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“I HATE that Evans house! All shiny! I like it here!” raged Ann, when she had left Ben and come into the brown and comfortable dowdiness of the Vickers sitting room.... Gritty Brussels carpet; Hoffmann pictures of Christ; old college textbooks, and Walter Scott and Dickens and Washington Irving and the “English Men of Letters” series and The Jungle and The Birds’ Christmas Carol and Cruden’s Concordance; a highly tufted sofa with an autograph sofa-cushion; and Father’s slippers in a wall-case worked with his initials.

“I like it here. It’s safe!” said Ann, and trudged up to bed.

She took off her splendor of organdy frock scornfully. But she was too neat a soul to do anything so melodramatic as to tear it, to hurl it regally on the floor. She hung it up precisely, smoothing out the skirt, her fingers conscious of the cool crispness.

She brushed her hair, she patted her pillow, but she did not go to bed. She put on her little mackintosh (the Vickers household did not, in 1906, run to dressing-gowns) and sat in a straight chair, looking about the room solemnly, as though she had never seen it before.

It was of only hall-bedroom size, yet there was about it a stripped cleanness which made it seem larger. Ann hated what she called “clutter.” Here were no masses of fly-spotted dance-programs, with little pencils, hanging by the mirror on the bureau; no snapshots of bathing parties on the beach during that wonderful camping party; and not a single Yale or University of Illinois banner!

One shelf of books—Hans Christian Andersen, Water Babies, Lays of Ancient Rome, David Copperfield (stolen from the set downstairs), Le Gallienne’s Quest of the Golden Girl, her mother’s Bible, a book about bees, Hamlet, and Kim, its pages worn black with reading. A bureau with the comb and brush and buttonhook in exact parallels. (Like many rackety and adventurous people, Ann was far more precise in arranging her kit, wherever she was, than the steady folk whose fear of living is matched by their laziness in organizing their dens.)

A prim cot-bed with one betraying feminine sentimentality: a tiny lace-insertion pillow. The straight chair. A reasonably bad carbon print of Watts’s reasonably bad view of Sir Galahad. A wide window, usually open. A rag carpet. And peace.

It was Ann herself, this room. Since the death of her mother, there had been no one to tell her what the room of a well-bred young lady should be. She had made it. Yet she looked at it now, and looked at herself, as alien and strange and incredible.

She talked to herself.

Now it is true that Ann Vickers, at fifteen, was all that she would ever be at forty, except for the trimmings. But it is also true that she could not talk to herself so acidly sharp as she would at forty. Her monologue was cloudy; it was inarticulate emotion. Yet could that emotion have been translated into words, there where she sat, huddled in her little mackintosh, her nails bitter against her palms, it would have run:

“I loved Dolph. Oh, dear Lord, I did love him. Maybe even not quite nice. When that funny thing happened to me, that Father told me not to worry about, I wanted him to kiss me. Oh, darling, I did love you. You were so wonderful—you had such a thin hard body, and you dived—dove?—so beautifully. But you weren’t kind. I thought you meant it, what you said to me tonight under the spruce tree. I thought you meant it! That I wasn’t just a husky girl that could do athletics but nobody could love her.

“I shan’t ever have a real Beau. I guess I’m too vi’lent. Oh, I don’t want to be! I know I plan all the games. I don’t want to. I just can’t keep my mouth shut, I guess.... And all the rest are so damn stupid! ... Dear Lord, forgive me that I said ‘damn,’ but they are so damn stupid!

“Ben. He would love me. He is so kind.

“I don’t want to be loved by any spaniels! I am me! I’m going to see the whole world—Springfield and Joliet and maybe Chicago!

“I guess if I ever love anybody that’s as husky as I am, he’ll always be scared of me——

“No, Dolph wasn’t scared. He despised me!”

Suddenly—and there is no clear reason why she should have done so—she was reading the Twenty-fourth Psalm from her mother’s Bible, which was worn along the edges of the black, limp-leather binding, and her voice now, articulate and loud, rose as she chanted:

“Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in his holy place? He that hath clean hands and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully.

“He shall receive the blessing from the Lord, and righteousness from the God of his salvation. This is the generation of them that seek thy face, O Jacob. Selah.

“Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in. Who is this King of glory? The Lord, strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle.

“Lift up your heads, O ye gates; even lift them up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in. Who is this King of glory? The Lord of hosts, he is the King of glory. Selah.”

Her father was knocking, with a worried, “Ann! Annie! What is it? Are you sick?”

