Charles Dudley Warner

A Little Journey in the World

The Golden House

That Fortune

A LITTLE JOURNEY IN THE WORLD

By

Charles Dudley Warner

INTRODUCTORY SKETCH

The title naturally suggested for this story was “A Dead Soul,” but it was discarded because of the similarity to that of the famous novel by Nikolai Gogol—“Dead Souls”—though the motive has nothing in common with that used by the Russian novelist. Gogol exposed an extensive fraud practiced by the sale, in connection with lands, of the names of “serfs” (called souls) not living, or “dead souls.”

This story is an attempt to trace the demoralization in a woman’s soul of certain well-known influences in our existing social life. In no other way could certain phases of our society be made to appear so distinctly as when reflected in the once pure mirror of a woman’s soul.

The character of Margaret is the portrait of no one woman. But it was suggested by the career of two women (among others less marked) who had begun life with the highest ideals, which had been gradually eaten away and destroyed by “prosperous” marriages and association with unscrupulous methods of acquiring money.

The deterioration was gradual. The women were in all outward conduct unchanged, the conventionalities of life were maintained, the graces were not lost, the observances of the duties of charities and of religion were even emphasized, but worldliness had eaten the heart out of them, and they were “dead souls.” The tragedy of the withered life was a thousand-fold enhanced by the external show of prosperous respectability.

The story was first published (in 1888) in Harper’s Monthly. During its progress—and it was printed as soon as each installment was ready (a very poor plan)—I was in receipt of the usual letters of sympathy, or protest, and advice. One sympathetic missive urged the removal of Margaret to a neighboring city, where she could be saved by being brought under special Christian influences. The transfer, even in a serial, was impossible, and she by her own choice lived the life she had entered upon.

And yet, if the reader will pardon the confidence, pity intervened to shorten it. I do not know how it is with other writers, but the persons that come about me in a little drama are as real as those I meet in everyday life, and in this case I found it utterly impossible to go on to what might have been the bitter, logical development of Margaret’s career. Perhaps it was as well. Perhaps the writer should have no despotic power over his creations, however slight they are. He may profitably recall the dictum of a recent essayist that “there is no limit to the mercy of God.”

CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER.

Hartford, August 11, 1899.

I

We were talking about the want of diversity in American life, the lack of salient characters. It was not at a club. It was a spontaneous talk of people who happened to be together, and who had fallen into an uncompelled habit of happening to be together. There might have been a club for the study of the Want of Diversity in American Life. The members would have been obliged to set apart a stated time for it, to attend as a duty, and to be in a mood to discuss this topic at a set hour in the future. They would have mortgaged another precious portion of the little time left us for individual life. It is a suggestive thought that at a given hour all over the United States innumerable clubs might be considering the Want of Diversity in American Life. Only in this way, according to our present methods, could one expect to accomplish anything in regard to this foreign-felt want. It seems illogical that we could produce diversity by all doing the same thing at the same time, but we know the value of congregate effort. It seems to superficial observers that all Americans are born busy. It is not so. They are born with a fear of not being busy; and if they are intelligent and in circumstances of leisure, they have such a sense of their responsibility that they hasten to allot all their time into portions, and leave no hour unprovided for. This is conscientiousness in women, and not restlessness. There is a day for music, a day for painting, a day for the display of tea-gowns, a day for Dante, a day for the Greek drama, a day for the Dumb Animals’ Aid Society, a day for the Society for the Propagation of Indians, and so on. When the year is over, the amount that has been accomplished by this incessant activity can hardly be estimated. Individually it may not be much. But consider where Chaucer would be but for the work of the Chaucer clubs, and what an effect upon the universal progress of things is produced by the associate concentration upon the poet of so many minds.

A cynic says that clubs and circles are for the accumulation of superficial information and unloading it on others, without much individual absorption in anybody. This, like all cynicism, contains only a half-truth, and simply means that the general diffusion of half-digested information does not raise the general level of intelligence, which can only be raised to any purpose by thorough self-culture, by assimilation, digestion, meditation. The busy bee is a favorite simile with us, and we are apt to overlook the fact that the least important part of his example is buzzing around. If the hive simply got together and buzzed, or even brought unrefined treacle from some cyclopaedia, let us say, of treacle, there would be no honey added to the general store.

It occurred to some one in this talk at last to deny that there was this tiresome monotony in American life. And this put a new face on the discussion. Why should there be, with every race under the heavens represented here, and each one struggling to assert itself, and no homogeneity as yet established even between the people of the oldest States? The theory is that democracy levels, and that the anxious pursuit of a common object, money, tends to uniformity, and that facility of communication spreads all over the land the same fashion in dress; and repeats everywhere the same style of house, and that the public schools give all the children in the United States the same superficial smartness. And there is a more serious notion, that in a society without classes there is a sort of tyranny of public opinion which crushes out the play of individual peculiarities, without which human intercourse is uninteresting. It is true that a democracy is intolerant of variations from the general level, and that a new society allows less latitude in eccentricities to its members than an old society.

But with all these allowances, it is also admitted that the difficulty the American novelist has is in hitting upon what is universally accepted as characteristic of American life, so various are the types in regions widely separated from each other, such different points of view are had even in conventionalities, and conscience operates so variously on moral problems in one community and another. It is as impossible for one section to impose upon another its rules of taste and propriety in conduct—and taste is often as strong to determine conduct as principle—as it is to make its literature acceptable to the other. If in the land of the sun and the jasmine and the alligator and the fig, the literature of New England seems passionless and timid in face of the ruling emotions of life, ought we not to thank Heaven for the diversity of temperament as well as of climate which will in the long-run save us from that sameness into which we are supposed to be drifting?

When I think of this vast country with any attention to local developments I am more impressed with the unlikenesses than with the resemblances. And besides this, if one had the ability to draw to the life a single individual in the most homogeneous community, the product would be sufficiently startling. We cannot flatter ourselves, therefore, that under equal laws and opportunities we have rubbed out the saliencies of human nature. At a distance the mass of the Russian people seem as monotonous as their steppes and their commune villages, but the Russian novelists find characters in this mass perfectly individualized, and, indeed, give us the impression that all Russians are irregular polygons. Perhaps if our novelists looked at individuals as intently, they might give the world the impression that social life here is as unpleasant as it appears in the novels to be in Russia.

This is partly the substance of what was said one winter evening before the wood fire in the library of a house in Brandon, one of the lesser New England cities. Like hundreds of residences of its kind, it stood in the suburbs, amid forest-trees, commanding a view of city spires and towers on the one hand, and on the other of a broken country of clustering trees and cottages, rising towards a range of hills which showed purple and warm against the pale straw-color of the winter sunsets. The charm of the situation was that the house was one of many comfortable dwellings, each isolated, and yet near enough together to form a neighborhood; that is to say, a body of neighbors who respected each other’s privacy, and yet flowed together, on occasion, without the least conventionality. And a real neighborhood, as our modern life is arranged, is becoming more and more rare.

I am not sure that the talkers in this conversation expressed their real, final sentiments, or that they should be held accountable for what they said. Nothing so surely kills the freedom of talk as to have some matter-of-fact person instantly bring you to book for some impulsive remark flashed out on the instant, instead of playing with it and tossing it about in a way that shall expose its absurdity or show its value. Freedom is lost with too much responsibility and seriousness, and the truth is more likely to be struck out in a lively play of assertion and retort than when all the words and sentiments are weighed. A person very likely cannot tell what he does think till his thoughts are exposed to the air, and it is the bright fallacies and impulsive, rash ventures in conversation that are often most fruitful to talker and listeners. The talk is always tame if no one dares anything. I have seen the most promising paradox come to grief by a simple “Do you think so?” Nobody, I sometimes think, should be held accountable for anything said in private conversation, the vivacity of which is in a tentative play about the subject. And this is a sufficient reason why one should repudiate any private conversation reported in the newspapers. It is bad enough to be held fast forever to what one writes and prints, but to shackle a man with all his flashing utterances, which may be put into his mouth by some imp in the air, is intolerable slavery. A man had better be silent if he can only say today what he will stand by tomorrow, or if he may not launch into the general talk the whim and fancy of the moment. Racy, entertaining talk is only exposed thought, and no one would hold a man responsible for the thronging thoughts that contradict and displace each other in his mind. Probably no one ever actually makes up his mind until he either acts or puts out his conclusion beyond his recall. Why should one be debarred the privilege of pitching his crude ideas into a conversation where they may have a chance of being precipitated?

I remember that Morgan said in this talk that there was too much diversity. “Almost every church has trouble with it—the different social conditions.”

An Englishman who was present pricked-up his ears at this, as if he expected to obtain a note on the character of Dissenters. “I thought all the churches here were organized on social affinities?” he inquired.

“Oh, no; it is a good deal a matter of vicinage. When there is a real-estate extension, a necessary part of the plan is to build a church in the centre of it, in order to—”

“I declare, Page,” said Mrs. Morgan, “you’ll give Mr. Lyon a totally erroneous notion. Of course there must be a church convenient to the worshipers in every district.”

“That is just what I was saying, my dear: As the settlement is not drawn together on religious grounds, but perhaps by purely worldly motives, the elements that meet in the church are apt to be socially incongruous, such as cannot always be fused even by a church-kitchen and a church-parlor.”

“Then it isn’t the peculiarity of the church that has attracted to it worshipers who would naturally come together, but the church is a neighborhood necessity?” still further inquired Mr. Lyon.

“All is,” I ventured to put in, “that churches grow up like schoolhouses, where they are wanted.”

“I beg your pardon,” said Mr. Morgan; “I’m talking about the kind of want that creates them. If it’s the same that builds a music hall, or a gymnasium, or a railway waiting-room, I’ve nothing more to say.”

“Is it your American idea, then, that a church ought to be formed only of people socially agreeable together?” asked the Englishman.

“I have no American idea. I am only commenting on facts; but one of them is that it is the most difficult thing in the world to reconcile religious association with the real or artificial claims of social life.”

“I don’t think you try much,” said Mrs. Morgan, who carried along her traditional religious observance with grateful admiration of her husband.

Mr. Page Morgan had inherited money, and a certain advantageous position for observing life and criticising it, humorously sometimes, and without any serious intention of disturbing it. He had added to his fair fortune by marrying the daintily reared daughter of a cotton-spinner, and he had enough to do in attending meetings of directors and looking out for his investments to keep him from the operation of the State law regarding vagrants, and give greater social weight to his opinions than if he had been compelled to work for his maintenance. The Page Morgans had been a good deal abroad, and were none the worse Americans for having come in contact with the knowledge that there are other peoples who are reasonably prosperous and happy without any of our advantages.

“It seems to me,” said Mr. Lyon, who was always in the conversational attitude of wanting to know, “that you Americans are disturbed by the notion that religion ought to produce social equality.”

Mr. Lyon had the air of conveying the impression that this question was settled in England, and that America was interesting on account of numerous experiments of this sort. This state of mind was not offensive to his interlocutors, because they were accustomed to it in transatlantic visitors. Indeed, there was nothing whatever offensive, and little defensive, in Mr. John Lyon. What we liked in him, I think, was his simple acceptance of a position that required neither explanation nor apology—a social condition that banished a sense of his own personality, and left him perfectly free to be absolutely truthful. Though an eldest son and next in succession to an earldom, he was still young. Fresh from Oxford and South Africa and Australia and British Columbia he had come to study the States with a view of perfecting himself for his duties as a legislator for the world when he should be called to the House of Peers. He did not treat himself like an earl, whatever consciousness he may have had that his prospective rank made it safe for him to flirt with the various forms of equality abroad in this generation.

“I don’t know what Christianity is expected to produce,” Mr. Morgan replied, in a meditative way; “but I have an idea that the early Christians in their assemblies all knew each other, having met elsewhere in social intercourse, or, if they were not acquainted, they lost sight of distinctions in one paramount interest. But then I don’t suppose they were exactly civilized.”

“Were the Pilgrims and the Puritans?” asked Mrs. Fletcher, who now joined the talk, in which she had been a most animated and stimulating listener, her deep gray eyes dancing with intellectual pleasure.

“I should not like to answer ‘no’ to a descendant of the Mayflower. Yes, they were highly civilized. And if we had adhered to their methods, we should have avoided a good deal of confusion. The meeting-house, you remember, had a committee for seating people according to their quality. They were very shrewd, but it had not occurred to them to give the best pews to the sitters able to pay the most money for them. They escaped the perplexity of reconciling the mercantile and the religious ideas.”

“At any rate,” said Mrs. Fletcher, “they got all sorts of people inside the same meeting-house.”

“Yes, and made them feel they were all sorts; but in those, days they were not much disturbed by that feeling.”

“Do you mean to say,” asked Mr. Lyon, “that in this country you have churches for the rich and other churches for the poor?”

“Not at all. We have in the cities rich churches and poor churches, with prices of pews according to the means of each sort, and the rich are always glad to have the poor come, and if they do not give them the best seats, they equalize it by taking up a collection for them.”

“Mr. Lyon,” Mrs. Morgan interrupted, “you are getting a travesty of the whole thing. I don’t believe there is elsewhere in the world such a spirit of Christian charity as in our churches of all sects.”

“There is no doubt about the charity; but that doesn’t seem to make the social machine run any more smoothly in the church associations. I’m not sure but we shall have to go back to the old idea of considering the churches places of worship, and not opportunities for sewing-societies, and the cultivation of social equality.”

“I found the idea in Rome,” said Mr. Lyon, “that the United States is now the most promising field for the spread and permanence of the Roman Catholic faith.”

“How is that?” Mr. Fletcher asked, with a smile of Puritan incredulity.

“A high functionary at the Propaganda gave as a reason that the United States is the most democratic country and the Roman Catholic is the most democratic religion, having this one notion that all men, high or low, are equally sinners and equally in need of one thing only. And I must say that in this country I don’t find the question of social equality interfering much with the work in their churches.”

“That is because they are not trying to make this world any better, but only to prepare for another,” said Mrs. Fletcher.

“Now, we think that the nearer we approach the kingdom-of-heaven idea on earth, the better off we shall be hereafter. Is that a modern idea?”

“It is an idea that is giving us a great deal of trouble. We’ve got into such a sophisticated state that it seems easier to take care of the future than of the present.”

“And it isn’t a very bad doctrine that if you take care of the present, the future will take care of itself,” rejoined Mrs. Fletcher.

“Yes, I know,” insisted Mr. Morgan; “it’s the modern notion of accumulation and compensation—take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves—the gospel of Benjamin Franklin.”

“Ah,” I said, looking up at the entrance of a newcomer, “you are just in time, Margaret, to give the coup de grace, for it is evident by Mr. Morgan’s reference, in his Bunker Hill position, to Franklin, that he is getting out of powder.”

The girl stood a moment, her slight figure framed in the doorway, while the company rose to greet her, with a half-hesitating, half-inquiring look in her bright face which I had seen in it a thousand times.

II

I remember that it came upon me with a sort of surprise at the moment that we had never thought or spoken much of Margaret Debree as beautiful. We were so accustomed to her; we had known her so long, we had known her always. We had never analyzed our admiration of her. She had so many qualities that are better than beauty that we had not credited her with the more obvious attraction. And perhaps she had just become visibly beautiful. It may be that there is an instant in a girl’s life corresponding to what the Puritans called conversion in the soul, when the physical qualities, long maturing, suddenly glow in an effect which we call beauty. It cannot be that women do not have a consciousness of it, perhaps of the instant of its advent. I remember when I was a child that I used to think that a stick of peppermint candy must burn with a consciousness of its own deliciousness.

Margaret was just turned twenty. As she paused there in the doorway her physical perfection flashed upon me for the first time. Of course I do not mean perfection, for perfection has no promise in it, rather the sad note of limit, and presently recession. In the rounded, exquisite lines of her figure there was the promise of that ineffable fullness and delicacy of womanhood which all the world raves about and destroys and mourns. It is not fulfilled always in the most beautiful, and perhaps never except to the woman who loves passionately, and believes she is loved with a devotion that exalts her body and soul above every other human being.

It is certain that Margaret’s beauty was not classic. Her features were irregular even to piquancy. The chin had strength; the mouth was sensitive and not too small; the shapely nose with thin nostrils had an assertive quality that contradicted the impression of humility in the eyes when downcast; the large gray eyes were uncommonly soft and clear, an appearance of alternate tenderness and brilliancy as they were veiled or uncovered by the long lashes. They were gently commanding eyes, and no doubt her most effective point. Her abundant hair, brown with a touch of red in it in some lights, fell over her broad forehead in the fashion of the time. She had a way of carrying her head, of throwing it back at times, that was not exactly imperious, and conveyed the impression of spirit rather than of mere vivacity. These details seem to me all inadequate and misleading, for the attraction of the face that made it interesting is still undefined. I hesitate to say that there was a dimple near the corner of her mouth that revealed itself when she smiled lest this shall seem mere prettiness, but it may have been the keynote of her face. I only knew there was something about it that won the heart, as a too conscious or assertive beauty never does. She may have been plain, and I may have seen the loveliness of her nature, which I knew well, in features that gave less sign of it to strangers. Yet I noticed that Mr. Lyon gave her a quick second glance, and his manner was instantly that of deference, or at least attention, which he had shown to no other lady in the room. And the whimsical idea came into my mind—we are all so warped by international possibilities—to observe whether she did not walk like a countess (that is, as a countess ought to walk) as she advanced to shake hands with my wife. It is so easy to turn life into a comedy!

Margaret’s great-grandmother—no, it was her great-great-grandmother, but we have kept the Revolutionary period so warm lately that it seems near—was a Newport belle, who married an officer in the suite of Rochambeau what time the French defenders of liberty conquered the women of Rhode Island. After the war was over, our officer resigned his love of glory for the heart of one of the loveliest women and the care of the best plantation on the Island. I have seen a miniature of her, which her lover wore at Yorktown, and which he always swore that Washington coveted—a miniature painted by a wandering artist of the day, which entirely justifies the French officer in his abandonment of the trade of a soldier. Such is man in his best estate. A charming face can make him campaign and fight and slay like a demon, can make a coward of him, can fill him with ambition to win the world, and can tame him into the domesticity of a drawing-room cat. There is this noble capacity in man to respond to the divinest thing visible to him in this world. Etienne Debree became, I believe, a very good citizen of the republic, and in ‘93 used occasionally to shake his head with satisfaction to find that it was still on his shoulders. I am not sure that he ever visited Mount Vernon, but after Washington’s death Debree’s intimacy with our first President became a more and more important part of his life and conversation. There is a pleasant tradition that Lafayette, when he was here in 1784, embraced the young bride in the French manner, and that this salute was valued as a sort of heirloom in the family.

I always thought that Margaret inherited her New England conscience from her great-great-grandmother, and a certain esprit or gayety—that is, a sub-gayety which was never frivolity—from her French ancestor. Her father and mother had died when she was ten years old, and she had been reared by a maiden aunt, with whom she still lived. The combined fortunes of both required economy, and after Margaret had passed her school course she added to their resources by teaching in a public school. I remember that she taught history, following, I suppose, the American notion that any one can teach history who has a text-book, just as he or she can teach literature with the same help. But it happened that Margaret was a better teacher than many, because she had not learned history in school, but in her father’s well-selected library.

There was a little stir at Margaret’s entrance; Mr. Lyon was introduced to her, and my wife, with that subtle feeling for effect which women have, slightly changed the lights. Perhaps Margaret’s complexion or her black dress made this readjustment necessary to the harmony of the room. Perhaps she felt the presence of a different temperament in the little circle.

I never can tell exactly what it is that guides her in regard to the influence of light and color upon the intercourse of people, upon their conversation, making it take one cast or another. Men are susceptible to these influences, but it is women alone who understand how to produce them. And a woman who has not this subtle feeling always lacks charm, however intellectual she may be; I always think of her as sitting in the glare of disenchanting sunlight as indifferent to the exposure as a man would be. I know in a general way that a sunset light induces one kind of talk and noonday light another, and I have learned that talk always brightens up with the addition of a fresh crackling stick to the fire. I shouldn’t have known how to change the lights for Margaret, although I think I had as distinct an impression of her personality as had my wife. There was nothing disturbing in it; indeed, I never saw her otherwise than serene, even when her voice betrayed strong emotion. The quality that impressed me most, however, was her sincerity, coupled with intellectual courage and clearness that had almost the effect of brilliancy, though I never thought of her as a brilliant woman.

“What mischief have you been attempting, Mr. Morgan?” asked Margaret, as she took a chair near him. “Were you trying to make Mr. Lyon comfortable by dragging in Bunker Hill?”

“No; that was Mr. Fairchild, in his capacity as host.”

“Oh, I’m sure you needn’t mind me,” said Mr. Lyon, good-humoredly. “I landed in Boston, and the first thing I went to see was the Monument. It struck me as so odd, you know, that the Americans should begin life by celebrating their first defeat.”

“That is our way,” replied Margaret, quickly. “We have started on a new basis over here; we win by losing. He who loses his life shall find it. If the red slayer thinks he slays he is mistaken. You know the Southerners say that they surrendered at last simply because they got tired of beating the North.”

“How odd!”

“Miss Debree simply means,” I exclaimed, “that we have inherited from the English an inability to know when we are whipped.”

“But we were not fighting the battle of Bunker Hill, or fighting about it, which is more serious, Miss Debree. What I wanted to ask you was whether you think the domestication of religion will affect its power in the regulation of conduct.”

“Domestication? You are too deep for me, Mr. Morgan. I don’t any more understand you than I comprehend the writers who write about the feminization of literature.”

“Well, taking the mystery out of it, the predominant element of worship, making the churches sort of good-will charitable associations for the spread of sociability and good-feeling.”

“You mean making Christianity practical?”

“Partially that. It is a part of the general problem of what women are going to make of the world, now they have got hold of it, or are getting hold of it, and are discontented with being women, or with being treated as women, and are bringing their emotions into all the avocations of life.”

“They cannot make it any worse than it has been.”

“I’m not sure of that. Robustness is needed in churches as much as in government. I don’t know how much the cause of religion is advanced by these church clubs of Christian Endeavor if that is the name, associations of young boys and girls who go about visiting other like clubs in a sufficiently hilarious manner. I suppose it’s the spirit of the age. I’m just wondering whether the world is getting to think more of having a good time than it is of salvation.”

“And you think woman’s influence—for you cannot mean anything else—is somehow taking the vigor out of affairs, making even the church a soft, purring affair, reducing us all to what I suppose you would call a mush of domesticity.”

“Or femininity.”

“Well, the world has been brutal enough; it had better try a little femininity now.”

“I hope it will not be more cruel to women.”

“That is not an argument; that is a stab. I fancy you are altogether skeptical about woman. Do you believe in her education?”

“Up to a certain point, or rather, I should say, after a certain point.”

“That’s it,” spoke up my wife, shading her eyes from the fire with a fan. “I begin to have my doubts about education as a panacea. I’ve noticed that girls with only a smattering—and most of them in the nature of things can go, no further—are more liable to temptations.”

“That is because ‘education’ is mistaken for the giving of information without training, as we are finding out in England,” said Mr. Lyon.

“Or that it is dangerous to awaken the imagination without a heavy ballast of principle,” said Mr. Morgan.

“That is a beautiful sentiment,” Margaret exclaimed, throwing back her head, with a flash from her eyes. “That ought to shut out women entirely. Only I cannot see how teaching women what men know is going to give them any less principle than men have. It has seemed to me a long while that the time has come for treating women like human beings, and giving them the responsibility of their position.”

“And what do you want, Margaret?” I asked.

“I don’t know exactly what I do want,” she answered, sinking back in her chair, sincerity coming to modify her enthusiasm. “I don’t want to go to Congress, or be a sheriff, or a lawyer, or a locomotive engineer. I want the freedom of my own being, to be interested in everything in the world, to feel its life as men do. You don’t know what it is to have an inferior person condescend to you simply because he is a man.”

“Yet you wish to be treated as a woman?” queried Mr. Morgan.

“Of course. Do you think I want to banish romance out of the world?”

“You are right, my dear,” said my wife. “The only thing that makes society any better than an industrial ant-hill is the love between women and men, blind and destructive as it often is.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Morgan, rising to go, “having got back to first principles—”

“You think it is best to take your husband home before he denies even them,” Mr. Morgan added.

When the others had gone, Margaret sat by the fire, musing, as if no one else were in the room. The Englishman, still alert and eager for information, regarded her with growing interest. It came into my mind as odd that, being such an uninteresting people as we are, the English should be so curious about us. After an interval, Mr. Lyon said:

“I beg your pardon, Miss Debree, but would you mind telling me whether the movement of Women’s Rights is gaining in America?”

“I’m sure I don’t know, Mr. Lyon,” Margaret replied, after a pause, with a look of weariness. “I’m tired of all the talk about it. I wish men and women, every soul of them, would try to make the most of themselves, and see what would come of that.”

“But in some places they vote about schools, and you have conventions—”

“Did you ever attend any kind of convention yourself, Mr. Lyon?”

“I? No. Why?”

“Oh, nothing. Neither did I. But you have a right to, you know. I should like to ask you one question, Mr. Lyon,” the girl, continued, rising.

“Should be most obliged.”

“Why is it that so few English women marry Americans?”

“I—I never thought of that,” he stammered, reddening. “Perhaps—perhaps it’s because of American women.”

“Thank you,” said Margaret, with a little courtesy. “It’s very nice of you to say that. I can begin to see now why so many American women marry Englishmen.”

The Englishman blushed still more, and Margaret said goodnight.

It was quite evident the next day that Margaret had made an impression on our visitor, and that he was struggling with some new idea.

“Did you say, Mrs. Fairchild,” he asked my wife, “that Miss Debree is a teacher? It seems very odd.”

“No; I said she taught in one of our schools. I don’t think she is exactly a teacher.”

“Not intending always to teach?”

“I don’t suppose she has any definite intentions, but I never think of her as a teacher.”

“She’s so bright, and—and interesting, don’t you think? So American?”

“Yes; Miss Debree is one of the exceptions.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean that all American women were as clever as Miss Debree.”

“Thank you,” said my wife. And Mr. Lyon looked as if he couldn’t see why she should thank him.

The cottage in which Margaret lived with her aunt, Miss Forsythe, was not far from our house. In summer it was very pretty, with its vine-shaded veranda across the front; and even in winter, with the inevitable raggedness of deciduous vines, it had an air of refinement, a promise which the cheerful interior more than fulfilled. Margaret’s parting word to my wife the night before had been that she thought her aunt would like to see the “chrysalis earl,” and as Mr. Lyon had expressed a desire to see something more of what he called the “gentry” of New England, my wife ended their afternoon walk at Miss Forsythe’s.

It was one of the winter days which are rare in New England, but of which there had been a succession all through the Christmas holidays. Snow had not yet come, all the earth was brown and frozen, whichever way you looked the interlacing branches and twigs of the trees made a delicate lace-work, the sky was gray-blue, and the low-sailing sun had just enough heat to evoke moisture from the frosty ground and suffuse the atmosphere into softness, in which all the landscape became poetic. The phenomenon known as “red sunsets” was faintly repeated in the greenish crimson glow along the violet hills, in which Venus burned like a jewel.

There was a fire smoldering on the hearth in the room they entered, which seemed to be sitting-room, library, parlor, all in one; the old table of oak, too substantial for ornament, was strewn with late periodicals and pamphlets—English, American, and French—and with books which lay unarranged as they were thrown down from recent reading. In the centre was a bunch of red roses in a pale-blue Granada jug. Miss Forsythe rose from a seat in the western window, with a book in her hand, to greet her callers. She was slender, like Margaret, but taller, with soft brown eyes and hair streaked with gray, which, sweeping plainly aside from her forehead in a fashion then antiquated, contrasted finely with the flush of pink in her cheeks. This flush did not suggest youth, but rather ripeness, the tone that comes with the lines made in the face by gentle acceptance of the inevitable in life. In her quiet and self-possessed manner there was a little note of graceful timidity, not perhaps noticeable in itself, but in contrast with that unmistakable air of confidence which a woman married always has, and which in the unrefined becomes assertive, an exaggerated notion of her importance, of the value added to her opinions by the act of marriage. You can see it in her air the moment she walks away from the altar, keeping step to Mendelssohn’s tune. Jack Sharpley says that she always seems to be saying, “Well, I’ve done it once for all.” This assumption of the married must be one of the hardest things for single women to bear in their self-congratulating sisters.

I have no doubt that Georgiana Forsythe was a charming girl, spirited and handsome; for the beauty of her years, almost pathetic in its dignity and self-renunciation, could not have followed mere prettiness or a commonplace experience. What that had been I never inquired, but it had not soured her. She was not communicative nor confidential, I fancy, with any one, but she was always friendly and sympathetic to the trouble of others, and helpful in an undemonstrative way. If she herself had a secret feeling that her life was a failure, it never impressed her friends so, it was so even, and full of good offices and quiet enjoyment. Heaven only knows, however, the pathos of this apparently undisturbed life. For did a woman ever live who would not give all the years of tasteless serenity, for one year, for one month, for one hour, of the uncalculating delirium of love poured out upon a man who returned it? It may be better for the world that there are these women to whom life has still some mysteries, who are capable of illusions and the sweet sentimentality that grows out of a romance unrealized.

Although the recent books were on Miss Forsythe’s table, her tastes and culture were of the past age. She admired Emerson and Tennyson. One may keep current with the news of the world without changing his principles. I imagine that Miss Forsythe read without injury to herself the passionate and the pantheistic novels of the young women who have come forward in these days of emancipation to teach their grandmothers a new basis of morality, and to render meaningless all the consoling epitaphs on the mossy New England gravestones. She read Emerson for his sweet spirit, for his belief in love and friendship, her simple Congregationalist faith remaining undisturbed by his philosophy, from which she took only a habit of toleration.

“Miss Debree has gone to church,” she said, in answer to Mr. Lyon’s glance around the room.

“To vespers?”

“I believe they call it that. Our evening meetings, you know, only begin at early candlelight.”

“And you do not belong to the Church?”

“Oh, yes, to the ancient aristocratic church of colonial times,” she replied, with a little smile of amusement. “My niece has stepped off Plymouth Rock.”

“And was your religion founded on Plymouth Rock?”

“My niece says so when I rally her deserting the faith of her fathers,” replied Miss Forsythe, laughing at the working of the Episcopalian mind.

“I should like to understand about that; I mean about the position of Dissenters in America.”

“I’m afraid I could not help you, Mr. Lyon. I fancy an Englishman would have to be born again, as the phrase used to be, to comprehend that.”

While Mr. Lyon was still unsatisfied on this point, he found the conversation shifted to the other side. Perhaps it was a new experience to him that women should lead and not follow in conversation. At any rate, it was an experience that put him at his ease. Miss Forsythe was a great admirer of Gladstone and of General Gordon, and she expressed her admiration with a knowledge that showed she had read the English newspapers.

“Yet I confess I don’t comprehend Gladstone’s conduct with regard to Egypt and Gordon’s relief,” she said.

“Perhaps,” interposed my wife, “it would have been better for Gordon if he had trusted Providence more and Gladstone less.”

“I suppose it was Gladstone’s humanity that made him hesitate.”

“To bombard Alexandria?” asked Mr. Lyon, with a look of asperity.

“That was a mistake to be expected of a Tory, but not of Mr. Gladstone, who seems always seeking the broadest principles of justice in his statesmanship.”

“Yes, we regard Mr. Gladstone as a very great man, Miss Forsythe. He is broad enough. You know we consider him a rhetorical phenomenon. Unfortunately he always ‘muffs’ anything he touches.”

“I suspected,” Miss Forsythe replied, after a moment, “that party spirit ran as high in England as it does with us, and is as personal.”

Mr. Lyon disclaimed any personal feeling, and the talk drifted into a comparison of English and American politics, mainly with reference to the social factor in English politics, which is so little an element here.

In the midst of the talk Margaret came in. The brisk walk in the rosy twilight had heightened her color, and given her a glowing expression which her face had not the night before, and a tenderness and softness, an unworldliness, brought from the quiet hour in the church.

“My lady comes at last,

Timid and stepping fast,

And hastening hither,

Her modest eyes downcast.”

She greeted the stranger with a Puritan undemonstrativeness, and as if not exactly aware of his presence.

“I should like to have gone to vespers if I had known,” said Mr. Lyon, after an embarrassing pause.

“Yes?” asked the girl, still abstractedly. “The world seems in a vesper mood,” she added, looking out the west windows at the red sky and the evening star.

In truth Nature herself at the moment suggested that talk was an impertinence. The callers rose to go, with an exchange of neighborhood friendliness and invitations.

“I had no idea,” said Mr. Lyon, as they walked homeward, “what the New World was like.”

III

Mr. Lyon’s invitation was for a week. Before the end of the week I was called to New York to consult Mr. Henderson in regard to a railway investment in the West, which was turning out more permanent than profitable. Rodney Henderson—the name later became very familiar to the public in connection with a certain Congressional investigation—was a graduate of my own college, a New Hampshire boy, a lawyer by profession, who practiced, as so many American lawyers do, in Wall Street, in political combinations, in Washington, in railways. He was already known as a rising man.

When I returned Mr. Lyon was still at our house. I understood that my wife had persuaded him to extend his visit—a proposal he was little reluctant to fall in with, so interested had he become in studying social life in America. I could well comprehend this, for we are all making a “study” of something in this age, simple enjoyment being considered an unworthy motive. I was glad to see that the young Englishman was improving himself, broadening his knowledge of life, and not wasting the golden hours of youth. Experience is what we all need, and though love or lovemaking cannot be called a novelty, there is something quite fresh about the study of it in the modern spirit.

Mr. Lyon had made himself very agreeable to the little circle, not less by his inquiring spirit than by his unaffected manners, by a kind of simplicity which women recognize as unconscious, the result of an inherited habit of not thinking about one’s position. In excess it may be very disagreeable, but when it is combined with genuine good-nature and no self-assertion, it is attractive. And although American women like a man who is aggressive towards the world and combative, there is the delight of novelty in one who has leisure to be agreeable, leisure for them, and who seems to their imagination to have a larger range in life than those who are driven by business—one able to offer the peace and security of something attained.

There had been several little neighborhood entertainments, dinners at the Morgans’ and at Mrs. Fletcher’s, and an evening cup of tea at Miss Forsythe’s. In fact Margaret and Mr. Lyon had been thrown much together. He had accompanied her to vespers, and they had taken a wintry walk or two together before the snow came. My wife had not managed it—she assured me of that; but she had not felt authorized to interfere; and she had visited the public library and looked into the British Peerage. Men were so suspicious. Margaret was quite able to take care of herself. I admitted that, but I suggested that the Englishman was a stranger in a strange land, that he was far from home, and had perhaps a weakened sense of those powerful social influences which must, after all, control him in the end. The only response to this was, “I think, dear, you’d better wrap him up in cotton and send him back to his family.”

Among her other activities Margaret was interested in a mission school in the city, to which she devoted an occasional evening and Sunday afternoons. This was a new surprise for Mr. Lyon. Was this also a part of the restlessness of American life? At Mrs. Howe’s german the other evening the girl had seemed wholly absorbed in dress, and the gayety of the serious formality of the occasion, feeling the responsibility of it scarcely less than the “leader.” Yet her mind was evidently much occupied with the “condition of women,” and she taught in a public school. He could not at all make it out. Was she any more serious about the german than about the mission school? It seemed odd at her age to take life so seriously. And was she serious in all her various occupations, or only experimenting? There was a certain mocking humor in the girl that puzzled the Englishman still more.

“I have not seen much of your life,” he said one night to Mr. Morgan; “but aren’t most American women a little restless, seeking an occupation?”

“Perhaps they have that appearance; but about the same number find it, as formerly, in marriage.”

“But I mean, you know, do they look to marriage as an end so much?”

“I don’t know that they ever did look to marriage as anything but a means.”

“I can tell you, Mr. Lyon,” my wife interrupted, “you will get no information out of Mr. Morgan; he is a scoffer.”

“Not at all, I do assure you,” Morgan replied. “I am just a humble observer. I see that there is a change going on, but I cannot comprehend it. When I was young, girls used to go in for society; they danced their feet off from seventeen to twenty-one. I never heard anything about any occupation; they had their swing and their fling, and their flirtations; they appeared to be skimming off of those impressionable, joyous years the cream of life.”

“And you think that fitted them for the seriousness of life?” asked his wife.

“Well, I am under the impression that very good women came out of that society. I got one out of that dancing crowd who has been serious enough for me.”

“And little enough you have profited by it,” said Mrs. Morgan.

“I’m content. But probably I’m old-fashioned. There is quite another spirit now. Girls out of pinafores must begin seriously to consider some calling. All their flirtation from seventeen to twenty-one is with some occupation. All their dancing days they must go to college, or in some way lay the foundation for a useful life. I suppose it’s all right. No doubt we shall have a much higher style of women in the future than we ever had in the past.”

“You allow nothing,” said Mrs. Fletcher, “for the necessity of earning a living in these days of competition. Women never will come to their proper position in the world, even as companions of men, which you regard as their highest office, until they have the ability to be self-supporting.”

“Oh, I admitted the fact of the independence of women a long time ago. Every one does that before he comes to middle life. About the shifting all round of this burden of earning a living, I am not so sure. It does not appear yet to make competition any less; perhaps competition would disappear if everybody did earn his own living and no more. I wonder, by-the-way, if the girls, the young women, of the class we seem to be discussing ever do earn as much as would pay the wages of the servants who are hired to do the housework in their places?”

“That is a most ignoble suggestion,” I could not help saying, “when you know that the object in modern life is the cultivation of the mind, the elevation of women, and men also, in intellectual life.”

“I suppose so. I should like to have asked Abigail Adams’s opinion on the way to do it.”

“One would think,” I said, “that you didn’t know that the spinning-jenny and the stocking-knitter had been invented. Given these, the women’s college was a matter of course.”

“Oh, I’m a believer in all kinds of machinery anything to save labor. Only, I have faith that neither the jenny nor the college will change human nature, nor take the romance out of life.”

“So have I,” said my wife. “I’ve heard two things affirmed: that women who receive a scientific or professional education lose their faith, become usually agnostics, having lost sensitiveness to the mysteries of life.”

“And you think, therefore, that they should not have a scientific education?”

“No, unless all scientific prying into things is a mistake. Women may be more likely at first to be upset than men, but they will recover their balance when the novelty is worn off. No amount of science will entirely change their emotional nature; and besides, with all our science, I don’t see that the supernatural has any less hold on this generation than on the former.”

“Yes, and you might say the world was never before so credulous as it is now. But what was the other thing?”

“Why, that co-education is likely to diminish marriages among the co-educated. Daily familiarity in the classroom at the most impressionable age, revelation of all the intellectual weaknesses and petulances, absorption of mental routine on an equality, tend to destroy the sense of romance and mystery that are the most powerful attractions between the sexes. It is a sort of disenchanting familiarity that rubs off the bloom.”

“Have you any statistics on the subject?”

“No. I fancy it is only a notion of some old fogy who thinks education in any form is dangerous for women.”

“Yes, and I fancy that co-education will have about as much effect on life generally as that solemn meeting of a society of intelligent and fashionable women recently in one of our great cities, who met to discuss the advisability of limiting population.”

“Great Scott!” I exclaimed, “this is an interesting age.”

I was less anxious about the vagaries of it when I saw the very old-fashioned way in which the international drama was going on in our neighborhood. Mr. Lyon was increasingly interested in Margaret’s mission work. Nor was there much affectation in this. Philanthropy, anxiety about the working-classes, is nowhere more serious or in the fashion than it is in London. Mr. Lyon, wherever he had been, had made a special study of the various aid and relief societies, especially of the work for young waifs and strays.

One Sunday afternoon they were returning from the Bloom Street Mission. Snow covered the ground, the sky was leaden, and the air had a penetrating chill in it far more disagreeable than extreme cold.

“We also,” Mr. Lyon was saying, in continuation of a conversation, “are making a great effort for the common people.”

“But we haven’t any common people here,” replied Margaret, quickly. “That bright boy you noticed in my class, who was a terror six months ago, will no doubt be in the City Council in a few years, and likely enough mayor.”

“Oh, I know your theory. It practically comes to the same thing, whatever you call it. I couldn’t see that the work in New York differed much from that in London. We who have leisure ought to do something for the working-classes.”

“I sometimes doubt if it is not all a mistake most of our charitable work. The thing is to get people to do something for themselves.”

“But you cannot do away with distinctions?”

“I suppose not, so long as so many people are born vicious, or incompetent, or lazy. But, Mr. Lyon, how much good do you suppose condescending charity does?” asked Margaret, firing up in a way the girl had at times. “I mean the sort that makes the distinctions more evident. The very fact that you have leisure to meddle in their affairs may be an annoyance to the folks you try to help by the little palliatives of charity. What effect upon a wretched city neighborhood do you suppose is produced by the advent in it of a stylish carriage and a lady in silk, or even the coming of a well-dressed, prosperous woman in a horse-car, however gentle and unassuming she may be in this distribution of sympathy and bounty? Isn’t the feeling of inequality intensified? And the degrading part of it may be that so many are willing to accept this sort of bounty. And your men of leisure, your club men, sitting in the windows and seeing the world go by as a spectacle-men who never did an hour’s necessary work in their lives—what effect do you suppose the sight of them has upon men out of work, perhaps by their own fault, owing to the same disposition to be idle that the men in the club windows have?”

“And do you think it would be any better if all were poor alike?”

“I think it would be better if there were no idle people. I’m half ashamed that I have leisure to go every time I go to that mission. And I’m almost sorry, Mr. Lyon, that I took you there. The boys knew you were English. One of them asked me if you were a ‘lord’ or a ‘juke’ or something. I cannot tell how they will take it. They may resent the spying into their world of an ‘English juke,’ and they may take it in the light of a show.”

Mr. Lyon laughed. And then, perhaps after a little reflection upon the possibility that the nobility was becoming a show in this world, he said:

“I begin to think I’m very unfortunate, Miss Debree. You seem to remind me that I am in a position in which I can do very little to help the world along.”

“Not at all. You can do very much.”

“But how, when whatever I attempt is considered a condescension? What can I do?”

“Pardon me,” and Margaret turned her eyes frankly upon him. “You can be a good earl when your time comes.”

Their way lay through the little city park. It is a pretty place in summer—a varied surface, well planted with forest and ornamental trees, intersected by a winding stream. The little river was full now, and ice had formed on it, with small openings here and there, where the dark water, hurrying along as if in fear of arrest, had a more chilling aspect than the icy cover. The ground was white with snow, and all the trees were bare except for a few frozen oak-leaves here and there, which shivered in the wind and somehow added to the desolation. Leaden clouds covered the sky, and only in the west was there a gleam of the departing winter day.

Upon the elevated bank of the stream, opposite to the road by which they approached, they saw a group of people—perhaps twenty-drawn closely together, either in the sympathy of segregation from an unfeeling world, or for protection from the keen wind. On the hither bank, and leaning on the rails of the drive, had collected a motley crowd of spectators, men, women, and boys, who exhibited some impatience and much curiosity, decorous for the most part, but emphasized by occasional jocose remarks in an undertone. A serious ceremony was evidently in progress. The separate group had not a prosperous air. The women were thinly clad for such a day. Conspicuous in the little assembly was a tall, elderly man in a shabby long coat and a broad felt hat, from under which his white hair fell upon his shoulders. He might be a prophet in Israel come out to testify to an unbelieving world, and the little group around him, shaken like reeds in the wind, had the appearance of martyrs to a cause. The light of another world shone in their thin, patient faces. Come, they seemed to say to the worldlings on the opposite bank—come and see what happiness it is to serve the Lord. As they waited, a faint tune was started, a quavering hymn, whose feeble notes the wind blew away of first, but which grew stronger.

Before the first stanza was finished a carriage appeared in the rear of the group. From it descended a middle-aged man and a stout woman, and they together helped a young girl to alight. She was clad all in white. For a moment her thin, delicate figure shrank from the cutting wind. Timid, nervous, she glanced an instant at the crowd and the dark icy stream; but it was only a protest of the poor body; the face had the rapt, exultant look of joyous sacrifice.

The tall man advanced to meet her, and led her into the midst of the group.

For a few moments there was prayer, inaudible at a distance. Then the tall man, taking the girl by the hand, advanced down the slope to the stream. His hat was laid aside, his venerable locks streamed in the breeze, his eyes were turned to heaven; the girl walked as in a vision, without a tremor, her wide-opened eyes fixed upon invisible things. As they moved on, the group behind set up a joyful hymn in a kind of mournful chant, in which the tall man joined with a strident voice. Fitfully the words came on the wind, in an almost heart-breaking wail:

“Beyond the smiling and the weeping I shall be soon;

Beyond the waking and the sleeping,

Beyond the sowing and the reaping, I shall be soon.”

They were near the water now, and the tall man’s voice sounded out loud and clear:

“Lord, tarry not, but come!”

They were entering the stream where there was an opening clear of ice; the footing was not very secure, and the tall man ceased singing, but the little band sang on:

“Beyond the blooming and the fading I shall be soon.”

The girl grew paler and shuddered. The tall man sustained her with an attitude of infinite sympathy, and seemed to speak words of encouragement. They were in the mid-stream; the cold flood surged about their waists. The group sang on:

“Beyond the shining and the shading,

Beyond the hoping and the dreading, I shall be soon.”

The strong, tender arms of the tall man gently lowered the white form under the cruel water; he staggered a moment in the swift stream, recovered himself, raised her, white as death, and the voices of the wailing tune came:

“Love, rest, and home

Sweet hope! Lord, tarry not, but come!”

And the tall man, as he struggled to the shore with his almost insensible burden, could be heard above the other voices and the wind and the rush of the waters:

“Lord, tarry not, but come!”

The girl was hurried into the carriage, and the group quickly dispersed. “Well, I’ll be—” The tender-hearted little wife of the rough man in the crowd who began that sentence did not permit him to finish it. “That’ll be a case for a doctor right away,” remarked a well-known practitioner who had been looking on.

Margaret and Mr. Lyon walked home in silence. “I can’t talk about it,” she said. “It’s such a pitiful world.”

IV

In the evening, at our house, Margaret described the scene in the park.

“It’s dreadful,” was the comment of Miss Forsythe. “The authorities ought not to permit such a thing.”

“It seemed to me as heroic as pitiful, aunt. I fear I should be incapable of making such a testimony.”

“But it was so unnecessary.”

“How do we know what is necessary to any poor soul? What impressed me most strongly was that there is in the world still this longing to suffer physically and endure public scorn for a belief.”

“It may have been a disappointment to the little band,” said Mr. Morgan, “that there was no demonstration from the spectators, that there was no loud jeering, that no snowballs were thrown by the boys.”

“They could hardly expect that,” said I; “the world has become so tolerant that it doesn’t care.”

“I rather think,” Margaret replied, “that the spectators for a moment came under the spell of the hour, and were awed by something supernatural in the endurance of that frail girl.”

“No doubt,” said my wife, after a little pause. “I believe that there is as much sense of mystery in the world as ever, and as much of what we call faith, only it shows itself eccentrically. Breaking away from traditions and not going to church have not destroyed the need in the minds of the mass of people for something outside themselves.”

“Did I tell you,” interposed Morgan—“it is almost in the line of your thought—of a girl I met the other day on the train? I happened to be her seat-mate in the car-thin face, slight little figure—a commonplace girl, whom I took at first to be not more than twenty, but from the lines about her large eyes she was probably nearer forty. She had in her lap a book, which she conned from time to time, and seemed to be committing verses to memory as she looked out the window. At last I ventured to ask what literature it was that interested her so much, when she turned and frankly entered into conversation. It was a little Advent song-book. She liked to read it on the train, and hum over the tunes. Yes, she was a good deal on the cars; early every morning she rode thirty miles to her work, and thirty miles back every evening. Her work was that of clerk and copyist in a freight office, and she earned nine dollars a week, on which she supported herself and her mother. It was hard work, but she did not mind it much. Her mother was quite feeble. She was an Adventist. ‘And you?’ I asked. ‘Oh, yes; I am. I’ve been an Adventist twenty years, and I’ve been perfectly happy ever since I joined—perfectly,’ she added, turning her plain face, now radiant, towards me. ‘Are you one?’ she asked, presently. ‘Not an immediate Adventist,’ I was obliged to confess. ‘I thought you might be, there are so many now, more and more.’ I learned that in our little city there were two Advent societies; there had been a split on account of some difference in the meaning of original sin. ‘And you are not discouraged by the repeated failure of the predictions of the end of the world?’ I asked. ‘No. Why should we be? We don’t fix any certain day now, but all the signs show that it is very near. We are all free to think as we like. Most of our members now think it will be next year.’—‘I hope not!’ I exclaimed. ‘Why?’ she asked, turning to me with a look of surprise. ‘Are you afraid?’ I evaded by saying that I supposed the good had nothing to fear. ‘Then you must be an Adventist, you have so much sympathy.’—‘I shouldn’t like to have the world come to an end next year, because there are so many interesting problems, and I want to see how they will be worked out.’—‘How can you want to put it off’—and there was for the first time a little note of fanaticism in her voice—‘when there is so much poverty and hard work? It is such a hard world, and so much suffering and sin. And it could all be ended in a moment. How can you want it to go on?’ The train approached the station, and she rose to say good-by. ‘You will see the truth some day,’ she said, and went away as cheerful as if the world was actually destroyed. She was the happiest woman I have seen in a long time.”

“Yes,” I said, “it is an age of both faith and credulity.”

“And nothing marks it more,” Morgan added, “than the popular expectation among the scientific and the ignorant of something to come out of the dimly understood relation of body and mind. It is like the expectation of the possibilities of electricity.”

“I was going on to say,” I continued, “that wherever I walk in the city of a Sunday afternoon, I am struck with the number of little meetings going on, of the faithful and the unfaithful, Adventists, socialists, spiritualists, culturists, Sons and Daughters of Edom; from all the open windows of the tall buildings come notes of praying, of exhortation, the melancholy wail of the inspiring Sankey tunes, total abstinence melodies, over-the-river melodies, songs of entreaty, and songs of praise. There is so much going on outside of the regular churches!”

“But the churches are well attended,” suggested my wife.

“Yes, fairly, at least once a day, and if there is sensational preaching, twice. But there is nothing that will so pack the biggest hall in the city as the announcement of inspirational preaching by some young woman who speaks at random on a text given her when she steps upon the platform. There is something in her rhapsody, even when it is incoherent, that appeals to a prevailing spirit.”’

“How much of it is curiosity?” Morgan asked. “Isn’t the hall just as jammed when the clever attorney of Nothingism, Ham Saversoul, jokes about the mysteries of this life and the next?”

“Very likely. People like the emotional and the amusing. All the same, they are credulous, and entertain doubt and belief on the slightest evidence.”

“Isn’t it natural,” spoke up Mr. Lyon, who had hitherto been silent, “that you should drift into this condition without an established church?”

“Perhaps it’s natural,” Morgan retorted, “that people dissatisfied with an established religion should drift over here. Great Britain, you know, is a famous recruiting-ground for our socialistic experiments.”

“Ah, well,” said my wife, “men will have something. If what is established repels to the extent of getting itself disestablished, and all churches should be broken up, society would somehow precipitate itself again spiritually. I heard the other day that Boston, getting a little weary of the Vedas, was beginning to take up the New Testament.”

“Yes,” said Morgan, “since Tolstoi mentioned it.”

After a little the talk drifted into psychic research, and got lost in stories of “appearances” and “long-distance” communications. It appeared to me that intelligent people accepted this sort of story as true on evidence on which they wouldn’t risk five dollars if it were a question of money. Even scientists swallow tales of prehistoric bones on testimony they would reject if it involved the title to a piece of real estate.

Mr. Lyon still lingered in the lap of a New England winter as if it had been Capua. He was anxious to visit Washington and study the politics of the country, and see the sort of society produced in the freedom of a republic, where there was no court to give the tone and there were no class lines to determine position. He was restless under this sense of duty. The future legislator for the British Empire must understand the Constitution of its great rival, and thus be able to appreciate the social currents that have so much to do with political action.

In fact he had another reason for uneasiness. His mother had written him, asking why he stayed so long in an unimportant city, he who had been so active a traveler hitherto. Knowledge of the capitals was what he needed. Agreeable people he could find at home, if his only object was to pass the time. What could he reply? Could he say that he had become very much interested in studying a schoolteacher—a very charming schoolteacher? He could see the vision raised in the minds of his mother and of the earl and of his elder sister as they should read this precious confession—a vision of a schoolma’am, of an American girl, and an American girl without any money at that, moving in the little orbit of Chisholm House. The thing was absurd. And yet why was it absurd? What was English politics, what was Chisholm House, what was everybody in England compared to this noble girl? Nay, what would the world be without her? He grew hot in thinking of it, indignant at his relations and the whole artificial framework of things.

The situation was almost humiliating. He began, to doubt the stability of his own position. Hitherto he had met no obstacle: whatever he had desired he had obtained. He was a sensible fellow, and knew the world was not made for him; but it certainly had yielded to him in everything. Why did he doubt now? That he did doubt showed him the intensity of his interest in Margaret. For love is humble, and undervalues self in contrast with that which it desires. At this touchstone rank, fortune, all that go with them, seemed poor. What were all these to a woman’s soul? But there were women enough, women enough in England, women more beautiful than Margaret, doubtless as amiable and intellectual. Yet now there was for him only one woman in the world. And Margaret showed no sign. Was he about to make a fool of himself? If she should reject him he would seem a fool to himself. If she accepted him he would seem a fool to the whole circle that made his world at home. The situation was intolerable. He would end it by going.

But he did not go. If he went today he could not see her tomorrow. To a lover anything can be borne if he knows that he shall see her tomorrow. In short, he could not go so long as there was any doubt about her disposition towards him.

And a man is still reduced to this in the latter part of the nineteenth century, notwithstanding all our science, all our analysis of the passion, all our wise jabber about the failure of marriage, all our commonsense about the relation of the sexes. Love is still a personal question, not to be reasoned about or in any way disposed of except in the old way. Maidens dream about it; diplomats yield to it; stolid men are upset by it; the aged become young, the young grave, under its influence; the student loses his appetite—God bless him! I like to hear the young fellows at the club rattle on bravely, indifferent to the whole thing—skeptical, in fact, about it. And then to see them, one after another, stricken down, and looking a little sheepish and not saying much, and by-and-by radiant. You would think they owned the world. Heaven, I think, shows us no finer sarcasm than one of these young skeptics as a meek family man.

Margaret and Mr. Lyon were much together.

And their talk, as always happens when two persons find themselves much together, became more and more personal. It is only in books that dialogues are abstract and impersonal. The Englishman told her about his family, about the set in which he moved—and he had the English frankness in setting it out unreservedly—about the life he led at Oxford, about his travels, and so on to what he meant to do in the world. Margaret in return had little to tell, her own life had been so simple—not much except the maidenly reserves, the discontents with herself, which interested him more than anything else; and of the future she would not speak at all. How can a woman, without being misunderstood? All this talk had a certain danger in it, for sympathy is unavoidable between two persons who look ever so little into each other’s hearts and compare tastes and desires.

“I cannot quite understand your social life over here,” Mr. Lyon was saying one day. “You seem to make distinctions, but I cannot see exactly for what.”

“Perhaps they make themselves. Your social orders seem able to resist Darwin’s theory, but in a republic natural selection has a better chance.”

“I was told by a Bohemian on the steamer coming over that money in America takes the place of rank in England.”

“That isn’t quite true.”

“And I was told in Boston by an acquaintance of very old family and little fortune that ‘blood’ is considered here as much as anywhere.”

“You see, Mr. Lyon, how difficult it is to get correct information about us. I think we worship wealth a good deal, and we worship family a good deal, but if any one presumes too much upon either, he is likely to come to grief. I don’t understand it very well myself.”

“Then it is not money that determines social position in America?”

“Not altogether; but more now than formerly. I suppose the distinction is this: family will take a person everywhere, money will take him almost everywhere; but money is always at this disadvantage—it takes more and more of it to gain position. And then you will find that it is a good deal a matter of locality. For instance, in Virginia and Kentucky family is still very powerful, stronger than any distinction in letters or politics or success in business; and there is a certain diminishing number of people in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, who cultivate a good deal of exclusiveness on account of descent.”

“But I am told that this sort of aristocracy is succumbing to the new plutocracy.”

“Well, it is more and more difficult to maintain a position without money. Mr. Morgan says that it is a disheartening thing to be an aristocrat without luxury; he declares that he cannot tell whether the Knickerbockers of New York or the plutocrats are more uneasy just now. The one is hungry for social position, and is morose if he cannot buy it; and when the other is seduced by luxury and yields, he finds that his distinction is gone. For in his heart the newly rich only respects the rich. A story went about of one of the Bonanza princes who had built his palace in the city, and was sending out invitations to his first entertainment. Somebody suggested doubts to him about the response. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘the beggars will be glad enough to come!’”

“I suppose, Mr. Lyon,” said Margaret, demurely, “that this sort of thing is unknown in England?”

“Oh, I couldn’t say that money is not run after there to some extent.”

“I saw a picture in Punch of an auction, intended as an awful satire on American women. It struck me that it might have two interpretations.”

“Yes, Punch is as friendly to America as it is to the English aristocracy.”

“Well, I was only thinking that it is just an exchange of commodities. People will always give what they have for what they want. The Western man changes his pork in New York for pictures. I suppose that—what do you call it?—the balance of trade is against us, and we have to send over cash and beauty.”

“I didn’t know that Miss Debree was so much of a political economist.”

“We got that out of books in school. Another thing we learned is that England wants raw material; I thought I might as well say it, for it wouldn’t be polite for you.”

“Oh, I’m capable of saying anything, if provoked. But we have got away from the point. As far as I can see, all sorts of people intermarry, and I don’t see how you can discriminate socially—where the lines are.”

Mr. Lyon saw the moment that he had made it that this was a suggestion little likely to help him. And Margaret’s reply showed that he had lost ground.

“Oh, we do not try to discriminate—except as to foreigners. There is a popular notion that Americans had better marry at home.”

“Then the best way for a foreigner to break your exclusiveness is to be naturalized.” Mr. Lyon tried to adopt her tone, and added, “Would you like to see me an American citizen?”

“I don’t believe you could be, except for a little while; you are too British.”

“But the two nations are practically the same; that is, individuals of the nations are. Don’t you think so?”

“Yes, if one of them gives up all the habits and prejudices of a lifetime and of a whole social condition to the other.”

“And which would have to yield?”

“Oh, the man, of course. It has always been so. My great-great-grandfather was a Frenchman, but he became, I have always heard, the most docile American republican.”

“Do you think he would have been the one to give in if they had gone to France?”

“Perhaps not. And then the marriage would have been unhappy. Did you never take notice that a woman’s happiness, and consequently the happiness of marriage, depends upon a woman’s having her own way in all social matters? Before our war all the men who married down South took the Southern view, and all the Southern women who married up North held their own, and sensibly controlled the sympathies of their husbands.”

“And how was it with the Northern women who married South, as you say?”

“Well, it must be confessed that a good many of them adapted themselves, in appearance at least. Women can do that, and never let anyone see they are not happy and not doing it from choice.”

“And don’t you think American women adapt themselves happily to English life?”

“Doubtless some; I doubt if many do; but women do not confess mistakes of that kind. Woman’s happiness depends so much upon the continuation of the surroundings and sympathies in which she is bred. There are always exceptions. Do you know, Mr. Lyon, it seems to me that some people do not belong in the country where they were born. We have men who ought to have been born in England, and who only find themselves really they go there. There are who are ambitious, and court a career different from any that a republic can give them. They are not satisfied here. Whether they are happy there I do not know; so few trees, when at all grown, will bear transplanting.”

“Then you think international marriages are a mistake?”

“Oh, I don’t theorize on subjects I am ignorant of.”

“You give me very cold comfort.”

“I didn’t know,” said Margaret, with a laugh that was too genuine to be consoling, “that you were traveling for comfort; I thought it was for information.”

“And I am getting a great deal,” said Mr. Lyon, rather ruefully. “I’m trying to find out where. I ought to have been born.”

“I’m not sure,” Margaret said, half seriously, “but you would have been a very good American.”

This was not much of an admission, after all, but it was the most that Margaret had ever made, and Mr. Lyon tried to get some encouragement out of it. But he felt, as any man would feel, that this beating about the bush, this talk of nationality and all that, was nonsense; that if a woman loved a man she wouldn’t care where he was born; that all the world would be as nothing to him; that all conditions and obstacles society and family could raise would melt away in the glow of a real passion. And he wondered for a moment if American girls were not “calculating”—a word to which he had learned over here to attach a new and comical meaning.

V

The afternoon after this conversation Miss Forsythe was sitting reading in her favorite window-seat when Mr. Lyon was announced. Margaret was at her school. There was nothing un usual in this afternoon call; Mr. Lyon’s visits had become frequent and informal; but Miss Forsythe had a nervous presentiment that something important was to happen, that showed itself in her greeting, and which was perhaps caught from a certain new diffidence in his manner.

Perhaps the maiden lady preserves more than any other this sensitiveness, inborn in women, to the approach of the critical moment in the affairs of the heart. The day may some time be past when she—is sensitive for herself—philosophers say otherwise—but she is easily put in a flutter by the affair of another. Perhaps this is because the negative (as we say in these days) which takes impressions retains all its delicacy from the fact that none of them have ever been developed, and perhaps it is a wise provision of nature that age in a heart unsatisfied should awaken lively apprehensive curiosity and sympathy about the manifestation of the tender passion in others. It certainly is a note of the kindliness and charity of the maiden mind that its sympathies are so apt to be most strongly excited in the success of the wooer. This interest may be quite separable from the common feminine desire to make a match whenever there is the least chance of it. Miss Forsythe was not a match-maker, but Margaret herself would not have been more embarrassed than she was at the beginning of this interview.

When Mr. Lyon was seated she made the book she had in her hand the excuse for beginning a talk about the confidence young novelists seem to have in their ability to upset the Christian religion by a fictitious representation of life, but her visitor was too preoccupied to join in it. He rose and stood leaning his arm upon the mantelpiece, and looking into the fire, and said, abruptly, at last:

“I called to see you, Miss Forsythe, to—to consult you about your niece.”

“About her career?” asked Miss Forsythe, with a nervous consciousness of falsehood.

“Yes, about her career; that is, in a way,” turning towards her with a little smile.

“Yes?”

“You must have seen my interest in her. You must have known why I stayed on and on. But it was, it is, all so uncertain. I wanted to ask your permission to speak my mind to her.”

“Are you quite sure you know your own mind?” asked Miss Forsythe, defensively.

“Sure—sure; I have never had the feeling for any other woman I have for her.”

“Margaret is a noble girl; she is very independent,” suggested Miss Forsythe, still avoiding the point.

“I know. I don’t ask you her feeling.” Mr. Lyon was standing quietly looking down into the coals. “She is the only woman in the world to me. I love her. Are you against me?” he asked, suddenly looking up, with a flush in his face.

“Oh, no! no!” exclaimed Miss Forsythe, with another access of timidity. “I shouldn’t take the responsibility of being against you, or—or otherwise. It is very manly in you to come to me, and I am sure I—we all wish nothing but your own happiness. And so far as I am concerned—”

“Then I have your permission?” he asked, eagerly.

“My permission, Mr. Lyon? why, it is so new to me, I scarcely realized that I had any permission,” she said, with a little attempt at pleasantry. “But as her aunt—and guardian, as one may say—personally I should have the greatest satisfaction to know that Margaret’s destiny was in the hands of one we all esteem and know as we do you.”

“Thank you, thank you,” said Mr. Lyon, coming forward and seizing her hand.

“But you must let me say, let me suggest, that there are a great many things to be thought of. There is such a difference in education, in all the habits of your lives, in all your relations. Margaret would never be happy in a position where less was accorded to her than she had all her life. Nor would her pride let her take such a position.”

“But as my wife—”

“Yes, I know that is sufficient in your mind. Have you consulted your mother, Mr. Lyon?”

“Not yet.”

“And have you written to any one at home about my niece?”

“Not yet.”

“And does it seem a little difficult to do so?” This was a probe that went even deeper than the questioner knew. Mr. Lyon hesitated, seeing again as in a vision the astonishment of his family. He was conscious of an attempt at self-deception when he replied:

“Not difficult, not at all difficult, but I thought I would wait till I had something definite to say.”

“Margaret is, of course, perfectly free to act for herself. She has a very ardent nature, but at the same time a great deal of what we call common sense. Though her heart might be very much engaged, she would hesitate to put herself in any society which thought itself superior to her. You see I speak with great frankness.”

It was a new position for Mr. Lyon to find his prospective rank seemingly an obstacle to anything he desired. For a moment the whimsicality of it interrupted the current of his feeling. He thought of the probable comments of the men of his London club upon the drift his conversation was taking with a New England spinster about his fitness to marry a schoolteacher. With a smile that was summoned to hide his annoyance, he said, “I don’t see how I can defend myself, Miss Forsythe.”

“Oh,” she replied, with an answering smile that recognized his view of the humor of the situation, “I was not thinking of you, Mr. Lyon, but of the family and the society that my niece might enter, to which rank is of the first importance.”

“I am simply John Lyon, Miss Forsythe. I may never be anything else. But if it were otherwise, I did not suppose that Americans objected to rank.”

It was an unfortunate speech, felt to be so the instant it was uttered. Miss Forsythe’s pride was touched, and the remark was not softened to her by the air of half banter with which the sentence concluded. She said, with a little stillness and formality: “I fear, Mr. Lyon, that your sarcasm is too well merited. But there are Americans who make a distinction between rank and blood. Perhaps it is very undemocratic, but there is nowhere else more pride of family, of honorable descent, than here. We think very much of what we call good blood. And you will pardon me for saying that we are accustomed to speak of some persons and families abroad which have the highest rank as being thoroughly bad blood. If I am not mistaken, you also recognize the historic fact of ignoble blood in the owners of noble titles. I only mean, Mr. Lyon,” she added, with a softening of manner, “that all Americans do not think that rank covers a multitude of sins.”

“Yes, I think I get your American point of view. But to return to myself, if you will allow me; if I am so fortunate as to win Miss Debree’s love, I have no fear that she would not win the hearts of all my family. Do you think that my—my prospective position would be an objection to her?”

“Not your position, no; if her heart were engaged. But expatriation, involving a surrender of all the habits and traditions and associations of a lifetime and of one’s kindred, is a serious affair. One would need to be very much in love”—and Miss Forsythe blushed a little as she said it—“to make such a surrender.”

“I know. I am sure I love her too much to wish to bring any change in her life that would ever cause her unhappiness.”

“I am glad to feel sure of that.”

“And so I have your permission?”

“Most sincerely,” said Miss Forsythe, rising and giving him her hand. “I could wish nothing better for Margaret than union with a man like you. But whatever I wish, you two have your destiny in your own hands.” Her tone was wholly frank and cordial, but there was a wistful look in her face, as of one who knew how roughly life handles all youthful enthusiasms.

When John Lyon walked away from her door his feelings were very much mixed. At one instant his pride rebelled against the attitude he had just assumed. But this was only a flash, which he put away as unbecoming a man towards a true woman. The next thought was one of unselfish consideration for Margaret herself. He would not subject her to any chance of social mortifications. He would wait. He would return home and test his love by renewing his lifelong associations, and by the reception his family would give to his proposal. And the next moment he saw Margaret as she had become to him, as she must always be to him. Should he risk the loss of her by timidity? What were all these paltry considerations to his love?

Was there ever a young man who could see any reasons against the possession of the woman he loved? Was there ever any love worth the name that could be controlled by calculations of expediency? I have no doubt that John Lyon went through the usual process which is called weighing a thing in the mind. It is generally an amusing process, and it is consoling to the conscience. The mind has little to do with it except to furnish the platform on which the scales are set up. A humorist says that he must have a great deal of mind, it takes him so long to make it up. There is the same apparent deliberation where love is concerned. Everything “contra” is carefully placed in one scale of the balance, and it is always satisfactory and convincing to see how quickly it kicks the beam when love is placed in the other scale. The lightest love in the world, under a law as invariable as gravitation, is heavier than any other known consideration. It is perhaps doing injustice to Mr. Lyon not to dwell upon this struggle in his mind, and to say that in all honesty he may not have known that the result of it was predetermined. But interesting and commendable as are these processes of the mind, I confess that I should have respected him less if the result had not been predetermined. And this does not in any way take from him the merit of a restless night and a tasteless breakfast.

Philosophizers on this topic say that a man ought always to be able to tell by a woman’s demeanor towards him whether she is favorably inclined, and that he need run no risk. Little signs, the eyes alone, draw people together, and make formal language superfluous. This theory is abundantly sustained by examples, and we might rest on it if all women knew their own minds, and if, on the other hand, they could always tell whether a man was serious before he made a definite avowal. There is another notion, fortunately not yet extinct, that the manliest thing a man can do is to take his life in his hand, pay the woman he loves the highest tribute in his power by offering her his heart and name, and giving her the definite word that may be the touchstone to reveal to herself her own feeling. In our conventional life women must move behind a mask in a world of uncertainties. What wonder that many of them learn in their defensive position to play a game, and sometimes experiment upon the honest natures of their admirers! But even this does not absolve the chivalrous man from the duty of frankness and explicitness. Life seems ideal in that far country where the handsome youth stops his carriage at the gate of the vineyard, and says to the laughing girl carrying a basket of grapes on her head, “My pretty maid, will you marry me?” And the pretty maid, dropping a courtesy, says, “Thank you, sir; I am already bespoken,” or “Thank you; I will consider of it when I know you better.”

Not for a moment, I suppose, is a woman ever ignorant of a man’s admiration of her, however uncertain she may be of his intentions, and it was with an unusual flutter of the heart that Margaret received Mr. Lyon that afternoon. If she had doubts, they were dissipated by a certain constraint in his manner, and the importance he seemed to be attaching to his departure, and she was warned to go within her defenses. Even the most complaisant women like at least the appearance of a siege.

