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 CHAPTER 7: INVESTIGATING WINDOWS, LINUX,
AND GRAPHIC FILES

Multiple Choice:

1. Examples of user data include all of the following EXCEPT

A. User passwords

B. User profiles

C. Program files

D. Temp files

Answer: A Reference: Investigating Windows Systems Difficulty: Easy

2. In an NTFS system, by default, which of the following have access to files and folders not uniquely theirs?

A. Each user in the Group folder

B. Only those users in the Users folder

C. Each user who successfully logs in

D. Only the user assigned to those resources

Answer: D Reference: Separation of Duties Difficulty: Moderate

3. All of the following are key differences in identifying an operating system EXCEPT

A. The Recycle Bin folder

B. Operating system folder names

C. User root folder construction

D. Folders containing group userids

Answer: D Reference: Identifying the Operating System Difficulty: Moderate

of a Target Hard Drive
4. Which of the following is the primary default folder in Windows 2000 and XP?

A. Documents and Settings

B. My Documents

C. User Root

D. My Computer

Answer: A Reference: Documents and Settings Folder Difficulty: Moderate

5. The user root folder may contain all of the following EXCEPT

A. Internet data

B. Application parameters

C. Wallpaper

D. Registry settings

Answer: D Reference: User Root Folder Difficulty: Difficult

6. Sources of e-evidence within Windows subfolders can include all of the following EXCEPT

A. Pointers to Office files

B. Listing of programs on the Quick Launch bar

C. Pointers to Internet Favorites

D. The user’s address book

Answer: C Reference: Application Data Folder Difficulty: Moderate

7. In a forensics context, hidden information about files and folders is called

A. Artifact data

B. Metadata

C. Archive data

D. Read-only data

Answer: B Reference: Metadata Difficulty: Moderate

8. All configuration information needed by the operating may be located in which of the following?

A. System folder

B. Configuration file

C. Autoexec.bat file

D. Registry hives

Answer: D Reference: Registry Difficulty: Moderate

9. When you send a job to the printer, Windows creates a(n)

A. Enhanced metafile (EMF)

B. Enhanced image file (IMF)

C. Temporary print file (TPF)

D. Tagged image format file (TIFF)

Answer: A Reference: Print Spool Difficulty: Moderate

10. Which of the following is NOT one of the file types available within Linux?

A. Block devices

B. Directories

C. Named pipes

D. Superblock

Answer: D Reference: File Systems Difficulty: Moderate

11. Which of the following is one of the default directories created when installing Linux?

A. /setup

B. /default

C. /bin

D. /swap

Answer: C Reference: System Directories Difficulty: Moderate

12. Which of the following is considered an excellent source to obtain information on when passwords were
last changed within a Linux system?

A. /etc/sysconfig

B. /etc/shadow/passwd

C. /etc/shadow

D. /etc

Answer: C Reference: Key Linux Files and Directories to Investigate Difficulty: Moderate

13. If you change a file extension by renaming the file,

A. You also change the data in the file

B. You will not be able to open the file

C. Windows will change the icon that represents the file

D. You also change the data header

Answer: C Reference: File Signatures Difficulty: Moderate

14. In steganography, the original file that contains the hidden information is the

A. Steganographic carrier

B. Carrier medium

C. Hiding medium

D. Concealing medium

Answer: B Reference: Steganography Difficulty: Moderate

15. Clues that may indicate stego use include all of the following EXCEPT

A. The sophistication of the computer’s owner

B. Software clues on the computer

C. Type of crime being investigated

D. Large number of files in the Recycle Bin

Answer: D Reference: Steganography Difficulty: Moderate

Fill in the Blank:

16. System data and artifacts are files generated by the ________.

Answer: operating system Reference: Investigating Windows Systems Difficulty: Moderate

17. Files are first loaded into a(n) ________ before being printed.

Answer: buffer Reference: Investigating Windows Systems Difficulty: Difficult

18. A(n) ________ is created by the computer for each user.

Answer: userid Reference: Data and User Authentication Weaknesses of FAT Difficulty: Moderate

19. A(n) ________ is designed as a hierarchical listing of folders and files.

Answer: directory tree structure Reference: Identifying the Operating System Difficulty: Moderate
of a Target Hard Drive

20. The ________ folder is used by Internet sites to store information about the user.

Answer: Cookies Reference: Cookies Folder Difficulty: Moderate

21. The ________ subfolder lists the files that the user has accessed over several time periods.

Answer: History Reference: Local Settings Folder Difficulty: Moderate

22. The ________ folder generally contains information concerning the programs the user typically works with.

Answer: Start Menu Reference: Start Menu Folder Difficulty: Moderate

23. One application of metadata used by Windows is an uncommon storage concept called ________.

Answer: alternate data streams Reference: Metadata Difficulty: Difficult

24. Windows NT and higher changed the registry to a mixture of several files referred to as ________.

Answer: hives Reference: Registry Difficulty: Moderate

25. The ________ tracks those actions deemed as events by the software application.

Answer: application log Reference: Event Logs Difficulty: Easy

26. By default, the ________ is used as virtual memory.

Answer: swap file (or page file) Reference: Swap File/Page File Difficulty: Moderate

27. The ________ command gives Linux users the ability to perform administrative duties, which require a
separate password for each user.

Answer: sudo Reference: Investigating Linux Systems Difficulty: Moderate

28. In Linux, everything—including all devices, partitions, and folders—is seen as a unified ________.

Answer: file system Reference: Investigating Linux Systems Difficulty: Moderate

29. ________ are used to determine where data starts and ends when graphic files are located in unallocated or
slack space.

Answer: File signatures Reference: Graphic File Forensics Difficulty: Moderate

30. The process of retrieving image data from unallocated or slack space is called ________.

Answer: data carving (or salvaging) Reference: Data Carving Difficulty: Moderate

Matching:

31. Match the following to their definitions.

I. User profiles A. Internet history files

II. Program files B. Installed applications

III. Temp files C. Though used only briefly, they are not deleted

IV. Application-level files D. Data created by a user

Answer: D B C A Reference: Terms throughout the chapter Difficulty: Moderate

32. Match the following keys to their hive file.

I. HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT A. Default

II. HKEY_USERS\.Default B. System

III. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SAM C. SAM

IV. HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG D. Software

Answer: D A C B Reference: Registry Difficulty: Difficult

33. Match the following to their data structures.

I. Data block A. Contain metadata for each file

II. Inodes B. Unit of allocation for storage

III. Dentry object C. Created for every file system mounted

IV. Superblock D. Contains information about the directory structure

Answer: B A D C Reference: File Systems Difficulty: Moderate

34. Match the following file types to their description.

I. Sockets A. Unbuffered files used to exchange data

II. Character devices B. Virtual connections between two processes

III. Named pipes C. Provide a FIFO mechanism

IV. Block devices D. Buffered files used to exchange data

Answer: B A C D Reference: File Systems Difficulty: Difficult

35. Match the type of directory to its definition.

I. /lib A. Where files with no names are placed

II. /etc B. Contains information on printers, log files, and transient data

III. /lost+found C. Could be a rich source of evidence if not recently cleaned

IV. /var D. Library files

V. /tmp E. Contains shadow password files

Answer: D E A B C Reference: System Directories Difficulty: Difficult

36. Match the following GREP tokens with their related functions.

I. * A. Used to match the ASCII hexadecimal representation of a single character

II. \xHH B. Implements an OR situation

III. [] C. When placed after a character, matches any number of occurrences of that character

IV. . D. Matches a single character

Answer: C A B D Reference: Using Grep to Search File Contents Difficulty: Difficult