She hated men then, save the King of glory, for whom she would sacrifice all the smirking Adolphs and complaisant fathers of this world. She felt savage. But she said civilly:

“Oh, no. I’m sorry, Daddy. I was just reading—uh—rehearsing something we thought we’d do. I’m terribly sorry I woke you up. Good-night, dear.”

“Did you have a nice party?”

Ann was always to lie like a gentleman, and she caroled:

“Oh, it was lovely. Good-night!”

“Yes, I’ll have to give it up. The boys, the ones I want, they’ll never like me. And golly, I do like them! But I just got to be satisfied with being a boy myself.

“And I don’t want to.

“But I’ll do something! ‘Be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors!’

“He was so strong. And slim!

“Oh, him!

“I’ll never be cheap again and want anybody.

“That picture doesn’t hang straight, not quite.

“Girls like Mabel! That hang around the boys!

“I won’t ever give ’em, I won’t ever give the boys another chance to make fun of me for being square with them!

“ ‘Be ye lift up!’ I’m going to sleep.”

Though often she saw him in the grocery to which he tranquilly retired from the arduous life of learning in the high school, though it was the period when her gang was definitely aligning itself into Girls and Fellows, Ann showed no more interest in Adolph Klebs.

“Jiminy, Ann Vickers is funny,” observed Mildred Evans. “She’s crazy! She says she don’t want to get married. She wants to be a doctor or a lawyer or somethin’, I dunno. She’s crazy!”

Oh, Mildred, how wise you were, how wise you are! Today, married to Ben, have you not the best radio in town? Can you not hear Amos ’n’ Andy, or the wisdom of Ramsay MacDonald relayed from London? Have you not a Buick, while Dr. Ann Vickers jerks along in a chipped Ford? Do you not play bridge, in the choicest company, while she plays pinochle with one silent man? Good Mildred, wise Mildred, you never tackled the world, which will always throw you.

Good-night, Mildred. You are ended.

That Christmas Eve, when Ann was seventeen, was a postcard Christmas Eve. As she scampered to the church for the Sunday school exercises, the kind lights of neighbors’ houses shone on a snowy road where the sleigh tracks were like two lines of polished steel. The moon was high and frosty, and the iced branches of the spruce trees tinkled faintly, and everywhere in the good dry cold was a feeling of festivity.

Ann was absorbed and busy—too busy to have given such attention to clothes and elegance as she had in her days of vanity, at fifteen. She did wish she had something more fashionable than her plaid silk blouse, and she a little hated the thick union suit which her sensible father had bought for her but—oh, well, her days of frivolity were done.

She was teacher of the Girls’ Intermediate Class of the First Presbyterian Church, which had once been taught by Mrs. Fred Graves, now asleep in Greenwood Cemetery, and from which a girl named Annie Vickers had been driven for flippancy about the necessity of disciplining women. The Girls’ Intermediate Class was to present the cantata “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing” at the Sunday school exercises, and Ann was hurrying—hurrying—because it was so important that she should be there, that she should take charge of things, that her class should impress the audience.

The church was a very furnace of festivity as she came up to it. The windows were golden, the door was jollily framed in a wooden Gothic arch. On the church porch were all the small boys who, though perhaps neglectful of their Sabbath duties for fifty weeks out of the year, had been edifyingly attendant the past two weeks.

Inside, the church was a cave of green and crystal. Even the helpful mottoes painted on the side walls, “Blessed be the Name of the Lord,” and “Are you saved?” were almost hidden by holly wreaths. But the splendor of it all was the Christmas tree on the platform. Ten good feet it rose, with candles and papier-mâché angels—for on Christmas Eve the Presbyterian Church permitted itself to be so Roman as to admit angels, along with the Christ Child. Candles against the deep green; candles and white angels and silver balls and plentiful snow made of rich cotton batting. And at the foot of the tree were the stockings, one for each of the Presbyterian children, even those who had been convincedly Calvinistic only for the last two weeks; stockings of starchy net, each containing an orange, a bag of hard candy, including peppermints printed in red with such apt mottoes as “Come on, baby!”, three Brazil nuts (better known in Waubanakee as “niggertoes”), a pamphlet copy of the Gospel According to St. John, and a Gift—a tin trumpet or a whistle or a cotton monkey.

They had been purchased by the new pastor, young Reverend Donnelly, out of his salary of $1,800 a year—when he got it. He was not altogether wise, this young man. He frightened adolescents, including Ann Vickers, by the spectacle of an angry old God watching them and trying to catch them in nasty little habits. And his sermons were dull, suffocatingly dull. But he was so kind, so eager! And it was Reverend Donnelly (not, locally, the Reverend Mister) who dashed down the aisle now to greet Ann.

