Evening Star Newspaper, June 15, 1925, Page 26

THE EVENING STAR, WASHINGTON, D. C, MONDAY, JUNE 15, 1925 Romance and Sally Byrd BY ELLEN GLASGOW. (Copyright, 1925, by t he Crowell Publishing Co.) * One of a series of the year's best short stories. EVER AGAIN,” thought | Sally Byrd Littlepage. as | she opened her eves. | “Never in."” | She awoke with the feel- | something delightful was | st as she used to | in her | s morn They she [13 ing that about 1o happen awake on Christmas morning: childhood. Only her Christr ings were always disappointing. had burst lfke bubbles when touched them, while this dreamlike | expectancy was as real as Stanley. | The name sang in her mind, as if a thrush were imprisoned there and could not get out. And not only the thrush, but the sunshine, the fragrant wind and the blue sky filled with little clouds like momosa blossoms—all these made a fairy ring in \her thoughts where there was only dull grayness a few weeks ago )nly three weeks ago what a dreary round life had been! Only three weeks ago she had gone plodding through her days, unaware that Stan- lew was in the world waiting for her. Awakening in the morning with noth- ing to expect, falling asleep at night with nothing to dream about. Going out after breakfast to teach in the kindergarten of the public school, coming back after lunch to wait on Grandfather or Grandmother Little. page. Breakfast, dinner, bed, that s all. Grandfather's worry about grandmother’s worry about Aunt Louisa’s worry about | neuralgia: Aunt Matilda's worry about salvation. Just that and nothing else in her days. Drabness everywhere that she looked. Drabness and pov erty and the irksome monotony of | things that did not matter. And then, | in the midst of the grayn sunshine had flooded the world. She had met nley one day, by the strangest nee, in the library where she had gone to return a book. They had both had to wait for the librarian, and while | they were waiting they had begun tc talk about Shakespeare’s plays. After- ward she had discovered that he was related to Gerty Cunningham. who taught in the kindergarten with her, and that he wrote plays which were so fine that she had never seen them; but it was really Shakespeare who in- troduced them. From beginning to end it had all been miraculous. It was one of those accidents which ap- pear, when vou look back on them in tender retrospect. to have occurred through some divine intervention in the chaos of circumstances. Nothing, she felt, except a beneficent Provi- dence could have created so perfect an event out of the vast commonplace of existence Though she was only 19, it seemed | to be that she had lived through a lifetime of drudgery before Stanley | came. Even as a child she had been cramped and isolated by poverty, as if poverty were a contagious disease. They had never let her play with the other children in the streets: they had always kept her sewing with her elderly aunts in the faded drawing room. or walking back and forth to the park with Grandfather Littlepage. Tn_ the solitude of the once fashion able and now fallen street in which | they lived there were no neighbors of their own class for them to mingle with, and mingling with “the common children” was sternly forbidden by | Sally By grandparents. | Well, it was all over now. Ina few | minutes she would slip out of bed and | bathe in water that sparkled like hap- | piness; she would brush her da x-m" hair and wind it in a wreath of plaits round her head: she would touch her | glowing cheeks with the powder she | had bought vesterday: she would put | on her green crepe dress and the lock- | et with her mother’s miniature: and she would go down to breakfast with the joy in her heart shining through her gray-green eyes which Stanley once said were the color of April mist “Why did you put on your Sunday | dre: Aunt Matilda would ask: and, made wise by love, she would lie| happily: “Oh, it's May ds vou | know. There’s to be a celebration in | the kindergarten en. when break- | fast was over, she would run out to meet Stanley in the park, and they would go away to be married. Aftel that her thoughts dissolved in a rosy glow of expectancy. She thought of marriage as her grandfather thought | of great wealth or her Aunt Matilda thought of heaven—as a passive and | permanent condition of bliss | In the dining room, which looked nd smelt depressingly. & . a withered tree of an old man, | facing grandmother, a withered bush of an old woman 3 ference betwee {jar on the mantelpiece. | who | greener, more like an April mist than father was very tall and thin and grandmother was very short and thick Both were old, tired, embittered and drained of humanity by self-denial. They had gone so long without pleas. ure that they had come to regard it, even for the young, as a luxury, not a necessity. You are late, Sally By re. marked grandmother, pouring coffee with her trembling hapds. “You will have to hurry to beé in time for school.” “I know, grandmother. 