37. Match the hex signature with its file extension.

I. 00 00 01 00 A. BMP

II. FF D8 FF E1 xx xx 45 78 69 66 00 B. ICO

III. 42 4D C. PNG

IV. 89 50 4E 47 0D 0A 1A 0A D. JPEG

Answer: B D A C Reference: File Signatures Difficulty: Difficult

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ancestors have saved up to hand you unawares. I cannot help
playing the piano. They say I even make people like Bach, but I wish
I could, for it is life to me, after a fashion, and death after another.
You cannot mix house-and-garden living and a career any more than
oil and water. It must be the choice absolute of one or the other. If a
big person marries, she often marries some one inferior and therein
lies disaster. Moral, do not marry.”
Thurley’s fingers stole inside her pocket to clutch at the corner of
Betsey’s letter. “But you can be happy, if you do not marry,” she said
uneasily.
“Has it begun to worry so soon? Wake up, Silver Heels! Tell her
there is much else besides the little hope-chest crowded with pink-
ribboned nighties and cook books.” She stirred the Persian kitten
with her slipper toe.
“I—I’ve been engaged,” Thurley announced, not knowing why.
“Of course you have, living in a small town and with those eyes!
Who was he—not the constable? I could believe anything of you,
Thurley, but that!” Ernestine was kindly and teasing all in one.
“Just a nice boy,” she said with an effort, “but I gave him up.”
“You did wisely. It is the trying to delude ourselves to clutch with
one hand for a laurel wreath and for orange blossoms with the other.
That is what makes us failures on both sides of the question. You
must see Collin’s lovely country place up the Hudson, and we must
go to some lectures together. Besides, you have all Europe to
exclaim over. I’m going to walk through Spain next summer. Come
along?”
“I’d love to if—if I have the money—”
“We’ll find the money. You must do these things. Bliss is making a
little machine out of you with his blessed, idealistic self, hidden like a
monk under his habit. Never mind—bright days for Young America—
want to hear me play?”
“Would you, really?”
 “Listen!” Rising, she went to the piano and began “The Two
Larks,” gliding from that into some things of Grieg.
When she finished, Thurley, ruthlessly scattering cake crumbs,
came beside her. The timid country girl had vanished. She was the
wild-rose Thurley with the “fire, dash, touch of strangeness.”
“Let me sing for you! You can tell me the truth, better than Mr.
Hobart. Oh, but you can!” she begged.
Ernestine pointed to the shelves of music, but Thurley shook her
head.
“I’ll play for myself,” sitting on the bench beside her hostess.
The chords were few and far between, but the girl’s voice rose
high and clear with the ethereal quality of a child’s, as she sang an
old Scotch ballad.
Ernestine Christian drew her to her with a sudden, deft gesture.
“Shall I pity or congratulate you?” she asked, her sallow cheeks
flushed with excitement.
Then they fell to talking, as women will, of lighter things, and by
degrees Thurley found herself in Ernestine Christian’s bedroom—a
striking affair in yellow lacquered furniture with Chinese designs in
gold, ivory walls and huge, black fur rugs which she had brought
from Russia. There was point de venise and fillet lace over gray silk
for the furniture coverings and a veritable sheath of photographs,
among which Thurley found Bliss Hobart’s.
Then Thurley found herself taking note of Ernestine’s gowns,
learning many things which she resolved to put into practice. She
discovered that Ernestine Christian had just celebrated her thirtieth
birthday and was indifferent to the fact in any way; that Bliss Hobart
had had a fever when a lad and hence the grayish hair; that Polly
Harris was as good a treat as a fairy pantomime but she carried a
heartbreak bravely concealed, for she loved Collin Hedley, the
childish, irresponsible artist, and she had not the greatness of genius
in herself for which she so longed. Also, there was a Madame Lissa
Dagmar whom Ernestine disapproved of but spoke no open ill
concerning. This Madame Dagmar threatened the welfare of Mark
Wirth, the dancer, for she had fallen in love with him and turned his
head with strange notions, and, lastly, this Thurley’s woman heart
told her, Ernestine Christian loved the popular, irreverent novelist,
Caleb Patmore, but she believed marriage would interfere with his
work as well as her own, so she steadfastly stood him off in that
tantalizing fashion common to women of brilliant attainments and
childish, hungry hearts.
When Thurley left her, the sting as to Lorraine and Dan’s
engagement had been spirited away—she knew not how. Perhaps it
was the graceful way in which Ernestine had welcomed her, the new
surroundings, the music, the confidences about these “stars in the
artistic firmament,” as Birge’s Corners would have expressed it, the
knowledge she was to be one of the sacred family which had hidden
its existence even from press agents, or, thrilling thought, that she
was to be famous and rich—or was it none of these? Was it that
Thurley learned more about Bliss Hobart?—that he was an idealist
who seldom expressed ideals, lest they become trampled upon and
return to him in cynical disguise; that he was not old but young in
fact and unmarried, and, as yet, interested in no woman personally
save as his two friends, Polly and Ernestine, amused him; and, best
of all, that he told Ernestine to be particularly nice to Thurley
Precore, nicer than she had been to any other girl he had trained
and presented to the public!
 CHAPTER XII
Hobart did invite Thurley to the family dinner party. With
customary tardiness the invitation did not reach her until the
afternoon of the day, late afternoon in fact, after a fatiguing round of
“polishings off,” as she dubbed them, and an hour with Miss Clergy
during which she had read aloud from an archaic little romance and
had listened to the ghost-lady murmur her opinions.
Very swiftly it was becoming clear to Thurley that fame, even the
great, dazzling fame of which the workaday world reads with awe,
merely meant one had a different standard of values; that all
emotions such as joy, sorrow, anger, renunciation, cowardice,
heroism and so on were relative. Tom Jones and wife and child in
Skiddeoot, Missouri, might attain as great joy over acquiring a
terrifically green-colored bungalow and veneered mahogany to
decorate the parlor, while Mrs. Tom was to have a woman to wash,
and Mr. Tom membership in the Skiddeoot bowling club—quite as
much joy as Ernestine Christian when she stayed at Buckingham
Palace an honored guest and had on her dressing table the
miniatures of the young princes and a certain jewelled box given her
by the king of Italy. The lives of these luminaries, when one came to
know them on equal footing, were composed of a multitude of trivial
details, the same as were the Joneses’ of Skiddeoot—the proper
breakfast food, annoyance of a thunder shower, the wrong-sized-
gaiters, the intense dislike of parsnips, the fondness for Japanese
prints, the staunch conviction as to when the world was to end, the
way to eat one’s melons (in Skiddeoot it would be porridge), the
best style of spring motor car (in Skiddeoot it would be whether to
have the Ford wheels red or yellow)—and so on through an endless
list of things about which physical and mental existence is centered.
 Thurley had been exceptionally spared the grind and slow
advancement of the average artist. On the other hand, she had
experienced both grind and decidedly depressing experiences during
her travels in the box-car. She was now placed, as it were, in the
front ranks of the artistic world and allowed to gaze about,
investigate, presume, acquire knowledge, as much as her own
possibilities would permit. Her possibilities being above the average,
Thurley, inside of the few months in New York, had come to the
settled conviction that folks were really just folks no matter how they
were dressed, and the artists quite the same as the population of
Birge’s Corners, only in a different setting and with a different set of
values.
It was rather disappointing to come to the conclusion, not at all
romantic and stimulating or in keeping with the conclusions Caleb
Patmore’s “Victorious Victoria” had arrived at in an amazingly short
space of time. It was like a child’s suddenly being put on everyday
relations With Santa Claus himself and finding out, besides his ability
to ride reindeer skyward, and, toy-laden, shoot down narrow
chimneys, that he had a gouty foot the same as Oyster Jim’s, was
rather caustic if his eggs were overdone, was a Republican, body,
boots and breeches, the same as Ali Baba, and, if he lost three
games of cribbage straight running, was distinctly “peeved.”
So Thurley advanced beyond the illusions of the uninitiated.
Before she came into Bliss Hobart’s dominion she had been one of
the public, the sort of public who believe newspaper reports of opera
singers having frolicsome boa-constrictors as family pets, to
welcome them when they stagger home under van-loads of orchids
from the evening’s work! She saw now with the clear, innocent eyes
of youth, which is so often wiser than dictatorial and narrow middle
age, that the common lot was the universal lot and that in the sum
total of all things the famous ones were spared no more nor less nor
given greater qualities of endurance or supreme power.
Had the invitation to the “family” dinner come a week ago,
Thurley would have hesitated before accepting. But Ernestine
Christian’s personality—as yet it was not Ernestine Christian’s real
self since she betrayed that to no one—had woven a big-sister armor
about Thurley’s wild-rose self. She was eager to become one of the
family, unconscious of the honor for which many had sighed and
bribed for in vain. She showed the note to Miss Clergy and became
very flapperlike on the subject of her costume.
“Wear any you like,” Miss Clergy said fondly. “Dear me, I sha’n’t
go. I’m an old lady, sleepy as an infant by half after eight.”
“Must I always be alone?” Thurley protested.
Miss Clergy, whose girlhood had been bounded on all sides by the
“Polite Letter Writer” and “Godey’s Lady’s Book,” hesitated. “Take a
maid,” she urged.
“For protection? Goodness, no! Why, I’ve walked at midnight in
the darkest road at home, when Philena would be taken very ill and
we had to have the north end doctor. I’ll go alone—and wear my
green velvet.”
“If you want more dresses—” began Miss Clergy cheerily. When
one had a wild-rose girl with the voice of a lark, revenge just
naturally lost its grim and ugly aspects.
But Thurley shook her head and vanished, singing snatches of her
exercises and finding out that she was not so tired as she had
fancied; the languor had magically vanished. She propped Hobart’s
tantalizing note on her dressing table as she did her hair.