“I’m off tomorrow,” he said, “for Washington. You know you recommended it as necessary to my American education.”

“Yes. We send Representatives and strangers there to be educated. I have never been there myself.”

“And do you not wish to go?”

“Very much. All Americans want to go to Washington. It is the great social opportunity; everybody there is in society. You will be able to see there, Mr. Lyon, how a republican democracy manages social life.

“Do you mean to say there are no distinctions?”

“Oh, no; there are plenty of official distinctions, and a code that is very curious and complicated, I believe. But still society is open.”

“It must be—pardon me—a good deal like a mob.”

“Well, our mobs of that sort are said to be very well behaved. Mr. Morgan says that Washington is the only capital in the world where the principle of natural selection applies to society; that it is there shown for the first time that society is able to take care of itself in the free play of democratic opportunities.”

“It must be very interesting to see that.”

“I hope you will find it so. The resident diplomats, I have heard, say that they find society there more agreeable than at any other capital—at least those who have the qualities to make themselves agreeable independent of their rank.”

“Is there nothing like a court? I cannot see who sets the mode.”

“Officially there may be something like a court, but it can be only temporary, for the personnel of it is dissolved every four years. And society, always forming and reforming, as the voters of the republic dictate, is almost independent of the Government, and has nothing of the social caste of Berlin or London.”

“You make quite an ideal picture.”

“Oh, I dare say it is not at all ideal; only it is rather fluid, and interesting, to see how society, without caste and subject to such constant change, can still be what is called ‘society.’ And I am told that while it is all open in a certain way, it nevertheless selects itself into agreeable groups, much as society does elsewhere. Yes, you ought to see what a democracy can do in this way.”

“But I am told that money makes your aristocracy here.”

“Very likely rich people think they are an aristocracy. You see, Mr. Lyon, I don’t know much about the great world. Mrs. Fletcher, whose late husband was once a Representative in Washington, says that life is not nearly so simple there as it used to be, and that rich men in the Government, vying with rich men who have built fine houses and who live there permanently without any Government position, have introduced an element of expense and display that interferes very much with the natural selection of which Mr. Morgan speaks. But you will see. We are all right sorry to have you leave us,” Margaret added, turning towards him with frank, unclouded eyes.

“It is very good in you to say so. I have spent here the most delightful days of my life.”

“Oh, that is charming flattery. You will make us all very conceited.”

“Don’t mock me, Miss Debree. I hoped I had awakened something more valuable to me than conceit,” Lyon said, with a smile.

“You have, I assure you: gratitude. You have opened quite another world to us. Reading about foreign life does not give one at all the same impression of it that seeing one who is a part of it does.”

“And don’t you want to see that life for yourself? I hope some time—”

“Of course,” Margaret said, interrupting; “all Americans expect to go to Europe. I have a friend who says she should be mortified if she reached heaven and there had to confess that she never had seen Europe. It is one of the things that is expected of a person. Though you know now that the embarrassing question that everybody has to answer is, ‘Have you been to Alaska?’ Have you been to Alaska, Mr. Lyon?”

This icy suggestion seemed very inopportune to Lyon. He rose and walked a step or two, and stood by the fire facing her. He confessed, looking down, that he had not been in Alaska, and he had no desire to go there. “In fact, Miss Debree,” he said, with effort at speaking lightly, “I fear I am not in a geographical mood today. I came to say good-by, and—and—”

“Shall I call my aunt?” said Margaret, rising also.

“No, I beg; I had something to say that concerns us; that is, that concerns myself. I couldn’t go away without knowing from you—that is, without telling you—”

The color rose in Margaret’s cheek, and she made a movement of embarrassment, and said, with haste: “Some other time; I beg you will not say—I trust that I have done nothing that—”

“Nothing, nothing,” he went on quickly; “nothing except to be yourself; to be the one woman”—he would not heed her hand raised in a gesture of protest; he stood nearer her now, his face flushed and his eyes eager with determination—“the one woman I care for. Margaret, Miss Debree, I love you!”

Her hand that rested on the table trembled, and the hot blood rushed to her face, flooding her in an agony of shame, pleasure, embarrassment, and anger that her face should contradict the want of tenderness in her eyes. In an instant self-possession came back to her mind, but not strength to her body, and she sank into the chair, and looking up, with only pity in her eyes, said, “I am sorry.”

Lyon stopped; his heart seemed to stand still; the blood left his face; for an instant the sunshine left the world. It was a terrible blow, the worst a man can receive—a bludgeon on the head is nothing to it. He half turned, he looked again for an instant at the form that was more to him than all the world besides, unable to face the dreadful loss, and recovering speech, falteringly said, “Is that all?”

“That is all, Mr. Lyon,” Margaret answered, not looking up, and in a voice that was perfectly steady.

He turned to go mechanically, and passed to the door in a sort of daze, forgetful of all conventionality; but habit is strong, and he turned almost immediately back from the passage. Margaret was still sitting, with no recognition of his departure.

“I beg you will make my excuses, and say good-by to Miss Forsythe. I had mentioned it to her. I thought perhaps she had told you, perhaps—I should like to know if it is anything about difference in—in nationality, about family, or—”

“No, no,” said Margaret; “this could never be anything but a personal question with me. I—”

“But you said, ‘some other time:’ Might I ever expect—”

“No, no; there is no other time; do not go on. It can only be painful.”

And then, with a forced cheerfulness: “You will no doubt thank me some day. Your life must be so different from mine. And you must not doubt my esteem, my appreciation,” (her sense of justice forced this from her), “my good wishes. Good-by.” She gave him her hand. He held it for a second, and then was gone.

She heard his footstep, rapid and receding. So he had really gone! She was not sorry—no. If she could have loved him! She sank back in her chair.

No, she could not love him. The man to command her heart must be of another type. But the greatest experience in a woman’s life had come to her here, just now, in this commonplace room. A man had said he loved her. A thousand times as a girl she had dreamed of that, hardly confessing it to herself, and thought of such a scene, and feared it. And a man had said that he loved her. Her eyes grew tenderer and her face burned at the thought. Was it with pleasure? Yes, and with womanly pain. What an awful thing it was! Why couldn’t he have seen? A man had said he loved her. Perhaps it was not in her to love any one. Perhaps she should live on and on like her aunt Forsythe. Well, it was over; and Margaret roused herself as her aunt entered the room.

“Has Mr. Lyon been here?”

“Yes; he has just gone. He was so sorry not to see you and say good-by. He left ever so many messages for you.”

“And” (Margaret was moving as if to go) “did he say nothing—nothing to you?”

“Oh yes, he said a great deal,” answered this accomplished hypocrite, looking frankly in her aunt’s eyes. “He said how delightful his visit had been, and how sorry he was to go.”

“And nothing else, Margaret?”

“Oh yes; he said he was going to Washington.” And the girl was gone from the room.

VI

Margaret hastened to her chamber. Was the air oppressive? She opened the window and sat down by it. A soft south wind was blowing, eating away the remaining patches of snow; the sky was full of fleecy clouds. Where do these days come from in January? Why should nature be in a melting mood? Margaret instinctively would have preferred a wild storm, violence, anything but this elemental languor. Her emotion was incredible to herself.

It was only an incident. It had all happened in a moment, and it was over. But it was the first of the kind in a woman’s life. The thrilling, mysterious word had been dropped into a woman’s heart. Hereafter she would be changed. She never again would be as she was before. Would her heart be hardened or softened by the experience? She did not love him; that was clear. She had done right; that was clear. But he had said he loved her. Unwittingly she was following him in her thought. She had rejected plain John Lyon, amiable, intelligent, unselfish, kindly, deferential. She had rejected also the Earl of Chisholm, a conspicuous position, an honorable family, luxury, a great opportunity in life. It came to the girl in a flash. She moved nervously in her chair. She put down the thought as unworthy of her. But she had entertained it for a moment. In that second, ambition had entered the girl’s soul. She had a glimpse of her own nature that seemed new to her. Was this, then, the meaning of her restlessness, of her charitable activities, of her unconfessed dreams of some career? Ambition had entered her soul in a definite form. She expelled it. It would come again in some form or other. She was indignant at herself as she thought of it. How odd it was! Her privacy had been invaded. The even tenor of her life had been broken. Henceforth would she be less or more sensitive to the suggestion of love, to the allurements of ambition? Margaret tried, in accordance with her nature, to be sincere with herself.

After all, what nonsense it was! Nothing really had happened. A stranger of a few weeks before had declared himself. She did not love him; he was no more to her than any other man. It was a common occurrence. Her judgment accorded with her feeling in what she had done. How was she to know that she had made a mistake, if mistake it was? How was she to know that this hour was a crisis in her life? Surely the little tumult would pass; surely the little whisper of worldliness could not disturb her ideals. But all the power of exclusion in her mind could not exclude the returning thought of what might have been if she had loved him. Alas! in that moment was born in her heart something that would make the idea of love less simple than it had been in her mind. She was heart-free, but her nature was too deep not to be profoundly affected by this experience.

Looking back upon this afternoon in the light of after-years, she probably could not feel—no one could say—that she had done wrong. How was she to tell? Why is it that to do the right thing is often to make the mistake of a life? Nothing could have been nobler than for Margaret indignantly to put aside a temptation that her heart told her was unworthy. And yet if she had yielded to it?

I ought to ask pardon, perhaps, for dwelling upon a thing so slight as the entrance of a thought in a woman’s life. For as to Margaret, she seemed unchanged. She made no sign that anything unusual had occurred. We only knew that Mr. Lyon went away less cheerful than he usually was, that he said nothing of returning in response to our invitations, and that he seemed to anticipate nothing but the fulfillment of a duty in his visit to Washington.

What had happened was regarded as only an episode. In fact, however, I doubt if there are any episodes in our lives, any asides, that do not permanently affect our entire career. Are not the episodes, the casual thoughts, the fortuitous, unplanned meetings, the brief and maybe at the moment unnoted events, those which exercise the most influence on our destiny? To all observation the career of Lyon, and not of Margaret, was most affected by their interview. But often the implanting of an idea in the mind is more potent than the frustration of a plan or the gratification of a desire, so hidden are the causes that make character.

For some time I saw little of Margaret. Affairs in which I was not alone or chiefly concerned took me from home. One of the most curious and interesting places in the world is a Chamber in the business heart of New York—if that scene of struggle and passion can be said to have a heart—situated midway where the currents of eagerness to acquire the money of other people, not to make it, ceaselessly meet and dash against each other. If we could suppose there was a web covering this region, spun by the most alert and busy of men to catch those less alert and more productive, here in this Chamber would sit the ingenious spiders. But the analogy fails, for spiders do not prey upon each other. Scientists say that the human system has two nerve-centres—one in the brain, to which and from which are telegraphed all movements depending upon the will, and another in the small of the back, the centre of the involuntary operations of respiration, digestion, and so on. It may be fanciful to suppose that in the national system Washington is the one nervous centre and New York the other. And yet it does sometimes seem that the nerves and ganglions in the small of the back in the commercial metropolis act automatically and without any visible intervention of intelligence. For all that, their operations may be as essential as the other, in which the will-power sometimes gets into a deadlock, and sometimes telegraphs the most eccentric and incomprehensible orders. Puzzled by these contradictions, some philosophers have said that there may be somewhere outside of these two material centres another power that keeps affairs moving along with some steadiness.

This noble Chamber has a large irregular area of floor space, is very high, and has running round three sides a narrow elevated gallery, from which spectators can look down upon the throng below. Upon a raised dais at one side sits the presiding genius of the place, who rules very much as Jupiter was supposed to govern the earthly swarms, by letting things run and occasionally launching a thunderbolt. High up on one side, in an Olympian seclusion, away from the noise and the strife, sits a Board, calm as fate, and panoplied in the responsibility of chance, whose function seems to be that of switch-shifters in their windowed cubby at a network of railway intersections—to prevent collisions.

At both ends of the floor and along one side are narrow railed-off spaces full of clerks figuring at desks, of telegraph operators clicking their machines, of messenger-boys arriving and departing in haste, of unprivileged operators nervously watching the scene and waiting the chance of a word with some one on the floor; through noiseless swinging doors men are entering and departing every moment—men in a hurry, men with anxious faces, conscious that the fate of the country is in their hands. On the floor itself are five hundred, perhaps a thousand, men, gathered for the most part in small groups about little stands upon the summit of which is a rallying legend, talking, laughing, screaming, good-natured, indifferent, excited, running hither and thither in response to changing figures in the checker-board squares on the great wall opposite—calm, cynical one moment, the next violently agitated, shouting, gesticulating, rushing together, shaking their fists in a tumult of passion which presently subsides.

The swarms ebb and flow about these little stands—bees, not bringing any honey, but attracted to the hive where it is rumored most honey is to be had. By habit some always stand or sit about a particular hive, waiting for the show of comb. By-and-by there is a stir; the crowd thickens; one beardless youth shouts out the figure “one-half”; another howls, “three-eighths.” The first one nods. It is done. The electric wire running up the stand quivers and takes the figure, passes it to all the other wires, transmits it to every office and hotel in the city, to all the “tickers” in ten thousand chambers and “bucketshops” and offices in the republic. Suddenly on the bulletin-boards in New Orleans, Chicago, San Francisco, Podunk, Liverpool, appear the mysterious “three-eighths,” electrifying the watchers of these boards, who begin to jabber and gesticulate and “transact business.” It is wonderful.

What induced the beardless young man to make this “investment” in “three-eighths”—who can tell? Perhaps he had heard, as he came into the room, that the Secretary of the Treasury was going to make a call of Fives; perhaps he had heard that Bismarck had said that the French blood was too thin and needed a little more iron; perhaps he had heard that a norther in Texas had killed a herd of cattle, or that two grasshoppers had been seen in the neighborhood of Fargo, or that Jay Hawker had been observed that morning hurrying to his brokers with a scowl on his face and his hat pulled over his eyes. The young man sold what he did not have, and the other young man bought what he will never get.

This is business of the higher and almost immaterial sort, and has an element of faith in it, and, as one may say, belief in the unseen, whence it is characterized by an expression—“dealing in futures.” It is not gambling, for there are no “chips” used, and there is no roulette-table in sight, and there are no piles of money or piles of anything else. It is not a lottery, for there is no wheel at which impartial men preside to insure honest drawings, and there are no predestined blanks and prizes, and the man who buys and the man who sells can do something, either in the newspapers or elsewhere, to affect the worth of the investment, whereas in a lottery everything depends upon the turn of the blind wheel. It is not necessary, however, to attempt a defense of the Chamber. It is one of the recognized ways of becoming important and powerful in this world. The privilege of the floor—a seat, as it is called—in this temple of the god Chance to be Rich is worth more than a seat in the Cabinet. It is not only true that a fortune may be made here in a day or lost here in a day, but that a nod and a wink here enable people all over the land to ruin others or ruin themselves with celerity. The relation of the Chamber to the business of the country is therefore evident. If an earthquake should suddenly sink this temple and all its votaries into the bowels of the earth, with all its nervousness and all its electricity, it is appalling to think what would become of the business of the country.

Not far from this vast Chamber, where great financial operations are conducted on the highest principles of honor, and with the strictest regard to the Marquis of Dusenbury’s rules, there is another less pretentious Chamber, known as “open,” a sort of overflow meeting. Those who have not quite left hope behind can go in here. Here are the tickers communicating with the Chamber, tended by lads, who transfer the figures to big blackboards on the wall. In front of these boards sit, from morning to night, rows, perhaps relays, of men intently or listlessly watching the figures. Many of them, who seldom make a sign, come here from habit; they have nowhere else to go. Some of them were once lords in the great Chamber, who have been, as the phrase is, “cleaned out.” There is a gray-bearded veteran in seedy clothes, with sunken fiery eyes, who was once many times a millionaire, was a power in the Board, followed by reporters, had a palace in the Avenue, and drove to his office with coachman and footman in livery, and his wife headed the list of charities. Now he spends his old age watching this blackboard, and considers it a good day that brings him five dollars and his car-fare. At one end of the low-ceiled apartment are busy clerks behind a counter, alert and cheerful. If one should go through a side door and down a passage he might encounter the smell of rum. Smart young men, clad in the choicest raiment from the misfit counters, with greed stamped on their astute faces, bustle about, watch the blackboards, and make investments with each other. Middle-aged men in slouch hats lounge around with hungry eyes. The place is feverish rather than exciting. A tall fellow, whose gait and clothes proclaim him English, with a hard face and lack-lustre eyes, saunters about; his friends at home suppose he is making his fortune in America. A dapper young gentleman, quite in the mode, and with the quick air of prosperity, rapidly enters the room and confers with a clerk at the counter. He has the run of the Chamber, and is from the great house of Flamm and Slamm. Perhaps he is taking a “flier” on his own account, perhaps he represents his house in a side transaction; there are so many ways open to enterprising young men in the city; at any rate, his entrance is regarded as significant: This is not a hospital for the broken down and “cleaned out” of the Chamber, but it is a place of business, which is created and fed by the incessant “ticker.” How men existed or did any business at all before the advent of the “ticker” is a wonder.

But the Chamber, the creator of low-pressure and high-pressure, the inspirer of the “ticker,” is the great generator of business. Here I found Henderson in the morning hour, and he came up to me on the call of a messenger. He approached, nonchalant and smiling as usual. “Do you see that man,” he said, as we stood a moment looking down, “sitting there on a side bench—big body, small head, hair grayish, long beard parted—apparently taking no interest in anything?

“That’s Flink, who made the corner in O. B.—one of the longest-headed operators in the Chamber. He is about the only man who dare try a hold with Jay Hawker. And for some reason or another, though they have apparent tussles, Hawker rather favors him. Five years ago he could just raise money enough to get into the Chamber. Now he is reckoned at anywhere from five to ten millions. I was at his home the other night. Everybody was there. I had a queer feeling, in all the magnificence, that the sheriff might be in there in ten days. Yet he may own a good slice of the island in ten years. His wife, whom I complimented, and who thanked me for coming, said she had invited none but the reshershy.”

“He looks like a rascal,” I ventured to remark.

“Oh, that is not a word used in the Chamber. He is called a ‘daisy.’ I was put into his pew in church the other Sunday, and the preacher described him and his methods so exactly that I didn’t dare look at him. When we came out he whispered, ‘That was rather hard on Slack; he must have felt it.’ These men rather like that sort of preaching.”

“I don’t come here often,” Henderson resumed, as we walked away. “The market is flat today. There promised to be a little flurry in L. and P., and I looked in for a customer.”

We walked to his downtown club to lunch. Everybody, I noticed, seemed to know Henderson, and his presence was hailed with a cordial smile, a good-humored nod, or a hearty grasp of the hand. I never knew a more prepossessing man; his bonhomie was infectious. Though his demeanor was perfectly quiet and modest, he carried the air of good-fellowship. He was entirely frank, cordial, and had that sort of sincerity which one can afford to have who does not take life too seriously. Tall—at least six feet-with a well-shaped head set on square shoulders, brown hair inclined to curl, large blue eyes which could be merry or exceedingly grave, I thought him a picture of manly beauty. Good-natured, clever, prosperous, and not yet thirty. What a dower!

After we had disposed of our little matter of business, which I confess was not exactly satisfactory to me, although when I was told that “the first bondholders will be obliged to come in,” he added that “of course we shall take care of our friends,” we went to his bachelor quarters uptown. “I want you to see,” he said, “how a hermit lives.”

The apartments were not my idea of a hermitage—except in the city. A charming library, spacious, but so full as to be cozy, with an open fire; chamber, dressing-room, and bathroom connecting, furnished with everything that a luxurious habit could suggest and good taste would not refuse, made a retreat that could almost reconcile a sinner to solitude. There were a few good paintings, many rare engravings, on the walls, a notable absence, even in the sleeping-room, of photographs of actresses and professional beauties, but here and there souvenirs of travel and evidences that the gentler sex had contributed the skill of their slender fingers to the cheerfulness of the bachelor’s home. Scattered about were the daily and monthly products of the press, the newest sensations, the things talked about at dinners, but the walls for the most part were lined with books that are recognized as the proper possessions of the lover of books, and most of them in exquisite bindings. Less care, I thought, had been given in the collection to “sets” of “standards” than to those that are rare, or for some reason, either from distinguished ownership or autograph notes, have a peculiar value.

In this atmosphere, when we were prepared to take our ease, the talk was no longer of stocks, or railways, or schemes, but of books. Whether or not Henderson loved literature I did not then make up my mind, but he had a passion for books, especially for rare and first editions; and the delight with which he exhibited his library, the manner in which he handled the books that he took down one after the other, the sparkle in his eyes over a “find” or a bargain, gave me a side of his character quite different from that I should have gained by seeing him “in the street” only. He had that genuine respect and affection for a “book” which has become almost traditional in these days of cheap and flimsy publications, a taste held by scholars and collectors, and quite beyond the popular comprehension. The respect for a book is essential to the dignity and consideration of the place of literature in the world, and when books are treated with no more regard than the newspaper, it is a sign that literature is losing its power. Even the collector, who may read little and care more for the externals than for the soul of his favorites, by the honor he pays them, by the solicitude he expends upon their preservation without spot, by the lavishness of expense upon binding, contributes much to the dignity of that art which preserves for the race the continuity of its thought and development. If Henderson loved books merely as a collector whose taste for luxury and expense takes this direction, his indulgence could not but have a certain refining influence. I could not see that he cultivated any decided specialty, but he had many rare copies which had cost fabulous prices, the possession of which gives a reputation to any owner. “My shelves of Americana,” he said, “are nothing like Goodloe’s, who has a lot of scarce things that I am hoping to get hold of some day. But there’s a little thing” (it was a small coffee-colored tract of six leaves, upon which the binder of the city had exercised his utmost skill) “which Goodloe offered me five hundred dollars for the other day. I picked it up in a New Hampshire garret.” Not the least interesting part of the collection was first editions of American authors—a person’s value to a collector is often in proportion to his obscurity—and what most delighted him among them were certain thin volumes of poetry, which the authors since becoming famous had gone to a good deal of time and expense to suppress. The world seems to experience a lively pleasure in holding a man to his early follies. There were many examples of superb binding, especially of exquisite tooling on hog-skin covers—the appreciation of which has lately greatly revived. The recent rage for bindings has been a sore trouble to students and collectors in special lines, raising the prices of books far beyond their intrinsic value. I had a charming afternoon in Henderson’s library, an enjoyment not much lessened at the time by experiencing in it, with him, rather a sense of luxury than of learning. It is true, one might pass an hour altogether different in the garret of a student, and come away with quite other impressions of the pageant of life.

At five o’clock his stylish trap was sent around from the boarding stable, and we drove in the Park till twilight. Henderson handling the reins, and making a part of that daily display which is too heterogeneous to have distinction, reverted quite naturally to the tone of worldliness and tolerant cynicism which had characterized his conversation in the morning. If the Park and the moving assemblage had not the air of distinction, it had that of expense, which is quite as attractive to many. Here, as downtown, my companion seemed to know and be known by everybody, returning the familiar salutes of brokers and club men, receiving gracious bows from stout matrons, smiles and nods from pretty women, and more formal recognition from stately and stiff elderly men, who sat bolt-upright beside their wives and tried to look like millionaires. For every passerby Henderson had a quick word of characterization sufficiently amusing, and about many a story which illuminated the social life of the day. It was wonderful how many of this chance company had little “histories”—comic, tragic, pitiful, interesting enough for the pages of a novel.

“There is a young lady”—Henderson touched his hat, and I caught a glimpse of golden hair and a flash of dark eyes out of a mass of furs—“who has no history: the world is all before her.”

“Who is that?”

“The daughter of old Eschelle—Carmen Eschelle—the banker and politician, you remember; had a diplomatic position abroad, and the girl was educated in Europe. She is very clever. She and her mother have more money than they ought to know what to do with.”

“That was the celebrated Jay Hawker” ( a moment after), “in the modest coupe—not much display about him.”

“Is he recognized by respectable people?”

“Recognized?” Henderson laughed. “He’s a power. There are plenty of people who live by trying to guess what he is going to do. Hawker isn’t such a bad fellow. Other people have used the means he used to get rich and haven’t succeeded. They are not held up to point a moral. The trouble is that Hawker succeeded. Of course, it’s a game. He plays as fair as anybody.”

“Yes,” Henderson resumed, walking his horses in sight of the obelisk, which suggested the long continuance of the human race, “it is the same old game, and it is very interesting to those who are in it. Outsiders think it is all greed. In the Chamber it is a good deal the love of the game, to watch each other, to find out a man’s plans, to circumvent him, to thwart him, to start a scheme and manipulate it, to catch somebody, to escape somebody; it is a perpetual excitement.”

“The machine in the Chamber appears to run very smoothly,” I said. “Oh, that is a public register and indicator. The system back of it is comprehensive, and appears to be complicated, but it is really very simple. Spend an hour some day in the office of Flamm and Slamm, and you will see a part of the system. There are, always a number of men watching the blackboard, figures on which are changed every minute by the attendants. Telegrams are constantly arriving from every part of the Union, from all over the continent, from all the centres in Europe, which are read by some one connected with the firm, and then displayed for the guidance of the watchers of the blackboard. Upon this news one or another says, ‘I think I’ll buy,’ or ‘I think I’ll sell,’ so and so. His order is transmitted instantly to the Chamber. In two minutes the result comes back and appears upon the blackboard.”

“But where does the news come from?”

“From the men whose special business it is to pick it up or make it. They are inside of politics, of the railways, of the weather bureau, everywhere. The other day in Chicago I sat some time in a broker’s office with others watching the market, and dropped into conversation with a bright young fellow, at whose right hand, across the rail, was a telegraph operator at the end of a private wire. Soon a man came in quietly, and whispered in the ear of my neighbor and went out. The young fellow instantly wrote a despatch and handed it to the operator, and turning to me, said, ‘Now watch the blackboard.’

“In an incredibly short space of time a fall in a leading railway showed on the blackboard. ‘What was it?’ I asked. ‘Why, that man was the general freight manager of the A. B. road. He told me that they were to cut rates. I sent it to New York by a private wire.’ I learned by further conversation that my young gentleman was a Manufacturer of News, and that such was his address and intelligence that though he was not a member of the broker’s firm, he made ten thousand a year in the business. Soon another man came in, whispered his news, and went away. Another despatch—another responsive change in the figures. ‘That,’ explained my companion, ‘was a man connected with the weather bureau. He told me that there would be a heavy frost tonight in the Northwest.’”

“Do they sell the weather?” I asked, very much amused.

“Yes, twice; once over a private wire, and then to the public, after the value of it has been squeezed out, in the shape of predictions. Oh, the weather bureau is worth all the money it costs, for business purposes. It is a great auxiliary.”

Dining that evening with Henderson at his club, I had further opportunity to study a representative man. He was of a good New Hampshire family, exceedingly respectable without being distinguished. Over the chimney-place in the old farmhouse hung a rusty Queen Anne that had been at the taking of Louisburg. His grandfather shouldered a musket at Bunker Hill; his father, the youngest son, had been a judge as well as a farmer, and noted for his shrewdness and reticence. Rodney, inheriting the thrift of his ancestors, had pushed out from his home, adapting this thrift to the modern methods of turning it to account. He had brought also to the city the stamina of three generations of plain living—a splendid capital, by which the city is constantly reinforced, and which one generation does not exhaust, except by the aid of extreme dissipation. With sound health, good ability, and fair education, he had the cheerful temperament which makes friends, and does not allow their misfortunes to injure his career. Generous by impulse, he would rather do a favor than not, and yet he would be likely to let nothing interfere with any object he had in view for himself. Inheriting a conventional respect for religion and morality, he was not so bigoted as to rebuke the gayety of a convivial company, nor so intractable as to make him an uncomfortable associate in any scheme, according to the modern notions of business, that promised profit. His engaging manner made him popular, and his good-natured adroitness made him successful. If his early experience of life caused him to be cynical, he was not bitterly so; his cynicism was of the tolerant sort that does not condemn the world and withdraw from it, but courts it and makes the most of it, lowering his private opinion of men in proportion as he is successful in the game he plays with them. At this period I could see that he had determined to be successful, and that he had not determined to be unscrupulous. He would only drift with the tide that made for fortune. He enjoyed the world—a sufficient reason why the world should like him. His business morality was gauged by what other people do in similar circumstances. In short, he was a product of the period since the civil war closed, that great upheaval of patriotic feeling and sacrifice, which ended in so much expansion and so many opportunities. If he had remained in New Hampshire he would probably have been a successful politician, successful not only in keeping in place, but in teaching younger aspirants that serving the country is a very good way to the attainment of luxury and the consideration that money brings. But having chosen the law as a stepping-stone to the lobby, to speculation, and the manipulation of chances, he had a poor opinion of politics and of politicians. His success thus far, though considerable, had not been sufficient to create for him powerful enemies, so that he may be said to be admired by all and feared by none. In the general opinion he was a downright good fellow and amazingly clever.

VII

In youth, as at the opera, everything seems possible. Surely it is not necessary to choose between love and riches. One may have both, and the one all the more easily for having attained the other. It must be a fiction of the moralists who construct the dramas that the god of love and the god of money each claims an undivided allegiance. It was in some wholly legendary, perhaps spiritual, world that it was necessary to renounce love to gain the Rhine gold. The boxes at the Metropolitan did not believe this. The spectators of the boxes could believe it still less. For was not beauty there seen shining in jewels that have a market value, and did not love visibly preside over the union, and make it known that his sweetest favors go with a prosperous world? And yet, is the charm of life somewhat depending upon a sense of its fleetingness, of its phantasmagorial character, a note of coming disaster, maybe, in the midst of its most seductive pageantry, in the whirl and glitter and hurry of it? Is there some subtle sense of exquisite satisfaction in snatching the sweet moments of life out of the very delirium of it, that must soon end in an awakening to bankruptcy of the affections, and the dreadful loss of illusions? Else why do we take pleasure—a pleasure so deep that it touches the heart like melancholy—in the common drama of the opera? How gay and joyous is the beginning! Mirth, hilarity, entrancing sound, brilliant color, the note of a trumpet calling to heroism, the beseeching of the concordant strings, and the soft flute inviting to pleasure; scenes placid, pastoral, innocent; light-hearted love, the dance on the green, the stately pageant in the sunlit streets, the court, the ball, the mad splendor of life. And then love becomes passion, and passion thwarted hurries on to sin, and sin lifts to the heights of the immortal, sweetly smiling gods, and plunges to the depths of despair. In vain the orchestra, the inevitable accompaniment of life, warns and pleads and admonishes; calm has gone, and gayety has gone; there is no sweetness now but in the wildness of surrender and of sacrifice. How sad are the remembered strains that aforetime were incentives to love and promises of happiness! Gloom settles upon the scene; Mephisto, the only radiant one, flits across it, and mocks the poor broken-hearted girl clinging to the church door. There is a dungeon, the chanting of the procession of tonsured priests, the passing-bell. Seldom appears the golden bridge over which the baffled and tired pass into Valhalla.

Do we like this because it is life, or because there is a certain satisfaction in seeing the tragedy which impends over all, pervades the atmosphere, as it were, and adds something of zest to the mildest enjoyment? Should we go away from the mimic stage any, better and stronger if the drama began in the dungeon and ended on the greensward, with innocent love and resplendent beauty in possession of the Rhine gold?

How simple, after all, was the created world on the stage to the real world in the auditorium, with its thousand complexities and dramatic situations, and if the little knot of players of parts for an hour could have had leisure to be spectators of the audience, what a deeper revelation of life would they not have seen! For the world has never assembled such an epitome of itself, in its passion for pleasure and its passion for display, as in the modern opera, with its ranks and tiers of votaries from the pit to the dome. I fancy that even Margaret, whose love for music was genuine, was almost as much fascinated by the greater spectacle as by the less.

It was a crowded night, for the opera was one that appealed to the senses and stimulated them to activity, and left the mind free to pursue its own schemes; in a word, orchestra and the scenes formed a sort of accompaniment and interpreter to the private dramas in the boxes. The opera was made for society, and not society for the opera. We occupied a box in the second tier—the Morgans, Margaret, and my wife. Morgan said that the glasses were raised to us from the parquet and leveled at us from the loges because we were a country party, but he well enough knew whose fresh beauty and enthusiastic young face it was that drew the fire when the curtain fell on the first act, and there was for a moment a little lull in the hum of conversation.

“I had heard,” Morgan was saying, “that the opera was not acclimated in New York; but it is nearly so. The audience do not jabber so loud nor so incessantly as at San Carlo, and they do not hum the airs with the singers—”

“Perhaps,” said my wife, “that is because they do not know the airs.”

“But they are getting on in cultivation, and learning how to assert the social side of the opera, which is not to be seriously interfered with by the music on the stage.”

“But the music, the scenery, were never before so good,” I replied to these cynical observations.

“That is true. And the social side has risen with it. Do you know what an impudent thing the managers did the other night in protesting against the raising of the lights by which the house was made brilliant and the cheap illusions of the stage were destroyed? They wanted to make the house positively gloomy for the sake of a little artificial moonlight on the painted towers and the canvas lakes.”

As the world goes, the scene was brilliant, of course with republican simplicity. The imagination was helped by no titled names any more than the eye was by the insignia of rank, but there was a certain glow of feeling, as the glass swept the circle, to know that there were ten millions in this box, and twenty in the next, and fifty in the next, attested well enough by the flash of jewels and the splendor of attire, and one might indulge a genuine pride in the prosperity of the republic. As for beauty, the world, surely, in this later time, had flowered here—flowered with something of Aspasia’s grace and something of the haughty coldness of Agrippina. And yet it was American. Here and there in the boxes was a thoroughbred portrait by Copley—the long shapely neck, the sloping shoulders, the drooping eyelids, even to the gown in which the great-grandmother danced with the French officers.

“Who is that lovely creature?” asked Margaret, indicating a box opposite.

I did not know. There were two ladies, and behind them I had no difficulty in making out Henderson and—Margaret evidently had not seen him Mr. Lyon. Almost at the same moment Henderson recognized me, and signaled for me to come to his box. As I rose to do so, Mrs. Morgan exclaimed: “Why, there is Mr. Lyon! Do tell him we are here.” I saw Margaret’s color rise, but she did not speak.

I was presented to Mrs. Eschelle and her daughter; in the latter I recognized the beauty who had flashed by us in the Park. The elder lady inclined to stoutness, and her too youthful apparel could not mislead one as to the length of her pilgrimage in this world, nor soften the hard lines of her worldly face-lines acquired, one could see, by a social struggle, and not drawn there by an innate patrician insolence.

“We are glad to see a friend of Mr. Henderson’s,” she said, “and of Mr. Lyon’s also. Mr. Lyon has told us much of your charming country home. Who is that pretty girl in your box, Mr. Fairchild?”

Miss Eschelle had her glass pointed at Margaret as I gave the desired information.

“How innocent!” she murmured. “And she’s quite in the style—isn’t she, Mr. Lyon?” she asked, turning about, her sweet mobile face quite the picture of what she was describing. “We are all innocent in these days.”

“It is a very good style,” I said.

“Isn’t it becoming?” asked the girl, making her dark eyes at once merry and demure.

Mr. Lyon was looking intently at the opposite box, and a slight shade came over his fine face. “Ah, I see!”

“I beg your pardon, Miss Eschelle,” he said, after a second, “I hardly know which to admire most, the beauty, or the wit, or the innocence of the American women.”

“There is nothing so confusing, though, as the country innocence,” the girl said, with the most natural air; “it never knows where to stop.”

“You are too absurd, Carmen,” her mother interposed; “as if the town girl did!”

“Well, mamma, there is authority for saying that there is a time for everything, only one must be in the fashion, you know.”

Mr. Lyon looked a little dubious at this turn of the talk; Mr. Henderson was as evidently amused at the girl’s acting. I said I was glad to see that goodness was in fashion.

“Oh, it often is. You know we were promised a knowledge of good as well as evil. It depends upon the point of view. I fancy, now, that Mr. Henderson tolerates the good—that is the reason we get on so well together; and Mr. Lyon tolerates the evil—that’s the reason he likes New York. I have almost promised him that I will have a mission school.”

The girl looked quite capable of it, or of any other form of devotion. Notwithstanding her persistent banter, she had a most inviting innocence of manner, almost an ingenuousness, that well became her exquisite beauty. And but for a tentative daring in her talk, as if the gentle creature were experimenting as to how far one could safely go, her innocence might have seemed that of ignorance.

It came out in the talk that Mr. Lyon had been in Washington for a week, and would return there later on.

“We had a claim on him,” said Mrs. Eschelle, “for his kindness to us in London, and we are trying to convince him that New York is the real capital.”

“Unfortunately,” added Miss Eschelle, looking up in Mr. Lyon’s face, “he visited Brandon first, and you seem to have bewitched him with your simple country ways. I can get him to talk of nothing else.”

“You mean to say,” Mr. Lyon replied, with the air of retorting, “that you have asked me about nothing else.”

“Oh, you know we felt a little responsible for you; and there is no place so dangerous as the country. Now here you are protected—we put all the wickedness on the stage, and learn to recognize and shun it.”

“It may be wicked,” said her mother, “but it is dull. Don’t you find it so, Mr. Henderson? I am passionately fond of Wagner, but it is too noisy for anything tonight.”

“I notice, dear,” the dutiful daughter replied for all of us, “that you have to raise your voice. But there is the ballet. Let us all listen now.”

Mr. Lyon excused himself from going with me, saying that he would call at our hotel, and I took Henderson. “I shall count the minutes you are going to lose,” the girl said as we went out-to our box. The lobbies in the interact were thronged with men—for the most part the young speculators of the Chamber turned into loungers in the foyer—knowing, alert, attitudinizing in the extreme of the mode, unable even in this hour to give beauty the preference to business, well knowing, perhaps, that beauty itself in these days has a fine eye for business.

I liked Henderson better in our box than in his own. Was it because the atmosphere was more natural and genuine? Or was it Margaret’s transparent nature, her sincere enjoyment of the scene, her evident pleasure in the music, the color, the gayety of the house, that made him drop the slight cynical air of the world which had fitted him so admirably a moment before? He already knew my wife and the Morgans, and, after the greetings were made, he took a seat by Margaret, quite content while the act was going on to watch its progress in the play of her responsive features. How quickly she felt, how the frown followed the smile, how, she seemed to weigh and try to apprehend the meaning of what went on—how her every sense enjoyed life!

“It is absurd,” she said, turning her bright face to him when the curtain dropped, “to be so interested in fictitious trouble.”

“I’m not so sure that it is,” he replied, in her own tone; “the opera is a sort of pulpit, and not seldom preaches an awful sermon—more plainly than the preacher dares to make it.”

“But not in nomine Dei.”

“No. But who can say what is most effective? I often wonder, as I watch the congregations coming from the churches on the Avenue, if they are any more solemnized than the audiences that pour out of this house. I confess that I cannot shake off ‘Lohengrin’ in a good while after I hear it.”

“And so you think the theatres have a moral influence?”

“Honestly”—and I heard his good-natured laugh—“I couldn’t swear to that. But then we don’t know what New York might be without them.”

“I don’t know,” said Margaret, reflectively, “that my own good impulses, such as I have, are excited by anything I see on the stage; perhaps I am more tolerant, and maybe toleration is not good. I wonder if I should grow worldly, seeing more of it?”

“Perhaps it is not the stage so much as the house,” Henderson replied, beginning to read the girl’s mind.

“Yes, it would be different if one came alone and saw the play, unconscious of the house, as if it were a picture. I think it is the house that disturbs one, makes one restless and discontented.”

“I never analyzed my emotions,” said Henderson, “but when I was a boy and came to the theatre I well remember that it made me ambitious; every sort of thing seemed possible of attainment in the excitement of the crowded house, the music, the lights, the easy successes on the stage; nothing else is more stimulating to a lad; nothing else makes the world more attractive.”

“And does it continue to have the same effect, Mr. Henderson?”

“Hardly,” and he smiled; “the illusion goes, and the stage is about as real as the house—usually less interesting. It can hardly compete with the comedy in the boxes.”

“Perhaps it is lack of experience, but I like the play for itself.”

“Oh yes; desire for the dramatic is natural. People will have it somehow. In the country village where there are no theatres the people make dramas out of each other’s lives; the most trivial incidents are magnified and talked about—dramatized, in short.”

“You mean gossiped about?”

“Well, you may call it gossip—nothing can be concealed; everybody knows about everybody else; there is no privacy; everything is used to create that illusory spectacle which the stage tries to give. I think that in the country village a good theatre would be a wholesome influence, satisfy a natural appetite indicated by the inquisition into the affairs of neighbors, and by the petty scandal.”

“We are on the way to it,” said Mr. Morgan, who sat behind them; “we have theatricals in the church parlors, which may grow into a nineteenth century substitute for the miracle-plays. You mustn’t, Margaret, let Mr. Henderson prejudice you against the country.”

“No,” said the latter, quickly; “I was only trying to defend the city. We country people always do that. We must base our theatrical life on something in nature.”

“What is the difference, Mr. Henderson,” asked Margaret, “between the gossip in the boxes and the country gossip you spoke of?”

“In toleration mainly, and lack of exact knowledge. It is here rather cynical persiflage, not concentrated public opinion.”

“I don’t follow you,” said Morgan. “It seems to me that in the city you’ve got gossip plus the stage.”

“That is to say, we have the world.”

“I don’t like to believe that,” said Margaret, seriously—“your definition of the world.”

“You make me see that it was a poor jest,” he said, rising to go. “By-the-way, we have a friend of yours in our box tonight—a young Englishman.”

“Oh, Mr. Lyon. We were all delighted with him. Such a transparent, genuine nature!”

“Tell him,” said my wife, “that we should be happy to see him at our hotel.”

When Henderson came back to his box Carmen did not look up, but she said, indifferently: “What, so soon? But your absence has made one person thoroughly miserable. Mr. Lyon has not taken his eyes off you. I never saw such an international attachment.”

“What more could I do for Miss Eschelle than to leave her in such company?”

“I beg your pardon,” said Lyon. “Miss Eschelle must believe that I thoroughly appreciate Mr. Henderson’s self-sacrifice. If I occasionally looked over where he was, I assure you it was in pity.”

“You are both altogether too self-sacrificing,” the beauty replied, turning to Henderson a look that was sweetly forgiving. “They who sin much shall be forgiven much, you know.”

“That leaves me,” Mr. Lyon answered, with a laugh, “as you say over here, out in the cold, for I have passed a too happy evening to feel like a transgressor.”

“The sins of omission are the worst sort,” she retorted.

“You see what you must do to be forgiven,” Henderson said to Lyon, with that good-natured smile that was so potent to smooth away sharpness.

“I fear I can never do enough to qualify myself.” And he also laughed.

“You never will,” Carmen answered, but she accompanied the doubt with a witching smile that denied it.

“What is all this about forgiveness?” asked Mrs. Eschelle, turning to them from regarding the stage.

“Oh, we were having an experience meeting behind your back, mamma, only Mr. Henderson won’t tell his experience.”

“Miss Eschelle is in such a forgiving humor tonight that she absolves before any one has a chance to confess,” he replied.

“Don’t you think I am always so, Mr. Lyon?”

Mr. Lyon bowed. “I think that an opera-box with Miss Eschelle is the easiest confessional in the world.”

“That’s something like a compliment. You see” (to Henderson) “how much you Americans have to learn.”

“Will you be my teacher?”

“Or your pupil,” the girl said, in a low voice, standing near him as she rose.

The play was over. In the robing and descending through the corridors there were the usual chatter, meaning looks, confidential asides. It is always at the last moment, in the hurry, as in a postscript, that woman says what she means, or what for the moment she wishes to be thought to mean. In the crowd on the main stairway the two parties saw each other at a distance, but without speaking.

“Is it true that Lyon is ‘epris’ there?” Carmen whispered to Henderson when she had scanned and thoroughly inventoried Margaret.

“You know as much as I do.”

“Well, you did stay a long time,” she said, in a lower tone.

As Margaret’s party waited for their carriage she saw Mrs. Eschelle and her daughter enter a shining coach, with footman and coachman in livery. Henderson stood raising his hat. A little white hand was shaken to him from the window, and a sweet, innocent face leaned forward—a face with dark, eyes and golden hair, lit up with a radiant smile. That face for the moment was New York to Margaret, and New York seemed a vain show.

Carmen threw herself back in her seat as if weary. Mrs. Eschelle sat bolt-upright.

“What in the world, child, made you go on so tonight?”

“I don’t know.”

“What made you snub Mr. Lyon so often?”

“Did I? He won’t mind much. Didn’t you see, mother, that he was distrait the moment he espied that girl? I’m not going to waste my time. I know the signs. No fisheries imbroglio for me, thank you.”

“Fish? Who said anything about fish?”

“Oh, the international business. Ask Mr. Henderson to explain it. The English want to fish in our waters, I believe. I think Mr. Lyon has had a nibble from a fresh-water fish. Perhaps it’s the other way, and he’s hooked. There be fishers of men, you know, mother.”

“You are a strange child, Carmen. I hope you will be civil to both of them.” And they rode on in silence.

VIII

In real life the opera or the theatre is only the prologue to the evening. Our little party supped at Delgardo’s. The play then begins. New York is quite awake by that time, and ready to amuse itself. After the public duty, the public attitudinizing, after assisting at the artificial comedy and tragedy which imitate life under a mask, and suggest without satisfying, comes the actual experience. My gentle girl—God bless your sweet face and pure heart!—who looked down from the sky-parlor at the Metropolitan upon the legendary splendor of the stage, and the alluring beauty and wealth of the boxes, and went home to create in dreams the dearest romance in a maiden’s life, you did not know that for many the romance of the night just began when the curtain fell.

The streets were as light as day. At no other hour were the pavements so thronged, was there such a crush of carriages, such a blockade of cars, such running, and shouting, greetings and decorous laughter, such a swirl of pleasurable excitement. Never were the fashionable cafes and restaurants so crowded and brilliant. It is not a carnival time; it is just the flow and ebb of a night’s pleasure, an electric night which has all of the morning except its peace, a night of the gayest opportunity and unlimited possibility.

At each little table was a drama in progress, light or serious—all the more serious for being light at the moment and unconsidered. Morgan, who was so well informed in the gossip of society and so little involved in it—some men have this faculty, which makes them much more entertaining than the daily newspaper—knew the histories of half the people in the room. There were an Italian marquis and his wife supping together like lovers, so strong is the force of habit that makes this public life necessary even when the domestic life is established. There is a man who shot himself rather seriously on the doorsteps of the beauty who rejected him, and in a year married the handsome and more wealthy woman who sits opposite him in that convivial party. There is a Russian princess, a fair woman with cool observant eyes, making herself agreeable to a mixed company in three languages. In this brilliant light is it not wonderful how dazzlingly beautiful the women are—brunettes in yellow and diamonds, blondes in elaborately simple toilets, with only a bunch of roses for ornament, in the flush of the midnight hour, in a radiant glow that even the excitement and the lifted glass cannot heighten? That pretty girl yonder—is she wife or widow?—slight and fresh and fair, they say has an ambition to extend her notoriety by going upon the stage; the young lady with her, who does not seem to fear a public place, may be helping her on the road. The two young gentlemen, their attendants, have the air of taking life more seriously than the girls, but regard with respectful interest the mounting vivacity of their companions, which rises and sparkles like the bubbles in the slender glasses which they raise to their lips with the dainty grace of practice. The staid family parties who are supping at adjoining tables notice this group with curiosity, and express their opinion by elevated eyebrows.

Margaret leaned back in her chair and regarded the whole in a musing’ frame of mind. I think she apprehended nothing of it except the light, the color, the beauty, the movement of gayety. For her the notes of the orchestra sounded through it all—the voices of the singers, the hum of the house; it was all a spectacle and a play. Why should she not enjoy it? There was something in the nature of the girl that responded to this form of pleasure—the legitimate pleasure the senses take in being gratified. “It is so different,” she said to me, “from the pleasure one has in an evening by the fire. Do you know, even Mr. Morgan seems worldly here.”

It was a deeper matter than she thought, this about worldliness, which had been raised in Margaret’s mind. Have we all double natures, and do we simply conform to whatever surrounds us? Is there any difference in kind between the country worldliness and the city worldliness? I do not suppose that Margaret formulated any of these ideas in words. Her knowledge of the city had hitherto been superficial. It was a place for shopping, for a day in a picture exhibition, for an evening in the theatre, no more a part of her existence than a novel or a book of travels: of the life of the town she knew nothing. That night in her room she became aware for the first time of another world, restless, fascinating, striving, full of opportunities. What must London be?

If we could only note the first coming into the mind of a thought that changes life and reforms character—supposing that every act and every new departure has this subtle beginning—we might be less the sport of circumstances than we seem to be. Unnoted, the desire so swiftly follows the thought and juggles with the will.

The next day Mr. Henderson left his card and a basket of roses. Mr. Lyon called. It was a constrained visit. Margaret was cordially civil, and I fancied that Mr. Lyon would have been more content if she had been less so. If he were a lover, there was little to please him in the exchange of the commonplaces of the day.

“Yes,” he was saying to my wife, “perhaps I shall have to change my mind about the simplicity of your American life. It is much the same in New York and London. It is only a question of more or less sophistication.”

“Mr. Henderson tells us,” said my wife, “that you knew the Eschelles in London.”

“Yes. Miss Eschelle almost had a career there last season.”

“Why almost?”

“Well—you will pardon me—one needs for success in these days to be not only very clever, but equally daring. It is every day more difficult to make a sensation.”

“I thought her, across the house,” Margaret said, “very pretty and attractive. I did not know you were so satirical, Mr. Lyon. Do you mean that one must be more daring, as you call it, in London than in New York?”

“I hope it will not hurt your national pride, Miss Debree, if I say that there is always the greater competition in the larger market.”

“Oh, my pride,” Margaret answered, “does not lie in that direction.”

“And to do her justice, I don’t think Miss Eschelle’s does, either. She appears to be more interested now in New York than in London.”

He laughed as he said this, and Margaret laughed also, and then stopped suddenly, thinking of the roses that came that morning. Could she be comparing the Londoner with the handsome American who sat by her side at the opera last night? She was half annoyed with herself at the thought.

“And are not you also interested in New York, Mr. Lyon?” my wife asked.

“Yes, moderately so, if you will permit me to say it.” It was an effort on his part to keep up the conversation, Margaret was so wholly unresponsive; and afterwards, knowing how affairs stood with them, I could understand his well-bred misery. The hardest thing in the world is to suffer decorously and make no sign in the midst of a society which insists on stoicism, no matter how badly one is hurt. The Society for First Aid to the Injured hardens its heart in these cases. “I have never seen another place,” he continued, “where the women are so busy in improving themselves. Societies, clubs, parlor lectures, readings, recitations, musicales, classes—it fatigues one to keep in sight of them. Every afternoon, every evening, something. I doubt if men are capable of such incessant energy, Mrs. Fairchild.”

“And you find they have no time to be agreeable?”

“Quite the contrary. There is nothing they are not interesting in, nothing about which they cannot talk, and talk intensely. They absorb everything, and have the gift of acquiring intelligence without, as one of them told me, having to waste time in reading. Yes, it is a most interesting city.”

The coming in of Mr. Morgan gave another turn to the talk. He had been to see a rural American play, an exhibition of country life and character, constructed in absolute disregard of any traditions of the stage.

“I don’t suppose,” Mr. Morgan said, “a foreigner would understand it; it would be impossible in Paris, incomprehensible in London.”

“Yes, I saw it,” said Mr. Lyon, thus appealed to. “It was very odd, and seemed to amuse the audience immensely. I suppose one must be familiar with American farm life to see the points of it. I confess that while I sat there, in an audience so keenly in sympathy with the play—almost a part of it, one might say—I doubted if I understood your people as well as I thought I did when I had been here a week only. Perhaps this is the beginning of an American drama.”

“Some people say that it is.”

“But it is so local!”

“Anything that is true must be true to local conditions, to begin with. The only question is, is it true to human nature? What puzzled me in this American play was its raising the old question of nature and art. You’ve seen Coquelin? Well, that is acting, as artificial as a sonnet, the perfection of training, skill in an art. You never doubt that he is performing in a play for the entertainment of an audience. You have the same enjoyment of it that you have of a picture—a picture, I mean, full of character and sentiment, not a photograph. But I don’t think of Denman Thompson as an actor trained to perfection in a dramatic school, but as a New Hampshire farmer. I don’t admire his skill; I admire him. There is plenty that is artificial, vulgarly conventional, in his play, plenty of imitation of the rustic that shows it is imitation, but he is the natural man. If he is a stage illusion, he does not seem so to me.” “Probably to an American audience only he does not,” Mr. Lyon remarked.

“Well, that is getting to be a tolerably large audience.”

“I doubt if you will change the laws of art,” said Mr. Lyon, rising to go.

“We shall hope to see you again at our house,” my wife said.

“You are very good. I should like it; but my time is running out.”

“If you cannot come, you may leave your adieus with Miss Debree, who is staying some time in the city,” my wife said, evidently to Margaret’s annoyance. But she could do no less than give him her city address, though the information was not accompanied by any invitation in her manner.

Margaret was to stay some time with two maiden ladies, old friends of her mother, the Misses Arbuser. The Arbusers were people of consequence in their day, with a certain social prestige; in fact, the excellent ladies were two generations removed from successful mercantile life, which in the remote prospective took on an old-family solidity. Nowhere else in the city could Margaret have come closer in contact with a certain phase of New York life in which women are the chief actors—a phase which may be a transition, and may be only a craze. It is not so much a condescension of society to literature as it is a discovery that literature and art, in the persons of those who produce both, may be sources of amusement, or perhaps, to be just, of the enlargement of the horizon and the improvement of the mind. The society mind was never before so hospitable to new ideas and new sensations. Charities, boards of managers, missions, hospitals, news-rooms, and lodging-houses for the illiterate and the homeless—these are not sufficient, even with balls, dancing classes, and teas, for the superfluous energies of this restless, improving generation; there must be also radical clubs, reading classes, study classes, ethical, historical, scientific, literary lectures, the reading of papers by ladies of distinction and gentlemen of special attainments—an unremitting pursuit of culture and information. Curiosity is awake. The extreme of social refinement and a mild Bohemianism almost touch. It passes beyond the affectation of knowing persons who write books and write for the press, artists in paint and artists in music. “You cannot be sure in the most exclusive circle”—it was Carmen Eschelle who said this—“that you will not meet an author or even a journalist.” Not all the women, however, adore letters or affect enthusiasm at drawing-room lectures; there are some bright and cynical ones who do not, who write papers themselves, and have an air of being behind the scenes.

Margaret had thought that she was fully occupied in the country, with her teaching, her reading, her literature and historical clubs, but she had never known before what it was to be busy and not have time for anything, always in pursuit of some new thing, and getting a fragment here and there; life was a good deal like reading the dictionary and remembering none of the words. And it was all so cosmopolitan and all-embracingly sympathetic. One day it was a paper by a Servian countess on the social life of the Servians, absorbingly interesting both in itself and because it was a countess who read it; and this was followed by the singing of an Icelandic tenor and a Swedish soprano, and a recital on the violin by a slight, red-haired, middle-aged woman from London. All the talents seem to be afloat and at the service of the strenuous ones who are cultivating themselves.

The first function at which Margaret assisted in the long drawing-rooms of the Arbusers was a serious one—one that combined the charm of culture with the temptations of benevolence. The rooms were crowded with the fashion of the town, with a sprinkling of clergymen and of thin philanthropic gentlemen in advanced years. It was a four-o’clock, and the assembly had the cheerfulness of a reception, only that the display of toilets was felt to be sanctified by a purpose. The performance opened with a tremendous prelude on the piano by Herr Bloomgarten, who had been Liszt’s favorite pupil; indeed, it was whispered that Liszt had said that, old as he was, he never heard Bloomgarten without learning something. There was a good deal of subdued conversation while the pianist was in his extreme agony of execution, and a hush of extreme admiration—it was divine, divine, ravishing—when he had finished. The speaker was a learned female pundit from India, and her object was to interest the women of America in the condition of their unfortunate Hindoo sisters. It appeared that thousands and tens of thousands of them were doomed to early and lifelong widowhood, owing to the operation of cruel caste laws, which condemned even girls betrothed to deceased Brahmins to perpetual celibacy. This fate could only be alleviated by the education and elevation of women. And money was needed for schools, especially for medical schools, which would break down the walls of prejudice and enfranchise the sex. The appeal was so charmingly made that every one was moved by it, especially the maiden ladies present, who might be supposed to enter into the feelings of their dusky sisters beyond the seas. The speaker said, with a touch of humor that always intensifies a serious discourse, that she had been told that in one of the New England States there was a superfluity of unmarried women; but this was an entirely different affair; it was a matter of choice with these highly educated and accomplished women. And the day had come when woman could make her choice! At this there was a great clapping of hands. It was one thing to be free to lead a life of single self-culture, and quite another to be compelled to lead a single fife without self-culture. The address was a great success, and much enthusiasm spread abroad for the cause of the unmarried women of India.

In the audience were Mrs. Eschelle and her daughter. Margaret and Carmen were made acquainted, and were drawn together by curiosity, and perhaps by a secret feeling of repulsion. Carmen was all candor and sweetness, and absorbingly interested in the women of India, she said. With Margaret’s permission she would come and see her, for she believed they had common friends.

It would seem that there could not be much sympathy between natures so opposed, persons who looked at life from such different points of view, but undeniably Carmen had a certain attraction for Margaret. The New Englander, whose climate is at once his enemy and his tonic, always longs for the tropics, which to him are a region of romance, as Italy is to the German. In his nature, also, there is something easily awakened to the allurements of a sensuous existence, and to a desire for a freer experience of life than custom has allowed him. Carmen, who showed to Margaret only her best side—she would have been wise to exhibit no other to Henderson, but women of her nature are apt to cheapen themselves with men—seemed an embodiment of that graceful gayety and fascinating worldliness which make the world agreeable.

One morning, a few days after the Indian function, Margaret was alone in her own cozy sitting-room. Nothing was wanting that luxury could suggest to make it in harmony with a beautiful woman, nothing that did not flatter and please, or nurse, perhaps, a personal sense of beauty, and impart that glow of satisfaction which comes when the senses are adroitly ministered to. Margaret had been in a mood that morning to pay extreme attention to her toilet. The result was the perfection of simplicity, of freshness, of maiden purity, enhanced by the touch of art. As she surveyed herself in the pier-glass, and noted the refined lines of the morning-gown which draped but did not conceal the more exquisite lines of her figure, and adjusted a rose in her bosom, she did not feel like a Puritan, and, although she may not have noted the fact, she did not look like one. It was not a look of vanity that she threw into the mirror, or of special self-consciousness; in her toilet she had obeyed only her instinct (that infallible guide in a woman of refinement), and if she was conscious of any emotion, it was of the stirring within her of the deepest womanly nature.

In fact, she was restless. She flung herself into an easy-chair before the fire, and took up a novel. It was a novel with a religious problem. In vain she tried to be interested in it. At home she would have absorbed it eagerly; they would have discussed it; the doubts and suggestions in it would have assumed the deepest personal importance. It might have made an era in her thoughtful country life. Here it did not so appeal to her; it seemed unreal and shadowy in a life that had so much more of action than of reflection in it. It was a life fascinating and exciting, and profoundly unsatisfactory. Yet, after all, it was more really life than that placid vegetation in the country. She felt that in the whirl of only a few days of it—operas, receptions, teas, readings, dances, dinners, where everybody sparkled with a bewildering brilliancy, and yet from which one brought away nothing but a sense of strain; such gallantry, such compliments, such an easy tossing about of every topic under heaven; such an air of knowing everything, and not caring about anything very much; so much mutual admiration and personal satisfaction! She liked it, and perhaps was restless because she liked it. To be admired, to be deferred to—was there any harm in that? Only, if one suffers admiration today, it becomes a necessity tomorrow. She began to feel the influence of that life which will not let one stand still for a moment. If it is not the opera, it is a charity; if it is not a lover, it is some endowed cot in a hospital. There must be something going on every day, every hour.

Yes, she was restless, and could not read. She thought of Mr. Henderson. He had called formally. She had seen him, here and there, again and again. He had sought her out in all companies; his face had broken into a smile when he met her; he had talked with her lightly, gayly; she remembered the sound of his voice; she had learned to know his figure in a room among a hundred; and she blushed as she remembered that she had once or twice followed him with her eyes in a throng. He was, to be sure, nothing to her; but he was friendly; he was certainly entertaining; he was a part, somehow, of this easy-flowing life.

Miss Eschelle was announced. Margaret begged that she would come upstairs without ceremony. The mutual taking-in of the pretty street costume and the pretty morning toilet was the work of a moment—the photographer has invented no machine that equals a woman’s eyes for such a purpose.

“How delightful it is! how altogether charming!” and Margaret felt that she was included with the room in this admiration. “I told mamma that I was coming to see you this morning, even if I missed the Nestors’ luncheon. I like to please myself sometimes. Mamma says I’m frivolous, but do you know”—the girls were comfortably seated by the fire, and Carmen turned her sweet face and candid eyes to her companion—“I get dreadfully tired of all this going round and round. No, I don’t even go to the Indigent Mothers’ Home; it’s part of the same thing, but I haven’t any gift that way. Ah, you were reading—that novel.”

“Yes; I was trying to read it; I intend to read it.”

“Oh, we have had it! It’s a little past now, but it has been all the rage. Everybody has read it; that is, I don’t know that anybody has read it, but everybody has been talking about it. Of course somebody must have read it, to set the thing agoing. And it has been discussed to death. I sometimes feel as if I had changed my religion half a dozen times in a fortnight. But I haven’t heard anything about it for a week. We have taken up the Hindoo widows now, you know.” And the girl laughed, as if she knew she were talking nonsense.

“And you do not read much in the city?” Margaret asked, with an answering smile.

“Yes; in the summer. That is, some do. There is a reading set. I don’t know that they read much, but there is a reading set. You know, Miss Debree, that when a book is published—really published, as Mr. Henderson says—you don’t need to read it. Somehow it gets into the air and becomes common property. Everybody hears the whole thing. You can talk about it from a notice. Of course there are some novels that one must read in order to understand human nature. Do you read French?”

“Yes; but not many French novels; I cannot.”

“Nor can I,” said Carmen, with a sincere face. “They are too realistic for me.” She was at the moment running over in her mind a “situation” in a paper-covered novel turned down on her nightstand. “Mr. Henderson says that everybody condemns the French novels, and that people praise the novels they don’t read.”

“You know Mr. Henderson very well?”

“Yes; we’ve known him a long time. He is the only man I’m afraid of.”

“Afraid of?”

“Well, you know he is a sort of Club man; that style of man provokes your curiosity, for you never can tell how much such men know. It makes you a little uneasy.”

Carmen was looking into the fire, as if abstractedly reflecting upon the nature of men in general, but she did not fail to notice a slight expression of pain on Margaret’s face.

“But there is your Mr. Lyon—”

Margaret laughed. “You do me too much honor. I think you discovered him first.”

“Well, our Mr. Lyon.” Carmen was still looking into the fire. “He is such a good young man!”

Margaret did not exactly fancy this sort of commendation, and she replied, with somewhat the tone of defending him, “We all have the highest regard for Mr. Lyon.”

“Yes, and he is quite gone on Brandon, I assure you. He intends to do a great deal of good in the world. I think he spends half his time in New York studying, he calls it, our charitable institutions. Mamma reproaches me that I don’t take more interest in philanthropy. That is her worldly side. Everybody has a worldly side. I’m as worldly as I can be”—this with a look of innocence that denied the self-accusation—“but I haven’t any call to marry into Exeter Hall and that sort of thing. That is what she means—dear mamma. Are you High-Church or evangelical?” she asked, after a moment, turning to Margaret?

Margaret explained that she was neither.

“Well, I am High-Church, and Mr. Lyon is evangelical-Church evangelical. There couldn’t be any happiness, you know, without harmony in religious belief.”

“I should think not,” said Margaret, now quite recovering herself. “It must be a matter of great anxiety to you here.”

Carmen was quick to note the change of tone, and her face beamed with merriment as she rose.

“What nonsense I’ve been talking! I did not intend to go into such deep things. You must not mind what I said about Mr.—(a little pause to read Margaret’s face)—Mr. Lyon. We esteem him as much as you do. How charming you are looking this morning! I wish I had your secret of not letting this life tell on one.” And she was gone in a shower of compliments and smiles and caressing ways. She had found out what she came to find out. Mr. Henderson needs watching, she said to herself.

The interview, as Margaret thought it over, was amusing, but it did not raise her spirits. Was everybody worldly and shallow? Was this the sort of woman whom Mr. Henderson fancied? Was Mr. Henderson the sort of man to whom such a woman would be attracted?

IX

It was a dinner party in one of the up-town houses—palaces—that begin to repeat in size, spaciousness of apartments, and decoration the splendor of the Medicean merchant princes. It is the penalty that we pay for the freedom of republican opportunity that some must be very rich. This is the logical outcome of the open chance for everybody to be rich—and it is the surest way to distinction. In a free country the course must be run, and it is by the accumulation of great wealth that one can get beyond anxiety, and be at liberty to indulge in republican simplicity.

Margaret and Miss Arbuser were ushered in through a double row of servants in livery—shortclothes and stockings—in decorous vacuity—an array necessary to bring into relief the naturalness and simplicity of the entertainers. Vulgarity, one can see, consists in making one’s self a part of the display of wealth: the thing to be attained is personal simplicity on a background of the richest ostentation. It is difficult to attain this, and theory says that it takes three generations for a man to separate himself thus from his display. It was the tattle of the town that the first owner of the pictures in the gallery of the Stott mansion used to tell the prices to his visitors; the third owner is quite beyond remembering them. He might mention, laughingly, that the ornamented shovel in the great fireplace in the library was decorated by Vavani—it was his wife’s fancy. But he did not say that the ceiling in the music-room was painted by Pontifex Lodge, or that six Italian artists had worked four years making the Corean room, every inch of it exquisite as an intaglio—indeed, the reporters had made the town familiar with the costly facts.

The present occupants understood quite well the value of a background: the house swarmed with servants—retainers, one might say. Margaret, who was fresh from her history class, recalled the days of Elizabeth, when a man’s importance was gauged by the retinue of servitors and men and women in waiting. And this is, after all, a better test of wealth than a mere accumulation of things and cost of decoration; for though men and women do not cost so much originally as good pictures—that is, good men and women—everybody knows that it needs more revenue to maintain them. Though the dinner party was not large, there was to be a dance afterwards, and for every guest was provided a special attendant.

The dinner was served in the state diningroom, to which Mr. Henderson had the honor of conducting Margaret. Here prevailed also the same studied simplicity. The seats were for sixteen. The table went to the extremity of elegant plainness, no crowding, no confusion of colors under the soft lights; if there was ostentation anywhere, it was in the dazzling fineness of the expanse of table-linen, not in the few rare flowers, or the crystal, or the plate, which was of solid gold, simply modest. The eye is pleased by this chastity—pure whiteness, the glow of yellow, the slight touch of sensuous warmth in the rose. The dinner was in keeping, short, noiselessly served under the eye of the maitre d’hotel, few courses, few wines; no anxiety on the part of the host and hostess—perhaps just a little consciousness that everything was simple and elegant, a little consciousness of the background; but another generation will remove that.

If to Margaret’s country apprehension the conversation was not quite up to the level of the dinner and the house—what except that of a circle of wits, who would be out of place there, could be?—the presence of Mr. Henderson, who devoted himself to her, made the lack unnoticed. The talk ran, as usual, on the opera, Wagner, a Christmas party at Lenox, at Tuxedo, somebody’s engagement, some lucky hit in the Exchange, the irritating personalities of the newspapers, the last English season, the marriage of the Duchess of Bolinbroke, a confidential disclosure of who would be in the Cabinet and who would have missions, a jocular remark across the table about a “corner” (it is impossible absolutely here, as well as at a literary dinner, to sink the shop), the Sunday opening of galleries—anything to pass the hour, the ladies contributing most of the vivacity and persiflage.

“I saw you, Mr. Henderson”—it was Mrs. Laflamme raising her voice—“the other night in a box with a very pretty woman.”

“Yes—Miss Eschelle.”

“I don’t know them. We used to hear of them in Naples, Venice, various places; they were in Europe some time; I believe. She was said to be very entertaining—and enterprising.”

“Well, I suppose they have seen something of the world. The other lady was her mother. And the man with us—that might interest you more, Mrs. Laflamme, was Mr. Lyon, who will be the Earl of Chisholm.”

“Ah! Then I suppose she has money?”

“I never saw any painful evidence of poverty. But I don’t think Mr. Lyon is fortune-hunting. He seems to be after information and—goodness.”

Margaret flushed a little, but apparently Henderson did not notice it. Then she said (after Mrs. Laflamme had dropped the subject with the remark that he had come to the right place), “Miss Eschelle called on me yesterday.”

“And was, no doubt, agreeable.”

“She was, as Mrs. Laflamme says, entertaining. She quoted you a good deal.”

“Quoted me? For what?”

“As one would a book, as a familiar authority.”

“I suppose I ought to be flattered, if you will excuse the street expression, to have my stock quotable. Perhaps you couldn’t tell whether Miss Eschelle was a bull or a bear in this case?”

“I don’t clearly know what that is. She didn’t offer me any,” said Margaret, in a tone of carrying on the figure without any personal meaning.

“Well, she is a bit of an operator. A good many women here amuse themselves a little in stocks.”

“It doesn’t seem to me very feminine.”

“No? But women generally like to’ take risks and chances. In countries where lotteries are established they always buy tickets.”

“Ah! then they only risk what they have. I think women are more prudent and conservative than men.”

“No doubt. They are conservatives usually. But when they do go in for radical measures and risks, they leave us quite behind.” Mr. Henderson did not care to extend the conversation in this direction, and he asked, abruptly, “Are you finding New York agreeable, Miss Debree?”