1. Why did you put on your Sunday dress?” inquired Aunt Matilda in her d crackling voice. She was a pale, long, narrow woman, whose ideas were embalmed in religion as if it were a preserving fluid. Her features had once been pretty and aristocratic, and there was a lengend that she had been in love with an infidel in her youth. She suffered day and night from a sense of sin, and if possible she was a more depressing companion than Aunt Louisa, who suffered day and night from neuralgia. +Oh, ay day. There's to be a celebr: in the kindergarten,” re- plied Sally Byrd, just as she had im- agined. It was wonderful, she told herself, while she sprinkled sugar on her oatmeal and wished for cream, the life went on blandly repeating imagination. did you put ginger jar vesterday asked Aunt Louisa. tes, 1 put it in.” Every month she put her salary in the green ginger Aunt Louisa, attended to the rent and the housekeeping, kept the money there because she imagined it was a place where no burglar would ever think of looking. Aunt Verbena, the ancient maid of all work, having lived in the family for 40 vears, had proved her- self to be perfectly honest. And, be sides, since she spent her working hours in dim regions below ground, it was loglcal to suppose that character in her place was supplemented by lack of opportunity. “1 shan’t need any money,” Sally Byrd was thinking. anley told me not to bring anything, not even a bag. He will buy clothes for me. Prettier clothes than I have ever had in my ife.” Her e grew softer and 1 overslept the money in the Sally Byrd?" ever, when she thought of the clothes stanley would buy for her. Yes, I put the money in," she answered fow your neuralgia Aunt Lou “Never again!” sang the thrush. ever again | Aunt Louisa, with the resigned smile of the neuralgic or the recently bereaved, replied in chastened tones that she was waiting for her coffee be- fore taking a third dose of aspirin. “Matilda insisted on having air in the room last night,” she said, “though she knows that I cannot stand afr at night “I must hurry away,” said the girl gayly, as she finally drew back from he table. Did they hear the excite. nent in her voice, she wondered, the suppressed jov? “But you've eaten nothing. Byrd,” protested grandfather, saliy | and grandmother repeated after her habit, “eaten nothing.” *“Oh, T took oatmeal, and oatmeal s so very filling, you know,” replied Sally Byrd, laughing. Then, as she turned to leave the room, her heart contracted with a spasm of pity. She saw them all ught together like mice in a trap. Perhaps in their youth, béfore they | Brew too old to struggle, they also had tried to escape into freedom. “Goodbye!" she called, waving back from the door: and in spite of the pity through which she looked at them, the thrush in her thoughts sang eagerly, “Never again!" As soon as she was outside of the house she felt that she wanted to dance on the pavement. Did prison ers always feel like this on the morn ing they were released? How beau tiful the world, the same world that she had once thought so sordid, looked today! And the people she passed looked at her so pleasantly, as if, one and all they were sharing her secret joy. That kind old man leaning on his stick at the crossing: the woman with a shaw] over her head hurrying to market; the nurse in uniform on the porch of a boarding house: the milkman swing ing himself down from his wagon; the baby in the perambulator thumping the head of his Teddy bear; all these different persons gazed at her with little sympathetic smiles peeping from their eyes and the corners of their lips. Did they suspect that she was going to be married today? Oh, if you could only dance with vour feet When you danced with your heart! At the crossing she darted like a sparrow among the vehicles in the street. In the park, by the fountain, she knew Stanley was wafting. As soon as that laundry wagon drawn by the white horse went by she would be able to see him. Why did it move Would it never go again? ing just as she reached the opposite pavement: and while her eves searched the walks of the park she chught her breath and stopped suddenly, rooted by the magic of a thought to the spot on which she was standing. Suppose he should not have come! Suppose something had hap- pened! Suppose he had changed his mind at the last minute! For an in stant it seemed to her that her blood ran cold in her veins. Her pulses flagged, andesthen, with a throb of delight, they began beating a jazz rhapsody. She had caught a gitmpse of him by the fountain. When she entered the park and could look under the young leaves on the trees she could see him distinctly. He wa: standing there alone with his hat in his hand and his arm on the railing She could see his brown hair, with the gloss catching the light, where it swept back from his forehead; the ruddy tan of his face the easy, de lightful look of his figure in the gray clothes she loved to touch. In a min ute she would see his hazel eyes twin kling down on her. As soon as he aught sight of her she knew that his face would come alive just as a dark