Henry Is Twenty. Samuel Merwin

It contained the following books: Daily Strength for Daily Needs, Browning, Trollope, and Hawthorne in sets, Sonnets, from the Portuguese, Words often Mispronounced, Longfellow, complete in one fat volume. Red Line Edition, and Six Thousand Puzzles, all of which had been his mother's; Green's History of the English People, Boswell's Johnson, both largely uncut, and the Discourses of Epictetus, which three had come as Christmas or birthday gifts; and exactly one volume, a work by an obscure author (who was pictured in the frontispiece with a bristling moustache and intensely knit brows) entitled Will Power and Self Mastery, which offered the only clue as to Henry's own taste in book buying.

      His taste in reading was another matter. The novels and romances he had devoured during certain periods of his teens had mostly come from the Sunbury Free Public Library. Lately, however, apart from thrilling moments with The Prisoner of Zenda, Under the Red Rose, and The Princess Aline, he had found difficulty in reading at all. Something was stirring within him, something restlessly positive, an impulse to give out rather than take in. Though he had, at intervals, lunged with determination at the Green and the Boswell. This effort, indeed, had been repeated so many times that he occasionally caught himself speaking of these authors as if he had read them exhaustively.

      The bottom drawer of the bureau was a third full of unfinished manuscripts—attempts at novels, short stories, poems, plays—each faithfully reflecting its immediate source of inspiration. There were paragraphs that might have been written by a little Dickens; there were thinly diluted specimens of Dumas, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Richard Harding Davis, Thackeray. The rest was all Kipling, prose and verse. Everybody was writing Kipling then.

      A step sounded in the hall. The knob turned softly; the door opened a little way; and the thinnish, moderately pretty face of Mamie Wilcox appeared—pale blue eyes with the beginnings of hollows beneath them, fair skin, straight hay-coloured hair, wisps of it straying down across forehead and cheek, thin nose, soft but rather sulky mouth. She was probably twenty-two or twenty-three at this time.

      All she said was, 'Oh!'—very low.

      'Wonder you wouldn't knock!' said he.

      'Wonder you wouldn't get up before noon!' she responded smartly, but still in that cautious voice; then added, 'Here, I'll leave the towels, and come back.' And she slipped into the room, a heavier and more shapely figure of a girl than was suggested by the face, a girl in a full-length gingham apron and little shoes with unexpectedly high heels; not 'French' heels, but the sloping style known then as 'military.'

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      Henry's colour was rising a little. He cleared his throat, and said, mumbling, 'Leave anything you like.'

      'I'll do just that,'—she turned, with a flirt of her apron and stood, between washstand and door, surveying him—'what I like, and nothing more.'... Her eyes wandered now from him to the picture at the left of the pincushion, then to the snapshots on the wall, and she smiled, very self-contained, very knowing, with the expression that the young call 'sarcastic.' The adjective came to mind. Henry's colour was mounting higher.

      'Pretty snappy to-day, ain't we?' said he.

      'Yes, when we're snapped at,' said she.

      There was a silence that ran on into seconds and tens of seconds.

      Then, acting on an impulse of astonishing suddenness, he sprang toward her.

      With almost equal agility she stepped away. But he caught one hand.

      She had the door-knob in her other hand. She drew the door open, then, indecisively, pushed it nearly to.

      'Be careful!' she whispered. 'They'll hear!'

      She made a small effort to free her hand. For a moment they stood tugging at each other.

      When Henry spoke, in an effort to appear the off-hand man of the world he assuredly was not, his voice sounded weak and husky.

      'Whew—strong!'

      'Suppose I slapped.'

      'Slap all you like.'

      'What would Martha Caldwell say?'

      There was a gloomy sort of anger on Henry's red face. He jerked her violently toward him.

      'Stop! You're hurting my wrist!' With which she yielded a little. He found himself about to take her in his arms. He heard her whispering—'For Heaven's sake be careful! They'll surely hear!'

      He was most unhappy. He pushed her roughly away, and rushed to the window.,

      He knew from the silence that she was lingering. He hated her. And himself.

      She said: 'Well, you needn't get mad.'

      Then, slowly, cautiously, she let herself out. He heard her moving composedly along the hall.

      He felt weak. And deeply guilty. For a long time this moment had been a possibility; now it had taken place. What if some one had seen her come in! What if she should come again! What if she should tell!...

      He found one hair brush on the floor, the other on the bed, and brushed his hair; donned his coat, buttoning it and smoothing it down about his shapely torso with a momentary touch of complacency; glanced at the mirror; twisted up his moustache; then stood waiting for his colour to go down.

      Suddenly, with one of his quick impulses, he sprang at the bookcase, drew out the Epictetus—it was a little book, bound in 'ooze' calf of an olive-green colour—and read these words (the book opened there):—

      'To the rational animal only is the irrational intolerable.

      He lowered the book and repeated the phrase aloud.

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      A little later—red about the ears, and given to sudden starts when the swinging pantry doors opened to let a student waiter in or out—he sat, quite erect, in the dining room and bolted a boarding-house breakfast of stewed prunes, oatmeal, fried steak, fried potatoes, fried mush swimming in brown sugar syrup, and coffee. The Discourses of Epictetus lay at his elbow.

      After this he walked—stiffly self-conscious, book under arm—over to Simpson Street, and took a chair and an Inter Ocean at Schultz and Schwartz's, among the line of those waiting to be shaved.

      This accomplished he paused outside, on the curb, to pencil this entry in a red pocket account-book:—

      'Shave—10 c.'

      He wavered when passing Donovan's; stepped in and consumed a frosted maple shake. Which necessitated the further entry in the red book:—

      'Soda—10 c.'

      In front of Berger's grocery he met Martha Caldwell. They walked together to the corner.

      Martha was a sizable girl, about as tall as Henry, with large blue eyes, an attractively short nose, abundant brown hair coiled away under her flat straw hat, and a general air of good sense. Martha was really a goodlooking young woman, and would have been popular had not Henry stood in her light. She had a small gift at drawing (the Gibson copies in Henry's room were hers) and danced gracefully enough. Monday and Thursday evenings were his regular calling times; and there were so many other evenings when he was expected to take her to this house or that with 'the crowd' that the other local 'men' had long since given up calling at her house. But they were not engaged.

      On this occasion there was constraint between them. They spoke of the lovely weather. She, knowing Henry pretty well, looked with some curiosity at his book. Henry glanced sidelong at her across a wide bottomless gulf, and stroked his moustache. He was groping desperately for words. He began to resent her. He presented an