Thurley—
Come and be christened at seven-thirty. The family
must know the baby.
B. H.

Thurley deliberately powdered her face and added a soupçon of

superfluous rouge. She was thinking, “Now I shall know the real
man, the real Bliss Hobart,” dropping into a hum instead of singing
aloud, always a symptom of rare joy.
Presently she appeared to say good night to Miss Clergy, a radiant
young person looking, as Caleb Patmore said afterwards, “an up-to-
date historical romance bound in green velvet and silver lace.” But
she was disappointed in Hobart’s apartment, for she realized at a
glance it was only more of his “setting”; that here he existed as Bliss
Hobart the critic and master, not Bliss Hobart the man. It was
equally as awesome as his studio offices, but in a more
distinguished, definite style. There was rare, decorative wall paper,
with shellacked panels set in the yellow, marbleized walls
reproducing the design made by David for the great Napoleon.
Black, velvety carpet covered the tiled floors, the chairs were of
deep mouse color edged with gold fringe, there were pale gray
hangings against shell pink satin screens and a tiled Portuguese
mantel of blue and yellow.
She found Ernestine Christian and Caleb Patmore waging a lively
argument, with Bliss Hobart enjoying it hugely. Nor did they stop
after Thurley’s bashful entrance and Hobart’s introduction,
“The family infant! Remember, ‘children should be seen and not
heard.’ There’s the chair for you, and if you are very ‘pie’ and don’t
contradict your elders, you’ll be rewarded later.”
Thurley accepted the rôle gladly. It was evident they considered
her a promising infant. Some day she would be able to tell them the
same half-patronizing things or be introducing some other prodigy
into the family in equally clever, blasé fashion. That first and
memorable dinner party was more of an education than all the
lessons Thurley had endured since her New York advent. Here she
saw the demonstration of the theories taught her regarding form,
cleverness and so on. Long before the evening was ended, she felt
she could now dispense with the social secretary, the beauty doctor
and the gymnast. She had only to observe her “family” and practise
the results of the observation before her mirror.
 “We are waiting for Polly Harris and Collin Hedley,” Hobart
remarked during a lull in the battle. “Polly is as punctual as an alarm
clock, but Collin would not be on time at his own funeral, if it were
possible. We always give him a half hour leeway and never mind
because Polly is such fun when she rages.”
Thurley murmured some reply, and then Caleb Patmore, who had
been looking at her almost rudely, began anew his argument.
Despite his depraved ideas regarding novel writing, Thurley liked
him. He had the clean-cut business air which she admired, rather
than the air of the proverbial long-haired novelist with a hemstitched
neck scarf.
“Of course we respect Daphne,” he said grudgingly. “For five years
she has made her living writing poetry—poetry—and how many can
say as much? No bribes of the corset makers for limerick
advertisements ever tempted her, but now she has sensibly
surrendered in favor of marrying one Oscar Human, Indiana plumber
at large. The only remarkable thing about it is that Oscar Human
would marry a failure poetess who must have forgotten how to cook
a boiled dinner or be interested in the new style nickel fittings! Well,
luck to Daphne Rhodes, but what good was it all? A starved,
embittered space filler, she admitted, soothing a makeup man’s
difficulties by rounding out the page with a plump sonnet.”
Ernestine walked over to the mantel in order to look as majestic as
possible, so Hobart called out. She was very lovely in her crystal
colored satin with silvery panels and those interesting, homely hands
of hers clasped awkwardly.
“You do love fleshpots, Caleb, no matter whether an Indiana
plumber or an editor bestows them. You’ll have Daphne taking
orders for your next novel, I dare say—a premium with every new
kitchen sink Oscar installs! You wretch! I’ve no doubt Daphne is
going to be happy, at least her experience as a poetess will
mercifully teach her never to let this Oscar know how commonplace
he is. Therein will lie the success of the union. As soon as Polly
comes, we’ll decide on the wedding present. For my part, I think
Daphne has done a brave thing to hold to the best in herself, and,
when she saw she was unable to attain her goal, to drop back
gracefully into the house-and-garden rank and file.”
Caleb shrugged his shoulders. “Well, long ago I became tired of
being a literary chameleon and trying to match up every editor’s
bark! I found out what the reading public wanted and I have given it
to them—great hunks of it! I haven’t come out so badly, eh? Now,
Daphne could have done the same.” He leaned back in his chair
looking defiantly at Ernestine.
“You are trying to make me the man in the divorce case; his wife
took the furniture and the five children and he took the blame. But I
challenge you, Caleb, to prove that you have ever really written a
good story—a story you felt and loved and were willing to fight for
until it was printed.”
“You’ve never gone through my attic trunks,” he reminded.
“Besides, the public doesn’t like highbrow stories. They like stories
about people who are capable of wearing pink underwear, and a
villain must be a villain if found carrying a riding crop. Just when I
am settled in my mind concerning my next heroine, Ernestine breaks
out with uplift, as annoying as to have a motor stuffed with relatives
drive up to the door at dinner time,” he informed Hobart. “Can’t you
lend a hand?”
“How can I, when I want to stay friends with you both? By Jove,
there’s the bell; they’ve arrived.”
Ernestine blew Caleb a kiss and murmured, “If one cannot write
au naturel, I presume it must be au gratin!”
Then there swept into the room two of the strangest and most
delightful persons Thurley had ever seen. Collin Hedley came first, a
fair-haired, boyish man with eyes so joyous and brilliant one could
not look at them for long, and the bristly head of the plebeian with
deep incurvation of the temples. He was most carelessly dressed,
but no one would have noticed that as long as his eyes smiled; he
had a mad Van Dyke beard and a lovable yet combative mouth
which might or might not prophesy many things.
But it was Polly Harris who captivated Thurley’s heart and made
her forget her shyness. Polly had the fashion of bombarding one’s
self-consciousness. She could have changed the saying, “A cat may
look at a king” to “a cat may order a king.” Even Bliss Hobart lost
dignity in her presence.
“Polly can teach you to write vers libre on your cuff and tell a
Chicago art patron from a Pittsburg coal dealer at a distance of fifty
yards,” was Hobart’s universal recommendation. But Polly Harris
could do a great deal more.
She reminded one, although her age was less than Ernestine’s, of
October sunshine, partly because she was a tiny, wood-brown thing,
an oddity, a fact she well knew, flat-chested as a boy, with tanned
skin, eyes like topazes, if she were happy, and her brown hair
bobbed like a child’s and fastened with a ridiculous velvet bow. Her
dresses were inevitably the same—since her income was likewise—
Polly’s regimentals, they called them, brown corduroy for winter,
made in semi-smock, semi-Eton-jacket style with an abbreviated
skirt and stout little boots laced as if for a walking tour. In the
summer Polly appeared in brown cotton made in similar fashion and
when she was dragged to some formal affair she would be induced
to wear her “heirloom,” a brocaded brown velvet which Ernestine
had brought from Paris. Polly was just Polly with her crisp little voice,
a heart of gold and a tongue which could be sharp as a battle lance
or as tender as pink rosebuds.
“The only sprite in captivity,” the family dubbed her, pitying her
impossible aim—to write grand opera—and never hinting what
tragedy lay before her when the tanned face would wrinkle and the
bobbed hair turn gray. It was as probable that Polly Harris could
write a grand opera as that Betsey Pilrig could lead the Russian
ballet—but Polly, as so often happens in the case of “captured
sprites,” saw none of the absurdity encasing her ambitions.
 No one knew just how she lived, for she had the fierce pride of
failures. “Sure ’nuff” successes or “comers” are always more
amenable to loans and helping hands. In her sky parlor, the tiptop
room in a bohemian New York rooming house, Polly somehow
wrested from fate and the world at large a living. Limericks and hack
work of hideous monotony and starvation wage with the pride of her
family behind her! Her father had been an Ohio judge and her
grandfather a senator, while Polly, alone and without resources, had
wilfully burned family bridges some years before and drifted to New
York to write her operas.
Even Polly admitted the first operas were hopeless, bravely
burning them as one does old love letters. But grand opera remained
