第2章

When she was in her first year at the High School and he in his last he walked home with her every day; and they regarded themselves as engaged.Her once golden hair had darkened now to a beautiful brown with red flashing from its waves; and her skin was a clear olive pallid but healthy.And she had shot up into a tall, slender young woman; her mother yielded to her pleadings, let her put her hair into a long knot at the back of her neck and wear skirts ALMOST to the ground.

When he came from Ann Arbor for his first Christmas holidays each found the other grown into a new person.She thought him a marvel of wisdom and worldly experience.He thought her a marvel of ideal womanhood--gay, lively; not a bit "narrow" in judging him, yet narrow to primness in her ideas of what she herself could do, and withal charming physically.He would not have cared to explain how he came by the capacity for such sophisticated judgment of a young woman.They were to be married as soon as he had his degree; and he was immediately to be admitted to partnership in his father's woolen mills--the largest in the state of Indiana.

He had been home three weeks of the long vacation between his sophomore and junior years.There appeared on the town's big and busy stream of gossip, stories of his life at Ann Arbor--of drinking and gambling and wild "tears" in Detroit.And it was noted that the fast young men of Saint X--so every one called Saint Christopher--were going a more rapid gait.Those turbulent fretters against the dam of dullness and stern repression of even normal and harmless gaiety had long caused scandal.But never before had they been so daring, so defiant.

One night after leaving Pauline he went to play poker in Charley Braddock's rooms.Braddock, only son of the richest banker in Saint X, had furnished the loft of his father's stable as bachelor quarters and entertained his friends there without fear that the noise would break the sleep and rouse the suspicions of his father.That night, besides Braddock and Dumont, there were Jim Cauldwell and his brother Will.As they played they drank;and Dumont, winning steadily, became offensive in his raillery.

There was a quarrel, a fight; Will Cauldwell, accidently toppled down a steep stairway by Dumont, was picked up with a broken arm and leg.

By noon the next day the town was boiling with this outbreak of deviltry in the leading young men, the sons and prospective successors of the "bulwarks of religion and morality." The Episcopalian and Methodist ministers preached against Dumont, that "importer of Satan's ways into our peaceful midst," and against Charley Braddock with his "ante-room to Sheol"--the Reverend Sweetser had just learned the distinction between Sheol and Hades.The Presbyterian preacher wrestled spiritually with Will Cauldwell and so wrought upon his depression that he gave out a solemn statement of confession, remorse and reform.In painting himself in dark colors he painted Jack Dumont jet black.

Pauline had known that Dumont was "lively"--he was far too proud of his wild oats wholly to conceal them from her.And she had all the tolerance and fascinated admiration of feminine youth for the friskiness of masculine freedom.Thus, though she did not precisely approve what he and his friends had done, she took no such serious view of it as did her parents and his.The most she could do with her father was to persuade him to suspend sentence pending the conclusion of an investigation into Jack's doings at the University of Michigan and in Detroit.Colonel Gardiner was not so narrow or so severe as Jack said or as Pauline thought.He loved his daughter; so he inquired thoroughly.He knew that his daughter loved Dumont; so he judged liberally.When he had done he ordered the engagement broken and forbade Dumont the house.

"He is not wild merely; he is--worse than you can imagine,"said the colonel to his wife, in concluding his account of his discoveries and of Dumont's evasive and reluctant admissions--an account so carefully expurgated that it completely misled her.

"Tell Pauline as much as you can--enough to convince her."This, when Mrs.Gardiner was not herself convinced.She regarded the colonel as too high-minded to be a fit judge of human frailty; and his over-caution in explanation had given her the feeling that he had a standard for a husband for their daughter which only another such rare man as himself could live up to.

Further, she had always been extremely reserved in mother-and-daughter talk with Pauline, and thus could not now give her a clear idea of what little she had been able to gather from Colonel Gardiner's half-truths.This typical enacting of a familiar domestic comedy-tragedy had the usual result: the girl was confirmed in her original opinion and stand.

"Jack's been a little too lively," was her unexpressed conclusion from her mother's dilution of her father's dilution of the ugly truth."He's sorry and won't do it again, and--well, I'd hate a milksop.Father has forgotten that he was young himself once."Dumont's father and mother charged against Ann Arbor that which they might have charged against their own alternations of tyranny and license, had they not been humanly lenient in self-excuse.

"No more college!" said his father.

"The place for you, young man, is my office, where I can keep an eye or two on you.""That suits me," replied the son, indifferently--he made small pretense of repentance at home.

"I never wanted to go to college."

"Yes, it was your mother's doing," said old Dumont."Now we'll try MY way of educating a boy."So Jack entered the service of his father's god-of-the-six-days, and immediately showed astonishing talent and twelve-to-fourteen-hour assiduity.He did not try to talk with Pauline.He went nowhere but to business; he avoided the young men.