“Miss Vickers! I’m so glad you’re early! We’re going to have a glorious Christmas Eve!”

“Oh I do hope so. Ismyclassready?” demanded the energetic Ann.

The exercises went superbly: the prayer, the singing by the choir and congregation of “Come All Ye Faithful,” the comic song by Dr. Brevers, the dentist, the cantata, with Ann leading, very brisk with her baton; and they came to the real point of the exercises—distribution of the Christmas stockings by Santa Claus, very handsome and benevolent in a red coat and snowy whiskers. Privately, Santa was Mr. Bimby, of the clarinet and the Eureka Dry Goods Store.

Mr. Bimby speaking:

“Now, boys and girls, I’ve, ur, come a long way, all the way from the ice and snow and, ur, the glaciers of the North Pole, because I’ve heard that the boys and girls of the Waubanakee Presbyterian Church was particularly good and done what their parents and teachers told them to, and so I’ve given up my dates with the Pope at Rome and the King of England and all those folks to be with you, myself, personally.”

Ann Vickers, as a participant, had a seat in one of the front pews. A little uneasily she watched a candle drooping on a lower bough of the Christmas tree. She rebuked herself for her phobia, but she could scarce attend to Mr. Bimby’s humor as he rollicked on:

“Now I guess there’s some of you that haven’t been quite as good as maybe you might of been, this past year. And maybe some of you ain’t gone to Sunday school as often as you might of. I know that in my class—I mean, I got a phone call from my friend Ted Bimby, the teacher of the Older Boys’ Class here, and he says sometimes on a nice summer morning——”

The candle was drooping like a tired hand. Ann’s fingers were tight.

“—some of the boys would rather go off fishing than hear the Word of the Lord, and all them lessons that you can learn from the example of Jacob and Abraham and all them old wise folks——”

The candle reached the cotton batting. Instantly the tree was aflame, a gusty and terrible flame. Reverend Donnelly and Santa Claus Bimby stood gaping. It was Ann Vickers who sprang onto the platform, pushing Bimby aside.

The children were screaming, in the utter reasonless terror of children, fighting toward the door.

Ann snatched up the grass rug which adorned the pulpit platform, threw it over the incandescent tree, and with her hands beat down the flames which the rug did not cover, while her whole scorched body hurt like toothache. She raged, she said, “Oh, dear!” in a tone which made it sound worse than “Oh, damn!”

Just as she dropped, she was conscious that the fire was quenched and that Dr. McGonegal was throwing his coonskin coat over the tree. She was hoping the coat would not be burned.

For two weeks Ann lay abed. She was, said Dr. McGonegal, to have no scars save a faint smirch or two on her wrists. And for that two weeks she was a heroine.

Reverend Donnelly called every day. Mr. Bimby brought her a valuable bead wreath. Her father read David Harum to her. The Waubanakee Intelligencer said that she was kin to Susan B. Anthony, Queen Elizabeth, and Joan of Arc.

But what excited her was the calling of Oscar Klebs—his Homeric brow, his white beard, his quiet desperation.

Rather fussily and somewhat incredulous at such a proletarian caller, Professor Vickers brought in the old man, with a falsely cheery, “Another visitor for you, dear.”

The authority of being a heroine gave Ann a courage toward her amiable but still parental parent that she had rarely shown before. She dared to drive him out with an almost wifely inclination of her head toward the door, and she was alone with Oscar.

The old man sat by her bed, patting her hand.

“You were very fine, my little lady. And I am not so bigoted I t’ink it all happened because it was in a church. No, maybe not! But I come——Little Ann, don’t let it make you t’ink that you are a herowine! Life, it is not heroism. It is t’ought. Bless you, my little lady! Now I go!”

It was much the shortest visit she had. And for a week, freed from the duty of being brisk and important about unimportant affairs, she lay abed, thinking—the one week in all her life so far when she had had time to think.

Oscar Klebs seemed always to be sitting beside her, demanding that she think.

“Um—huh. I enjoyed it too much,” she brooded. “Being a heroine! I put out that fire before I had time to realize it. Annie, that was nice of you, putting out that fire. Yes, it was, dear! Mr. Bimby was scared, and so was Reverend Donnelly. You weren’t! And what of that? You just move quicker than most folks. And yet you couldn’t make Adolph love you!

“Oh, dear God, make me solid! Don’t let me ever be too tickled by applause!

“ ‘Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in his holy place? He that hath clean hands and a pure heart.’

“But by golly I did put out that fire, while all those men stood goggling!”