The Under Side of Things

Proofed and corrected from the scanned original edition.

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Contents:

I. THE MOTHER OF ALICE
II. A SMALL TOWN
III. ALICE GOES TO WEST POINT
IV. ALICE AND KATE VANDEVOORT
V. BREAKFAST AT COZZENS'S
VI. GUARD-MOUNTING
VII. DOWN FLIRTATION WALK
VIII. COUNTER-IRRITANTS
IX. THE CHILD PROBLEM
X. ON THE BOAT-HOUSE STEPS
XI. THE BATTLE OF STOCKBRIDGE
XII. THE COPELAND TERRACE
XIII. ALICE'S WEDDING-DAY
XIV. AT FORT HAMILTON
XV. THE FORK IN THE ROAD
XVI. INTO SILENCE

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An excerpt from the beginning of:

I
THE MOTHER OF ALICE


IT was written in the outlines of Mrs. Copeland's nose that she was a Code of Public Morals, which you would do well to investigate and live by. So remarkable was this eloquent feature that no description could bring it before you, no portrait do it full justice, because it shifted its position, not upon her face--pray do not misunderstand--but in its attitude towards the world. It needed not the cold grayness of her near-set eyes to accentuate its standard of Self, for if you could put your hand over her eyes, still you never would think of asking that nose for anything. No ill-clad, desperate man would beg her to visit his sick wife; no lost child ask her the way home. Had she been a man it would have been the nose of a money-getter, a money-lender, a usurer.



The peculiar thing about it was that it had no salient points by which to describe it. You could not recall her to a friend by referring to her nose, for it was neither hooked nor retroussé, but when once you saw it you never forgot it. It meant so much of what had happened, and presaged so clearly what would happen. It was neither large nor thin nor high, and yet it was all three, but so cunningly were these attributes combined that you noticed without speaking of it. The nostrils were not thin to show sensitiveness. They were not thick. They were shapeless. And in a nose plainly intended by Nature to be pointed, there was an unexpected broadness in the end, which meant sufficiency unto itself, and a determined belief in the supremacy of her Ego over the Egoes of everybody else in the world. Her nose challenged your pedigree on the spot.

If you had your own life to live, and your own view of how to live it, Mrs. Copeland's nose became most annoying. There is a virtue so blatant that it becomes a vice. Hers was of that order. You felt that you ought to adopt it and that she thought so too, and that if you were in her family she would make you.

After one critical look at her nose you knew why George Copeland went to West Point when his father hoped he would be a lawyer. You knew why Alice Copeland, having been brought up by her mother, loved her father the best. You knew why the poor sometimes refused to accept blankets from her, which entitled her to order their whole future lives to suit herself. You knew why beggars occasionally threw her bread back in her face. You knew why she never gave generously, palms outward, but always with her hands turned in. You knew why, when she sent a sick friend a potted plant, she asked her to return the pot; or if she sent her jelly, she asked her to return the glass. You knew why she always walked to church on Sundays, rain or shine, with her black kid hands crossed over one another, her whole attitude that of an unrecognized martyr, her stiff skirts breathing the Pharisee's prayer. And if you were a weak-minded person, and Mrs. Copeland's way on a rainy Sunday lay by your house, you knew why you altered your feeble intention of staying at home, and why you went to church too.

Yet nobody ever discovered all this except Kate Vandevoort, who gave this description to Mollie Overshine after her first interview. But then Kate was frivolous. Everybody who did not know her said so.