her goal; nothing less would or could satisfy her. After seven
desperate years of work and insufficient means, Polly had become
one of the family of the very great and was envied by all; it meant,
however, that she took from this family not one jot of aid or
influence nor permitted them to know whether “we are eating to-day
or we are moving our belt strap into the next hole.”
Sometimes the family outwitted Polly Harris and helped her in
spite of herself, but more often they knew it was kindest to not try.
So they did the finest thing of all because the girl’s fine self deserved
and demanded it—they took her in as one of them and talked of the
day her operas should be sung, listening to her pitiful dreams as
kindly as they would have listened to Wagner could he have been
among them telling of his Rhinegold! Polly had become a character
in artistic New York and when the near-great enviously urged her to
make use of the truly great, to accept some easy position as
secretary or companion to this celebrity or that, Polly’s eyes would
change to angry, storm things and she would turn on them with the
threat that they would still see her win out, some day the great
theme would come to her and the world admit her success! Then
she would repay the beloved family for their kindness in not forcing
old clothes and baskets of food, loans of money—as one tipped a
maid. Polly would be famous, as famous as Ernestine Christian or
Bliss or the lazy deceiver of a Caleb or Collin Hedley whom Polly
loved in strange fashion although he was honestly unconscious of
the fact.
Until then painting lamp shades at night, writing wretched verse
for some wretched publication, doing a child’s song cycle for almost
the cost of the music paper, harmonizing impossible marching songs,
substituting at a Harlem movie house as the piano player—none of
these was too mean for Polly to do since they sustained her until the
day the great theme should whisper itself!
“The thing which keeps Polly afloat,” Ernestine had declared, “is
that she is glad for every one else who wins out—it has made her so
sunny hearted she just can’t go under.”
Polly approached Thurley with open arms, saying in her crisp
fashion, “Bliss tells me you have never known father, mother nor
telephone number and we can baby you all we like,” bending down
unexpectedly to kiss her.
Before Thurley answered, Polly whirled around to demand,
“Listen, every one, I’ve come to the conclusion we should all be
thankful for anything that makes cold chills go up and down our
spines,” dashing into some nonsensical adventure told in her own
fashion.
Hobart waited until the conclusion, after which he offered Thurley
his arm and led the way into the dining room which proved to be an
enclosed sort of terrace with wonderfully imitated flowering shrubs,
green striped awnings, a lily pool fountain giving a touch of the
unreal and illusive. Wicker chairs, artificial ascension lilies and
Canterbury bells were in profusion. The room was called the “village
green,” Caleb whispered to Thurley, and on nights when the
thermometer skidded below zero, Hobart delighted to come into this
exquisite little oasis of almost tropical heat and make his guests
forget the sleet and frost without. Two chairs were tipped against
their well appointed places, one for Mark Wirth, the dancer, and one
for Sam Sparling, the actor, Thurley learned, a family custom always
observed.
 As they sat about the table, Thurley between Polly and Collin,
Polly remarked naïvely:
“I’m trying to get Collin to tell me why women who dabble in
water colors always paint ‘Pharaoh’s Horses’ with chests like inflated,
tuppenny balloons?”
“How can a mere painter of fried egg sunsets answer?” he
retorted. “Oh, I say, about Daphne’s wedding present—Polly doesn’t
want to send it.”
At which a chorus of “why nots” issued, to which Polly said
forcibly:
“Because it will remind her of what she can never have. Pick out
some nice, golden oak and green plush article which will do credit to
the establishment of one Oscar Human, plumber at large. It will be
salve on a throbbing wound. Daphne will think, bless her amateurish
old heart, that it is our choice and being typical of the golden oak
and green plush atmosphere which must always be hers, she’ll still
feel one of us! But that green metal desk set with silver trim—
horrors, think of its shivering with loneliness in Oscar’s back parlor!”
“Right,” Hobart added, “I’ll get the picture of a wistful tabby cat
staring at oysters fairly shivering in their shells and a battenberg
doily underneath—no, that would be too broad—we’ll get—I say,
here’s our infant fresh from Birge’s Corners and Birge’s Corners’
brides—nearly one herself if the truth were known! What ho,
Thurley, what would you propose to give a Birge’s Corners’ bride that
would meet the town’s approval?”
Flushing as she thought of Lorraine’s chest of linens, the new
house which was to cost twenty thousand dollars—and then of
Ernestine’s necklace which cost that alone—Thurley, without
hesitation, answered, “Why, a cut glass punch bowl with the silver
hooks all around it for the little glasses!”
“The infant is christened,” Hobart pronounced after the applause
ended. “I nominate a shopping committee of Ernestine Christian and
Thurley Precore.”
 During the rest of the supper party Thurley remained a spectator
until Hobart whispered that she sing for them and she rose, for the
first time in her life, reluctant to obey.
“She has not done well,” she heard Hobart saying as she finished,
“stage fright—too few of us—too small a room—the opera stage, five
thousand people and she would sing as if her throat were copper
lined—however—”
Polly Harris finished the sentence for him. “However, if Ernestine
wisely realizes the limitations of the pianoforte, Thurley Precore will
never have to realize the limitations of her voice.”
Caleb took Ernestine and Thurley home in his machine, Collin and
Polly following in the former’s roadster. Being the infant, Thurley was
left at her hotel first of all with fond good nights and quips about the
sandman’s speedy arrival! She regretted that she was not allowed to
whirl about taking Polly home and then Collin and then Ernestine
and, finally, to be left alone with this rich, willful novelist-slacker and
have him tell about his world even as Ernestine had hinted of hers.
As she undressed, the memories of the evening being rehearsed
by her dramatic self and shamedly admitting she had been a stupid
country lass who had not sung one-tenth as well as she could,
Thurley realized another valuable thing, one which the public does
not take the pains to decipher, that artists, in order to be successes,
must, per se, acquire definite and almost narrow ways and methods
of living such as dressing, recreation and so on, their personalities
must crystallize and become impenetrable to the onslaught of the
personalities which they will undertake to interpret or create. Here,
in part, lies the secret of fame. Once one has one’s own self quite
modelled and secure from invasion, the tortures of creation and
interpretation become but the day’s work just as the man with grimy
hands polishes the most expensive limousine body and returns
homeward via a street car.
The members of the family had distinct and original personalities—
true, they did not seem to be the complement of their forms of
artistic achievement; Collin’s pictures never reminded one of Collin
nor Ernestine’s programs have many of her own favorites, but back
of their work, a haven to temperament, stood these people’s
personalities which carried them bravely on the tidal wave of
success. Whether or not something else stood behind these
personalities and formed the universal trinity of expression was to be
determined later—when one did not suggest cut glass punch bowls
with hooks as wedding gifts!
But as Thurley lay down to sleep, too excited to remember Birge’s
Corners, she determined with amusing worldliness to set to work
developing her own personality, to both pamper and crystallize it,
pitting it against this wild rose Thurley who blushed and who
sneezed—unpoetic truth—just when she should not!
 CHAPTER XIII
Instead of the Christmas season making Thurley homesick, it lent
a vivacious joy that caused Ernestine Christian and Polly Harris to
marvel at her development. The atmosphere of the city had its
foothold. She thought, if at all, of the Christmas preparations in
Birge’s Corners, with passing scorn.
Thurley’s thoughts had been rather well regulated by routine until
she was left with but scant time for reminiscence. No lesson had
been done away with but more added. She spent twice as much
time at Hobart’s studio, either with him or with the Bohemian singing
teacher whom she loathed but who knew how to guide her voice
into unsurpassed channels.
Then there were hateful languages to conquer and, if she disliked
the social secretary or the gymnast or the corps of other workers
who were making her “ready” to sing for her supper on the opera