“Yes. Yes and no. One has no time to one’s self. Do you understand why it is, Mr. Henderson, that one can enjoy the whole day and then be thoroughly dissatisfied with it?”

“Perfectly; when the excitement is over.”

“And then I don’t seem to be myself here. I have a feeling of having lost myself.”

“Because the world is so big?”

“Not that. Do you know, the world seems much smaller here than at home.”

“And the city appears narrow and provincial?”

“I cannot quite explain it. The interests of life don’t seem so large—the questions, I mean, what is going on in Europe, the literature, the reforms, the politics. I get a wider view when I stand off—at home. I suppose it is more concentrated here. And, oh dear, I’m so stupid! Everybody is so alert in little things, so quick to turn a compliment, and say a bright thing. While I am getting ready to say what I really think about Browning, for instance, he is disposed of in a sentence.”

“That is because you try to say what you really think.”

“If one don’t, what’s the use of talk?”

“Oh, to pass the time.”

Margaret looked up to see if Henderson was serious. There was a smile of amusement on his face, but not at all offensive, because the woman saw that it was a look of interest also.

“Then I sha’n’t be serious any more,” she said, as there was a movement to quit the table.

“That lays the responsibility on me of being serious,” he replied, in the same light tone.

Later they were wandering through the picture-gallery together. A gallery of modern pictures appeals for the most part to the senses—represents the pomps, the color, the allurements of life. It struck Henderson forcibly that this gallery, which he knew well, appeared very different looking at it with Miss Debree from what it would if he had been looking at it with Miss Eschelle. There were some pictures that he hurried past, some technical excellences only used for sensuous effects—that he did not call attention to as he might have done with another. Curiously enough, he found himself seeking sentiment, purity. If the drawing was bad, Margaret knew it; if a false note was struck, she saw it. But she was not educated up to a good many of the suggestions of the gallery. Henderson perceived this, and his manner to her became more deferential and protective. It was a manner to which every true woman responds, and Margaret was happy, more herself, and talked with a freedom and gayety, a spice of satire, and a note of reality that made her every moment more attractive to her companion. In her, animation the charm of her unworn beauty blazed upon him with a direct personal appeal. He hardly cared to conceal his frank admiration. She, on her part, was thinking, what could Miss Eschelle mean by saying that she was afraid of him?

“Does the world seem any larger here, Miss Debree?” he asked, as they had lingeringly made the circuit of the room and passed out through the tropical conservatory to join the rest of the company.

“Yes—away from people.”

“Then it is not numbers, I am glad to know, that make a world.”

She did not reply. But when he encountered her, robed for departure, at the foot of the stairway, she gave him her hand in goodnight, and their eyes met for a moment.

I wonder if that was the time? Probably not. I fancy that when the right day came she confessed that the moment was when she first saw him enter their box at the opera.

Henderson walked down the avenue slowly, hearing the echo of his own steps in the deserted street. He was in no haste to reach home. It was such a delightful evening-snowing a little, and cold, but so exhilarating. He remembered just how she turned her head as she got into the carriage. She had touched his arm lightly once in the gallery to call his attention to a picture. Yes, the world was larger, larger, by one, and it would seem large—her image came to him distinctly—if she were the only one.

Henderson was under the spell of this evening when the next, in response to a note asking him to call for a moment on business, he was shown into the Eschelle drawing-room. It was dimly lighted, but familiarity with the place enabled him without difficulty to find his way down the long suite, rather overcrowded with luxurious furniture, statuary, and pictures on easels, to the little library at the far end glowing in a rosy light.

There, ensconced in a big chair, a book in her hand, one pretty foot on the fender, sat Carmen, in a grayish, vaporous toilet, which took a warm hue from the color of the spreading lamp-shades. On the carved table near was a litter of books and of nameless little articles, costly and coquettish, which assert femininity, even in a literary atmosphere. Over the fireplace hung a picture of spring—a budding girl, smiling and winning, in a semi-transparent raiment, advancing with swift steps to bring in the season of flowers and of love. The hand that held the book rested upon the arm of the chair, a finger inserted in the place where she had been reading, her rounded white arm visible to the elbow, and Carmen was looking into the fire in the attitude of reflection upon a suggestive passage.

Women have so many forms of attraction, different women are attractive in so many different ways, moods are so changing, beauty is so undefinable, and has so many weapons. And yet men are called inconstant!

It was not until Henderson had time to take in the warmth of this domestic picture that Carmen rose.

“It is so good of you to come, with all your engagements. Mamma is excused with a headache, but she has left me power of attorney to ask questions about our little venture.”

“I hope the attorney will not put me through a cross-examination.”

“That depends upon how you have been behaving, Mr. Henderson. I’m not very cross yet. Now, sit there so that I can look at you and see how honest you are.”

“Do you want me to put on my business or my evening expression?”

“Oh, the first, if you mean business.”

“Well, your stocks are going up.”

“That’s nice. You are so lucky! Everything goes up with you. Do you know what they say of you.

“Nothing bad, I hope.”

“That everything you touch turns to gold. That you will be one of the nabobs of New York in ten years.”

“That’s a startling destiny.”

“Isn’t it? I don’t like it.” The girl seemed very serious. “I’d like you to be distinguished. To be in the Cabinet. To be minister—go to England. But one needs a great deal of money for that, to go as one ought to go. What a career is open to a man in this country if he has money!”

“But I don’t care for politics.”

“Who does? But position. You can afford that if you have money enough. Do you know, Mr. Henderson, I think you are dull.”

“Thank you. I reckoned you’d find it out.”

“The other night at the Nestor ball a lady—no, I won’t tell you who she is—asked me if I knew who that man was across the room; such an air of distinction; might be the new British Minister. You know, I almost blushed when I said I did know him.”

“Well?”

“You see what people expect of you. When a man looks distinguished and is clever, and knows how to please if he likes, he cannot help having a career, unless he is afraid to take the chances.”

Henderson was not conscious of ever being wanting in this direction. The picture conjured up by the ingenious girl was not unfamiliar to his mind, and he understood quite well the relation to it that Carmen had in her mind; but he did not take the lead offered. Instead, he took refuge in the usual commonplace, and asked, “Wouldn’t you like to have been a man?”

“Heaven forbid! I should be too wicked. It is responsibility enough to be a woman. I did not expect such a banality from you. Do you think, Mr. Henderson, we had better sell?”

“Sell what?”

“Our stocks. You are so occupied that I thought they might fall when you are up in the clouds somewhere.”

“No, I shall not forget.”

“Well, such things happen. I might forget you if it were not for the stocks.”

“Then I shall keep the stocks, even if they fall.”

“And we should both fall together. That would be some compensation. Not much. Going to smash with you would be something like going to church with Mr. Lyon. It might have a steadying effect.”

“What has come over you tonight, Carmen?” Henderson asked, leaning forward with an expression of half amusement, half curiosity.

“I’ve been thinking—doesn’t that astonish you?—about life. It is very serious. I got some new views talking with that Miss Debree from Brandon. Chiefly from what she didn’t say. She is such a lovely girl, and just as unsophisticated—well, as we are. I fear I shocked her by telling her your opinion of French novels.”

“You didn’t tell her that I approved of all the French novels you read?”

“Oh no! I didn’t say you approved of any. It sort of came out that you knew about them. She is so downright and conscientious. I declare I felt virtuous shivers running all over me all the time I was with her. I’m conscientious myself. I want everybody to know the worst of me. I wish I could practice some concealment. But she rather discourages me. She would take the color out of a career. She somehow doesn’t allow for color, I could see. Duty, duty—that is the way she looks at life. She’d try to keep me up to it; no playing by the way. I liked her very much. I like people not to have too much toleration. She would be just the wife for some nice country rector.”

“Perhaps I ought to tell her your plan for her? I dined with her last night at the Stotts’.”

“Yes?” Carmen had been wondering if he would tell her of that. “Was it very dull?”

“Not very. There was music, distant enough not to interfere with conversation, and the gallery afterwards.”

“It must have been very exhilarating. You talked about the Duchess of Bolinbroke, and the opera, and Prince Talleyrand, and the corner in wheat—dear me, I know, so decorous! And you said Miss Debree was there?”

“I had the honor of taking her out.”

“Mr. Henderson”—the girl had risen to adjust the lamp-shade, and now stood behind his chair with her arm resting on it, so that he was obliged to turn his head backward to see her—“Mr. Henderson, do you know you are getting to be a desperate flirt?” The laughing eyes looking into his said that was not such a desperate thing to do if he chose the right object.

“Who taught me?” He raised his left hand. She did not respond to the overture, except to snap the hand with her index-finger, and was back in her chair again, regarding him demurely.

“I think we shall go abroad soon.” The little foot was on the fender again, and the face had the look of melancholy resolution.

“And leave Mr. Lyon without any protection here?” The remark was made in a tone of good-humored raillery, but for some reason it seemed to sting the girl.

“Pshaw!” she said. “How can you talk such nonsense? You,” and she rose to her feet in indignation—“you to advise an American girl to sell herself for a title—the chance of a title. I’m ashamed of you!”

“Why, Carmen,” he replied, flushing, “I advised nothing of the sort. I hadn’t the least idea. I don’t care a straw for Mr. Lyon.”

“That’s just it; you don’t care,” sinking into her seat, still unappeased. “I think I’ll tell Mr. Lyon that he will have occupation enough to keep him in this country if he puts his money into that scheme you were talking over the other night.”

Henderson was in turn annoyed. “You can tell him anything you like. I’m no more responsible for his speculations than for his domestic concerns.”

“Now you are offended. It’s not nice of you to put me in the wrong when you know how impulsive I am. I wish I didn’t let my feelings run away with me.” This said reflectively, and looking away from him. And then, turning towards him with wistful, pleading eyes: “Do you know, I sometimes wish I had never seen you. You have so much power to make a person very bad or very good.”

“Come, come,” said Henderson, rising, “we mustn’t quarrel about an Englishman—such old friends.”

“Yes, we are very old friends.” The girl rose also, and gave him her hand. “Perhaps that’s the worst of it. If I should lose your esteem I should go into a convent.” She dropped his hand, and snatching a bunch of violets from the table, fixed them in his button-hole, looking up in his face with vestal sweetness. “You are not offended?”

“Not a bit; not the least in the world,” said Henderson, heartily, patting the hand that still lingered upon his lapel.

When he had gone, Carmen sank into her chair with a gesture of vexation, and there were hard lines in her sweet face. “What an insensible stick!” Then she ran upstairs to her mother, who sat in her room reading one of the town-weeklies, into which some elderly ladies look for something to condemn.

“Well?”

“Such a stupid evening! He is just absorbed in that girl from Brandon. I told him we were going abroad.”

“Going abroad! You are crazy, child. New York is forty times as amusing.”

“And forty times as tiresome. I’m sick of it. Mamma, don’t you think it would be only civil to ask Mr. Lyon to a quiet dinner before he goes?”

“Certainly. That is what I said the other day. I thought you—”

“Yes, I was ill-natured then. But I want to please you. And we really ought to be civil.”

One day is so like another in the city. Every day something new, and, the new the same thing over again. And always the expectation that it will be different tomorrow. Nothing is so tiresome as a kaleidoscope, though it never repeats itself.

Fortunately there are two pursuits that never pall—making money and making love.

Henderson had a new object in life, though the new one did not sensibly divert him from the old; it rather threw a charming light over it, and made the possibilities of it more attractive. In all his schemes he found the thought of Margaret entering. Why should it not have been Carmen? he sometimes thought. She thoroughly understood him. She would never stand in the way of his most daring ambitions with any scruples. Her conscience would never nag his. She would be ambitious for a career for him. Would she care for him or the career? How clever she was! And affectionate? She would be if she had a heart.

He was not balancing the two. What man ever does, in fact? It was simply because Margaret had a heart that he loved her, that she seemed necessary to him. He was quite capable of making a match for his advancement, but he felt strong enough to make one for his own pleasure. And if there are men so worldly as not to be attracted to unworldliness in a woman, Henderson was not one of them. If his heart had not dictated, his brain would have told him the value of the sympathy of a good woman.

He was a very busy man, in the thick of the struggle for a great fortune. It did not occur to him to reflect whether she would approve all the methods he resorted to, but all the women he knew liked success, and the thought of her invigorated him. If she once loved him, she would approve what he did.

He saw much of her in those passing days—days that went like a dream to one of them at least. He was a welcome guest at the Arbusers’, but he saw little of Margaret alone. It did not matter. A chance look is a volume; a word is a library. They saw each other; they heard each other. And then passion grows almost as well in the absence as in the presence of the object. Imagination then has free play. A little separation sometimes will fan it into a flame.

The days went by, and Margaret’s visit was over. I am obliged to say that the leave-taking was a gay one, as full of laughter as it was of hope. Brandon was such a little way off. Henderson often had business there. The Misses Arbuser said, “Of course.” And Margaret said he must not forget that she lived there. Even when she bade her entertainers an affectionate good-by, she could not look very unhappy.

Spring was coming. That day in the cars there were few signs of it on the roadside to be seen, but the buds were swelling. And Margaret, neglecting the book which lay on her lap, and looking out the window, felt it in all her veins.

X

It is said that the world is created anew for every person who is in love. There is therefore this constant miracle of a new heavens and a new earth. It does not depend upon the seasons. The subtle force which is in every human being, more or less active, has this power, as if love were somehow a principle pervading nature itself, and capable of transforming it. Is this a divine gift? Can it be used more than once? Once spent, does the world to each succeeding experimenter in it become old and stale? We say the world is old. In one sense, the real sense to every person, it is no older than the lives lived in it at any given time. If it is always passing away, it is always being renewed. Every time a youth looks love in a maiden’s eyes, and sees the timid appealing return of the universal passion, the world for those two is just as certainly created as it was on the first morning, in all its color, odor, song, freshness, promise. This is the central mystery of life.

Unconsciously to herself, Margaret had worked this miracle. Never before did the little town look so bright; never before was there exactly such a color on the hills-sentiment is so pale compared with love; never before did her home appear so sweet; never before was there such a fine ecstasy in the coming of spring.

For all this, home-coming, after the first excitement of arrival is over, is apt to be dull. The mind is so occupied with other emotions that the friends even seem a little commonplace and unresponsive, and the routine is tame. Out of such a whirl of new experiences to return and find that nothing has happened; that the old duties and responsibilities are waiting! Margaret had eagerly leaped from the carriage to throw herself into her aunt’s arms-what a sweet welcome it is, that of kin!—and yet almost before the greeting was over she felt alone. There was that in the affectionate calmness of Miss Forsythe that seemed to chill the glow and fever of passion in her new world. And she had nothing to tell. Everything had changed, and she must behave as if nothing had happened. She must take up her old life—the interests of the neighborhood. Even the little circle of people she loved appeared distant from her at the moment; impossible it seemed to bring them into the rushing current of her life. Their joy in getting her back again she could not doubt, nor the personal affection with which she was welcomed. But was the New England atmosphere a little cold? What was the flavor she missed in it all? The next day a letter came. The excuse for it was the return of a fan which Mr. Henderson had carried off in his pocket from the opera. What a wonderful letter it was—his handwriting, the first note from him! Miss Forsythe saw in it only politeness. For Margaret it outweighed the town of Brandon. It lay in her lap as she sat at her chamber window looking out over the landscape, which was beginning to be flushed with a pale green. There was a robin on the lawn, and a blackbird singing in the pine. “Go not, happy day,” she said, with tears in her eyes. She took up the brief letter and read it again. Was he really hers, “truly”? And she answered the letter, swiftly and with no hesitation, but with a throbbing heart. It was a civil acknowledgment; that was all. Henderson might have lead it aloud in the Exchange. But what color, what charming turns of expression, what of herself, had the girl put into it, that gave him such a thrill of pleasure when he read it? What secret power has a woman to make a common phrase so glow with her very self?

Here was something in her life that was her own, a secret, a hope, and yet a tremulous anticipation to be guarded almost from herself. It colored everything; it was always, whatever she was doing or saying, present, like an air that one unconsciously hums for days after it has caught his fancy. Blessed be the capacity of being fond and foolish! If that letter was under her pillow at night, if this new revelation was last in her thought as she fell asleep, if it mingled with the song of the birds in the spring morning, as some great good pervading the world, is there anything distinguishing in such an experience that it should be dwelt on? And if there were questionings and little panics of doubt, did not these moments also reveal Margaret to herself more certainly than the hours of happy dreaming?

Questionings no doubt there were, and, later, serious questionings; for habit is almost as strong as love, and the old ways of life and of thought will reassert themselves in a thoughtful mind, and reason will insist on analyzing passion and even hope.

Gradually the home life and everyday interests began to assume their natural aspect and proportions. It was so sweet and sane, this home life, interesting and not feverish. There was time for reading, time for turning over things in the mind, time for those interchanges of feeling and of ideas, by the fireside; she was not required to be always on dress parade, in mind or person, always keyed up to make an impression or receive one; how much wider and sounder was Morgan’s view of the world, allowing for his kindly cynicism, than that prevalent in the talk where she had lately been! How sincere and hearty and free ran the personal currents in this little neighborhood! In the very fact that the daily love and affection for her and interest in her were taken for granted she realized the difference between her position here and that among newer friends who showed more open admiration.

Little by little there was a readjustment. In comparison, the city life, with its intensity of action and feeling, began to appear distant, not so real, mixed, turbid, even frivolous. And was Henderson a vanishing part of this pageant? Was his figure less distinct as the days went by? It could not be affirmed. Love is such a little juggler, and likes, now and again, to pretend to be so reasonable and judicious. There were no more letters. If there had been a letter now and then, on any excuse, the nexus would have been more distinct: nothing feeds the flame exactly like a letter; it has intention, personality, secrecy. And the little excitement of it grows. Once a week gets to be twice a week, three times, four times, and then daily. And then a day without a letter is such a blank, and so full of fear! What can have happened? Is he ill? Has he changed? The opium habit is nothing to the letter habit-between lovers. Not that Margaret expected a letter. Indeed, reason told her that it had not gone so far as that. But she should see him. She felt sure of that. And the thought filled all the vacant places in her imagination of the future.

And yet she thought she was seeing him more clearly than when he was with her. Oh wise young woman! She fancied she was deliberating, looking at life with great prudence. It must be one’s own fault if one makes a radical mistake in marriage. She was watching the married people about her with more interest-the Morgans, our own household, Mrs. Fletcher; and besides, her aunt, whose even and cheerful life lacked this experience. It is so wise to do this, to keep one’s feelings in control, not to be too hasty! Everybody has these intervals of prudence. That is the reason there are so few mistakes.

I dare say that all these reflections and deliberations in the maidenly mind were almost unconscious to herself; certainly unacknowledged. It was her imagination that she was following, and scarcely a distinct reality or intention. She thought of Henderson, and he gave a certain personality, vivid maybe, to that dream of the future which we all in youth indulge; but she would have shrunk from owning this even to herself. We deceive ourselves as often as we deceive others. Margaret would have repudiated with some warmth any intimation that she had lost her heart, and was really predicting the practical possibilities of that loss, and she would have been quite honest with herself in thinking that she was still mistress of her own feeling. Later on she would know, and delight to confess, that her destiny was fixed at a certain hour, at a certain moment, in New York, for subsequent events would run back to that like links in a chain. And she would have been right and also wrong in that; for but for those subsequent events the first impression would have faded, and been taken little account of in her life. I am more and more convinced that men and women act more upon impulse and less upon deep reflection and self-examination than the analytic novelists would have us believe, duly weighing motives and balancing considerations; and that men and women know themselves much less thoroughly than they suppose they do. There is a great deal of exaggeration, I am convinced, about the inward struggles and self-conflicts. The reader may know that Margaret was hopelessly in love, because he knows everything; but that charming girl would have been shocked and wounded to the most indignant humiliation if she had fancied that her friends thought that. Nay, more, if Henderson had at this moment made by letter a proposal for her hand, her impulse would have been to repudiate the offer as unjustified by anything that had taken place, and she would no doubt have obeyed that impulse.

But something occurred, while she was in this mood, that did not shock her maidenly self-consciousness, nor throw her into antagonism, but which did bring her face to face with a possible reality. And this was simply the receipt of a letter from Henderson; not a love-letter—far enough from that—but one in which there was a certain tone and intention that the most inexperienced would recognize as possibly serious. Aside from the announcement in the letter, the very fact of writing it was significant, conveying an intimation that the reader might be interested in what concerned the writer. The letter was longer than it need have been, for one thing, as if the pen, once started on its errand, ran on con amore. The writer was coming to Brandon; business, to be sure, was the excuse; but why should it have been necessary to announce to her a business visit? There crept into the letter somehow a good deal about his daily life, linked, to be sure, with mention of places and people in which she had recently an interest. He had been in Washington, and there were slight sketches of well-known characters in Congress and in the Government; he had been in Chicago, and even as far as Denver, and there were little pictures of scenes that might amuse her. There was no special mystery about all this travel and hurrying from place to place, but it gave Margaret a sense of varied and large occupations that she did not understand. Through it all there was the personality that had been recently so much in her thoughts. He was coming. That was a very solid fact that she must meet. And she did not doubt that he was coming to see her, and soon. That was a definite and very different idea from the dim belief that he would come some time. He had signed himself hers “faithfully.”

It was a letter that could not be answered like the other one; for it raised questions and prospects, and the thousand doubts that make one hesitate in any definite step; and, besides, she pleased herself to think that she did not know her own mind. He had not asked if he might come; he had said he was coming, and really there was no answer to that. Therefore she put it out of her mind-another curious mental process we have in dealing with a matter that is all the time the substratum of our existence. And she was actually serious; if she was reflective, she was conscious of being judicially reflective.

But in this period of calm and reflection it was impossible that a woman of Margaret’s habits and temperament should not attempt to settle in her mind what that life was yonder of which she had a little taste; what was the career that Henderson had marked out for himself; what were his principles; what were the methods and reasons of his evident success. Endeavoring in her clear mind to separate the person, about whose personality she was so fondly foolish, from his schemes, which she so dimly comprehended, and applying to his somewhat hazy occupations her simple moral test, were the schemes quite legitimate? Perhaps she did not go so far as this; but what she read in the newspapers of moneymaking in these days made her secretly uneasy, and she found herself wishing that he were definitely practicing some profession, or engaged in some one solid occupation.

In the little parliament at our house, where everything, first and last, was overhauled and brought to judgment, without, it must be confessed, any visible effect on anything, one evening a common “incident” of the day started the conversation. It was an admiring account in a newspaper of a brilliant operation by which three or four men had suddenly become millionaires.

“I don’t see,” said my wife, “any mention in this account of the thousands who have been reduced to poverty by this operation.”

“No,” said Morgan; “that is not interesting.”

“But it would be very interesting to me,” Mrs. Fletcher remarked. “Is there any protection, Mr. Morgan, for people who have invested their little property?”

“Yes; the law.”

“But suppose your money is all invested, say in a railway, and something goes wrong, where are you to get the money to pay for the law that will give you restitution? Is there anything in the State, or public opinion, or anywhere, that will protect your interests against clever swindling?”

“Not that I know of,” Morgan admitted. “You take your chance when you let your money go out of your stocking. You see there are so many people who want it. You can put it in the ground.”

“But if I own the ground I put it in, the voters who have no ground will tax it till there is nothing left for me.”

“That is equality.”

“But it isn’t equality, for somebody gets very rich in railways or lands, while we lose our little all. Don’t you think there ought to be a public official whose duty it is to enforce the law gratis which I cannot afford to enforce when I am wronged?”

“The difficulty is to discover whether you are wronged or only unfortunate. It needs a lawyer to find that out. And very likely if you are wronged, the wrongdoer has so cleverly gone round the law that it needs legislation to set you straight, and that needs a lobbyist, whom the lawyer must hire, or he must turn lobbyist himself. Now, a lawyer costs money, and a lobbyist is one of the most expensive of modern luxuries; but when you have a lawyer and lobbyist in one, you will find it economical to let him take your claim and all that can be made out of it, and not bother you any more about it. But there is no doubt about the law, as I said. You can get just as much law as you can pay for. It is like any other commodity.”

“You mean to say,” I asked, “that the lawyer takes what the operator leaves?”

“Not exactly. There is a great deal of unreasonable prejudice against lawyers. They must live. There is no nobler occupation than the application of the principle of justice in human affairs. The trouble is that public opinion sustains the operator in his smartness, and estimates the lawyer according to his adroitness. If we only evoked the aid of a lawyer in a just cause, the lawyers would have less to do.

“Usually and naturally the best talent goes with the biggest fees.”

“It seems to me,” said my wife, musing along, in her way, on parallel lines, “that there ought to be a limit to the amount of property one man can get into his absolute possession, to say nothing of the methods by which he gets it.”

“That never yet could be set,” Morgan replied. “It is impossible for any number of men to agree on it. I don’t see any line between absolute freedom of acquisition, trusting to circumstances, misfortune, and death to knock things to pieces, and absolute slavery, which is communism.”

“Do you believe, Mr. Morgan, that any vast fortune was ever honestly come by?”

“That is another question. Honesty is such a flexible word. If you mean a process the law cannot touch, yes. If you mean moral consideration for others, I doubt. But property accumulates by itself almost. Many a man who has got a start by an operation he would not like to have investigated, and which he tries to forget, goes on to be very rich, and has a daily feeling of being more and more honorable and respectable, using only means which all the world calls fair and shrewd.”

“Mr. Morgan,” suddenly asked Margaret, who had been all the time an uneasy listener to the turn the talk had taken, “what is railroad wrecking?”

“Oh, it is very simple, at least in some of its forms. The ‘wreckers,’ as they are called, fasten upon some railway that is prosperous, pays dividends, pays a liberal interest on its bonds, and has a surplus. They contrive to buy, no matter of what cost, a controlling interest in it, either in its stock or its management. Then they absorb its surplus; they let it run down so that it pays no dividends, and by-and-by cannot even pay its interest; then they squeeze the bondholders, who may be glad to accept anything that is offered out of the wreck, and perhaps then they throw the property into the hands of a receiver, or consolidate it with some other road at a value enormously greater than the cost to them in stealing it. Having in one way or another sucked it dry, they look round for another road.”

“And all the people who first invested lose their money, or the most of it?”

“Naturally, the little fish get swallowed.”

“It is infamous,” said Margaret—“infamous! And men go to work to do this, to get other people’s property, in cool blood?”

“I don’t know how cool, but it is in the way of business.”

“What is the difference between that and getting possession of a bank and robbing it?” she asked, hot with indignation.

“Oh, one is an operation, and the other is embezzlement.”

“It is a shame. How can people permit it? Suppose, Mrs. Fletcher, a wrecker should steal your money that way?”

“I was thinking of that.”

I never saw Margaret more disturbed—out of all proportion, I thought, to the cause; for we had talked a hundred times about such things.

“Do you think all men who are what you call operating around are like that?” she asked.

“Oh, no,” I said. “Probably most men who are engaged in what is generally called speculation are doing what seems to them a perfectly legitimate business. It is a common way of making a fortune.”

“You see, Margaret,” Morgan explained, “when people in trade buy anything, they expect to sell it for more than they gave for it.”

“It seems to me,” Margaret replied, more calmly, “that a great deal of what you men call business is just trying to get other people’s money, and doesn’t help anybody or produce anything.”

“Oh, that is keeping up the circulation, preventing stagnation.”

“And that is the use of brokers in grain and stocks?”

“Partly. They are commonly the agents that others use to keep themselves from stagnation.”

“I cannot see any good in it,” Margaret persisted. “No one seems to have the things he buys or sells. I don’t understand it.”

“That is because you are a woman, if you will pardon me for saying it. Men don’t need to have things in hand; business is done on faith and credit, and when a transaction is over, they settle up and pay the difference, without the trouble of transporting things back and forth.”

“I know you are chaffing me, Mr. Morgan. But I should call that betting.”

“Oh, there is a risk in everything you do. But you see it is really paying for a difference of knowledge or opinion.”

“Would you buy stocks that way?”

“What way?”

“Why, agreeing to pay for your difference of opinion, as you call it, not really having any stock at all.”

“I never did. But I have bought stocks and sold them pretty soon, if I could make anything by the sale. All merchants act on that principle.”

“Well,” said Margaret, dimly seeing the sophistry of this, “I don’t understand business morality.”

“Nobody does, Margaret. Most men go by the law. The Golden Rule seems to be suspended by a more than two-thirds vote.”

It was by such inquiries, leading to many talks of this sort, that Margaret was groping in her mind for the solution of what might become to her a personal question. Consciously she did not doubt Henderson’s integrity or his honor, but she was perplexed about the world of which she had recently had a glimpse, and it was impossible to separate him from it. Subjected to an absolutely new experience, stirred as her heart had never been before by any man—a fact which at once irritated and pleased her—she was following the law of her own nature, while she was still her own mistress, to ponder these things and to bring her reason to the guidance of her feeling. And it is probable that she did not at all know the strength of her feeling, or have any conception of the real power of love, and how little the head has to do with the great passion of life, the intensity of which the poets have never in the least exaggerated. If she thought of Mr. Lyon occasionally, of his white face and pitiful look of suffering that day, she could not, after all, make it real or permanently serious. Indeed, she was sure that no emotion could so master her. And yet she looked forward to Henderson’s coming with a sort of nervous apprehension, amounting almost to dread.

XI

It was the susceptible time of the year for plants, for birds, for maids: all innocent natural impulses respond to the subtle influence of spring. One may well gauge his advance in selfishness, worldliness, and sin by his loss of this annual susceptibility, by the failure of this sweet appeal to touch his heart. One must be very far gone if some note of it does not for a moment bring back the tenderest recollections of the days of joyous innocence.

Even the city, with its mass of stone and brick, rectangles, straight lines, dust, noise, and fever of activity, is penetrated by this divine suggestion of the renewal of life. You can scarcely open a window without letting in a breath of it; the south wind, the twitter of a sparrow, the rustle of leaves in the squares, the smell of the earth and of some struggling plant in the area, the note of a distant hand-organ softened by distance, are begetting a longing for youth, for green fields, for love. As Carmen walked down the avenue with Mr. Lyon on a spring morning she almost made herself believe that an unworldly life with this simple-hearted gentleman—when he should come into his title and estate—would be more to her liking than the most brilliant success in place and power with Henderson. Unfortunately the spring influence also suggested the superior attractiveness of the only man who had ever taken her shallow fancy. And unfortunately the same note of nature suggested to Mr. Lyon the contrast of this artificial piece of loveliness with the domestic life of which he dreamed.

As for Margaret, she opened her heart to the spring without reserve. It was May. The soft maples had a purple tinge, the chestnuts showed color, the apple-trees were in bloom (all the air was full of their perfume), the blackbirds were chattering in convention in the tall oaks, the bright leaves and the flowering shrubs were alive with the twittering and singing of darting birds. The soft, fleecy clouds, hovering as over a world just created, seemed to make near and participant in the scene the delicate blue of the sky. Margaret—I remember the morning—was standing on her piazza, as I passed through the neighborhood drive, with a spray of apple-blossoms in her hand. For the moment she seemed to embody all the maiden purity of the scene, all its promise. I said, laughing:

“We shall have to have you painted as spring.”

“But spring isn’t painted at all,” she replied, holding up the apple—blossoms, and coming down the piazza with a dancing step.

“And so it won’t last. We want something permanent,” I was beginning to say, when a carriage passed, going to our house. “I think that must be Henderson.”

“Ah!” she exclaimed. Her sunny face clouded at once, and she turned to go in as I hurried away.

It was Mr. Henderson, and there was at least pretense enough of business to occupy us, with Mr. Morgan, the greater part of the day. It was not till late in the afternoon that Henderson appeared to remember that Margaret was in the neighborhood, and spoke of his intention of calling. My wife pointed out the way to him across the grounds, and watched him leisurely walking among the trees till he was out of sight.

“What an agreeable man Mr. Henderson is!” she said, turning to me; “most companionable; and yet—and yet, my dear, I’m glad he is not my husband. You suit me very well.” There was an air of conviction about this remark, as if it were the result of deep reflection and comparison, and it was emphasized by the little possessory act of readjusting my necktie—one of the most subtle of female flatteries.

“But who wanted him to be your husband?” I asked. “Married women have the oddest habit of going about the world picking out the men they would not like to have married. Do they need continually to justify themselves?”

“No; they congratulate themselves. You never can understand.”

“I confess I cannot. My first thought about an attractive woman whose acquaintance I make is not that I am glad I did not marry her.”

“I dare say not. You are all inconsistent, you men. But you are the least so of any man in the world, I do believe.”

It would be difficult to say whether the spring morning seemed more or less glorious to Margaret when she went indoors, but its serenity was gone.

It was like the premonition in nature of a change. She put the apple blossoms in water and placed the jug on the table, turning it about half a dozen times, moving her head from side to side to get the effect. When it was exactly right, she said to her aunt, who sat sewing in the bay-window, in a perfectly indifferent tone, “Mr. Fairchild just passed here, and said that Mr. Henderson had come.”

“Ah!” Her aunt did not lift her eyes from her work, or appear to attach the least importance to this tremendous piece of news. Margaret was annoyed at what seemed to her an assumed indifference. Her nerves were quivering with the knowledge that he had arrived, that he was in the next house, that he might be here any moment—the man who had entered into her whole life—and the announcement was no more to her aunt than if she had said it rained. She was provoked at herself that she should be so disturbed, yes, annoyed, at his proximity. She wished he had not come—not today, at any rate. She looked about for something to do, and began to rearrange this and that trifle in the sitting-room, which she had perfectly arranged once before in the morning, moving about here and there in a rather purposeless manner, until her aunt looked up and for a moment followed her movements till Margaret left the room. In her own chamber she sat by the window and tried to think, but there was no orderly mental process; in vain she tried to run over in her mind the past month and all her reflections and wise resolves. She heard the call of the birds, she inhaled the odor of the new year, she was conscious of all that was gracious and inviting in the fresh scene, but in her subconsciousness there was only one thought—he was there, he was coming. She took up her sewing, but the needle paused in the stitch, and she found herself looking away across the lawn to the hills; she took up a book, but the words had no meaning, read and reread them as she would. He is there, he is coming. And what of it? Why should she be so disturbed? She was uncommitted, she was mistress of her own actions. Had she not been coolly judging his conduct? She despised herself for being so nervous and unsettled. If he was coming, why did he not come? Why was he waiting so long? She arose impatiently and went down-stairs. There was a necessity of doing something.

“Is there anything that you want from town, auntie?”

“Nothing that I know of. Are you going in?”

“No, unless you have an errand. It is such a fine day that it seems a pity to stay indoors.”

“Well, I would walk if I were you.” But she did not go; she went instead to her room. He might come any moment. She ought not to run away; and yet she wished she were away. He said he was coming on business. Was it not, then, a pretense? She felt humiliated in the idea of waiting for him if the business were not a pretense.

How insensible men are! What a mere subordinate thing to them in life is the love of a woman! Yes, evidently business was more important to him than anything else. He must know that she was waiting; and she blushed to herself at the very possibility that he should think such a thing. She was not waiting. It was lunch-time. She excused herself. In the next moment she was angry that she had not gone down as usual. It was time for him to come. He would certainly come immediately after lunch. She would not see him. She hoped never to see him. She rose in haste, put on her hat, put it on carefully, turning and returning before the glass, selected fresh gloves, and ran down-stairs.

“I’m going, auntie, for a walk to town.”

The walk was a long one. She came back tired. It was late in the afternoon. Her aunt was quietly reading. She needed to ask her nothing: Mr. Henderson had not been there. Why had he written to her?

“Oh, the Fairchilds want us to come over to dinner,” said Miss Forsythe, without looking up.

“I hope you will go, auntie. I sha’n’t mind being alone.”

“Why? It’s perfectly informal. Mr. Henderson happens to be there.”

“I’m too stupid. But you must go. Mr. Henderson, in New York, expressed the greatest desire to make your acquaintance.”

Miss Forsythe smiled. “I suppose he has come up on purpose. But, dear, you must go to chaperon me. It would hardly be civil not to go, when you knew Mr. Henderson in New York, and the Fairchilds want to make it agreeable for him.”

“Why, auntie, it is just a business visit. I’m too tired to make the effort. It must be this spring weather.”

Perhaps it was. It is so unfortunate that the spring, which begets so many desires, brings the languor that defeats their execution. But there is a limit to the responsibility even of spring for a woman’s moods. Just as Margaret spoke she saw, through the open window, Henderson coming across the lawn, walking briskly, but evidently not inattentive to the charm of the landscape. It was his springy step, his athletic figure, and, as he came nearer, the joyous anticipation in his face. And it was so sudden, so unexpected—the vision so long looked for! There was no time for flight, had she wanted to avoid him; he was on the piazza; he was at the open door. Her hand went quickly to her heart to still the rapid flutter, which might be from pain and might be from joy—she could not tell. She had imagined their possible meeting so many times, and it was not at all like this. She ought to receive him coldly, she ought to receive him kindly, she ought to receive him indifferently. But how real he was, how handsome he was! If she could have obeyed the impulse of the moment I am not sure but she would have fled, and cast herself face downward somewhere, and cried a little and thanked God for him. He was in the room. In his manner there was no hesitation, in his expression no uncertainty. His face beamed with pleasure, and there was so much open admiration in his eyes that Margaret, conscious of it to her heart’s core, feared that her aunt would notice it. And she met him calmly enough, frankly enough. The quickness with which a woman can pull herself together under such circumstances is testimony to her superior fibre.

“I’ve been looking across here ever since morning,” he said, as soon as the hand-shaking and introduction were over, “and I’ve only this minute been released.” There was no air of apology in this, but a delicate intimation of impatience at the delay. And still, what an unconscious brute a man is!

“I thought perhaps you had returned,” said Margaret, “until my aunt was just telling me we were asked to dine with you.”

Henderson gave her a quick glance. Was it possible she thought he could go away without seeing her?

“Yes, and I was commissioned to bring you over when you are ready.” “I will not keep you waiting long, Mr. Henderson,” interposed Miss Forsythe, out of the goodness of her heart. “My niece has been taking a long walk, and this debilitating spring weather—”

“Oh, since the sun has gone away, I think I’m quite up to the exertion, since you wish it, auntie,” a speech that made Henderson stare again, wholly unable to comprehend the reason of an indirection which he could feel—he who had been all day impatient for this moment. There was a little talk about the country and the city at this season, mainly sustained by Miss Forsythe and Henderson, and then he was left alone. “Of course you should go, Margaret,” said her aunt, as they went upstairs; “it would not be at all the thing for me to leave you here. And what a fine, manly, engaging fellow Mr. Henderson is!”

“Yes, he acts very much like a man;” and Margaret was gone into her room.

Go? There was not force enough in the commonwealth, without calling out the militia, to keep Margaret from going to the dinner. She stopped a moment in the middle of her chamber to think. She had almost forgotten how he looked—his eyes, his smile. Dear me! how the birds were singing outside, and how fresh the world was! And she would not hurry. He could wait. No doubt he would wait now any length of time for her. He was in the house, in the room below, perhaps looking out of the window, perhaps reading, perhaps spying about at her knick-knacks—she would like to look in at the door a moment to see what he was doing. Of course he was here to see her, and all the business was a pretext. As she sat a moment upon the edge of her bed reflecting what to put on, she had a little pang that she had been doing him injustice in her thought. But it was only for an instant. He was here. She was not in the least flurried. Indeed, her mental processes were never clearer than when she settled upon her simple toilet, made as it was in every detail with the sure instinct of a woman who dresses for her lover. Heavens! what a miserable day it had been, what a rebellious day! He ought to be punished for it somehow. Perhaps the rose she put in her hair was part of the punishment. But he should not see how happy she was; she would be civil, and just a little reserved; it was so like a man to make a woman wait all day and then think he could smooth it all over simply by appearing.

But somehow in Henderson’s presence these little theories of conduct did not apply. He was too natural, direct, unaffected, his pleasure in being with her was so evident! He seemed to brush aside the little defenses and subterfuges. There was this about him that appeared to her admirable, and in contrast with her own hesitating indirection, that whatever he wanted—money, or position, or the love of woman—he went straight to his object with unconsciousness that failure was possible. Even in walking across the grounds in the soft sunset light, and chatting easily, their relations seemed established on a most natural basis, and Margaret found herself giving way to the simple enjoyment of the hour. She was not only happy, but her spirits rose to inexpressible gayety, which ran into the humor of badinage and a sort of spiritual elation, in which all things seemed possible. Perhaps she recognized in herself, what Henderson saw in her. And with it all there was an access of tenderness for her aunt, the dear thing whose gentle life appeared so colorless.

I had never seen Margaret so radiant as at the dinner; her high spirits infected the table, and the listening and the talking were of the best that the company could give. I remembered it afterwards, not from anything special that was said, but from its flow of high animal spirits, and the electric responsive mood everyone was in; no topic carried too far, and the chance seriousness setting off the sparkling comments on affairs. Henderson’s talk had the notable flavor of direct contact with life, and very little of the speculative and reflective tone of Morgan’s, who was always generalizing and theorizing about it. He had just come from the West, and his off-hand sketches of men had a special cynicism, not in the least condemnatory, mere good-natured acceptance, and in contrast to Morgan’s moralizing and rather pitying cynicism. It struck me that he did not believe in his fellows as much as Morgan did; but I fancied that Margaret only saw in his attitude a tolerant knowledge of the world.

“Are the people on the border as bad as they are represented?” she asked.

“Certainly not much worse than they represent themselves,” he replied; “I suppose the difference is that men feel less restraint there.”

“It is something more than that,” added Morgan. “There is a sort of drift-wood of adventure and devil-may-care-ism that civilization throws in advance of itself; but that isn’t so bad as the slag it manufactures in the cities.”

“I remember you said, Mr. Morgan, that men go West to get rid of their past,” said Margaret.

“As New Yorkers go to Europe to get rid of their future?” Henderson inquired, catching the phrase.

“Yes”—Morgan turned to Margaret—“doubtless there is a satisfaction sometimes in placing the width of a continent between a man and what he has done. I’ve thought that one of the most popular verses in the Psalter, on the border, must be the one that says—you will know if I quote it right ‘Look how wide also the East is from the West; so far hath He set our sins from us.’”

“That is dreadful,” exclaimed Margaret. “To think of you spending your time in the service picking out passages to fit other people!”

“It sounds as if you had manufactured it,” was Henderson’s comment.

“No; that quiet Mr. Lyon pointed it out to me when we were talking about Montana. He had been there.”

“By-the-way, Mr. Henderson,” my wife asked, “do you know what has become of Mr. Lyon?”

“I believe he is about to go home.”

“I fancied Miss Eschelle might have something to say about that,” Morgan remarked.

“Perhaps, if she were asked. But Mr. Lyon appeared rather indifferent to American attractions.”

Margaret looked quickly at Henderson as he said this, and then ventured, a little slyly, “She seemed to appreciate his goodness.”

“Yes; Miss Eschelle has an eye for goodness.”

This was said without change of countenance, but it convinced the listener that Carmen was understood.

“And yet,” said Margaret, with a little air of temerity, “you seem to be very good friends.”

“Oh, she is very charitable; she sees, I suppose, what is good in me; and I’ll spare you the trouble of remarking that she must necessarily be very sharp-sighted.”

“And I’m not going to destroy your illusion by telling you her real opinion of you,” Margaret retorted.

Henderson begged to know what it was, but Margaret evaded the question by new raillery. What did she care at the moment what Carmen thought of Henderson? What—did either of them care what they were saying, so long as there was some personal flavor in the talk! Was it not enough to talk to each other, to see each other?

As we sat afterwards upon the piazza with our cigars, inhaling the odor of the apple blossoms, and yielding ourselves, according to our age, to the influence of the mild night, Margaret was in the high spirits which accompany the expectation of bliss, without the sobering effect of its responsibility. Love itself is very serious, but the overture is full of freakish gayety. And it was all gayety that night. We all constituted ourselves a guard of honor to Miss Forsythe and Margaret when they went to their cottage, and there was a merry leave-taking in the moonlight. To be sure, Margaret walked with Henderson, and they lagged a little behind, but I had no reason to suppose that they were speaking of the stars, or that they raised the ordinary question of their being inhabited. I doubt if they saw the stars at all. How one remembers little trifles, that recur like the gay bird notes of the opening scenes that are repeated in the tragedy of the opera! I can see Margaret now, on some bantering pretext, running back, after we had said goodnight, to give Henderson the blush-rose she had worn in her hair. How charming the girl was in this freakish action!

“Do you think he is good enough for her?” asked my wife, when we were alone.

“Who is good enough for whom?” I said, a yawn revealing my want of sentiment.

“Don’t be stupid. You are not so blind as you pretend.”

“Well, if I am not so blind as I pretend, though I did not pretend to be blind, I suppose that is mainly her concern.”

“But I wish she had cared for Lyon.”

“Perhaps Lyon did not care for her,” I suggested.

“You never see anything. Lyon was a noble fellow.”

“I didn’t deny that. But how was I to know about Lyon, my dear? I never heard you say that you were glad he wasn’t your husband.”

“Don’t be silly. I think Henderson has very serious intentions.”

“I hope he isn’t frivolous,” I said.

“Well, you are. It isn’t a joking matter—and you pretend to be so fond of Margaret!”

“So that is another thing I pretend? What do you want me to do? Which one do you want me to make my enemy by telling him or her that the other isn’t good enough?”

“I don’t want you to do anything, except to be reasonable, and sympathize.”

“Oh, I sympathize all round. I assure you I’ve no doubt you are quite right.” And in this way I crawled out of the discussion, as usual.

What a pretty simile it is, comparing life to a river, because rivers are so different! There are the calm streams that flow eagerly from the youthful sources, join a kindred flood, and go placidly to the sea, only broadening and deepening and getting very muddy at times, but without a rapid or a fall. There are others that flow carelessly in the upper sunshine, begin to ripple and dance, then run swiftly, and rush into rapids in which there is no escape (though friends stand weeping and imploring on the banks) from the awful plunge of the cataract. Then there is the tumult and the seething, the exciting race and rage through the canon, the whirlpools and the passions of love and revelations of character, and finally, let us hope, the happy emergence into the lake of a serene life. And the more interesting rivers are those that have tumults and experiences.

I knew well enough before the next day was over that it was too late for the rescue of Margaret or Henderson. They were in the rapids, and would have rejected any friendly rope thrown to draw them ashore. And notwithstanding the doubts of my wife, I confess that I had so much sympathy with the genuineness of it that I enjoyed this shock of two strong natures rushing to their fate. Was it too sudden? Do two living streams hesitate when they come together? When they join they join, and mingle and reconcile themselves afterwards. It is only canals that flow languidly in parallel lines, and meet, if they meet at all, by the orderly contrivance of a lock.

In the morning the two were off for a stroll. There is a hill from which a most extensive prospect is had of the city, the teeming valley, with a score of villages and innumerable white spires, of forests and meadows and broken mountain ranges. It was a view that Margaret the night before had promised to show Henderson, that he might see what to her was the loveliest landscape in the world. Whether they saw the view I do not know. But I know the rock from which it is best seen, and could fancy Margaret sitting there, with her face turned towards it and her hands folded in her lap, and Henderson sitting, half turned away from it, looking in her face. There is an apple orchard just below. It was in bloom, and all the invitation of spring was in the air. That he saw all the glorious prospect reflected in her mobile face I do not doubt—all the nobility and tenderness of it. If I knew the faltering talk in that hour of growing confidence and expectation, I would not repeat it. Henderson lunched at the Forsythe’s, and after lunch he had some talk with Miss Forsythe. It must have been of an exciting nature to her, for, immediately after, that good woman came over in a great flutter, and was closeted with my wife, who at the end of the interview had an air of mysterious importance. It was evidently a woman’s day, and my advice was not wanted, even if my presence was tolerated. All I heard my wife say through the opening door, as the consultation ended, was, “I hope she knows her own mind fully before anything is decided.”

As to the objects of this anxiety, they were upon the veranda of the cottage, quite unconscious of the necessity of digging into their own minds. He was seated, and she was leaning against the railing on which the honeysuckle climbed, pulling a flower in pieces.

“It is such a short time I have known you,” she was saying, as if in apology for her own feeling.

“Yes, in one way;” and he leaned forward, and broke his sentence with a little laugh. “I think I must have known you in some pre-existent state.”

“Perhaps. And yet, in another way, it seems long—a whole month, you know.” And the girl laughed a little in her turn.

“It was the longest month I ever knew, after you left the city.”

“Was it? I oughtn’t to have said that first. But do you know, Mr. Henderson, you seem totally different from any other man I ever knew.”

That this was a profound and original discovery there could be no doubt, from the conviction with which it was announced. “I felt from the first that I could trust you.”

“I wish”—and there was genuine feeling in the tone—“I were worthier of such a generous trust.”

There was a wistful look in her face—timidity, self-depreciation, worship—as Henderson rose and stood near her, and she looked up while he took the broken flower from her hand. There was but one answer to this, and in spite of the open piazza and the all-observant, all-revealing day, it might have been given; but at the moment Miss Forsythe was seen hurrying towards them through the shrubbery. She came straight to where they stood, with an air of New England directness and determination. One hand she gave to Henderson, the other to Margaret. She essayed to speak, but tears were in her eyes, and her lips trembled; the words would not come. She regarded them for an instant with all the overflowing affection of a quarter of a century of repression, and then quickly turned and went in. In a moment they followed her. Heaven go with them!

After Henderson had made his hasty adieus at our house and gone, before the sun was down, Margaret came over. She came swiftly into the room, gave me a kiss as I rose to greet her, with a delightful impersonality, as if she owed a debt somewhere and must pay it at once—we men who are so much left out of these affairs have occasionally to thank Heaven for a merciful moment—seized my wife, and dragged her to her room.

“I couldn’t wait another moment,” she said, as she threw herself on my wife’s bosom in a passion of tears. “I am so happy! he is so noble, and I love him so!” And she sobbed as if it were the greatest calamity in the world. And then, after a little, in reply to a question—for women are never more practical than in such a crisis: “Oh, no—not for a long, long, long time. Not before autumn.”

And the girl looked, through her glad tears, as if she expected to be admired for this heroism. And I have no doubt she was.

XII

Well, that was another success. The world is round, and like a ball seems swinging in the air, and swinging very pleasantly, thought Henderson, as he stepped on board the train that evening. The world is truly what you make it, and Henderson was determined to make it agreeable. His philosophy was concise, and might be hung up, as a motto: Get all you can, and don’t fret about what you cannot get.

He went into the smoking compartment, and sat musing by the window for some time before he lit his cigar, feeling a glow of happiness that was new in his experience. The country was charming at twilight, but he was little conscious of that. What he saw distinctly was Margaret’s face, trustful and wistful, looking up into his as she bade him goodby. What he was vividly conscious of was being followed, enveloped, by a woman’s love.

“You will write, dear, the moment you get there, will you not? I am so afraid of accidents,” she had said.

“Why, I will telegraph, sweet,” he had replied, quite gayly.

“Will you? Telegraph? I never had that sort of a message.” It seemed a very wonderful thing that he should use the public wire for this purpose, and she looked at him with new admiration.

“Are you timid about the train?” he asked.

“No. I never think of it. I never thought of it for myself; but this is different.”

“Oh, I see.” He put his arm round her and looked down into her eyes. This was a humorous suggestion to him, who spent half his time on the trains. “I think I’ll take out an accident policy.”

“Don’t say that. But you men are so reckless. Promise you won’t stand on the platform, and won’t get off while the train is in motion, and all the rest of the directions,” she said, laughing a little with him; “and you will be careful?”

“I’ll take such care of myself as I never did before, I promise. I never felt of so much consequence in my life.”

“You’ll think me silly. But you know, don’t you, dear?” She put a hand on each shoulder, and pushing him back, studied his face. “You are all the world. And only to think, day before yesterday, I didn’t think of the trains at all.”

To have one look like that from a woman! To carry it with him! Henderson still forgot to light his cigar.

“Hello, Rodney!”

“Ah, Hollowell! I thought you were in Kansas City.”

The newcomer was a man of middle age, thick set, with rounded shoulders, deep chest, heavy neck, iron-gray hair close cut, gray whiskers cropped so as to show his strong jaw, blue eyes that expressed at once resolution and good-nature.

“Well, how’s things? Been up to fix the Legislature?”

“No; Perkins is attending to that,” said Henderson, rather indifferently, like a man awakened out of a pleasant dream. “Don’t seem to need much fixing. The public are fond of parallels.”

Hollowell laughed. “I guess that’s so—till they get ‘em.”

“Or don’t get them,” Henderson added. And then both laughed.

“It looks as if it would go through this time. Bemis says the C. D.‘s badly scared. They’ll have to come down lively.”

“I shouldn’t wonder. By-the-way, look in tomorrow. I’ve got something to show you.”

Henderson lit his cigar, and they both puffed in silence for some moments.

“By-the-way, did I ever show you this?” Hollowell took from his breast-pocket a handsome morocco case, and handed it to his companion. “I never travel without that. It’s better than an accident policy.”

Henderson unfolded the case, and saw seven photographs—a showy-looking handsome woman in lace and jewels, and six children, handsome like their mother, the whole group with the photographic look of prosperity.

Henderson looked at it as if it had been a mirror of his own destiny, and expressed his admiration.

“Yes, it’s hard to beat,” Hollowell confessed, with a soft look in his face. “It’s not for sale. Seven figures wouldn’t touch it.” He looked at it lovingly before he put it up, and then added: “Well, there’s a figure for each, Rodney, and a big nest-egg for the old woman besides. There’s nothing like it, old man. You’d better come in.” And he put his hand affectionately on Henderson’s knee.

Jeremiah Hollowell—commonly known as Jerry—was a remarkable man. Thirty years ago he had come to the city from Maine as a “hand” on a coast schooner, obtained employment in a railroad yard, then as a freight conductor, gone West, become a contractor, in which position a lucky hit set him on the road of the unscrupulous accumulation of property. He was now a railway magnate, the president of a system, a manipulator of dexterity and courage. All this would not have come about if his big head had not been packed with commonsense brains, and he had not had uncommon will and force of character. Success had developed the best side of him, the family side; and the worst side of him—a brutal determination to increase his big fortune. He was not hampered by any scruples in business, but he had the good-sense to deal squarely with his friends when he had distinctly agreed to do so.

Henderson did not respond to the matrimonial suggestion; it was not possible for him to vulgarize his own affair by hinting it to such a man as Hollowell; but they soon fell into serious talk about schemes in which they were both interested. This talk so absorbed Henderson that after they had reached the city he had walked some blocks towards his lodging before he recalled his promise about the message. On his table he found a note from Carmen bidding him to dinner informally—an invitation which he had no difficulty in declining on account of a previous engagement. And then he went to his club, and passed a cheerful evening. Why not? There was nothing melancholy about the young fellows in the smoking-room, who liked a good story and the latest gossip, and were attracted to the society of Henderson, who was open-handed and full of animal spirits, and above all had a reputation for success, and for being on the inside of affairs. There is nowhere else so much wisdom and such understanding of life as in a city club of young fellows, who have their experience still, for the most part, before them. Henderson was that night in great “force”—as the phrase is. His companions thought he had made a lucky turn, and he did not tell them that he had won the love of the finest girl in the world, who was at that moment thinking of him as fondly as he was thinking of her—but this was the subconsciousness of his gayety. Late at night he wrote her a long letter—an honest letter of love and admiration, which warmed into the tenderness of devotion as it went on; a letter that she never parted with all her life long; but he left a description of the loneliness of his evening without her to her imagination.

It was for Margaret also a happy evening, but not a calm one, and not gay. She was swept away by a flood of emotions. She wanted to be alone, to think it over, every item of the short visit, every look, every tone. Was it all true? The great change made her tremble: of the future she dared scarcely think. She was restless, but not restless as before; she could not be calm in such a great happiness. And then the wonder of it, that he should choose her of all others—he who knew the world so well, and must have known so many women. She followed him on his journey, thinking what he was doing now, and now, and now. She would have given the world to see him just for a moment, to look in his eyes and be sure again, to have him say that little word once more: there was a kind of pain in her heart, the separation was so cruel; it had been over two hours now. More than once in the evening she ran down to the sitting-room, where her aunt was pretending to be absorbed in a book, to kiss her, to pet her, to smooth her grayish hair and pat her cheek, and get her to talk about her girlhood days. She was so happy that tears were in her eyes half the time. At nine o’clock there was a pull at the bell that threatened to drag the wire out, and an insignificant little urchin appeared with a telegram, which frightened Miss Forsythe, and seemed to Margaret to drop out of heaven. Such an absurd thing to do at night, said the aunt, and then she kissed Margaret, and laughed a little, and declared that things had come to a queer pass when people made love by telegraph. There wasn’t any love in the telegram, Margaret said; but she knew better—the sending word of his arrival was a marvelous exhibition of thoughtfulness and constancy.

And then she led her aunt on to talk of Mr. Henderson, to give her impression, how he looked, what she really thought of him, and so on, and so on.

There was not much to say, but it could be said over and over again in various ways. It was the one night of the world, and her overwrought feeling sought relief. It would not be so again. She would be more reticent and more coquettish about her lover, but now it was all so new and strange.

That night when the girl went to sleep the telegram was under her pillow, and it seemed to throb with a thousand messages, as if it felt the pulsation of the current that sent it.

The prospective marriage of the budding millionaire Rodney Henderson was a society paper item in less than a week—the modern method of publishing the banns. This was accompanied by a patronizing reference to the pretty schoolma’am, who was complimented upon her good-fortune in phrases so neatly turned as to give Henderson the greatest offense, and leave him no remedy, since nothing could have better suited the journal than further notoriety. He could not remember that he had spoken of it to any one except the Eschelles, to whom his relations made the communication a necessity, and he suspected Carmen, without, however, guessing that she was a habitual purveyor of the town gossiper.

“It is a shameful impertinence,” she burst out, introducing the subject herself, when he called to see her. “I would horsewhip the editor.” Her indignation was so genuine, and she took his side with such warm good comradeship, that his suspicions vanished for a moment.

“What good?” he answered, cooling down at the sight of her rage. “It is true, we are to be married, and she has taught school. I can’t drag her name into a row about it. Perhaps she never will see it.”

“Oh dear! dear me! what have I done?” the girl cried, with an accent of contrition. “I never thought of that. I was so angry that I cut it out and put it in the letter that was to contain nothing but congratulations, and told her how perfectly outrageous I thought it. How stupid!” and there was a world of trouble in her big dark eyes, while she looked up penitently, as if to ask his forgiveness for a great crime.

“Well, it cannot be helped,” Henderson said, with a little touch of sympathy for Carmen’s grief. “Those who know her will think it simply malicious, and the others will not think of it a second time.”

“But I cannot forgive myself for my stupidity. I’m not sure but I’d rather you’d think me wicked than stupid,” she continued, with the smile in her eyes that most men found attractive. “I confess—is that very bad?—that I feel it more for you than for her. But” ( she thought she saw a shade in his face) “I warn you, if you are not very nice, I shall transfer my affections to her.”

The girl was in her best mood, with the manner of a confiding, intimate friend. She talked about Margaret, but not too much, and a good deal more about Henderson and his future, not laying too great stress upon the marriage, as if it were, in fact, only an incident in his career, contriving always to make herself appear as a friend, who hadn’t many illusions or much romance, to be sure, but who could always be relied on in any mood or any perplexity, and wouldn’t be frightened or very severe at any confidences. She posed as a woman who could make allowances, and whose friendship would be no check or hinderance. This was conveyed in manner as much as in words, and put Henderson quite at his ease. He was not above the weakness of liking the comradeship of a woman of whom he was not afraid, a woman to whom he could say anything, a woman who could make allowances. Perhaps he was hardly conscious of this. He knew Carmen better than she thought he knew her, and he couldn’t approve of her as a wife; and yet the fact was that she never gave him any moral worries.

“Yes,” she said, when the talk drifted that way, “the chrysalis earl has gone. I think that mamma is quite inconsolable. She says she doesn’t understand girls, or men, or anything, these days.”

“Do you?” asked Henderson, lightly.

“I? No. I’m an agnostic—except in religion. Have you got it into your head, my friend, that I ever fancied Mr. Lyon?”

“Not for himself—” began Henderson, mischievously.

“That will do.” She stopped him. “Or that he ever had any intention—”

“I don’t see how he could resist such—”

“Stuff! See here, Mr. Rodney!” The girl sprang up, seized a plaque from the table, held it aloft in one hand, took half a dozen fascinating, languid steps, advancing and retreating with the grace of a Nautch girl, holding her dress with the other hand so as to allow a free movement. “Do you think I’d ever do that for John the Lyon’s head on a charger?”

Then her mood changed to the domestic, as she threw herself into an easy-chair and said: “After all, I’m rather sorry he has gone. He was a man you could trust; that is, if you wanted to trust anybody—I wish I had been made good.”

When Henderson bade her goodnight it was with the renewed impression that she was a very diverting comrade.

“I’m sort of sorry for you,” she said, and her eyes were not so serious as to offend, as she gave him her hand, “for when you are married, you know, as the saying is, you’ll want some place to spend your evenings.” The audacity of the remark was quite obscured in the innocent frankness and sweetness of her manner.

What Henderson had to show Hollowell in his office had been of a nature greatly to interest that able financier. It was a project that would have excited the sympathy of Carmen, but Henderson did not speak of it to her—though he had found that she was a safe deposit of daring schemes in general—on account of a feeling of loyalty to Margaret, to whom he had never mentioned it in any of his daily letters. The scheme made a great deal of noise, later on, when it came to the light of consummation in legislatures and in courts, both civil and criminal; but its magnitude and success added greatly to Henderson’s reputation as a bold and fortunate operator, and gave him that consideration which always attaches to those who command millions of money, and have the nerve to go undaunted through the most trying crises. I am anticipating by saying that it absolutely ruined thousands of innocent people, caused widespread strikes and practical business paralysis over a large region; but those things were regarded as only incidental to a certain sort of development, and did not impair the business standing, and rather helped the social position, of the two or three men who counted their gains by millions in the operation. It furnished occupation and gave good fees to a multitude of lawyers, and was dignified by the anxious consultation of many learned judges. A moralist, if he were poor and pessimistic, might have put the case in a line, and taken that line from the Mosaic decalogue (which was not intended for this new dispensation); but it was involved in such a cloud of legal technicalities, and took on such an aspect of enterprise and development of resources, and what not, that the general public mind was completely befogged about it. I am charitable enough to suppose that if the scheme had failed, the public conscience is so tender that there would have been a question of Henderson’s honesty. But it did not fail.

Of this scheme, however, we knew nothing at the time in Brandon. Henderson was never in better spirits, never more agreeable, and it did not need inquiry to convince one that he was never so prosperous. He was often with us, in flying visits, and I can well remember that his coming and the expectation of it gave a kind of elation to the summer—that and Margaret’s supreme and sunny happiness. Even my wife admitted that it was on both sides a love-match, and could urge nothing against it except the woman’s instinct that made her shrink from the point of ever thinking of him as a husband for herself, which seemed to me a perfectly reasonable feeling under all the circumstances.

The summer—or what we call summer in the North, which is usually a preparation for warm weather, ending in a preparation for cold weather—seemed to me very short—but I have noticed that each summer is a little shorter than the preceding one. If Henderson had wanted to gain the confidence of my wife he could not have done so more effectually than he did in making us the confidants of a little plan he had in the city, which was a profound secret to the party most concerned. This was the purchase and furnishing of a house, and we made many clandestine visits with him to town in the early autumn in furtherance of his plan. He was intent on a little surprise, and when I once hinted to him that women liked to have a hand in making the home they were to occupy, he said he thought that my wife knew Margaret’s taste—and besides, he added, with a smile, “it will be only temporary; I should like her, if she chooses, to build and furnish a house to suit herself.” In any one else this would have seemed like assumption, but with Henderson it was only the simple belief in his career.

We were still more surprised when we came to see the temporary home that Henderson had selected, the place where the bride was to alight, and look about her for such a home as would suit her growing idea of expanding fortune and position. It was one of the old-fashioned mansions on Washington Square, built at a time when people attached more importance to room and comfort than to outside display—a house that seemed to have traditions of hospitality and of serene family life. It was being thoroughly renovated and furnished, with as little help from the decorative artist and the splendid upholsterer as consisted with some regard to public opinion; in fact the expenditure showed in solid dignity and luxurious ease, and not in the construction of a museum in which one could only move about with the constant fear of destroying something. My wife was given almost carte blanche in the indulgence of her taste, and she confessed her delight in being able for once to deal with a house without the feeling that she was ruining me. Only in the suite designed for Margaret did Henderson seriously interfere, and insist upon a luxury that almost took my wife’s breath away. She opposed it on moral grounds. She said that no true woman could stand such pampering of her senses without destruction of her moral fibre. But Henderson had his way, as he always had it. What pleased her most in the house was the conservatory, opening out from the drawing-room—a spacious place with a fountain and cool vines and flowering plants, not a tropical hothouse in a stifling atmosphere, in which nothing could live except orchids and flowers born near the equator, but a garden with a temperature adapted to human lungs, where one could sit and enjoy the sunshine, and the odor of flowers, and the clear and not too incessant notes of Mexican birds. But when it was all done, undoubtedly the most agreeable room in the house was that to which least thought had been given, the room to which any odds and ends could be sent, the room to which everybody gravitated when rest and simple enjoyment without restraint were the object Henderson’s own library, with its big open fire, and the books and belongings of his bachelor days. Man is usually not credited with much taste or ability to take care of himself in the matter of comfortable living, but it is frequently noticed that when woman has made a dainty paradise of every other portion of the house, the room she most enjoys, that from which it is difficult to keep out the family, is the one that the man is permitted to call his own, in which he retains some of the comforts and can indulge some of the habits of his bachelor days. There is an important truth in this fact with regard to the sexes, but I do not know what it is.

They were married in October, and went at once to their own house. I suppose all other days were but a preparation for this golden autumn day on which we went to church and returned to the wedding-breakfast. I am sure everybody was happy. Miss Forsythe was so happy that tears were in her eyes half the time, and she bustled about with an affectation of cheerfulness that was almost contagious. Poor, dear, gentle lady! I can imagine the sensations of a peach-tree, in an orchard of trees which bud and bloom and by-and-by are weighty with yellow fruit, year after year—a peach-tree that blooms, also, but never comes to fruition, only wastes its delicate sweetness on the air, and finally blooms less and less, but feels nevertheless in each returning spring the stir of the sap and the longing for that fuller life, while all the orchard bursts into flower, and the bees swarm about the pink promises, and the fruit sets and slowly matures to lusciousness in the sun of July. I fancy the wedding, which robbed us all, was hardest for her, for it was in one sense a finality of her life. Whereas if Margaret had regrets—and deep sorrow she had in wrenching herself from the little neighborhood, though she never could have guessed the vacancy she caused by the withdrawal of her loved presence—her own life was only just beginning, and she was sustained by the longing which every human soul has for a new career, by the curiosity and imagination which the traveler feels when he departs for a land which he desires, and yet dreads to see lest his illusions should vanish. Margaret was about to take that journey in the world which Miss Forsythe had dreamed of in her youth, but had never set out on. There are some who say that those are happiest who keep at home and content themselves with reading about the lands of the imagination. But happily the world does not believe this, and indeed would be very unhappy if it could not try and prove all the possibilities of human nature, to suffer as well as to enjoy.

I do not know how we fell into the feeling that this marriage was somehow exceptional and important, since marriages take place every day, and are so common and ordinarily so commonplace, when the first flutter is over. Even Morgan said, in his wife’s presence, that he thought there had been weddings enough; at least he would interdict those that upset things like this one. For one thing, it brought about the housekeeping union of Mrs. Fletcher and Miss Forsythe in the tatter’s cottage—a sort of closing up of the ranks that happens on the field during a fatal engagement. As we go on, it becomes more and more difficult to fill up the gaps.

We were very unwilling to feel that Margaret had gone out of our life. “But you cannot,” Morgan used to say, “be friends with the rich, and that is what makes the position of the very rich so pitiful, for the rich get so tired of each other.”

“But Margaret,” my wife urged, “will never be of that sort: money will not change either her habits or her affections.”

“Perhaps. You can never trust to inherited poverty. I have no doubt that she will resist the world, if anybody can, but my advice is that if you want to keep along with Margaret, you’d better urge your husband to make money. Experience seems to teach that while they cannot come to us, we may sometimes go to them.”

My wife and Mrs. Fletcher were both indignant at this banter, and accused Morgan of want of faith, and even lack of affection for Margaret; in short, of worldly-mindedness himself.

“Perhaps I am rather shop-worn,” he confessed. “It’s not distrust of Margaret’s intentions, but knowledge of the strength of the current on which she has embarked. Henderson will not stop in his career short of some overwhelming disaster or of death.”

“I thought you liked him? At any rate, Margaret will make a good use of his money.”

“It isn’t a question, my dear Mrs. Fairchild, of the use of money, but of the use money makes of you. Yes, I do like Henderson, but I can’t give up my philosophy of life for the sake of one good fellow.”

“Philosophy of fudge!” exclaimed my wife. And there really was no answer to this.

After six weeks had passed, my wife paid a visit to Margaret. Nothing could exceed the affectionate cordiality of her welcome. Margaret was overjoyed to see her, to show the house, to have her know her husband better, to take her into her new life. She was hardly yet over the naive surprises of her lovely surroundings. Or if it is too mach to say that her surprise had lasted six weeks—for it is marvelous how soon women adapt themselves to new conditions if they are agreeable—she was in a glow of wonder at her husband’s goodness, at his love, which had procured all this happiness for her.

“You have no idea,” she said, “how thoughtful he is about everything—and he makes so little of it all. I am to thank you, he tells me always, for whatever pleases my taste in the house, and indeed I think I should have known you had been here if he had not told me. There are so many little touches that remind me of home. I am glad of that, for it is the more likely to make you feel that it is your home also.”

