
that old hole--you'll see! And if he once does that, he'll settle down
there and it'll be too late and we'll never get him out.”

“Well, anyhow, I think you could use a little more tact with him.”

“I do try to,” the mother sighed. “It never was much use with him. I
don't think you understand him as well as I do, Alice.”

“There's one thing I don't understand about either of you,” Alice
returned, crisply. “Before people get married they can do anything they
want to with each other. Why can't they do the same thing after they're
married? When you and papa were young people and engaged, he'd have done
anything you wanted him to. That must have been because you knew how to
manage him then. Why can't you go at him the same way now?”

Mrs. Adams sighed again, and laughed a little, making no other response;
but Alice persisted. “Well, WHY can't you? Why can't you ask him to do
things the way you used to ask him when you were just in love with each
other? Why don't you anyhow try it, mama, instead of ding-donging at
him?”

“'Ding-donging at him,' Alice?” Mrs. Adams said, with a pathos somewhat
emphasized. “Is that how my trying to do what I can for you strikes
you?”

“Never mind that; it's nothing to hurt your feelings.” Alice disposed of
the pathos briskly. “Why don't you answer my question? What's the matter
with using a little more tact on papa? Why can't you treat him the way
you probably did when you were young people, before you were married? I
never have understood why people can't do that.”

“Perhaps you WILL understand some day,” her mother said, gently. “Maybe
you will when you've been married twenty-five years.”

“You keep evading. Why don't you answer my question right straight out?”

“There are questions you can't answer to young people, Alice.”

“You mean because we're too young to understand the answer? I don't see
that at all. At twenty-two a girl's supposed to have some intelligence,
isn't she? And intelligence is the ability to understand, isn't it?
Why do I have to wait till I've lived with a man twenty-five years to
understand why you can't be tactful with papa?”

“You may understand some things before that,” Mrs. Adams said,
tremulously. “You may understand how you hurt me sometimes. Youth
can't know everything by being intelligent, and by the time you could
understand the answer you're asking for you'd know it, and wouldn't need
to ask. You don't understand your father, Alice; you don't know what it
takes to change him when he's made up his mind to be stubborn.”

Alice rose and began to get herself into a skirt. “Well, I don't think
making scenes ever changes anybody,” she grumbled. “I think a little
jolly persuasion goes twice as far, myself.”

“'A little jolly persuasion!'” Her mother turned the echo of this phrase
into an ironic lament. “Yes, there was a time when I thought that, too!
It didn't work; that's all.”

“Perhaps you left the 'jolly' part of it out, mama.”

For the second time that morning--it was now a little after seven
o'clock--tears seemed about to offer their solace to Mrs. Adams. “I
might have expected you to say that, Alice; you never do miss a chance,”
she said, gently. “It seems queer you don't some time miss just ONE
chance!”

But Alice, progressing with her toilet, appeared to be little concerned.
“Oh, well, I think there are better ways of managing a man than just
hammering at him.”

Mrs. Adams uttered a little cry of pain. “'Hammering,' Alice?”

“If you'd left it entirely to me,” her daughter went on, briskly, “I
believe papa'd already be willing to do anything we want him to.”

“That's it; tell me I spoil everything. Well, I won't interfere from now
on, you can be sure of it.”

“Please don't talk like that,” Alice said, quickly. “I'm old enough to
realize that papa may need pressure of all sorts; I only think it makes
him more obstinate to get him cross. You probably do understand him
better, but that's one thing I've found out and you haven't. There!”
She gave her mother a friendly tap on the shoulder and went to the door.
“I'll hop in and say hello to him now.”

As she went, she continued the fastening of her blouse, and appeared in
her father's room with one hand still thus engaged, but she patted his
forehead with the other.

“Poor old papa-daddy!” she said, gaily. “Every time he's better somebody
talks him into getting so mad he has a relapse. It's a shame!”

Her father's eyes, beneath their melancholy brows, looked up at her
wistfully. “I suppose you heard your mother going for me,” he said.

“I heard you going for her, too!” Alice laughed. “What was it all
about?”

“Oh, the same danged old story!”

“You mean she wants you to try something new when you get well?” Alice
asked, with cheerful innocence. “So we could all have a lot more money?”

At this his sorrowful forehead was more sorrowful than ever. The deep
horizontal lines moved upward to a pattern of suffering so familiar to
his daughter that it meant nothing to her; but he spoke quietly. “Yes;
so we wouldn't have any money at all, most likely.”

“Oh, no!” she laughed, and, finishing with her blouse, patted his cheeks
with both hands. “Just think how many grand openings there must be for
a man that knows as much as you do! I always did believe you could get
rich if you only cared to, papa.”

But upon his forehead the painful pattern still deepened. “Don't you
think we've always had enough, the way things are, Alice?”

“Not the way things ARE!” She patted his cheeks again; laughed again.
“It used to be enough, maybe anyway we did skimp along on it--but the
way things are now I expect mama's really pretty practical in her ideas,
though, I think it's a shame for her to bother you about it while you're
so weak. Don't you worry about it, though; just think about other things
till you get strong.”

“You know,” he said; “you know it isn't exactly the easiest thing in the
world for a man of my age to find these grand openings you speak of. And
when you've passed half-way from fifty to sixty you're apt to see some
risk in giving up what you know how to do and trying something new.”

