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John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC

The Ice Palace. A shorty story by F. Scott Fitzgerald.



THE SUNLIGHT dripped over the house like golden paint over an
art jar, and the freckling shadows here and there only intensified
the rigor of the bath of light. The Butterworth and Larkin houses
flanking were intrenched behind great stodgy trees ; only the Happer
house took the full sun, and all day long faced the dusty road-street
with a tolerant kindly patience. This was the city of Tarleton in
southernmost Georgia, September afternoon.
Up in her bedroom window Sally Carrol Happer rested her nine-
teen-year-old chin on a fifty-two-year-old sill and watched Clark
Darrow's ancient Ford turn the corner. The car was hot being
partly metallic it retained all the heat it absorbed or evolved and
Clark Darrow sitting bolt upright at the wheel wore a pained,
strained expression as though he considered himself a spare part, and
rather likely to break. He laboriously crossed two dust ruts, the
wheels squeaking indignantly at the encounter, and then with a
terrifying expression he gave the steering-gear a final wrench and
deposited self and car approximately in front of the Happer steps.
There was a plaintive heaving sound, a death-rattle, followed by a
short silence ; and then the air was rent by a startling whistle.
Sally Carrol gazed down sleepily. She started to yawn, but finding
this quite impossible unless she raised her chin from the window-sill,
changed her mind and continued silently to regard the car, whose
owner sat brilliantly if perfunctorily at attention as he waited for
an answer to his signal. After a moment the whistle once more split
the dusty air.
"Good mawnin ."
With difficulty Clark twisted his tall body round and bent a dis-
torted glance on the window.
" Tain't mawnin', Sally Carrol."
"Isn't it, sure enough?"
"What you doin'?"
"Eatin' 'n apple."
"Come on go swimmin' want to?"
"Reckon so."
"How 'bout hurryin' up?"
"Sure enough."
Sally Carrol sighed voluminously and raised herself with profound
inertia from the floor, where she had been occupied in alternately
destroying parts of a green apple and painting paper dolls for her
younger sister. She approached a mirror, regarded her expression
with a pleased and pleasant languor, dabbed two spots of rouge on
her lips and a grain of powder on her nose, and covered her bobbed
corn-colored hair with a rose-littered sunbonnet. Then she kicked
over the painting water, said, "Oh, damn!" but let it lay and
left the room.
"How you, Clark?" she inquired a minute later as she slipped
nimbly over the side of the car.
"Mighty fine, Sally Carrol."
"Where we go swimmin'?"
"Out to Walley's Pool. Told Marylyn we'd call by an' get her an'
Joe Ewing."
Clark was dark and lean, and when on foot was rather inclined
to stoop. His eyes were ominous and his expression somewhat petu-
lant except when startlingly illuminated by one of his frequent
smiles. Clark had "a income" just enough to keep himself in ease
and his car in gasoline and he had spent the two years since he
graduated from Georgia Tech in dozing round the lazy streets of his
home town, discussing how he could best invest his capital for an
immediate fortune.
Hanging round he found not at all difficult ; a crowd of little girls
had grown up beautifully, the amazing Sally Carroll foremost among
them ; and they enjoyed being swum with and danced with and made
love to in the flower-filled summery evenings and they all liked
Clark immensely. When feminine company palled there were half
a dozen other youths who were always just about to do something,
and meanwhile were quite willing to join him in a few holes of golf,
or a game of billiards, or the consumption of a quart of "hard yella
licker." Every once in a while one of these contemporaries made a
farewell round of calls before going up to New York or Philadelphia
or Pittsburgh to go into business, but mostly they just stayed round
in this languid paradise of dreamy skies and firefly evenings and
noisy niggery street fairs and especially of gracious, soft-voiced
girls, who were brought up on memories instead of money.
The Ford having been excited into a sort of restless resentful life
Clark and Sally Carrol rolled and rattled down Valley Avenue into
Jefferson Street, where the dust road became a pavement; along
opiate Millicent Place, where there were half a dozen prosperous,
substantial mansions; and on into the down-town section. Driving
was perilous here, for it was shopping time; the population idled
casually across the streets and a drove of low-moaning oxen were
being urged along in front of a placid street-car; even the shops
seemed only yawning their doors and blinking their windows in the
sunshine before retiring into a state of utter and finite coma.
"Sally Carrol," said Clark suddenly, "it a fact that you're en-
gaged?"
She looked at him quickly.
"Where'd you hear that?"
"Sure enough, you engaged?"
" 'At's a nice question ! "
"Girl told me you were engaged to a Yankee you met up in Ashe-
ville last summer."
Sally Carrol sighed.
"Never saw such an old town for rumors."
"Don't marry a Yankee, Sally Carrol. We need you round here."
Sally Carrol was silent a moment.
"Clark," she demanded suddenly, "who on earth shall I marry?"
"I offer my services."
"Honey, you couldn't support a wife," she answered cheerfully.
"Anyway, I know you too well to fall in love with you."
" 'At doesn't mean you ought to marry a Yankee," he persisted.
"S'pose I love him?"
He shook his head.
"You couldn't. He'd be a lot different from us, every way."
He broke off as he halted the car in front of a rambling, dilapidated
house. Marylyn Wade and Joe Ewing appeared in the doorway.
" 'Lo, Sally Carrol."
"Hi!"
"Howyou-all?"
"Sally Carrol," demanded Marylyn as they started off again, "you
engaged?"
"Lawdy, where'd all this start? Can't I look at a man 'thout every-
body in town engagin' me to him?"
Clark stared straight in front of him at a bolt on the clattering
wind-shield.
"Sally Carrol," he said with a curious intensity, "don't you like
us?"
"what?"
"Us down here?"
"Why, Clark, you know I do. I adore all you boys."
"Then why you gettin' engaged to a Yankee?"
"Clark, I don't know. I'm not sure what I'll do, but well, I want
to go places and see people. I want my mind to grow. I want to live
where things happen on a big scale."
"What you mean ?"
"Oh, Clark, I love you, and I love Joe here, and Ben Arrot, and
you-all, but you'll you'll "
"We'll all be failures?"
"Yes. I don't mean only money failures, but just sort of of in-
effectual and sad, and oh, how can I tell you?"
"You mean because we stay here in Tarleton?"
"Yes, Clark; and because you like it and never want to change
things or think or go ahead."
He nodded and she reached over and pressed his hand.
"Clark," she said softly, "I wouldn't change you for the world.
You're sweet the way you are. The things that'll make you fail I'll
love always the living in the past, the lazy days and nights you
have, and all your carelessness and generosity."
"But you're goin' away?"
"Yes because I couldn't ever marry you. You've a place in my
heart no one else ever could have, but tied down here I'd get restless.
I'd feel I was wastin' myself. There's two sides to me, you see.
There's the sleepy old side you love ; an' there's a sort of energy
the feelin' that makes me do wild things. That's the part of me that
may be useful somewhere, that'll last when I'm not beautiful any
more."
She broke off with characteristic suddenness and sighed, "Oh,
sweet cooky I " as her mood changed.
Half closing her eyes and tipping back her head till it rested on the
seat-back she let the savory breeze fan her eyes and ripple the fluffy
curls of her bobbed hair. They were in the country now, hurrying
between tangled growths of bright-green coppice and grass and tall
trees that sent sprays of foliage to hang a cool welcome over the
road. Here and there they passed a battered Negro cabin, its oldest
white-haired inhabitant smoking a corncob pipe beside the door, and
half a dozen scantily clothed pickaninnies parading tattered dolls
on the wild-grown grass in front. Farther out were lazy cotton-fields,
where even the workers seemed intangible shadows lent by the sun
to the earth, not for toil, but to while away some age-old tradition
in the golden September fields. And round the drowsy picturesque-
ness, over the trees and shacks and muddy rivers, flowed the heat,
never hostile, only comforting, like a great warm nourishing bosom
for the infant earth.
"Sally Carrol, we're here!"
"Poor chile's soun' asleep."
"Honey, you dead at last outa sheer laziness ?"
"Water, Sally Carrol ! Cool water waitin' for you ! "
Her eyes opened sleepily.
"Hi ! she murmured, smiling.

