Play the Game! | Page 3

hear his insistent voice. "Her
husband. The first--husband--she--ever had. Say it, Mildred. Say it."
And now Honor was thirteen and a half, and tardily ready for High
School, and there were three little Lorimers, twins and a six months' old
single. Stephen Lorimer, who had been a singularly footloose world
rover, had settled down securely in the old Carmody house on South
Figueroa Street. He was intensely proud of his paternity, personal and
vicarious, and took it not seriously but joyously. He was dramatic critic
and special writer for the leading newspaper of Los Angeles, and
theoretically he worked by night and slept by day, but as a matter of
puzzling fact he did not sleep at all, unless one counted his brief
morning naps. His eyes, in consequence, seemed never to be quite open,
but nothing, nevertheless, escaped them.

An outsider, looking in on them now, the erect, hot-cheeked, imperious
woman, a little insolent always of her beauty, and the lolling, lounging
man with the drooping lids, would have placed his odds unhesitatingly
on her winning of any point she might have in mind. Even Mildred
Lorimer herself, after four years and a half of being married to him,
thought she would win out over him this time. Honor was the only
daughter she had, the only daughter she would ever have, for she had
definitely decided, at forty-one, to cease her dealings with the
long-legged bird who had flapped six times to her roof, and it seemed
intolerable to her that--with five boys--her one girl should be so
robustly ungirlish.
"Now, then, let's have it. You want Honor to go to Marlborough. As
she herself asked and I myself repeated,--why?"
"And as I answered you both," said his wife, trying hard to keep the
conversation spinning lightly in the air as he did, "it's because I want
her to be more like other girls."
"And I," said her husband, "do not." This was the place for Mildred
Lorimer to fling her own why but her husband was too quick for her.
"Because she is so much finer and sounder and saner and sweeter as
she is. Mildred, I have never seen any living creature so selfless. What
was the word they coined in that play about Mars?--'Otherdom?' That's
it, yes; otherdom. That's Honor Carmody. She could have finished
grammar school at twelve, but Jimsy needed her help."
"That's just it! Can't you see how wrong that is?"
"No. I'm too much occupied with seeing how right it is. Good Lord, my
dear, in a world given over to the first person perpendicular, can't you
see the amazing beauty and rarity of your child's soul? Every day and
all day long she gives herself,--to you, to me, to the kiddies, to her
friends. She is the eternal mother." Mildred Lorimer was not the eternal
mother. She was not in fact a mother at all. The physical fact of
motherhood had six times descended upon her and she was doing her
gentle, well-bred, conscientious best in six lively directions, but under
it all she was forever Helen, forever the best beloved. She was getting

rather beyond her depth but she was not giving up. Stephen, in
discussion, had an elusive way of soaring into hazy generalities. She
brought him down.
"I can't see why it should make her any less unselfish to attend the best
girls' school than to--to run with the boys." She brought out the little
vulgarism with a faint curl of her lovely lip.
"'Run with the boys!' That has a positively Salem flavor, hasn't it?
Almost as deadly, that 'with,' as 'after,'" He loved words, Stephen
Lorimer; he played with them and juggled them. "Yet isn't that exactly
what the girls of to-day must and should do? Isn't it what the girls of
to-morrow--naturally, unrebuked--will do? Not running after them,
slyly or brazenly; not sitting at home, crimped and primped and curled,
waiting to be run after. No," he said hotly, getting up and beginning to
swallow up the room from wall to wall with his long strides, "no! With
them. Running with them, chin in, chest out, sound, conditioned,
unashamed!" He believed that he meant to write a tremendous book,
one day, Honor's stepfather. He often reeled off whole chapters in his
mind, warm and glowing. It was only when he got it down on paper
that it cooled and congealed. "Running with them in the race--for the
race----" his hurtling promenade took him to the window and he paused
for an instant. "Come here, Mildred. Look at her!"
Mildred Lorimer came to join him. On the shabby, rusty lawn of the
King place, next door, all the rustier for its nearness to their own
emerald turf, sat Honor Carmody and Jimsy King, jointly and severally
lacing