She clung to this idea in the whirl of the new life. In the first days she dwelt much on this theme; indeed it was hardly second in her talk to her worship—I can call it nothing less—of her husband. She liked to talk of Brandon and the dear life there and the dearer friends—this much talk about it showed that it was another life, already of the past, and beginning to be distant in the mind. My wife had a feeling that Margaret, thus early, was conscious of a drift, of a widening space, and was making an effort to pull the two parts of her life together, that there should be no break, as one carried away to sea by a resistless tide grasps the straining rope that still maintains his slender connection with the shore.

But it was all so different: the luxurious house, the carriage at call, the box at the opera, the social duties inevitable with her own acquaintances and the friends of her husband. She spoke of this in moments of confidence, and when she was tired, with a consciousness that it was a different life, but in no tone of regret, and I fancy that the French blood in her veins, which had so long run decorously in Puritan channels, leaped at its return into new gayety. Years ago Margaret had thought that she might some time be a missionary, at least that she should like to devote her life to useful labors among the poor and the unfortunate. If conscience ever reminded her of this, conscience was quieted by the suggestion that now she was in a position to be more liberal than she ever expected to be; that is, to give everything except the essential thing—herself. Henderson liked a gay house, brightness, dinners, entertainment, and that his wife should be seen and admired. Proof of his love she found in all this, and she entered into it with spirit, and an enjoyment increased by the thought that she was lightening the burden of his business, which she could see pressed more and more. Not that Henderson made any account of his growing occupations, or that any preoccupation was visible except to the eye of love, which is quick to see all moods. These were indeed happy days, full of the brightness of an expanding prosperity and unlimited possibilities of the enjoyment of life. It was in obedience to her natural instinct, and not yet a feeling of compensation and propitiation, that enlisted Margaret in the city charities, connection with which was a fashionable self-entertainment with some, and a means of social promotion with others. My wife came home a little weary with so much of the world, but, on the whole, impressed with Margaret’s good-fortune. Henderson in his own house was the soul of consideration and hospitality, and Margaret was blooming in the beauty that shines in satisfied desire.

XIII

It is so painful to shrink, and so delightful to grow! Every one knows the renovation of feeling—often mistaken for a moral renewal—when the worn dress of the day is exchanged for the fresh evening toilet. The expansiveness of prosperity has a like effect, though the moralist is always piping about the beneficent uses of adversity. The moralist is, of course, right, time enough given; but what does the tree, putting out its tender green leaves to the wooing of the south wind, care for the moralist? How charming the world is when you go with it, and not against it!

It was better than Margaret had thought. When she came to Washington in the winter season the beautiful city seemed to welcome her and respond to the gayety of her spirit. It was so open, cheerful, hospitable, in the appearance of its smooth, broad avenues and pretty little parks, with the bronze statues which all looked noble—in the moonlight; it was such a combination and piquant contrast of shabby ease and stately elegance—negro cabins and stone mansions, picket-fences and sheds, and flower-banked terraces before rows of residences which bespoke wealth and refinement. The very aspect of the street population was novel; compared to New York, the city was as silent as a country village, and the passers, who have the fashion of walking in the middle of the street upon the asphalt as freely as upon the sidewalks, had a sort of busy leisureliness, the natural air of thousands of officials hived in offices for a few hours and then left in irresponsible idleness. But what most distinguished the town, after all, in Margaret’s first glimpse of it, was the swarming negro population pervading every part of it—the slouching plantation negro, the smart mulatto girl with gay raiment and mincing step, the old-time auntie, the brisk waiter-boy with uncertain eye, the washerwoman, the hawkers and fruiterers, the loafing strollers of both sexes—carrying everywhere color, abandon, a certain picturesqueness and irresponsibility and good-nature, and a sense of moral relaxation in a too strict and duty-ridden world.

In the morning, when Margaret looked from the windows of the hotel, the sky was gray and yielding, and all the outlines of the looming buildings were softened in the hazy air. The dome of the Capitol seemed to float like a bubble, and to be as unsubstantial as the genii edifices in the Arabian tale. The Monument, the slim white shaft as tall as the Great Pyramid, was still more a dream creation, not really made of hard marble, but of something as soft as vapor, almost melting into the sky, and yet distinct, unwavering, its point piercing the upper air, threatening every instant to dissolve, as if it were truly the baseless fabric of a vision—light, unreal, ghost-like, spotless, pure as an unsullied thought; it might vanish in a breath; and yet, no; it is solid: in the mist of doubt, in the assault of storms, smitten by the sun, beaten by the tempests, it stands there, springing, graceful, immovable—emblem, let us say, of the purity and permanence of the republic.

“You never half told me, Rodney, how beautiful it all is!” Margaret exclaimed, in a glow of delight.

“Yes,” said Henderson, “the Monument is behaving very well this morning. I never saw it before look so little like a factory chimney.”

“That is, you never looked at it with my eyes before, cynic. But it is all so lovely, everywhere.”

“Of course it is, dear.” They were standing together at the window, and his arm was where it should have been. “What did you expect? There are concentrated here the taste and virtue of sixty millions of people.”

“But you always said the Washington hotels were so bad. These apartments are charming.”

“Yes”—and he drew her closer to him—“there is no denying that. But presently I shall have to explain to you an odd phenomenon. Virginia, you know, used to be famous for its good living, and Maryland was simply unapproachable for good cooking. It was expected when the District was made out of these two that the result would be something quite extraordinary in the places of public entertainment. But, by a process which nobody can explain, in the union the art of cooking in hotels got mislaid.”

“Well,” she said, with winning illogicality, “you’ve got me.”

“If you could only eat the breakfasts for me, as you can see the Monument for me!”

“Dear, I could eat the Monument for you, if it would do you any good.” And neither of them was ashamed of this nonsense, for both knew that married people indulge in it when they are happy.

Although Henderson came to Washington on business, this was Margaret’s wedding journey. There is no other city in the world where a wedding journey can better be combined with such business as is transacted here, for in both is a certain element of mystery. Washington is gracious to a bride, if she is pretty and agreeable—devotion to governing, or to legislation, or to diplomacy, does not render a man insensible to feminine attractions; and if in addition to beauty a woman has the reputation of wealth, she is as nearly irresistible here as anywhere. To Margaret, who was able to return the hospitality she received, and whose equipage was almost as much admired as her toilets, all doors were open—a very natural thing, surely, in a good-natured, give-and-take world. The colonel—Margaret had laughed till she cried when first she heard her husband saluted by this title in Washington by his New Hampshire acquaintances, but he explained to her that he had justly won it years ago by undergoing the hardship of receptions as a member of the Governor’s staff—the colonel had brought on his horses and carriages, not at all by way of ostentation, but simply out of regard to what was due her as his wife, and because a carriage at call is a constant necessity in this city, whose dignity is equal to the square of its distances, and because there is something incongruous in sending a bride about in a herdic. Margaret’s unworldly simplicity had received a little shock when she first saw her servants in livery, but she was not slow to see the propriety and even necessity of it in a republican society, since elegance cannot be a patchwork, but must be harmonious, and there is no harmony between a stylish turnout—noble horses nobly caparisoned—and a coachman and footman on the box dressed according to their own vulgar taste. Given a certain position, one’s sense of fitness and taste mast be maintained. And there is so much kindliness and consideration in human nature—Margaret’s gorgeous coachman and footman never by a look revealed their knowledge that she was new to the situation, and I dare say that their respectful demeanor contributed to raise her in her own esteem as one of the select and favored in this prosperous world. The most self-poised and genuine are not insensible to the tribute of this personal consideration. My lady giving orders to her respectful servitors, and driving down the avenue in her luxurious turnout, is not at all the same person in feeling that she would be if dragged about in a dissolute-looking hack whose driver has the air of the stable. We take kindly to this transformation, and perhaps it is only the vulgar in soul who become snobbish in it. Little by little, under this genial consideration, Margaret advanced in the pleasant path of worldliness; and we heard, by the newspapers and otherwise—indeed, Mr. and Mrs. Morgan were there for a couple of weeks in the winter—that she was never more sweet and gracious and lovely than in this first season at the capital. I don’t know that the town was raving, as they said, about her beauty and wit—there is nothing like the wit of a handsome woman—and amiability and unostentatious little charities, but she was a great favorite. We used to talk about it by the fire in Brandon, where everything reminded us of the girl we loved, and rejoice in her good-fortune and happiness, and get rather heavy-hearted in thinking that she had gone away from us into such splendor.

“I wish you were here,” she wrote to my wife. “I am sure you would enjoy it. There are so many distinguished people and brilliant people—though the distinguished are not always brilliant nor the brilliant distinguished—and everybody is so kind and hospitable, and Rodney is such a favorite. We go everywhere, literally, and all the time. You must not scold, but I haven’t opened a book, except my prayerbook, in six weeks—it is such a whirl. And it is so amusing. I didn’t know there were so many kinds of people and so many sorts of provincialism in the world. The other night, at the British Minister’s, a French attache, who complimented my awful French—I told him that I inherited all but the vocabulary and the accent—said that if specimens of the different kinds of women evolved in all out-of-the-way places who come to Washington could be exhibited, nobody would doubt any more that America is an interesting country. Wasn’t it an impudent speech? I tried to tell him, in French, how grateful American women are for any little attention from foreigners who have centuries of politeness behind them. Ah me! I sometimes long for one of the old-fashioned talks before your smoldering logs! What we talk about here, Heaven only knows. I sometimes tell Rodney at night—it is usually morning—that I feel like an extinct piece of fireworks. But next day it is all delightful again; and, dear friend, I don’t know but that I like being fireworks.”

Among the men who came oftenest to see Henderson was Jerry Hollowell. It seemed to Margaret an odd sort of companionship; it could not be any similarity of tastes that drew them together, and she could not understand the nature of the business transacted in their mysterious conferences. Social life had few attractions for Hollowell, for his family were in the West; he appeared to have no relations with any branch of government; he wanted no office, though his influence was much sought by those who did want it.

“You spend a good deal of time here, Mr. Hollowell,” Margaret said one day when he called in Henderson’s absence.

“Yes, ma’am, considerable. Things need a good deal of fixing up. Washington is a curious place. It’s a sort of exchange for the whole country: you can see everybody here, and it is a good place to arrange matters.”

“With Congress, do you mean?” Margaret had heard much of the corruption of Congress.

“No, not Congress particularly. Congressmen are just about like other people. It’s all nonsense, this talk about buying Congressmen. You cannot buy them any more than you can buy other people, but you can sort of work together with some of them. We don’t want anything of Congress, except to be let alone. If we are doing something to develop the trade in the Southwest, build it up, some member who thinks he is smart will just as likely as not try to put in a block somewhere, or investigate, or something, in order to show his independence, and then he has to be seen, and shown that he is going against the interests of his constituents. It is just as it is everywhere: men have to be shown what their real interest is. No; most Congressmen are poor, and they stay poor. It is a good deal easier to deal with those among them who are rich and have some idea about the prosperity of the country. It is just so in the departments. You’ve got to watch things, if you expect them to go smooth. You’ve got to get acquainted with the men. Most men are reasonable when you get well acquainted with them. I tell your husband that people are about as reasonable in Washington as you’ll find them anywhere.”

“Washington is certainly very pleasant.”

“Yes, that’s so; it is pleasant. Where most everybody wants something, they are bound to be accommodating. That’s my idea. I reckon you don’t find Jerry Hollowell trying to pull a cat by its tail,” he added, dropping into his native manner.

“Well, I must go and hunt up the old man. Glad to have made your acquaintance, Mrs. Henderson.” And then, with a sly look, “If I knew you better, ma’am, I should take the liberty of congratulating you that Henderson has come round so handsomely.”

“Come round?” asked Margaret, in amused wonder.

“Well, I took the liberty of giving him a hint that he wasn’t cut-out for a single man. I showed him that,” and he lugged out his photograph-case from a mass of papers in his breast-pocket and handed it to her.

“Ah, I see,” said Margaret, studying the photographs with a peculiar smile.

“Oh, Henderson knows a good thing when he sees it,” said Hollowell, complacently.

It was not easy to be offended with Hollowell’s kind-hearted boorishness, and after he had gone, Margaret sat a long time reflecting upon this new specimen of man in her experience. She was getting many new ideas in these days, the moral lines were not as clearly drawn as she had thought; it was impossible to ticket men off into good and bad. In Hollowell she had a glimpse of a world low-toned and vulgar; she had heard that he was absolutely unscrupulous, and she had supposed that he would appear to be a very wicked man. But he seemed to be good-hearted and tolerant and friendly. How fond he was of his family, and how charitable about Congress! And she wondered if the world was generally on Hollowell’s level. She met many men more cultivated than he, gentlemen in manner and in the first social position, who took, after all, about his tone in regard to the world, very agreeable people usually, easy to get on with, not exacting, or professing much faith in anybody, and mildly cynical—only bitterly cynical when they failed to get what they wanted, and felt the good things of life slipping away from them. It was to take her some time to learn that some of the most agreeable people are those who have succeeded by the most questionable means; and when she came to this knowledge, what would be her power of judgment as to these means?

“Mr. Hollowell has been here,” she said, when Henderson returned.

“Old Jerry? He is a character.”

“Do you trust him?”

“It never occurred to me. Yes, I suppose so, as far as his interests go. He isn’t a bad sort of fellow—very long-headed.”

“Dear,” said Margaret, with hesitation, “I wish you didn’t have anything to do with such men.”

“Why, dearest?”

“Oh, I don’t know. You needn’t laugh. It rather lets one down; and it isn’t like you.”

Henderson laughed aloud now. “But you needn’t associate with Hollowell. We men cannot pick our companions in business and politics. It needs all sorts to keep the world going.”

“Then I’d rather let it stop,” Margaret said.

“And sell out at auction?” he cried, with a look of amusement.

“But aren’t Mr. Morgan and Mr. Fairchild business men?”

“Yes—of the old-fashioned sort. The fact—is, Margaret, you’ve got a sort of preserve up in Brandon, and you fancy that the world is divided into sheep and goats. It’s a great mistake. There is no such division. Every man almost is both a sheep and a goat.”

“I don’t believe it, Rodney. You are neither.” She came close to him, and taking the collar of his coat in each hand, gave him a little shake, and looking up into his face with quizzical affection, asked, “What is your business here?”

Henderson stooped down and kissed her forehead, and tenderly lifted the locks of her brown hair. “You wouldn’t understand, sweet, if I told you.”

“You might try.”

“Well, there’s a man here from Fort Worth who wants us to buy a piece of railroad, and extend it, and join it with Hollowell’s system, and open up a lot of new country.”

“And isn’t it a good piece of road?”

“Yes; that’s the trouble. The owners want to keep it to themselves, and prevent the general development. But we shall get it.”

“It isn’t anything like wrecking, is it, dear?”

“Do you think we would want to wreck our own property?”

“But what has Congress to do with it?”

“Oh, there’s a land grant. But some of the members who were not in the Congress that voted it say that it is forfeited.”

In this fashion the explanation went on. Margaret loved to hear her husband talk, and to watch the changing expression of his face, and he explained about this business until she thought he was the sweetest fellow in the world.

The Morgans had arrived at the same hotel, and Margaret went about with them in the daytime, while Henderson was occupied. It was like a breath of home to be with them, and their presence, reviving that old life, gave a new zest to the society spectacle, to the innocent round of entertainments, which more and more absorbed her. Besides, it was very interesting to have Mr. Morgan’s point of view of Washington, and to see the shifting panorama through his experience. He had been very much in the city in former years, but he came less and less now, not because it was less beautiful or attractive in a way, but because it had lost for him a certain charm it once had.

“I am not sure,” he said, as they were driving one day, “that it is not now the handsomest capital in the world; at any rate, it is on its way to be that. No other has public buildings more imposing, or streets and avenues so attractive in their interrupted regularity, so many stately vistas ending in objects refreshing to the eye—a bit of park, banks of flowers, a statue or a monument that is decorative, at least in the distance. As the years go on we shall have finer historical groups, triumphal arches and columns that will give it more and more an air of distinction, the sort of splendor with which the Roman Empire celebrated itself, and, added to this, the libraries and museums and galleries that are the chief attractions of European cities. Oh, we have only just begun—the city is so accessible in all directions, and lends itself to all sorts of magnificence and beauty.”

“I declare,” said Mrs. Morgan to Margaret, “I didn’t know that he could be so eloquent. Page, you ought to be in Congress.”

“In order to snuff myself out? Congress is not so important a feature as it used to be. Washington is getting to have a character of its own; it seems as if it wouldn’t be much without its official life, yet the process is going on here that is so marked all over the country—the divorce of social and political life. I used to think, fifteen years ago, that Washington was a standing contradiction to the old aphorism that a democracy cannot make society—there was no more agreeable society in the world than that in Washington even ten years ago: society selected itself somehow without any marked class distinction, and it was delightfully simple and accessible.”

“And what has changed it?” Margaret asked.

“Money, which changes everything and everybody. The whole scale has altered. There is so much more display and expense. I remember when a private carriage in Washington was a rare object. The possession of money didn’t help one much socially. What made a person desired in any company was the talent of being agreeable, talent of some sort, not the ability to give a costly dinner or a big ball.”

“But there are more literary and scientific people here, everybody says,” said Margaret, who was becoming a partisan of the city.

“Yes, and they keep more to themselves—withdraw into their studies, or hive in their clubs. They tell me that the delightful informality and freedom of the old life is gone. Ask the old Washington residents whether the coming in of rich people with leisure hasn’t demoralized society, or stiffened it, and made it impossible after the old sort. It is as easy here now as anywhere else to get together a very heavy dinner party—all very grand, but it isn’t amusing. It is more and more like New York.”

“But we have been to delightful dinners,” Margaret insisted.

“No doubt. There are still houses of the old sort, where wit and good-humor and free hospitality are more conspicuous than expense; but when money selects, there is usually an incongruous lot about the board. An oracular scientist at the club the other night put it rather neatly when he said that a society that exists mainly to pay its debts gets stupid.”

“That’s as clever,” Margaret retorted, “as the remark of an under-secretary at a cabinet reception the other night, that it is one thing to entertain and another to be entertaining. I won’t have you slander Washington. I should like to spend all my winters here.”

“Dear me!” said Morgan, “I’ve been praising Washington. I should like to live here also, if I had the millions of Jerry Hollowell. Jerry is going to build a palace out on the Massachusetts Avenue extension bigger than the White House.”

“I don’t want to hear anything about Hollowell.”

“But he is the coming man. He represents the democratic plutocracy that we are coming to.”

All Morgan’s banter couldn’t shake Margaret’s enjoyment of the cheerful city. “You like it as well as anybody,” she told him. And in truth he and Mrs. Morgan dipped into every gayety that was going. “Of course I do,” he said, “for a couple of weeks. I shouldn’t like to be obliged to follow it as a steady business. Washington is a good place to take a plunge occasionally. And then you can go home and read King Solomon with appreciation.”

Margaret had thought when she came to Washington that she should spend a good deal of time at the Capitol, listening to the eloquence of the Senators and Representatives, and that she should study the collections and the Patent-office and explore all the public buildings, in which she had such intense historical interest as a teacher in Brandon. But there was little time for these pleasures, which weighed upon her like duties. She did go to the Capitol once, and tired herself out tramping up and down, and was very proud of it all, and wondered how any legislation was ever accomplished, and was confused by the hustling about, the swinging of doors, the swarms in the lobbies, and the racing of messengers, and concluded unjustly that it was a big hive of whispered conference, and bargaining, and private interviewing. Morgan asked her if she expected that the business of sixty millions of people was going to be done with the order and decorum of a lyceum debating society. In one of the committee-rooms she saw Hollowell, looking at ease, and apparently an indispensable part of the government machine. Her own husband, who had accompanied the party, she lost presently, whisked away somewhere. He was sought in vain afterwards, and at last Margaret came away dazed and stunned by the noise of the wheels of the great republic in motion. She did not try it again, and very little strolling about the departments satisfied her. The west end claimed her—the rolling equipages, the drawing-rooms, the dress, the vistas of evening lamps, the gay chatter in a hundred shining houses, the exquisite dinners, the crush of the assemblies, the full flow of the tide of fashion and of enjoyment—what is there so good in life? To be young, to be rich, to be pretty, to be loved, to be admired, to compliment and be complimented—every Sunday at morning service, kneeling in a fluttering row of the sweetly devout, whose fresh toilets made it good to be there, and who might humbly hope to be forgiven for the things they have left undone, Margaret thanked Heaven for its gifts.

And it went well with Henderson meantime. Surely he was born under a lucky star—if it is good-luck for a man to have absolute prosperity and the gratification of all his desires. One reason why Hollowell sought his cooperation was a belief in this luck, and besides Henderson was, he knew, more presentable, and had social access in quarters where influence was desirable, although Hollowell was discovering that with most men delicacy in presenting anything that is for their interest is thrown away. He found no difficulty in getting recruits for his little dinners at Champolion’s—dinners that were not always given in his name, and where he appeared as a guest, though he footed the bills. Bungling grossness has disappeared from all really able and large transactions, and genius is mainly exercised in the supply of motives for a line of conduct. The public good is one of the motives that looks best in Washington.

Henderson and Hollowell got what they wanted in regard to the Southwest consolidation, and got it in the most gentlemanly way. Nobody was bought, no one was offered a bribe. There were, of course, fees paid for opinions and for professional services, and some able men induced to take a prospective interest in what was demonstrably for the public good. But no vote was given for a consideration—at least this was the report of an investigating committee later on. Nothing, of course, goes through Congress of its own weight, except occasionally a resolution of sympathy with the Coreans, and the calendar needs to be watched, and the good offices of friends secured. Skillful wording of a clause, the right moment, and opportune recognition do the business. The main thing is to create a favorable atmosphere and avoid discussion. When the bill was passed, Hollowell did give a dinner on his own invitation, a dinner that was talked of for its refinement as well as its cost. The chief topic of conversation was the development of the Southwest and the extension of our trade relations with Mexico. The little scheme, hatched in Henderson’s New York office, in order to transfer certain already created values to the pockets of himself and his friends, appeared to have a national importance. When Henderson rose to propose the health of Jerry Hollowell, neither he nor the man he eulogized as a creator of industries whose republican patriotism was not bound by State lines nor circumscribed by sections was without a sense of the humor of the situation.

And yet in a certain way Mr. Hollowell was conscious that he merited the eulogy. He had come to believe that the enterprises in which he was engaged, that absolutely gave him, it was believed, an income of a million a year, were for the public good. Such vast operations lent him the importance of a public man. If he was a victim of the confusion of mind which mistook his own prosperity for the general benefit, he only shared a wide public opinion which regards the accumulation of enormous fortunes in a few hands as an evidence of national wealth.

Margaret left Washington with regret. She had a desire to linger in the opening of the charming spring there, for the little parks were brilliant with flower beds-tulips, hyacinths, crocuses, violets—the magnolias and redbuds in their prodigal splendor attracted the eye a quarter of a mile away, and the slender twigs of the trees began to be suffused with tender green. It was the sentimental time of the year. But Congress had gone, and whatever might be the promise of the season, Henderson had already gathered the fruits that had been forced in the hothouse of the session. He was in high spirits.

“It has all been so delightful, dear!” said Margaret as they rode away in the train, and caught their last sight of the dome. They were in Hollowell’s private car, which the good-natured old fellow had put at their disposal. And Margaret had a sense of how delightful and prosperous this world is as seen from a private car.

“Yes,” Henderson answered, thinking of various things; “it has been a successful winter. The capital is really attractive. It occurred to me the other day that America has invented a new kind of city, the apotheosis of the village—Washington.”

They talked of the city, of the acquaintances of the winter, of Hollowell’s thoughtfulness in lending them his car, that their bridal trip, as he had said, might have a good finish. Margaret’s heart opened to the world. She thought of the friends at Brandon, she thought of the poor old ladies she was accustomed to look after in the city, of the ragged-school that she visited, of the hospital in which she was a manager, of the mission chapel. The next Sunday would be Easter, and she thought of a hundred ways in which she could make it brighter for so many of the unfortunates. Her heart was opened to the world, and looking across to Henderson, who was deep in the morning paper, she said, with a wife’s unblushing effrontery, “Dearest, how handsome you are!”

The home life took itself up again easily and smoothly in Washington Square. Did there ever come a moment of reflection as to the nature of this prosperity which was altogether so absorbing and agreeable? If it came, did it give any doubts and raise any of the old questions that used to be discussed at Brandon? Wasn’t it the use that people made of money, after all, that was the real test? She did not like Hollowell, but on acquaintance he was not the monster that he had appeared to her in the newspapers. She was perplexed now and then by her husband’s business, but did it differ from that of other men she had known, except that it was on a larger scale? And how much good could be done with money!

On Easter morning, when Margaret returned from early service, to which she had gone alone, she found upon her dressing-table a note addressed to “My Wife,” and in it a check for a large sum to her order, and a card, on which was written, “For Margaret’s Easter Charities.” Flushed with pleasure, she ran to meet her husband on the landing as he was descending to breakfast, threw her arms about his neck, and, with tears in her eyes, cried, “Dearest, how good you are!”

It is such a good and prosperous generation.

XIV

Our lives are largely made up of the things we do not have. In May, the time of the apple blossoms—just a year from the swift wooing of Margaret—Miss Forsythe received a letter from John Lyon. It was in a mourning envelope. The Earl of Chisholm was dead, and John Lyon was Earl of Chisholm. The information was briefly conveyed, but with an air of profound sorrow. The letter spoke of the change that this loss brought to his own life, and the new duties laid upon him, which would confine him more closely to England. It also contained congratulations—which circumstances had delayed—upon Mrs. Henderson’s marriage, and a simple wish for her happiness. The letter was longer than it need have been for these purposes; it seemed to love to dwell upon the little visit to Brandon and the circle of friends there, and it was pervaded by a tone, almost affectionate, towards Miss Forsythe, which touched her very deeply. She said it was such a manly letter.

America, the earl said, interested him more and more. In all history, he wrote, there never had been such an opportunity for studying the formation of society, for watching the working out of political problems; the elements meeting were so new, and the conditions so original, that historical precedents were of little service as guides. He acknowledged an almost irresistible impulse to come back, and he announced his intention of another visit as soon as circumstances permitted.

I had noticed this in English travelers of intelligence before. Crude as the country is, and uninteresting according to certain established standards, it seems to have a “drawing” quality, a certain unexplained fascination. Morgan says that it is the social unconventionality that attracts, and that the American women are the loadstone. He declares. that when an Englishman secures and carries home with him an American wife, his curiosity about the country is sated. But this is generalizing on narrow premises.

There was certainly in Lyon’s letter a longing to see the country again, but the impression it made upon me when I read it—due partly to its tone towards Miss Forsythe, almost a family tone—was that the earldom was an empty thing without the love of Margaret Debree. Life is so brief at the best, and has so little in it when the one thing that the heart desires is denied. That the earl should wish to come to America again without hope or expectation was, however, quite human nature. If a man has found a diamond and lost it, he is likely to go again and again and wander about the field where he found it, not perhaps in any defined hope of finding another, but because there is a melancholy satisfaction in seeing the spot again. It was some such feeling that impelled the earl to wish to see again Miss Forsythe, and perhaps to talk of Margaret, but he certainly had no thought that there were two Margaret Debrees in America.

To her aunt’s letter conveying the intelligence of Mr. Lyon’s loss, Margaret replied with a civil message of condolence. The news had already reached the Eschelles, and Carmen, Margaret said, had written to the new earl a most pious note, which contained no allusion to his change of fortune, except an expression of sympathy with his now enlarged opportunity for carrying on his philanthropic plans—a most unworldly note. “I used to think,” she had said, when confiding what she had done to Margaret, “that you would make a perfect missionary countess, but you have done better, my dear, and taken up a much more difficult work among us fashionable sinners. Do you know,” she went on, “that I feel a great deal less worldly than I used to?”

Margaret wrote a most amusing account of this interview, and added that Carmen was really very good-hearted, and not half as worldly-minded as she pretended to be; an opinion with which Miss Forsythe did not at all agree. She had spent a fortnight with Margaret after Easter, and she came back in a dubious frame of mind. Margaret’s growing intimacy with Carmen was one of the sources of her uneasiness. They appeared to be more and more companionable, although Margaret’s clear perception of character made her estimate of Carmen very nearly correct. But the fact remained that she found her company interesting. Whether the girl tried to astonish the country aunt, or whether she was so thoroughly a child of her day as to lack certain moral perceptions, I do not know, but her candid conversation greatly shocked Miss Forsythe.

“Margaret,” she said one day, in one of her apparent bursts of confidence, “seems to have had such a different start in life from mine. Sometimes, Miss Forsythe, she puzzles me. I never saw anybody so much in love as she is with Mr. Henderson; she doesn’t simply love him, she is in love with him. I don’t wonder she is fond of him—any woman might be that—but, do you know, she actually believes in him.”

“Why shouldn’t she believe in him?” exclaimed Miss Forsythe, in astonishment.

“Oh, of course, in a way,” the girl went on. “I like Mr. Henderson—I like him very much—but I don’t believe in him. It isn’t the way now to believe in anybody very much. We don’t do it, and I think we get along just as well—and better. Don’t you think it’s nicer not to have any deceptions?”

Miss Forsythe was too much stunned to make any reply. It seemed to her that the bottom had fallen out of society.

“Do you think Mr. Henderson believes in people?” the girl persisted.

“If he does not he isn’t much of a man. If people don’t believe in each other, society is going to pieces. I am astonished at such a tone from a woman.”

“Oh, it isn’t any tone in me, my dear Miss Forsythe,” Carmen continued, sweetly. “Society is a great deal pleasanter when you are not anxious and don’t expect too much.”

Miss Forsythe told Margaret that she thought Miss Eschelle was a dangerous woman. Margaret did not defend her, but she did not join, either, in condemning her; she appeared to have accepted her as a part of her world. And there were other things that Margaret seemed to have accepted without that vigorous protest which she used to raise at whatever crossed her conscience. To her aunt she was never more affectionate, never more solicitous about her comfort and her pleasure, and it was almost enough to see Margaret happy, radiant, expanding day by day in the prosperity that was illimitable, only there was to her a note of unreality in all the whirl and hurry of the busy life. She liked to escape to her room with a book, and be out of it all, and the two weeks away from her country life seemed long to her. She couldn’t reconcile Margaret’s love of the world, her tolerance of Carmen, and other men and women whose lives seemed to be based on Carmen’s philosophy, with her devotion to the church services, to the city missions, and the dozens of charities that absorb so much of the time of the leaders of society.

“You are too young, dear, to be so good and devout,” was Carmen’s comment on the situation.

To Miss Forsythe’s wonder, Margaret did not resent this impertinence, but only said that no accumulation of years was likely to bring Carmen into either of these dangers. And the reply was no more satisfactory to Miss Forsythe than the remark that provoked it.

That she had had a delightful visit, that Margaret was more lovely than ever, that Henderson was a delightful host, was the report of Miss Forsythe when she returned to us. In a confidential talk with my wife she confessed, however, that she couldn’t tell whither Margaret was going.

One of the worries of modern life is the perplexity where to spend the summer. The restless spirit of change affects those who dwell in the country, as well as those who live in the city. No matter how charming the residence is, one can stay in it only a part of the year. He actually needs a house in town, a villa by the sea, and a cottage in the hills. When these are secured—each one an establishment more luxurious year by year—then the family is ready to travel about, and is in a greater perplexity than before whether to spend the summer in Europe or in America, the novelties of which are beginning to excite the imagination. This nomadism, which is nothing less than society on wheels, cannot be satirized as a whim of fashion; it has a serious cause in—the discovery of the disease called nervous prostration, which demands for its cure constant change of scene, without any occupation. Henderson recognized it, but he said that personally he had no time to indulge in it. His summer was to be a very busy one. It was impossible to take Margaret with him on his sudden and tedious journeys from one end of the country to the other, but she needed a change. It was therefore arranged that after a visit to Brandon she should pass the warm months with the Arbusers in their summer home at Lenox, with a month—the right month—in the Eschelle villa at Newport; and he hoped never to be long absent from one place or the other.

Margaret came to Brandon at the beginning of June, just at the season when the region was at its loveliest, and just when its society was making preparations to get away from it to the sea, or the mountains, or to any place that was not home. I could never understand why a people who have been grumbling about snow and frost for six months, and longing for genial weather, should flee from it as soon as it comes. I had made the discovery, quite by chance—and it was so novel that I might have taken out a patent on it—that if one has a comfortable home in our northern latitude, he cannot do better than to stay in it when the hum of the mosquito is heard in the land, and the mercury is racing up and down the scale between fifty and ninety. This opinion, however, did not extend beyond our little neighborhood, and we may be said to have had the summer to ourselves.

I fancied that the neighborhood had not changed, but the coming of Margaret showed me that this was a delusion. No one can keep in the same place in life simply by standing still, and the events of the past two years had wrought a subtle change in our quiet. Nothing had been changed to the eye, yet something had been taken away, or something had been added, a door had been opened into the world. Margaret had come home, yet I fancied it was not the home to her that she had been thinking about. Had she changed?

She was more beautiful. She had the air—I should hesitate to call it that of the fine lady—of assured position, something the manner of that greater world in which the possession of wealth has supreme importance, but it was scarcely a change of manner so much as of ideas about life and of the things valuable in it gradually showing itself. Her delight at being again with her old friends was perfectly genuine, and she had never appeared more unselfish or more affectionate. If there was a subtle difference, it might very well be in us, though I found it impossible to conceive of her in her former role of teacher and simple maiden, with her heart in the little concerns of our daily life. And why should she be expected to go back to that stage? Must we not all live our lives? Miss Forsythe’s solicitude about Margaret was mingled with a curious deference, as to one who had a larger experience of life than her own. The girl of a year ago was now the married woman, and was invested with something of the dignity that Miss Forsythe in her pure imagination attached to that position. Without yielding any of her opinions, this idea somehow changed her relations to Margaret; a little, I thought, to the amusement of Mrs. Fletcher and the other ladies, to whom marriage took on a less mysterious aspect. It arose doubtless from a renewed sense of the incompleteness of her single life, long as it had been, and enriched as it was by observation.

In that June there were vexatious strikes in various parts of the country, formidable combinations of laboring-men, demonstrations of trades-unions, and the exhibition of a spirit that sharply called attention to the unequal distribution of wealth. The discontent was attributed in some quarters to the exhibition of extreme luxury and reckless living by those who had been fortunate. It was even said that the strikes, unreasonable and futile as they were, and most injurious to those who indulged in them, were indirectly caused by the railway manipulation, in the attempt not only to crush out competition, but to exact excessive revenues on fictitious values. Resistance to this could be shown to be blind, and the strikers technically in the wrong, yet the impression gained ground that there was something monstrously wrong in the way great fortunes were accumulated, in total disregard of individual rights, and in a materialistic spirit that did not take into account ordinary humanity. For it was not alone the laboring class that was discontented, but all over the country those who lived upon small invested savings, widows and minors, found their income imperiled by the trickery of rival operators and speculators in railways and securities, who treated the little private accumulations as mere counters in the games they were playing. The loss of dividends to them was poorly compensated by reflections upon the development of the country, and the advantage to trade of great consolidations, which inured to the benefit of half a dozen insolent men.

In discussing these things in our little parliament we were not altogether unprejudiced, it must be confessed. For, to say nothing of interests of Mr. Morgan and my own, which seemed in some danger of disappearing for the “public good,” Mrs. Fletcher’s little fortune was nearly all invested in that sound “rock-bed” railway in the Southwest that Mr. Jerry Hollowell had recently taken under his paternal care. She was assured, indeed, that dividends were only reserved pending some sort of reorganization, which would ultimately be of great benefit to all the parties concerned; but this was much like telling a hungry man that if he would possess his appetite in patience, he would very likely have a splendid dinner next year. Women are not constituted to understand this sort of reasoning. It is needless to say that in our general talks on the situation these personalities were not referred to, for although Margaret was silent, it was plain to see that she was uneasy.

Morgan liked to raise questions of casuistry, such as that whether money dishonestly come by could be accepted for good purposes.

“I had this question referred to me the other day,” he said. “A gambler—not a petty cheater in cards, but a man who has a splendid establishment in which he has amassed a fortune, a man known for his liberality and good-fellowship and his interest in politics—offered the president of a leading college a hundred thousand dollars to endow a professorship. Ought the president to take the money, knowing how it was made?”

“Wouldn’t the money do good—as much good as any other hundred thousand dollars?” asked Margaret.

“Perhaps. But the professorship was to bear his name, and what would be the moral effect of that?”

“Did you recommend the president to take the money, if he could get it without using the gambler’s name?”

“I am not saying yet what I advised. I am trying to get your views on a general principle.”

“But wouldn’t it be a sneaking thing to take a man’s money, and refuse him the credit of his generosity?”

“But was it generosity? Was not his object, probably, to get a reputation which his whole life belied, and to get it by obliterating the distinction between right and wrong?”

“But isn’t it a compromising distinction,” my wife asked, “to take his money without his name? The president knows that it is money fraudulently got, that really belongs to somebody else; and the gambler would feel that if the president takes it, he cannot think very disapprovingly of the manner in which it was acquired. I think it would be more honest and straightforward to take his name with the money.”

“The public effect of connecting the gambler’s name with the college would be debasing,” said Morgan; “but, on the contrary, is every charity or educational institution bound to scrutinize the source of every benefaction? Isn’t it better that money, however acquired, should be used for a good purpose than a bad one?”

“That is a question,” I said, “that is a vital one in our present situation, and the sophistry of it puzzles the public. What would you say to this case? A man notoriously dishonest, but within the law, and very rich, offered a princely endowment to a college very much in need of it. The sum would have enabled it to do a great work in education. But it was intimated that the man would expect, after a while, to be made one of the trustees. His object, of course, was social position.”

“I suppose, of course,” Margaret replied, “that the college couldn’t afford that. It would look like bribery.”

“Wouldn’t he be satisfied with an LL.D.?” Morgan asked.

“I don’t see,” my wife said, “any difference between the two cases stated and that of the stock gambler, whose unscrupulous operations have ruined thousands of people, who founds a theological seminary with the gains of his slippery transactions. By accepting his seminary the public condones his conduct. Another man, with the same shaky reputation, endows a college. Do you think that religion and education are benefited in the long-run by this? It seems to me that the public is gradually losing its power of discrimination between the value of honesty and dishonesty. Real respect is gone when the public sees that a man is able to buy it.”

This was a hot speech for my wife to make. For a moment Margaret flamed up under it with her old-time indignation. I could see it in her eyes, and then she turned red and confused, and at length said:

“But wouldn’t you have rich men do good with their money?”

“Yes, dear, but I would not have them think they can blot out by their liberality the condemnation of the means by which many of them make money. That is what they are doing, and the public is getting used to it.”

“Well,” said Margaret, with some warmth, “I don’t know that they are any worse than the stingy saints who have made their money by saving, and act as if they expected to carry it with them.”

“Saints or sinners, it does not make much difference to me,” now put in Mrs. Fletcher, who was evidently considering the question from a practical point of view, “what a man professes, if he founds a hospital for indigent women out of the dividends that I never received.”

Morgan laughed. “Don’t you think, Mrs. Fletcher, that it is a good sign of the times, that so many people who make money rapidly are disposed to use it philanthropically?”

“It may be for them, but it does not console me much just now.”

“But you don’t make allowance enough for the rich. Perhaps they are under a necessity of doing something. I was reading this morning in the diary of old John Ward of Stratford-on-Avon this sentence: ‘It was a saying of Navisson, a lawyer, that no man could be valiant unless he hazarded his body, nor rich unless he hazarded his soul.’”

“Was Navisson a modern lawyer?” I asked.

“No; the diary is dated 1648-1679.”

“I thought so.”

There was a little laugh at this, and the talk drifted off into a consideration of the kind of conscience that enables a professional man to espouse a cause he knows to be wrong as zealously as one he knows to be right; a talk that I should not have remembered at all, except for Margaret’s earnestness in insisting that she did not see how a lawyer could take up the dishonest side.

Before Margaret went to Lenox, Henderson spent a few days with us. He brought with him the abounding cheerfulness, and the air of a prosperous, smiling world, that attended him in all circumstances. And how happy Margaret was! They went over every foot of the ground on which their brief courtship had taken place, and Heaven knows what joy there was to her in reviving all the tenderness and all the fear of it! Busy as Henderson was, pursued by hourly telegrams and letters, we could not but be gratified that his attention to her was that of a lover. How could it be otherwise, when all the promise of the girl was realized in the bloom and the exquisite susceptibility of the woman? Among other things, she dragged him down to her mission in the city, to which he went in a laughing and bantering mood. When he had gone away, Margaret ran over to my wife, bringing in her hand a slip of paper.

“See that!” she cried, her eyes dancing with pleasure. It was a check for a thousand dollars. “That will refurnish the mission from top to bottom,” she said, “and run it for a year.”

“How generous he is!” cried my wife. Margaret did not reply, but she looked at the check, and there were tears in her eyes.

XV

The Arbuser cottage at Lenox was really a magnificent villa. Richardson had built it. At a distance it had the appearance of a mediaeval structure, with its low doorways, picturesque gables, and steep roofs, and in its situation on a gentle swell of green turf backed by native forest-trees it imparted to the landscape an ancestral tone which is much valued in these days. But near to, it was seen to be mediaevalism adapted to the sunny hospitality of our summer climate, with generous verandas and projecting balconies shaded by gay awnings, and within spacious, open to the breezes, and from its broad windows offering views of lawns and flower-beds and ornamental trees, of a great sweep of pastures and forests and miniature lakes, with graceful and reposeful hills on the horizon.

It was, in short, the modern idea of country simplicity. The passion for country life, which has been in decadence for nearly half a century, has again become the fashion. Nature, which, left to itself, is a little ragged, not to say monotonous and tiresome, is discovered to be a valuable ally for aid in passing the time when art is able to make portions of it exclusive. What the Arbusers wanted was a simple home in the country, and in obtaining it they were indulging a sentiment of returning to the primitive life of their father, who had come to the city from a hill farm, and had been too busy all his life to recur to the tastes of his boyhood. At least that was the theory of his daughters; but the old gentleman had a horror of his early life, and could scarcely be dragged away from the city even in the summer. He would no doubt have been astonished at the lofty and substantial stone stables, the long range of greenhouses, and at a farm which produced nothing except lawns and flower-beds, ornamental fields of clover, avenues of trees, lawn-tennis grounds, and a few Alderneys tethered to feed among the trees, where their beauty would heighten the rural and domestic aspect of the scene. The Arbusers liked to come to this place as early as possible to escape the society exactions of the city. That was another theory of theirs. All their set in the city met there for the same purpose.

Margaret was welcomed with open arms.

“We have been counting the days,” said the elder of the sisters. “Your luggage has come, your rooms are all ready, and your coachman, who has been here some days, says that the horses need exercise. Everybody is here, and we need you for a hundred things.”

“You are very kind. It is so charming here. I knew it would be, but I couldn’t bear to shorten my visit in Brandon.”

“Your aunt must miss you very much. Is she well?”

“Perfectly.”

“Wouldn’t she have come with you? I’ve a mind to telegraph.”

“I think not. She is wedded to quiet, and goes away from her little neighborhood with reluctance.”

“So Brandon was a little dull?” said Miss Arbuser, with a shrewd guess at the truth.

“Oh no,” quickly replied Margaret, shrinking a little from what was in her own mind; “it was restful and delightful; but you know that we New England people take life rather seriously, and inquire into the reason of things, and want an object in life.”

“A very good thing to have,” answered this sweet woman of the world, whose object was to go along pleasantly and enjoy it.

“But to have it all the time!” Margaret suggested, lightly, as she ran upstairs. But even in this suggestion she was conscious of a twinge of disloyalty to her former self. Deep down in her heart, coming to the atmosphere of Lenox was a relief from questionings that a little disturbed her at her old home, and she was indignant at herself that it should be so, and then indignant at the suggestions that put her out of humor with herself. Was it a sin, she said, to be happy and prosperous?

On her dressing-table was a letter from her husband. He was detained in the city by a matter of importance. He scratched only a line, to catch the mail, during a business interview. It was really only a business interview, and had no sort of relation to Lenox or the summer gayety there.

Henderson was in his private office. The clerks in the outer offices, in the neglige of summer costumes, winked to each other as they saw old Jerry Hollowell enter and make his way to the inner room unannounced. Something was in the wind.

“Well, old man,” said Uncle Jerry, in the cheeriest manner, coming in, depositing his hat on the table, and taking a seat opposite Henderson, “we seem to have stirred up the animals.”

“Only a little flurry,” replied Henderson, laying down his pen and folding a note he had just finished; “they’ll come to reason.”

“They’ve got to.” Mr. Hollowell drew out a big bandanna and mopped his heated face. “I’ve just got a letter from Jorkins. There’s the certificates that make up the two-thirds-more than we need, anyway. No flaw about that, is there?”

“No. I’ll put these with the balance in the safe. It’s all right, if Jorkins has been discreet. It may make a newspaper scandal if they get hold of his operations.”

“Oh, Jorkins is close. But he is a little overworked. I don’t know but it would do him good to have a little nervous prostration and go abroad for a while.”

“I guess it would do Jorkins good to take a turn in Europe for a year or so.”

“Well, you write to him. Give him a sort of commission to see the English bondholders, and explain the situation. They will appreciate that half a loaf is better than no bread. What bothers me is the way the American bondholders take it. They kick.”

“Let ‘em kick. The public don’t care for a few soreheads and impracticables in an operation that is going to open up the whole Southwest. I’ve an appointment with one of them this morning. He ought to be here now.”

At the moment Henderson’s private secretary entered and laid on the table the card of Mr. John Hopper, who was invited to come in at once. Mr. Hopper was a man of fifty, with iron-gray hair, a heavy mustache, and a smooth-shaven chin that showed resolution. In dress and manner his appearance was that of the shrewd city capitalist—quiet and determined, who is neither to be deceived nor bullied. With a courteous greeting to both the men, whom he knew well, he took a seat and stated his business.

“I have called to see you, Mr. Henderson, about the bonds of the A. and B., and I am glad to find Mr. Hollowell here also.”

“What amount do you represent, Mr. Hopper?” asked Henderson.

“With my own and my friends’, altogether, rising a million. What do you propose?”

“You got our circular?”

“Yes, and we don’t accept the terms.”

“I’m sorry. It is the best that we could do.”

“That is, the best you would do!”

“Pardon me, Mr. Hopper, the best we could do under the circumstances. We gave you your option, to scale down on a fair estimate of the earnings of the short line (the A. and B.), or to surrender your local bonds and take new ones covering the whole consolidation, or, as is of course in your discretion, to hold on and take the chances.”

“Which your operations have practically destroyed.”

“Not at all, Mr. Hopper. We offer you a much better security on the whole system instead of a local road.”

“And you mean to tell me, Mr. Henderson, that it is for our advantage to exchange a seven per cent. bond on a road that has always paid its interest promptly, for a four and a half on a system that is manipulated nobody knows how? I tell you, gentlemen, that it looks to outsiders as if there was crookedness somewhere.”

“That is a rather rough charge, Mr. Hopper,” said Henderson, with a smile.

“But we are to understand that if we do not accept your terms, it’s a freeze-out?”

“You are to understand that we want to make the best arrangement possible for all parties in interest.”

“How some of those interests were acquired may be a question for the courts,” replied Mr. Hopper, resolutely. “When we put our money in good seven per cent. bonds, we propose to inquire into the right of anybody to demand that we shall exchange them for four and a half per cents. on other security.”

“Perfectly right, Mr. Hopper,” said Henderson, with imperturbable good-humor; “the transfer books are open to your inspection.”

“Well, we prefer to hold on to our bonds.”

“And wait for your interest,” interposed Hollowell.

Mr. Hopper turned to the speaker. “And while we are waiting we propose to inquire what has become of the surplus of the A. and B. The bondholders had the first claim on the entire property.”

“And we propose to protect it. See here, Mr. Hopper,” continued Uncle Jerry, with a most benevolent expression, “I needn’t tell you that investments fluctuate—the Lord knows mine do! The A. and B. was a good road. I know that. But it was going to be paralleled. We’d got to parallel it to make our Southwest connections. If we had, you’d have waited till the Gulf of Mexico freezes over before you got any coupons paid. Instead of that, we took it into our system, and it’s being put on a permanent basis. It’s a little inconvenient for holders, and they have got to stand a little shrinkage, but in the long-run it will be better for everybody. The little road couldn’t stand alone, and the day of big interest is about over.”

“That explanation may satisfy you, Mr. Hollowell, but it don’t give us our money, and I notify you that we shall carry the matter into the courts. Good-morning.”

When Mr. Hopper had gone, the two developers looked at each other a moment seriously.

“Hopper ‘ll fight,” Hollowell said at last.

“And we have got the surplus to fight him with,” replied Henderson.

“That’s so,” and Uncle Jerry chuckled to himself. “The rats that are on the inside of the crib are a good deal better off than the rats on the outside.”

“The reporter of The Planet wants five minutes,” announced the secretary, opening the door. Henderson told him to let him in.

The reporter was a spruce young gentleman, in a loud summer suit, with a rose in his button-hole, and the air of assurance which befits the commissioner of the public curiosity.

“I am sent by The Planet,” said the young man, “to show you this and ask you if you have anything to say to it.”

“What is it?” asked Henderson.

“It’s about the A. and B.”

“Very well. There is the president, Mr. Hollowell. Show it to him.”

The reporter produced a long printed slip and handed it to Uncle Jerry, who took it and began to read. As his eye ran down the column he was apparently more and more interested, and he let it be shown on his face that he was surprised, and even a little astonished. When he had finished, he said:

“Well, my young friend, how did you get hold of this?”

“Oh, we have a way,” said the reporter, twirling his straw hat by the elastic, and looking more knowing than old Jerry himself.

“So I see,” replied Jerry, with an admiring smile; “there is nothing that you newspaper folks don’t find out. It beats the devil!”

“Is it true, sir?” said the young gentleman, elated with this recognition of his own shrewdness.

“It is so true that there is no fun in it. I don’t see how the devil you got hold of it.”

“Have you any explanations?”

“No, I guess not,” said Uncle Jerry, musingly. “If it is to come out, I’d rather The Planet would have it than any, other paper. It’s got some sense. No; print it. It’ll be a big beat for your paper. While you are about it—I s’pose you’ll print it anyway?” (the reporter nodded)—“you might as well have the whole story.”

“Certainly. We’d like to have it right. What is wrong about it?”

“Oh, nothing but some details. You have got it substantially. There’s a word or two and a date you are out on, naturally enough, and there are two or three little things that would be exactly true if they were differently stated.”

“Would you mind telling me what they are?”

“No,” said Jerry, with a little reluctance; “might as well have it all out—eh, Henderson?”

And the old man took his pencil and changed some dates and a name or two, and gave to some of the sentences a turn that seemed to the reporter only another way of saying the same thing.

“There, that is all I know. Give my respects to Mr. Goss.”

When the commissioner had withdrawn, Uncle Jerry gave vent to a long whistle. Then he rose suddenly and called to the secretary, “Tell that reporter to come back.” The reporter reappeared.

“I was just thinking, and you can tell Mr. Goss, that now you have got onto this thing, you might as well keep the lead on it. The public is interested in what we are doing in the Southwest, and if you, or some other bright fellow who has got eyes in his head, will go down there, he will see something that will astonish him. I’m going tomorrow in my private car, and if you could go along, I assure you a good time. I want you to see for yourself, and I guess you would. Don’t take my word. I can’t give you any passes, and I know you don’t want any, but you can just get into my private car and no expense to anybody, and see all there is to be seen. Ask Goss, and let me know tonight.”

The young fellow went off feeling several inches higher than when he came in. Such is the power of a good address, and such is the omnipotence of the great organ. Mr. Jerry Hollowell sat down and began to fan himself. It was very hot in the office.

“Seems to me it’s lunch-time. Great Scott! what a lot of time I used to waste fighting the newspapers! That thing would have played the devil as it stood. It will be comparatively harmless now. It will make a little talk, but there is nothing to get hold of. Queer, about the difference of a word or two. Come, old man, I’m thirsty.”

“Uncle Jerry,” said Henderson, taking his arm as they went out, “you ought to be President of the United States.”

“The salary is too small,” said Uncle Jerry.

Of all this there was nothing to write to Margaret, who was passing her time agreeably in the Berkshire hills, a little impatient for her husband’s arrival, postponed from day to day, and full of sympathy for him, condemned to the hot city and the harassment of a business the magnitude of which gave him the obligations and the character of a public man. Henderson sent her instead a column from The Planet devoted to a description of his private library. Mr. Goss, the editor, who was college bred, had been round to talk with Henderson about the Southwest trip, and the conversation drifting into other matters, Henderson had taken from his desk and shown him a rare old book which he had picked up the day before in a second-hand shop. This led to further talk about Henderson’s hobby, and the editor had asked permission to send a reporter down to make a note of Henderson’s collection. It would make a good midsummer item, “The Stock-Broker in Literature,” “The Private Tastes of a Millionaire,” etc. The column got condensed into a portable paragraph, and went the rounds of the press, and changed the opinions of a good many people about the great operator—he wasn’t altogether devoted to vulgar moneymaking. Uncle Jerry himself read the column with appreciation of its value. “It diverts the public mind,” he said. He himself had recently diverted the public mind by the gift of a bell to the Norembega Theological (colored) Institute, and the paragraph announcing the fact conveyed the impression that while Uncle Jerry was a canny old customer, his heart was on the right side. “There are worse men than Uncle Jerry who are not worth a cent,” was one of the humorous paragraphs tacked on to the item.

Margaret was not alone in finding the social atmosphere of Lenox as congenial as its natural beauties. Mrs. Laflamme declared that it was the perfection of existence for a couple of months, one in early summer and another in the golden autumn with its pathetic note of the falling curtain dropping upon the dream of youth. Mrs. Laflamme was not a sentimental person, but she was capable of drifting for a moment into a poetic mood—a great charm in a woman of her vivacity and air of the world. Margaret remembered her very distinctly, although she had only exchanged a word with her at the memorable dinner in New York when Henderson had revealed her feelings to herself. Mrs. Laflamme had the immense advantage—it seemed so to her after five years of widowhood of being a widow on the sunny side of thirty-five. If she had lost some illusions she had gained a great deal of knowledge, and she had no feverish anxiety about what life would bring her. Although she would not put it in this way to herself, she could look about her deliberately, enjoying the prospect, and please herself. Her position had two advantages—experience and opportunity. A young woman unmarried, she said, always has the uneasy sense of the possibility—well, it is impossible to escape slang, and she said it with the merriest laugh—the possibility of being left. A day or two after Margaret’s arrival she had driven around to call in her dog-cart, looking as fresh as a daisy in her sunhat. She held the reins, but her seat was shared by Mr. Fox McNaughton, the most useful man in the village, indispensable indeed; a bachelor, with no intentions, no occupation, no ambition (except to lead the german), who could mix a salad, brew a punch, organize a picnic, and chaperon anything in petticoats with entire propriety, without regard to age. And he had a position of social authority. This eminence Mr. Fox McNaughton had attained by always doing the correct thing. The obligation of society to such men is never enough acknowledged. While they are trusted and used, and worked to death, one is apt to hear them spoken of in a deprecatory tone.

“You hold the reins a moment, please. No, I don’t want any help,” she said, as she jumped down with an elastic spring, and introduced him to Margaret. “I’ve got Mr. McNaughton in training, and am thinking of bringing him out.”

She walked in with Margaret, chatting about the view and the house and the divine weather.

“And your husband has not come yet?”

“He may come any day. I think business might suspend in the summer.”

“So do I. But then, what would become of Lenox? It is rather hard on the men, only I dare say they like it. Don’t you think Mr. Henderson would like a place here?”

“He cannot help being pleased with Lenox.”

“I’m sure he would if you are. I have hardly seen him since that evening at the Stotts’. Can I tell you?—I almost had five minutes of envy that evening. You won’t mind it in such an old woman?”

“I should rather trust your heart than your age, Mrs. Laflamme,” said Margaret, with a laugh.

“Yes, my heart is as old as my face. But I had a feeling, seeing you walk away that evening into the conservatory. I knew what was coming. I think I have discovered a great secret, Mrs. Henderson to be able to live over again in other people. By-the-way, what has become of that quiet Englishman, Mr. Lyon?”

“He has come into his title. He is the Earl of Chisholm.”

“Dear me, how stupid in us not to have taken a sense of that! And the Eschelles—do you know anything of the Eschelles?”

“Yes; they are at their house in Newport.”

“Do you think there was anything between Miss Eschelle and Mr. Lyon? I saw her afterwards several times.”

“Not that I ever heard. Miss Eschelle says that she is thoroughly American in her tastes.”

“Then her tastes are not quite conformed to her style. That girl might be anything—Queen of Spain, or coryphee in the opera ballet. She is clever as clever. One always expects to hear of her as the heroine of an adventure.”

“Didn’t you say you knew her in Europe?”

“No. We heard of her and her mother everywhere. She was very independent. She had the sort of reputation to excite curiosity. But I noticed that the men in New York were a little afraid of her. She is a woman who likes to drive very near the edge.”

Mrs. Laflamme rose. “I must not keep Mr. McNaughton waiting for any more of my gossip. We expect you and the Misses Arbuser this afternoon. I warn you it will be dull. I should like to hear of some summer resort where the men are over sixteen and under sixty.”

Mrs. Laflamme liked to drive near the edge as much as Carmen did, and this piquancy was undeniably an attraction in her case. But there was this difference between the two: there was a confidence that Mrs. Laflamme would never drive over the edge, whereas no one could tell what sheer Carmen might not suddenly take. A woman’s reputation is almost as much affected by the expectation of what she may do as by anything she has done. It was Fox McNaughton who set up the dictum that a woman may do almost anything if it is known that she draws a line somewhere.

The lawn party was not at all dull to Margaret. In the first place, she received a great deal of attention. Henderson’s name was becoming very well known, and it was natural that the splendor of his advancing fortune should be reflected in the person of his young wife, whose loveliness was enhanced by her simple enjoyment of the passing hour. Then the toilets of the women were so fresh and charming, the colors grouped so prettily on the greensward, the figures of the slender girls playing at tennis or lounging on the benches under the trees, recalled scenes from the classic poets. It was all so rich and refined. Nor did she miss the men of military age, whose absence Mrs. Laflamme had deplored, for she thought of her husband. And, besides, she found even the college boys (who are always spoken of as men) amusing, and the elderly gentlemen—upon whom watering-place society throws much responsibility—gallant, facetious, complimentary, and active in whatever was afoot. Their boyishness, indeed, contrasted with—the gravity of the undergraduates, who took themselves very seriously, were civil to the young ladies,—confidential with the married women, and had generally a certain reserve and dignity which belong to persons upon whom such heavy responsibility rests.

There were, to be sure, men who looked bored, and women who were listless, missing the stimulus of any personal interest; but the scene was so animated, the weather so propitious, that, on the whole, a person must be very cynical not to find the occasion delightful.

There was a young novelist present whose first story, “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” had made a hit the last season. It was thought to take a profound hold upon life, because it was a book that could not be read aloud in a mixed company. Margaret was very much interested in him, although Mr. Summers Bass was not her idea of an imaginative writer. He was a stout young gentleman, with very black hair and small black eyes, to which it was difficult to give a melancholy cast even by an habitual frown. Mr. Bass dressed himself scrupulously in the fashion, was very exact in his pronunciation, careful about his manner, and had the air of a little weariness, of the responsibility of one looking at life. It was only at rare moments that his face expressed intensity of feeling.

“It is a very pretty scene. I suppose, Mr. Bass, that you are making studies,” said Margaret, by way of opening a conversation.

“No; hardly that. One must always observe. It gets to be a habit. The thing is to see reality under appearances.”

“Then you would call yourself a realist?”

Mr. Bass smiled. “That is a slang term, Mrs. Henderson. What you want is nature, color, passion—to pierce the artificialities.”

“But you must describe appearance.”

“Certainly, to an extent—form, action, talk as it is, even trivialities—especially the trivialities, for life is made up of the trivial.”

“But suppose that does not interest me?”

“Pardon me, Mrs. Henderson, that is because you are used to the conventional, the selected. Nature is always interesting.”

“I do not find it so.”

“No? Nature has been covered up; it has been idealized. Look yonder,” and Mr. Bass pointed across the lawn. “See that young woman upon whom the sunlight falls standing waiting her turn. See the quivering of the eyelids, the heaving of the chest, the opening lips; note the curve of her waist from the shoulder, and the line rounding into the fall of the folds of the Austrian cashmere. I try to saturate myself with that form, to impress myself with her every attitude and gesture, her color, her movement, and then I shall imagine the form under the influence of passion. Every detail will tell. I do not find unimportant the tie of her shoe. The picture will be life.”

“But suppose, Mr. Bass, when you come to speak with her, you find that she has no ideas, and talks slang.”

“All the better. It shows what we are, what our society is. And besides, Mrs. Henderson, nearly everybody has the capacity of being wicked; that is to say, of expressing emotion.”

“You take a gloomy view, Mr. Bass.”

“I take no view, Mrs. Henderson. My ambition is to record. It will not help matters by pretending that people are better than they are.”

“Well, Mr. Bass, you may be quite right, but I am not going to let you spoil my enjoyment of this lovely scene,” said Margaret, moving away. Mr. Bass watched her until she disappeared, and then entered in his notebook a phrase for future use, “The prosperous propriety of a pretty plutocrat.” He was gathering materials for his forthcoming book, “The Last Sigh of the Prude.”

The whole world knows how delightful Lenox is. It even has a club where the men can take refuge from the exactions of society, as in the city. The town is old enough to have “histories”; there is a romance attached to nearly every estate, a tragedy of beauty, and money, and disappointment; great writers have lived here, families whose names were connected with our early politics and diplomacy; there is a tradition of a society of wit and letters, of women whose charms were enhanced by a spice of adventure, of men whose social brilliancy ended in misanthropy. All this gave a background of distinction to the present gayety, luxury, and adaptation of the unsurpassed loveliness of nature to the refined fashion of the age.

Here, if anywhere, one could be above worry, above the passion of envy; for did not every new “improvement” and every new refinement in living add to the importance of every member of this favored community? For Margaret it was all a pageant of beauty. The Misses Arbuser talked about the quality of the air, the variety of the scenery, the exhilaration of the drives, the freedom from noise and dust, the country quiet. There were the morning calls, the intellectual life of the reading clubs, the tennis parties, the afternoon teas, combined with charming drives from one elegant place to another; the siestas, the idle swinging in hammocks, with the latest magazine from which to get a topic for dinner, the mild excitement of a tete-a-tete which might discover congenial tastes or run on into an interesting attachment. Half the charm of life, says a philosopher, is in these personal experiments.

When Henderson came, as he did several times for a few days, Margaret’s happiness was complete. She basked in the sun of his easy enjoyment of life. She liked to take him about with her, and see the welcome in all companies of a man so handsome, so natural and cordial, as her husband. Especially aid she like the consideration in which he was evidently held at the club, where the members gathered about him to listen to his racy talk and catch points about the market. She liked to think that he was not a woman’s man. He gave her his version of some recent transactions that had been commented on in the newspapers, and she was indignant over the insinuations about him. It was the price, he said, that everybody had to pay for success. Why shouldn’t he, she reflected, make money? Everybody would if they could, and no one knew how generous he was. If she had been told that the family of Jerry Hollowell thought of him in the same way, she would have said that there was a world-wide difference in the two men. Insensibly she was losing the old standards she used to apply to success. Here in Lenox, in this prosperous, agreeable world, there was nothing to remind her of them.

In her enjoyment of this existence without care, I do not suppose it occurred to her to examine if her ideals had been lowered. Sometimes Henderson had a cynical, mocking tone about the world, which she reproved with a caress, but he was always tolerant and good-natured. If he had told her that he acted upon the maxim that every man and woman has his and her price she would have been shocked, but she was getting to make allowances that she would not have made before she learned to look at the world through his eyes. She could see that the Brandon circle was over-scrupulous. Her feeling of this would have been confirmed if she had known that when her aunt read the letter announcing a month’s visit to the Eschelles in Newport, she laid it down with a sigh.

XVI

Uncle Jerry was sitting on the piazza of the Ocean House, absorbed in the stock reports of a New York journal, answering at random the occasional observations of his wife, who filled up one of the spacious chairs near him—a florid woman, with diamonds in her ears, who had the resolute air of enjoying herself. It was an August Newport morning, when there is a salty freshness in the air, but a temperature that discourages exertion. A pony phaeton dashed by containing two ladies. The ponies were cream-colored, with flowing manes and tails, and harness of black and gold; the phaeton had yellow wheels with a black body; the diminutive page with folded arms, on the seat behind, wore a black jacket and yellow breeches. The lady who held the yellow silk reins was a blonde with dark eyes. As they flashed by, the lady on the seat with her bowed, and Mr. Hollowell returned the salute.

“Who’s that?” asked Mrs. Hollowell.

“That’s Mrs. Henderson.”

“And the other one?”

“I don’t know her. She knows how to handle the ribbons, though.”

“I seen her at the Casino the other night, before you come, with that tandem-driving count. I don’t believe he’s any more count than you are.”

“Oh, he’s all right. He’s one of the Spanish legation. This is just the place for counts. I shouldn’t wonder, Maria, if you’d like to be a countess. We can afford it—the Countess Jeremiah, eh?” and Uncle Jerry’s eyes twinkled.

“Don’t be a goose, Mr. Hollowell,” bringing her fat hands round in front of her, so that she could see the sparkle of the diamond rings on them. “She’s as pretty as a picture, that girl, but I should think a good wind would blow her away. I shouldn’t want to have her drive me round.”

“Jorkins has sailed,” said Mr. Hollowell, looking up from his paper. “The Planet reporter tried to interview him, but he played sick, said he was just going over and right back for a change. I guess it will be long enough before they get a chance at him again.”

“I’m glad he’s gone. I hope the papers will mind their own business for a spell.”

The house of the Eschelles was on the sea, looking over a vast sweep of lawn to the cliff and the dimpling blue water of the first beach. It was known as the Yellow Villa. Coming from the elegance of Lenox, Margaret was surprised at the magnificence and luxury of this establishment, the great drawing-rooms, the spacious chambers, the wide verandas, the pictures, the flowers, the charming nooks and recessed windows, with handy book-stands, and tables littered with the freshest and most-talked-of issues from the press of Paris, Madrid, and London. Carmen had taken a hint from Henderson’s bachelor apartment, which she had visited once with her mother, and though she had no literary taste, further than to dip in here and there to what she found toothsome and exciting in various languages, yet she knew the effect of the atmosphere of books, and she had a standing order at a book-shop for whatever was fresh and likely to come into notice.

And Carmen was a delightful hostess, both because her laziness gave an air of repose to the place, and she had the tact never to appear to make any demands upon her guests, and because she knew when to be piquant and exhibit personal interest, and when to show even a little abandon of vivacity. Society flowed through her house without any obstructions. It was scarcely ever too early and never too late for visitors. Those who were intimate used to lounge in and take up a book, or pass an hour on the veranda, even when none of the family were at home. Men had a habit of dropping in for a five o’clock cup of tea, and where the men went the women needed little urging to follow. At first there had been some reluctance about recognizing the Eschelles fully, and there were still houses that exhibited a certain reserve towards them, but the example of going to this house set by the legations, the members of which enjoyed a chat with Miss Eschelle in the freedom of their own tongues and the freedom of her tongue, went far to break down this barrier. They were spoken of occasionally as “those Eschelles,” but almost everybody went there, and perhaps enjoyed it all the more because there had been a shade of doubt about it.

Margaret’s coming was a good card for Carmen. The little legend about her French ancestry in Newport, and the romantic marriage in Rochambeau’s time, had been elaborated in the local newspaper, and when she appeared the ancestral flavor, coupled with the knowledge of Henderson’s accumulating millions, lent an interest and a certain charm to whatever she said and did. The Eschelle house became more attractive than ever before, so much so that Mrs. Eschelle declared that she longed for the quiet of Paris. To her motherly apprehension there was no result in this whirl of gayety, no serious intention discoverable in any of the train that followed Carmen. “You act, child,” she said, “as if youth would last forever.”

Margaret entered into this life as if she had been born to it. Perhaps she was. Perhaps most people never find the career for which they are fitted, and struggle along at cross-purposes with themselves. We all thought that Margaret’s natural bent was for some useful and self-sacrificing work in the world, and never could have imagined that under any circumstances she would develop into a woman of fashion.

“I intend to read a great deal this month,” she said to Carmen on her arrival, as she glanced at the litter of books.

“That was my intention,” replied Carmen; “now we can read together. I’m taking Spanish lessons of Count Crispo. I’ve learned two Spanish poems and a Castilian dance.”

“Is he married?”

“Not now. He told me, when he was teaching me the steps, that his heart was buried in Seville.”

“He seems to be full of sentiment.”

“Perhaps that is because his salary is so small. Mamma says, of all things an impecunious count! But he is amusing.”

“But what do you care for money?” asked Margaret, by way of testing Carmen’s motives.

“Nothing, my dear. But deliver me from a husband who is poor; he would certainly be a tyrant. Besides, if I ever marry, it will be with an American.”

“But suppose you fall in love with a poor man?”

“That would be against my principles. Never fall below your ideals—that is what I heard a speaker say at the Town and Country Club, and that is my notion. There is no safety for you if you lose your principles.”

“That depends upon what they are,” said Margaret, in the same bantering tone.

“That sounds like good Mr. Lyon. I suspect he thought I hadn’t any. Mamma said I tried to shock him; but he shocked me. Do you think you could live with such a man twenty-four hours, even if he had his crown on?”

“I can imagine a great deal worse husbands than the Earl of Chisholm.”

“Well, I haven’t any imagination.”