II

In November Harry Bellamy, tall, broad, and brisk, came down
from his Northern city to spend four days. His intention was to settle
a matter that had been hanging fire since he and Sally Carrol had
met in Asheville, North Carolina, in midsummer. The settlement
took only a quiet afternoon and an evening in front of a glowing open
fire, for Harry Bellamy had everything she wanted ; and, besides, she
loved him loved him with that side of her she kept especially for
loving. Sally Carrol had several rather clearly defined sides.
On his last afternoon they walked, and she found their steps tend-
ing half-unconsciously toward one of her favorite haunts, the ceme-
tery. When it came in sight, gray-white and golden-green under the
cheerful late sun, she paused, irresolute, by the iron gate.
"Are you mournful by nature, Harry?" she asked with a faint
smile.
"Mournful? Not I."
"Then let's go in here. It depresses some folks, but I like it."
They passed through the gateway and followed a path that led
through a wavy valley of graves dusty-gray and mouldy for the
fifties ; quaintly carved with flowers and jars for the seventies ; ornate
and hideous for the nineties, with fat marble cherubs lying in sodden
sleep on stone pillows, and great impossible growths of nameless
granite flowers. Occasionally they saw a kneeling figure with trib-
utary flowers, but over most of the graves lay silence and withered
leaves with only the fragrance that their own shadowy memories
could waken in living minds.
They reached the top of a hill where they were fronted by a tall,
round head-stone, freckled with dark spots of damp and half grown
over with vines.
"Margery Lee," she read; "1844-1873. Wasn't she nice? She died
when she was twenty-nine. Dear Margery Lee," she added softly.
"Can't you see her, Harry?"
"Yes, Sally Carrol."
He felt a little hand insert itself into his.
"She was dark, I think ; and she always wore her hair with a rib-
bon in it, and gorgeous hoop-skirts of alice blue and old rose."
"Yes."
"Oh, she was sweet, Harry ! And she was the sort of girl born to
stand on a wide, pillared porch and welcome folks in. I think perhaps
a lot of men went away to war meanin' to come back to her ; but
maybe none of 'em ever did."
He stooped down close to the stone, hunting for any record of
marriage.
"There's nothing here to show."
"Of course not. How could there be anything there better than
just 'Margery Lee/ and that eloquent date?"
She drew close to him and an unexpected lump came into his
throat as her yellow hair brushed his cheek.
"You see how she was, don't you, Harry?"
"I see," he agreed gently. "I see through your precious eyes. You're
beautiful now, so I know she must have been."
Silent and close they stood, and he could feel her shoulders trem-
bling a little. An ambling breeze swept up the hill and stirred the
brim of her floppidy hat.
' Let's go down there!"
She was pointing to a flat stretch on the other side of the hill where
along the green turf were a thousand grayish-white crosses stretch-
ing in endless, ordered rows like the stacked arms of a bat-
talion.
"Those are the Confederate dead," said Sally Carrol simply.
They walked along and read the inscriptions, always only a name
and a date, sometimes quite indecipherable.