stage, they continued to appear at regular intervals until Thurley
realized that Bliss Hobart had had method in his madness, for he
had seen the need of curbing a rebellious and turbulent spirit, one
that tired too quickly of routine for its own good. In reality, he was
teaching her the grind, which most artists never escape, in a
condensed and merciful fashion.
Thurley was beginning to realize even more of this great question
of “values.” In the old days at the Corners when gray, sullen moods
conquered her sunny self, she had been wont to take refuge within
the box-car wagon or the hilly cemetery, to sob without reason or
plan rebellions of which neither Dan nor Betsey Pilrig could have had
the slightest understanding! Now she called a taxi and drove through
the parks or out suburban roads, thinking the same quality of
thoughts with different and widely varied guises and returning, as
she had done from the box-car wagon or cemetery, light hearted,
dangerously glad for every one, singing like a meadow lark and
insisting on doing things for whosoever might come her way almost
to the extent of exaggeration.
Formerly, when saddish longings and presentiments would sweep
over the wild rose Thurley, she had tramped through the pine woods
as sturdily as a soldier under his captain’s orders, tramping,
tramping, tramping up through the amphitheater of hills which lay
outside the town. Finally, she would come upon a pasture clearing
and here she would sit, exhausted but filled with sweet
contentment, at the “top of the world” she fondly called it, looking
down at the little village which seemed a cardboard play-town and
dreaming of the day when she should stand at the top of the world
to sing and all the cardboard towns in the universe should listen and
applaud.
In New York, Thurley took another method when pessimism
interrupted common sense routine. She went to the piano and
practised until her throat gave warning to cease and she could again
face the world as the wild-rose-with-a-prophecy-of-the-hothouse-
variety Thurley, baby of the great “family,” an interesting young
goddess who seldom voiced an opinion but who could sweep away
opinions if she sang a ballad (unbeknownst to her present audience)
with thoughts of Dan or Philena or the old days in the wagon as the
inspiration!
During those effervescent moods of abandon which fairly
intoxicated all those who saw Thurley under their spell—back in the
Corners—she had always rushed down to the emporium and coaxed
Dan away on a frolic—a picnic, if summer, or skating, if winter. They
would sit, these two, on the porch of a deserted lake mansion
dreaming dreams of a lyric quality with a sincerity which made both
the boy and the girl the better for having dreamed them! Thurley
would weave garlands of wild flowers—Dan gathering them—and
she would come home to Betsey Pilrig, her cheeks like roses and her
eyes like stars, singing a spring song and causing Betsy to lapse into
Ali Baba’s favorite expression, “Land sakes and Mrs. Davis—Thurley,
be you from another world?”
The joyous moods, these days, came very seldom. To some
degree they happened when Ernestine told her that Hobart was
pleased with her progress or when Polly Harris kissed her and said
she was a little sister to the great; some faint imitation of them was
experienced when Caleb took her motoring and told her his
humorous troubles or when she went with Miss Clergy and Hobart to
the first opera—“Rigoletto”—and saw with the grave, conceited eyes
of youth herself outshining the present Gilda—herself standing with
outstretched arms to acknowledge the applause. The wild joy was
felt for half an instant when Collin Hedley said he would paint the
infant before her début—there would be no fun at all in painting her
when she was famous and unapproachable, waving engagement
tablets at a mere artist.
Thurley came to realize clearly the difference in the inspiration of
her joy—the joy which had been her solace during the gray, hungry
days of childhood. In Birge’s Corners supreme mirth came from smell
of new mown hay, with sunshine sparkling all about, or the summer
breeze kissing the little curls at the delicious nape of her white, soft
neck—it was generated by the discovery of the first violets or the
exhilaration of a skating party with Dan, by some baby’s laughing
face or Betsey’s pleased smile—and most of all by Dan’s ardor.
Thurley told herself with almost shamed admission that her values
had changed.
But if Thurley changed quickly during the winter, Miss Clergy
stayed the same feeble, at times querulous, ghost lady, always
willing for Thurley to go to places without her, trusting the girl as
one would trust a matron, content, now that she had roused from
her neurotic lethargy, to lapse into a semi-doze with a vigilant eye
for only two things—to have Thurley succeed as a spinster and to
have no one become personally acquainted with her own withered
self lest memories be unearthed over which she mourned in vain.
 So Thurley came and went at will and the family became used to
the fact that the infant’s benefactress was a “character.” For that
matter the family themselves were characters with pet “phobias” and
hobbies and theories, to say nothing of scars, cotton-wooled and
well protected from the bromidic world.
It was Christmas week when Thurley experienced a savage mood
—anger really the stimulus—for she had bought a supply of frocks
and hats preparatory to the “family’s” Christmas festivities when
Ernestine wrote her a note from Chicago, where she was playing
engagements, saying that she would not be home until January and
she was writing before Christmas purposely because she never had
believed in the holiday and neither gave nor accepted gifts;
therefore she wished the child-Thurley all good things and to work
as hard as she could; she would see her within a few weeks.
The savage mood began to manifest itself as Thurley read the
careless note. Like the writer, its force and decision were
unquestionable. Thurley had prepared gifts for all members of the
family in the same impulsive fashion as for every one she had loved
back at the Corners. She went to the bureau drawer and opened it
to examine them—they seemed garish and absurd. She was not yet
at the topnotch of fame which allows one to do whatsoever one will
and have it accepted. If she had made her début and chosen to
present Ernestine Christian with one of those gilded rolling pins with
a regiment of hooks which hung on the doors of many of the best
families in the Corners, it would have been received in resigned
silence. As it was, the purse she had chosen for Ernestine was
probably not at all what she would have liked; Thurley would give it
to the room maid instead. She would think it quite wonderful and
carry it for shopping or Sunday mass!
She looked at the handkerchiefs she had for Polly Harris—but Polly
would probably make some sarcastic squib at their expense and
never be seen with one protruding from her smock pocket. No, the
handkerchiefs would do for the social secretary and the antique
leather box for Caleb she would press upon the gymnast, while the
book on art originally intended for Collin would be relegated to the
scrap heap! Thurley laughed aloud as she thought of giving Collin a
book on art—when Collin, foremost portrait painter in America, had
written a book on art which was used as an authority by the younger
school ... well, it had not been so very long since she had bought
her gifts at Dan’s store with Dan refusing her money and had done
them up in white tissue and the reddest of red ribbon, flying about
like a good fairy on Christmas Eve to leave them at doorsteps! After
re-reading Ernestine’s note, Thurley came to the conclusion that
Christmas was not for those afflicted with exaggerated ego but
merely for those who held good jobs.
She had bought no present for Sam Sparling or Mark Wirth, the
latter still abroad, and as for Bliss Hobart, her fingers fearfully
touched the carved idol—a metal Buddha mounted on teakwood.
Why she had selected it, after endless excursions to endless shops,
Thurley did not know—perhaps it was because she had never seen
one in his office where there was everything else under the sun from
a Filipino kris to a bibelot which had belonged to Marie Antoinette.
Or perhaps there was another reason—at any rate, she had
recklessly bought the idol and sacrificed her spending money for a
month to come, blushing furiously each time she planned what to
write on the accompanying card.
She could hardly give the Buddha to a bellboy and she had
purchased black gloves for Miss Clergy, the presents for Betsey, Ali
Baba and Hopeful being on their way.
She pushed the Buddha back in the drawer and went to her lesson
with Hobart with a reserved, patronizing manner which amused him
and his amusement, in turn, angered Thurley.
Fame seemed something which would strangle everything
commonplace and joyous, Thurley thought, as she mechanically did
her exercises. These persons were so ultra, so fond of “my taste in