There was no reading that day nor the next. In the morning there was a drive with the ponies through town, in the afternoon in the carriage by the sea, with a couple of receptions, the five o’clock tea, with its chatter, and in the evening a dinner party for Margaret. One day sufficed to launch her, and thereafter Carmen had only admiration for the unflagging spirit which Margaret displayed. “If you were only unmarried,” she said, “what larks we could have!” Margaret looked grave at this, but only for a moment, for she well knew that she could not please her husband better than by enjoying the season to the full. He never criticised her for taking the world as it is; and she confessed to herself that life went very pleasantly in a house where there were never any questions raised about duties. The really serious thought in Carmen’s mind was that perhaps after all a woman had no real freedom until she was married. And she began to be interested in Margaret’s enjoyment of the world.

It was not, after all, a new world, only newly arranged, like another scene in the same play. The actors, who came and went, were for the most part the acquaintances of the Washington winter, and the callers and diners and opera-goers and charity managers of the city. In these days Margaret was quite at home with the old set: the British Minister, the Belgian, the French, the Spanish, the Mexican, the German, and the Italian, with their families and attaches—nothing was wanting, not even the Chinese mandarin, who had rooms at the hotel, going about everywhere in the conscientious discharge of his duties as ambassador to American society, a great favorite on account of his silk apparel, which gave him the appearance of a clumsy woman, and the everlasting, three-thousand-year-old smile on his broad face, punctiliously leaving in every house a big flaring red piece of paper which the ladies pinned up for a decoration; a picture of helpless, childlike enjoyment, and almost independent of the interpreter who followed him about, when he had learned, upon being introduced to a lady, or taking a cup of tea, to say “good-by” as distinctly as an articulating machine; a truly learned man, setting an example of civility and perfect self-possession, but keenly observant of the oddities of the social life to which his missionary government had accredited him. One would like to have heard the comments of the minister and his suite upon our manners; but perhaps they were too polite to make any even in their seclusion. Certain it is that no one ever heard any of the legation express any opinion but the most suave and flattering.

And yet they must have been amazed at the activity of this season of repose, the endurance of American women who rode to the fox meets, were excited spectators of the polo, played lawn-tennis, were incessantly dining and calling, and sat through long dinners served with the formality and dullness and the swarms of liveried attendants of a royal feast. And they could not but admire the young men, who did not care for politics or any business beyond the chances of the stock exchange, but who expended an immense amount of energy in the dangerous polo contests, in riding at fences after the scent-bag, in driving tandems and four-in-hands, and yet had time to dress in the cut and shade demanded by every changing hour.

Formerly the annual chronicle of this summer pageant, in which the same women appeared day after day, and the same things were done over and over again, Margaret used to read with a contempt for the life; but that she enjoyed it, now she was a part of it, shows that the chroniclers for the press were unable to catch the spirit of it, the excitement of the personal encounters that made it new every day. Looking at a ball is quite another thing from dancing.

“Yes, it is lively enough,” said Mr. Ponsonby, one afternoon when they had returned from the polo grounds and were seated on the veranda. Mr. Ponsonby was a middle-aged Englishman, whose diplomatic labors at various courts had worn a bald spot on his crown. Carmen had not yet come, and they were waiting for a cup of tea. “And they ride well; but I think I rather prefer the Wild West Show.”

“You Englishmen,” Margaret retorted, “seem to like the uncivilized. Are you all tired of civilization?”

“Of some kinds. When we get through with the London season, you know, Mrs. Henderson, we like to rough it, as you call it, for some months. But, ‘pon my word, I can’t see much difference between Washington and Newport.”

“We might get up a Wild West Show here, or a prize-fight, for you. Do you know, Mr. Ponsonby, I think it will take full another century for women to really civilize men.”

“How so?”

“Get the cruelty and love of brutal sports out of them.”

“Then you’d cease to like us. Nothing is so insipid, I fancy, to a woman as a man made in her own image.”

“Well, what have you against Newport?”

“Against it? I’m sure nothing could be better than this.” And Mr. Ponsonby allowed his adventurous eyes to rest for a moment upon Margaret’s trim figure, until he saw a flush in her face. “This prospect,” he added, turning to the sea, where a few sails took the slant rays of the sun.

“‘Where every prospect pleases,”’ quoted Margaret, “‘and only man—’”

“I beg your pardon, Mrs. Henderson; men are not to be considered. The women in Newport would make the place a paradise even if it were a desert.”

“That is another thing I object to in men.”

“What’s that?”

“Flattery. You don’t say such things to each other at the club. What is your objection to Newport?”

“I didn’t say I had any. But if you compel me well, the whole thing seems to be a kind of imitation.”

“How?”

“Oh, the way things go on—the steeple-chasing and fox-hunting, and the carts, and the style of the swell entertainments. Is that ill-natured?”

“Not at all. I like candor, especially English candor. But there is Miss Eschelle.”

Carmen drove up with Count Crispo, threw the reins to the groom, and reached the ground with a touch on the shoulder of the count, who had alighted to help her down.

“Carmen,” said Margaret, “Mr. Ponsonby says that all Newport is just an imitation.”

“Of course it is. We are all imitations, except Count Crispo. I’ll bet a cup of tea against a pair of gloves,” said Carmen, who had facility in picking up information, “that Mr. Ponsonby wasn’t born in England.”

Mr. Ponsonby looked redder than usual, and then laughed, and said, “Well, I was only three years old when I left Halifax.”

“I knew it!” cried Carmen, clapping her hands. “Now come in and have a cup of English breakfast tea. That’s imitation, too.”

“The mistake you made,” said Margaret, “was not being born in Spain.”

“Perhaps it’s not irreparable,” the count interposed, with an air of gallantry.

“No, no,” said Carmen, audaciously; “by this time I should be buried in Seville. No, I should prefer Halifax, for it would have been a pleasure to emigrate from Halifax. Was it not, Mr. Ponsonby?”

“I can’t remember. But it is a pleasure to sojourn in any land with Miss Eschelle.”

“Thank you. Now you shall have two cups. Come.”

The next morning, Mr. Jerry Hollowell, having inquired where Margaret was staying, called to pay his respects, as he phrased it. Carmen, who was with Margaret in the morning-room, received him with her most distinguished manner. “We all know Mr. Hollowell,” she said.

“That’s not always an advantage,” retorted Uncle Jerry, seating himself, and depositing his hat beside his chair. “When do you expect your husband, Mrs. Henderson?”

“Tomorrow. But I don’t mean to tell him that you are here—not at first.”

“No,” said Carmen; “we women want Mr. Henderson a little while to ourselves.”

“Why, I’m the idlest man in America. I tell Henderson that he ought to take more time for rest. It’s no good to drive things. I like quiet.”

“And you get it in Newport?” Margaret asked.

“Well, my wife and children get what they call quiet. I guess a month of it would use me up. She says if I had a place here I’d like it. Perhaps so. You are very comfortably fixed, Miss Eschelle.”

“It does very well for us, but something more would be expected of Mr. Hollowell. We are just camping-out here. What Newport needs is a real palace, just to show those foreigners who come here and patronize us. Why is it, Mr. Hollowell, that all you millionaires can’t think of anything better to do with your money than to put up a big hotel or a great elevator or a business block?”

“I suppose,” said Uncle Jerry, blandly, “that is because they are interested in the prosperity of the country, and have simple democratic tastes for themselves. I’m afraid you are not democratic, Miss Eschelle.”

“Oh, I’m anxious about the public also. I’m on your side, Mr. Hollowell; but you don’t go far enough. You just throw in a college now and then to keep us quiet, but you owe it to the country to show the English that a democrat can have as fine a house as anybody.”

“I call that real patriotism. When I get rich, Miss Eschelle, I’ll bear it in mind.”

“Oh, you never will be rich,” said Carmen, sweetly, bound to pursue her whim. “You might come to me for a start to begin the house. I was very lucky last spring in A. and B. bonds.”

“How was that? Are you interested in A. and B.?” asked Uncle Jerry, turning around with a lively interest in this gentle little woman.

“Oh, no; we sold out. We sold when we heard what an interest there was in the road. Mamma said it would never do for two capitalists to have their eggs in the same basket.”

“What do you mean, Carmen?” asked Margaret, startled. “Why, that is the road Mr. Henderson is in.”

“Yes, I know, dear. There were too many in it.”

“Isn’t it safe?” said Margaret, turning to Hollowell.

“A great deal more solid than it was,” he replied. “It is part of a through line. I suppose Miss Eschelle found a better investment.”

“One nearer home,” she admitted, in the most matter-of-fact way.

“Henderson must have given the girl points,” thought Hollowell. He began to feel at home with her. If he had said the truth, it would have been that she was more his kind than Mrs. Henderson, but that he respected the latter more.

“I think we might go in partnership, Miss Eschelle, to mutual advantage—but not in building. Your ideas are too large for me there.”

“I should be a very unreliable partner, Mr. Hollowell; but I could enlarge your ideas, if I had time.”

Hollowell laughed, and said he hadn’t a doubt of that. Margaret inquired for Mrs. Hollowell and the children, and she and Carmen appointed an hour for calling at the Ocean House. The talk went to other topics, and after a half-hour ended in mutual good-feeling.

“What a delightful old party!” said Carmen, after he had gone. “I’ve a mind to adopt him.”

In a week Hollowell and Carmen were the best of friends. She called him “Uncle Jerry,” and buzzed about him, to his great delight. “The beauty of it is,” he said, “you never can tell where she will light.”

Everybody knows what Newport is in August, and we need not dwell on it. To Margaret, with its languidly moving pleasures, its well-bred scenery, the luxury that lulled the senses into oblivion of the vulgar struggle and anxiety which ordinarily attend life, it was little less than paradise. To float along with Carmen, going deeper and deeper into the shifting gayety which made the days fly without thought and with no care for tomorrow, began to seem an admirable way of passing life. What could one do fitter, after all, for a world hopelessly full of suffering and poverty and discontent, than to set an example of cheerfulness and enjoyment, and to contribute, as occasion offered, to the less fortunate? Would it help matters to be personally anxious and miserable? To put a large bill in the plate on Sunday, to open her purse wide for the objects of charity and relief daily presented, was indeed a privilege and a pleasure, and a satisfaction to the conscience which occasionally tripped her in her rapid pace.

“I don’t believe you have a bit of conscience,” said Margaret to Carmen one Sunday, as they walked home from morning service, when Margaret had responded “extravagantly,” as Carmen said, to an appeal for the mission among the city pagans.

“I never said I had, dear. It must be the most troublesome thing you can carry around with you. Of course I am interested in the heathen, but charity—that is where I agree with Uncle Jerry—begins at home, and I don’t happen to know a greater heathen than I am.”

“If you were as bad as you make yourself out, I wouldn’t walk with you another step.”

“Well, you ask mother. She was in such a rage one day when I told Mr. Lyon that he’d better look after Ireland than go pottering round among the neglected children. Not that I care anything about the Irish,” added this candid person.

“I suppose you wanted to make it pleasant for Mr. Lyon?”

“No; for mother. She can’t get over the idea that she is still bringing me up. And Mr. Lyon! Goodness! there was no living with him after his visit to Brandon. Do you know, Margaret, that I think you are just a little bit sly?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Margaret, looking offended.

“Dear, I don’t blame you,” said the impulsive creature, wheeling short round and coming close to Margaret. “I’d kiss you this minute if we were not in the public road.”

When Henderson came, Margaret’s world was full; no desire was ungratified. He experienced a little relief when she did not bother him about his business nor inquire into his operations with Hollowell, and he fancied that she was getting to accept the world as Carmen accepted it. There had been moments since his marriage when he feared that Margaret’s scruples would interfere with his career, but never a moment when he had doubted that her love for him would be superior to any solicitations from others. Carmen, who knew him like a book, would have said that the model wife for Henderson would be a woman devoted to him and to his interests, and not too scrupulous. A wife is a torment, if you can’t feel at ease with her.

“If there were only a French fleet in the harbor, dear,” said Margaret one day, “I should feel that I had quite taken up the life of my great-great-grandmother.”

They were sailing in Hollowell’s yacht, in which Uncle Jerry had brought his family round from New York. He hated the water, but Mrs. Hollowell and the children doted on the sea, he said.

“Wouldn’t the torpedo station make up for it?” Henderson asked.

“Hardly. But it shows the change of a hundred years. Only, isn’t it odd, this personal dropping back into an old situation? I wonder what she was like?”

“The accounts say she was the belle of Newport. I suppose Newport has a belle once in a hundred years. The time has come round. But I confess I don’t miss the French fleet,” replied Henderson, with a look of love that thrilled Margaret through and through.

“But you would have been an officer on the fleet, and I should have fallen in love with you. Ah, well, it is better as it is.”

And it was better. The days went by without a cloud. Even after Henderson had gone, the prosperity of life filled her heart more and more.

“She might have been like me,” Carmen said to herself, “if she had only started right; but it is so hard to get rid of a New England conscience.”

When Margaret stayed in her room, one morning, to write a long-postponed letter to her aunt, she discovered that she had very little to write, at least that she wanted to write, to her aunt. She began, however, resolutely with a little account of her life. But it seemed another thing on paper, addressed to the loving eyes at Brandon. There were too much luxury and idleness and triviality in it, too much Carmen and Count Crispo and flirtation and dissipation in it.

She tore it up, and went to the window and looked out upon the sea. She was indignant with the Brandon people that they should care so little about this charming life. She was indignant at herself that she had torn up the letter. What had she done that anybody should criticise her? Why shouldn’t she live her life, and not be hampered everlastingly by comparisons?

She sat down again, and took up her pen. Was she changing—was she changed? Why was it that she had felt a little relief when her last Brandon visit was at an end, a certain freedom in Lenox and a greater freedom in Newport? The old associations became strong again in her mind, the life in the little neighborhood, the simplicity of it, the high ideals of it, the daily love and tenderness. Her aunt was no doubt wondering now that she did not write, and perhaps grieving that Margaret no more felt at home in Brandon. It was too much. She loved them, she loved them all dearly. She would write that, and speak only generally of her frivolous, happy summer. And she began, but somehow the letter seemed stiff and to lack the old confiding tone.

But why should they disapprove of her? She thought of her husband. If circumstances had altered, was she to blame? Could she always be thinking of what they would think at Brandon? It was an intolerable bondage. They had no right to set themselves up over her. Suppose her aunt didn’t like Carmen. She was not responsible for Carmen. What would they have her do? Be unhappy because Henderson was prosperous, and she could indulge her tastes and not have to drudge in school? Suppose she did look at some things differently from what she used to. She knew more of the world. Must you shut yourself up because you found you couldn’t trust everybody? What was Mr. Morgan always hitting at? Had he any better opinion of men and women than her husband had? Was he any more charitable than Uncle Jerry? She smiled as she thought of Uncle Jerry and his remark—“It’s a very decent world if you don’t huff it.” No; she did like this life, and she was not going to pretend that she didn’t. It would be dreadful to lose the love and esteem of her dear old friends, and she cried a little as this possibility came over her. And then she hardened her heart a little at the thought that she could not help it if they chose to misunderstand her and change.

Carmen was calling from the stairs that it was time to dress for the drive. She dashed off a note. It contained messages of love for everybody, but it was the first one in her life written to her aunt not from her heart.

XVII

Shall we never have done with this carping at people who succeed? Are those who start and don’t arrive any better than those who do arrive? Did not men always make all the money they had an opportunity to make? Must we always have the old slow-coach merchants and planters thrown up to us? Talk of George Washington and the men of this day! Were things any better because they were on a small scale? Wasn’t the thrifty George Washington always adding to his plantations, and squeezing all he could out of his land and his slaves? What are the negro traditions about it? Were they all patriots in the Revolutionary War? Were there no contractors who amassed fortunes then? And how was it in the late war? The public has a great spasm of virtue all of a sudden. But we have got past the day of stage-coaches.

Something like this Henderson was flinging out to Carmen as he paced back and forth in her parlor. It was very unlike him, this outburst, and Carmen knew that he would indulge in it to no one else, not even to Uncle Jerry. She was coiled up in a corner of the sofa, her eyes sparkling with admiration of his indignation and force. I confess that he had been irritated by the comments of the newspapers, and by the prodding of the lawyers in the suit then on trial over the Southwestern consolidation.

“Why, there was old Mansfield saying in his argument that he had had some little experience in life, but he never had known a man to get rich rapidly, barring some piece of luck, except by means that it would make him writhe to have made public. I don’t know but that Uncle Jerry was right, that we made a mistake in not retaining him for the corporation.”

“Not if you win,” said Carmen, softly. “The public won’t care for the remark unless you fail.”

“And he tried to prejudice the Court by quoting the remark attributed to Uncle Jerry, ‘The public be d–-d’ as if, said Mansfield, the public has no rights as—against the railroad wreckers. Uncle Jerry laughed, and interrupted: ‘That’s nonsense, reporters’ nonsense. What I said was that if the public thought I was fool enough to make it our enemy, the public might be d–d (begging your honor’s pardon).’ Then everybody laughed. ‘It’s the bond holders, who want big dividends, that stand in the way of the development of the country, that’s what it is,’ said he, as he sat down, to those around him, but loud enough to be heard all over the room. Mansfield asked the protection of the Court against these clap-trap interruptions. The judge said it was altogether irregular, and Uncle Jerry begged pardon. The reporters made this incident the one prominent thing in the case that day.”

“What a delightful Uncle Jerry it is!” said Carmen. “You’d better keep an eye on him, Rodney; he’ll be giving your money to that theological seminary in Alabama.”

“That reminds me,” Henderson said, cooling down, “of a paragraph in The Planet, the other day, about the amount of my gifts unknown to the public. I showed it to Uncle Jerry, and he said, ‘Yes, I mentioned it to the editor; such things don’t do any harm.’”

“I saw it, and wondered who started it,” Carmen replied, wrinkling her brows as if she had been a good deal perplexed about it.

“I thought,” said Henderson, with a smile, “that it ought to be explained to you.”

“No,” she said, reflectively; “you are liberal enough, goodness knows—too liberal—but you are not a flat.”

Henderson was in the habit of dropping in at the Eschelles’ occasionally, when he wanted to talk freely. He had no need to wear a mask with Carmen. Her moral sense was tolerant and elastic, and feminine sympathy of this sort is a grateful cushion. She admired Henderson, without thinking any too well of the world in general, and she admired him for the qualities that were most conformable to his inclination. It was no case of hero-worship, to be sure, nor for tragedy; but then what a satisfaction it must be to sweet Lady Macbeth, coiled up on her sofa, to feel that the thane of Cawdor has some nerve!

The Hendersons had come back to Washington Square late in the autumn. It is a merciful provision that one has an orderly and well-appointed home to return to from the fatigues of the country. Margaret, at any rate, was a little tired with the multiform excitements of her summer, and experienced a feeling of relief when she crossed her own threshold and entered into the freedom and quiet of her home. She was able to shut the door there even against the solicitations of nature and against the weariness of it also. How quiet it was in the square in those late autumn days, and yet not lifeless by any means! Indeed, it seemed all the more a haven because the roar of the great city environed it, and one could feel, without being disturbed by, the active pulsation of human life. And then, if one has sentiment, is there anywhere that it is more ministered to than in the city at the close of the year? The trees in the little park grow red and yellow and brown, the leaves fall and swirl and drift in windrows by the paths, the flower-beds flame forth in the last dying splendor of their color; the children, chasing each other with hoop and ball about the walks, are more subdued than in the spring-time; the old men, seeking now the benches where the sunshine falls, sit in dreamy reminiscence of the days that are gone; the wandering minstrel of Italy turns the crank of his wailing machine, O! bella, bella, as in the spring, but the notes seem to come from far off and to be full of memory rather than of promise; and at early morning, or when the shadows lengthen at evening, the south wind that stirs the trees has a salt smell, and sends a premonitory shiver of change to the fading foliage. But how bright are the squares and the streets, for all this note of melancholy! Life is to begin again.

But the social season opened languidly. It takes some time to recover from the invigoration of the summer gayety—to pick up again the threads and weave them into that brilliant pattern, which scarcely shows all its loveliness of combination and color before the weavers begin to work in the subdued tints of Lent. How delightful it is to see this knitting and unraveling of the social fabric year after year! and how untiring are the senders of the shuttles, the dyers, the hatchelers, the spinners, the ever-busy makers and destroyers of the intricate web we call society! After one campaign, must there not be time given to organize for another? Who has fallen out, who are the new recruits, who are engaged, who will marry, who have separated, who has lost his money? Before we can safely reorganize we must not only examine the hearts but the stock-list. No matter how many brilliant alliances have been arranged, no matter how many husbands and wives have drifted apart in the local whirlpools of the summer’s current, the season will be dull if Wall Street is torpid and discouraged. We cannot any of us, you see, live to ourselves alone. Does not the preacher say that? And do we not all look about us in the pews, when he thus moralizes, to see who has prospered? The B’s have taken a back seat, the C’s have moved up nearer the pulpit. There is a reason for these things, my friends.

I am sorry to say that Margaret was usually obliged to go alone to the little church where she said her prayers; for however restful her life might have been while that season was getting under way, Henderson was involved in the most serious struggle of his life—a shameful kind of conspiracy, Margaret told Carmen, against him. I have hinted at his annoyance in the courts. Ever since September he had been pestered with injunctions, threatened with attachments. And now December had come and Congress was in session; in the very first days an investigation had been ordered into the land grants involved in the Southwestern operations. Uncle Jerry was in Washington to explain matters there, and Henderson, with the ablest counsel in the city, was fighting in the courts. The affair made a tremendous stir. Some of the bondholders of the A. and B. happened to be men of prominence, and able to make a noise about their injury. As several millions were involved in this one branch of the case—the suit of the bondholders—the newspapers treated it with the consideration and dignity it deserved. It was a vast financial operation, some said, scathingly, a “deal,” but the magnitude of it prevented it from falling into the reports of petty swindling that appear in the police-court column. It was a public affair, and not to be judged by one’s private standard. I know that there were remarks made about Henderson that would have pained Margaret if she had heard them, but I never heard that he lost standing in the street. Still, in justice to the street it must be said that it charitably waits for things to be proven, and that if Henderson had failed, he might have had little more lenient judgment in the street than elsewhere.

In fact, those were very trying days for him-days when he needed all the private sympathy he could get, and to be shielded, in his great fight with the conspiracy, from petty private annoyances. It needed all his courage and good-temper and bonhomie to carry him through. That he went through was evidence not only of his adroitness and ability, but it was proof also that he was a good fellow. If there were people who thought otherwise, I never heard that they turned their backs on him, or failed in that civility which he never laid aside in his intercourse with others.

If a man present a smiling front to the world under extreme trial, is not that all that can be expected of him? Shall he not be excused for showing a little irritation at home when things go badly? Henderson was as good-humored a man as I ever knew, and he loved Margaret, he was proud of her, he trusted her. Since when did the truest love prevent a man from being petulant, even to the extent of wounding those he best loves, especially if the loved one shows scruples when sympathy is needed? The reader knows that the present writer has no great confidence in the principle of Carmen; but if she had been married, and her husband had wrecked an insurance company and appropriated all the surplus belonging to the policy-holders, I don’t believe she would have nagged him about it.

And yet Margaret loved Henderson with her whole soul. And in this stage of her progress in the world she showed that she did, though not in the way Carmen would have showed her love, if she had loved, and if she had a soul capable of love.

It may have been inferred from Henderson’s exhibition of temper that his case had gone against him. It is true; an injunction had been granted in the lower court, and public opinion went with the decree, and was in a great measure satisfied by it. But this fight had really only just begun; it would go on in the higher courts, with new resources and infinite devices, which the public would be unable to fathom or follow, until by-and-by it would come out that a compromise had been made, and the easy public would not understand that this compromise gave the looters of the railway substantially all they ever expected to get. The morning after the granting of the injunction Henderson had been silent and very much absorbed at breakfast, hardly polite, Margaret thought, and so inattentive to her remarks that she asked him twice whether they should accept the Brandon invitation to Christmas. “Christmas! I don’t know. I’ve got other things to think of than Christmas,” he said, scarcely looking at her, and rising abruptly and going away to his library.

When the postman brought Margaret’s mail there was a letter in it from her aunt, which she opened leisurely after the other notes had been glanced through, on the principle that a family letter can wait, or from the fancy that some have of keeping the letter likely to be most interesting till the last. But almost the first line enchained her attention, and as she read, her heart beat faster, and her face became scarlet. It was very short, and I am able to print it, because all Margaret’s correspondence ultimately came into possession of her aunt:

class="letter">

“BRANDON, December 17th.

“DEAREST MARGARET,—You do not say whether you will come for Christmas, but we infer from your silence that you will. You know how pained we shall all be if you do not. Yet I fear the day will not be as pleasant as we could wish. In fact, we are in a good deal of trouble. You know, dear, that poor Mrs. Fletcher had nearly every dollar of her little fortune invested in the A. and B. bonds, and for ten months she has not had a cent of income, and no prospect of any. Indeed, Morgan says that she will be lucky if she ultimately saves half her principal. We try to cheer her up, but she is so cast down and mortified to have to live, as she says, on charity. And it does make rather close housekeeping, though I’m sure I couldn’t live alone without her. It does not make so much difference with Mr. Fairchild and Mr. Morgan, for they have plenty of other resources. Mr. Fairchild tells her that she is in very good company, for lots of the bonds are held in Brandon, and she is not the only widow who suffers; but this is poor consolation. We had great hopes, the other day, of the trial, but Morgan says it may be years before any final settlement. I don’t believe Mr. Henderson knows. But there, dearest, I won’t find fault. We are all well, and eager to see you. Do come.

“Your affectionate aunt,

“GEORGIAN A.”

Margaret’s hand that held the letter trembled, and the eyes that read these words were hot with indignation; but she controlled herself into an appearance of calmness as she marched away with it straight to the library.

As she entered, Henderson was seated at his desk, with bowed head and perplexed brows, sorting a pile of papers before him, and making notes. He did not look up until she came close to him and stood at the end of his desk. Then, turning his eyes for a moment, and putting out his left hand to her, he said, “Well, what is it, dear?”

“Will you read that?” said Margaret, in a voice that sounded strange in her own ears.

“What?”

“A letter from Aunt Forsythe.”

“Family matter. Can’t it wait?” said Henderson, going on with his figuring.

“If it can, I cannot,” Margaret answered, in a tone that caused him to turn abruptly and look at her. He was so impatient and occupied that even yet he did not comprehend the new expression in her face.

“Don’t you see I am busy, child? I have an engagement in twenty minutes in my office.”

“You can read it in a moment,” said Margaret, still calm.

Henderson took the letter with a gesture of extreme annoyance, ran his eye through it, flung it from him on the table, and turned squarely round in his chair.

“Well, what of it?”

“To ruin poor Mrs. Fletcher and a hundred like her!” cried Margaret, with rising indignation.

“What have I to do with it? Did I make their investments? Do you think I have time to attend to every poor duck? Why don’t people look where they put their money?”

“It’s a shame, a burning shame!” she cried, regarding him steadily.

“Oh, yes; no doubt. I lost a hundred thousand yesterday; did I whine about it? If I want to buy anything in the market, have I got to look into every tuppenny interest concerned in it? If Mrs. Fletcher or anybody else has any complaint against me, the courts are open. I defy the whole pack!” Henderson thundered out, rising and buttoning his coat—“the whole pack!”

“And you have nothing else to say, Rodney?” Margaret persisted, not quailing in the least before his indignation. He had never seen her so before, and he was now too much in a passion to fully heed her.

“Oh, women, women!” he said, taking up his hat, “you have sympathy enough for anybody but your husbands.” He pushed past her, and was gone without another word or look.

Margaret turned to follow him. She would have cried “Stop!” but the word stuck in her throat. She was half beside herself with rage for a moment. But he had gone. She heard the outer door close. Shame and grief overcame her. She sat down in the chair he had just occupied. It was infamous the way Mrs. Fletcher was treated. And her husband—her husband was so regardless of it. If he was not to blame for it, why didn’t he tell her—why didn’t he explain? And he had gone away without looking at her. He had left her for the first time since they were married without kissing her! She put her head down on the desk and sobbed; it seemed as if her heart would break. Perhaps he was angry, and wouldn’t come back, not for ever so long.

How cruel to say that she did not sympathize with her husband! How could he be angry with her for her natural anxiety about her old friend! He was unjust. There must be something wrong in these schemes, these great operations that made so many confiding people suffer. Was everybody grasping and selfish? She got up and walked about the dear room, which recalled to her only the sweetest memories; she wandered aimlessly about the lower part of the house. She was wretchedly unhappy. Was her husband capable of such conduct? Would he cease to love her for what she had done—for what she must do? How lovely this home was! Everything spoke of his care, his tenderness, his quickness to anticipate her slightest wish or whim. It had been all created for her. She looked listlessly at the pictures, the painted ceiling, where the loves garlanded with flowers chased each other; she lifted and let drop wearily the rich hangings. He had said that it was all hers. How pretty was this vista through the luxurious rooms down to the green and sunny conservatory. And she shrank instinctively from it all. Was it hers? No; it was his. And was she only a part of it? Was she his? How cold his look as he went away!

What is this love, this divine passion, of which we hear so much? Is it, then, such a discerner of right and wrong? Is it better than anything else? Does it take the place of duty, of conscience? And yet what an unbearable desert, what a den of wild beasts it would be, this world, without love, the passionate, all-surrendering love of the man and the woman!

In the chambers, in her own apartments, into which she dragged her steps, it was worse than below. Everything here was personal. Mrs. Fairchild had said that it was too rich, too luxurious; but her husband would have it so. Nothing was too costly, too good, for the woman he loved. How happy she had been in this boudoir, this room, her very own, with her books, the souvenirs of all her happy life!

It seemed alien now, external, unsympathetic. Here, least of all places, could she escape from herself, from her hateful thoughts. It was a chilly day, and a bright fire crackled on the hearth. The square was almost deserted, though the sun illuminated it, and showed all the delicate tracery of the branches and twigs. It was a December sun. Her easy-chair was drawn to the fire and her book-stand by it, with the novel turned down that she had been reading the night before. She sat down and took up the book. She had lost her interest in the characters. Fiction! What stuff it was compared to the reality of her own life! No, it was impossible. She must do something. She went to her dressing-room and selected a street dress. She took pleasure in putting on the plainest costume she could find, rejecting every ornament, everything but the necessary and the simple. She wanted to get back to herself. Her maid appeared in response to the bell.

“I am going out, Marie.”

“Will madame have the carriage?”

“No, I will walk; I need exercise. Tell Jackson not to serve lunch.”

Yes, she would walk; for it was his carriage, after all.

It was after mid-day. In the keen air and the bright sunshine the streets were brilliant. Margaret walked on up the avenue. How gay was the city, what a zest of life in the animated scene! The throng increased as she approached Twenty-third Street. In the place where three or four currents meet there was the usual jam of carriages, furniture wagons, carts, cars, and hurried, timid, half-bewildered passengers trying to make their way through it. It was all such a whirl and confusion. A policeman aided Margaret to gain the side of the square. Children were playing there; white-capped maids were pushing about baby-carriages; the sparrows chattered and fought with as much vivacity as if they were natives of the city instead of foreigners in possession. It seemed all so empty and unreal. What was she, one woman with an aching heart, in the midst of it all? What had she done? How could she have acted otherwise? Was he still angry with her? The city was so vast and cruel. On the avenue again there was the same unceasing roar of carts and carriages; business, pleasure, fashion, idleness, the stream always went by. From one and another carriage Margaret received a bow, a cool nod, or a smile of greeting. Perhaps the occupants wondered to see her on foot and alone. What did it matter? How heartless it all was! what an empty pageant! If he was alienated, there was nothing. And yet she was right. For a moment she thought of the Arbusers. She thought of Carmen. She must see somebody. No, she couldn’t talk. She couldn’t trust herself. She must bear it alone.

And how weary it was, walking, walking, with such a burden! House after house, street after street, closed doors, repellant fronts, staring at her. Suppose she were poor and hungry, a woman wandering forlorn, how stony and pitiless these insolent mansions! And was she not burdened and friendless and forlorn! Tired, she reached at last, and with no purpose, the great white cathedral. The door was open. In all this street of churches and palaces there was no other door open. Perhaps here for a moment she could find shelter from the world, a quiet corner where she could rest and think and pray.

She entered. It was almost empty, but down the vista of the great columns hospitable lights gleamed, and here and there a man or a woman—more women than men—was kneeling in the great aisle, before a picture, at the side of a confessional, at the steps of the altar. How hushed and calm and sweet it was! She crept into a pew in a side aisle in the shelter of a pillar; and sat down. Presently, in the far apse, an organ began to play, its notes stealing softly out through the great spaces like a benediction. She fancied that the saints, the glorified martyrs in the painted windows illumined by the sunlight, could feel, could hear, were touched by human sympathy in their beatitude. There was peace here at any rate, and perhaps strength. What a dizzy whirl it all was in which she had been borne along! The tones of the organ rose fuller and fuller, and now at the side entrances came pouring in children, the boys on one side, the girls on another-school children with their books and satchels, the poor children of the parish, long lines of girls and of boys, marshaled by priests and nuns, streaming in—in frolicsome mood, and filling all the pews of the nave at the front. They had their books out, their singing-books; at a signal they all stood up; a young priest with his baton stepped into the centre aisle; he waved his stick, Margaret heard his sweet tenor voice, and then the whole chorus of children’s voices rising and filling all the house with the innocent concord, but always above all the penetrating, soaring notes of the priest-strong, clear, persuading. Was it not almost angelic there at the moment? And how inspired the beautiful face of the singer leading the children!

Ah, me! it is not all of the world worldly, then. I don’t know that the singing was very good: it was not classical, I fear; not a voice, maybe, that priest’s, not a chorus, probably, that, for the Metropolitan. I hear the organ is played better elsewhere. Song after song, chorus after chorus, repeated, stopped, begun again: it was only drilling the little urchins of the parochial schools—little ragamuffins, I dare say, many of them. What was there in this to touch a woman of fashion, sitting there crying in her corner? Was it because they were children’s voices, and innocent? Margaret did not care to check her tears. She was thinking of her old home, of her own childhood, nay, of her girlhood—it was not so long ago—of her ideals then, of her notion of the world and what it would bring her, of the dear, affectionate life, the simple life, the school, the little church, her room in the cottage—the chamber where first the realization of love came to her with the odors of May. Was it gone, that life?—gone or going out of her heart? And—great heavens!—if her husband should be cold to her! Was she very worldly? Would he love her if she were as unworldly as she once was? Why should this childish singing raise these contrasts, and put her at odds so with her own life? For a moment I doubt not this dear girl saw herself as we were beginning to see her. Who says that the rich and the prosperous and the successful do not need pity?

Was this a comforting hour, do you think, for Margaret in the cathedral? Did she get any strength, I wonder? When the singing was over and the organ ceased, and the children had filed out, she stole away also, wearily and humbly enough, and took the stage down the avenue. It was near the dinner-hour, and Henderson, if he came, would be at home any moment. It seemed as if she could not wait—only to see him!

XVIII

Do you suppose that Henderson had never spoken impatiently and sharply to his wife before, that Margaret had never resented it and replied with spirit, and been hurt and grieved, and that there had never been reconciliations? In writing any biography there are some things that are taken for granted with an intelligent public. Are men always gentle and considerate, and women always even-tempered and consistent, simply by virtue of a few words said to the priest?

But this was a more serious affair. Margaret waited in a tumult of emotion. She felt that she would die if she did not see him soon, and she dreaded his coming. A horrible suspicion had entered her mind that respect for her husband, confidence in him, might be lowered, and a more horrible doubt that she might lose his love. That she could not bear. And was Henderson unconscious of all this? I dare say that in the perplexing excitement of the day he did recall for a moment with a keen thrust of regret the scene of the morning-his wife standing there flushed, wounded, indignant. “I might have turned back, and taken her in my arms, and told her it was all right,” he thought. He wished he had done so. But what nonsense it was to think that she could be seriously troubled! Besides, he couldn’t have women interfering with him every moment.

How inconsiderate men are! They drop a word or a phrase—they do not know how cruel it is—or give a look—they do not know how cold it is—and are gone without a second thought about it; but it sinks into the woman’s heart and rankles there. For the instant it is like a mortal blow, it hurts so, and in the brooding spirit it is exaggerated into a hopeless disaster. The wound will heal with a kind word, with kisses. Yes, but never, never without a little scar. But woe to the woman’s love when she becomes insensible to these little stabs!

Henderson hurried home, then, more eagerly than usual, with reparation in his heart, but still with no conception of the seriousness of the breach. Margaret heard the key in the door, heard his hasty step in the hall, heard him call, as he always did on entering, “Margaret! where is Margaret?” and she, sitting there in the deep window looking on the square, longed to run to him, as usual also, and be lifted up in his strong arms; but she could not stir. Only when he found her did she rise up with a wistful look and a faint smile. “Have you had a good day, child?” And he kissed her. But her kiss was on her lips only, for her heart was heavy.

“Dinner will be served as soon as you dress,” she said. What a greeting was this! Who says that a woman cannot be as cruel as a man? The dinner was not very cheerful, though Margaret did her best not to appear constrained, and Henderson rattled on about the events of the day. It had been a deuce of a day, but it was coming right; he felt sure that the upper court would dissolve the injunction; the best counsel said so; and the criminal proceedings—“Had there been criminal proceedings?” asked Margaret, with a stricture at her heart—had broken down completely, hadn’t a leg to stand on, never had, were only begun to bluff the company. It was a purely malicious prosecution. And Henderson did not think it necessary to tell Margaret that only Uncle Jerry’s dexterity had spared both of them the experience of a night in the Ludlow Street jail.

“Come,” said Henderson—“come into the library. I have something to tell you.” He put his arm round her as they walked, and seating himself in his chair by his desk in front of the fire, he tried to draw Margaret to sit on his knee.

“No; I’ll sit here, so that I can see you,” she said, composed and unyielding.

He took out his pocket-book, selected a slip of paper, and laid it on the table before him. “There, that is a check for seven hundred dollars. I looked in the books. That is the interest for a year on the Fletcher bonds. Might as well make it an even year; it will be that soon.”

“Do you mean to say—” asked Margaret, leaning forward.

“Yes; to brighten up the Christmas up there a little.”

“—that you are going to send that to Mrs. Fletcher?” Margaret had risen.

“Oh, no; that wouldn’t do. I cannot send it, nor know anything about it. It would raise the—well, it would—if the other bondholders knew anything about it. But you can change that for your check, and nobody the wiser.”

“Oh, Rodney!” She was on his knee now. He was good, after all. Her head was on his shoulder, and she was crying a little. “I’ve been so unhappy, so unhappy, all day! And I can send that?” She sprang up. “I’ll do it this minute—I’ll run and get my check-book!” But before she reached the door she turned back, and came and stood by him and kissed him again and again, and tumbled up his hair, and looked at him. There is, after all, nothing in the world like a woman.

“Time enough in the morning,” said Henderson, detaining her. “I want to tell you all about it.”

What he told her was, in fact, the case as it had been presented by his lawyers, and it seemed a very large, a constitutional, kind of case. “Of course,” he said, “in the rivalry and competition of business somebody must go to the wall, and in a great scheme of development and reorganization of the transportation of a region as big as an empire some individual interests will suffer. You can’t help these changes. I’m sorry for some of them—very sorry; but nothing would ever be done if we waited to consider every little interest. And that the men who create these great works, and organize these schemes for the benefit of the whole public, shouldn’t make anything by their superior enterprise and courage is all nonsense. The world is not made that way.”

The explanation, I am bound to say, was one that half the world considers valid; it was one that squeezed through the courts. And when it was done, and the whole thing had blown over, who cared? There were some bondholders who said that it was rascally, that they had been boldly swindled. In the clubs, long after, you would hear it said that Hollowell and Henderson were awfully sharp, and hard to beat. It is a very bad business, said the Brandon parliament, and it just shows that the whole country is losing its moral sense, its capacity to judge what is right and what is wrong.

I do not say that this explanation, the nature of which I have only indicated, would have satisfied the clear mind of Margaret a year or two before. But it was made by the man she loved, the man who had brought her out into a world that was full of sunlight and prosperity and satisfied desire; and more and more, day by day, she saw the world through his eyes, and accepted his estimate of the motives of people—and a low estimate I fear it was. Who would not be rich if he could? Do you mean to tell me that a man who is getting fat dividends out of a stock does not regard more leniently the manner in which that stock is manipulated than one who does not own any of it? I dare say, if Carmen had heard that explanation, and seen Margaret’s tearful, happy acceptance of it, she would have shaken her pretty head and said, “They are getting too worldly for me.”

In the morning the letter was despatched to Miss Forsythe, enclosing the check for Mrs. Fletcher—a joyful note, full of affection. “We cannot come,” Margaret wrote. “My husband cannot leave, and he does not want to spare me”—the little hypocrite! he had told her that she could easily go for a day “but we shall think of you dear ones all day, and I do hope that now there will not be the least cloud on your Christmas.”

It seems a great pity, in view of the scientific organization of society, that there are so many sensibilities unclassified and unprovided for in the otherwise perfect machinery. Why should the beggar to whom you toss a silver dollar from your carriage feel a little grudge against you? Perhaps he wouldn’t like to earn the dollar, but if it had been accompanied by a word of sympathy, his sensibility might have been soothed by your recognition of human partnership in the goods of this world. People not paupers are all eager to take what is theirs of right; but anything in the semblance of charity is a bitter pill to swallow until self-respect is a little broken down. Probably the resentment lies in the recognition of the truth that it is much easier to be charitable than to be just. If Margaret had seen the effect produced by her letter she might have thought of this; she might have gone further, and reflected upon what would have been her own state of mind two years earlier if she had received such a letter. Miss Forsythe read it with a very heavy heart. She hesitated about showing it to Mrs. Fletcher, and when she did, and gave her the check, it was with a sense of shame.

“The insolence of the thing!” cried Mrs. Fletcher, as soon as she comprehended it.

“Not insolence,” pleaded Miss Forsythe, softly; “it is out of the kindness of her heart. She would be dreadfully wounded to know that you took it so.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Fletcher, hotly, “I like that kind of sensibility. Does she think I have no feeling? Does she think I would take from her as a charity what her husband knows is mine by right?”

“Perhaps her husband—”

“No,” Mrs. Fletcher interrupted. “Why didn’t he send it, then? why didn’t the company send it? They owe it. I’m not a pauper. And all the other bondholders who need the money as much as I do! I’m not saying that if the company sent it I should refuse it because the others had been treated unjustly; but to take it as a favor, like a beggar!”

“Of course you cannot take it from Margaret,” said Miss Forsythe sadly.

“How dreadful it is!”

Mrs. Fletcher would have shared her last crust with Miss Forsythe, and if her own fortune were absolutely lost, she would not hesitate to accept the shelter of her present home, using her energies to add to their limited income, serving and being served in all love and trust. But this is different from taking a bounty from the rich.

The check had to go back. Even my wife, who saw no insolence in Margaret’s attempt, applauded Mrs. Fletcher’s spirit. She told Miss Forsythe that if things did not mend they might get a few little pupils for Mrs. Fletcher from the neighborhood, and Miss Forsythe knew that she was thinking that her own boy might have been one of them if he had lived. Mr. Morgan was a little satirical, as usual. He thought it would be a pity to check Margaret’s growing notion that there was no wrong that money could not heal a remark that my wife thought unjust to the girl. Mrs. Fletcher was for re-enclosing the check without a word of comment, but that Miss Forsythe would not do.

“My dearest Margaret,” she wrote, “I know the kindness of heart that moved you to do this, and I love you more than ever, and am crying as I think of it. But you must see yourself, when you reflect, that Mrs. Fletcher could not take this from you. Her self-respect would not permit it. Somebody has done a great wrong, and only those who have done it can undo it. I don’t know much about such things, my dear, and I don’t believe all that the newspapers have been saying, but there would be no need for charity if there had not been dishonesty somewhere. I cannot help thinking that. We do not blame you. And you must not take it to heart that I am compelled to send this back. I understand why you sent it, and you must try to understand why it cannot be kept.”

There was more of this sort in the letter. It was full of a kind of sorrowful yearning, as if there was fear that Margaret’s love were slipping away and all the old relations were being broken up, but yet it had in it a certain moral condemnation that the New England spinster could not conceal. Softened as it was by affectionate words, and all the loving messages of the season, it was like a slap in the face to Margaret. She read it in the first place with intense mortification, and then with indignation. This was the way her loving spirit was flung back upon her! They did not blame her! They blamed her husband, then. They condemned him. It was his generosity that was spurned.

Is there a particular moment when we choose our path in life, when we take the right or the left? At this instant, when Margaret arose with the crumpled letter in her hand, and marched towards her husband’s library, did she choose, or had she been choosing for the two years past, and was this only a publication of her election? Why had she secretly been a little relieved from restraint when her Brandon visit ended in the spring? They were against her husband; they disapproved of him, that was clear. Was it not a wife’s duty to stand by her husband? She was indignant with the Brandon scrupulousness; it chafed her.. Was this simply because she loved her husband, or was this indignation a little due also to her liking for the world which so fell in with her inclinations? The motives in life are so mixed that it seems impossible wholly to condemn or wholly to approve. If Margaret’s destiny had been united with such a man as John Lyon, what would have been her discernment in such a case as this? It is such a pity that for most people there is only one chance in life.

She laid the letter and the check upon her husband’s desk. He read it with a slight frown, which changed to a smile of amusement as he looked up and saw Margaret’s excitement.

“Well, it was a miss-go. Those folks up there are too good for this world. You’d better send it to the hospital.”

“But you see that they say they do not blame me,” Margaret said, with warmth.

“Oh, I can stand it. People usually don’t try to hurt my feelings that way. Don’t mind it, child. They will come to their senses, and see what nonsense it all is.”

Yes, it was nonsense. And how generous and kind at heart her husband was! In his skillful making little of it she was very much comforted, and at the same time drawn into more perfect sympathy with him. She was glad she was not going to Brandon for Christmas; she would not submit herself to its censorship. The note of acknowledgment she wrote to her aunt was short and almost formal. She was very sorry they looked at the matter in that way. She thought she was doing right, and they might blame her or not, but her aunt would see that she could not permit any distinction to be set up between her and her husband, etc.

Was this little note a severance of her present from her old life? I do not suppose she regarded it so. If she had fully realized that it was a step in that direction, would she have penned it with so little regret as she felt? Or did she think that circumstances and not her own choice were responsible for her state of feeling? She was mortified, as has been said, but she wrote with more indignation than pain.

A year ago Carmen would have been the last person to whom Margaret would have spoken about a family affair of this kind. Nor would she have done so now, notwithstanding the intimacy established at Newport, if Carmen had not happened in that day, when Margaret was still hurt and excited, and skillfully and most sympathetically extracted from her the cause of the mood she found her in. But even with all these allowances, that Margaret should confide such a matter to Carmen was the most startling sign of the change that had taken place in her.

“Well,” said this wise person, after she had wormed out the whole story, and expressed her profound sympathy, and then fallen into an attitude of deep reflection—“well, I wish I could cast my bread upon the waters in that way. What are you going to do with the money?”

“I’ve sent it to the hospital.”

“What extravagance! And did you tell your aunt that?”

“Of course not.”

“Why not? I couldn’t have resisted such a righteous chance of making her feel bad.”

“But I don’t want to make her feel bad.”

“Just a little? You will never convince people that you are unworldly this way. Even Uncle Jerry wouldn’t do that.”

“You and Uncle Jerry are very much alike,” cried Margaret, laughing in spite of herself—“both of you as bad as you can be.”

“But, dear, we don’t pretend, do we?” asked Carmen, innocently.

To some of us at Brandon, Margaret’s letter was scarcely a surprise, though it emphasized a divergence we had been conscious of. But with Miss Forsythe it was far otherwise. The coolness of Margaret’s tone filled her with alarm; it was the premonition of a future which she did not dare to face.

There was a passage in the letter which she did not show; not that it was unfeeling, she told my wife afterwards, but that it exhibited a worldly-mindedness that she could not have conceived of in Margaret. She could bear separation from the girl on whom she had bestowed her tenderest affection, that she had schooled herself to expect upon her marriage—that, indeed, was only a part of her life of willing self-sacrifice—their paths must lie apart, and she could hope to see little of her. But what she could not bear was the separation in spirit, the wrenching apart of sympathy, the loss of her heart, and the thought of her going farther and farther away into that world whose cynical and materialistic view of life made her shudder. I think there are few tragedies in life comparable to this to a sensitive, trusting soul—not death itself, with its gracious healing and oblivion and pathos. Family quarrels have something sustaining in them, something of a sense of wrong and even indignation to keep up the spirits. There was no family quarrel here, no indignation, just simple, helpless grief and sense of loss. In one sense it seemed to the gentle spinster that her own life was ended, she had lived so in this girl—ever since she came to her a child, in long curls and short frocks, the sweetest, most trustful, mischievous, affectionate thing. These two then never had had any secrets, never any pleasure, never any griefs they did not share. She had seen the child’s mind unfold, the girl’s grace and intelligence, the woman’s character. Oh, Margaret, she cried, to herself, if you only knew what you are to me!

Margaret’s little chamber in the cottage was always kept ready for her, much in the condition she had left it. She might come back at any time, and be a girl again. Here were many of the things which she had cherished; indeed everything in the room spoke of the simple days of her maidenhood. It was here that Miss Forsythe sat in her loneliness the morning after she received the letter, by the window with the muslin curtain, looking out through the shrubbery to the blue hills. She must be here; she could stay nowhere else in the house, for here the little Margaret came back to her. Ah, and when she turned, would she hear the quick steps and see the smiling face, and would she put back the tangled hair and lift her up and kiss her? There in that closet still hung articles of her clothing-dresses that had been laid aside when she became a woman—kept with the sacred sentiment of New England thrift. How each one, as Miss Forsythe took them down, recalled the girl! In the inner closet was a pile of paper boxes. I do not know what impulse it was that led the heavy-hearted woman to take them down one by one, and indulge her grief in the memories enshrined in them. In one was a little bonnet, a spring bonnet; Margaret had worn it on the Easter Sunday when she took her first communion. The little thing was out of fashion now; the ribbons were all faded, but the spray of moss rosebuds on the side was almost as fresh as ever. How well she remembered it, and the girl’s delight in the nodding roses!

When Mrs. Fletcher had called again and again, with no response, and finally opened the door and peeped in, there the spinster sat by the window, the pitiful little bonnet in her hand, and the tears rolling down her cheeks. God help her!

XIX

The medical faculty are of the opinion that a sprain is often worse than a broken limb; a purely scientific, view of the matter, in which the patient usually does not coincide. Well-bred people shrink from the vulgarity of violence, and avoid the publicity of any open rupture in domestic and social relations. And yet, perhaps, a lively quarrel would be less lamentable than the withering away of friendship while appearances are kept up. Nothing, indeed, is more pitiable than the gradual drifting apart of people who have been dear to each other—a severance produced by change of views and of principle, and the substitution of indifference for sympathy. This disintegration is certain to take the spring and taste out of life, and commonly to habituate one to a lower view of human nature.

There was no rupture between the Hendersons and the Brandon circle, but there was little intercourse of the kind that had existed before. There was with us a profound sense of loss and sorrow, due partly to the growing knowledge, not pleasing to our vanity, that Margaret could get on very well without us, that we were not necessary to her life. Miss Forsythe recovered promptly her cheerful serenity, but not the elasticity of hope; she was irretrievably hurt; it was as if life was now to be endured. That Margaret herself was apparently unconscious of this, and that it did not affect much her own enjoyment, made it the harder to bear. The absolute truth probably was that she regretted it, and had moments of sentimental unhappiness; but there is great compensation for such loss in the feeling of freedom to pursue a career that is more and more agreeable. And I had to confess, when occasionally I saw Margaret during that winter, that she did not need us. Why should she? Did not the city offer her everything that she desired? And where in the world are beauty, and gayety with a touch of daring, and a magnificent establishment better appreciated? I do not know what criterion newspaper notoriety is of social prestige, but Mrs. Rodney Henderson’s movements were as faithfully chronicled as if she had been a visiting princess or an actress of eccentric proclivities. Her name appeared as patroness of all the charities, the balls, the soirees, musical and literary, and if it did not appear in a list of the persons at any entertainment, one might suspect that the affair lacked the cachet of the best society. I suppose the final test of one’s importance is to have all the details of one’s wardrobe spread before the public. Judged by this, Margaret’s career in New York was phenomenal. Even our interested household could not follow her in all the changing splendor of her raiment. In time even Miss Forsythe ceased to read all these details, but she cut them out, deposited them with other relics in a sort of mortuary box of the child and the maiden. I used to wonder if, in the Brandon attitude of mind at this period, there were not just a little envy of such unclouded prosperity. It is so much easier to forgive a failure than a success.

In the spring the Hendersons went abroad. The resolution to go may have been sudden, for Margaret wrote of it briefly, and had not time to run up and say good-by. The newspapers said that the trip was taken on account of Mrs. Henderson’s health; that it was because Henderson needed rest from overwork; that he found it convenient to be away for a time, pending the settlement of certain complications. There were ugly stories afloat, but they were put in so many forms, and followed by so many different sorts of denial, and so much importance was attached to every word Henderson uttered, and every step he took, that the general impression of his far-reaching sagacity and Napoleonic command of fortune was immensely raised. Nothing is more significant of our progress than the good-humored deference of the world to this sort of success. It is said that the attraction of gravitation lessens according to the distance from the earth, and there seems to be a region of aerial freedom, if one can attain it, where the moral forces cease to be operative.

They remained in Europe a year, although Mr. Henderson in the interim made two or three hasty trips to this country, always, so far as it was made public, upon errands of great importance, and in connection with names of well-known foreign capitalists and enterprises of dignity. Margaret wrote seldom, but always with evident enjoyment of her experiences, which were mainly social, for wherever they went they commanded the consideration that is accorded to fortune. What most impressed me in these hasty notes was that the woman was so little interested in the persons and places which in the old days she expressed such a lively desire to see. If she saw them at all, it was from a different point of view than that she formerly had. She did indeed express her admiration of some charming literary friends of ours in London, to whom I had written to call on her—people in very moderate circumstances, I am ashamed to say—but she had not time to see much of them. She and her husband had spent a couple of days at Chisholm—delightful days. Of the earl she had literally nothing to say, except that he was very kind, and that his family received them with the most engaging and simple cordiality. “It makes me laugh,” she wrote from Chisholm, “when I think what we considered fine at Lenox and Newport. I’ve got some ideas for our new house.” A note came from “John Lyon” to Miss Forsythe, expressing the great pleasure it was to return, even in so poor a way, the hospitality he had received at Brandon. I did not see it, but Miss Forsythe said it was a sad little note.

In Paris Margaret was ill—very ill; and this misfortune caused for a time a revival of all the old affection, in sympathy with a disappointment which awoke in our womankind all the tenderness of their natures. She was indeed a little delicate for some time, but all our apprehensions were relieved by the reports from Rome of a succession of gayeties little interfered with by archaeological studies. They returned in June. Of the year abroad there was nothing to chronicle, and there would be nothing to note except that when Margaret passed a day with us on her return, we felt, as never before, that our interests in life were more and more divergent.

How could it be otherwise? There were so many topics of conversation that we had to avoid. Even light remarks on current news, comments that we used to make freely on the conduct of conspicuous persons, now carried condemnation that took a personal color. The doubtful means of making money, the pace of fashionable life, the wasteful prodigality of the time, we instinctively shrank from speaking of before Margaret. Perhaps we did her injustice. She was never more gracious, never more anxious to please. I fancied that there was at times something pathetic in her wistful desire for our affection and esteem. She was always a generous girl, and I have no doubt she felt repelled at the quiet rejection of her well-meant efforts to play the Lady Bountiful. There were moments during her brief visit when her face was very sad, but no doubt her predominant feeling escaped her in regard to the criticism quoted from somebody on Jerry Hollowell’s methods and motives. “People are becoming very self-righteous,” she said.

My wife said to me that she was reminded of the gentle observation of Carmen Eschelle, “The people I cannot stand are those who pretend they are not wicked.” If one does not believe in anybody his cynicism has usually a quality of contemptuous bitterness in it. One brought up as Margaret had been could not very well come to her present view of life without a touch of this quality, but her disposition was so lovely—perhaps there is no moral quality in a good temper—that change of principle could not much affect it. And then she was never more winning; perhaps her beauty had taken on a more refined quality from her illness abroad; perhaps it was that indefinable knowledge of the world, which is recognized as well in dress as in manner, which increased her attractiveness. This was quite apart from the fact that she was not so sympathetically companionable to us as she once was, and it was this very attractiveness of the worldly sort, I fancied, that pained her aunt, and marked the separateness of their sympathies.

How could it be otherwise than that our interests should diverge? It was a very busy summer with the Hendersons. They were planning the New York house, which had been one of the objects of Henderson’s early ambition. The sea-air had been prescribed for Margaret, and Henderson had built a steam-yacht, the equipment and furnishing of which had been a prolific newspaper topic. It was greatly admired by yachtsmen for the beauty of its lines and its speed, and pages were written about its sumptuous and comfortable interior. I never saw it, having little faith in the comfort of any structure that is not immovably reposeful, but from the descriptions it was a boudoir afloat. In it short voyages were made during the summer all along the coast from New York to Maine, and the arrival and departure of the Henderson yacht was one of the telegraphic items we always looked for. Carmen Eschelle was usually of the party on board, sometimes the Misses Arbuser; it was always a gay company, and in whatever harbor it dropped anchor there was a new impetus given to the somewhat languid pleasure of the summer season. We read of the dinners and lunches on board, the entertainments where there were wine and dancing and moonlight, and all that. I always thought of it as a fairy sort of ship, sailing on summer seas, freighted with youth and beauty, and carrying pleasure and good-fortune wherever it went. What more pleasing spectacle than this in a world that has such a bad name for want and misery?

Henderson was master of the situation. The sudden accumulation of millions of money is a mystery to most people. If Henderson had been asked about it he would have said that he had not a dollar which he had not earned by hard work. None worked harder. If simple industry is a virtue, he would have been an example for Sunday-school children. The object of life being to make money, he would have been a perfect example. What an inspiration, indeed, for all poor boys were the names of Hollowell and Henderson, which were as familiar as the name of the President! There was much speculation as to the amount of Henderson’s fortune, and many wild estimates of it, but by common consent he was one of the three or four great capitalists. The gauge of this was his power, and the amounts he could command in an emergency. There was a mystery in the very fact that the amount he could command was unknown. I have said that his accumulation was sudden; it was probably so only in appearance. For a dozen years, by operations, various, secret, untiring, he had been laying the foundations for his success, and in the maturing of his schemes it became apparent how vast his transactions had been. For years he had been known as a rising man, and suddenly he became an important man. The telegraph, the newspapers, chronicled his every movement; whatever he said was construed like a Delphic oracle. The smile or the frown of Jay Hawker himself had not a greater effect upon the market. The Southwest operation, which made so much noise in the courts, was merely an incident. In the lives of many successful men there are such incidents, which they do not care to have inquired into, turning-points that one slides over in the subsequent gilded biography, or, as it is called, the nickel-plated biography. The uncomfortable A. and B. bondholders had been settled with and silenced, after a fashion. In the end, Mrs. Fletcher had received from the company nearly the full amount of her investment. I always thought this was due to Margaret, but I made no inquiries. There were many people who had no confidence in Henderson, but generally his popularity was not much affected, and whatever was said of him in private, his social position was almost as unchallenged as his financial. It was a great point in his favor that he was very generous to his family and his friends, and his public charities began to be talked of. Nothing could have been more admirable than a paper which appeared about this time in one of the leading magazines, written by a great capitalist during a strike in his “system,” off the uses of wealth and the responsibilities of rich men. It amused Henderson and Uncle Jerry, and Margaret sent it, marked, to her aunt. Uncle Jerry said it was very timely, for at the moment there was a report that Hollowell and Henderson had obtained possession of one of the great steamship lines in connection with their transcontinental system. I thought at the time that I should like to have heard Carmen’s comments on the paper.

The continued friendly alliance of Rodney Henderson and Jerry Hollowell was a marvel to the public, which expected to read any morning that the one had sold out the other, or unloaded in a sly deal. The Stock Exchange couldn’t understand it; it was so against all experience that it was considered something outside of human nature. But the explanation was simple enough. The two kept a sharp eye on each other, and, as Uncle Jerry would say, never dropped a stitch; but the simple fact was that they were necessary to each other, and there had been no opportunity when the one could handsomely swallow the other. So it was beautiful to see their accord, and the familiar understanding between them.

One day in Henderson’s office—it was at the time they were arranging the steamship “scoop” while they were waiting for the drafting of some papers, Uncle Jerry suddenly asked:

“By the way, old man, what’s all this about a quarter of a million for a colored college down South?”

“Oh, that’s Mrs. Henderson’s affair. They say it’s the most magnificent college building south of Washington. It’s big enough. I’ve seen the plan of it. Henderson Hall, they are going to call it. I suggested Margaret Henderson Hall, but she wouldn’t have it.”

“What is it for?”

“One end of it is scientific, geological, chemical, electric, biological, and all that; and the other end is theological. Miss Eschelle says it’s to reconcile science and religion.”

“She’s a daisy-that girl. Seems to me, though, that you are educating the colored brother all on top. I suppose, however, it wouldn’t have been so philanthropic to build a hall for a white college.”

Henderson laughed. “You keep your eye on the religious sentiment of the North, Uncle Jerry. I told Mrs. Henderson that we had gone long on the colored brother a good while. She said this was nothing. We could endow a Henderson University by-and-by in the Southwest, white as alabaster, and I suppose we shall.”

“Yes, probably we’ve got to do something in that region to keep ‘em quiet. The public is a curious fish. It wants plenty of bait.”

“And something to talk about,” continued Henderson. “We are going down next week to dedicate Henderson Hall. I couldn’t get out of it.”

“Oh, it will pay,” said Uncle Jerry, as he turned again to business.

The trip was made in Henderson’s private car; in fact, in a special train, vestibuled; a neat baggage car with library and reading-room in one end, a diningroom car, a private car for invited guests, and his own car—a luxurious structure, with drawing-room, sleeping-room, bathroom, and office for his telegrapher and type-writer. The whole was a most commodious house of one story on wheels. The cost of it would have built and furnished an industrial school and workshop for a hundred negroes; but this train was, I dare say, a much more inspiring example of what they might attain by the higher education. There were half a dozen in the party besides the Hendersons—Carmen, of course; Mr. Ponsonby, the English attache; and Mrs. Laflamme, to matronize three New York young ladies. Margaret and Carmen had never been so far South before.

Is it not agreeable to have sweet charity silver shod? This sumptuous special train caused as much comment as the errand on which it went. Its coming was telegraphed from station to station, and crowds everywhere collected to see it. Brisk reporters boarded it; the newspapers devoted columns to descriptions of it; editorials glorified it as a signal example of the progress of the great republic, or moralized on it as a sign of the luxurious decadence of morals; pointing to Carthage and Rome and Alexandria in withering sarcasm that made those places sink into insignificance as corrupters of the world. There were covert allusions to Cleopatra ensconced in the silken hangings of the boudoir car, and one reporter went so far as to refer to the luxury of Capua and Baiae, to their disparagement. All this, however, was felt to add to the glory of the republic, and it all increased the importance of Henderson. To hear the exclamations, “That’s he!” “That’s him!” “That’s Henderson!” was to Margaret in some degree a realization of her ambition; and Carmen declared that it was for her a sweet thought to be identified with Cleopatra.

So the Catachoobee University had its splendid new building—as great a contrast to the shanties from which its pupils came as is the Capitol at Washington to the huts of a third of its population. If the reader is curious he may read in the local newspapers of the time glowing accounts of its “inaugural dedication”; but universities are so common in this country that it has become a little wearisome to read of ceremonies of this sort. Mr. Henderson made a modest reply to the barefaced eulogy on himself, which the president pronounced in the presence of six hundred young men and women of various colors and invited guests—a eulogy which no one more thoroughly enjoyed than Carmen. I am sorry to say that she refused to take the affair seriously.

“I felt for you, Mr. Henderson,”; she said, after the exercises were over. “I blushed for you. I almost felt ashamed, after all the president said, that you had given so little.”

“You seem, Miss Eschelle,” remarked Mr. Ponsonby, “to be enthusiastic about the education and elevation of the colored people.”

“Yes, I am; I quite share Mr. Henderson’s feeling about it. I’m for the elevation of everything.”

“There is a capital chance for you,” said Henderson; “the university wants some scholarships.”

“And I’ve half a mind to found one—the Eschelle Scholarship of Washing and Clear-starching. You ought to have seen my clothes that came back to the car. Probably they were not done by your students. The things looked as if they had been dragged through the Cat-a-what-do-you-call-it River, and ironed with a pine chip.”

“Could you do them any better, with all your cultivation?” asked Margaret.

“I think I could, if I was obliged to. But I couldn’t get through that university, with all its ologies and laboratories and Greek and queer bottles and machines. You have neglected my education, Mr. Henderson.”

“It is not too late to begin now; you might see if you could pass the examination here. It is part of our plan gradually to elevate the whites,” said Henderson.

“Yes, I know; and did you see that some of the scholars had red hair and blue eyes, quite in the present style? And how nice the girls looked,” she rattled on; “and what a lot of intelligent faces, and how they kindled up when the president talked about the children of Israel in the wilderness forty years, and Caesar crossing the Rubicon! And you, sir”—she turned to the Englishman—“I’ve heard, were against all this emancipation during the war.”

“Bless my soul!” exclaimed Ponsonby, “we never were against emancipation, and wanted the best side to win.”

“You had a mighty queer way of showing it, then.”

“Well, honestly, Miss Eschelle, do you think the negroes are any better off?”

“You’d better ask them. My opinion is that everybody should do what he likes in this world.”

“Then what are you girding Mr. Henderson for about his university?”

“Because these philanthropists, like Mr. Henderson and Uncle Jerry Hollowell, are all building on top; putting on the frosting before the cake rises.”

“Haven’t you found out, Mr. Ponsonby,” Margaret interrupted, “that if there were eight sides to a question, Miss Eschelle would be on every one of them?”

“And right, too. There are eight sides to every question, and generally more. I think the negro question has a hundred. But there is only one side to Henderson Hall. It is a noble institution. I like to think about it, and Uncle Caesar Hollowell crossing the Rubicon in his theological seminary. It is all so beautiful!”

“You are a bad child,” said Margaret. “We should have left you at home.”

“No, not bad, dear; only confused with such a lot of good deeds in a naughty world.”

That this junketing party was deeply interested in the cause of education for whites or blacks, no one would have gathered from the conversation. Margaret felt that Carmen had exactly hit the motives of this sort of philanthropy, and she was both amused and provoked by the girl’s mockery. By force of old habit she defended, as well she might, these schools.

“You must have a high standard,” she said. “You cannot have good lower schools without good higher schools. And these colleges, which you think above the colored people, will stimulate them and gradually raise the whole mass. You cannot do anything until you educate teachers.”

“So I have always heard,” replied the incorrigible. “I have always been a philanthropist about the negro till I came down here, and I intend to be again when I go back.”

Mrs. Laflamme was not a very eager apostle either, and the young ladies devoted themselves to the picturesque aspects of the population, without any concern for the moral problems. They all declared that they liked the negro. But Margaret was not to be moved from her good-humor by any amount of badgering. She liked Henderson Hall; she was proud of the consideration it brought her husband; she had a comfortable sense of doing something that was demanded by her opportunity. It is so difficult to analyze motives, and in Margaret’s case so hard to define the change that had taken place in her. That her heart was not enlisted in this affair, as it would have been a few years before, she herself knew. Insensibly she had come to look at the world, at men and women, through her husband’s eyes, to take the worldly view, which is not inconsistent with much good feeling and easy-going charity. She also felt the necessity—a necessity totally unknown to such a nature as Carmen’s—of making compensation, of compounding for her pleasures. Gradually she was learning to play her husband’s game in life, and to see no harm in it. What, then, is this thing we call conscience? Is it made of India-rubber? I once knew a clever Southern woman, who said that New England women seemed to her all conscience—Southern women all soul and impulse. If it were possible to generalize in this way, we might say that Carmen had neither conscience nor soul, simply very clever reason. Uncle Jerry had no more conscience than Carmen, but he had a great deal of natural affection. Henderson, with an abundance of good-nature, was simply a man of his time, troubled with no scruples that stood in the way of his success. Margaret, with a finer nature than either of them, stifling her scruples in an atmosphere of worldly-mindedness, was likely to go further than either of them. Even such a worldling as Carmen understood this. “I do things,” she said to Mrs. Laflamme—she made anybody her confidant when the fit was on her—“I do things because I don’t care. Mrs. Henderson does the same, but she does care.”

Margaret would be a sadder woman, but not a better woman, when the time came that she did not care. She had come to the point of accepting Henderson’s methods of overreaching the world, and was tempering the result with private liberality. Those were hypocrites who criticised him; those were envious who disparaged him; the sufficient ethics of the world she lived in was to be successful and be agreeable. And it is difficult to condemn a person who goes with the general opinion of his generation. Carmen was under no illusions about Henderson, or the methods and manners of which she was a part. “Why pretend?” she said. “We are all bad together, and I like it. Uncle Jerry is the easiest person to get on with.” I remember a delightful, wicked old baroness whom I met in my youth stranded in Geneva on short allowance—European resorts are full of such characters. “My dear,” she said, “why shouldn’t I renege? Why shouldn’t men cheat at cards? It’s all in the game. Don’t we all know we are trying to deceive each other and get the best of each other? I stopped pretending after Waterloo. Fighting for the peace of Europe! Bah! We are all fighting for what we can get.”

So the Catachoobee Henderson Hall was dedicated, and Mr. Henderson got great credit out of it.

“It’s a noble deed, Mr. Henderson,” Carmen remarked, when they were at dinner on the car the day of their departure. “But”—in an aside to her host—“I advise the lambs in Wall Street to look alive at your next deal.”

XX

We can get used to anything. Morgan says that even the New England summer is endurable when you learn to dress warmly enough. We come to endure pain and loss with equanimity; one thing and another drops out of our lives-youth, for instance, and sometimes enthusiasm—and still we go on with a good degree of enjoyment. I do not say that Miss Forsythe was quite the same, or that a certain zest of life and spring had not gone out of the little Brandon neighborhood.