"The last row is the saddest see, 'way over there. Every cross
has just a date on it, and the word 'Unknown.' "
She looked at him and her eyes brimmed with tears.
"I can't tell you how real it is to me, darling if you don't know."
"How you feel about it is beautiful to me."
"No, no, it's not me, it's them that old time that I've tried to
have live in me. These were just men, unimportant evidently or they
wouldn't have been 'unknown' ; but they died for the most beautiful
thing in the world the dead South. You see," she continued, her
voice still husky, her eyes glistening with tears, "people have these
dreams they fasten onto things, and I've always grown up with that
dream. It was so easy because it was all dead and there weren't any
disillusions comin' to me. I've tried in a way to live up to those past
standards of noblesse oblige there's just the last remnants of it,
you know, like the roses of an old garden dying all round us streaks
of strange courtliness and chivalry in some of these boys an' stories
I used to hear from a Confederate soldier who lived next door, and a
few old darkies. Oh, Harry, there was something, there was some-
thing! I couldn't ever make you understand, but it was there."
"I understand," he assured her again quietly.
Sally Carrol smiled and dried her eyes on the tip of a handker-
chief protruding from his breast pocket.
"You don't feel depressed, do you, lover? Even when I cry I'm
happy here, and I get a sort of strength from it."
Hand in hand they turned and walked slowly away. Finding soft
grass she drew him down to a seat beside her with their backs against
the remnants of a low broken wall. *
"Wish those three old women would clear out," he complained. "I
want to kiss you, Sally Carrol."
"Me, too."
They waited impatiently for the three bent figures to move off,
and then she kissed him until the sky seemed to fade out and all her
smiles and tears to vanish in an ecstasy of eternal seconds.
Afterward they walked slowly back together, while on the corners
twilight played at somnolent black-and-white checkers with the end
of day.
"You'll be up about mid- January," he said, "and youVe got to stay
a month at least. It'll be slick. There's a winter carnival on, and if
you've never really seen snow it'll be like fairy-land to you. There'll
be skating and skiing and tobogganing and sleigh-riding, and all
sorts of torchlight parades on snow-shoes. They haven't had one for
years, so they're going to make it a knock-out."
"Will I be cold, Harry?" she asked suddenly.
"You certainly won't. You may freeze your nose, but you won't
be shivery cold. It's hard and dry, you know."
"I guess I'm a summer child. I don't like any cold I've ever seen."
She broke off and they were both silent for a minute.

"Sally Carrol," he said very slowly, "what do you say to
March?"
"I say I love you."
"March?"
"March, Harry."