room does when you light a lamp in it “Stanley!" she called softly, and ran toward him with her hands out- | porches unscreened. in hot weather, t silER\\fogn "FOREST “A Restricted Community Under Club Control” Invites you to examine into its claims to distinction. Situated on very high land, it is swept by prevailing breezes. Nights are proverbially cool and mosquitoes a negligible factor For those not caring to keep house 5 Community Dining Halls are conveniently located and arranged with an eye to comfort RIVER A splendid Bathing Beach and Pler {s safeguarded during bath- ing hours by a lifeguard. The matchless Eighteen-Hole Sher- wood Forest Golf Course—adjacent. Furnished Cottages by the Season—$300 and Upward Proportionate rates for shorter periods. For Further Particulars Apply 503 Fourteenth St. N.W. Telephone—Main 7523 Beautiful drive by way of Marlbore. Road in excellent condition. Cut again—deeper! This morning we put every remaining Spring Suit at a new lower price—to hurry along the clearance. There are many light weights in the light colors for now. There are heavier weights aqd darker shades for early Fall. There are plain stretched and the sunshine in her eves. He started as if he were jerked back from a reverfe, and glanced swiftly over his shoulder before he drew her into his arms. “Sally Byrd, you darling!” claimed as he kissed her. She laughed with happiness. “‘Oh, you oughtn't to! Not here in the park.” “But there isn't a soul about. There fsn't a blessed thing in sight except the soarrows, and they won't tell on us.” Of course he was right to be merry but on a morning like this, when they were golng away in secret, she feit she should have preferred him to be—well, not grave exactly, but at least serfous. After all, when you came to think of it, and she had thought of nothing for the last three weeks, marriage was & very very serlous thing. And when you married at 19 you would have such a long time ahead elther to enjoy it or to regret ft. “So vou really came?” “Didn’t you know I was coming?” “I hardiy dared belleve it. Did vou look in the glass this morning “When 1 did my hair. But why? Is my hat on wrong?" ‘No, your hat is all right, but you've got a carnation for a face.” She laughed and drew closer to his side. ‘Then a fat man strolled by lefsurely, after the habit of the fat, and she slipped away again. “How long have you been waiting?" “Ten minutes, and every minute was longer than the one before it.” “I know.” she agreed. “It was like that all day vesterday.” The fat man had sat down on a bench under a locust tree, just where he couldn't help seeing them if he glanced up from his newspaper. Wasn't that like life! she exclaimed inwardly while she looked at him “Let's go on the other side,” said Stanley, turning away, and she fol- lowed him obediently around the foun tain. “I'd like to*have a picture of ou as you look this morning,” he said. “T'd call it April.” How lovely of him that was! There came over her suddenly the feeling that she was living not In the actual world but in some enchanting dream Life was too beautiful to be real. “I can't belleve that it is going to happen,” she said. His eyes were grave as he looked at her. “It takes courage, dear. Have You courage enough?” “Courage?” she faltered because she could not “To be happy?"” “To be happy like this. A great many have tried it, and very few have succeeded. The difference is one of courage. Nothing else can take its_place, not even love.” Sho looked at him with the eyes of he ex- understand. youth. afraid of anything answered. “Not even of me?" he asked. *“I mean afrald that I mikht some day make you unhappy.” “But you love me.” “That Is only another reason why 1 may hurt you.” For a moment he was silent, and then he said very slowly “Yes, T love you. I am sure that love you.” Just as if love were a thing you had to reason about, she | told herself, and not a miracle which you percelved in a flash through some infallible instinct. | “Then 1 know you will never hurt me," she said. He had drawn her to his side on a bench, and was holding her hands in his while he spoke. She wished now that he would be less grave, that he would take their happiness more lightly. “If T could be sure you would never reproach me,” he said. The color ebbed from her face. “Do you mean,” she asked in a small cold | voice, “that you don’t want to take me away with you “No, no, I don't mean that”” He was kissing her hands. “I want you more than ever. I am sure 1 want you: but I am afraid. I am afraid of the future.” “You don't know—you can’t feel with all your heart and soul that you | want to marry me?" Oh, if only the | earth would open and let her sink through it! He was pressing her hands to his lips. “If it were only that! he re. plled, “but you know, dear, we can't be perfectly sure even of that. After | all, my wife may refuse to divorce me." | For a minute after he had spoken | she sat gazing at him in silence, as if | she had been turned to stone by his words. Her look was still fastened to his: her hand was still pressed to his lips; but the color had died so utterly in her face that it might have been the face of a statue. Only her AMBULANCES, $4.00 Up to date—Fully equipped with rolling cot."stretcher, blankets and pillows. CHAMBERS' BROWNSTONE FUNERAL HOME. Col. 432 _ 3 with you,” she SEE ANNOUNCEMENT TUESDAY'S AND SATURDAY'S STAR. duced, per yard, to... < Your 3-piece Living Room new, using new sprin Special I Velours and Sl Ushotstery. Materiaie: 627 F St. NW. Bring COVER YOUR FURNITURE With Beautiful New Stylish SLIP COVERS We make them to order and offer you the lowest prices in Washington on genuine Belgian Slip Cover Materials. Suite upholstered like and other materials when neces- sary. The labor for this work will be only......... . 0dd pleces upholstered at special low prices. on our complele stock of Tapestries. AMERICAN UPHOLSTERY CO. Phone, Write or Call—Man Will Phone Main 8139 ‘ Du Pont Paints Stains & Varnishes Navy Deck Paint Washington’s Recognized Headquarters For ALL PAINT SUPPLIES Of Dependable Quality HUGH REILLY CO. Paints and Glass 1334 NEW YORK AVEN Phone Main 1703 PRICES SPECIALLY Screen Paint, Porch Paints Sponges, Chamois, Furniture Tioba7 Dulae Tican ovas Delmsay sreariiny denly like a 1 thoug | that you knew-in the beginning. s seemed to open sud- sta in a wood, and some- the time T imagined you avolded |with there before. ing, too.” don’t understand. I| “But T didn't understand. she said | dream,” she repeated helplessly were afraid| “Does it make all that difference to | you, Sally Byrd?" only |~ His voice was miles away from her; I didn't| that she if she et she had felt nothing, it [ the young green leaves and the roofs | hers chimneys of the city. Beyond Out of nothing. Strange | while she answered, that her body became | and that along these | everything. sed and recrossed, | that he should have passed so far were | away from her in a moment. Scarcely |a moment even, only a few seconds Gerty told me | before she had been quite close to him All 'and now they were sitting side by side g0. | But it you knew. Dress speaking of her from some feeling of | them. thing looked out of them that he had |delicacy. So I went on blindly avoid- seen “But—but I didn’t know zou had a wife, whisper 5 of heing overheard At first stunned sensation that follows a but seemed to her of wire: nd , which ¢ quivers of pain, like tiny fames difference at | herself made it came out of the dim horizon beyond | Does “In hers? My Oh, we got ove divorce,” he never wanted ore untii now.” an immense distance between it doesn’t make any d love. It “doesn’t “ma all in that,” she he; ing_in thin, faint tones ounded ltke the far-off whistle train. Then a sudden thought her glance at him sharpl it make ny difference in * she asked ‘e’'s, you mean” that sort of thing long We've heen separated for T've never sked her for a ded contritely. “I've (Continued in Tomorrow's Star.) In Cool Summer Styles Without Cash ! : Come to the Liberal Store where you can enjoy the EAS- IEST CREDIT TERMS in the city. A very small down payment will secure for you a complete stylish Summer Outfit and we will give you many weeks to pay. Another Great Sale of Women’s and Misses’ Silk Crepe SUMMER DRESSE Another big shipment of Wonder Value Dresses, made of printed silk crepe. Dozens of new paterns to choose from, worth far more than we ask, ON EASY CREDIT TERMS. / A REMARKABLE Women’s & Misses’ High Grade ALL SIZES Hundreds of crispy new Summer Dresses just unpacked. Flowered materials, strip ete. All nicely trimmed. Ex- ceptional values. You can charge it. KEEP COOL MEN! Our Entire Stock of Coats, Suits, Ensembles now 1-3 Off WASH DRESSE Wear one of our light weight 2 or 3-piece suits without any actual outlay of cash. Pay a little each week. SUMMER SUITS Ask to See Our Complete Summer Out- fit, Including Suit, Shoes, Shirt and Hat —For Only $5.00 Down. Blues—that provide a Coat for wear with white trousers on state occasions. ..525 335 345 Polishes. for boats Now $35 and $40 Suits are. Now $50 Suits are......... Now $55 and $60 Suits are. Now $65 and $70 Suits are. s55 Now $75 and $85 Suits are......%6D Pick while the picking is good—for these prices will make short work of them. Hundreds of smart styles, dis- tinctive models. Exceptional tai- loring. All sizes. New light shades. Single and double-breast- eds. Priced as low as.. ) with home happenings —while you are on your vacation. Just order The Star—Evening and Sunday —sent to your address.” No matter where you go—or how often you change your location — if mail will reach you—so will The Star. ‘ § Rates by Mail—Postage Paid Payable in Advance Maryland and Virginia— h’u:#"ln%'“m‘ Sunday ceees.20c I8¢ -Bc Heiwulos Are Here Again! Those of you who have been waiting for the re- plenished supply of the Heiwulo Tweed Coat and Trousers Suits can be fitted now. The assortment is 81 6.50 complete again—in both patterns and sizes, W Y \ §“ | W \ I A\ L iy e One month......... All other States— One month. .. The Mode—F at Eleventr: 60c 20c