As the months and the years went by we saw less and less of Margaret—less and less, that is, in the old way. Her rare visits were perfunctory, and gave little satisfaction to any of us; not that she was ungracious or unkindly, but simply because the things we valued in life were not the same. There was no doubt that any of us were welcome at the Hendersons’ when they were in the city, genuinely, though in an exterior way, but gradually we almost ceased to keep up an intercourse which was a little effort on both sides. Miss Forsythe came back from her infrequent city visits weary and sad.

Was Margaret content? I suppose so. She was gay; she was admired; she was always on view in that semi-public world in which Henderson moved; she attained a newspaper notoriety which many people envied. If she journeyed anywhere, if she tarried anywhere, if she had a slight illness, the fact was a matter of public concern. We knew where she worshiped; we knew the houses she frequented, the charities she patronized, the fetes she adorned, every new costume that her wearing made the fashion. Was she content? She could perhaps express no desire that an attempt was not made to gratify it. But it seems impossible to get enough things enough money, enough pleasure. They had a magnificent place in Newport; it was not large enough; they were always adding to it—awning, a ballroom, some architectural whim or another. Margaret had a fancy for a cottage at Bar Harbor, but they rarely went there. They had an interest in Tuxedo; they belonged to an exclusive club on Jekyl Island. They passed one winter yachting among the islands in the eastern Mediterranean; a part of another sailing from one tropical paradise to another in the West Indies. If there was anything that money could not obtain, it seemed to be a place where they could rest in serene peace with themselves.

I used to wonder whether Margaret was satisfied with her husband’s reputation. Perhaps she mistook the newspaper homage, the notoriety, for public respect. She saw his influence and his power. She saw that he was feared, and of course hated, by some—the unsuccessful—but she saw the terms he was on with his intimates, due to the fact that everybody admitted that whatever Henderson was in “a deal,” privately he was a deuced good fellow.

Was this an ideal married life? Henderson’s selfishness was fully developed, and I could see that he was growing more and more hard. Would Margaret not have felt it, if she also had not been growing hard, and accustomed to regard the world in his unbelieving way? No, there was sharpness occasionally between them, tiffs and disagreements. He was a great deal away from home, and she plunged into a life of her own, which had all the external signs of enjoyment. I doubt if he was ever very selfish where she was concerned, and love can forgive almost any conduct where there is personal indulgence. I had a glimpse of the real state of things in a roundabout way. Henderson loved his wife and was proud of her, and he was not unkind, but he might have been a brute and tied her up to the bedpost, and she never would have shown by the least sign to the world that she was not the most happy of wives.

When the Earl of Chisholm was in this country it was four years after Margaret’s marriage—we naturally saw a great deal of him. The young fellow whom we liked so much had become a man, with a graver demeanor, and I thought a trace of permanent sadness in his face; perhaps it was only the responsibility of his position, or, as Morgan said, the modern weight that must press upon an earl who is conscientious. He was still unmarried. The friendship between him and Miss Forsythe, which had been kept alive by occasional correspondence, became more cordial and confidential. In New York he had seen much of Margaret, not at all to his peace of mind in many ways, though the generous fellow would have been less hurt if he had not estimated at its real value the life she was leading. It did not need Margaret’s introduction for the earl to be sought for by the novelty and pleasure loving society of the city; but he got, as he confessed, small satisfaction out of the whirl of it, although we knew that he met Mrs. Henderson everywhere, and in a manner assisted in her social triumphs. But he renewed his acquaintance with Miss Eschelle, and it was the prattle of this ingenuous creature that made him more heavy-hearted than anything else.

“How nice it is of you, Mr. Lyon—may I call you so, to bring back the old relations?—to come here and revive the memory of the dear old days when we were all innocent and happy! Dear me, I used to think I could patronize that little country girl from Brandon! I was so worldly—don’t you remember?—and she was so good. And now she is such a splendid woman, it is difficult for the rest of us to keep pace with her. The nerve she has, and the things she will do! I just envy her. I sometimes think she will drive me into a convent. And don’t you think she is more beautiful than ever? Of course her face is a little careworn, but nobody makes up as she does; she was just ravishing the other night. Do you know, I think she takes her husband too seriously.”

“I trust she is happy,” the earl had said.

“Why shouldn’t she be?” Carmen asked in return. “She has everything she wants. They both have a little temper; life would be flat without that; she is a little irritable sometimes; she didn’t use to be; and when they don’t agree they let each other alone for a little. I think she is as happy as anybody can be who is married. Now you are shocked! Well, I don’t know any one who is more in love than she is, and that may be happiness. She is becoming exactly like Mr. Henderson. You couldn’t ask anything more than that.”

If Margaret were really happy, the earl told Miss Forsythe, he was glad, but it was scarcely the career he would have thought would have suited her.

Meantime, the great house was approaching completion. Henderson’s palace, in the upper part of the city, had long been a topic for the correspondents of the country press. It occupied half a square. Many critics were discontented with it because it did not occupy the whole square. Everybody was interested in having it the finest residence on the continent. Why didn’t Henderson take the whole block of ground, build his palace on three sides, with the offices and stables on the fourth, throw a glass roof over the vast interior court, plant it with tropical trees and plants, adorn it with flower-beds and fountains, and make a veritable winter-garden, giving the inhabitants a temperate climate all the cold months? He might easily have summer in the centre of the city from November to April. These rich people never know what to do with their money. Such a place would give distinction to the city, and compel foreigners to recognize the high civilization of America. A great deal of fault was found with Henderson privately for his parsimony in such a splendid opportunity.

Nevertheless it was already one of the sights of the town. Strangers were taken to see it, as it rose in its simple grandeur. Local reporters made articles on the progress of the interior whenever they could get an entrance. It was not ornate enough to please, generally, but those who admired the old Louvre liked the simplicity of its lines and the dignity of the elevations. They discovered the domestic note in its quiet character, and said that the architect had avoided the look of an “institution” in such a great mass. He was not afraid of dignified wall space, and there was no nervous anxiety manifested, which would have belittled it with trivial ornamentation.

Perhaps it was not an American structure, although one could find in it all the rare woods and stones of the continent. Great numbers of foreign workmen were employed in its finishing and decoration. One could wander in it from Pompeii to Japan, from India to Versailles, from Greece to the England of the Tudors, from the Alhambra to colonial Salem. It was so cosmopolitan that a representative of almost any nationality, ancient or modern, could have been suited in it with an apartment to his taste, and if the interior lacked unity it did not lack a display of variety that appealed to the imagination. From time to time paragraphs appeared in English, French, and Italian journals, regarding the work of this and that famous artist who was designing a set of furniture or furnishing the drawings of a room, or carving the paneling and statuary, or painting the ceiling of an apartment in the great Palazzo Henderson in New York—Washington. The United American Workers (who were half foreigners by birth) passed resolutions denouncing Henderson for employing foreign pauper labor, and organized more than one strike while the house was building. It was very unpatriotic and un-American to have anything done that could not be done by a member of the Union. There was a firm of excellent stone-cutters which offered to make all the statuary needed in the house, and set it up in good shape, and when the offer was declined, it memorialized Congress for protection.

Although Henderson gave what time he could spare to the design and erection of the building, it pleased him to call it Margaret’s house, and to see the eagerness with which she entered into its embellishment. There was something humorous in the enlargement of her ideas since the days when she had wondered at the magnificence of the Washington Square home, and modestly protested against its luxury. Her own boudoir was a cheap affair compared with that in the new house.

“Don’t you think, dear,” she said, puzzling over the drawings, “that it would better be all sandalwood? I hate mosaics. It looks so cheap to have little bits of precious woods stuck about.”

“I should think so. But what do you do with the ebony?”

“Oh, the ebony and gold? That is the adjoining sitting-room—such a pretty contrast.”

“And the teak?”

“It has such a beautiful polish. That is another room. Carmen says that will be our sober room, where we go when we want to repent of things.”

“Well, if you have any sandalwood left over, you can work it into your Boys’ Lodging-house, you know.”

“Don’t be foolish! And then the ballroom, ninety feet long—it looks small on the paper. And do you think we’d better have those life-size figures all round, mediaeval statues, with the incandescents? Carmen says she would prefer a row of monks—something piquant about that in a ballroom. I don’t know that I like the figures, after all; they are too crushing and heavy.”

“It would make a good room for the Common Council,” Henderson suggested. “Wouldn’t it be prettier hung with silken arras figured with a chain of dancing-girls? Dear me, I don’t know what to do. Rodney, you must put your mind on it.”

“Might line it with gold plate. I’ll make arrangements so that you can draw on the Bank of England.”

Margaret looked hurt. “But you told me, dear, not to spare anything—that we would have the finest house in the city. I’m sure I sha’n’t enjoy it unless you want it.”

“Oh, I want it,” resumed Henderson, good-humoredly. “Go ahead, little wife. We shall pull through.”

“Women beat me,” Henderson confessed to Uncle Jerry next day. “They are the most economical of beings and the most extravagant. I’ve got to look round for an extra million somewhere today.”

“Yes, there is this good thing about women,” Uncle Jerry responded, with a twinkle in his eyes, “they share your riches just as cheerfully as they do your poverty. I tell Maria that if I had the capacity for making money that she has for spending it I could assume the national debt.”

To have the finest house in the city, or rather, in the American newspaper phrase, in the Western world, was a comprehensible ambition for Henderson, for it was a visible expression of his wealth and his cultivated taste. But why Margaret should wish to exchange her dainty and luxurious home in Washington Square for the care of a vast establishment big enough for a royal court, my wife could not comprehend. But why not? To be the visible leader in her world, to be able to dispense a hospitality which should surpass anything heretofore seen, to be the mistress and autocrat of an army of servants, with ample room for their evolution, in a palace whose dimensions and splendor should awaken envy and astonishment—would this not be an attraction to a woman of imagination and spirit?

Besides, they had outgrown the old house. There was no longer room for the display, scarcely for the storage, of the works of art, the pictures, the curiosities, the books, that unlimited money and the opportunity of foreign travel had collected in all these years. “We must either build or send our things to a warehouse,” Henderson had long ago said. Among the obligations of wealth is the obligation of display. People of small means do not allow for the expansion of mind that goes along with the accumulation of property. It was only natural that Margaret, who might have been contented with two rooms and a lean-to as the wife of a country clergyman, should have felt cramped in her old house, which once seemed a world too large for the country girl.

“I don’t see how you could do with less room,” Carmen said, with an air of profound conviction. They were looking about the house on its last uninhabited day, directing the final disposition of its contents. For Carmen, as well as for Margaret, the decoration and the furnishing of the house had been an occupation. The girl had the whim of playing the part of restrainer and economizer in everything; but Henderson used to say, when Margaret told him of Carmen’s suggestions, that a little more of her economy would ruin him.

“Yes,” Margaret admitted, “there does not seem to be anything that is not necessary.”

“Not a thing. When you think of it, two people require as much space as a dozen; when you go beyond one room, you must go on. Of course you couldn’t get on without a reception-room, drawing-rooms, a conservatory, a music-room, a library, a morning-room, a breakfast-room, a small diningroom and a state diningroom, Mr. Henderson’s snuggery, with his own library, a billiard-room, a picture-gallery—it is full already; you’ll have to extend it or sell some pictures—your own suite and Mr. Henderson’s suite, and the guest-rooms, and I forgot the theatre in the attic. I don’t see but you have scrimped to the last degree.”

“And yet there is room to move about,” Margaret acknowledged, with a gratified smile, as they wandered around. “Dear me, I used to think the Stotts’ house was a palace.”

It was the height of the season before Lent. There had been one delay and another, but at last all the workmen had been expelled, and Margaret was mistress of her house. Cards for the house-warming had been out for two weeks, and the event was near. She was in her own apartments this pale, wintry afternoon, putting the finishing touches to her toilet. Nothing seemed to suit. The maid found her in a very bad humor. “Remember,” she had said to her husband, when he ordered his brougham after breakfast, “sharp seven, we are to dine alone the first time.” It lacked two hours yet of dinner-time, but she was dressing for want of other occupation.

Was this then the summit of her ambition? She had indeed looked forward to some such moment as this as one of exultation in the satisfaction of all her wishes. She took up a book of apothegms that lay on the table, and opened by chance to this, “Unhappy are they whose desires are all ratified.” It was like a sting. Why should she think at this moment of her girlhood; of the ideals indulged in during that quiet time; of her aunt’s cheerful, tender, lonely life; of her rejection of Mr. Lyon? She did not love Mr. Lyon; she was not satisfied then. How narrow that little life in Brandon had been! She threw the book from her. She hated all that restraint and censoriousness. If her aunt could see her in all this splendor, she would probably be sadder than ever. What right had she to sit there and mourn—as she knew her aunt did—and sigh over her career? What right had they to sit in judgment on her?

She went out from her room, down the great stairway, into the spacious house, pausing in the great hall to see opening vista after vista in the magnificent apartments. It was the first time that she had alone really taken the full meaning of it—had possessed it with the eye. It was hers. Wherever she went, all hers. No, she had desires yet. It should be filled with life—it should be the most brilliant house in the world. Society should see, should acknowledge the leadership. Yes—as she glanced at herself in a drawing-room mirror—they should see that Henderson’s wife was capable of a success equal to his own, and she would stop the hateful gossip about him. She set her foot firmly as she thought about it; she would crush those people who had sneered at them as parvenu. She strayed into the noble gallery. Some face there touched her, some landscape soothed her. No, she said to herself, I will win them, I do not want hateful strife.

Who knows what is in a woman? how many moods in a quarter of an hour, and which is the characteristic one? Was this the Margaret who had walked with Lyon that Sunday afternoon of the baptism, and had a heart full of pain for the pitiful suffering of the world?

As she sat there she grew calmer. Her thoughts went away in a vision of all the social possibilities of this wonderful house. From vaguely admiring what she looked at, she began to be critical; this and that could be changed to advantage; this shade of hanging was not harmonious; this light did not fall right. She smiled to think that her husband thought it all done. How he would laugh to find that she was already planning to rearrange it! Hadn’t she been satisfied for almost twenty-four hours? That was a long time for a woman. Then she thought of the reception; of the guests; of what some of them would wear; how they would look about; what they would say. She was already in that world which was so shining and shifting and attractive. She did not hear Henderson come in until his arm was around her.

“Well, sweet, keeping house alone? I’ve had a jolly day; lucky as old Mr. Luck.”

“Have you?” she cried, springing up. “I’m so glad. Come, see the house.”

“You look a little pale,” he said, as they strolled out to the conservatory together.

“Just a little tired,” she admitted. “Do you know, Rodney, I hated this house at five o’clock—positively hated it?”

“Why?”

“Oh, I don’t know; I was thinking. But I liked it at half-past six. I love it now. I’ve got used to it, as if I had always lived here. Isn’t it beautiful everywhere? But I’m going to make some changes.”

“A hanging garden on the roof?” Henderson asked, with meekness.

“That would be nice. No, not now. But to make over and take off the new look. Everything looks so new.”

“Well, we will try to live that down.”

And so they wandered on, admiring, bantering, planning. Could Etienne Debree have seen his descendant at this moment he would have been more than ever proud of his share in establishing the great republic, and of his appreciation of the promise of its beauty. What satisfies a woman’s heart is luxury, thought Henderson, in an admiring cynical moment.

They had come into his own den and library, and he stood looking at the rows of his favorite collection shining in their new home. For all its newness it had a familiar look. He thought for a moment that he might be in his old bachelor quarters. Suddenly Margaret made a rush at him. She shook the great fellow. She feasted her eyes on him.

“What’s got into you to look so splendid? Do you hear, go this instant and dress, and make yourself ten times as fascinating.”

XXI

Live not unto yourselves! Can any one deny that this blessed sentiment is extending in modern life? Do we build houses for ourselves or for others? Do we make great entertainments for our own comfort? I do not know that anybody regarded the erection of the Henderson palace as an altruistic performance. The socialistic newspapers said that it was pure ostentation. But had it not been all along in the minds of the builders to ask all the world to see it, to share the delight of it? Is this a selfish spirit? When I stroll in the Park am I not pleased with the equipages, with the display of elegance upon which so much money has been lavished for my enjoyment?

All the world was asked to the Henderson reception. The coming event was the talk of the town. I have now cuttings from the great journals, articles describing the house, more beautifully written than Gibbon’s stately periods about the luxury of later Rome. It makes one smile to hear that the day of fine writing is over. Everybody was eager to go; there was some plotting to obtain invitations by those who felt that they could not afford to be omitted from the list that would be printed; by those who did not know the Hendersons, and did not care to know them, but who shared the general curiosity; and everybody vowed that he supposed he must go, but he hated such a crush and jam as it was sure to be. Yet no one would have cared to go if it had not promised to be a crush. I said that all the world was asked, which is our way of saying that a thousand or two had been carefully selected from the million within reach.

Invitations came to Brandon, of course, for old times’ sake. The Morgans said that they preferred a private view; Miss Forsythe declared that she hadn’t the heart to go; in short, Mr. and Mrs. Fairchild alone went to represent the worldly element.

I am sorry to say that the reader must go to the files of the city press for an account of the night’s festivity. The pen that has been used in portraying Margaret’s career is entirely inadequate to it. There is a general impression that an American can do anything that he sets his hand to, but it is not true; it is true only that he tries everything. The reporter is born, as the poet is; it cannot be acquired—that astonishing, irresponsible command of the English language; that warm, lyrical tone; that color, and bewildering metaphorical brilliancy; that picturesqueness; that use of words as the painter uses pigments, in splashes and blotches which are so effective; that touch of raillery and sarcasm and condescension; that gay enjoyment of reveling in the illimitable; that air of superior knowledge and style; that dash of sentiment; that calm and somewhat haughty judgment.

I am always impressed at such an entertainment with the good-humor of the American people, no matter what may be the annoyance and discomfort.

In all the push and thrust and confusion, amid the rending of trains, the tearing of lace, the general crushing of costumes, there was the merriest persiflage, laughter, and chatter, and men and women entered into and drew out of the fashionable wreck in the highest spirits. For even in such a spacious mansion there were spots where currents met, and rooms where there was a fight for mere breath. It would have been a tame affair without this struggle. And what an epitome of life it all was! There were those who gave themselves up to admiration, who gushed with enthusiasm; there were those who had the weary air of surfeit with splendor of this sort; there were the bustling and volatile, who made facetious remarks, and treated the affair like a Fourth of July; and there were also groups dark and haughty, like the Stotts, who held a little aloof, and coldly admitted that it was most successful; it lacked je ne sais quoi, but it was in much better taste than they had expected. Is there something in the very nature of a crowd to bring out the inherent vulgarity of the best-bred people, so that some have doubted whether the highest civilization will tolerate these crushing and hilarious assemblies?

At any rate, one could enjoy the general effect. There might be vulgar units, and one caught notes of talk that disenchanted, but there were so many women of rare and stately beauty, of exquisite loveliness, of charm in manner and figure—so many men of fine presence, with such an air of power and manly prosperity and self-reliance—I doubt if any other assembly in the world, undecorated by orders and uniforms, with no blazon of rank, would have a greater air of distinction. Looking over it from a landing in the great stairway that commanded vistas and ranges of the lofty, brilliant apartments, vivified by the throng, which seemed ennobled by the spacious splendor in which it moved, one would be pardoned a feeling of national pride in the spectacle. I drew aside to let a stately train of beauty and of fashion descend, and saw it sweep through the hall, and enter the drawing-rooms, until it was lost in a sea of shifting color. It was like a dream.

And the centre of all this charming plutocratic graciousness and beauty was Margaret—Margaret and her handsome husband. Where did the New Hampshire boy learn this simple dignity of bearing, this good-humored cordiality without condescension, this easy air of the man of the world? Was this the railway wrecker, the insurance manipulator, the familiar of Uncle Jerry, the king of the lobby, the pride and the bugaboo of Wall Street? Margaret was regnant. And how charmingly she received her guests! How well I knew that half-imperious toss of the head, and the glance of those level, large gray eyes, softened instantly, on recognition, into the sweetest smile of welcome playing about the dimple and the expressive mouth! What woman would not feel a little thrill of triumph? The world was at her feet. Why was it, I wonder, as I stood there watching the throng which saluted this queenly woman of the world, in an hour of supreme social triumph, while the notes of the distant orchestra came softly on the air, and the overpowering perfume of banks of flowers and tropical plants—why was it that I thought of a fair, simple girl, stirred with noble ideals, eager for the intellectual life, tender, sympathetic, courageous? It was Margaret Debree—how often I had seen her thus!—sitting on her little veranda, swinging her chip hat by the string, glowing from some errand in which her heart had played a much more important part than her purse. I caught the odor of the honeysuckle that climbed on the porch, and I heard the note of the robin that nested there.

“You seem to be in a brown study,” said Carmen, who came up, leaning on the arm of the Earl of Chisholm.

“I’m lost in admiration. You must make allowance, Miss Eschelle, for a person from the country.”

“Oh, we are all from the country. That is the beauty of it. There is Mr. Hollowell, used to drive a peddler’s cart, or something of that sort, up in Maine, talking with Mr. Stott, whose father came in on the towpath of the Erie Canal. You don’t dance? The earl has just been giving me a whirl in the ballroom, and I’ve been trying to make him understand about democracy.”

“Yes,” the earl rejoined; “Miss Eschelle has been interpreting to me republican simplicity.”

“And he cannot point out, Mr. Fairchild, why this is not as good as a reception at St. James. I suppose it’s his politeness.”

“Indeed, it is all very charming. It must be a great thing to be the architect of your own fortune.”

“Yes; we are all self-made,” Carmen confessed.

“I am, and I get dreadfully tired of it sometimes. I have to read over the Declaration and look at the map of the Western country at such times. A body has to have something to hold on to.”

“Why, this seems pretty substantial,” I said, wondering what the girl was driving at.

“Oh, yes; I suppose the world looks solid from a balloon. I heard one man say to another just now, ‘How long do you suppose Henderson will last?’ Probably we shall all come down by the run together by-and-by.”

“You seem to be on a high plane,” I suggested.

“I guess it’s the influence of the earl. But I am the most misunderstood of women. What I really like is simplicity. Can you have that without the social traditions,” she appealed to the earl, “such as you have in England?”

“I really cannot say,” the earl replied, laughing. “I fancied there was simplicity in Brandon; perhaps that was traditional.”

“Oh, Brandon!” Carmen cried, “see what Brandon does when it gets a chance. I assure your lordship that we used to be very simple people in New York. Come, let us go and tell Mrs. Henderson how delightful it all is. I’m so sorry for her.”

As I moved about afterwards with my wife we heard not many comments, a word here and there about Henderson’s wonderful success, a remark about Margaret’s beauty, some sympathy for her in such a wearisome ordeal—the world is full of kindness—the house duly admired, and the ordinary compliments paid; the people assembled were, as usual, absorbed in their own affairs. From all we could gather, all those present were used to living in a palace, and took all the splendor quite as a matter of course. Was there no envy? Was there nothing said about the airs of a country schoolma’am, the aplomb of an adventurer? Were there no criticisms afterwards as the guests rolled home in their carriages, surfeited and exhausted? What would you have? Do you expect the millennium to begin in New York?

The newspapers said that it was the most brilliant affair the metropolis had ever seen. I have no doubt it was. And I do not judge, either, by the newspaper estimates of the expense. I take the simple words addressed by the earl to Margaret, when he said goodnight, at their full value. She flushed with pleasure at his modest commendation. Perhaps it was to her the seal of her night’s triumph.

The house was opened. The world had seen it. The world had gone. If sleep did not come that night to her tired head on the pillow, what wonder? She had a position in the great world. In imagination it opened wider and wider. Could not the infinite possibilities of it fill the hunger of any soul?

The echoes of the Henderson reception continued long in the country press. Items multiplied as to the cost. It was said that the sum expended in flowers alone, which withered in a night, would have endowed a ward in a charity hospital. Some wag said that the price of the supper would have changed the result of the Presidential election. Views of the mansion were given in the illustrated papers, and portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Henderson. In country villages, in remote farmhouses, this great social event was talked of, Henderson’s wealth was the subject of conjecture, Margaret’s toilet was an object of interest. It was a shining example of success. Preachers, whose sensational sermons are as widely read as descriptions of great crimes, moralized on Henderson’s career and Henderson’s palace, and raised up everywhere an envied image of worldly prosperity. When he first arrived in New York, with only fifty cents in his pocket—so the story ran-and walked up Broadway and Fifth Avenue, he had nearly been run over at the corner of Twenty-sixth Street by a carriage, the occupants of which, a lady and gentleman, had stared insolently at the country youth. Never mind, said the lad to himself, the day will come when you will cringe to me. And the day did come when the gentleman begged Henderson to spare him in Wall Street, and his wife intrigued for an invitation to Mrs. Henderson’s ball. The reader knows there is not a word of truth in this. Alas! said the preacher, if he had only devoted his great talents to the service of the Good and the True! Behold how vain are all the triumphs of this world! see the result of the worship of Mammon! My friends, the age is materialized, a spirit of worldliness is abroad; be vigilant, lest the deceitfulness of riches send your souls to perdition. And the plain country people thanked God for such a warning, and the country girl dreamed of Margaret’s career, and the country boy studied the ways of Henderson’s success, and resolved that he, too, would seek his fortune in this bad metropolis.

The Hendersons were important people. It was impossible that a knowledge of their importance should not have a reflex influence upon Margaret. Could it be otherwise than that gradually the fineness of her discrimination should be dulled by the almost universal public consent in the methods by which Henderson had achieved his position, and that in time she should come to regard adverse judgment as the result of envy? Henderson himself was under less illusion; the world was about what he had taken it for, only a little worse—more gullible, and with less principle. Carmen had mocked at Margaret’s belief in Henderson. It is certainly a pitiful outcome that Margaret, with her naturally believing nature, should in the end have had a less clear perception of what was right and wrong than Henderson himself. Yet Henderson would not have shrunk, any more than Carmen would, from any course necessary to his ends, while Margaret would have shrunk from many things; but in absolute worldliness, in devotion to it, the time had come when Henderson felt that his Puritan wife was no restraint upon him. It was this that broke gentle Miss Forsythe’s heart when she came fully to realize it.

I said that the world was at Margaret’s feet. Was it? How many worlds are there, and does one ever, except by birth (in a republic), conquer them all? Truth to say, there were penetralia in New York society concerning which this successful woman was uneasy in her heart. There were people who had accepted her invitations, to whose houses she had been, who had a dozen ways of making her feel that she was not of them. These people—I suppose that if two castaways landed naked on a desert island, one of them would instantly be the ancien regime—had spoken of Mrs. Henderson and her ambition to the Earl of Chisholm in a way that pained him. They graciously assumed that he, as one of the elect, would understand them. It was therefore with a heavy heart that he came to say good-by to Margaret before his return.

I cannot imagine anything more uncomfortable for an old lover than a meeting of this sort; but I suppose the honest fellow could not resist the inclination to see Margaret once more. I dare say she had a little flutter of pride in receiving him, in her consciousness of the change in herself into a wider experience of the world. And she may have been a little chagrined that he was not apparently more impressed by her surroundings, nor noticed the change in herself, but met her upon the ground of simple sincerity where they had once stood. What he tried to see, what she felt he was trying to see, was not the beautiful woman about whose charm and hospitality the town talked, but the girl he had loved in the old days.

He talked a little, a very little, about himself and his work in England, and a great deal about what had interested him here on his second visit, the social drift, the politics, the organized charities; and as he talked, Margaret was conscious how little the world in which she lived seemed to interest him; how little importance he attached to it. And she saw, as in a momentary vision of herself, that the things that once absorbed her and stirred her sympathies were now measurably indifferent to her. Book after book which he casually mentioned, as showing the drift of the age, and profoundly affecting modern thought, she knew only by name. “I guess,” said Carmen, afterwards, when Margaret spoke of the earl’s conversation, “that he is one of those who are trying to live in the spirit—what do they call it?—care for things of the mind.”

“You are doing a noble work,” he said, “in your Palace of Industry.”

“Yes, it is very well managed,” Margaret replied; “but it is uphill work, the poor are so ungrateful for charity.”

“Perhaps nobody, Mrs. Henderson, likes to be treated as an object of charity.”

“Well, work isn’t what they want when we give it, and they’d rather live in the dirt than in clean apartments.”

“Many of them don’t know any better, and a good many of our poor resent condescension.”

“Yes,” said Margaret, with warmth; “they are getting to demand things as their right, and they are insolent. The last time I drove down in that quarter I was insulted by their manner. What are you going to do with such people? One big fellow who was leaning against a lamp-post growled, ‘You’d better stay in your own palace, miss, and not come prying round here.’ And a brazen girl cried out: ‘Shut yer mouth, Dick; the lady’s got to have some pleasure. Don’t yer see, she’s a-slummin’?’”

“It’s very hard, I know,” said the earl; “perhaps we are all on the wrong track.”

“Maybe. Mr. Henderson says that the world would get on better if everybody minded his own business.”

“I wish it were possible,” the earl remarked, with an air of finishing the topic. “I have just been up to Brandon, Mrs. Henderson. I fear that I have seen the dear place for the last time.”

“You don’t mean that you are tired of America?”

“Not that. I shall never, even in thought, tire of Brandon.”

“Yes, they are dear, good people.”

“I thought Miss Forsythe—what a sweet, brave woman she is!—was looking sad and weary.”

“Oh, aunt won’t do anything, or take an interest in anything. She just stays there. I’ve tried in vain to get her here. Do you know”—and she turned upon the earl a look of the old playfulness—“she doesn’t quite approve of me.”

“Oh,” he replied, hesitating a little—“I think, Mrs. Henderson, that her heart is bound up in you. It isn’t for me to say that you haven’t a truer friend in the world.”

“Yes, I know. If I’d only—” and she stopped, with a petulant look on her fair face—“well, it doesn’t matter. She is a dear soul.”

“I—suppose,” said the earl, rising, “we shall see you again on the other side?”

“Perhaps,” with a smile. Could anything be more commonplace than such a parting? Good-by, I shall see you tomorrow or next year, or in the next world. Hail and farewell! That is the common experience. But, oh, the bitterness of it to many a soul!

It is quite possible that when the Earl of Chisholm said good-by, with an air of finality, Margaret felt that another part of her life was closed. He was not in any way an extraordinary person, he was not a very rich peer, probably with his modesty and conscientiousness, and devotion to the ordinary duties of his station, he would never attain high rank in the government. Yet no one could be long with him without apprehending that his life was on a high plane. It was with a little irritation that Margaret recognized this, and remembered, with a twinge of conscience, that it was upon that plane that her life once traveled. The time had been when the more important thing to her was the world of ideas, of books, of intellectual life, of passionate sympathy with the fortunes of humanity, of deepest interest in all the new thoughts struck out by the leaders who studied the profound problems of life and destiny.

That peace of mind which is found only in the highest activity for the noblest ends she once had, though she thought it then unrest and striving—what Carmen, who was under no illusions about Henderson, or Uncle Jerry, or the world of fashion, and had an intuitive perception of cant that is sometimes denied to the children of light, called “taking pleasure in the things of the mind.” To do Margaret justice, there entered into her reflections no thought of the title and position of the Earl of Chisholm. They had never been alluring to her. If one could take any satisfaction in this phase of her character, her worldiness was purely American.

“I hardly know which I should prefer,” Carmen was saying when they were talking over the ball and the earl’s departure, “to be an English countess or the wife of an American millionaire.”

“It might depend upon the man,” replied Margaret, with a smile.

“The American,” continued Carmen, not heeding this suggestion, “has the greater opportunities, and is not hindered by traditions. If you were a countess you would have to act like a countess. If you are an American you can act—like anything—you can do what you please. That is nicer. Now, an earl must do what an earl has always done. What could you do with such a husband? Mind! Yes, I know, dear, about things of the mind. First, you know, he will be a gentleman socialist (in the magazines), and maybe a Christian socialist, or a Christian scientist, or something of that sort, interested in the Mind Cure.”

“I should think that would suit you. Last I knew, you were deep in the Mind Cure.”

“So I was. That was last week. Now I’m in the Faith Cure; I’ve found out about both. The difference is, in the Mind Cure you don’t require any faith; in the Faith Cure you don’t require any mind. The Faith Cure just suits me.”

“So you put your faith in an American millionaire?”

“Yes, I think I should, until an American millionaire put faith in me. That might shake me. It is such a queer world. No, I’m in doubt. If you loved an earl he would stay an earl. If you loved an American millionaire, ten to one he would fail.”

Margaret did not escape the responsibility of her success. Who does? My dear Charmian, who wrote the successful novel of last year, do you not already repent your rash act? If you do not write a better novel this year, will not the public flout you and jeer you for a pretender? Did the public overpraise you at first? Its mistaken partiality becomes now your presumption. Last year the press said you were the rival of Hawthorne. This year it is, “that Miss Charmian who set herself up as a second Hawthorne.” When the new house was opened, it might be said that socially Mrs. Henderson had “arrived.” Had she? When one enters on the path of worldliness is there any resting-place? Is not eternal vigilance the price of position?

Henderson was apparently on good terms with the world. Many envied him, many paid him the sincerest flattery, that of imitation. He was a king in the street, great enterprises sought his aid, all the charities knocked at his door, his word could organize a syndicate or a trust, his nod could smash a “corner.” There were fabulous stories about his wealth, about his luck. This also was Margaret’s world. Her ambition expanded in it with his. The things he set his heart on she coveted. Alas! there is always another round to the ladder.

Seeing the means by which he gained his ends, and the public condonation of them, would not his cynicism harden into utter unbelief in general virtue and goodness? I don’t know that Henderson changed much, accented as his grasping selfishness was on occasion; prosperity had not impaired that indifferent good-fellowship and toleration which had early gained him popularity. His presence was nowhere a rebuke to whatever was going on. He was always accessible, often jocular. The younger members in the club said Henderson was a devilish good fellow, whatever people said. The President of the United States used to send for him and consult him, because he wanted no office; he knew men, and it was a relief to talk with a liberal rich man of so much bonhomie who wanted nothing.

And Margaret, what view of the world did all this give her? Did she come in contact with any one who had not his price, who was not going or wanting to go in the general current? Was it not natural that she should take Henderson’s view? Dear me, I am not preaching about her. We did not see much of her in those days, and for one or two years of what I suppose was her greatest enjoyment of her social triumphs. So far as we heard, she was liked, admired, followed, envied. It could not be otherwise, for she did not lose her beauty nor her charm, and she tried to please. Once when I saw her in the city and we fell into talk—and the talk was gay enough and unconstrained—I was struck with a certain hardness of tone, a little bitterness quite unlike her old self. It is a very hard thing to say, and I did not say it even to my wife, but I had a painful impression that she was valuing people by the money they had, by the social position they had attained.

Was she content in that great world in which she moved? I had heard stories of slights, of stabs, of rebuffs, of spiteful remarks. Had she not come to know how success even in social life is sometimes attained—the meannesses, the jealousies, the cringing? Even with all her money at command, did she not know that her position was at the price of incessant effort? Because she had taken a bold step today, she must take a bolder one tomorrow—more display, more servants, some new invention of luxury and extravagance. And seeing, as I say, the inside of this life and what it required, and how triumphs and notoriety were gained, was it a wonder that she gradually became in her gayety cynical, in her judgments bitter?

I am not criticising her. What are we, who have had no opportunities, to sit in judgment on her! I believe that it is true that it was at her solicitation that Henderson at last did endow a university in the Southwest. I know that her name was on all the leading charities of the city. I know that of all the patronesses of the charity ball her costume was the most exquisite, and her liberality was most spoken of. I know that in the most fashionable house of worship (the newspapers call it that) she was a constant attendant; that in her modest garb she never missed a Lenten service; and we heard that she performed a novena during this penitential season.

Why protract the story of how Margaret was lost to us? Could this interest any but us—we who felt the loss because we still loved her? And why should we presume to set up our standard of what is valuable in life, of what is a successful career? She had not become what we hoped, and little by little all the pleasure of intercourse on both sides, I dare say, disappeared. Could we say that life, after all, had not given her what she most desired? Rather than write on in this strain about her, I would like to read her story as it appeared to the companions whose pleasures were her pleasures, whose successes were her successes—her story written by one who appreciated her worldly advantages, and saw all the delight there was in this attractive worldliness.

What comfort there was in it we had in knowing that she was a favorite in the society of which we read such glowing descriptions, and that no one else bore its honors more winningly. It was not an easy life, with all its exactions and incessant movement. It demanded more physical strength than most women possess, and we were not surprised to hear from time to time that she was delicate, and that she went through her season with feverish excitement. But she chose it; it had become necessary to her. Can women stop in such a career, even if they wish to stop?

Yes, she chose it. I, for one, never begrudged her any pleasure she had in life, and I do not know but she was as happy as it is possible for human being to be in a full experiment of worldliness. Who is the judge? But we, I say, who loved her, and knew so well the noble possibilities of her royal nature under circumstances favorable to its development, felt more and more her departure from her own ideals. Her life in its spreading prosperity seemed more and more shallow. I do not say she was heartless, I do not say she was uncharitable, I do not say that in all the externals of worldly and religious observance she was wanting; I do not say that the more she was assimilated to the serenely worldly nature of her husband she did not love him, or that she was unlovely in the worldliness that ingulfed her and bore her onward. I do not know that there is anything singular in her history. But the pain of it to us was in the certainty—and it seemed so near—that in the decay of her higher life, in the hardening process of a material existence, in the transfer of all her interests to the trivial and sensuous gratifications—time, mind, heart, ambition, all fixed on them—we should never regain our Margaret. What I saw in a vision of her future was a dead soul—a beautiful woman in all the success of envied prosperity, with a dead soul.

XXII

It is difficult not to convey a false impression of Margaret at this time. Habits, manners, outward conduct—nay, the superficial kindliness in human intercourse, the exterior graceful qualities, may all remain when the character has subtly changed, when the real aims have changed, when the ideals are lowered. The fair exterior may be only a shell. I can imagine the heart retaining much tenderness and sympathy with suffering when the soul itself has ceased to struggle for the higher life, when the mind has lost, in regard to life, the final discrimination of what is right and wrong.

Perhaps it is fairer to Margaret to consider the general opinion of the world regarding her. No doubt, if we had now known her for the first time, we should have admired her exceedingly, and probably have accounted her thrice happy in filling so well her brilliant position. That her loss of interest in things intellectual, in a wide range of topics of human welfare, which is in the individual soul a sign of warmth and growth, made her less companionable to some is true, but her very absorption in the life of her world made her much more attractive to others. I well remember a dinner one day at the Hendersons’, when Mr. Morgan and I happened to be in town, and the gay chat and persiflage of the society people there assembled. Margaret shone in it. The light and daring touch of her raillery Carmen herself might have envied, and the spirit in which she handled the trifles and personal gossip tossed to the surface, like the bubbles on the champagne.

It was such a pretty picture—the noble diningroom, the table sparkling with glass and silver and glowing with masses of choicest flowers from the conservatory, the animated convives, and Margaret presiding, radiant in a costume of white and gold.

“After all,” Morgan was saying, apropos of the position of women, “men get mighty little out of it in the modern arrangement.”

“I’ve always said, Mr. Morgan,” Margaret retorted, “that you came into the world a couple of centuries too late; you ought to have been here in the squaw age.”

“Well, men were of some account then. I appeal to Henderson,” Morgan persisted, “if he gets more than his board and clothes.”

“Oh, my husband has to make his way; he’s no time for idling and philosophizing round.”

“I should think not. Come, Henderson, speak up; what do you get out of it?”

“Oh,” said Henderson, glancing at his wife with an amused expression, “I’m doing very well. I’m very well taken care of, but I often wonder what the fellows did when polygamy was the fashion.”

“Polygamy, indeed!” cried Margaret. “So men only dropped the a pluribus unum method on account of the expense?”

“Not at all,” replied Henderson. “Women are so much better now than formerly that one wife is quite enough.”

“You have got him well in hand, Mrs. Henderson, but—” Morgan began.

“But,” continued Margaret for him, “you think as things are going that polyandry will have to come in fashion—a woman will need more than one husband to support her?”

“And I was born too soon,” murmured Carmen.

“Yes, dear, you’ll have to be born again. But, Mr. Morgan, you don’t seem to understand what civilization is.”

“I’m beginning to. I’ve been thinking—this is entirely impersonal—that it costs more to keep one fine lady going than it does a college. Just reckon it up.” (Margaret was watching him with sparkling eyes.) “The palace in town is for her, the house in the mountains, the house by the sea, are for her, the army of servants is for her, the horses and carriages for all weathers are for her, the opera box is for her, and then the wardrobe—why, half Paris lives on what women wear. I say nothing of what would become of the medical profession but for her.”

“Have you done?” asked Margaret.

“No, but I’m taking breath.”

“Well, why shouldn’t we support the working-people of Paris and elsewhere? Do you want us to make our own clothes and starve the sewing-women? Suppose there weren’t any balls and fine dresses and what you call luxury. What would the poor do without the rich? Isn’t it the highest charity to give them work? Even with it they are ungrateful enough.”

“That is too deep for me,” said Morgan, evasively. “I suppose they ought to be contented to see us enjoying ourselves. It’s all in the way of civilization, I dare say.”

“It’s just as I thought,” said Margaret, more lightly. “You haven’t an inkling of what civilization is. See that flower before you. It is the most exquisite thing in this room. See the refinement of its color and form. That was cultivated. The plant came from South Africa. I don’t know what expense the gardener has been to about it, what material and care have been necessary to bring it to perfection. You may take it to Mrs. Morgan as an object-lesson. It is a thing of beauty. You cannot put any of your mercantile value on it. Well, that is woman, the consummate flower of civilization. That is what civilization is for.”

“I’m sorry for you, old fellow,” said Henderson.

“I’m sorry for myself,” Carmen said, demurely.

“I admit all that,” Morgan replied. “Take Mr. Henderson as a gardener, then.”

“Suppose you take somebody else, and let my husband eat his dinner.”

“Oh, I don’t mind preaching; I’ve got used to being made to point a moral.”

“But he will go on next about the luxury of the age, and the extravagance of women, and goodness knows what,” said Margaret.

“No, I’m talking about men,” Morgan continued. “Consider Henderson—it’s entirely impersonal—as a gardener. What does he get out of his occupation? He can look at the flower. Perhaps that is enough. He gets a good dinner when he has time for it, an hour at his club now and then, occasionally an evening or half a day off at home, a decent wardrobe—”

“Fifty-two suits,” interposed Margaret.

“His own brougham—”

“And a four-in-hand,” added Margaret.

“A pass on the elevated road—”

“And a steam-yacht.”

“Which he never gets time to sail in; practically all the time on the road, or besieged by a throng in his office, hustled about from morning till night, begged of, interviewed, a telegraphic despatch every five minutes, and—”

“And me!” cried Margaret, rising. The guests all clapped their hands.

The Hendersons liked to have their house full, something going on—dinners, musicales, readings, little comedies in the theatre; there was continual coming and going, calling, dropping in for a cup of tea, late suppers after the opera; the young fellows of town found no place so agreeable for a half-hour after business as Mrs. Henderson’s reception-room. I fancied that life would be dull and hang heavily, especially for Margaret, without this perpetual movement and excitement. Henderson, who certainly had excitement enough without seeking it at home, was pleased that his wife should be a leader in society, as he was in the great enterprises in which his fortune waxed to enormous proportions. About what we call the home life I do not know. Necessarily, as heretofore, Henderson was often absent, and whether Margaret accompanied him or not, a certain pace of life had to be kept up.

I suppose there is no delusion more general than that of retiring upon a fortune—as if, when gained, a fortune would let a person retire, or, still more improbable, as if it ever were really attained. It is not at all probable that Henderson had set any limit to that he desired; the wildest speculations about its amount would no doubt fall short of satisfying the love of power which he expected to gratify in immeasurably increasing it. Does not history teach us that to be a great general, or poet, or philanthropist, is not more certain to preserve one’s name than to be the richest man, the Croesus, in his age? I could imagine Margaret having a certain growing pride in this distinction, and a glowing ambition to be socially what her husband was financially.

Heaven often plans more mercifully for us than we plan for ourselves. Had not the Hebrew prophets a vision of the punishment by prosperity? Perhaps it applied to an old age, gratified to the end by possession of everything that selfishness covets, and hardened into absolute worldliness. I knew once an old lady whose position and wealth had always made her envied, and presumably happy, who was absolutely to be pitied for a soul empty of all noble feeling.

The sun still shone on Margaret, and life yielded to her its specious sweets. She was still young. If in her great house, in her dazzling career, in the whirl of resplendent prosperity, she had hours of unsatisfied yearning for something unattainable in this direction, the world would not have guessed it. Whenever we heard of her she was the centre and star of whatever for the moment excited the world of fashion. It was indeed, at last, in the zenith of her gay existence that I, became aware of a certain feminine anxiety about her in our neighborhood. She had been, years before, very ill in Paris, and the apprehensions for her safety now were based upon the recollection of her peril then. The days came when the tender-hearted Miss Forsythe went about the house restless, impatient, tearful, waiting for a summons that was sure to come when she was needed. She thought only of her child, as she called her, and all the tenderness of her nature was stirred-these years of cloud and separation and pain were as they had not been. Little Margaret had promised to send for her. She would not obtrude before she was wanted, but Margaret was certain to send. And she was ready for departure the instant the despatch came from Henderson—“Margaret wants you to come at once.” I went with her.

In calamity, trouble, sorrow, it is wonderful how the ties of blood assert themselves. In this hour I am sure that Margaret longed for no one more than her dear aunt, in whose arms, as a child, she had so often forgotten her griefs. She had been able to live without her—nay, for a long time her presence had been something of a restraint and a rebuke, and her feelings had hardened towards her. Why is it that the heart hardens in prosperity?

When we arrived Margaret was very ill. The house itself had a serious air: it was no longer the palace of festivity and gayety, precautions had been taken to secure quiet, the pavement was littered, and within the hushed movements and the sombre looks spoke of apprehension and the absence of the spirit that had been the life and light of the house. Our arrival seemed to be a relief to Henderson. Little was said. I had never before seen him nervous, never before so restless and anxious, probably never before in all his career had he been unnerved with a sense of his own helplessness.

“She has been asking for you this moment,” he said, as he accompanied Miss Forsythe to Margaret’s apartment.

“Dear, dear aunt, I knew you would come—I love you so;” she had tried to raise herself a little in her bed, and was sobbing like a child in her aunt’s arms.

“You must have courage, Margaret; it will all be well.”

“Yes, but I’m so discouraged; I’m so tired.”

The vigil began. The nurses were in waiting. The family physician would not leave the house. He was a man of great repute in his profession. Dr. Seftel’s name was well known to me, but I had never met him before; a man past middle life, smooth shaven, thin iron-gray hair, grave, usually taciturn, deliberate in all his movements, as if every gesture were important and significant, but with a kindly face. Knowing that every moment of his waking life was golden, I could not but be impressed with the power that could command his exclusive service for an indefinite time. When he came down, we talked together in Henderson’s room.

“It is a question of endurance, of constitution,” he said; “many weak women have this quality of persistence; many strong women go to pieces at once; we know little about it. Mrs. Henderson”—glancing about him—“has everything to live for; that’s in her favor. I suppose there are not two other men in the country whose fortune equals Henderson’s.”

I do not know how it was, probably the patient was not forgotten, but in a moment the grave doctor was asking me if I had seen the last bulletin about the yacht regatta. He took the keenest interest in the contest, and described to me the build and sailing qualities of the different yachts entered, and expressed his opinion as to which would win, and why. From this he passed to the city government and the recent election—like a true New Yorker, his chief interest centred in the city politics and not in the national elections. Without the least unbending from his dignity, he told me many anecdotes about city politicians, which would have been amusing if I had not been anxious about other things.

The afternoon passed, and the night, and the day, I cannot tell how. But at evening I knew by the movements in the house that the crisis had come. I was waiting in Henderson’s library. An hour passed, when Henderson came hurrying in, pale, excited, but joyous.

“Thank God,” he cried, “it is a boy!”

“And Margaret?” I gasped.

“Is doing very well!” He touched a bell, and gave an order to the servant. “We will drink to the dear girl and to the heir of the house.”

He was in great spirits. The doctor joined us, but I noticed that he was anxious, and he did not stay long. Henderson was in and out, talking, excited, restless. But everything was going very well, he thought. At last, as we sat talking, a servant appeared at the door, with a frightened look.

“The baby, sir!”

“What?”

Alas! there had been an heir of the house of Henderson for just two hours; and Margaret was not sustaining herself.

Why go on? Henderson was beside himself; stricken with grief, enraged, I believe, as well, at the thought of his own impotence. Messengers were despatched, a consultation was called. The best skill of the city, at any cost, was at Margaret’s bedside. Was there anything, then, that money could not do? How weak we are!

The next day the patient was no better, she was evidently sinking. The news went swiftly round the city. It needed a servant constantly at the door to answer the stream of sympathetic inquirers. Reporters were watching the closed house from the opposite pavement. I undertook to satisfy some of them who gained the steps and came forward, civil enough and notebooks in hand, when the door was opened. This intrusion of curiosity seemed so dreadful.

The great house was silent. How vain and empty and pitiful it all seemed as I wandered alone through the gorgeous apartments! What a mockery it all was of the tragedy impending above-stairs—the approach on list-shod feet of the great enemy! Let us not be unjust. He would have come just the same if his prey had lain in a farmhouse among the hills, or in a tenement-house in C Street.

A day and a night, and another day—and then! It was Miss Forsythe who came down to me, with strained eyes and awe in her face. It needed no words. She put her face upon my shoulder, and sobbed as if her heart were broken.

I could not stay in the house. I went out into the streets, the streets brilliant in the sun of an autumn day, into the town, gay, bustling, crowded, pulsing with vigorous life. How blue the sky was! The sparrows twittered in Madison Square, the idlers sat in the sun, the children chased their hoops about the fountain.

I wandered into the club. The news had preceded me there. More than one member in the reading-room grasped my hand, with just a word of sympathy. Two young fellows, whom I had last seen at the Henderson dinner, were seated at a small table.

“It’s rough, Jack”—the speaker paused, with a match in his hand—“it’s rough. I’ll be if she was not the finest woman I ever knew.”

My wife and I were sitting in the orchestra stalls of the Metropolitan. The opera was Siegfried. At the close of the first act, as we turned to the house, we saw Carmen enter a box, radiant, in white. Henderson followed, and took a seat a little in shadow behind her. There were others in the box. There was a little movement and flutter as they came in and glasses were turned that way.

“Married, and it is only two years,” I said.

“It is only a year and eight months,” my wife replied.

And the world goes on as cheerfully and prosperously as ever.

THE GOLDEN HOUSE

By

Charles Dudley Warner

I

It was near midnight: The company gathered in a famous city studio were under the impression, diligently diffused in the world, that the end of the century is a time of license if not of decadence. The situation had its own piquancy, partly in the surprise of some of those assembled at finding themselves in bohemia, partly in a flutter of expectation of seeing something on the border-line of propriety. The hour, the place, the anticipation of the lifting of the veil from an Oriental and ancient art, gave them a titillating feeling of adventure, of a moral hazard bravely incurred in the duty of knowing life, penetrating to its core. Opportunity for this sort of fruitful experience being rare outside the metropolis, students of good and evil had made the pilgrimage to this midnight occasion from less-favored cities. Recondite scholars in the physical beauty of the Greeks, from Boston, were there; fair women from Washington, whose charms make the reputation of many a newspaper correspondent; spirited stars of official and diplomatic life, who have moments of longing to shine in some more languorous material paradise, had made a hasty flitting to be present at the ceremony, sustained by a slight feeling of bravado in making this exceptional descent. But the favored hundred spectators were mainly from the city-groups of late diners, who fluttered in under that pleasurable glow which the red Jacqueminot always gets from contiguity with the pale yellow Clicquot; theatre parties, a little jaded, and quite ready for something real and stimulating; men from the clubs and men from studios—representatives of society and of art graciously mingled, since it is discovered that it is easier to make art fashionable than to make fashion artistic.

The vast, dimly lighted apartment was itself mysterious, a temple of luxury quite as much as of art. Shadows lurked in the corners, the ribs of the roof were faintly outlined; on the sombre walls gleams of color, faces of loveliness and faces of pain, studies all of a mood or a passion, bits of shining brass, reflections from lustred ware struggling out of obscurity; hangings from Fez or Tetuan, bits of embroidery, costumes in silk and in velvet, still having the aroma of balls a hundred years ago, the faint perfume of a scented society of ladies and gallants; a skeleton scarcely less fantastic than the draped wooden model near it; heavy rugs of Daghestan and Persia, making the footfalls soundless on the floor; a fountain tinkling in a thicket of japonicas and azaleas; the stems of palmettoes, with their branches waving in the obscurity overhead; points of light here and there where a shaded lamp shone on a single red rose in a blue Granada vase on a toppling stand, or on a mass of jonquils in a barbarous pot of Chanak-Kallessi; tacked here and there on walls and hangings, colored memoranda of Capri and of the North Woods, the armor of knights, trophies of small-arms, crossed swords of the Union and the Confederacy, easels, paints, and palettes, and rows of canvases leaning against the wall-the studied litter, in short, of a successful artist, whose surroundings contribute to the popular conception of his genius.

On the wall at one end of the apartment was stretched a white canvas; in front of it was left a small cleared space, on the edge of which, in the shadow, squatting on the floor, were four swarthy musicians in Oriental garments, with a mandolin, a guitar, a ney, and a darabooka drum. About this cleared space, in a crescent, knelt or sat upon the rugs a couple of rows of men in evening dress; behind them, seated in chairs, a group of ladies, whose white shoulders and arms and animated faces flashed out in the semi-obscurity; and in their rear stood a crowd of spectators—beautiful young gentlemen with vacant faces and the elevated Oxford shoulders, rosy youth already blase to all this world can offer, and gray-headed men young again in the prospect of a new sensation. So they kneel or stand, worshipers before the shrine, expecting the advent of the Goddess of AEsthetic Culture.

The moment has come. There is a tap on the drum, a tuning of the strings, a flash of light from the rear of the room inundates the white canvas, and suddenly a figure is poised in the space, her shadow cast upon the glowing background.

It is the Spanish dancer!

The apparition evokes a flutter of applause. It is a superb figure, clad in a high tight bodice and long skirts simply draped so as to show every motion of the athletic limbs. She seems, in this pose and light, supernaturally tall. Through her parted lips white teeth gleam, and she smiles. Is it a smile of anticipated, triumph, or of contempt? Is it the smile of the daughter of Herodias, or the invitation of a ‘ghazeeyeh’? She pauses. Shall she surprise, or shock, or only please? What shall the art that is older than the pyramids do for these kneeling Christians? The drum taps, the ney pipes, the mandolin twangs, her arms are extended—the castanets clink, a foot is thrust out, the bosom heaves, the waist trembles. What shall it be—the old serpent dance of the Nile, or the posturing of decorous courtship when the olives are purple in the time of the grape harvest? Her head, wreathed with coils of black hair, a red rose behind the left ear, is thrown back. The eyes flash, there is a snakelike movement of the limbs, the music hastens slowly in unison with the quickening pulse, the body palpitates, seems to flash invitation like the eyes, it turns, it twists, the neck is thrust forward, it is drawn in, while the limbs move still slowly, tentatively; suddenly the body from the waist up seems to twist round, with the waist as a pivot, in a flash of athletic vigor, the music quickens, the arms move more rapidly to the click of the heated castenets, the steps are more pronounced, the whole woman is agitated, bounding, pulsing with physical excitement. It is a Maenad in an access of gymnastic energy. Yes, it is gymnastics; it is not grace; it is scarcely alluring. Yet it is a physical triumph. While the spectators are breathless, the fury ceases, the music dies, and the Spaniard sinks into a chair, panting with triumph, and inclines her dark head to the clapping of hands and the bravos. The kneelers rise; the spectators break into chattering groups; the ladies look at the dancer with curious eyes; a young gentleman with the elevated Oxford shoulders leans upon the arm of her chair and fans her. The pose is correct; it is the somewhat awkward tribute of culture to physical beauty.

To be on speaking terms with the phenomenon was for the moment a distinction. The young ladies wondered if it would be proper to go forward and talk with her.

“Why not?” said a wit. “The Duke of Donnycastle always shakes hands with the pugilists at a mill.”

“It is not so bad”—the speaker was a Washington beauty in an evening dress that she would have condemned as indecorous for the dancer it is not so bad as I—”

“Expected?” asked her companion, a sedate man of thirty-five, with the cynical air of a student of life.

“As I feared,” she added, quickly. “I have always had a curiosity to know what these Oriental dances mean.”

“Oh, nothing in particular, now. This was an exhibition dance. Of course its origin, like all dancing, was religious. The fault I find with it is that it lacks seriousness, like the modern exhibition of the dancing dervishes for money.”

“Do you think, Mr. Mavick, that the decay of dancing is the reason our religion lacks seriousness? We are in Lent now, you know. Does this seem to you a Lenten performance?”

“Why, yes, to a degree. Anything that keeps you up till three o’clock in the morning has some penitential quality.”

“You give me a new view, Mr. Mavick. I confess that I did not expect to assist at what New Englanders call an ‘evening meeting.’ I thought Eros was the deity of the dance.”

“That, Mrs. Lamon, is a vulgar error. It is an ancient form of worship. Virtue and beauty are the same thing—the two graces.”

“What a nice apothegm! It makes religion so easy and agreeable.”

“As easy as gravitation.”

“Dear me, Mr. Mavick, I thought this was a question of levitation. You are upsetting all my ideas. I shall not have the comfort of repenting of this episode in Lent.”

“Oh yes; you can be sorry that the dancing was not more alluring.”

Meantime there was heard the popping of corks. Venetian glasses filled with champagne were quaffed under the blessing of sparkling eyes, young girls, almond-eyed for the occasion, in the costume of Tokyo, handed round ices, and the hum of accelerated conversation filled the studio.

“And your wife didn’t come?”

“Wouldn’t,” replied Jack Delancy, with a little bow, before he raised his glass. And then added, “Her taste isn’t for this sort of thing.”

The girl, already flushed with the wine, blushed a little—Jack thought he had never seen her look so dazzlingly handsome—as she said, “And you think mine is?”

“Bless me, no, I didn’t mean that; that is, you know”—Jack didn’t exactly see his way out of the dilemma—“Edith is a little old-fashioned; but what’s the harm in this, anyway?”

“I did not say there was any,” she replied, with a smile at his embarrassment. “Only I think there are half a dozen women in the room who could do it better, with a little practice. It isn’t as Oriental as I thought it would be.”

“I cannot say as to that. I know Edith thinks I’ve gone into the depths of the Orient. But, on the whole, I’m glad—” Jack stopped on the verge of speaking out of his better nature.

“Now don’t be rude again. I quite understand that she is not here.”

The dialogue was cut short by a clapping of hands. The spectators took their places again, the lights were lowered, the illumination was turned on the white canvas, and the dancer, warmed with wine and adulation, took a bolder pose, and, as her limbs began to move, sang a wild Moorish melody in a shrill voice, action and words flowing together into the passion of the daughter of tents in a desert life. It was all vigorous, suggestive, more properly religious, Mavick would have said, and the applause was vociferous.

More wine went about. There was another dance, and then another, a slow languid movement, half melancholy and full of sorrow, if one might say that of a movement, for unrepented sin; a gypsy dance this, accompanied by the mournful song of Boabdil, “The Last Sigh of the Moor.” And suddenly, when the feelings of the spectators were melted to tender regret, a flash out of all this into a joyous defiance, a wooing of pleasure with smiling lips and swift feet, with the clash of cymbals and the quickened throb of the drum. And so an end with the dawn of a new day.

It was not yet dawn, however, for the clocks were only striking three as the assembly, in winter coats and soft wraps, fluttered out to its carriages, chattering and laughing, with endless goodnights in the languages of France, Germany, and Spain.

The streets were as nearly deserted as they ever are; here and there a lumbering market-wagon from Jersey, an occasional street-car with its tinkling bell, rarer still the rush of a trembling train on the elevated, the voice of a belated reveler, a flitting female figure at a street corner, the roll of a livery hack over the ragged pavement. But mainly the noise of the town was hushed, and in the sharp air the stars, far off and uncontaminated, glowed with a pure lustre.

Farther up town it was quite still, and in one of the noble houses in the neighborhood of the Park sat Edith Delancy, married not quite a year, listening for the roll of wheels and the click of a night-key.

II

Everybody liked John Corlear Delancy, and this in spite of himself, for no one ever knew him to make any effort to incur either love or hate. The handsome boy was a favorite without lifting his eyebrows, and he sauntered through the university, picking his easy way along an elective course, winning the affectionate regard of every one with whom he came in contact. And this was not because he lacked quality, or was merely easy-going and negative or effeminate, for the same thing happened to him when he went shooting in the summer in the Rockies. The cowboys and the severe moralists of the plains, whose sedate business in life is to get the drop on offensive persons, regarded him as a brother. It isn’t a bad test of personal quality, this power to win the loyalty of men who have few or none of the conventional virtues. These non-moral enforcers of justice—as they understood it liked Jack exactly as his friends in the New York clubs liked him—and perhaps the moral standard of approval of the one was as good as the other.

Jack was a very good shot and a fair rider, and in the climate of England he might have taken first-rate rank in athletics. But he had never taken first-rate rank in anything, except good-fellowship. He had a great many expensive tastes, which he could not afford to indulge, except in imagination. The luxury of a racing-stable, or a yacht, or a library of scarce books bound by Paris craftsmen was denied him. Those who account for failures in life by a man’s circumstances, and not by a lack in the man himself, which is always the secret of failure, said that Jack was unfortunate in coming into a certain income of twenty thousand a year. This was just enough to paralyze effort, and not enough to permit a man to expand in any direction. It is true that he was related to millions and moved in a millionaire atmosphere, but these millions might never flow into his bank account. They were not in hand to use, and they also helped to paralyze effort—like black clouds of an impending shower that may pass around, but meantime keeps the watcher indoors.

The best thing that Jack Delancy ever did, for himself, was to marry Edith Fletcher. The wedding, which took place some eight months before the advent of the Spanish dancer, was a surprise to many, for the girl had even less fortune than Jack, and though in and of his society entirely, was supposed to have ideals. Her family, indeed, was an old one on the island, and was prominent long before the building of the stone bridge on Canal Street over the outlet of Collect Pond. Those who knew Edith well detected in her that strain of moral earnestness which made the old Fletchers such stanch and trusty citizens. The wonder was not that Jack, with his easy susceptibility to refined beauty, should have been attracted to her, or have responded to a true instinct of what was best for him, but that Edith should have taken up with such a perfect type of the aimlessness of the society strata of modern life. The wonder, however, was based upon a shallow conception of the nature of woman. It would have been more wonderful if the qualities that endeared Jack to college friends and club men, to the mighty sportsmen who do not hesitate, in the clubs, to devastate Canada and the United States of big game, and to the border ruffians of Dakota, should not have gone straight to the tender heart of a woman of ideals. And when in all history was there a woman who did not believe, when her heart went with respect for certain manly traits, that she could inspire and lift a man into a noble life?

The silver clock in the breakfast-room was striking ten, and Edith was already seated at the coffee-urn, when Jack appeared. She was as fresh as a rose, and greeted him with a bright smile as he came behind her chair and bent over for the morning kiss—a ceremony of affection which, if omitted, would have left a cloud on the day for both of them, and which Jack always declared was simply a necessity, or the coffee would have no flavor. But when a man has picked a rose, it is always a sort of climax which is followed by an awkward moment, and Jack sat down with the air of a man who has another day to get through with.

“Were you amused with the dancing—this morning?”

“So, so,” said Jack, sipping his coffee. “It was a stunning place for it, that studio; you’d have liked that. The Lamons and Mavick and a lot of people from the provinces were there. The company was more fun than the dance, especially to a fellow who has seen how good it can be and how bad in its home.”

“You have a chance to see the Spanish dancer again, under proper auspices,” said Edith, without looking up.

“How’s that?”

“We are invited by Mrs. Brown—”

“The mother of the Bible class at St. Philip’s?”

“Yes—to attend a charity performance for the benefit of the Female Waifs’ Refuge. She is to dance.”

“Who? Mrs. Brown?”

Edith paid no attention to this impertinence. “They are to make an artificial evening at eleven o’clock in the morning.”

“They must have got hold of Mavick’s notion that this dance is religious in its origin. Do you, know if the exercises will open with prayer?”

“Nonsense, Jack. You know I don’t intend to go. I shall send a small check.”

“Well, draw it mild. But isn’t this what I’m accused of doing—shirking my duty of personal service by a contribution?”

“Perhaps. But you didn’t have any of that shirking feeling last night, did you?”

Jack laughed, and ran round to give the only reply possible to such a gibe. These breakfast interludes had not lost piquancy in all these months. “I’m half a mind to go to this thing. I would, if it didn’t break up my day so.”

“As for instance?”

“Well, this morning I have to go up to the riding-school to see a horse—Storm; I want to try him. And then I have to go down to Twist’s and see a lot of Japanese drawings he’s got over. Do you know that the birds and other animals those beggars have been drawing, which we thought were caricatures, are the real thing? They have eyes sharp enough to see things in motion—flying birds and moving horses which we never caught till we put the camera on them. Awfully curious. Then I shall step into the club a minute, and—”

“Be in at lunch? Bess is coming.”

“Don’t wait lunch. I’ve a lot to do.”

Edith followed him with her eyes, a little wistfully; she heard the outer door close, and still sat at the table, turning over the pile of notes at her plate, and thinking of many things—things that it began to dawn upon her mind could not be done, and things of immediate urgency that must be done. Life did not seem quite such a simple problem to her as it had looked a year ago. That there is nothing like experiment to clear the vision is the general idea, but oftener it is experience that perplexes. Indeed, Edith was thinking that some things seemed much easier to her before she had tried them.

As she sat at the table with a faultless morning-gown, with a bunch of English violets in her bosom, an artist could have desired no better subject. Many people thought her eyes her best feature; they were large brown eyes, yet not always brown, green at times, liquid, but never uncertain, apt to have a smile in them, yet their chief appealing characteristic was trustfulness, a pure sort of steadfastness, that always conveyed the impression of a womanly personal interest in the person upon whom they were fixed. They were eyes that haunted one like a remembered strain of music. The lips were full, and the mouth was drawn in such exquisite lines that it needed the clear-cut and emphasized chin to give firmness to its beauty. The broad forehead, with arching eyebrows, gave an intellectual cast to a face the special stamp of which was purity. The nose, with thin open nostrils, a little too strong for beauty, together with the chin, gave the impression of firmness and courage; but the wonderful eyes, the inviting mouth, so modified this that the total impression was that of high spirit and great sweetness of character. It was the sort of face from which one might expect passionate love or unflinching martyrdom. Her voice had a quality the memory of which lingered longer even than the expression of her eyes; it was low, and, as one might say, a fruity voice, not quite clear, though sweet, as if veiled in femineity. This note of royal womanhood was also in her figure, a little more than medium in height, and full of natural grace. Somehow Edith, with all these good points, had not the reputation of a belle or a beauty—perhaps for want of some artificial splendor—but one could not be long in her company without feeling that she had great charm, without which beauty becomes insipid and even commonplace, and with which the plainest woman is attractive.

Edith’s theory of life, if one may so dignify the longings of a young girl, had been very simple, and not at all such as would be selected by the heroine of a romance. She had no mission, nor was she afflicted by that modern form of altruism which is a yearning for notoriety by conspicuous devotion to causes and reforms quite outside her normal sphere of activity. A very sincere person, with strong sympathy for humanity tempered by a keen perception of the humorous side of things, she had a purpose, perhaps not exactly formulated, of making the most out of her own life, not in any outward and shining career, but by a development of herself in the most helpful and harmonious relations to her world. And it seemed to her, though she had never philosophized it, that a marriage such as she believed she had made was the woman’s way to the greatest happiness and usefulness. In this she followed the dictates of a clear mind and a warm heart. If she had reasoned about it, considering how brief life is, and how small can be any single contribution to a better social condition, she might have felt more strongly the struggle against nature, and the false position involved in the new idea that marriage is only a kind of occupation, instead of an ordinance decreed in the very constitution of the human race. With the mere instinct of femineity she saw the falseness of the assumption that the higher life for man or woman lies in separate and solitary paths through the wilderness of this world. To an intelligent angel, seated on the arch of the heavens, the spectacle of the latter-day pseudo-philosophic and economic dribble about the doubtful expediency of having a wife, and the failure of marriage, must seem as ludicrous as would a convention of birds or of flowers reasoning that the processes of nature had continued long enough. Edith was simply a natural woman, who felt rather than reasoned that in a marriage such as her heart approved she should make the most of her life.

But as she sat here this morning this did not seem to be so simple a matter as it had appeared. It began to be suspected that in order to make the most of one’s self it was necessary to make the most of many other persons and things. The stream in its own channel flowed along not without vexations, friction and foaming and dashings from bank to bank; but it became quite another and a more difficult movement when it was joined to another stream, with its own currents and eddies and impetuosities and sluggishness, constantly liable to be deflected if not put altogether on another course. Edith was not putting it in this form as she turned over her notes of invitation and appointments and engagements, but simply wondering where the time for her life was to come in, and for Jack’s life, which occupied a much larger space than it seemed to occupy in the days before it was joined to hers. Very curious this discovery of what another’s life really is. Of course the society life must go on, that had always gone on, for what purpose no one could tell, only it was the accepted way of disposing of time; and now there were the dozen ways in which she was solicited to show her interest in those supposed to be less fortunate in life than herself-the alleviation of the miseries of her own city. And with society, and charity, and sympathy with the working classes, and her own reading, and a little drawing and painting, for which she had some talent, what became of that comradeship with Jack, that union of interests and affections, which was to make her life altogether so high and sweet?