dress”—“the way I eat my artichokes”—“the sort of wall paper in my
studio”—so over developed and emphasized that they made clever,
well bred fun of the “pastoral joys,” as Ernestine named them, all the
while amusingly unconscious of the whine of conceit which crept into
their voices whenever they made a drastic statement.
There ought to be a refined, sulphitic, fumigated holiday just for
this sort of people, Thurley thought. She was driving home and
watching the crowds of shoppers laden with packages who tried to
make their way across the street. They were good-natured crowds
because they were buying something for some one else and she
longed to leave the cab and be one with them, to jostle and sway
together until the traffic signal was given and then to dash across to
reach a crosstown car and to end, breathless, disordered of hat and
hair but happy, in some small home where the packages were
relegated to the top shelf and a recital of the day’s happenings told
to the master of the household over a supper of steak, coffee and
baker’s pie!
Up to this moment Thurley had not experienced homesickness,
but as the cab shot on in patrician fashion she began recalling the
fattened turkey they would have at Birge’s Corners and the way
Betsey had made her pudding and Christmas cakes days before, as
well as the nights Dan had called for her to have her aid in trimming
the store windows with make-believe fireplaces and tinsel stars; the
way the boys and girls went into the woods for the smallest fir trees
and decorated the church until it was “a bower of beauty,” according
to the Gazette report; how the choir would practise the Christmas
anthem and carols night after night with Thurley directing, playing
the organ and singing. On Christmas morning would come the
service with Thurley, the envy of every girl in town because of her
new pin or bracelet or chain which Dan had given her, singing “The
Birthday of a King” in a glorious, clear voice—like some one
permitted to sing down from the clouds for an instant!
Oh, it was good to remember—good?—Thurley’s eyes filled with
tears. She told the man to drive on until she ordered him to turn
back to her hotel. She laughed as she snuggled down in the
machine, drawing a robe over her lap and prepared to dream-
remember. As she did so, she recalled Caleb Patmore’s saying to
Ernestine one afternoon at tea,
“I’m going into the ooze again.” To which Ernestine answered,
“Jolly lark, isn’t it? Don’t make it a habit or you may slip into it
altogether—then you would be helpless.”
“Take the advice for yourself,” he had retorted, to which she
nodded her head and the subject was dropped. When Thurley asked
her about it, Ernestine said with a trace of confusion,
“You child, you’re not ready for any ‘ooze’ game yet; you are still
in it in actuality to an extent. When you begin to want to go to nerve
specialists and are not hungry enough for bread and butter but keen
on frosted cake as it were, knowing nothing but work and wanting to
know nothing but play, when your day’s program—not the one
written by your press agent—is as impossible as a typewritten love
letter, you’ll find the ooze. I’ll show you how to find it.”
But Thurley had insisted, like a true Pandora, upon knowing and
so Ernestine good-naturedly tried to explain.
“My nice creature, when people are so famous they experience
loneliness because they are quite shut away from those who are
quite famous, they cannot exist on work no matter in what line their
talent may be—nor on lollipop praise of the public nor carping
criticisms. They must have an antidote. Yet they cannot sacrifice
their relentless system of life which takes a first mortgage on their
time and energy. So while you hear of us as having huge poultry
farms and see our pictures taken in the act of garroting a red pepper
from Madame So and So’s truck farm where she spends most of her
time when not—and so on, or read an interview in which one of us
declares a submarine boat to be our favorite siesta spot, please
know it is not true. But throughout the years of endless work and
surrender of the mystical force constituting genius, we have just to
be children—and pretend. There, that is the whole thing in a nutshell
—pretend just as children fancy themselves policemen, motormen,
kings and fairy queens all the while swallowing the mortification of
domineering nurses and bibs. We live with our memories, many
times, if they are pleasant. How rich a confession Caleb could wring
out of us, if he were not so sluggish! We dream-play, fancy, create a
world within a world. Bliss Hobart in a fit of cynicism—I noticed he
began taking pepsin the following week—named it ‘the ooze’—and it
became our trade name for it. The ooze, the unreal, really
unimportant and absurd, yet ready to be lived with and yet to
vanish, the state of mind which we people as we wish and live
house-and-garden lives for as much as half an hour at a time! You
may not give this credence, but it is quite as real as my piano or
Collin’s brush. And heaven grant you won’t need the ooze, Thurley,
for a little! Still, it is a lovely, plastic state of thought—like those
lavender and gold butterflies you find lingering in the corners of
Whistler’s paintings or that flutter in the margins of special editions.”
“Why don’t you have the—the ooze be real—live a fifty-fifty sort of
existence?” Thurley borrowed Dan’s slang.
“It would be like blending chilblains and poetry or mosquitoes and
mahogany—impossible! That is why they say all genius is a trifle
mad. Remember, the ooze is your best friend! Why, after a fatiguing
concert, I’ve played I was the bustling, happy mother of half a dozen
youngsters, the type of American housewife who does all her work
except the washing and whose hands grow red and hardened yet
are sparkling with diamonds, whose children grow up and adore her
—I’ve lived in a red brick house with those diamond-shaped panes at
the front windows and dotted muslin curtains criss-crossed—you
know—and I’ve entertained bridge clubs galore, making mayonnaise
and maple parfait myself while the baby was napping—” and when
Thurley had clamored for a clearer understanding, Ernestine ordered
her off to study her French and forget she shared the secret of the
“ooze.”
“What is Bliss Hobart’s ooze?” she had insisted.
“I think he plays he runs an ice cream soda fountain in Harlem,”
Ernestine had answered to be rid of her. At the time Thurley had
seriously questioned Ernestine’s sanity.
 But this snowy December night the ooze became very real to her
and, unknowingly, Thurley passed a telling boundary line of
progress. She dreamed on of Birge’s Corners—she saw the
Christmas entertainment taking place. There was the awful make-
believe chimney which the Sunday-school superintendent, invariably
the thinnest man in town, was to descend, fragments of his cotton
beard floating about the stage after the feat was accomplished. She
could see the primary class waving the red satin banner symbolic of
the best attendance—strange, how excellent is the Sunday-school
attendance during holiday season—and then marching on the stage
to sing in a series of mouse-like squeaks, “Jolly Old Saint Nicholas”
while their teacher, in love with Jo Drummer, the Santa Claus, stood
below to direct them and wonder if Jo was properly impressed with
her maternal devotion and her new hat.
Then the minister “delivered” a few remarks and Lorraine came on
the stage to hand out tarlatan stockings with nuts and hard candies
which accompanied the gifts. After laborious recitations by tortured
boys with slicked-back hair and freckles pale because of the
excitement, the town elocutionist let loose with “How They Brought
the Good News from Aix to Ghent” or “The Wreck of the Hesperus”
and about at this juncture the stage chimney would crash down and
reveal the truth—it was nothing but a lot of brick-paper pasted on
Dan Birge’s store boxes!
Well, it was fun to play that one was taking part in the
entertainment and showing off a little, as every one else did,
including the minister, to smell, in imagination, the pines and
evergreens and to visualize Dan Birge, the handsomest lad in the
assemblage, winking at her during the minister’s address!
The river wind swept in through the lowered taxicab window-pane
and Thurley leaned forward to say, “Home, please”—the ooze
drifting obediently away. She was Thurley Precore, the Thurley with
rejected Christmas gifts and the prospect of a hotel holiday dinner in
company with Miss Clergy who would nap most of the day!
 Yet the ooze had stimulated Thurley; she could always go slipping
back to the Corners to relive the homey things which had made her
a wild rose. It appeared to be tremendously comforting and she
went a step further in self-analysis, telling herself, as she was going
up to the hotel rooms, that the thing which made great people lapse
into the ooze for tangled up nerves and snarly frames of mind was
the thing which made sarcastic, aloof Ernestine Christian play a
gypsy dance with the wild fire its author intended it to have or gave