“My, what a frown!” she cried, blithely. “Didn't I tell you to stop
thinking about it till you get ALL well?” She bent over him, giving
him a gay little kiss on the bridge of his nose. “There! I must run to
breakfast. Cheer up now! Au 'voir!” And with her pretty hand she waved
further encouragement from the closing door as she departed.

Lightsomely descending the narrow stairway, she whistled as she went,
her fingers drumming time on the rail; and, still whistling, she came
into the dining-room, where her mother and her brother were already at
the table. The brother, a thin and sallow boy of twenty, greeted her
without much approval as she took her place.

“Nothing seems to trouble you!” he said.

“No; nothing much,” she made airy response. “What's troubling yourself,
Walter?”

“Don't let that worry you!” he returned, seeming to consider this to be
repartee of an effective sort; for he furnished a short laugh to go
with it, and turned to his coffee with the manner of one who has
satisfactorily closed an episode.

“Walter always seems to have so many secrets!” Alice said, studying
him shrewdly, but with a friendly enough amusement in her scrutiny.
“Everything he does or says seems to be acted for the benefit of some
mysterious audience inside himself, and he always gets its applause.
Take what he said just now: he seems to think it means something, but
if it does, why, that's just another secret between him and the secret
audience inside of him! We don't really know anything about Walter at
all, do we, mama?”

Walter laughed again, in a manner that sustained her theory well enough;
then after finishing his coffee, he took from his pocket a flattened
packet in glazed blue paper; extracted with stained fingers a bent and
wrinkled little cigarette, lighted it, hitched up his belted trousers
with the air of a person who turns from trifles to things better worth
his attention, and left the room.

Alice laughed as the door closed. “He's ALL secrets,” she said. “Don't
you think you really ought to know more about him, mama?”

“I'm sure he's a good boy,” Mrs. Adams returned, thoughtfully. “He's
been very brave about not being able to have the advantages that are
enjoyed by the boys he's grown up with. I've never heard a word of
complaint from him.”

“About his not being sent to college?” Alice cried. “I should think you
wouldn't! He didn't even have enough ambition to finish high school!”

Mrs. Adams sighed. “It seemed to me Walter lost his ambition when nearly
all the boys he'd grown up with went to Eastern schools to prepare for
college, and we couldn't afford to send him. If only your father would
have listened----”

Alice interrupted: “What nonsense! Walter hated books and studying, and
athletics, too, for that matter. He doesn't care for anything nice that
I ever heard of. What do you suppose he does like, mama? He must like
something or other somewhere, but what do you suppose it is? What does
he do with his time?”

“Why, the poor boy's at Lamb and Company's all day. He doesn't get
through until five in the afternoon; he doesn't HAVE much time.”

“Well, we never have dinner until about seven, and he's always late for
dinner, and goes out, heaven knows where, right afterward!” Alice shook
her head. “He used to go with our friends' boys, but I don't think he
does now.”

“Why, how could he?” Mrs. Adams protested. “That isn't his fault, poor
child! The boys he knew when he was younger are nearly all away at
college.”

“Yes, but he doesn't see anything of 'em when they're here at
holiday-time or vacation. None of 'em come to the house any more.”

“I suppose he's made other friends. It's natural for him to want
companions, at his age.”

“Yes,” Alice said, with disapproving emphasis. “But who are they? I've
got an idea he plays pool at some rough place down-town.”

“Oh, no; I'm sure he's a steady boy,” Mrs. Adams protested, but her tone
was not that of thoroughgoing conviction, and she added, “Life might
be a very different thing for him if only your father can be brought to
see----”

“Never mind, mama! It isn't me that has to be convinced, you know; and
we can do a lot more with papa if we just let him alone about it for a
day or two. Promise me you won't say any more to him until--well, until
he's able to come downstairs to table. Will you?”

Mrs. Adams bit her lip, which had begun to tremble. “I think you can
trust me to know a FEW things, Alice,” she said. “I'm a little older
than you, you know.”

“That's a good girl!” Alice jumped up, laughing. “Don't forget it's the
same as a promise, and do just cheer him up a little. I'll say good-bye
to him before I go out.”

“Where are you going?”

“Oh, I've got lots to do. I thought I'd run out to Mildred's to see what
she's going to wear to-night, and then I want to go down and buy a
yard of chiffon and some narrow ribbon to make new bows for my
slippers--you'll have to give me some money----”

“If he'll give it to me!” her mother lamented, as they went toward the
front stairs together; but an hour later she came into Alice's room with
a bill in her hand.

“He has some money in his bureau drawer,” she said. “He finally told me
where it was.”

There were traces of emotion in her voice, and Alice, looking shrewdly
at her, saw moisture in her eyes.

“Mama!” she cried. “You didn't do what you promised me you wouldn't, did
you--NOT before Miss Perry!”

“Miss Perry's getting him some broth,” Mrs. Adams returned, calmly.
“Besides, you're mistaken in saying I promised you anything; I said I
thought you could trust me to know what is right.”

“So you did bring it up again!” And Alice swung away from her, strode
to her father's door, flung it open, went to him, and put a light hand
soothingly over his unrelaxed forehead.

“Poor old papa!” she said. “It's a shame how everybody wants to trouble
him. He shan't be bothered any more at all! He doesn't need to have
everybody telling him how to get away from that old hole he's worked in
so long and begin to make us all nice and rich. HE knows how!”

Thereupon she kissed him a consoling good-bye, and made another gay
departure, the charming hand again fluttering like a white butterfly in
the shadow of the closing door.