This reverie, which did not last many minutes, and was interrupted by the abrupt moving away of Edith to the writing-desk in her own room, was caused by a moment’s vivid realization of what Jack’s interests in life were. Could she possibly make them her own? And if she did, what would become of her own ideals?

III

It was indeed a busy day for Jack. Great injustice would be done him if it were supposed that he did not take himself and his occupations seriously. His mind was not disturbed by trifles. He knew that he had on the right sort of four-in-hand necktie, with the appropriate pin of pear-shaped pearl, and that he carried the cane of the season. These things come by a sort of social instinct, are in the air, as it were, and do not much tax the mind. He had to hasten a little to keep his half-past-eleven o’clock appointment at Stalker’s stables, and when he arrived several men of his set were already waiting, who were also busy men, and had made a little effort to come round early and assist Jack in making up his mind about the horse.

When Mr. Stalker brought out Storm, and led him around to show his action, the connoisseurs took on a critical attitude, an attitude of judgment, exhibited not less in the poise of the head and the serious face than in the holding of the cane and the planting of legs wide apart. And the attitude had a refined nonchalance which professional horsemen scarcely ever attain. Storm could not have received more critical and serious attention if he had been a cooked terrapin. He could afford to stand this scrutiny, and he seemed to move about with the consciousness that he knew more about being a horse than his judges.

Storm was, in fact, a splendid animal, instinct with life from his thin flaring nostril to his small hoof; black as a raven, his highly groomed skin took the polish of ebony, and showed the play of his powerful muscles, and, one might say, almost the nervous currents that thrilled his fine texture. His large, bold eyes, though not wicked, flamed now and then with an energy and excitement that gave ample notice that he would obey no master who had not stronger will and nerve than his own. It was a tribute to Jack’s manliness that, when he mounted him for a turn in the ring, Storm seemed to recognize the fine quality of both seat and hand, and appeared willing to take him on probation.

“He’s got good points,” said Mr. Herbert Albert Flick, “but I’d like a straighter back.”

“I’ll be hanged, though, Jack,” was Mr. Mowbray Russell’s comment, “if I’d ride him in the Park before he’s docked. Say what you like about action, a horse has got to have style.”

“Moves easy, falls off a little too much to suit me in the quarter,” suggested Mr. Pennington Docstater, sucking the head of his cane. “How about his staying quality, Stalker?”

“That’s just where he is, Mr. Docstater; take him on the road, he’s a stayer for all day. Goes like a bird. He’ll take you along at the rate of nine miles in forty-five minutes as long as you want to sit there.”

“Jump?” queried little Bobby Simerton, whose strong suit at the club was talking about meets and hunters.

“Never refused anything I put him at,” replied Stalker; “takes every fence as if it was the regular thing.”

Storm was in this way entirely taken to pieces, praised and disparaged, in a way to give Stalker, it might be inferred from his manner, a high opinion of the knowledge of these young gentlemen. “It takes a gentleman,” in fact, Stalker said, “to judge a hoss, for a good hoss is a gentleman himself.” It was much discussed whether Storm would do better for the Park or for the country, whether it would be better to put him in the field or keep him for a roadster. It might, indeed, be inferred that Jack had not made up his mind whether he should buy a horse for use in the Park or for country riding. Even more than this might be inferred from the long morning’s work, and that was that while Jack’s occupation was to buy a horse, if he should buy one his occupation would be gone. He was known at the club to be looking for the right sort of a horse, and that he knew what he wanted, and was not easily satisfied; and as long as he occupied this position he was an object of interest to sellers and to his companions.

Perhaps Mr. Stalker understood this, for when the buyers had gone he remarked to the stable-boy, “Mr. Delancy, he don’t want to buy no hoss.”

When the inspection of the horse was finished it was time for lunch, and the labors of the morning were felt to justify this indulgence, though each of the party had other engagements, and was too busy to waste the time. They went down to the Knickerbocker.

The lunch was slight, but its ordering took time and consideration, as it ought, for nothing is so destructive of health and mental tone as the snatching of a mid-day meal at a lunch counter from a bill of fare prepared by God knows whom. Mr. Russell said that if it took time to buy a horse, it ought to take at least equal time and care to select the fodder that was to make a human being wretched or happy. Indeed, a man who didn’t give his mind to what he ate wouldn’t have any mind by-and-by to give to anything. This sentiment had the assent of the table, and was illustrated by varied personal experience; and a deep feeling prevailed, a serious feeling, that in ordering and eating the right sort of lunch a chief duty of a useful day had been discharged.

It must not be imagined from this, however, that the conversation was about trifles. Business men and operators could have learned something about stocks and investments, and politicians about city politics. Mademoiselle Vivienne, the new skirt dancer, might have been surprised at the intimate tone in which she was alluded to, but she could have got some useful hints in effects, for her judges were cosmopolitans who had seen the most suggestive dancing in all parts of the world. It came out incidentally that every one at table had been “over” in the course of the season, not for any general purpose, not as a sightseer, but to look at somebody’s stables, or to attend a wedding, or a sale of etchings, or to see his bootmaker, or for a little shooting in Scotland, just as one might run down to Bar Harbor or Tuxedo. It was only an incident in a busy season; and one of the fruits of it appeared to be as perfect a knowledge of the comparative merits of all the ocean racers and captains as of the English and American stables and the trainers. One not informed of the progress of American life might have been surprised to see that the fad is to be American, with a sort of patronage of things and ways foreign, especially of things British, a large continental kind of attitude, begotten of hearing much about Western roughing it, of Alaska, of horse-breeding and fruit-raising on the Pacific, of the Colorado River Canon. As for stuffs, well yes, London. As for style, you can’t mistake a man who is dressed in New York.

The wine was a white Riesling from California. Docstater said his attention had been called to it by Tom Dillingham at the Union, who had a ranch somewhere out there. It was declared to be sound and palatable; you know what you are drinking. This led to a learned discussion of the future of American wines, and a patriotic impulse was given to the trade by repeated orders. It was declared that in American wines lay the solution of the temperance question. Bobby Simerton said that Burgundy was good enough for him, but Russell put him down, as he saw the light yellow through his glass, by the emphatic affirmation that plenty of cheap American well-made wine would knock the bottom out of all the sentimental temperance societies and shut up the saloons, dry up all those not limited to light wines and beer. It was agreed that the saloons would have to go.

This satisfactory conclusion was reached before the coffee came on and the cigarettes, and the sound quality of the Riesling was emphasized by a pony of cognac.

It is fortunate when the youth of a country have an ideal. No nation is truly great without a common ideal, capable of evoking enthusiasm and calling out its energies. And where are we to look for this if not in the youth, and especially in those to whom fortune and leisure give an opportunity of leadership? It is they who can inspire by their example, and by their pursuits attract others to a higher conception of the national life. It may take the form of patriotism, as in this country, pride in the great republic, jealousy of its honor and credit, eagerness for its commanding position among the nations, patriotism which will show itself, in all the ardor of believing youth, in the administration of law, in the purity of politics, in honest local government, and in a noble aspiration for the glory of the country. It may take the form of culture, of a desire that the republic-liable, like all self-made nations, to worship wealth-should be distinguished not so much by a vulgar national display as by an advance in the arts, the sciences, the education that adorns life, in the noble spirit of humanity, and in the nobler spirit of recognition of a higher life, which will be content with no civilization that does not tend to make the country for every citizen a better place to live in today than it was yesterday. Happy is the country, happy the metropolis of that country, whose fortunate young men have this high conception of citizenship!

What is the ideal of their country which these young men cherish? There was a moment—was there not for them?—in the late war for the Union, when the republic was visible to them in its beauty, in its peril, and in a passion of devotion they were eager—were they not?—to follow the flag and to give their brief lives to its imperishable glory. Nothing is impossible to a nation with an ideal like that. It was this flame that ran over Europe in the struggle of France against a world in arms. It was this national ideal that was incarnate in Napoleon, as every great idea that moves the world is sooner or later incarnated. What was it that we saw in Washington on his knees at Valley Forge, or blazing with wrath at the cowardice on Monmouth? in Lincoln entering Richmond with bowed head and infinite sorrow and yearning in his heart? An embodiment of a great national idea and destiny.

In France this ideal burns yet like a flame, and is still evoked by a name. It is the passion of glory, but the desire of a nation, and Napoleon was the incarnation of passion. They say that he is not dead as others are dead, but that he may come again and ride at the head of his legions, and strike down the enemies of France; that his bugle will call the youth from every hamlet, that the roll of his drum will transform France into a camp, and the grenadiers will live again and ride with him, amid hurrahs, and streaming tears, and shouts of “My Emperor! Oh, my Emperor!” Is it only a legend? But the spirit is there; not a boy but dreams of it, not a girl but knots the thought in with her holiday tricolor. That is to have an abiding ideal, and patiently to hold it, in isolation, in defeat, even in an overripe civilization.

We believe—do we not?—in other triumphs than those of the drum and the sword. Our aspirations for the republic are for a nobler example of human society than the world has yet seen. Happy is the country, and the metropolis of the country, whose youth, gilded only by their virtues, have these aspirations.

When the party broke up, the street lamps were beginning to twinkle here and there, and Jack discovered to his surprise that the Twiss business would have to go over to another day. It was such a hurrying life in New York. There was just time for a cup of tea at Mrs. Trafton’s. Everybody dropped in there after five o’clock, when the duties of the day were over, with the latest news, and to catch breath before rushing into the program of the evening.

There were a dozen ladies in the drawing-room when Jack entered, and his first impression was that the scream of conversation would be harder to talk against than a Wagner opera; but he presently got his cup of tea, and found a snug seat in the chimney-corner by Miss Tavish; indeed, they moved to it together, and so got a little out of the babel. Jack thought the girl looked even prettier in her walking-dress than when he saw her at the studio; she had style, there was no doubt about that; and then, while there was no invitation in her manner, one felt that she was a woman to whom one could easily say things, and who was liable at any moment to say things interesting herself.

“Is this your first appearance since last night, Mr. Delancy?”

“Oh no; I’ve been racing about on errands all day. It is very restful to sit down by a calm person.”

“Well, I never shut my eyes till nine o’clock. I kept seeing that Spanish woman whirl around and contort, and—do you mind my telling you?—I couldn’t just help it, I” (leaning forward to Jack) “got up and tried it before the glass. There! Are you shocked?”

“Not so much shocked as excluded,” Jack dared to say. “But do you think—”.

“Yes, I know. There isn’t anything that an American girl cannot do. I’ve made up my mind to try it. You’ll see.”

“Will I?”

“No, you won’t. Don’t flatter yourself. Only girls. I don’t want men around.”

“Neither do I,” said Jack, honestly.

Miss Tavish laughed. “You are too forward, Mr. Delancy. Perhaps some time, when we have learned, we will let in a few of you, to look in at the door, fifty dollars a ticket, for some charity. I don’t see why dancing isn’t just as good an accomplishment as playing the harp in a Greek dress.”

“Nor do I; I’d rather see it. Besides, you’ve got Scripture warrant for dancing off the heads of people. And then it is such a sweet way of doing a charity. Dancing for the East Side is the best thing I have heard yet.”

“You needn’t mock. You won’t when you find out what it costs you.”

“What are you two plotting?” asked Mrs. Trafton, coming across to the fireplace.

“Charity,” said Jack, meekly.

“Your wife was here this morning to get me to go and see some of her friends in Hester Street.”

“You went?”

“Not today. It’s awfully interesting, but I’ve been.”

“Edith seems to be devoted to that sort of thing,” remarked Miss Tavish.

“Yes,” said Jack, slowly, “she’s got the idea that sympathy is better than money; she says she wants to try to understand other people’s lives.”

“Goodness knows, I’d like to understand my own.”

“And were you trying, Mr. Delancy, to persuade Miss Tavish into that sort of charity?”

“Oh dear, no,” said Jack; “I was trying to interest the East End in something, for the benefit of Miss Tavish.”

“You’ll find that’s one of the most expensive remarks you ever made,” retorted Miss Tavish, rising to go.

“I wish Lily Tavish would marry,” said Mrs. Trafton, watching the girl’s slender figure as it passed through the portiere; “she doesn’t know what to do with herself.”

Jack shrugged his shoulders. “Yes, she’d be a lovely wife for somebody;” and then he added, as if reminiscently, “if he could afford it. Good-by.”

“That’s just a fashion of talking. I never knew a time when so many people afforded to do what they wanted to do. But you men are all alike. Good-by.”

When Jack reached home it was only a little after six o’clock, and as they were not to go out to dine till eight, he had a good hour to rest from the fatigues of the day, and run over the evening papers and dip into the foreign periodicals to catch a topic or two for the dinner-table.

“Yes, sir,” said the maid, “Mrs. Delancy came in an hour ago.”

IV

Edith’s day had been as busy as Jack’s, notwithstanding she had put aside several things that demanded her attention. She denied herself the morning attendance on the Literature Class that was raking over the eighteenth century. This week Swift was to be arraigned. The last time when Edith was present it was Steele. The judgment, on the whole, had been favorable, and there had been a little stir of tenderness among the bonnets over Thackeray’s comments on the Christian soldier. It seemed to bring him near to them. “Poor Dick Steele!” said the essayist. Edith declared afterwards that the large woman who sat next to her, Mrs. Jerry Hollowell, whispered to her that she always thought his name was Bessemer; but this was, no doubt, a pleasantry. It was a beautiful essay, and so stimulating! And then there was bouillon, and time to look about at the toilets. Poor Steele, it would have cheered his life to know that a century after his death so many beautiful women, so exquisitely dressed, would have been concerning themselves about him. The function lasted two hours. Edith made a little calculation. In five minutes she could have got from the encyclopaedia all the facts in the essay, and while her maid was doing her hair she could have read five times as much of Steele as the essayist read. And, somehow, she was not stimulated, for the impression seemed to prevail that now Steele was disposed of. And she had her doubts whether literature would, after all, prove to be a permanent social distraction. But Edith may have been too severe in her judgment. There was probably not a woman in the class that day who did not go away with the knowledge that Steele was an author, and that he lived in the eighteenth century. The hope for the country is in the diffusion of knowledge.

Leaving the class to take care of Swift, Edith went to the managers’ meeting at the Women’s Hospital, where there was much to do of very practical work, pitiful cases of women and children suffering through no fault of their own, and money more difficult to raise than sympathy. The meeting took time and thought. Dismissing her carriage, and relying on elevated and surface cars, Edith then took a turn on the East Side, in company with a dispensary physician whose daily duty called her into the worst parts of the town. She had a habit of these tours before her marriage, and, though they were discouragingly small in direct results, she gained a knowledge of city life that was of immense service in her general charity work. Jack had suggested the danger of these excursions, but she had told him that a woman was less liable to insult in the East Side than in Fifth Avenue, especially at twilight, not because the East Side was a nice quarter of the city, but because it was accustomed to see women who minded their own business go about unattended, and the prowlers had not the habit of going there. She could even relate cases of chivalrous protection of “ladies” in some of the worst streets.

What Edith saw this day, open to be seen, was not so much sin as ignorance of how to live, squalor, filthy surroundings acquiesced in as the natural order, wonderful patience in suffering and deprivation, incapacity, ill-paid labor, the kindest spirit of sympathy and helpfulness of the poor for each other. Perhaps that which made the deepest impression on her was the fact that such conditions of living could seem natural to those in them, and that they could get so much enjoyment of life in situations that would have been simple misery to her.

The visitors were in a foreign city. The shop signs were in foreign tongues; in some streets all Hebrew. On chance news-stands were displayed newspapers in Russian, Bohemian, Arabic, Italian, Hebrew, Polish, German-none in English. The theatre bills were in Hebrew or other unreadable type. The sidewalks and the streets swarmed with noisy dealers in every sort of second-hand merchandise—vegetables that had seen a better day, fish in shoals. It was not easy to make one’s way through the stands and push-carts and the noisy dickering buyers and sellers, who haggled over trifles and chaffed good-naturedly and were strictly intent on their own affairs. No part of the town is more crowded or more industrious. If youth is the hope of the country, the sight was encouraging, for children were in the gutters, on the house steps, at all the windows. The houses seemed bursting with humanity, and in nearly every room of the packed tenements, whether the inmates were sick or hungry, some sort of industry was carried on. In the damp basements were junk-dealers, rag-pickers, goose-pickers. In one noisome cellar, off an alley, among those sorting rags, was an old woman of eighty-two, who could reply to questions only in a jargon, too proud to beg, clinging to life, earning a few cents a day in this foul occupation. But life is sweet even with poverty and rheumatism and eighty years. Did her dull eyes, turning inward, see the Carpathian Hills, a free girlhood in village drudgery and village sports, then a romance of love, children, hard work, discontent, emigration to a New World of promise? And now a cellar by day, the occupation of cutting rags for carpets, and at night a corner in a close and crowded room on a flock bed not fit for a dog. And this was a woman’s life.

Picturesque foreign women going about with shawls over their heads and usually a bit of bright color somewhere, children at their games, hawkers loudly crying their stale wares, the click of sewing-machines heard through a broken window, everywhere animation, life, exchange of rough or kindly banter. Was it altogether so melancholy as it might seem? Not everybody was hopelessly poor, for here were lawyers’ signs and doctors’ signs—doctors in whom the inhabitants had confidence because they charged all they could get for their services—and thriving pawnbrokers’ shops. There were parish schools also—perhaps others; and off some dark alley, in a room on the ground-floor, could be heard the strident noise of education going on in high-voiced study and recitation. Nor were amusements lacking—notices of balls, dancing this evening, and tencent shows in palaces of legerdemain and deformity.

It was a relenting day in March; patches of blue sky overhead, and the sun had some quality in its shining. The children and the caged birds at the open windows felt it-and there were notes of music here and there above the traffic and the clamor. Turning down a narrow alley, with a gutter in the centre, attracted by festive sounds, the visitors came into a small stone-paved court with a hydrant in the centre surrounded by tall tenement-houses, in the windows of which were stuffed the garments that would no longer hold together to adorn the person. Here an Italian girl and boy, with a guitar and violin, were recalling la bella Napoli, and a couple of pretty girls from the court were footing it as merrily as if it were the grape harvest. A woman opened a lower room door and sharply called to one of the dancing girls to come in, when Edith and the doctor appeared at the bottom of the alley, but her tone changed when she recognized the doctor, and she said, by way of apology, that she didn’t like her daughter to dance before strangers. So the music and the dance went on, even little dots of girls and boys shuffling about in a stiff-legged fashion, with applause from all the windows, and at last a largesse of pennies—as many as five altogether—for the musicians. And the sun fell lovingly upon the pretty scene.

But then there were the sweaters’ dens, and the private rooms where half a dozen pale-faced tailors stitched and pressed fourteen and sometimes sixteen hours a day, stifling rooms, smelling of the hot goose and steaming cloth, rooms where they worked, where the cooking was done, where they ate, and late at night, when overpowered with weariness, lay down to sleep. Struggle for life everywhere, and perhaps no more discontent and heart-burning and certainly less ennui than in the palaces on the avenues.

The residence of Karl Mulhaus, one of the doctor’s patients, was typical of the homes of the better class of poor. The apartment fronted on a small and not too cleanly court, and was in the third story. As Edith mounted the narrow and dark stairways she saw the plan of the house. Four apartments opened upon each landing, in which was the common hydrant and sink. The Mulhaus apartment consisted of a room large enough to contain a bed, a cook-stove, a bureau, a rocking-chair, and two other chairs, and it had two small windows, which would have more freely admitted the southern sun if they had been washed, and a room adjoining, dark, and nearly filled by a big bed. On the walls of the living room were hung highly colored advertising chromos of steamships and palaces of industry, and on the bureau Edith noticed two illustrated newspapers of the last year, a patent-medicine almanac, and a volume of Schiller. The bureau also held Mr. Mulhaus’s bottles of medicine, a comb which needed a dentist, and a broken hair-brush. What gave the room, however, a cheerful aspect were some pots of plants on the window-ledges, and half a dozen canary-bird cages hung wherever there was room for them.

None of the family happened to be at home except Mr. Mulhaus, who occupied the rocking-chair, and two children, a girl of four years and a boy of eight, who were on the floor playing “store” with some blocks of wood, a few tacks, some lumps of coal, some scraps of paper, and a tangle of twine. In their prattle they spoke, the English they had learned from their brother who was in a store.

“I feel some better today,” said Mr. Mulhaus, brightening up as the visitors entered, “but the cough hangs on. It’s three months since this weather that I haven’t been out, but the birds are a good deal of company.” He spoke in German, and with effort. He was very thin and sallow, and his large feverish eyes added to the pitiful look of his refined face. The doctor explained to Edith that he had been getting fair wages in a type-foundry until he had become too weak to go any longer to the shop.

It was rather hard to have to sit there all day, he explained to the doctor, but they were getting along. Mrs. Mulhaus had got a job of cleaning that day; that would be fifty cents. Ally—she was twelve—was learning to sew. That was her afternoon to go to the College Settlement. Jimmy, fourteen, had got a place in a store, and earned two dollars a week.

“And Vicky?” asked the doctor.

“Oh, Vicky,” piped up the eight-year-old boy. “Vicky’s up to the ‘stution”—the hospital was probably the institution referred to—“ever so long now. I seen her there, me and Jim did. Such a bootifer place! ‘Nd chicken!” he added. “Sis got hurt by a cart.”

Vicky was seventeen, and had been in a fancy store.

“Yes,” said Mulhaus, in reply to a question, “it pays pretty well raising canaries, when they turn out singers. I made fifteen dollars last year. I hain’t sold much lately. Seems ‘s if people stopped wanting ‘em such weather. I guess it ‘ll be better in the spring.”

“No doubt it will be better for the poor fellow himself before spring,” said the doctor as they made their way down the dirty stairways. “Now I’ll show you one of my favorites.”

They turned into a broader street, one of the busy avenues, and passing under an archway between two tall buildings, entered a court of back buildings. In the third story back lived Aunt Margaret. The room was scarcely as big as a ship’s cabin, and its one window gave little light, for it opened upon a narrow well of high brick walls. In the only chair Aunt Margaret was seated close to the window. In front of her was a small work-table, with a kerosene lamp on it, but the side of the room towards which she looked was quite occupied by a narrow couch—ridiculously narrow, for Aunt Margaret was very stout. There was a thin chest of drawers on the other side, and the small coal stove that stood in the centre so nearly filled the remaining space that the two visitors were one too many.

“Oh, come in, come in,” said the old lady, cheerfully, when the door opened. “I’m glad to see you.”

“And how goes it?” asked the doctor.

“First rate. I’m coming on, doctor. Work’s been pretty slack for two weeks now, but yesterday I got work for two days. I guess it will be better now.”

The work was finishing pantaloons. It used to be a good business before there was so much cutting in.

“I used to get fifteen cents a pair, then ten; now they don’t pay but five. Yes, the shop furnishes the thread.”

“And how many pairs can you finish in a day?” asked Edith.

“Three—three pairs, to do ‘em nice—and they are very particular—if I work from six in the morning till twelve at night. I could do more, but my sight ain’t what it used to be, and I’ve broken my specs.”

“So you earn fifteen cents a day?”

“When I’ve the luck to get work, my lady. Sometimes there isn’t any. And things cost so much. The rent is the worst.”

It appeared that the rent was two dollars and a half a month. That must be paid, at any rate. Edith made a little calculation that on a flush average of ninety cents a week earned, and allowing so many cents for coal and so many cents for oil, the margin for bread and tea must be small for the month. She usually bought three cents’ worth of tea at a time.

“It is kinder close,” said the old lady, with a smile. “The worst is, my feet hurt me so I can’t stir out. But the neighbors is real kind. The little boy next room goes over to the shop and fetches my pantaloons and takes ‘em back. I can get along if it don’t come slack again.”

Sitting all day by that dim window, half the night stitching by a kerosene lamp; lying for six hours on that narrow couch! How to account for this old soul’s Christian resignation and cheerfulness! “For,” said the doctor, “she has seen better days; she has moved in high society; her husband, who died twenty years ago, was a policeman. What the old lady is doing is fighting for her independence. She has only one fear—the almshouse.”

It was with such scenes as these in her eyes that Edith went to her dressing-room to make her toilet for the Henderson dinner.

V

It was the first time they had dined with the Hendersons. It was Jack’s doings. “Certainly, if you wish it,” Edith had said when the invitation came. The unmentioned fact was that Jack had taken a little flier in Oshkosh, and a hint from Henderson one evening at the Union, when the venture looked squally, had let him out of a heavy loss into a small profit, and Jack felt grateful.

“I wonder how Henderson came to do it?” Jack was querying, as he and old Fairfax sipped their five-o’clock “Manhattan.”

“Oh, Henderson likes to do a good-natured thing still, now and then. Do you know his wife?”

“No. Who was she?”

“Why, old Eschelle’s daughter, Carmen; of course you wouldn’t know; that was ten years ago. There was a good deal of talk about it at the time.”

“How?”

“Some said they’d been good friends before Mrs. Henderson’s death.”

“Then Carmen, as you call her, wasn’t the first?”

“No, but she was an easy second. She’s a social climber; bound to get there from the start.”

“Is she pretty?”

“Devilish. She’s a little thing. I saw her once at Homburg, on the promenade with her mother.

“The kind of sweet blonde, I said to myself, that would mix a man up in a duel before he knew where he was.”

“She must be interesting.”

“She was always clever, and she knows enough to play a straight game and when to propitiate. I’ll bet a five she tells Henderson whom to be good to when the chance offers.”

“Then her influence on him is good?”

“My dear sir, she gets what she wants, and Henderson is going to the… well, look at the lines in his face. I’ve known Henderson since he came fresh into the Street. He’d rarely knife a friend when his first wife was living. Now, when you see the old frank smile on his face, it’s put on.”

It was half-past eight when Mr. Henderson with Mrs. Delancy on his arm led the way to the diningroom. The procession was closed by Mrs. Henderson and Mr. Delancy. The Van Dams were there, and Mrs. Chesney and the Chesney girls, and Miss Tavish, who sat on Jack’s right, but the rest of the guests were unknown to Jack, except by name. There was a strong dash of the Street in the mixture, and although the Street was tabooed in the talk, there was such an emanation of aggressive prosperity at the table that Jack said afterwards that he felt as if he had been at a meeting of the board.

If Jack had known the house ten years ago, he would have noticed certain subtle changes in it, rather in the atmosphere than in many alterations. The newness and the glitter of cost had worn off. It might still be called a palace, but the city had now a dozen handsomer houses, and Carmen’s idea, as she expressed it, was to make this more like a home. She had made it like herself. There were pictures on the walls that would not have hung there in the late Mrs. Henderson’s time; and the prevailing air was that of refined sensuousness. Life, she said, was her idea, life in its utmost expression, untrammeled, and yes, a little Greek. Freedom was perhaps the word, and yet her latest notion was simplicity. The dinner was simple. Her dress was exceedingly simple, save that it had in it somewhere a touch of audacity, revealing in a flash of invitation the hidden nature of the woman. She knew herself better than any one knew her, except Henderson, and even he was forced to laugh when she travestied Browning in saying that she had one soul-side to face the world with, one to show the man she loved, and she declared he was downright coarse when on going out of the door he muttered, “But it needn’t be the seamy side.” The reported remark of some one who had seen her at church that she looked like a nun made her smile, but she broke into a silvery laugh when she head Van Dam’s comment on it, “Yes, a devil of a nun.”

The library was as cozy as ever, but did not appear to be used much as a library. Henderson, indeed, had no time to add to his collection or enjoy it. Most of the books strewn on the tables were French novels or such American tales as had the cachet of social riskiness. But Carmen liked the room above all others. She enjoyed her cigarette there, and had a fancy for pouring her five-o’clock tea in its shelter. Books which had all sorts of things in them gave somehow an unconventional atmosphere to the place, and one could say things there that one couldn’t say in a drawing-room.

Henderson himself, it must be confessed, had grown stout in the ten years, and puffy under the eyes. There were lines of irritation in his face and lines of weariness. He had not kept the freshness of youth so well as Carmen, perhaps because of his New England conscience. To his guest he was courteous, seemed to be making an effort to be so, and listened with well-assumed interest to the story of her day’s pilgrimage. At length he said, with a smile, “Life seems to interest you, Mrs. Delancy.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Edith, looking up brightly; “doesn’t it you?”

“Why, yes; not life exactly, but things, doing things—conflict.”

“Yes, I can understand that. There is so much to be done for everybody.”

Henderson looked amused. “You know in the city the gospel is that everybody is to be done.”

“Well,” said Edith, not to be diverted, “but, Mr. Henderson, what is it all for—this conflict? Perhaps, however, you are fighting the devil?”

“Yes, that’s it; the devil is usually the other fellow. But, Mrs. Delancy,” added Henderson, with an accent of seriousness, “I don’t know what it’s all for. I doubt if there is much in it.”

“And yet the world credits you with finding a great deal in it.”

“The world is generally wrong. Do you understand poker, Mrs. Delancy? No! Of course you do not. But the interest of the game isn’t so much in the cards as in the men.”

“I thought it was the stakes.”

“Perhaps so. But you want to win for the sake of winning. If I gambled it would be a question of nerve. I suppose that which we all enjoy is the exercise of skill in winning.”

“And not for the sake of doing anything—just winning? Don’t you get tired of that?” asked Edith, quite simply.

There was something in Edith’s sincerity, in her fresh enthusiasm about life, that appeared to strike a reminiscent note in Henderson. Perhaps he remembered another face as sweet as hers, and ideals, faint and long ago, that were once mixed with his ideas of success. At any rate, it was with an accent of increased deference, and with a look she had not seen in his face before, that he said:

“People get tired of everything. I’m not sure but it would interest me to see for a minute how the world looks through your eyes.” And then he added, in a different tone, “As to your East Side, Mrs. Henderson tried that some years ago.”

“Wasn’t she interested?”

“Oh, very much. For a time. But she said there was too much of it.” And Edith could detect no tone of sarcasm in the remark.

Down at the other end of the table, matters were going very smoothly. Jack was charmed with his hostess. That clever woman had felt her way along from the heresy trial, through Tuxedo and the Independent Theatre and the Horse Show, until they were launched in a perfectly free conversation, and Carmen knew that she hadn’t to look out for thin ice.

“Were you thinking of going on to the Conventional Club tonight, Mr. Delancy?” she was saying.

“I don’t belong,” said Jack. “Mrs. Delancy said she didn’t care for it.”

“Oh, I don’t care for it, for myself,” replied Carmen.

“I do,” struck in Miss Tavish. “It’s awfully nice.”

“Yes, it does seem to fill a want. Why, what do you do with your evenings, Mr. Delancy?”

“Well, here’s one of them.”

“Yes, I know, but I mean between twelve o’clock and bedtime.”

“Oh,” said Jack, laughing out loud, “I go to bed—sometimes.”

“Yes, ‘there’s always that. But you want some place to go to after the theatres and the dinners; after the other places are shut up you want to go somewhere and be amused.”

“Yes,” said Jack, falling in, “it is a fact that there are not many places of amusement for the rich; I understand. After the theatres you want to be amused. This Conventional Club is—”

“I tell you what it is. It’s a sort of Midnight Mission for the rich. They never have had anything of the kind in the city.”

“And it’s very nice,” said Miss Tavish, demurely.

“The performers are selected. You can see things there that you want to see at other places to which you can’t go. And everybody you know is there.”

“Oh, I see,” said Jack. “It’s what the Independent Theatre is trying to do, and what all the theatrical people say needs to be done, to elevate the character of the audiences, and then the managers can give better plays.”

“That’s just it. We want to elevate the stage,” Carmen explained.

“But,” continued Jack, “it seems to me that now the audience is select and elevated, it wants to see the same sort of things it liked to see before it was elevated.”

“You may laugh, Mr. Delancy,” replied Carmen, throwing an earnest simplicity into her eyes, “but why shouldn’t women know what is going on as well as men?”

“And why,” Miss Tavish asked, “will the serpentine dances and the London topical songs do any more harm to women than to men?”

“And besides, Mr. Delancy,” Carmen said, chiming in, “isn’t it just as proper that women should see women dance and throw somersaults on the stage as that men should see them? And then, you know, women are such a restraining influence.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” said Jack. “I thought the Conventional was for the benefit of the audience, not for the salvation of the performers.”

“It’s both. It’s life. Don’t you think women ought to know life? How are they to take their place in the world unless they know life as men know it?”

“I’m sure I don’t know whose place they are to take, the serpentine dancer’s or mine,” said Jack, as if he were studying a problem. “How does your experiment get on, Miss Tavish?”

Carmen looked up quickly.

“Oh, I haven’t any experiment,” said Miss Tavish, shaking her head. “It’s just Mr. Delancy’s nonsense.”

“I wish I had an experiment. There is so little for women to do. I wish I knew what was right.” And Carmen looked mournfully demure, as if life, after all, were a serious thing with her.

“Whatever Mrs. Henderson does is sure to be right,” said Jack, gallantly.

Carmen shot at him a quick sympathetic glance, tempered by a grateful smile. “There are so many points of view.”

Jack felt the force of the remark as he did the revealing glance. And he had a swift vision of Miss Tavish leading him a serpentine dance, and of Carmen sweetly beckoning him to a pleasant point of view. After all it doesn’t much matter. Everything is in the point of view.

After dinner and cigars and cigarettes in the library, the talk dragged a little in duets. The dinner had been charming, the house was lovely, the company was most agreeable. All said that. It had been so somewhere else the night before that, and would be the next night. And the ennui of it all! No one expressed it, but Henderson could not help looking it, and Carmen saw it. That charming hostess had been devoting herself to Edith since dinner. She was so full of sympathy with the East-Side work, asked a hundred questions about it, and declared that she must take it up again. She would order a cage of canaries from that poor German for her kitchen. It was such a beautiful idea. But Edith did not believe in her one bit. She told Jack afterwards that “Mrs. Henderson cares no more for the poor of New York than she does for—”

“Henderson?” suggested Jack.

“Oh, I don’t know anything about that. Henderson has only one idea—to get the better of everybody, and be the money king of New York. But I should not wonder if he had once a soft spot in his heart. He is better than she is.”

It was still early, lacked half an hour of midnight, and the night was before them. Some one proposed the Conventional. “Yes,” said Carmen; “all come to our box.” The Van Dams would go, Miss Tavish, the Chesneys; the suggestion was a relief to everybody. Only Mr. Henderson pleaded important papers that must have his attention that night. Edith said that she was too tired, but that her desertion must not break up the party.

“Then you will excuse me also,” said Jack, a little shade of disappointment in his face.

“No, no,” said Edith, quickly; “you can drop me on the way. Go, by all means, Jack.”

“Do you really want me to go, dear?” said Jack, aside.

“Why of course; I want you to be happy.”

And Jack recalled the loving look that accompanied these words, later on, as he sat in the Henderson box at the Conventional, between Carmen and Miss Tavish, and saw, through the slight haze of smoke, beyond the orchestra, the praiseworthy efforts of the Montana Kicker, who had just returned with the imprimatur of Paris, to relieve the ennui of the modern world.

The complex affair we call the world requires a great variety of people to keep it going. At one o’clock in the morning Carmen and our friend Mr. Delancy and Miss Tavish were doing their part. Edith lay awake listening for Jack’s return. And in an alley off Rivington Street a young girl, pretty once, unknown to fortune but not to fame, was about to render the last service she could to the world by leaving it.

The impartial historian scarcely knows how to distribute his pathos. By the electric light (and that is the modern light) gayety is almost as pathetic as suffering. Before the Montana girl hit upon the happy device that gave her notoriety, her feet, whose every twinkle now was worth a gold eagle, had trod a thorny path. There was a fortune now in the whirl of her illusory robes, but any day—such are the whims of fashion—she might be wandering again, sick at heart, about the great city, knocking at the side doors of variety shows for any engagement that would give her a pittance of a few dollars a week. How long had Carmen waited on the social outskirts; and now she had come into her kingdom, was she anything but a tinsel queen? Even Henderson, the great Henderson, did the friends of his youth respect him? had he public esteem? Carmen used to cut out the newspaper paragraphs that extolled Henderson’s domestic virtue and his generosity to his family, and show them to her lord, with a queer smile on her face. Miss Tavish, in the nervous consciousness of fleeting years, was she not still waiting, dashing here and there like a bird in a net for the sort of freedom, audacious as she was, that seemed denied her? She was still beautiful, everybody said, and she was sought and flattered, because she was always merry and good-natured. Why should Van Dam, speaking of women, say that there were horses that had been set up, and checked up and trained, that held their heads in an aristocratic fashion, moved elegantly, and showed style, long after the spirit had gone out of them? And Jack himself, happily married, with a comfortable income, why was life getting flat to him? What sort of career was it that needed the aid of Carmen and the serpentine dancer? And why not, since it is absolutely necessary that the world should be amused?

We are in no other world when we enter the mean tenement in the alley off Rivington Street. Here also is the life of the town. The room is small, but it contains a cook-stove, a chest of drawers, a small table, a couple of chairs, and two narrow beds. On the top of the chest are a looking-glass, some toilet articles, and bottles of medicine. The cracked walls are bare and not clean. In one of the beds are two children, sleeping soundly, and on the foot of it is a middle-aged woman, in a soiled woolen gown with a thin figured shawl drawn about her shoulders, a dirty cap half concealing her frowzy hair; she looks tired and worn and sleepy. On the other bed lies a girl of twenty years, a woman in experience. The kerosene lamp on the stand at the head of the bed casts a spectral light on her flushed face, and the thin arms that are restlessly thrown outside the cover. By the bedside sits the doctor, patient, silent, and watchful. The doctor puts her hand caressingly on that of the girl. It is hot and dry. The girl opens her eyes with a startled look, and says, feebly:

“Do you think he will come?”

“Yes, dear, presently. He never fails.”

The girl closed her eyes again, and there was silence. The dim rays of the lamp, falling upon the doctor, revealed the figure of a woman of less than medium size, perhaps of the age of thirty or more, a plain little body, you would have said, who paid the slightest possible attention to her dress, and when she went about the city was not to be distinguished from a working-woman. Her friends, indeed, said that she had not the least care for her personal appearance, and unless she was watched, she was sure to go out in her shabbiest gown and most battered hat. She wore tonight a brown ulster and a nondescript black bonnet drawn close down on her head and tied with black strings. In her lap lay her leathern bag, which she usually carried under her arm, that contained medicines, lint, bandages, smelling-salts, a vial of ammonia, and so on; to her patients it was a sort of conjurer’s bag, out of which she could produce anything that an emergency called for.

Dr. Leigh was not in the least nervous or excited. Indeed, an artist would not have painted her as a rapt angelic visitant to this abode of poverty. This contact with poverty and coming death was quite in her ordinary experience. It would never have occurred to her that she was doing anything unusual, any more than it would have occurred to the objects of her ministrations to overwhelm her with thanks. They trusted her, that was all. They met her always with a pleasant recognition. She belonged perhaps to their world. Perhaps they would have said that “Dr. Leigh don’t handsome much,” but their idea was that her face was good. That was what anybody would have said who saw her tonight, “She has such a good face;” the face of a woman who knew the world, and perhaps was not very sanguine about it, had few illusions and few antipathies, but accepted it, and tried in her humble way to alleviate its hardships, without any consciousness of having a mission or making a sacrifice.

Dr. Leigh—Miss Ruth Leigh—was Edith’s friend. She had not come from the country with an exalted notion of being a worker among the poor about whom so much was written; she had not even descended from some high circle in the city into this world, moved by a restless enthusiasm for humanity. She was a woman of the people, to adopt a popular phrase. From her childhood she had known them, their wants, their sympathies, their discouragements; and in her heart—though you would not discover this till you had known her long and well—there was a burning sympathy with them, a sympathy born in her, and not assumed for the sake of having a career. It was this that had impelled her to get a medical education, which she obtained by hard labor and self-denial. To her this was not a means of livelihood, but simply that she might be of service to those all about her who needed help more than she did. She didn’t believe in charity, this stout-hearted, clearheaded little woman; she meant to make everybody pay for her medical services who could pay; but somehow her practice was not lucrative, and the little salary she got as a dispensary doctor melted away with scarcely any perceptible improvement in her own wardrobe. Why, she needed nothing, going about as she did.

She sat—now waiting for the end; and the good face, so full of sympathy for the living, had no hope in it. Just another human being had come to the end of her path—the end literally. It was so everyday. Somebody came to the end, and there was nothing beyond. Only it was the end, and that was peace. One o’clock—half-past one. The door opened softly. The old woman rose from the foot of the bed with a start and a low “Herr! gross Gott.” It was Father Damon. The girl opened her eyes with a frightened look at first, and then an eager appeal. Dr. Leigh rose to make room for him at the bedside. They bowed as he came forward, and their eyes met. She shook her head. In her eyes was no expectation, no hope. In his was the glow of faith. But the eyes of the girl rested upon his face with a rapt expression. It was as if an angel had entered the room.

Father Damon was a young man, not yet past thirty, slender, erect. He had removed as he came in his broad-brimmed soft hat. The hair was close-cut, but not tonsured. He wore a brown cassock, falling in straight lines, and confined at the waist with a white cord. From his neck depended from a gold chain a large gold cross. His face was smooth-shaven, thin, intellectual, or rather spiritual; the nose long, the mouth straight, the eyes deep gray, sometimes dreamy and puzzling, again glowing with an inner fervor. A face of long vigils and the schooled calmness of repressed energy. You would say a fanatic of God, with a dash of self-consciousness. Dr. Leigh knew him well. They met often on their diverse errands, and she liked, when she could, to go to vespers in the little mission chapel of St. Anselm, where he ministered. It was not the confessional that attracted her, that was sure; perhaps not altogether the service, though that was soothing in certain moods; but it was the noble personality of Father Damon. He was devoted to the people as she was, he understood them; and for the moment their passion of humanity assumed the same aspect, though she knew that what he saw, or thought he saw, lay beyond her agnostic vision.

Father Damon was an Englishman, a member of a London Anglican order, who had taken the three vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, who had been for some years in New York, and had finally come to live on the East Side, where his work was. In a way he had identified himself with the people; he attended their clubs; he was a Christian socialist; he spoke on the inequalities of taxation; the strikers were pretty sure of his sympathy; he argued the injustice of the present ownership of land. Some said that he had joined a lodge of the Knights of Labor. Perhaps it was these things, quite as much as his singleness of purpose and his spiritual fervor, that drew Dr. Leigh to him with a feeling that verged on devotion. The ladies up-town, at whose tables Father Damon was an infrequent guest, were as fully in sympathy with this handsome and aristocratic young priest, and thought it beautiful that he should devote himself to the poor and the sinful; but they did not see why he should adopt their views.

It was at the mission that Father Damon had first seen the girl. She had ventured in not long ago at twilight, with her cough and her pale face, in a silk gown and flower-garden of a hat, and crept into one of the confessional boxes, and told him her story.

“Do you think, Father,” said the girl, looking up wistfully, “that I can—can be forgiven?”

Father Damon looked down sadly, pitifully. “Yes, my daughter, if you repent. It is all with our Father. He never refuses.”

He knelt down, with his cross in his hand, and in a low voice repeated the prayer for the dying. As the sweet, thrilling voice went on in supplication the girl’s eyes closed again, and a sweet smile played about her mouth; it was the innocent smile of the little girl long ago, when she might have awakened in the morning and heard the singing of birds at her window.

When Father Damon arose she seemed to be sleeping. They all stood in silence for a moment.

“You will remain?” he asked the doctor.

“Yes,” she said, with the faintest wan smile on her face. “It is I, you know, who have care of the body.”

At the door he turned and said, quite low, “Peace be to this house!”

VI

Father Damon came dangerously near to being popular. The austerity of his life and his known self-chastening vigils contributed to this effect. His severely formal, simple ecclesiastical dress, coarse in material but perfect in its saintly lines, separated him from the world in which he moved so unostentatiously and humbly, and marked him as one who went about doing good. His life was that of self-absorption and hardship, mortification of the body, denial of the solicitation of the senses, struggling of the spirit for more holiness of purpose—a life of supplication for the perishing souls about him. And yet he was so informed with the modern spirit that he was not content, as a zealot formerly might have been, to snatch souls out of the evil that is in the world, but he strove to lessen the evil. He was a reformer. It was probably this feature of his activity, and not his spiritual mission, that attracted to him the little group of positivists on the East Side, the demagogues of the labor lodges, the practical workers of the working-girls’ clubs, and the humanitarian agnostics like Dr. Leigh, who were literally giving their lives without the least expectation of reward. Even the refined ethical-culture groups had no sneer for Father Damon. The little chapel of St. Anselm was well known. It was always open. It was plain, but its plainness was not the barrenness of a non-conformist chapel. There were two confessionals; a great bronze lamp attached to one of the pillars scarcely dispelled the obscurity, but cast an unnatural light upon the gigantic crucifix that hung from a beam in front of the chancel. There were half a dozen rows of backless benches in the centre of the chapel. The bronze lamp, and the candles always burning upon the altar, rather accented than dissipated the heavy shadows in the vaulted roof. At no hour was it empty, but at morning prayer and at vespers the benches were apt to be filled, and groups of penitents or spectators were kneeling or standing on the floor. At vespers there were sure to be carriages in front of the door, and among the kneeling figures were ladies who brought into these simple services for the poor something of the refinement of grace as it is in the higher circles. Indeed, at the hour set apart for confession, there were in the boxes saints from up-town as well as sinners from the slums. Sometimes the sinners were from up-town and the saints from the slums.

When the organ sounded, and through a low door in the chancel the priest entered, preceded by a couple of acolytes, and advanced swiftly to the reading-desk, there was an awed hush in the congregation. One would not dare to say that there was a sentimental feeling for the pale face and rapt expression of the devotee. It was more than that. He had just come from some scene of suffering, from the bed of one dying; he was weary with watching. He was faint with lonely vigils; he was visibly carrying the load of the poor and the despised. Even Ruth Leigh, who had dropped in for half an hour in one of her daily rounds—even Ruth Leigh, who had in her stanch, practical mind a contempt for forms and rituals, and no faith in anything that she could not touch, and who at times was indignant at the efforts wasted over the future of souls concerning which no one knew anything, when there were so many bodies, which had inherited disease and poverty and shame, going to worldly wreck before so-called Christian eyes—even she could scarcely keep herself from adoring this self-sacrificing spirit. The woes of humanity grieved him as they grieved her, and she used to say she did not care what he believed so long as he gave his life for the needy.

It was when he advanced to the altar-rail to speak that the man best appeared. His voice, which was usually low and full of melody, could be something terrible when it rose in denunciation of sin. Those who had traveled said that he had the manner of a preaching friar—the simple language, so refined and yet so homely and direct, the real, the inspired word, the occasional hastening torrent of words. When he had occasion to address one of the societies of ladies for the promotion of something among the poor, his style and manner were simplicity itself. One might have said there was a shade of contempt in his familiar and not seldom slightly humorous remarks upon society and its aims and aspirations, about which he spoke plainly and vigorously. And this was what the ladies liked. Especially when he referred to the pitifulness of class distinctions, in the light of the example of our Lord, in our short pilgrimage in this world. This unveiling and denunciation made them somehow feel nearer to their work, and, indeed, while they sat there, co-workers with this apostle of righteousness.

Perhaps there was something in the priestly dress that affected not only the congregation in the chapel, but all the neighborhood in which Father Damon lived. There was in the long robe, with its feminine lines, an assurance to the women that he was set apart and not as others were; and, on the other hand, the semi-feminine suggestion of the straight-falling garment may have had for the men a sort of appeal for defense and even protection. It is certain, at any rate, that Father Damon had the confidence of high and low, rich and poor. The forsaken sought him out, the hungry went to him, the dying sent for him, the criminal knocked at the door of his little room, even the rich reprobate would have opened his bad heart to him sooner than to any one else. It is evident, therefore, that Father Damon was dangerously near to being popular. Human vanity will feed on anything within its reach, and there has been discovered yet no situation that will not minister to its growth. Suffering perhaps it prefers, and contumely and persecution. Are not opposition, despiteful anger, slander even, rejection of men, stripes even, if such there could be in these days, manna to the devout soul consciously set apart for a mission? But success, obsequiousness, applause, the love of women, the concurrent good opinion of all humanitarians, are these not almost as dangerous as persecution? Father Damon, though exalted in his calling, and filled with a burning zeal, was a sincere man, and even his eccentricities of saintly conduct expressed to his mind only the high purpose of self-sacrifice. Yet he saw, he could not but see, the spiritual danger in this rising tide of adulation. He fought against its influence, he prayed against it, he tried to humiliate himself, and his very humiliations increased the adulation. He was perplexed, almost ashamed, and examined himself to see how it was that he himself seemed to be thwarting his own work. Sometimes he withdrew from it for a week together, and buried himself in a retreat in the upper part of the island. Alas! did ever a man escape himself in a retreat? It made him calm for the moment. But why was it, he asked himself, that he had so many followers, his religion so few? Why was it, he said, that all the humanitarians, the reformers, the guilds, the ethical groups, the agnostics, the male and female knights, sustained him, and only a few of the poor and friendless knocked, by his solicitation, at the supernatural door of life? How was it that a woman whom he encountered so often, a very angel of mercy, could do the things he was doing, tramping about in the misery and squalor of the great city day and night, her path unilluminated by a ray from the future life?

Perhaps he had been remiss in his duty. Perhaps he was letting a vague philanthropy take the place of a personal solicitude for individual souls. The elevation of the race! What had the land question to do with the salvation of man? Suppose everybody on the East Side should become as industrious, as self-denying, as unselfish as Ruth Leigh, and yet without belief, without hope! He had accepted the humanitarian situation with her, and never had spoken to her of the eternal life. What unfaithfulness to his mission and to her! It should be so no longer.

It was after one of his weeks of retreat, at the close of vesper service, that Dr. Leigh came to him. He had been saying in his little talk that poverty is no excuse for irreligion, and that all aid in the hardship of this world was vain and worthless unless the sinner laid hold on eternal life. Dr. Leigh, who was laboring with a serious practical problem, heard this coldly, and with a certain contempt for what seemed to her a vague sort of consolation.

“Well,” he said, when she came to him in the vestry, with a drop from the rather austere manner in which he had spoken, “what can I do for you?”

“For me, nothing, Father Damon. I thought perhaps you would go round with me to see a pretty bad case. It is in your parish.”

“Ah, did they send for me? Do they want spiritual help?”

“First the natural, then the spiritual,” she replied, with a slight tone of sarcasm in her voice. “That’s just like a priest,” she was thinking. “I do not know what to do, and something must be done.”

“Did you report to the Associated Charities?”

“Yes. But there’s a hitch somewhere. The machine doesn’t take hold. The man says he doesn’t want any charity, any association, treating him like a pauper. He’s off peddling; but trade is bad, and he’s been away a week. I’m afraid he drinks a little.”

“Well?”

“The mother is sick in bed. I found her trying to do some fine stitching, but she was too weak to hold up the muslin. There are five young children. The family never has had help before.”

Father Damon put on his hat, and they went out together, and for some time picked their way along the muddy streets in silence.

At length he asked, in a softened voice, “Is the mother a Christian?”

“I didn’t ask,” she replied shortly. “I found her crying because the children were hungry.”

Father Damon, still under the impression of his neglect of duty, did not heed her warning tone, but persisted, “You have so many opportunities, Dr. Leigh, in your visits of speaking a word.”

“About what?” she asked, refusing to understand, and hardened at the slightest sign of what she called cant.

“About the necessity of repentance and preparation for another life,” he answered, softly but firmly. “You surely do not think human beings are created just for this miserable little experience here?”

“I don’t know. I have too much to do with the want and suffering I see to raise anxieties about a world of which no one can possibly know anything.”

“Pardon me,” he persisted, “have you no sense of incompleteness in this life, in your own life? no inward consciousness of an undying personality?”

The doctor was angry for a moment at this intrusion. It had seemed natural enough for Father Damon to address his exhortations to the poor and sinful of his mission. She admired his spirit, she had a certain sympathy with him; for who could say that ministering to minds diseased might not have a physical influence to lift these people into a more decent and prosperous way of living? She had thought of herself as working with him to a common end. But for him now to turn upon her, absolutely ignoring the solid, rational, and scientific ground on which he knew, or should know, she stood, and to speak to her as one of the “lost,” startled her, and filled her with indignation. She had on her lips a sarcastic reply to the effect that even if she had a soul, she had not taken up her work in the city as a means of saving it; but she was not given to sarcasm, and before she spoke she looked at her companion, and saw in the eyes a look of such genuine humble feeling, contradicting the otherwise austere expression of his face, that her momentary bitterness passed away.

“I think, Father Damon,” she said, gently, “we had better not talk of that. I don’t have much time for theorizing, you know, nor much inclination,” she added.

The priest saw that for the present he could make no progress, and after a little silence the conversation went back to the family they were about to visit.

They found the woman better—at least, more cheerful. Father Damon noticed that there were medicines upon the stand, and that there were the remains of a meal which the children had been eating. He turned to the doctor. “I see that you have been providing for them.”

“Oh, the eldest boy had already been out and begged a piece of bread when I came. Of course they had to have something more at once. But it is very little that I can do.”

He sat down by the bed, and talked with the mother, getting her story, while the doctor tidied up the room a bit, and then, taking the youngest child in her lap and drawing the others about her, began to tell a story in a low voice. Presently she was aware that the priest was on his knees and saying a prayer. She stopped in her story, and looked out through the dirty window into the chill and dark area.

“What is he doing?” whispered one of the children.

“I don’t know,” she said, and a sort of chill came over her heart. It all seemed a mockery, in these surroundings.

When he rose he said to the woman, “We will see that you do not want till your husband comes back.”

“And I will look in tomorrow,” said the doctor.

When they were in the street, Father Damon thanked her for calling his attention to the case, thanked her a little formally, and said that he would make inquiries and have it properly attended to. And then he asked: “Is your work ended for the day? You must be tired.”

“Oh, no; I have several visits to make. I’m not tired. I rather think it is good for me, being out-of-doors so much.” She thanked him, and said good-by.

For a moment he stood and watched the plain, resolute little woman threading her way through the crowded and unclean street, and then slowly walked away to his apartment, filled with sadness and perplexity.

The apartment which he occupied was not far from the mission chapel, and it was the one clean spot among the ill-kept tenements; but as to comfort, it was not much better than the cell of an anchorite. Of this, however, he was not thinking as he stretched himself out on his pallet to rest a little from the exhausting labors of the day. Probably it did not occur to him that his self-imposed privations lessened his strength for his work.

He was thinking of Ruth Leigh. What a rare soul! And yet apparently she did not think or care whether she had a soul. What could be the spring of her incessant devotion? If ever woman went about doing good in an unselfish spirit it was she. Yet she confessed her work hopeless. She had no faith, no belief in immortality, no expectation of any reward, nothing to offer to anybody beyond this poor life. Was this the enthusiasm of humanity, of which he heard so much? But she did not seem to have any illusions, or to be burned up by enthusiasm. She just kept on. Ah, he thought, what a woman she would be if she were touched by the fire of faith!

Meantime, Ruth Leigh went on her round. One day was like another, except that every day the kaleidoscope of misery showed new combinations, new phases of suffering and incompetence, and there was always a fresh interest in that. For years now this had been her life, in the chill of winter and the heat of summer, without rest or vacation. The amusements, the social duties, the allurements of dress and society, that so much occupied the thoughts of other women, did not seem to come into her life. For books she had little time, except the books of her specialty. The most exciting novels were pale compared with her daily experiences of real life. Almost her only recreation was a meeting of the working-girls, a session of her labor lodge, or an assembly at the Cooper Union, where some fiery orator, perhaps a priest, or a clever agitator, a working-man glib of speech, who had a mass of statistics at the end of his tongue, who read and discussed, in some private club of zealots of humanity, metaphysics, psychology, and was familiar with the whole literature of labor and socialism, awoke the enthusiasm of the discontented or the unemployed, and where men and women, in clear but homely speech, told their individual experiences of wrong and injustice. There was evidence in all these demonstrations and organizations that the world was moving, and that the old order must change.

Years and years the little woman had gone on with her work, and she frankly confessed to Edith, one day when they were together going her rounds, that she could see no result from it all. The problem of poverty and helplessness and incapacity seemed to her more hopeless than when she began. There might be a little enlightenment here and there, but there was certainly not less misery. The state of things was worse than she thought at first; but one thing cheered her: the people were better than she thought. They might be dull and suspicious in the mass, but she found so much patience, unselfishness, so many people of good hearts and warm affections.

“They are the people,” she said, “I should choose for friends. They are natural, unsophisticated. And do you know,” she went on, “that what most surprises me is the number of reading, thoughtful people among those who do manual labor. I doubt if on your side of town the best books, the real fundamental and abstruse books, are so read and discussed, or the philosophy of life is so seriously considered, as in certain little circles of what you call the working-classes.”

“Isn’t it all very revolutionary?” asked Edith.

“Perhaps,” replied the doctor, dryly. “But they have no more fads than other people. Their theories seem to them not only practical, but they try to apply them to actual legislation; at any rate, they discriminate in vagaries. You would have been amused the other night in a small circle at the lamentations over a member—he was a car-driver—who was the authoritative expositor of Schopenhauer, because he had gone off into Theosophy. It showed such weakness.”

“I have heard that the members of that circle were Nihilists.”

“The club has not that name, but probably the members would not care to repudiate the title, or deny that they were Nihilists theoretically—that is, if Nihilism means an absolute social and political overturning in order that something better may be built up. And, indeed, if you see what a hopeless tangle our present situation is, where else can the mind logically go?”

“It is pitiful enough,” Edith admitted. “But all this movement you speak of seems to me a vague agitation.”

“I don’t think,” the doctor said, after a moment, “that you appreciate the intellectual force that is in it all, or allow for the fermenting power in the great discontented mass of these radical theories on the problem of life.”

This was a specimen of the sort of talk that Edith and the doctor often drifted into in their mission work. As Ruth Leigh tramped along late this afternoon in the slush of the streets, from one house of sickness and poverty to another, a sense of her puny efforts in this great mass of suffering and injustice came over her anew. Her indignation rose against the state of things. And Father Damon, who was trying to save souls, was he accomplishing anything more than she? Why had he been so curt with her when she went to him for help this afternoon? Was he just a narrow-minded, bigoted priest? A few nights before she had heard him speak on the single tax at a labor meeting. She recalled his eloquence, his profound sympathy with the cause of the people, the thrilling, pathetic voice, the illumination of his countenance, the authority, the consecration in his attitude and dress; and he was transfigured to her then, as he was now in her thought, into an apostle of humanity. Alas! she thought, what a leader he would be if he would break loose from his superstitious traditions!

VII

The acquaintance between the house of Henderson and the house of Delancy was not permitted to languish. Jack had his reasons for it, which may have been financial, and Carmen had her reasons, which were probably purely social. What was the good of money if it did not bring social position? and what, on the other hand, was the good of social position if you could not use it to get money?

In his recent association with the newly rich, Jack’s twenty thousand a year began to seem small. In fact, in the lowering of the rate of interest and the shrinkage of securities, it was no longer twenty thousand a year. This would have been a matter of little consequence in the old order. His lot was not cast among the poor; most of his relations had solid fortunes, and many of them were millionaires, or what was equivalent to that, before the term was invented. But they made little display; none at all merely for the purpose of exhibition, or to gain or keep social place. In this atmosphere in which he was born Jack floated along without effort, with no demand upon him to keep up with a rising standard of living. Even impecuniosity, though inconvenient, would not have made him lose caste.

All this was changing now. Since the introduction of a new element even the conservative old millions had begun to feel the stir of uneasiness, and to launch out into extravagance in rivalry with the new millions. Even with his relations Jack began to feel that he was poor. It did not spur him to do anything, to follow the example, for instance, of the young fellows from the country, who were throwing themselves into Wall Street with the single purpose of becoming suddenly rich, but it made him uneasy. And when he was with the Hendersons, or Miss Tavish, whose father, though not newly rich, was one of the most aggressive of speculators, and saw how easily every luxurious desire glided into fulfillment, he felt for the first time in his life the emotion of envy. It seemed then that only unlimited money could make the world attractive. Why, even to keep up with the unthinking whims of Miss Tavish would bankrupt him in six months. That little spread at Wherry’s for the theatre party the other night, though he made light of it to Edith, was almost the price he couldn’t afford to pay for Storm. He had a grim thought that midwinter flowers made dining as expensive as dying. Carmen, whom nothing escaped, complimented him on his taste, quite aware that he couldn’t afford it, and, apropos, told him of a lady in Chicago who, hearing that the fashion had changed, wrote on her dinner cards, “No flowers.” It was only a matter of course for these people to build a new country-house in any spot that fashion for the moment indicated, to equip their yachts for a Mediterranean voyage or for loitering down the Southern coast, to give a ball that was the talk of the town, to make up a special train of luxurious private cars for Mexico or California. Even at the clubs the talk was about these things and the opportunities for getting them.

There was a rumor about town that Henderson was a good deal extended. It alarmed a hundred people, not on Henderson’s account, but their own. When one of them consulted Uncle Jerry, that veteran smiled.

“Oh, I guess Henderson’s all right. But I wouldn’t wonder if it meant a squeeze. Of course if he’s extended, it’s an excuse for settling up, and the shorts will squeal. I’ve seen Henderson extended a good many times,” and the old man laughed. “Don’t you worry about him.”

This opinion, when reported, did not seem to quiet Jack’s fears, who saw his own little venture at the mercy of a sweeping Street game. It occurred to him that he possibly might get a little light on the matter by dropping in that afternoon and taking a quiet cup of tea with Mrs. Henderson.

He found her in the library. Outdoors winter was slouching into spring with a cold drizzle, with a coating of ice on the pavements-animating weather for the medical profession. Within, there was the glow of warmth and color that Carmen liked to create for herself. In an entrancing tea-gown, she sat by a hickory fire, with a fresh magazine in one hand and a big paper-cutter in the other. She rose at Jack’s entrance, and, extending her hand, greeted him with a most cordial smile. It was so good of him! She was so lonesome! He could himself see that the lonesomeness was dissipated, as she seated him in a comfortable chair by the fire, and then stood a moment looking at him, as if studying his comfort. She was such a domestic woman!

“You look tired, monsieur,” she said, as she passed behind his chair and rested the tip of her forefinger for a second on his head. “I shall make you a cup of tea at once.”

“Not tired, but bothered,” said Jack, stretching out his legs.

“I know,” she replied; “it’s a bothering world.” She was still behind him, and spoke low, but with sympathy. “I remember, it’s only one lump.”

He could feel her presence, so womanly and friendly. “I don’t care what people say,” he was thinking, “she’s a good-hearted little thing, and understands men.” He felt that he could tell her anything, almost anything that he could tell a man. She was sympathetic and not squeamish.

“There,” she said, handing him the tea and looking down on him.

The cup was dainty, the fragrance of the tea delicious, the woman exquisite.

“I’m better already,” said Jack, with a laugh.

She made a cup for herself, handed him the cigarettes, lit one for herself, and sat on a low stool not far from him.

“Now what is it?”

“Oh, nothing—a little business worry. Have you heard any Street rumor?”

“Rumor?” she repeated, with a little start. And then, leaning forward, “Do you mean that about Mr. Henderson in the morning papers?”

“Yes.”

Carmen, relieved, gave a liquid little laugh, and then said, with a change to earnestness: “I’m going to trust you, my friend. Henderson put it in himself! He told me so this morning when I asked him about it. This is just between ourselves.”

Jack said, “Of course,” but he did not look relieved. The clever creature divined the situation without another word, for there was no turn in the Street that she was not familiar with. But there was no apparent recognition of it, except in her sympathetic tone, when she said: “Well, the world is full of annoyances. I’m bothered myself—and such a little thing.”

“What is it?”

“Oh nothing, not even a rumor. You cannot do anything about it. I don’t know why I should tell you. But I will.” And she paused a moment, looking down in an innocent perplexity. “It’s just this: I am on the Foundlings’ Board with Mrs. Schuyler Blunt, and I don’t know her, and you can’t think how awkward it is having to meet her every week in that stiff kind of way.” She did not go on to confide to Jack how she had intrigued to get on the board, and how Mrs. Schuyler Blunt, in the most well-bred manner, had practically ignored her.

“She’s an old friend of mine.”

“Indeed! She’s a charming woman.”

“Yes. We were great cronies when she was Sadie Mack. She isn’t a genius, but she is good-hearted. I suppose she is on all the charity boards in the city. She patronizes everything,” Jack continued, with a smile.

“I’m sure she is,” said Carmen, thinking that however good-hearted she might be she was very “snubby.” “And it makes it all the more awkward, for I am interested in so many things myself.”

“I can arrange all that,” Jack said, in an off-hand way. Carmen’s look of gratitude could hardly be distinguished from affection. “That’s easy enough. We are just as good friends as ever, though I fancy she doesn’t altogether approve of me lately. It’s rather nice for a fellow, Mrs. Henderson, to have a lot of women keeping him straight, isn’t it?” asked Jack, in the tone of a bad boy.

“Yes. Between us all we will make a model of you. I am so glad now that I told you.”

Jack protested that it was nothing. Why shouldn’t friends help each other? Why not, indeed, said Carmen, and the talk went on a good deal about friendship, and the possibility of it between a man and a woman. This sort of talk is considered serious and even deep, not to say philosophic. Carmen was a great philosopher in it. She didn’t know, but she believed, it seemed natural, that every woman should have one man friend. Jack rose to go.

“So soon?” And it did seem pathetically soon. She gave him her hand, and then by an impulse she put her left hand over his, and looked up to him in quite a business way.

“Mr. Delancy, don’t you be troubled about that rumor we were speaking of. It will be all right. Trust me.”

He understood perfectly, and expressed both his understanding and his gratitude by bending over and kissing the little hand that lay in his.

When he had gone, Carmen sat a long time by the fire reflecting. It would be sweet to humiliate the Delancy and Schuyler Blunt set, as Henderson could. But what would she gain by that? It would be sweeter still to put them under obligations, and profit by that. She had endured a good many social rebuffs in her day, this tolerant little woman, and the sting of their memory could only be removed when the people who had ignored her had to seek social favors she could give. If Henderson only cared as much for such things as she did! But he was at times actually brutal about it. He seemed to have only one passion. She herself liked money, but only for what it would bring. Henderson was like an old Pharaoh, who was bound to build the biggest pyramid ever built to his memory; he hated to waste a block. But what was the good of that when one had passed beyond the reach of envy?

Revolving these deep things in her mind, she went to her dressing-room and made an elaborate toilet for dinner. Yet it was elaborately simple. That sort needed more study than the other. She would like to be the Carmen of ten years ago in Henderson’s eyes.

Her lord came home late, and did not dress for dinner. It was often so, and the omission was usually not allowed to pass by Carmen without notice, to which Henderson was sure to growl that he didn’t care to be always on dress parade. Tonight Carmen was all graciousness and warmth. Henderson did not seem to notice it. He ate his dinner abstractedly, and responded only in monosyllables to her sweet attempts at conversation. The fact was that the day had been a perplexing one; he was engaged in one of his big fights, a scheme that aroused all his pugnacity and taxed all his resources. He would win—of course; he would smash everybody, but he would win. When he was in this mood Carmen felt that she was like a daisy in the path of a cyclone. In the first year of their marriage he used to consult her about all his schemes, and value her keen understanding. She wondered why he did not now. Did he distrust even her, as he did everybody else? Tonight she asked no questions. She was unruffled by his short responses to her conversational attempts; by her subtle, wifely manner she simply put herself on his side, whatever the side was.

In the library she brought him his cigar, and lighted it. She saw that his coffee was just as he liked it. As she moved about, making things homelike, Henderson noticed that she was more Carmenish than he had seen her in a long time. The sweet ways and the simple toilet must be by intention. And he knew her so well. He began to be amused and softened. At length he said, in his ordinary tone, “Well, what is it?”

“What is what, dear?”

“What do you want?”

Carmen looked perplexed and sweetly surprised. There is nothing so pitiful about habitual hypocrisy as that it never deceives anybody. It was not the less painful now that Carmen knew that Henderson knew her to the least fibre of her self-seeking soul, and that she felt that there were currents in his life that she could not calculate. A man is so much more difficult to understand than a woman, she reflected. And yet he is so susceptible that he can be managed even when he knows he is being managed. Carmen was not disconcerted for a moment. She replied, with her old candor:

“What an idea! You give me everything I want before I know what it is.”

“And before I know it either,” he responded, with a grim smile. “Well, what is the news today?”

“Just the same old round. The Foundlings’ Board, for one thing.”

“Are you interested in foundlings?”

“Not much,” said Carmen, frankly. “I’m interested in those that find them. I told you how hateful that Mrs. Schuyler Blunt is.”

“Why don’t you cut her? Why don’t you make it uncomfortable for her?”

“I can’t find out,” she said, with a laugh, dropping into the language of the Street, “anything she is short in, or I would.”

“And you want me to get a twist on old Blunt?” and Henderson roared with laughter at the idea.

“No, indeed. Dear, you are just a goose, socially. It is nothing to you, but you don’t understand what we women have to go through. You don’t know how hard it is—that woman!”

“What has she done?”

“Nothing. That’s just it. What do you say in the Street—freeze? Well, she is trying to freeze me out.”

Henderson laughed again. “Oh, I’ll back you against the field.”

“I don’t want to be backed,” said Carmen; “I want some sympathy.”

“Well, what is your idea?”

“I was going to tell you. Mr. Delancy dropped in this afternoon for a cup of tea—”

“Oh!”

“Yes, and he knows Mrs. Schuyler Blunt well; they are old friends, and he is going to arrange it.”

“Arrange what?”

“Why, smooth everything out, don’t you know. But, Rodney, I do want you to do something for me; not for me exactly, but about this. Won’t you look out for Mr. Delancy in this deal?”

“Seems to me you are a good deal interested in Jack Delancy,” said Henderson, in a sneering tone. The remark was a mistake, for it gave Carmen the advantage, and he did not believe it was just. He knew that Carmen was as passionless as a diamond, whatever even she might pretend for a purpose.