Caleb the power to invent an entirely new setting for the same old,
“Will you love me?” or told Collin how to forget the ingrowing chin of
his subject and make it strong and masterful still looking like the
ingrowing original—here, Thurley took the lesson home for she, too,
was crystallizing her personality. It gave Thurley the ability to feel
that she was Juliet in the tomb or Rosina having that delightful
music lesson with her masquerading lover, it was temperament,
psychic masquerading! There, that was a much nicer name than the
ooze and when she was famous enough she would tell Bliss Hobart
so and make him admit his clumsiness of nomenclature.
After which exhilaration came the hint of a warning—Miss Clergy’s
years of uselessness were the result of just such “psychic
masquerading” fed by revenge and disappointment. After all, was
this ooze merely confined to the great? Would they not have to yield
a point and admit they had much in common with their neighbors?
 CHAPTER XIV
When she came into the apartment sitting-room, she found Polly
Harris in her shabby brown trappings and another member of the
family whom Polly had dutifully brought to call.
“It’s Sam Sparling,” Polly announced in boyish fashion. “Have you
seen by the papers he’s to open here Christmas afternoon? This is
Bliss Hobart’s prize,” waving her hand in Thurley’s direction. “Now
beware of Sam because even duchesses fall in love with him and he
has trunks full of yellowed mash notes—”
Sam interrupted by frowning at Polly and saying, “Come over
here, my dear, don’t be afraid. I’m too busy to get up a new affair
before New Year’s.”
He had the cultured, pleasant voice of a well-bred Englishman and
Thurley could picture his irresistible methods of love-making,
although he was far older than she fancied and his mouth framed by
ironical furrows. He had really white hair combed into a brisk
pompadour, bright eyes like a young pointer’s and he dressed in
noticeable fashion, with a fine black and white check suit with
exaggerated flares, patent leather boots and silk shirt and tie
matching the suit in pattern. Still, it was no wonder Sam Sparling
could “get across” with Romeo one day and the next week be giving
out an interview in which he was quoted as remembering the day
Disraeli said to him—!
“What a dear she is!” he remarked to Polly. He had the habit of
talking about a person in front of that person when he wished to be
complimentary or to find fault. “A flapper in a thousand,” putting on
gold pince-nez with the foreign straight-across nose-piece which
Thurley had never seen. “By Jove, is Bliss sure she’s a singer? I
could make an actress out of that girl.”
 “You’ve not heard her sing,” Polly capered about. “When she sings,
I am inspired to tear up all the opera scores I’ve fancied were any
good and begin again. Because Thurley has promised me to sing the
title rôle in my opera—now haven’t you?” Polly’s little face was
distressingly in earnest.
Sam shook his head and began talking to Thurley about Polly.
“She is irrepressible, isn’t she? Fancies she can out-Wagner Wagner
—when she is just bound to end up by writing songs for a ballad
singer—one dressed in sheer muslin with velvet wrist bows—
possessing a thin, carefully tutored soprano that will always trill
certain words.”
Polly picked up a cushion and unceremoniously pitched it towards
him. It fell between Thurley and Sam and Sam knelt gracefully upon
it, adding, “Would that I could have one of these when I’m trying to
look romantic in this position before a matinée of school girls—ugh,
the old bones do make a howl if I use them carelessly! Thurley, don’t
mind us! You see I’m one of those old-young boys that just stay old-
young to the finish—always wearing a gardenia in their buttonhole
and their hat tilted rakishly over the left eye. Some day I’ll just go to
sleep and I’ll be toted to the Little Church Around the Corner with a
last gardenia in my buttonhole and I hope some friend of mine will
protest against that awful firebell embellished funeral march. At least
I’m entitled to have the Faust waltz played—I always have my
greatest luck with stage proposals when that is softly heard as
coming from the supposed supper room of a hunt ball—and a bill
poster without saying, ‘The End of an Old Beau!’ After it is all over, I
hope they’ll say, ‘Well, Sam never grew old while he was among us—
let’s hope he won’t start the habit now wherever he’s blown off to!’”
He jumped up as he finished, holding out his hand, and Thurley
took it shyly.
“Don’t mind our nonsense—she’s quite timid, isn’t she? Reminds
me of the way my leading ladies act when on the stage and when
off they rage like a stable boy if some one happens to cross their
notions.” He studied her a moment longer and remarked, “She is
pretty—I can’t find a single flaw.”
Thurley was pretty that afternoon; perhaps the ooze had lent her
the vivid coloring or it was her bright red coat with the great silver
buttons and the ermine tam slanting down and showing her dark
hair.
“I’m stupid,” she began, “because I’ve been working so hard.”
Sam settled himself on a sofa to take in the surroundings. Polly
was watching something out of the window so Thurley took
opportunity to remove her wraps and come to sit sedately beside the
famous old man.
“But I’m not really timid,” she supplemented naïvely, at which he
turned about crying bravo, and threatening Hobart with losing his
prima donna in order that she become Sam Sparling’s leading lady.
“She’s taking inventory of my wrinkles, Polly,” he complained, “and
my white hair and the wretched old hump o’ years that has fastened
itself on my back. Bring her to the Christmas matinée and let her see
me in lavender-striped trousers and cutaway coat, the
misunderstood young man turned from his father’s mansion,
returning in the last act to his steam yacht and his second best Rolls
Royce—let her have a go at me and come behind to have tea
afterwards,” he put his hand down and covered Thurley’s—a thin,
tired hand with prominent, blue veins and a handsome ring of
sapphires on the little finger.
“Haven’t you a good sort of leading woman?” asked Polly.
“No, the only real bond between us is a mutual love of Roquefort
salad dressing,” he sighed. “Her idea of art is to be undressed quite
halfway down her back and to fall on my neck in limp giggles.”
“Why do you have her then?” Thurley asked seriously.
“Youth, my child—she is a lovely, young thing, pink and white,
straight, slim, very good to gaze upon—and she knows it. She can
wear a wrap consisting of four flounces of purple chiffon and a strip
of rose satin and make the audience stare at her impudent,
untalented little self while they listen to my lines! The combination
lets my wrinkles, humped back and cantankerous joints slip by
unheeded. That is a penalty we pay for growing old. Never mind,
Thurley, you’ve years in which to revel in having both talent and
youth—divine combination!” Sam’s bright eyes grew moody, he was
remembering, as Thurley rightly guessed, the wonderful, golden
years in London when he was Romeo in appearance as in voice and
passion, when he was dark eyed, melancholy young Hamlet and the
critics gently insinuated that as King Lear he was a trifle youngish
although his makeup was superb! Those were the years when
people loved his Shakespeare because his youth illumined it and he
passed by with proper scorn the smart comedies requiring a morning
garden backdrop, a duel in the library and leading ladies who were
possessed of more dimples than brains.
“Why don’t you play old rôles?” Thurley demanded innocently,
Polly smothering a giggle.
“She doesn’t appreciate my romantic little heart and notions, does
she? Let her see me a swashbuckling hero in hip boots and a green
plumed bonnet while my black charger is led across the stage by
bribes of sugar—then she’ll understand.”
“No, she can’t understand, Sam dear, until she has reached the
matronly age and still wants to do Juliet and Senta and managers try
to show her the error of her ways—and figure!”
Thurley looked up at her new friend to wonder what form the
ooze took with him. But he good-naturedly patted her cheek, saying
much to her relief:
“I see you are human and not going to ask me to recite ‘Gunga
Din.’ I return the compliment by not demanding that you tear off
Tosti’s ‘Good-by.’ I only ran in to welcome you to our circle and to tell
you, as senior member, a few facts about the others. They will tell
you about me fast enough—”
 “Never happy unless he has a breach of promise suit waiting for
him in the morning’s mail,” promptly supplemented Polly. “Always
has it rumored he is to marry a prominent whiskey dealer’s widow—
sells his mash notes per pound to Caleb, owns a hothouse of
gardenias and has them shipped all over the map—at heart a flinty
old bachelor warrior—a splendid, precious, cross pal—a jewel of an
actor who makes you laugh and cry as easily as you breathe.”
“There is a young woman,” said Sam calmly, pointing an accusing
