have a house like George Tompkins’.”
“I don’t want an interior-decoration shop.”
“Forty thousand a year!” she repeated again, and then added softly: “Oh, Roger—”
“Yes?”
“I’m not going out with George Tompkins.”
“I wouldn’t let you, even if you wanted to,” he said shortly.
She made a show of indignation.
“Why, I’ve had a date with him for this Thursday for weeks.”
“It isn’t Thursday.”
“It is.”
“It’s Friday.”
“Why, Roger, you must be crazy! Don’t you think I know what day it is?”
“It isn’t Thursday,” he said stubbornly. “Look!” And he held out the morning paper.
“Friday!” she exclaimed. “Why, this is a mistake! This must be last week’s paper. Today’s Thursday.”
She closed her eyes and thought for a moment.
“Yesterday was Wednesday,” she said decisively. “The laundress came yesterday. I guess I know.”
“Well,” he said smugly, “look at the paper. There isn’t any question about it.”
With a bewildered look on her face she got out of bed and began searching for her clothes. Roger went into the bathroom to shave. A minute later he heard the springs creak again. Gretchen was getting back into bed.
“What’s the matter?” he inquired, putting his head around the corner of the bathroom.
“I’m scared,” she said in a trembling voice. “I think my nerves are giving away. I can’t find any of my shoes.”
“Your shoes? Why, the closet’s full of them.”
“I know, but I can’t see one.” Her face was pale with fear. “Oh, Roger!”
Roger came to her bedside and put his arm around her.
“Oh, Roger,” she cried, “what’s the matter with me? First that newspaper, and now all my shoes. Take care of me, Roger.”
“I’ll get the doctor,” he said.
He walked remorselessly to the telephone and took up the receiver.
“Phone seems to be out of order,” he remarked after a minute; “I’ll send Bebé.”
The doctor arrived in ten minutes.
“I think I’m on the verge of a collapse,” Gretchen told him in a strained voice.
Doctor Gregory sat down on the edge of the bed and took her wrist in his hand.
“It seems to be in the air this morning.”
“I got up,” said Gretchen in an awed voice, “and I found that I’d lost a whole day. I had an engagement to go riding with George Tompkins—”
“What?” exclaimed the doctor in surprise. Then he laughed.
“George Tompkins won’t go riding with anyone for many days to come.”
“Has he gone away?” asked Gretchen curiously.
“He’s going West.”
“Why?” demanded Roger. “Is he running away with somebody’s wife?”
“No,” said Doctor Gregory. “He’s had a nervous breakdown.”
“What?” they exclaimed in unison.
“He just collapsed like an opera-hat in his cold shower.”
“But he was always talking about his—his balanced life,” gasped Gretchen. “He had it on his mind.”
“I know,” said the doctor. “He’s been babbling about it all morning. I think it’s driven him a little mad. He worked pretty hard at it, you know.”
“At what?” demanded Roger in bewilderment.
“At keeping his life balanced.” He turned to Gretchen. “Now all I’ll prescribe for this lady here is a good rest. If she’ll just stay around the house for a few days and take forty winks of sleep she’ll be as fit as ever. She’s been under some strain.”
“Doctor,” exclaimed Roger hoarsely, “don’t you think I’d better have a rest or something? I’ve been working pretty hard lately.”
“You!” Doctor Gregory laughed, slapped him violently on the back. “My boy, I never saw you looking better in your life.”
Roger turned away quickly to conceal his smile—winked forty times, or almost forty times, at the autographed picture of Mr. George Tompkins, which hung slightly askew on the bedroom wall.
Absolution
I
There was once a priest with cold, watery eyes, who, in the still of the night, wept cold tears. He wept because the afternoons were warm and long, and he was unable to attain a complete mystical union with our Lord. Sometimes, near four o’clock, there was a rustle of Swede girls along the path by his window, and in their shrill laughter he found a terrible dissonance that made him pray aloud for the twilight to come. At twilight the laughter and the voices were quieter, but several times he had walked past Romberg’s Drug Store when it was dusk and the yellow lights shone inside and the nickel taps of the soda-fountain were gleaming, and he had found the scent of cheap toilet soap desperately sweet upon the air. He passed that way when he returned from hearing confessions on Saturday nights, and he grew careful to walk on the other side of the street so that the smell of the soap would float upward before it reached his nostrils as it drifted, rather like incense, toward the summer moon.
But there was no escape from the hot madness of four o’clock. From his window, as far as he could see, the Dakota wheat thronged the valley of the Red River. The wheat was terrible to look upon and the carpet pattern to which in agony he bent his eyes sent his thought brooding through grotesque labyrinths, open always to the unavoidable sun.
One afternoon when he had reached the point where the mind runs down like an old clock, his housekeeper brought into his study a beautiful, intense little boy of eleven named Rudolph Miller. The little boy sat down in a patch of sunshine, and the priest, at his walnut desk, pretended to be very busy. This was to conceal his relief that someone had come into his haunted room.
Presently he turned around and found himself staring into two enormous, staccato eyes, lit with gleaming points of cobalt light. For a moment their expression startled him—then he saw that his visitor was in a state of abject fear.
“Your mouth is trembling,” said Father Schwartz, in a haggard voice.
The little boy covered his quivering mouth with his hand.
“Are you in trouble?” asked Father Schwartz, sharply. “Take your hand away from your mouth and tell me what’s the matter.”
The boy—Father Schwartz recognized him now as the son of a parishioner, Mr. Miller, the freight-agent—moved his hand reluctantly off his mouth