Ill

All night in the Pullman it was very cold. She rang for the porter
to ask for another blanket, and when he couldn't give her one she
tried vainly, by squeezing down into the bottom of her berth and
doubling back the bedclothes, to snatch a few hours' sleep. She
wanted to look her best in the morning.
She rose at six and sliding uncomfortably into her clothes stumbled
up to the diner for a cup of coffee. The snow had filtered into the
vestibules and covered the floor with a slippery coating. It was in-
triguing, this cold, it crept in everywhere. Her breath was quite visible
and she blew into the air with a nai've enjoyment. Seated in the
diner she stared out the window at white hills and valleys and
scattered pines whose every branch was a green platter for a cold
feast of snow. Sometimes a solitary farmhouse would fly by, ugly
and bleak and lone on the white waste ; and with each one she had
an instant of chill compassion for the souls shut in there waiting
for spring.
As she left the diner and swayed back into the Pullman she experi-
enced a surging rush of energy and wondered if she was feeling the
bracing air of which Harry had spoken. This was the North, the
North her land now!
"Then blow, ye winds, heigho!
A-roving I will go,"
she chanted exultantly to herself.
"What's 'at?" inquired the porter politely.
"I said: 'Brush me off.'"
The long wires of the telegraph-poles doubled ; two tracks ran up
beside the train three four; came a succession of white-roofed
houses, a glimpse of a trolley-car with frosted windows, streets
more streets the city.
She stood for a dazed moment in the frosty station before she saw
three fur-bundled figures descending upon her.
"There she is!"
"Oh, Sally Carrol!"
Sally Carrol dropped her bag.
"Hi!"
A faintly familiar icy-cold face kissed her, and then she was in a
group of faces all apparently emitting great clouds of heavy smoke ;
she was shaking hands. There were Gordon, a short, eager man of
thirty who looked like an amateur knocked-about model for Harry,
and his wife, Myra, a listless lady with flaxen hair under a fur auto-
mobile cap. Almost immediately Sally Carrol thought of her as
vaguely Scandinavian. A cheerful chauffeur adopted her bag, and
amid ricochets of half-phrases, exclamations, and perfunctory list-
less "my dears" from Myra, they swept each other from the
station.
Then they were in a sedan bound through a crooked succession of
snowy streets where dozens of little boys were hitching sleds behind
grocery wagons and automobiles.
"Oh," cried Sally Carrol, "I want to do that! Can we, Harry?"
"That's for kids. But we might "
"It looks like such a circus!" she said regretfully.
Home was a rambling frame house set on a white lap of snow, and
there she met a big, gray-haired man of whom she approved, and a
lady who was like an egg, and who kissed her these were Harry's
parents. There was a breathless indescribable hour crammed full of
half-sentences, hot water, bacon and eggs and confusion ; and after
that she was alone with Harry in the library, asking him if she dared
smoke.
It was a large room with a Madonna over the fireplace and rows
upon rows of books in covers of light gold and dark gold and shiny
red. All the chairs had little lace squares where one's head should
rest, the couch was just comfortable, the books looked as if they
had been read some and Sally Carrol had an instantaneous vision
of the battered old library at home, with her father's huge medical
books, and the oil-paintings of her three great-uncles, and the old
couch that had been mended up for forty-five years and was still
luxurious to dream in. This room struck her as being neither attrac-
tive nor particularly otherwise. It was simply a room with a lot of
fairly expensive things in it that all looked about fifteen years old.
"What do you think of it up here?" demanded Harry eagerly.
"Does it surprise you? Is it what you expected, I mean?"
"You are, Harry," she said quietly, and reached out her arms to
him.
But after a brief kiss he seemed anxious to extort enthusiasm from
her.
"The town, I mean. Do you like it? Can you feel the pep in the
air?"
"Oh, Harry," she laughed, "you'll have to give me time. You can't
just fling questions at me."
She puffed at her cigarette with a sigh of contentment.
"One thing I want to ask you," he began rather apologetically;
"you Southerners put quite an emphasis on family, and all that
not that it isn't quite all right, but you'll find it a little different
here. I mean you'll notice a lot of things that'll seem to you sort of
vulgar display at first, Sally Carrol ; but just remember that this is
a three-generation town. Everybody has a father, and about half
of us have grandfathers. Back of that we don't go."
"Of course," she murmured.
"Our grandfathers, you see, founded the place, and a lot of them
had to take some pretty queer jobs while they were doing the found-
ing. For instance, there's one woman who at present is about the
social model for the town ; well, her father was the first public ash
man things like that."
"Why," said Sally Carrol, puzzled, "did you s'pose I was goin' to
make remarks about people?"
"Not at all," interrupted Harry; "and I'm not apologizing for any
one either. It's just that well, a Southern girl came up here last
summer and said some unfortunate things, and oh, I just thbught
I'd tell you."
Sally Carrol felt suddenly indignant as though she had been unjustly spanked but Harry evidently considered the subject closed,
for he went on with a great surge of enthusiasm.
"It's carnival time, you know. First in ten years. And there's an
ice palace they're building now that's the first they've had since
eighty-five. Built out of blocks of the clearest ice they could find on
a tremendous scale."
She rose and walking to the window pushed aside the heavy
Turkish portieres and looked out.
"Oh ! " she cried suddenly. "There's two little boys makin' a snow
man! Harry, do you reckon I can go out an' help 'em?"
"You dream ! Come here and kiss me."
She left the window rather reluctantly.
"I don't guess this is a very kissable climate, is it? I mean, it
makes you so you don't want to sit round, doesn't it?"
"We're not going to. I've got a vacation for the first week you're
here, and there's a dinner-dance to-night."
"Oh, Harry," she confessed, subsiding in a heap, half in his lap,
half in the pillows, "I sure do feel confused. I haven't got an idea
whether I'll like it or not, an' I don't know what people expect, or
anythin'. You'll have to tell me, honey."
"I'll tell you," he said softly, "if you'll just tell me you're glad to
be here."
"Glad just awful glad ! " she whispered, insinuating herself into
his arms in her own peculiar way. "Where you are is home for me,
Harry."
And as she said this she had the feeling for almost the first time in
her life that she was acting a part.
That night, amid the gleaming candles of a dinner-party, where
the men seemed to do most of the talking while the girls sat in a
haughty and expensive aloofness, even Harry's presence on her left
failed to make her feel at home.
"They're a good-looking crowd, don't you think?" he demanded.
"Just look round. There's Spud Hubbard, tackle at Princeton last
year, and Junie Morton he and the red-haired fellow next to him
were both Yale hockey captains ; Junie was in my class. Why, the
best athletes in the world come from these States round here. This is
a man's country, I tell you. Look at John J. Fishburn ! "
"Who's he?" asked Sally Carrol innocently.
"Don't you know?"
"I've heard the name."
"Greatest wheat man in the Northwest, and one of the greatest
financiers in the country."
She turned suddenly to a voice on her right.
"I guess they forgot to introduce us. My name's Roger Patton."
"My name is Sally Carrol Happer," she said graciously.
"Yes, I know. Harry told me you were coming."
"You a relative?"
"No, I'm a professor."
"Oh," she laughed.
"At the university. You're from the South, aren't you?"
"Yes ; Tarleton, Georgia."
She liked him immediately a reddish-brown mustache under
watery blue eyes that had something in them that these other eyes
lacked, some quality of appreciation. They exchanged stray sen-
tences through dinner, and she made up her mind to see him again.
After coffee she was introduced to numerous good-looking young
men who danced with conscious precision and seemed to take it for
granted that she wanted to talk about nothing except Harry.
"Heavens," she thought, "they talk as if my being engaged made
me older than they are as if I'd tell their mothers on them!"
In the South an engaged girl, even a young married woman, ex-
pected the same amount of half-affectionate badinage and flattery
that would be accorded a debutante, but here all that seemed banned.
One young man, after getting well started on the subject of Sally
Carrol's eyes, and how they had allured him ever since she entered
the room, went into a violent confusion when he found she was visit-
ing the Bellamys was Harry's fiancee. He seemed to feel as though
he had made some risque and inexcusable blunder, became imme-
diately formal, and left her at the first opportunity.
She was rather glad when Roger Patton cut in on her and suggested
that they sit out a while.
"Well," he inquired, blinking cheerily, "how's Carmen from the
South?"
"Mighty fine. How's how's Dangerous Dan McGrew? Sorry, but
he's the only Northerner I know much about."
He seemed to enjoy that.
"Of course," he confessed, "as a professor of literature I'm not
supposed to have read Dangerous Dan McGrew."
"Are you a native?"
“No, I'm a Philadelphian. Imported from Harvard to teach French.
But I've been here ten years."