finger, “who will never write grand opera—never! Watch how pale
she grows. But she will do something heroic, has all the salamander
qualities with none of their viciousness. Would snatch a funeral
wreath right off a door to make a present to some one she loved,
very whippy temperament, believes that bothering over one’s soul is
an emotional luxury, must have had an antique little romance back
somewhere. Where did you come from, Polly, anyhow? Sort of
neighborhood, I fancy, where the prevailing fashion was to have
your great-aunt’s deceased poodles stuffed and mounted to preside
over dark, chilly parlors.... Of course, Polly jumped the stockade and
landed among us—a forlorn child with squeaky shoes, as I
remember her. She’s as proud as Punch and stubborn as a bull
terrier, so we let her starve knowing that sometime or other she is
going to bump smack into Fame and he’ll never let go of her. But not
grand opera, Polly girl.”
“I shall stay in New York,” Polly announced, fastening her coat,
“and I shall write a grand opera in which Thurley shall sing. You will
all have to beg my pardon.” Her brown eyes showed the hurt in
them and Sam Sparling began helping her with refractory buttons of
her wrap.
“I’ll have my apology engraved on a gold scroll and you can use it
for a dinner gong—on the gong handle will be a bas relief of myself
—gardenia and all. So you can beat me up thrice a day.”
Thurley was laughing; she wondered if Miss Clergy had napped
during the turmoil. “Don’t go,” she begged. “Please stay a long time.”
 “We can’t, we’ve a raft of calls. I always take Polly because she
can break away so neatly. I’m the sort that sits and sits, ending by
halfway swallowing my cane handle and getting nowhere in
particular.”
“Will we really go to the matinée?” she asked Polly.
“Of course. I’ll call for you—and tea in Sam’s dressing room. Oh,
Thurley, you haven’t begun to realize New York as yet—not Bliss’s
New York, but your New York and mine and Sam’s, too.”
“Why do you love it so?” asked Thurley.
Polly leaned her two by four self against a chair as she answered,
“Oh, because—when I walk down the Avenue sunny mornings and
see ragamuffins sharing an ice cream cone and visiting British
peeresses with their fresh faces and dowdy clothes vying with our
American heiresses with their smart creations and hunks of black
pearls, when I come upon nice, happy boys and girls from up state
or clever Middle West men here on important commissions and
bronzed cowpunchers and trim naval officers, to say nothing of
portly men of finance bowling along—I’m New York mad. Besides,
when I have to watch the traffic cops and white baby prams
becoming friendly, to gaze at a window of caramels, mountains of
them, and right next to it to gaze at a window of paintings on silk
guarded by the Pinkertons, when I have to stop to watch the man in
Childs’ turn flapjacks and know that inside Sherry’s sit the prettiest,
best dressed, quite the most decent men and women in the world
nibbling at tomato surprise and whispering as to how many
apartment houses the waiters own, when I see Pekinese spaniels
airing their new jewelry and mongrels scrapping over a bone, when I
can go to a ten-cent movie or sit in a box at the opera and wear
Ernestine Christian’s adorable brown velvet dress, when I happen
upon dainty brides buying chintz remnants at Wanamaker’s, spotting
burglars chatting over their prospects at the Five Points a few
moments later—and when I can ride home sardine fashion in a
subway express or take a battered hansom what ’as seen better
days, pin a bunch of florist’s seconds to my chest and drift down
towards Washington Square or, once in a while, be picked up by
Caleb or Collin or Ernestine and be glided home in a motor—well—I
love New York,” she paused out of breath.
Sam bent and kissed her. “Marry me,” he demanded.
Thurley was noticeably embarrassed.
Polly burst out laughing. “That’s Sam’s remedy for all ills, Thurley.
When Ernestine had to move out of her old apartment, Sam was
engaged to her until she was satisfactorily settled in her new one. It
bucked her up no end.”
Thurley shook her head. “I’m afraid I’ve not come on enough
really to entertain you—do call a year from now.”
Sam laid his tired hand on her head in mock solemnity. “Don’t let
Hobart cheat you of what you deserve—remember, every woman
has the right to at least one trousseau!” After which they left, Polly
calling back something as to the time of their meeting on Christmas
afternoon.
Thurley stole to Miss Clergy’s door but the little ghost lady was
fast asleep.
“Every woman has the right to at least one trousseau,”—she
wished he had not said it. She did not want even deep-down, hidden
regrets.... French exercises, Italian opera scores, singing lessons,
English reading selections, dancing, fencing, horseback, social
etiquette, makeup, costuming, stage directions—pretend, pretend,
pretend things ... and they were trimming the church at the Corners
—Dan and Lorraine this year, Lorraine with her ring.... What strange
people, at odds with each other and their own selves—what queer,
detached lives—what remarkable theories, fantastically expressed!
where was the saneness of it, the rhythm—that was it—the rhythm?
Would she experience it and be satisfied after she had made her
bow to the public? Could the ooze always answer the requirements
of her savage young heart?
 After the Christmas matinée, when Thurley with eyes as large as
saucers, so Polly reported, had watched Sam play a difficult rôle in
superb fashion and had taken tea with him in his dressing room, she
returned alone to the hotel.
Polly was due at a Greenwich Village affair, Caleb was with Collin
in the country, Ernestine in Chicago practising scales, as her letter to
Thurley would intimate, and at Birge’s Corners ... ah, that was the
ooze, it was no longer real! So Thurley came into the dingy sitting
room—at least it now seemed dingy—to find that Miss Clergy had
suffered an attack of neuralgia and had been ordered off to bed. The
high tea in Sam’s dressing-room had robbed her of her appetite, so
she did not go downstairs for dinner but changed her party frock for
a schoolgirl blue serge and stoically settled herself at her books. She
promised herself that after she had diligently studied she would go
into the ooze and celebrate her real Christmas!
As she put her hand on the table the new bracelet Miss Clergy had
given her that morning struck the wood with a metallic clink. It was
a handsome thing set with diamonds, handsomer than anything Dan
had afforded. But it had been given her with the generosity of a
jailor in lieu of any one else’s daring to give her such an article!
Thurley began an irregular verb conjugation in sing-song fashion,
fighting off a savage mood. The telephone interrupted her and half a
second later she was saying in the gladdest voice she possessed:
“Tell Mr. Hobart to come right up,” hanging up the receiver and
running to the mirror to see just how much of a fright she looked.
She had no time to think of a change of costume for in he came, a
veritable domestic gentleman muffled in an ulster, holly in his
buttonhole and something in white tissue paper and tied with red
ribbon.
“Merry Christmas! I had five minutes’ extra time and I thought I’d
drop in to take the chance of finding you. Had an idea you’d be in
the doldrums, first Christmas out of the backyard, y’know.” Unasked,
he slipped off the ulster and Thurley saw he was in evening dress.
“Thing at the club,” he explained, noticing her expression. “Well,
what have we been doing? Don’t tell me that rascal of a Sam had
you behind for tea.”
“He did.” Thurley suddenly found her old wild-rose self as she told
him of the matinée.
When she finished he said, those curious gray eyes of his
narrowing, “A good singer should have a good—” holding out the
white tissue paper parcel.
“Oh, what?” she demanded. “It’s the only present I’ve had that
was done in white tissue paper. Nothing came from home and the
others laugh at Christmas. Miss Clergy gave me this bracelet—but
the bill was in the box,” she added resentfully. “But this—this is
direct from Santa Claus.”
“It’s a good mascot,” he informed her gravely. “Always keep it to
say little heathen prayers or curses to and tell it your troubles and
your joys. In short, treat it like a regular fellow.”
Thurley scrambled the paper and ribbon away. “Why—I bought
you almost the same,” she said unconsciously.
Hobart laughed. “You actually bought your stern maestro a
present?”
Thurley was absorbed in looking at the little Buddha carved from
lapis lazuli with gold for the features and diamonds for eyes. “This
one is much lovelier,” she said.
“Tell me—did you really buy me a present?” he demanded.
She nodded.
“Why haven’t you handed it over?”
“Because—I bought presents for every one—the sort of things you
people laugh at—but you seemed different from the others so I
bought you a Buddha because I thought you needed some one to
tell your real secrets to—and then, after I wrapped it up, I began to
think you would not like it—”