Argosy, Vol. 112, No. 2 — page 18: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

184 and doing the “ Romeo” balcony act! gods! I haven’t been right since. Well, we hadn't recovered enough from the shock to move when the household queen- regent returned and caught us. I managed to make the ten-spot apologize for our presence and got out. Not so Stella. A 75 mm. shell couldn’t have blown her out without the story. Her father, it seems, has lost his money and his nerve. The-wages we pay go to keep him in a sanatorium. She earns that because nobody has sense enough to teach her other ways to earn money, and because she’d just finished a series of magazine articles by some ‘idiot who wrote of the present remunerative- fess, dignity, independence, and general de- sirability of housework! You'll have to blame Stella for my writing this so promptly. She’s sure you’re in imme- diate need of it as relief from chronic cardiac lesion; and I don’t dare tell her a man could feel the way you look in that picture and ever get over it. And, since Stella expects me to read her your letters, I won’t take the chance that you'll be asking: “ Which one?” Her name is Norma Ballard. Before that picture of your face shattered my certitudes of everything I had supposed I knew, I thought that mine was— Harry CHIxon. Ye There was nothing funny about the letter to Duncan Grout. The thought that Norma Ballard was in circumstances that compelled her to do common housework for a liveli- hood was a more poignant grief than any conceivable loss of his own could have been. The fact that she cared for him—he made nothing else of the presence of his picture on her bureau—was joy as poignant as the_ grief. His brain was become that of a scientist. His feelings were still elemental. Joy and grief shook him, rocked him. But they fused into action that soothed him to utter tenderness. He became even patient over the usual delays in getting connections with the Guayaquil cable-station on the point. To-morrow her troubles would be over. She would know that he still reciprocated her love; that she need never wash another dish if she did not want to do so. Right through the tedious spelling out of words and names beyond the limited English of the operator, his voice would hardly have been recognized by his super- intendents who knew him best and really loved him. As the cable operator heard THE ARGOSY. > it, his message might have been a mother’s call to a hurt child to end its grief in her arms. The terseness of its phrasing was unconscious, the result of much habit of making cable and telegraph messages: Norma, care Chixon, 919 East 189, New York. Come marry me immediately. Apply Foster and Company, 500 Broad Street, all expenses. Cable answer, per same. Duncan Grout. To this he added another cablegram to the banking and brokerage concern. It bade them extend Norma Ballard his full credit and assist her as needed. Signed by a special code signature, that message was worth about thirty thousand dollars to Harry Chixon’s family housekeeper. He was through. He turned from the desk and the telephone. He stared about the room. Somehow it had gone strange. Strange? Good God! What hadn’t gone strange? His whole world was changed. He was changed. He had learned that Norma Ballard loved him! All the things he had thought he must give up—they were coming to him. Chixon’s flat! He laughed aloud. The attempt to get the dainty atmosphere of that flat seemed amazingly ludicrous. He would have his own home! The tremendous thing grew upon him. He wanted to rush out of doors to find room for his new-born happiness. He didn’t do it because he felt that outdoors was not big enough. He had been bred where men got drunk when their feelings got big. to call in McGrath and Hogan, his super- intendents; Drake, his assistant engineer; his bookkeepers, his two men_ stenogra- phers; his foremen—yes, and all the natives —and drink up everything potable in the medicine-chest and the storehouse. But a man couldn’t get drunk enough for this. No company could approach the adequate hilarity. His pistols—he would fire them round after round into the cahon. Fudge! All the dynamite cached down the line, set off to blow the bridge and the cafion’s walls into the river, could not come near getting up the noise for this. He’d have to find GEomichooks He wanted (0)