"Nine years, three hundred an' sixty-four days longer than me."
"Like it here?"
"Uh-huh. Sure do!"
"Really?"
"Well, why not? Don't I look as if I were bavin' a good time?"
"I saw you look out the window a minute ago and shiver."
"Just my imagination," laughed Sally Carrol. "I'm used to havin'
everythin' quiet outside, an' sometimes I look out an' see a flurry of
snow, an' it's just as if somethin' dead was movin'."
He nodded appreciatively.
"Ever been North before?"
"Spent two Julys in Asheville, North Carolina."
"Nice-looking crowd, aren't they?" suggested Patton, indicating
the swirling floor.
Sally Carrol started. This had been Harry's remark.
"Sure are ! They're canine."
"What?"
She flushed.
"I'm sorry; that sounded worse than I meant it. You see I always
think of people as feline or canine, irrespective of sex."
"Which are you?"
"I'm feline. So are you. So are most Southern men an' most of
these girls here."
"What's Harry?"
"Harry's canine distinctly. All the men I've met to-night seem to be
canine."
"What does 'canine' imply? A certain conscious masculinity as
opposed to subtlety?"
"Reckon so. I never analyzed it only I just look at people an'
say 'canine' or 'feline' right off. It's right absurd, I guess."
"Not at all. I'm interested. I used to have a theory about these
people. I think they're freezing up."
"What?"
"I think they're growing like Swedes Ibsenesque, you know. Very
gradually getting gloomy and melancholy. It's these long winters.
Ever read any Ibsen?"
She shook her head.
"Well, you find in his characters a certain brooding rigidity.
They're righteous, narrow, and cheerless, without infinite possibilities
for great sorrow or joy."
"Without smiles or tears?"
"Exactly. That's my theory. You see there are thousands of Swedes
up here. They come, I imagine, because the climate is very much like
their own, and there's been a gradual mingling. There're probably
not half a dozen here to-night, but we've had four Swedish gover-
nors. Am I boring you?"
"I'm mighty interested."
"Your future sister-in-law is half Swedish. Personally I like her,
but my theory is that Swedes react rather badly on us as a whole.
Scandinavians, you know, have the largest suicide rate in the world."
"Why do you live here if it's so depressing?"
"Oh, it doesn't get me. I'm pretty well cloistered, and I suppose
books mean more than people to me anyway."
"But writers all speak about the South being tragic. You know
Spanish seiioritas, black hair and daggers an' haunting music."
He shook his head.
"No, the Northern races are the tragic races they don't indulge
in the cheering luxury of tears."
Sally Carrol thought of her graveyard. She supposed that that was
vaguely what she had meant when she said it didn't depress her.
"The Italians are about the gayest people in the world but it's a
dull subject," he broke off. "Anyway, I want to tell you you're mar-
rying a pretty fine man."
Sally Carrol was moved by an impulse of confidence.
"I know. I'm the sort of person who wants to be taken care of
after a certain point, and I feel sure I will be."
"Shall we dance? You know," he continued as they rose, "it's
encouraging to find a girl who knows what she's marrying for. Nine-
tenths of them think of it as a sort of walking into a moving-picture
sunset."
She laughed, and liked him immensely.
Two hours later on the way home she nestled near Harry in the
back seat.
"Oh, Harry," she whispered, "it's so co-old!"
"But it's warm in here, darling girl."
"But outside it's cold ; and oh, that howling wind ! "
She buried her face deep in his fur coat and trembled involuntarily
as his cold lips kissed the tip of her ear.

IV

The first week of her visit passed in a whirl. She had her promised
toboggan-ride at the back of an automobile through a chill January
twilight. Swathed in furs she put in a morning tobogganing on the
country-club hill; even tried skiing, to sail through the air for a
glorious moment and then land in a tangled laughing bundle on a soft
snowdrift. She liked all the winter sports, except an afternoon spent
snow-shoeing over a glaring plain under pale yellow sunshine, but she
soon realized that these things were for children that she was being
humored and that the enjoyment round her was only a reflection of
her own.
At first the Bellamy family puzzled her. The men were reliable
and she liked them; to Mr. Bellamy especially, with his iron-gray
hair and energetic dignity, she took an immediate fancy, once she
found that he was born in Kentucky ; this made of him a link between

the old life and the new. But toward the women she felt a definite
hostility. Myra, her future sister-in-law, seemed the essence of spirit-
less conventionality. Her conversation was so utterly devoid of per-
sonality that Sally Carrol, who came from a country where a certain
amount of charm and assurance could be taken for granted in the
women, was inclined to despise her.
"If those women aren't beautiful," she thought, "they're nothing.
They just fade out when you look at them. They're glorified domes-
tics. Men are the centre of every mixed group."
Lastly there was Mrs. Bellamy, whom Sally Carrol detested. The
first day's impression of an egg had been confirmed an egg with a
cracked, veiny voice and such an ungracious dumpiness of carriage
that Sally Carrol felt that if she once fell she would surely scramble.
In addition, Mrs. Bellamy seemed to typify the town in being in-
nately hostile to strangers. She called Sally Carrol "Sally," and
could not be persuaded that the double name was anything more
than a tedious ridiculous nickname. To Sally Carrol this shortening
of her name was like presenting her to the public half clothed. She
loved "Sally Carrol"; she loathed "Sally." She knew also that
Harry's mother disapproved of her bobbed hair ; and she had never
dared smoke down-stairs after that first day when Mrs. Bellamy had
come into the library sniffing violently.
Of all the men she met she preferred Roger Patton, who was a
frequent visitor at the house. He never again alluded to the Ibsen-
esque tendency of the populace, but when he came in one day and
found her curled upon the sofa bent over "Peer Gynt" he laughed
and told her to forget what he'd said that it was all rot.
And then one afternoon in her second week she and Harry hovered
on the edge of a dangerously steep quarrel. She considered that he
precipitated it entirely, though the Serbia in the case was an un-
known man who had not had his trousers pressed.
They had been walking homeward between mounds of high-piled
snow and under a sun which Sally Carrol scarcely recognized. They
passed a little girl done up in gray wool until she resembled a small
Teddy bear, and Sally Carrol could not resist a gasp of maternal
appreciation.
"Look! Harry!"
"What?"
"That little girl did you see her face?"
"Yes, why?"
"It was red as a little strawberry. Oh, she was cute ! "
"Why, your own face is almost as red as that already! Every-
body^ healthy here. We're out in the cold as soon as we're old
enough to walk. Wonderful climate ! "




She looked at him and had to agree. He was mighty healthy-look-
ing ; so was his brother. And she had noticed the new red in her own
cheeks that very morning.
Suddenly their glances were caught and held, and they stared for
a moment at the street-corner ahead of them. A man was standing
there, his knees bent, his eyes gazing upward with a tense expression
as though he were about to make a leap toward the chilly sky. And
then they both exploded into a shout of laughter, for coming closer
they discovered it had been a ludicrous momentary illusion produced
by the extreme bagginess of the man's trousers.
"Reckon that's one on us," she laughed.
"He must be a Southerner, judging by those trousers," suggested
Harry mischievously.
"Why, Harry!"
Her surprised look must have irritated him.
"Those damn Southerners ! "
Sally Carrol's eyes flashed.
"Don't call 'em that!"
"I'm sorry, dear," said Harry, malignantly apologetic, "but you
know what I think of them. They're sort of sort of degenerates
not at all like the old Southerners. They've lived so long down
there with all the colored people that they've gotten lazy and shift-
less."
"Hush your mouth, Harry I " she cried angrily. "They're not ! They
may be lazy anybody would be in that climate but they're my
best friends, an' I don't want to hear 'em criticised in any such
aweepin' way. Some of J em are the finest men in the world."
"Oh, I know. They're all right when they come North to college,
but of all the hangdog, ill-dressed, slovenly lot I ever saw, a bunch
of small-town Southerners are the worst ! "
Sally Carrol was clinching her gloved hands and biting her lip
furiously.
"Why," continued Harry, "there was one in my class at New
Haven, and we all thought that at last we'd found the true type of
Southern aristocrat, but it turned out that he wasn't an aristocrat
at all just the son of a Northern carpetbagger, who owned about
all the cotton round Mobile."
"A Southerner wouldn't talk the way you're talking now," she said
evenly.
"They haven't the energy I "
"Or the somethin' else."
"I'm sorry, Sally Carrol, but I've heard you say yourself that
you'd never marry "
"That's quite different. I told you I wouldn't want to tie my life





to any of the boys that are round Tarleton now, but I never made
any sweepin' generalities."
They walked along in silence.
"I probably spread it on a bit thick, Sally Carrol. I'm sorry."
She nodded but made no answer. Five minutes later as they stood
in the hallway she suddenly threw her arms round him.
"Oh, Harry," she cried, her eyes brimming with tears, "let's get
married next week. I'm afraid of having fusses like that. I'm afraid,
Harry. It wouldn't be that way if we were married."
But Harry, being in the wrong, was still irritated.
"That'd be idiotic. We decided on March."
The tears in Sally Carrol's eyes faded ; her expression hardened
slightly.
"Very well I suppose I shouldn't have said that."
Harry melted.
"Dear little nut!" he cried. "Come and kiss me and let's forget."
That very night at the end of a vaudeville performance the orches-
tra played "Dixie" and Sally Carrol felt something stronger and
more enduring than her tears and smiles of the day brim up inside
her. She leaned forward gripping the arms of her chair until her
face grew crimson.
"Sort of get you, dear?" whispered Harry.
But she did not hear him. To the spirited throb of the violins and
the inspiring beat of the kettledrums her own old ghosts were march-
ing by and on into the darkness, and as fifes whistled and sighed
in the low encore they seemed so nearly out of sight that she could
have waved good-by.
"Away, away,
Away down South in Dixie !
Away, away,
Away down South in Dixie ! "
It was a particularly cold night. A sudden thaw had nearly cleared
the streets the day before, but now they were traversed again with a
powdery wraith of loose snow that travelled in wavy lines before the
feet of the wind, and filled the lower air with a fine-particled mist.
There was no sky only a dark, ominous tent that draped in the
tops of the streets and was in reality a vast approaching army of
snowflakes while over it all, chilling away the comfort from the
brown-and-green glow of lighted windows and muffling the steady
trot of the horse pulling their sleigh, interminably washed the north
wind. It was a dismal town after all, she thought dismal.
Sometimes at night it had seemed to her as though no one lived
here they had all gone long ago leaving lighted houses to be cov-
ered in time by tombing heaps of sleet. Oh, if there should be snow
on her grave ! To be beneath great piles of it all winter long, where
even her headstone would be a light shadow against light shadows.
Her gravea grave that should be flower-strewn and washed with
sun and rain.
She thought again of those isolated country houses that her train
had passed, and of the life there the long winter through the cease-
less glare through the windows, the crust forming on the soft drifts
of snow, finally the slow, cheerless melting, and the harsh spring of
which Roger Patton had told her. Her spring to lose it forever
with its lilacs and the lazy sweetness it stirred in her heart. She was
laying away that spring afterward she would lay away that sweet-
ness.
With a gradual insistence the storm broke. Sally Carrol felt a film
of flakes melt quickly on her eyelashes, and Harry reached over a
furry arm and drew down her complicated flannel cap. Then the
small flakes came in skirmish-line, and the horse bent his neck
patiently as a transparency of white appeared momentarily on his
coat.
"Oh, he's cold, Harry," she said quickly.
"Who? The horse? Oh, no, he isn't. He likes it!"
After another ten minutes they turned a corner and came in sight
of their destination. On a tall hill outlined in vivid glaring green
against the wintry sky stood the ice palace. It was three stories in
the air, with battlements and embrasures and narrow icicled windows,
and the innumerable electric lights inside made a gorgeous trans-
parency of the great central hall. Sally Carrol clutched Harry's hand
under the fur robe.
"It's beautiful!" he cried excitedly. "My golly, it's beautiful,
isn't it ! They haven't had one here since eighty-five ! "
Somehow the notion of there not having been one since eighty-five
oppressed her. Ice was a ghost, and this mansion of it was surely peo-
pled by those shades of the eighties, with pale faces and blurred
snow-filled hair.
"Come on, dear," said Harry.
She followed him out of the sleigh and waited while he hitched the
horse. A party of four Gordon, Myra, Roger Patton, and another
girl drew up beside them with a mighty jingle of bells. There were
quite a crowd already, bundled in fur or sheepskin, shouting and
calling to each other as they moved through the snow, which was
now so thick that people could scarcely be distinguished a few yards
away.
"It's a hundred and seventy feet tall," Harry was saying to a
muffled figure beside him as they trudged toward the entrance;
"covers six thousand square yards."
She caught snatches of conversation: "One main hall" "walls
twenty to forty inches thick" "and the ice cave has almost a mile
of ""this Canuck who built it "
They found their way inside, and dazed by the magic of the great
crystal walls Sally Carrol found herself repeating over and over
two lines from "Kubla Khan":

"It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice ! "
In the great glittering cavern with the dark shut out she took a
seat on a wooden bench, and the evening's oppression lifted. Harry
was right it was beautiful ; and her gaze travelled the smooth sur-
face of the walls, the blocks for which had been selected for their
purity and clearness to obtain this opalescent, translucent effect.
"Look ! Here we go oh, boy 1 " cried Harry.
A band in a far corner struck up "Hail, Hail, the Gang's All Here ! "
which echoed over to them in wild muddled acoustics, and then the
lights suddenly went out ; silence seemed to flow down the icy sides
and sweep over them. Sally Carrol could still see her white breath
in the darkness, and a dim row of pale faces over on the other side.
The music eased to a sighing complaint, and from outside drifted
in the full-throated resonant chant of the marching clubs. It grew
louder like some paean of a viking tribe traversing an ancient wild ; it
swelled they were coming nearer ; then a row of torches appeared,
and another and another, and keeping time with their moccasined
feet a long column of gray-mackinawed figures swept in, snowshoes
slung at their shoulders, torches soaring and flickering as their voices
rose along the great walls.
The gray column ended and another followed, the light streaming
luridly this time over red toboggan caps and flaming crimson
mackinaws, and as they entered they took up the refrain ; then came
a long platoon of blue and white, of green, of white, of brown and
yellow.
"Those white ones are the Wacouta Club," whispered Harry
eagerly. "Those are the men youVe met round at dances."
The volume of the voices grew ; the great cavern was a phantas-
magoria of torches waving in great banks of fire, of colors and the
rhythm of soft-leather steps. The leading column turned and halted,
platoon deployed in front of platoon until the whole procession
made a solid flag of flame, and then from thousands of voices burst
a mighty shout that filled the air like a crash of thunder, and sent
the torches wavering. It was magnificent, it was tremendous! To
Sally Carrol it was the North offering sacrifice on some mighty altar
to the gray pagan God of Snow. As the shout died the band struck up
again and there came more singing, and then long reverberating
cheers by each club. She sat very quiet listening while the staccato
cries rent the stillness ; and then she started, for there was a volley
of explosion, and great clouds of smoke went up here and there
through the cavern the flash-light photographers at work and the
council was over. With the band at their head the clubs formed
in column once more, took up their chant, and began to march
out.
"Come on ! " shouted Harry. "We want to see the labyrinths down-
stairs before they turn the lights off ! "

They all rose and started toward the chute Harry and Sally
Carrol in the lead, her little mitten buried in his big fur gantlet. At
the bottom of the chute was a long empty room of ice, with the ceil-
ing so low that they had to stoop and their hands were parted. Be-
fore she realized what he intended Harry had darted down one of
the half-dozen glittering passages that opened into the room and was
only a vague receding blot against the green shimmer.
"Harry! "she called.
"Come on ! " he cried back.
She looked round the empty chamber ; the rest of the party had
evidently decided to go home, were already outside somewhere in the
blundering snow. She hesitated and then darted in after Harry.
"Harry!" she shouted.
She had reached a turning-point thirty feet down; she heard a
faint muffled answer far to the left, and with a touch of panic fled
toward it. She passed another turning, two more yawning alleys.
"Harry!"
No answer. She started to run straight forward, and then turned
like lightning and sped back the way she had come, enveloped in a
sudden icy terror.
She reached a turn was it here ? took the left and came to what
should have been the outlet into the long, low room, but it was only
another glittering passage with darkness at the end. She called again
but the walls gave back a flat, lifeless echo with no reverberations.
Retracing her steps she turned another corner, this time following
a wide passage. It was like the green lane between the parted waters
of the Red Sea, like a damp vault connecting empty tombs.
She slipped a little now as she walked, for ice had formed ou tif
bottom of her overshoes ; she had to run her gloves along the half-
slippery, half-sticky walls to keep her balance.
"Harry!"
Still no answer. The sound she made bounced mockingly down to
the end of the passage.
Then on an instant the lights went out, and she was in complete
darkness. She gave a small, frightened cry, and sank down into a
cold little heap on the ice. She felt her left knee do something as she
fell, but she scarcely noticed it as some deep terror far greater than
any fear of being lost settled upon her. She was alone with this
presence that came out of the North, the dreary loneliness that rose
from ice-bound whalers in the Arctic seas, from smokeless, trackless
wastes where were strewn the whitened bones of adventure. It was
an icy breath of death ; it was rolling down low across the land to
clutch at her.
With a furious, despairing energy she rose again and started
blindly down the darkness. She must get out. She might be lost in
here for days, freeze to death and lie embedded in the ice like corpses
she had read of, kept perfectly preserved until the melting of a
glacier. Harry probably thought she had left with the others he had
gone by now ; no one would know until late next day. She reached
pitifully for the wall. Forty inches thick, they had said forty inches
thick !
"Oh!"
On both sides of her along the walls she felt things creeping, damp
souls that haunted this palace, this town, this North.
"Oh, send somebody send somebody ! " she cried aloud.
Clark Darrow he would understand ; or Joe Ewing ; she couldn't
be left here to wander forever to be frozen, heart, body, and soul.
This her this Sally Carrol ! Why, she was a happy thing. She was
a happy little girl. She liked warmth and summer and Dixie. These
things were foreign foreign.
"You're not crying," something said aloud. "You'll never cry any
more. Your tears would just freeze ; all tears freeze up here ! "
She sprawled full length on the ice.
"Oh, God .'"she faltered.
A long single file of minutes went by, and with a great weariness
she felt her eyes closing. Then some one seemed to sit down near her
and take her face in warm, soft hands. She looked up gratefully.
"Why, it's Margery Lee," she crooned softly to herself. "I knew
you'd come." It really was Margery Lee, and she was just as Sally
Carrol had known she would be, with a young, white brow, and
wide, welcoming eyes, and a hoop-skirt of some soft material that
was quite comforting to rest on.
"Margery Lee."
It was getting darker now and darker all those tombstones ought
to be repainted, sure enough, only that would spoil 'em, of course.
Still, you ought to be able to see 'em.
Then after a succession of moments that went fast and then slow,
but seemed to be ultimately resolving themselves into a multitude
of blurred rays converging toward a pale-yellow sun, she heard a
great cracking noise break her new-found stillness.
It was the sun, it was a light ; a torch, and a torch beyond that,
and another one, and voices ; a face took flesh below the torch, heavy
-arms raised her, and she felt something on her cheek it felt wet.
Some one had seized her and was rubbing her face with snow. How
ridiculous with snow 1
"Sally Carrol ! Sally Carrol ! "
It was Dangerous Dan McGrew ; and two other faces she didn't
know.
"Child, child ! We've been looking for you two hours ! Harry's half-
trazy ! "
Things came rushing back into place the singing, the torches, the
great shout of the marching clubs. She squirmed in Patton's arms
and gave a long low cry.
"Oh, I want to get out of here! I'm going back home. Take me
home" her voice rose to a scream that sent a chill to Harry's heart
as he came racing down the next passage "to-morrow ! " she cried
with delirious, unrestrained passion "To-morrow ! To-morrow !
To-morrow ! "


VI

The wealth of golden sunlight poured a quite enervating yet
oddly comforting heat over the house where day long it faced the
dusty stretch of road. Two birds were making a great to-do in a cool
spot found among the branches of a tree next door, and down the
street a colored woman was announcing herself melodiously as a pur-
veyor of strawberries. It was April afternoon.
Sally Carrol Happer, resting her chin on her arm, and her arm on
an old window-seat gazed sleepily down over the spangled dust
whence the heat waves were rising for the first time this spring. She
was watching a very ancient Ford turn a perilous corner .and rattle
and groan to a jolting stop at the end of the walk. She made no
sound, and in a minute a strident familiar whistle rent the air. Sally
Carrol smiled and blinked.
"Good mawninV
A head appeared tortuously from under the car-top below.
"Tain't mawnin', Sally Carrol."
"Sure enough!" she said in affected surprise. "I guess maybe not."
"What you doin'?"
"Eatin' green peach. 'Spect to die any minute."
Clark twisted himself a last impossible notch to get a view of her
face.
"Water's warm as a kettla steam, Sally Carrol. Wanta go swim-
min'?"
'Hate to move," sighed Sally Carrol lazily, "but I reckon so."