“Aren’t you ashamed!” she cried, with indignation, and her eyes flared for an instant and then filled with tears. “And I try so hard.”

“But I can’t look out for all the lame ducks.”

“He isn’t a duck,” said Carmen, using her handkerchief; “I’d hate him for a duck. It’s just to help me, when you know, when you know—and it is so hard,” and the tears came again.

Did Henderson believe? After all, what did it matter? Perhaps, after all, the woman had a right to her game, as he had to his.

“Oh, well,” he said, “don’t take on about it. I’ll fix it. I’ll make a memorandum this minute. Only don’t you bother me in the future with too many private kites.”

Carmen dried her eyes. She did not look triumphant; she just looked sweet and grateful, like a person who had been helped. She went over and kissed her lord on the forehead, and sat on the arm of his chair, not too long, and then patted him on the shoulder, and said he was a good fellow, and she was a little bother, and so went away like a dutiful little wife.

And Henderson sat looking into the fire and musing, with the feeling that he had been at the theatre, and that the comedy had been beautifully played.

His part of the play was carried out next day in good faith. One of the secrets of Henderson’s success was that he always did what he said he would do. This attracted men to him personally, and besides he found, as Bismarck did, that it was more serviceable to him than lying, for the crafty world usually banks upon insincerity and indirectness. But while he kept his word he also kept his schemes to himself, and executed them with a single regard to his own interest and a Napoleonic selfishness. He did not lie to enemy or friend, but he did not spare either when either was in his way. He knew how to appeal to the self-interest of his fellows, and in time those who had most to do with him trusted him least when he seemed most generous in his offers.

When, the next day, his secretary reported to him briefly that Delancy was greatly elated with the turn things had taken for him, and was going in again, Henderson smiled sardonically, and said, “It was the worst thing I could have done for him.”

Jack, who did not understand the irony of his temporary rescue, and had little experience of commercial integrity, so called, was intent on fulfilling his part of the understanding with Carmen. This could best be effected by a return dinner to the Hendersons. The subject was broached at breakfast in an off-hand manner to Edith.

It was not an agreeable subject to Edith, that was evident; but it was not easy for her to raise objections to the dinner. She had gone to the Hendersons’ to please Jack, in her policy of yielding in order to influence him; but having accepted the hospitality, she could not object to returning it. The trouble was in making the list.

“I do not know,” said Edith, “who are the Hendersons’ friends.”

“Oh, that doesn’t matter. Ask our friends. If we are going to do a thing to please them, no use in doing it half-way, so as to offend them, by drawing social lines against them.”

“Well, suggest.”

“There’s Mavick; he’ll be over from Washington next week.”

“That’s good; and, oh, I’ll ask Father Damon.”

“Yes; he’ll give a kind of flavor to it. I shouldn’t wonder if he would like to meet such a man as Henderson.”

“And then the Van Dams and Miss Tavish; they were at Henderson’s, and would help to make it easy.”

“Yes; well, let’s see. The Schuyler Blunts?”

“Oh, they wouldn’t do at all. They wouldn’t come. She wouldn’t think of going to the Hendersons’.”

“But she would come to us. I don’t think she would mind once in a way.”

“But why do you want them?”

“I don’t want them particularly; but it would no doubt please the Hendersons more than any other thing we could do-and, well, I don’t want to offend Henderson just now. It’s a little thing, anyway. What’s the use of all this social nonsense? We are not responsible for either the Hendersons or the Blunts being in the world. No harm done if they don’t come. You invite them, and I’ll take the responsibility.”

So it was settled, against Edith’s instinct of propriety, and the dinner was made up by the addition of the elder Miss Chesney. And Jack did persuade Mrs. Blunt to accept. In fact, she had a little curiosity to see the man whose name was in the newspapers more prominently than that of the President.

It was a bright thought to secure Mr. Mavick. Mr. Thomas Mavick was socially one of the most desirable young men of the day. Matrimonially he was not a prize, for he was without fortune and without powerful connections. He had a position in the State Department. Originally he came from somewhere in the West, it was said, but he had early obtained one or two minor diplomatic places; he had lived a good deal abroad; he had traveled a little—a good deal, it would seem, from his occasional Oriental allusions. He threw over his past a slight mystery, not too much; and he always took himself seriously. His salary was sufficient to set up a bachelor very comfortably who always dined out; he dressed in the severity of the fashion; he belonged only to the best clubs, where he unbent more than anywhere else; he was credited with knowing a good deal more than he would tell. It was believed, in fact, that he had a great deal of influence. The President had been known to send for him on delicate personal business with regard to appointments, and there were certain ticklish diplomatic transactions that he was known to have managed most cleverly. His friends could see his hand in state papers. This he disclaimed, but he never denied that he knew the inside of whatever was going on in Washington. Even those who thought him a snob said he was clever. He had perfectly the diplomatic manner, and the reserve of one charged with grave secrets. Whatever he disclosed was always in confidence, so that he had the reputation of being as discreet as he was knowing. With women he was of course a favorite, for he knew how to be confidential without disclosing anything, and the hints he dropped about persons in power simply showed that he was secretly manoeuvring important affairs, and could make the most interesting revelations if he chose. His smile and the shake of his head at the club when talk was personal conveyed a world of meaning. Tom Mavick was, in short, a most accomplished fellow. It was evident that he carried on the State Department, and the wonder to many was that he was not in a position to do it openly. His social prestige was as mysterious as his diplomatic, but it was now unquestioned, and he might be considered as one of the first of a class who are to reconcile social and political life in this country.

VIII

Looking back upon this dinner of the Delancys, the student of human affairs can see how Providence uses small means for the accomplishment of its purposes. Of all our social contrivances, the formal dinner is probably the cause of more anxiety in the arrangement, of more weariness in the performance, and usually of less satisfaction in the retrospect than any other social function. However carefully the guests are selected, it lacks the spontaneity that gives intellectual zest to the chance dining together of friends. This Delancy party was made up for reasons which are well understood, and it seemed to have been admirably well selected; and yet the moment it assembled it was evident that it could not be very brilliant or very enjoyable. Doubtless you, madam, would have arranged it differently, and not made it up of such incongruous elements.

As a matter of fact, scarcely one of those present would not have had more enjoyment somewhere else. Father Damon, whose theory was that the rich needed saving quite as much as the poor, would nevertheless have been in better spirits sitting down to a collation with the working-women in Clinton Place. It was a good occasion for the cynical observation of Mr. Mavick, but it was not a company that he could take in hand and impress with his mysterious influence in public affairs. Henderson was not in the mood, and would have had much more ease over a chop and a bottle of half-and-half with Uncle Jerry. Carmen, socially triumphant, would have been much more in her element at a petit souper of a not too fastidious four. Mrs. Schuyler Blunt was in the unaccustomed position of having to maintain a not too familiar and not too distant line of deportment. Edith and Jack felt the responsibility of having put an incongruous company on thin conventional ice. It was only the easy-going Miss Tavish and two or three others who carried along their own animal spirits and love of amusement who enjoyed the chance of a possible contretemps.

And yet the dinner was providentially arranged. If these people had not met socially, this history would have been different from what it must be. The lives of several of them were appreciably modified by this meeting. It is too much to say that Father Damon’s notion of the means by which such men as Henderson succeed was changed, but personal contact with the man may have modified his utterances about him, and he may have turned his mind to the uses to which his wealth might be applied rather than to the means by which he obtained it. Carmen’s ingenuous interest in his work may have encouraged the hope that at least a portion of this fortune might be rescued to charitable uses. For Carmen, dining with Mrs. Schuyler Blunt was a distinct gain, and indirectly opened many other hitherto exclusive doors. That lady may not have changed her opinion about Carmen, but she was good-natured and infected by the incoming social tolerance; and as to Henderson, she declared that he was an exceedingly well-bred man, and she did not believe half the stories about him. Henderson himself at once appreciated the talents of Mavick, gauged him perfectly, and saw what services he might be capable of rendering at Washington. Mr. Mavick appreciated the advantage of a connection with such a capitalist, and of having open to him another luxurious house in New York. At the dinner-table Carmen and Mr. Mavick had not exchanged a dozen remarks before these clever people felt that they were congenial spirits. It was in the smoking-room that Henderson and Mavick fell into an interesting conversation, which resulted in an invitation for Mavick to drop in at Henderson’s office in the morning. The dinner had not been a brilliant one. Henderson found it not easy to select topics equally interesting to Mrs. Delancy and Mrs. Blunt, and finally fell into geographical information to the latter about Mexico and Honduras. For Edith, the sole relief of the evening was an exchange of sympathy with Father Damon, and she was too much preoccupied to enjoy that. As for Carmen, placed between Jack and Mr. Mavick, and conscious that the eyes of Mrs. Blunt were on her, she was taking a subdued role, which Jack found much less attractive than her common mood. But this was not her only self-sacrifice of the evening. She went without her usual cigarette.

To Edith the dinner was a revelation of new difficulties in the life she proposed for herself, though they were rather felt than distinctly reasoned about. The social atmosphere was distasteful; its elements were out of harmony with her ideals. Not that this society was new to her, but that she saw it in a new light. Before her marriage all these things had been indifferent to this high-spirited girl. They were merely incidents of the social state into which she was born, and she pursued her way among them, having a tolerably clear conception of what her own life should be, with little recognition of their tendencies. Were only her own life concerned, they would still be indifferent to her. But something had happened. That which is counted the best thing in life had come to her, that best thing which is the touchstone of character as it is of all conditions, and which so often introduces inextricable complications. She had fallen in love with Jack Delancy and married him.

The first effect of this was to awake and enlarge what philosophers would call her enthusiasm of humanity. The second effect was to show her—and this was what this little dinner emphasized—that she had put limitations upon herself and taken on unthought-of responsibilities. To put this sort of life one side, or make it secondary to her own idea of a useful and happy life, would have been easy but for one thing—she loved Jack. This philosophic reasoning about it does her injustice. It did not occur to her that she could go her way and let him go his way. Nor must it be supposed that the problem seemed as grave to her as it really was—the danger of frittering away her own higher nature in faithfulness to one of the noblest impulses of that nature. Yet this is the way that so many trials of life come, and it is the greatest test of character. She felt—as many women do feel—that if she retained her husband’s love all would be well, and the danger involved to herself probably did not cross her mind.

But what did cross her mind was that these associations meant only evil for Jack, and that to be absorbed in the sort of life that seemed to please him was for her to drift away from all her ideals.

A confused notion of all this was in her thoughts when she talked with Father Damon, while the gentlemen were in the smoking-room. She asked him about his mission.

“The interest continues,” he replied; “but your East Side, Mrs. Delancy, is a puzzling place.”

“How so?”

“Perhaps you’ll laugh if I say there is too much intelligence.”

Edith did laugh, and then said: “Then you’d better move your mission over to this side. Here is a field of good, unadulterated worldliness. But what, exactly, do you mean?”

“Well, the attempt of science to solve the problem of sin and wretchedness. What can you expect when the people are socialists and their leaders agnostics?”

“But I thought you were something of a socialist yourself!”

“So I am,” he said, frankly, “when I see the present injustice, the iniquitous laws and combinations that leave these people so little chance. They are ignorant, and expect the impossible; but they are right in many things, and I go with them. But my motive is not theirs. I hope not. There is no hope except in a spiritual life. Materialism down at the bottom of society is no better than materialism at the top. Do you know,” he went on, with increased warmth, “that pessimism is rather the rule over that side, and that many of those who labor most among the poor have the least hope of ever making things substantially better?”

“But such unselfish people as Dr. Leigh do a great deal of good,” Edith suggested.

“Yes,” he said reflecting—“yes, I have no doubt. I don’t understand it. She is not hopeful. She sees nothing beyond. I don’t know what keeps her up.”

“Love of humanity, perhaps.”

“I wish the phrase had never been invented. Religion of humanity! The work is to save the souls of those people.”

“But,” said Edith, with a flush of earnestness “but, Father Damon, isn’t human love the greatest power to save?”

The priest looked at the girl. His face softened, and he said, more gently, “I don’t know. Of the soul, yes. But human love is so apt to stand in the way of the higher life.”

In her soul Edith resented this as an ascetic and priestly view; but she knew his devotion to that humanity which he in vain tried to eliminate from his austere life, and she turned the talk lightly by saying, “Ah, that is your theory. But I am coming over soon, and shall expect you and Dr. Leigh to take me about.”

The next morning Mr. Mavick’s card gave him instant admission to the inner office of Mr. Henderson, the approach to whom was more carefully guarded than that to the President of the United States. This was not merely necessary to save him from the importunities of cranks who might carry concealed dynamite arguments, but as well to protect him from hundreds of business men with whom he was indirectly dealing, and with whom he wished to evade explanations. He thoroughly understood the advantages of delay. He also understood the value of the mystery that attends inaccessibility. Even Mr. Mavick himself was impressed by the show of ceremony, by the army of clerks, and by the signs of complete organization. He knew that the visitor was specially favored who penetrated these precincts so far as to get an interview, usually fruitless, with Henderson’s confidential man. This confidential man was a very grave and confidence-begetting person, who dealt out dubious hints and promises, and did not at all mind when Henderson found it necessary to repudiate as unauthorized anything that had been apparently said in his name. To be sure, this gave a general impression that Henderson was an inscrutable man to deal with, but at the same time it was confessed that his spoken word could be depended on. Anything written might, it is true, lead to litigation, and this gave rise to a saying in the Street that Henderson’s word was better than his bond.

Henderson was not a politician, but he was a friend of politicians. It was said that he contributed about equally to both sides in a political campaign, and that this showed patriotism more than partisanship. It was for his interest to have friends on both sides in Congress, and friends in the Cabinet, and it was even hinted that he was concerned to have men whose economic and financial theories accorded with his own on the Supreme Bench. He had unlimited confidence in the power of money. His visitor of the morning was not unlike him in many respects. He also was not a politician. He would have described himself as a governmental man, and had a theory of running the government with as little popular interference as possible. He regarded himself as belonging to the governing class.

Between these two men, who each had his own interests in view, there was naturally an apparent putting aside of reserve.

“I was very glad to make your acquaintance, Mr. Mavick,” said Henderson, cordially. “I have known of you for a long time.”

“Yes? I’ve been in the employ of the government for some time.”

“And I suppose it pays pretty well,” said Henderson, smilingly.

“Oh, extravagantly,” Mavick rejoined, in the same spirit. “You just about get your board and clothes out of government. Your washing is another thing. You are expected, you know, to have your washing done where you vote.”

“Well, it’s a sure thing.”

“Yes, till you are turned out. You know the theory at Washington is that virtue is its own reward. Tom Fakeltree says it’s enough.”

“I wonder how he knows?”

“Observation, probably. Tom startled a dinner table the other day with the remark that when a man once gives himself up to the full enjoyment of a virtuous life, it seems strange to him that more people do not follow his example.”

“The trouble with the virtue of Washington is that it always wants to interfere with other people’s business. Fellows like Tom are always hunting up mares’ nests in order to be paid for breaking them up.”

“I can’t say about Tom,” rejoined Mavick. “I suppose it is necessary to live.”

“I suppose so. And that goes along with another proposition—that the successful have no rights which the unsuccessful are bound to respect. As soon as a man gets ahead,” Henderson continued, with a tone of bitterness, “the whole pack are trying to pull him down. A capitalist is a public enemy. Why, look at that Hodge bill! Strikes directly at the ability of the railways to develop the country. Have you seen it?”

“Yes,” Mavick admitted; “the drawer of it was good enough to consult me on its constitutionality. It’s a mighty queer bill.”

“It can’t get through the Senate,” said Henderson; “but it’s a bother. Such schemes are coming up all the time, and they unsettle business. These fellows need watching.”

“And managing,” added Mavick.

“Exactly. I can’t be in Washington all the time. And I need to know what is going on every twenty-four hours from the inside. I can’t rely on politicians or lobbyists.”

“Well,” said Mr. Mavick, in his easiest manner, “that’s easy enough. You want a disinterested friend.”

Henderson nodded, but did not even smile, and the talk went on about other measures, and confidentially about certain men in Washington, until, after twenty minutes’ conversation, the two men came to a perfect understanding. When Mavick arose to go they shook hands even more cordially than at first, and Henderson said:

“Well, I expect to hear from you, and remember that our house will always be your home in the city.”

IX

It seemed very fortunate to Jack Delancy that he should have such a clever woman as Carmen for his confidante, a man so powerful as Henderson as his backer, and a person so omniscient as Mavick for his friend. No combination could be more desirable for a young man who proposed to himself a career of getting money by adroit management and spending it in pure and simple self-indulgence. There are plenty of men who have taken advantage of like conditions to climb from one position to another, and have then kicked down the ladders behind them as fast as they attained a new footing. It was Jack’s fault that he was not one of these. You could scarcely dignify his character by saying that he had an aim, except to saunter through life with as little personal inconvenience as possible. His selfishness was boneless. It was not by any means negative, for no part of his amiable nature was better developed than regard for his own care and comfort; but it was not strong enough to give him Henderson’s capacity for hard work and even self-denial, nor Mavick’s cool, persevering skill in making a way for himself in the world. Why was not Edith his confidante? His respect for her was undoubted; his love for her was unquestioned; his trust in her was absolute. And yet with either Carmen or Miss Tavish he fell into confidential revelations of himself which instinctively he did not make to Edith. The explanation of this is on the surface, and it is the key to half the unhappiness in domestic life. He felt that Edith was not in sympathy with the associations and the life he was leading. The pitiful and hopeless part of it is that if she had been in sympathy with them, Jack would have gone on in his frivolous career at an accelerated pace. It was not absence of love, it was not unfaithfulness, that made Jack enjoy the hours he spent with Carmen, or with the pleasing and not too fastidious Miss Tavish, with a zest that was wanting to his hours at home. If he had been upon a sinking steamboat with the three women, and could have saved only one of them, he would not have had a moment’s hesitation in rescuing Edith and letting the other two sink out of his life. The character is not unusual, nor the situation uncommon. What is a woman to do? Her very virtues are enemies of her peace; if she appears as a constant check and monitor, she repels; if she weakly acquiesces, the stream will flow over both of them. The dilemma seems hopeless.

It would be a mistake to suppose that either Edith or Jack put their relations in any such definite shape as this. He was unthinking. She was too high-spirited, too confident of her position, to be assailed by such fears. And it must be said, since she was a woman, that she had the consciousness of power which goes along with the possession of loveliness and keen wit. Those who knew her best knew that under her serenity was a gay temperament, inherited from the original settlers of Manhattan, an abounding enjoyment of life, and capacity for passion. It was early discovered in her childhood that little Edith had a will of her own.

Lent was over. It was the time of the twittering of sparrows, of the opening of windows, of putting in order the little sentimental spots called “squares,” where the poor children get their idea of forests, and the rich renew their faint recollections of innocence and country life; when the hawkers go about the streets, and the hand-organs celebrate the return of spring and the possibility of love. Even the idle felt that it was a time for relaxation and quiet.

“Have you answered Miss Tavish’s invitation?” asked Jack one morning at the breakfast-table.

“Not yet. I shall decline today for myself.”

“Why? It’s for charity.”

“Well, my charity extends to Miss Tavish. I don’t want to see her dance.”

“That leaves me in a nice hole. I said I’d go.”

“And why not? You go to a good many places you don’t take me—the clubs, brokers’ offices, Stalker’s, the Conventional, and—”

“Oh, go on. Why do you object to my going to see this dance?”

“My dear Jack,” said Edith, “I haven’t objected the least in the world;” and her animated face sparkled with a smile, which seemed to irritate Jack more than a frown would have done.

“I don’t see why you set yourself up. I’ll bet Miss Tavish will raise more money for the Baxter Street Guild, yes, and do more good, than you and the priest and that woman doctor slopping about on the East Side in six months.”

“Very likely,” replied Edith, still with the same good-humored smile. “But, Jack, it’s delightful to see your philanthropic spirit stirred up in this way. You ought to be encouraged. Why don’t you join Miss Tavish in this charity? I have no doubt that if it was advertised that Miss Tavish and Mr. Jack Delancy would dance for the benefit of an East Side guild in the biggest hall in the city, there wouldn’t be standing room.”

“Oh, bosh!” said Jack, getting up from his chair and striding about the room, with more irritation than he had ever shown to Edith before. “I wouldn’t be a prude.”

Edith’s eyes flashed and her face flushed, but her smile came back in a moment, and she was serene again. “Come here, Jack. Now, old fellow, look me straight in the eyes, and tell me if you would like to have me dance the serpentine dance before a drawing-room full of gossiping women, with, as you say, just a few men peeping in at the doors.”

Jack did look, and the serene eyes, yet dancing with amusement at the incongruous picture, seemed to take a warmer glow of love and pleading.

“Oh, hang it! that’s different,” and he stooped and gave her an awkward kiss.

“I’m glad you know it’s different,” she said, with a laugh that had not a trace of mockery in it; “and since you do, you’d better go along and do your charity, and I’ll stay at home, and try to be—different when you come back.”

And Jack went; with a little feeling of sheepishness that he would not have acknowledged at the time, and he found himself in a company where he was entirely at his ease. He admired the dancing of the blithe, graceful girl, he applauded her as the rest did with hand-clapping and bravas, and said it was ravishing. It all suited him perfectly. And somehow, in the midst of it all, in the sensuous abandon of this electric-light eccentricity at mid-day, he had a fleeting vision of something very different, of a womanhood of another sort, and a flush came to his face for a moment as he imagined Edith in a skirt dance under the gaze of this sensation-loving society. But this was only for a moment. When he congratulated Miss Tavish his admiration was entirely sincere; and the girl, excited with her physical triumph, seemed to him as one emancipated out of acquired prudishness into the Greek enjoyment of life. Miss Tavish, who would not for the world have violated one of the social conventions of her set, longed, as many women do, for the sort of freedom and the sort of applause which belongs to women who succeed upon the stage. Not that she would have forfeited her position by dancing at a theatre for money; but; within limits, she craved the excitement, the abandon, the admiration, that her grace and passion could win. This was not at all the ambition which led the Egyptian queen Hatshepsu to assume the dress of a man, but rather that more famous aspiration which led the daughter of Herodias, in a pleasure-loving court, to imitate and excel the professional dancing-girls. If in this inclination of the women of the day, which is not new, but has characterized all societies to which wealth has brought idleness, there was a note of demoralization, it did not seem so to Jack, who found the world day by day more pleasing and more complaisant.

As the months went by, everything prospered with him on his drifting voyage. Of all voyages, that is the easiest to make which has no port in view, that depends upon the varying winds, if the winds happen to be soft and the chance harbors agreeable. Jack was envied, thanks to Henderson. He was lucky in whatever he touched. Without any change in his idle habits, and with no more attention to business than formerly, money came to him so freely that he not only had a complacent notion that he was a favorite of fortune, but the idea of his own importance in the financial world increased enormously, much to the amusement of Mavick, when he was occasionally in the city, to whom he talked somewhat largely of his operations, and who knew that he had no more comprehension of the sweep of Henderson’s schemes than a baby has of the stock exchange when he claps his hands with delight at the click of the ticker.

His prosperity was visible. It showed in the increase of his accounts at the Union, in his indifference to limits in the game of poker, in a handsome pair of horses which he insisted on Edith’s accepting for her own use, in an increased scale of living at home, in the hundred ways that a man of fashion can squander money in a luxurious city. If he did not haunt the second-hand book-shops or the stalls of dealers in engravings, or bring home as much bric-a-brac as he once had done, it was because his mind was otherwise engaged; his tailor’s bills were longer, and there were more expensive lunches at the clubs, at which there was a great deal of sage talk about stocks and combinations, and much wisdom exhibited in regard to wines; and then there were the little suppers at Wherry’s after the theatres, which a bird could have eaten and a fish have drunken, and only a spendthrift have paid for.

“It is absurd,” Edith had said one night after their return. “It makes us ridiculous in the eyes of anybody but fools.” And Jack had flared up about it, and declared that he knew what he could afford, and she had retorted that as for her she would not countenance it. And Jack had attempted to pass it off lightly, at last, by saying, “Very well then, dear, if you won’t back me, I shall have to rely upon my bankers.” At any rate, neither Carmen nor Miss Tavish took him to task. They complimented him on his taste, and Carmen made him feel that she appreciated his independence and his courage in living the life that suited him. She knew, indeed, how much he made in his speculations, how much he lost at cards; she knew through him the gossip of the clubs, and venturing herself not too far at sea, liked to watch the undertow of fashionable life. And she liked Jack, and was not incapable of throwing him a rope when the hour came that he was likely to be swept away by that undertow.

It was remarked at the Union, and by the men in the Street who knew him, that Jack was getting rapid. But no one thought the less of him for his pace—that is, no one appeared to, for this sort of estimate of a man is only tested by his misfortunes, when the day comes that he must seek financial backing. In these days he was generally in an expansive mood, and his free hand and good-humor increased his popularity. There were those who said that there were millions of family money back of Jack, and that he had recently come in for something handsome.

But this story did not deceive Major Fairfax, whose business it was to know to a dot the standing of everybody in society, in which he was a sort of oracle and privileged favorite. No one could tell exactly how the Major lived; no one knew the rigid economy that he practiced; no one had ever seen his small dingy chamber in a cheap lodging-house. The name of Fairfax was as good as a letter of introduction in the metropolis, and the Major had lived on it for years, on that and a carefully nursed little income—an habitue of the club, and a methodical cultivator of the art of dining out. A most agreeable man, and perhaps the wisest man in his generation in those things about which it would be as well not to know anything.

Seated one afternoon in his favorite corner for street observation, by the open window, with the evening paper in his hand, in the attitude of one expecting the usual five o’clock cocktail, he hailed Jack, who was just coming down-stairs from a protracted lunch.

“I say, Delancy, what’s this I hear?”

“About what?” said Jack, sauntering along to a seat opposite the Major, and touching a bell on the little table as he sat down. Jack’s face was flushed, but he talked with unusual slowness and distinctness. “What have you heard, Major?”

“That you have bought Benham’s yacht.”

“No, I haven’t; but I was turning the thing over in my mind,” Jack replied, with the air of a man declining an appointment in the Cabinet. “He offers it cheap.”

“My dear boy, there is no such thing as a cheap yacht, any more than there is a cheap elephant.”

“It’s better to buy than build,” Jack insisted. “A man’s got to have some recreation.”

“Recreation! Why don’t you charter a Fifth Avenue stage and take your friends on a voyage to the Battery? That’ll make ‘em sick enough.” It was a misery of the Major’s life that, in order to keep in with necessary friends, he had to accept invitations for cruises on yachts, and pretend he liked it. Though he had the gout, he vowed he would rather walk to Newport than go round Point Judith in one of those tipping tubs. He had tried it, and, as he said afterwards, “The devil of it was that Mrs. Henderson and Miss Tavish sympathized with me. Gad! it takes away a person’s manhood, that sort of thing.”

The Major sipped his bitters, and then added: “Or I’ll tell you what; if you must do something, start a newspaper—the drama, society, and letters, that sort of thing, with pictures. I heard Miss Tavish say she wished she had a newspaper.”

“But,” said Jack, with gravity, “I’m not buying a yacht for Miss Tavish.”

“I didn’t suppose you were. Devilish fine girl, though. I don’t care who you buy it for if you don’t buy it for yourself. Why don’t you buy it for Henderson? He can afford it.”

“I’d like to know what you mean, Major Fairfax!” cried Jack. “What business—”

“There!” exclaimed the Major, sinking back in his chair, with a softened expression in his society beaten face. “It’s no use of nonsense, Jack. I’m an average old sinner, and I’m not old enough yet to like a milksop. But I’ve known you since you were so high, and I knew your father; he used to stay weeks on my plantation when we were both younger. And your mother—that was a woman!—did me a kindness once when I was in a d–d tight place, and I never forgot it. See here, Jack, if I had money enough I’d buy a yacht and put Carmen and Miss Tavish on it, and send them off on the longest voyage there is.”

“Who’s been talking?” exclaimed Jack, touched a little, but very much offended.

“The town, Jack. Don’t mind the talk. People always talk. I suppose people talk about me: At your age I should have been angry too at a hint even from an old friend. But I’ve learned. It doesn’t pay. I don’t get angry any more. Now there’s Henderson—”

“What have you got against Henderson?”

“Nothing. He is a very good fellow, for that sort of man. But, Lord! Henderson is a big machine. You might as well try to stand in with a combination of gang-saws, or to make friends with the Department of the Interior. Look at the men who have gone in with Henderson from time to time. The ground is strewn with them. He’s got no more feeling in business than a reaper-and-binder.”

“I don’t know what Henderson’s got to do with my having a yacht.”

“I beg your pardon, Jack; it’s none of my business. Only I do not put my investments”—Jack smiled faintly, as if the conversation were taking a humorous turn—“at the mercy of Henderson’s schemes. If I did, I wouldn’t try to run a yacht at the same time. I should be afraid that some day when I got to sea I should find myself out of coal. You know, my boy, that the good book says you cannot serve two masters.”

“Nobody ever accused you of that, Major,” retorted Jack, with a laugh. “But what two have you in mind?”

“Oh, I don’t mean anything personal. I just use names as typical. Say Henderson and Carmen.” And the Major leaned back and tapped his fingers together, as if he were putting a general proposition.

Jack flushed, and then thought a moment—it would be ridiculous to get angry with old Fairfax—and then said: “Major, if I were you, I wouldn’t have anything to do with either of them. You’ll spoil your digestion.”

“Umph!” the Major grunted, as he rose from his chair. “This is an age of impudence. There’s no more respect for gray hair than if it were dyed. I cannot waste any more time on you. I’ve got an early dinner. Devilish uphill work trying to encourage people who dine at seven. But, my boy, think on these things, as the saint says.”

And the old fellow limped away. There was one good thing about the Major. He stood up in church every Sunday and read his prayers, like a faithful old sinner as he was.

Jack, sobered by the talk, walked home in a very irritated mood, blaming everybody except himself. For old Fairfax’s opinion he didn’t care, but evidently the old fellow represented a lot of gossip. He wished people would mind their own business. His irritation was a little appeased by Edith’s gay and loving greeting; but she, who knew every shade of his face, saw it.

“Have you had a worrying day?”

“No; not specially. I’ve had an hour of old Fairfax, who hasn’t any business of his own to attend to.”

“Oh, nobody minds the Major,” Edith said, as she gave him a shake and another kiss; but a sharp pang went through her heart, for she guessed what had happened, since she had had a visit that afternoon from another plain-speaking person.

They were staying late in town. Edith, who did not care to travel far, was going presently to a little cottage by the sea, and Mrs. Schuyler Blunt had looked in for a moment to say good-by before she went up to her Lenox house.

“It’s only an old farmhouse made over,” Mrs. Blunt was saying; “hardly smart enough to ask anybody to, but we hope to have you and Jack there some time.”

“That would be very nice. I hear Lenox is more beautiful than ever.”

“Yes, it is, and about as difficult to get into as the kingdom of heaven. It’s being spoiled for moderate people. The Hendersons and the Van Dams and that sort are in a race to see who shall build houses with the biggest rooms, and give the most expensive entertainments. It’s all show. The old flavor has gone.”

“But they cannot spoil the scenery.”.

“My child, they are the scenery. You can’t see anything else. It doesn’t bother me, but some of my old neighbors are just ruining themselves trying to keep the pace. I do think the Americans are the biggest fools on earth.”

“Father Damon says the trouble is we haven’t any middle class for a balance.”

“Yes, that’s the English of it. But it’s a pity that fashion has got hold of the country, and is turning our summers into a worry and a burden. I thought years ago when we went to Lenox that it was a good thing the country was getting to be the fashion; but now it’s fashionable, and before we know it every desirable spot will be what they call syndicated. Miss Tavish says she is coming to visit the Hendersons there.”

“I thought she went to Bar Harbor.”

“But she is coming down for part of the season. These people don’t stay anywhere. Just long enough in one place to upset everything with their extravagance. That’s the reason I didn’t ask you and Jack up this summer.”

“Thank you, we couldn’t go, you know,” said Edith, simply, and then, with curiosity in her eyes, asked; “but I don’t quite understand what’s the reason.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Blunt, as if nerving herself up to say what must be said, “I thought perhaps you wouldn’t like to be where they are.”

“I don’t know why I should or why I should not,” Edith replied.

“Nor have Jack with them,” continued Mrs. Blunt, stoutly.

“What do you mean, Mrs. Blunt?” cried Edith, her brown eyes flaming.

“Don’t turn on me, Edith dear. I oughtn’t to have said anything. But I thought it was my duty. Of course it is only talk.”

“Well?”

“That Jack is always with one or the other of those women.”

“It is false!” cried Edith, starting up, with tears now in her eyes; “it’s a cruel lie if it means anything wrong in Jack. So am I with those women; so are you. It’s a shame. If you hear any one say such things, you can tell them for me that I despise them.”

“I said it was a shame, all such talk. I said it was nonsense. But, dear, as a friend, oughtn’t I to tell you?” And the kind-hearted gossip put her arm round Edith, and kept saying that she perfectly understood it, and that nobody really meant anything. But Edith was crying now, with a heart both hurt and indignant.

“It’s a most hateful world, I know,” Mrs. Blunt answered; “but it’s the best we have, and it’s no use to fret about it.”

When the visitor had gone, Edith sat a long time in misery. It was the first real shock of her married life. And in her heart she prayed. For Jack? Oh no. The dear girl prayed for herself, that suspicions might not enter her heart. She could not endure that the world should talk thus of him. That was all. And when she had thought it all over and grown calm, she went to her desk and wrote a note to Carmen. It asked Mrs. Henderson, as they were so soon to leave town, to do her the favor to come round informally and lunch with her the next day, and afterwards perhaps a little drive in the Park.

X

Jack was grateful for Edith’s intervention. He comprehended that she had stepped forward as a shield to him in the gossip about Carmen. He showed his appreciation in certain lover-like attentions and in a gayety of manner, but it was not in his nature to feel the sacrifice she had made or its full magnanimity; he was relieved, and in a manner absolved. Another sort of woman might have made him very uncomfortable. Instead of being rebuked he had a new sense of freedom.

“Not one woman in a thousand would have done it,” was the comment of Major Fairfax when he heard of the drive in the Park. “Gad! most of ‘em would have cut Carmen dead and put Jack in Coventry, and then there would have been the devil to pay. It takes quality, though; she’s such a woman as Jack’s mother. If there were not one of them now and then society would deliquesce.” And the Major knew, for his principal experience had been with a deliquescent society.

Whether Carmen admired Mrs. Delancy or thought her weak it is impossible to say, but she understood the advances made and responded to them, for they fell in perfectly with her social plans. She even had the face to eulogize Mrs. Delancy to Jack, her breadth of view, her lack of prejudice, and she had even dared to say, “My dear friend, she is too good for us,” and Jack had not protested, but with a laugh had accepted the implication of his position on a lower moral level. Perhaps he did not see exactly what it meant, this being on confidential terms about his wife with another woman; all he cared for at the moment was that the comradeship of Miss Tavish and Carmen was agreeable to him. They were no restraint upon him. So long as they remained in town the exchange of civilities was kept up. Carmen and Miss Tavish were often at his house, and there was something reassuring to Jack in the openness with which affairs went on.

Early in June Edith went down to their rented cottage on the south Long Island shore. In her delicate health the doctor had recommended the seaside, and this locality as quiet and restful, and not too far from the whirl of the city. The place had a charm of its own, the charm, namely, of a wide sky, illimitable, flashing, changing sea, rolling in from the far tropical South with its message of romance to the barren Northern shore, and the pure sand dunes, the product of the whippings of tempests and wild weather. The cottage was in fact an old farmhouse, not an impertinent, gay, painted piece of architecture set on the sand like a tent for a month, but a solid, ugly, fascinating habitation, with barns and outhouses, and shrubs, and an old garden—a place with a salty air friendly to delicate spring blossoms and summer fruits and foliage. If it was a farmhouse, the sea was an important part of the farm, and the low-ceiled rooms suggested cabins; it required little imagination to fancy that an East-Indian ship had some time come ashore and settled in the sand, that it had been remodeled and roofed over, and its sides pierced with casement windows, over which roses had climbed in order to bind the wanderer to the soil. It had been painted by the sun and the wind and the salt air, so that its color depended upon the day, and it was sometimes dull and almost black, or blue-black, under a lowering sky, and again a golden brown, especially at sunset, and Edith, feeling its character rather than its appearance to ordinary eyes, had named it the Golden House. Nature is such a beautiful painter of wood.

With Edith went one of her Baltimore cousins, a young kindergarten teacher of fine intelligence and sympathetic manner, who brought to her work a long tradition of gentle breeding and gayety and simplicity—qualities which all children are sure to recognize. What a hopeful thing it is, by-the-way, in the world, that all conditions of people know a lady at sight! Jack found the place delightful. He liked its quaintness, the primitiveness of the farmer-fisherman neighbors, he liked the sea. And then he could run up to the city any morning and back at night. He spent the summer with Edith at the Golden House. This was his theory. When he went to town in the morning he expected to return at night. But often he telegraphed in the afternoon that he was detained by business; he had to see Henderson, or Mavick was over from Washington. Occasionally, but not often, he missed the train. He had too keen a sense of the ridiculous to miss the train often. When he was detained over for two or three days, or the better part of the week, he wrote Edith dashing, hurried letters, speaking of ever so many places he had been to and ever so many people he had seen—yes, Carmen and Miss Tavish and everybody who was in town, and he did not say too much about the hot city and its discomforts.

Henderson’s affairs kept him in town, Miss Tavish still postponed Bar Harbor, and Carmen willingly remained. She knew the comfort of a big New York house when the season is over, when no social duties are required, and one is at leisure to lounge about in cool costumes, to read or dream, to open the windows at night for the salt breeze from the bay, to take little excursions by boat or rail, to dine al fresco in the garden of some semi-foreign hotel, to taste the unconventional pleasures of the town, as if one were in some foreign city. She used to say that New York in matting and hollands was almost as nice as Buda-Pesth. These were really summer nights, operatic sorts of nights, with music floating in the air, gay groups in the streets, a stage imitation of nature in the squares with the thick foliage and the heavy shadows cast on the asphalt by the electric lights, the brilliant shops, the nonsense of the summer theatres, where no one expected anything, and no one was disappointed, the general air of enjoyment, and the suggestion of intrigue. Sometimes, when Mavick was over, a party was made up for the East Side, to see the foreign costumes, the picturesque street markets, the dime museums, and the serious, tragical theatres of the people. The East Side was left pretty much to itself, now that the winter philanthropists had gone away, and was enjoying its summer nights and its irresponsible poverty.

They even looked in at Father Damon’s chapel, the dimly lighted fragrant refuge from the world and from sin. Why not? They were interested in the morals of the region. Had not Miss Tavish danced for one of the guilds; and had not Carmen given Father Damon a handsome check in support of his mission? It was so satisfactory to go into such a place and see the penitents kneeling here and there, the little group of very plainly dressed sinners attracted by Father Damon’s spiritual face and unselfish enthusiasm. Carmen said she felt like kneeling at one of the little boxes and confessing—the sins of her neighbors. And then the four—Carmen, Miss Tavish, Mavick, and Jack—had a little supper at Wherry’s, which they enjoyed all the more for the good action of visiting the East Side—a little supper which lasted very late, and was more and more enjoyed as it went on, and was, in fact, so gay that when the ladies were set down at their houses, Jack insisted on dragging Mavick off to the Beefsteak Club and having something manly to drink; and while they drank he analyzed the comparative attractions of Carmen and Miss Tavish; he liked that kind of women, no nonsense in them; and presently he wandered a little and lost the cue of his analysis, and, seizing Mavick by the arm, and regarding him earnestly, in a burst of confidence declared that, notwithstanding all appearances, Edith was the dearest girl in the world.

It was at this supper that the famous society was formed, which the newspapers ridiculed, and which deceived so many excellent people in New York because it seemed to be in harmony with the philanthropic endeavor of the time, but which was only an expression of the Mephistophelian spirit of Carmen—the Society for Supplying Two Suspenders to Those who have only One.

By the end of June there was no more doubt about the heat of the town than about its odors. The fashionable residence part was dismantled and deserted. At least miles and miles of houses seemed to be closed. Few carriages were seen in this quarter, the throngs of fashion had disappeared, comparatively few women were about, and those that appeared in the Sunday promenade were evidently sightseers and idlers from other quarters; the throng of devotees was gone from the churches, and indeed in many of them services were suspended till a more convenient season. The hotels, to be sure, were full of travelers, and the club-houses had more habitues than usual, and were more needed by the members whose families had gone into the country.

Notwithstanding the silence and vacation aspect of up-town, the public conveyances were still thronged, and a census would have shown no such diminution of population as seemed. Indeed, while nobody was in town, except accidentally, the greater portion of it presented a more animated appearance than usual, especially at night, on account of the open windows, the groups on doorsteps and curbstones, and the restless throng in the streets-buyers and sellers and idlers. To most this outdoor life was a great enjoyment, and to them the unclean streets with the odors and exhalations of decay were homelike and congenial. Nor did they seem surprised that a new country should so completely reproduce the evil smells and nastiness of the old civilization. It was all familiar and picturesque. Work still went on in the crowded tenement-houses, and sickness simply changed its character, death showing an increased friendliness to young children. Some impression was of course made by the agents of various charities, the guilds and settlements bravely strove at their posts, some of the churches kept their flags flying on the borders of the industrial districts, the Good Samaritans of the Fresh-air Fund were active, the public dispensaries did a thriving business, and the little band of self-sacrificing doctors, most of them women, went their rounds among the poor, the sick, and the friendless.

Among them Ruth Leigh was one who never took a vacation. There was no time for it. The greater the heat, the more noisome the town, the more people became ill from decaying food and bad air and bad habits, the more people were hungry from improvidence or lack of work, the more were her daily visits a necessity; and though she was weary of her monotonous work, and heart-sick at its small result in such a mass, there never came a day when she could quit it. She made no reputation in her profession by this course; perhaps she awoke little gratitude from those she served, and certainly had not so much of their confidence as the quacks who imposed upon them and took their money; and she was not heartened much by hope of anything better in this world or any other; and as for pay, if there was enough of that to clothe her decently, she apparently did not spend it on herself.

It was, in short, wholly inexplicable that this little woman should simply go about doing good, without any ulterior purpose whatever, not even notoriety. Did she love these people? She did not ever say anything about that. In the Knights of Labor circle, and in the little clubs for the study of social questions, which she could only get leisure to attend infrequently, she was not at all demonstrative about any religion of humanity. Perhaps she simply felt that she was a part of these people, and that whether they rejected her or received her, there was nothing for her to do but to give herself to them. She would probably have been surprised if Father Damon had told her that she was in this following a great example, and there might have been a tang of agnostic bitterness in her reply. When she thought of it the condition seemed to her hopeless, and the attitude of what was called civilization towards it so remorseless and indifferent, and that of Christianity so pharisaical. If she ever lost her temper, it was when she let her mind run in this nihilistic channel, in bitterness against the whole social organization, and the total outcome of civilization so far as the mass of humanity is concerned.

One day Father Damon climbed up to the top of a wretched tenement in Baxter Street in search of a German girl, an impulsive and pretty girl of fifteen, whom he had missed for several days at the chapel services. He had been in the room before. It was not one of the worst, for though small and containing a cook-stove, a large bed, and a chest of drawers, there was an attempt to make it tidy. In a dark closet opening out from it was another large bed. As he knocked and opened the door, he saw that Gretchen was not at home. Her father sat in a rocking-chair by an open window, on the sill of which stood a pot of carnations, the Easter gift of St. George’s, a wax-faced, hollow-eyed man of gentle manners, who looked round wearily at the priest. The mother was washing clothes in a tub in one corner; in another corner was a half-finished garment from a slop-shop. The woman alternated the needle at night and the tub in the daytime. Seated on the bed, with a thin, sick child in her arms, was Dr. Leigh. As she looked up a perfectly radiant smile illuminated her usually plain face, an unworldly expression of such purity and happiness that she seemed actually beautiful to the priest, who stopped, hesitating, upon the threshold.

“Oh, you needn’t be afraid to come in, Father Damon,” she cried out; “it isn’t contagious—only rash.”

Father Damon, who would as readily have walked through a pestilence as in a flower-garden, only smiled at this banter, and replied, after speaking to the sick man, and returning in German the greeting of the woman, who had turned from the tub, “I’ve no doubt you are disappointed that it isn’t contagious!” And then, to the mother: “Where is Gretchen? She doesn’t come to the chapel.”

“Nein,” replied the woman, in a mixture of German and English, “it don’t come any more in dot place; it be in a shtore now; it be good girl.”

“What, all day?”

“Yaas, by six o’clock, and abends so spate. Not much it get, but my man can’t earn nothing any more.” And the woman, as she looked at him, wiped her eyes with the corner of her apron.

“But, on Sunday?” Father Damon asked, still further.

“Vell, it be so tired, and goed up by de Park with Dick Loosing and dem oder girls.”

“Don’t you think it better, Father Damon,” Dr. Leigh interposed, “that Gretchen should have fresh air and some recreation on Sunday?”

“Und such bootiful tings by de Museum,” added the mother.

“Perhaps,” said he, with something like a frown on his face, and then changed the subject to the sick child. He did not care to argue the matter when Dr. Leigh was present, but he resolved to come again and explain to the mother that her daughter needed some restraining power other than her own impulse, and that without religious guidance she was pretty certain to drift into frivolous and vulgar if not positively bad ways. The father was a free-thinker; but Father Damon thought he had some hold on the mother, who was of the Lutheran communion, but had followed her husband so far as to become indifferent to anything but their daily struggle for life. Yet she had a mother’s instinct about the danger to her daughter, and had been pleased to have her go to Father Damon’s chapel.

And, besides, he could not bring himself in that presence to seem to rebuke Ruth Leigh. Was she not practically doing what his Lord did—going about healing the sick, sympathizing with the poor and the discouraged, taking upon herself the burden of the disconsolate, literally, without thought of self, sharing, as it were, the misery and sin of this awful city? And today, for the first time, he seemed to have seen the woman in her—or was it the saint? and he recalled that wonderful illumination of her plain face that made her actually beautiful as she looked up from the little waif of humanity she held in her arms. It had startled him, and struck a new chord in his heart, and planted a new pang there that she had no belief in a future life.

It did not occur to him that the sudden joy in her face might have been evoked by seeing him, for it was a long time since she had seen him. Nor did he think that the pang at his heart had another cause than religious anxiety. Ah, priest and worldly saint, how subtle and enduring are the primal instincts of human nature!

“Yes,” he said, as they walked away, in reply to her inquiry as to his absence, “I have been in retreat a couple of weeks.”

“I suppose,” she said, softly, “you needed the rest; though,” and she looked at him professionally, “if you will allow me to say it, it seems to me that you have not rested enough.”

“I needed strength”—and it was the priest that spoke—“in meditation and prayer to draw upon resources not my own.”

“And in fasting, too, I dare say,” she added, with a little smile.

“And why not?” he asked.

“Pardon me,” she said; “I don’t pretend to know what you need. I need to eat, though Heaven knows it’s hard enough to keep up an appetite down here. But it is physical endurance you need for the work here. Do you think fasting strengthens you to go through your work night and day?”

“I know I couldn’t do it on my own strength.” And Dr. Leigh recalled times when she had seen him officiating in the chapel apparently sustained by nothing but zeal and pure spirit, and wondered that he did not faint and fall. And faint and fall he did, she was sure, when the service was over.

“Well, it may be necessary to you, but not as an example to these people. I see enough involuntary fasting.”

“We look at these people from different points of view, I fear.” And after a moment he said: “But, doctor, I wanted to ask you about Gretchen. You see her?”

“Occasionally. She works too many hours, but she seems to be getting on very well, and brings her mother all she earns.”

“Do you think she is able to stand alone?”

Dr. Leigh winced a little at this searching question, for no one knew better than she the vulgarizing influence of street life and chance associations upon a young girl, and the temptations. She was even forced to admit the value in the way of restraint, as a sort of police force, of the church and priestly influence, especially upon girls at the susceptible age. But she knew that Father Damon meant something more than this, and so she answered:

“But people have got to stand alone. She might as well begin.”

“But she is so young.”

“Yes, I know. She is in the way of temptation, but so long as she works industriously, and loves her mother, and feels the obligation, which the poor very easily feel, of doing her share for the family, she is not in so much moral danger as other girls of her age who lead idle and self-indulgent lives. The working-girls of the city learn to protect themselves.”

“And you think this is enough, without any sort of religion—that this East Side can go on without any spiritual life?”

Ruth Leigh made a gesture of impatience. In view of the actual struggle for existence she saw around her, this talk seemed like cant. And she said:

“I don’t know that anything can go on. Let me ask you a question, Father Damon. Do you think there is any more spirituality, any more of the essentials of what you call Christianity, in the society of the other side than there is on the East Side?”

“It is a deep question, this of spirituality,” replied Father Damon, who was in the depths of his proselyting action a democrat and in sympathy with the people, and rated quite at its full value the conventional fashion in religion. “I shouldn’t like to judge, but there is a great body of Christian men and women in this city who are doing noble work.”

“Yes,” replied the little doctor, bitterly, “trying to save themselves. How many are trying to save others—others except the distant and foreign sinners?”

“You surely cannot ignore,” replied the father, still speaking mildly, “the immense amount of charitable work done by the churches!”

“Yes, I know; charity, charity, the condescension of the rich to the poor. What we want are understanding, fellowship, and we get alms! If there is so much spirituality as you say, and Christianity is what you say it is today, how happens it that this side is left in filth and misery and physical wretchedness? You know what it is, and you know the luxury elsewhere. And you think to bridge over the chasm between classes with flowers, in pots, yes, and Bible-readers and fashionable visitors and little aid societies—little palliatives for an awful state of things. Why, look at it! Last winter the city authorities hauled off the snow and the refuse from the fashionable avenues, and dumped it down in the already blockaded and filthy side streets, and left us to struggle with the increased pneumonia and diphtheria, and general unsanitary conditions. And you wonder that the little nihilist groups and labor organizations and associations of agnostics, as you call them, meeting to study political economy and philosophy, say that the existing state of things has got to be overturned violently, if those who have the power and the money continue indifferent.”

“I do not wonder,” replied Father Damon, sadly. “The world is evil, and I should be as despairing as you are if I did not know there was another life and another world. I couldn’t bear it. Nobody could.”

“And all you’ve got to offer, then, to this mass of wretchedness, poverty, ignorance, at close quarters with hunger and disease, is to grin and bear it, in hope of a reward somewhere else!”

“I think you don’t quite—”

The doctor looked up and saw a look of pain on the priest’s face.

“Oh,” she hastened to say, almost as impetuously as she had spoken before, “I don’t mean you—I don’t mean you. I know what you do. Pardon me for speaking so. I get so discouraged sometimes.” They stood still a moment, looking up and down the hot, crowded, odorful street they were in, with its flaunting rags of poverty and inefficiency. “I see so little result of what I can do, and there is so little help.”

“I know,” said the father, as they moved along. “I don’t see how you can bear it alone.”

This touched a sore spot, and aroused Ruth Leigh’s combativeness. It seemed to her to approach the verge of cant again. But she knew the father’s absolute sincerity; she felt she had already said too much; and she only murmured, as if to herself, “If we could only know.” And then, after a moment, she asked, “Do you, Father Damon, see any sign of anything better here?”

“Yes, today.” And he spoke very slowly and hesitatingly. “If you will excuse the personality of it. When I entered that room today, and saw you with that sick child in your arms, and comprehended what it all meant, I had a great wave of hope, and I knew, just then, that there is coming virtue enough in the world to redeem it.”

Ruth was confounded. Her heart seemed to stand still, and then the hot blood flowed into her face in a crimson flood. “Ah,” escaped from her lips, and she walked on more swiftly, not daring to look up. This from him! This recognition from the ascetic father! If one of her dispensary comrades had said it, would she have been so moved?

And afterwards, when she had parted from him, and gone to her little room, the hot flush again came to her neck and brow, and she saw his pale, spiritual face, and could hear the unwonted tenderness of his voice. Yes, Father Damon had said it of her.

XI

The question has been very much discussed whether the devil, in temperate latitudes, is busier in the summer or in the winter. When Congress and the various State legislatures are in session, and the stock and grain exchanges are most active, and society is gayest, and the churches and benevolent and reformatory associations are most aggressive—at this season, which is the cool season, he seems to be most animated and powerful.

But is not this because he is then most opposed? The stream may not flow any faster because it is dammed, but it exhibits at the obstructed points greater appearance of agitation. Many people are under the impression that when they stop fighting there is a general truce: There is reason to believe that the arch enemy is pleased with this impression, that he likes a truce, and that it is his best opportunity, just as the weeds in the garden, after a tempest, welcome the sun and the placidity of the elements. It is well known that in summer virtue suffers from inertia, and that it is difficult to assemble the members of any vigilant organization, especially in cities, where the flag of the enemy is never lowered. But wherever the devil is there is always a quorum present for business. It is not his plan to seek an open fight, and many observers say that he gains more ground in summer than in any other season, and this notwithstanding people are more apt to lose their tempers, and even become profane, in the aggravations of what is known as spring than at any other time. The subject cannot be pursued here, but there is ground for supposing that the devil prefers a country where the temperature is high and pretty uniform.

At any rate, it is true that the development of character is not arrested by any geniality or languor of nature. By midsummer the Hendersons were settled in Lenox, where the Blunts had long been, and Miss Tavish and her party of friends were at Bar Harbor. Henderson was compelled to be in the city most of the time, and Jack Delancy fancied that business required his presence there also; but he had bought a yacht, and contemplated a voyage, with several of the club men, up the Maine coast. “No, I thank you,” Major Fairfax had said; “I know an easier way to get to Bar Harbor.”

Jack was irritable and restless, to be sure, in the absence of the sort of female society he had become accustomed to; but there were many compensations in his free-and-easy bachelor life, in his pretense of business, which consisted in watching the ticker, as it is called, in an occasional interview with Henderson, and in the floating summer amusements of the relaxed city. There was nothing unusual in this life except that he needed a little more stimulation, but this was not strange in the summer, and that he devoted more time to poker—but everybody knows that a person comes out about even in the game of poker if he keeps at it long enough—there was nothing unusual in this, only it was giving Jack a distaste for the quiet and it seemed to him the restraint of the Golden House down by the sea. And he was more irritable there than elsewhere. It is so difficult to estimate an interior deterioration of this sort, for Jack was just as popular with his comrades as ever, and apparently more prosperous.

It is true that Jack had had other ideas when he was courting Edith Fletcher, and at moments, at any rate, different aspirations from any he had now. With her at that time there had been nobler aspirations about life. But now she was his wife. That was settled. And not only that, but she was the best woman he knew; and if she were not his wife, he would spare no effort to win her. He felt sure of that. He did not put it to himself in the way an Oriental would do, “That is finished”; but it was an act done—a good act—and here was his world again, with a hundred interests, and there were people besides Edith to be thought of, other women and men, and affairs. Because a man was married, was he to be shut up to one little narrow career, that of husband? Probably it did not occur to him that women take a different view of this in the singleness of their purpose and faith. Edith, for instance, knew or guessed that Jack had no purpose in life that was twenty-four hours old; but she had faith—and no amount of observation destroys this faith in women—that marriage would inspire him with energy and ambition to take a man’s place in the world.

With most men marriage is un fait accompli. Jack had been lucky, but there was, no doubt, truth in an observation of Mavick’s. One night as they sat at the club Jack had asked him a leading question, apropos of Henderson’s successful career: “Mavick, why don’t you get married?” “I have never,” he replied, with his usual cynical deliberation, “been obliged to. The fact is, marriage is a curb-bit. Some horses show off better with it, and some are enraged and kick over the traces. I cannot decide which I would be.”

“That’s true enough,” said Jack, “from a bachelor’s point of view of independence, but it’s really a question of matching.”

“The most difficult thing in the world—in horses. Just about impossible in temperament and movement, let alone looks. Most men are lucky if they get, like Henderson, a running mate.”

“I see,” said Jack, who knew something about the Henderson household, “your idea of a pair is that they should go single.”

Mavick laughed, and said something about the ideas of women changing so much lately that nobody could tell what the relation of marriage would become, and Jack, who began to feel that he was disloyal, changed the subject. To do him justice, he would have been ashamed for Edith to hear this sort of flippant and shallow talk, which wouldn’t have been at all out of place with Carmen or Miss Tavish.

“I wanted to ask you, Mavick, as a friend, do you think Henderson is square?”

“How square?”

“Well, safe?”

“Nobody is safe. Henderson is as safe as anybody. You can rely on what he says. But there’s a good deal he doesn’t say. Anything wrong?”

“Not that I know. I’ve been pretty lucky. But the fact is, I’ve gone in rather deep.”

“Well, it’s a game. Henderson plays it, as everybody does, for himself. I like Henderson. He plays to win, and generally does. But, you know, if one man wins, somebody else has got to lose in this kind of industry.”

“But Henderson looks out for his friends?”

“Yes—when it doesn’t cost too much. Times may come when a man has to look out for himself. Wealth isn’t made out of nothing. There must be streams into the reservoir. These great accumulations of one—you can see that—must be made up of countless other men’s small savings. There’s Uncle Jerry. He operates a good deal with Henderson, and they’d incline to help each other out. But Uncle Jerry says he’s got a small pond of his own, and he’s careful not to connect it with Henderson’s reservoir.”

“What do you think of Missouri?”

“What do I think of the Milky Way? It doesn’t much matter to me what becomes of Missouri, unless Henderson should happen to get smashed in it, and that isn’t what he is there for. But when you look at the combinations, and the dropping-off of roads that have been drained, and the scaling down in refunding, and the rearranging, and the strikes, how much chance do you think the small fry stand? I don’t doubt that Henderson will make a big thing out of it, and there will be lots of howling by those who were not so smart, and the newspapers will say that Henderson was too strong for them. What we respect nowadays are adroitness and strength.”

“It’s an exciting game,” Mavick continued, after a moment’s pause. “Let me know if you get uneasy. But I’ll tell you what it is, Jack; if I had a comfortable income, I wouldn’t risk it in any speculation. There is a good deal that is interesting going on in this world, and I like to be in it; but the best plan for a man who has anything is, as Uncle Jerry says, to sail close and salt down.”

The fact was that Mavick’s connection with Henderson was an appreciable addition to his income, and it was not a bad thing for Henderson. Mavick’s reputation for knowing the inside of everything and being close-mouthed actually brought him confidences; that which at first was a clever assumption became a reality, and his reputation was so established for being behind the scenes that he was not believed when he honestly professed ignorance of anything. His modest disclaimer merely increased the impression that he was deep. Henderson himself had something of the Bismarck trait of brutal, contemptuous frankness. Mavick was never brutal and never contemptuous, but he had a cynical sort of frankness, which is a good deal more effectual in a business way than the oily, plausible manner which on ‘Change, as well as in politics, is distrusted as hypocrisy. Now Uncle Jerry Hollowell was neither oily nor frank; he was long-headed and cautious, and had a reputation for shrewdness and just enough of plasticity of conscience to remove him out of the list of the impracticable and over-scrupulous. This reputation that business men and politicians acquire would be a very curious study. The world is very complacent, and apparently worships success and votes for smartness, but it would surprise some of our most successful men to know what a real respect there is in the community, after all, for downright integrity.

Even Jack, who fell into the current notion of his generation of young men that the Henderson sort of morality was best adapted to quick success, evinced a consciousness of want of nobility in the course he was pursuing by not making Edith his confidante. He would have said, of course, that she knew nothing about business, but what he meant was that she had a very clear conception of what was honest. All the evidences of his prosperity, shown in his greater freedom of living, were sore trials to her. She belonged to that old class of New-Yorkers who made trade honorable, like the merchants of Holland and Venice, and she knew also that Jack’s little fortune had come out of honest toil and strict business integrity. Could there be any happiness in life in any other course?

It seemed cruel to put such a problem as this upon a young woman hardly yet out of girlhood, in the first flush of a new life, which she had dreamed should be so noble and high and so happy, in the period which is consecrated by the sweetest and loveliest visions and hopes that ever come into a woman’s life.

As the summer wore on to its maximum of heat and discomfort in the city, Edith, who never forgot to measure the hardships of others by her own more fortunate circumstances, urged Dr. Leigh to come away from her labors and rest a few days by the sea. The reply was a refusal, but there was no complaint in the brief businesslike note. One might have supposed that it was the harvest-time of the doctor, if he had not known that she gathered nothing for herself. There had never been so much sickness, she wrote, and such an opportunity for her. She was learning a great deal, especially about some disputed contagious diseases. She would like to see Mrs. Delancy, and she wouldn’t mind a breath of air that was more easily to be analyzed than that she existed in, but nothing could induce her to give up her cases. All that appeared in her letter was her interest in her profession.

Father Damon, who had been persuaded by Edith’s urgency to go down with Jack for a few days to the Golden House, seemed uncommonly interested in the reasons of Dr. Leigh’s refusal to come.

“I never saw her,” he said, “so cheerful. The more sickness there is, the more radiant she is. I don’t mean,” he added, laughing, “in apparel. Apparently she never thinks of herself, and positively she seems to take no time to eat or sleep. I encounter her everywhere. I doubt if she ever sits down, except when she drops in at the mission chapel now and then, and sits quite unmoved on a bench by the door during vespers.”

“Then she does go there?” said Edith.

“That is a queer thing. She would promptly repudiate any religious interest. But I tell her she is a bit of a humbug. When I speak about her philanthropic zeal, she says her interest is purely scientific.”

“Anyway, I believe,” Jack put in, “that women doctors are less mercenary than men. I dare say they will get over that when the novelty of coming into the profession has worn off.”

“That is possible,” said Father Damon; “but that which drives women into professions now is the desire to do something rather than the desire to make something. Besides, it is seldom, in their minds, a finality; marriage is always a possibility.”

“Yes,” replied Edith, “and the probability of having to support a husband and family; then they may be as mercenary as men are.”

“Still, the enthusiasm of women,” Father Damon insisted, “in hospital and outdoor practice, the singleness of their devotion to it, is in contrast to that of the young men-doctors. And I notice another thing in the city: they take more interest in philanthropic movements, in the condition of the poor, in the labor questions; they dive eagerly into philosophic speculations, and they are more aggressively agnostics. And they are not afraid of any social theories. I have one friend, a skillful practitioner they tell me, a linguist, and a metaphysician, a most agreeable and accomplished woman, who is in theory an extreme nihilist, and looks to see the present social and political order upset.”

“I don’t see,” Jack remarked, “what women especially are to gain by such a revolution.”

“Perhaps independence, Jack,” replied Edith. “You should hear my club of working-girls, who read and think much on these topics, talk of these things.”

“Yes,” said Father Damon, “you toss these topics about, and discuss them in the magazines, and fancy you are interested in socialistic movements. But you have no idea how real and vital they are, and how the dumb discontent of the working classes is being formulated into ideas. It is time we tried to understand each other.”

Not all the talk was of this sort at the Golden House. There were three worlds here—that of Jack, to which Edith belonged by birth and tradition and habit; that of which we have spoken, to which she belonged by profound sympathy; and that of Father Damon, to which she belonged by undefined aspiration. In him was the spiritual element asserting itself in a mediaeval form, in a struggle to mortify and deny the flesh and yet take part in modern life. Imagine a celibate and ascetic of the fifteenth century, who knew that Paradise must be gained through poverty and privation and suffering, interesting himself in the tenement-house question, in labor leagues, and the single tax.

Yet, hour after hour, in those idle summer days, when nature was in a mood that suggested grace and peace, when the waves lapsed along the shore and the cicada sang in the hedge, did Father Damon unfold to Edith his ideas of the spiritualization of modern life through a conviction of its pettiness and transitoriness. How much more content there would be if the poor could only believe that it matters little what happens here if the heart is only pure and fixed on the endless life.

“Oh, Father Damon,” replied Edith, with a grave smile, “I think your mission ought to be to the rich.”

“Yes,” he replied, for he also knew his world, “if I wanted to make my ideas fashionable; but I want to make them operative. By-and-by,” he added, also with a smile, “we will organize some fishermen and carpenters and tailors on a mission to the rich.”

Father Damon’s visit was necessarily short, for his work called him back to town, and perhaps his conscience smote him a little for indulging in this sort of retreat. By the middle of August Jack’s yacht was ready, and he went with Mavick and the Van Dams and some other men of the club on a cruise up the coast. Edith was left alone with her Baltimore friend.

And yet not alone. As she lay in her hammock in those dreamy days a new world opened to her. It was not described in the chance romance she took up, nor in the volume of poems she sometimes held in her hand, with a finger inserted in the leaves. Of this world she felt herself the centre and the creator, and as she mused upon its mysteries, life took a new, strange meaning to her. It was apt to be a little hazy off there in the watery horizon, and out of the mist would glide occasionally a boat, and the sun would silver its sails, and it would dip and toss for half an hour in the blue, laughing sea, and then disappear through the mysterious curtain. Whence did it come? Whither had it gone? Was life like that? Was she on the shore of such a sea, and was this new world into which she was drifting only a dream? By her smile, by the momentary illumination that her sweet thoughts made in her lovely, hopeful face, you knew that it was not. Who can guess the thoughts of a woman at such a time? Are the trees glad in the spring, when the sap leaps in their trunks, and the buds begin to swell, and the leaves unfold in soft response to the creative impulse? The miracle is never old nor commonplace to them, nor to any of the human family. The anticipation of life is eternal. The singing of the birds, the blowing of the south wind, the sparkle of the waves, all found a response in Edith’s heart, which leaped with joy. And yet there was a touch of melancholy in it all, the horizon was so vast, and the mist of uncertainty lay along it. Literature, society, charities, all that she had read and experienced and thought, was nothing to this, this great unknown anxiety and bliss, this saddest and sweetest of all human experiences. She prayed that she might be worthy of this great distinction, this responsibility and blessing.

And Jack, dear Jack, would he love her more?

XII

Although Father Damon had been absent from his charge only ten days, it was time for him to return. If he had not a large personal following, he had a wide influence. If comparatively few found their way to his chapel, he found his way to many homes; his figure was a familiar one in the streets, and his absence was felt by hundreds who had no personal relations with him, but who had become accustomed to seeing him go about on his errands of encouragement, and probably had never realized how much the daily sight of him had touched them. The priestly dress, which may once have provoked a sneer at his effeminacy, had now a suggestion of refinement, of unselfish devotion, of consecration to the service of the unfortunate, his spiritual face appealed to their better natures, and the visible heroism that carried his frail figure through labors that would have worn out the stoutest physique stirred in the hearts of the rudest some comprehension of the reality of the spirit.

It may not have occurred to them that he was of finer clay than they—perhaps he was not—but his presence was in their minds a subtle connection and not a condescending one, rather a confession of brotherhood, with another world and another view of life. They may not have known that their hearts were stirred because he had the gift of sympathy.

And was it an unmanly trait that he evoked in men that sentiment of chivalry which is never wanting in the roughest community for a pure woman? Wherever Father Damon went there was respect for his purity and his unselfishness, even among those who would have been shamefaced if surprised in any exhibition of softness.

And many loved him, and many depended on him. Perhaps those who most depended on him were the least worthy, and those who loved him most were least inclined to sacrifice their own reasonable view of life to his own sublimated spiritual conception. It was the spirit of the man they loved, and not the creed of the priest. The little chapel in its subdued lights and shadows, with confessionals and crosses and candles and incense, was as restful a refuge as ever to the tired and the dependent; but wanting his inspiring face and voice, it was not the same thing, and the attendance always fell away when he was absent. There was needed there more than elsewhere the living presence.

He was missed, and the little world that missed him was astray. The first day of his return his heart was smitten by the thinness of the congregation. Had he, then, accomplished nothing; had he made no impression, established in his shifting flock no habit of continuance in well-doing that could survive even his temporary withdrawal? The fault must be his. He had not sufficiently humiliated and consecrated himself, and put under all strength of the flesh and trust in worldly instrumentalities. There must be more prayer, more vigils, more fasting, before the power would come back to him to draw these wandering minds to the light. And so in the heat of this exhausting August, at the time when his body most needed reenforcement for the toil he required of it, he was more rigid in his spiritual tyranny and contempt of it.

Ruth Leigh was not dependent upon Father Damon, but she also learned how long ten days could be without a sight of him. When she looked into his chapel occasionally she realized, as never before, how much in the air his ceremonies and his creed were. There was nothing there for her except his memory. And she knew when she stepped in there, for her cool, reasoning mind was honest, that it was the thought of him that drew her to the place, and that going there was a sentimental indulgence. What she would have said was that she admired, loved Father Damon on account of his love for humanity. It was a common saying of all the professional women in her set, and of the working-girls, that they loved Father Damon. It is a comfort to women to be able to give their affection freely where conventionalities and circumstances make the return of it in degree unlikely.

At the close of a debilitating day Dr. Leigh found herself in the neighborhood of the mission chapel. She was tired and needed to rest somewhere. She knew that Father Damon had returned, but she had not seen him, and a double motive drew her steps. The attendance was larger than it had been recently, and she found a stool in a dark corner, and listened, with a weary sort of consciousness of the prayers and the singing, but not without a deeper feeling of peace in the tones of a voice every inflection of which she knew so well. It seemed to her that the reading cost him an effort, and there was a note of pathos in the voice that thrilled her. Presently he advanced towards the altar rail—he was accustomed to do this with his little flock—and placing one hand on the lectern, began to speak.

At first, and this was not usual, he spoke about himself in a strain of sincere humility, taking blame upon himself for his inability to do effectively the great service his Master had set him to do. He meant to have given himself more entirely to the dear people among whom he labored; he hoped to show himself more worthy of the trust they had given him; he was grateful for the success of his mission, but no one knew so well as he how far short it came of being what he ought to have made it. He knew indeed how weak he was, and he asked the aid of their sympathy and encouragement. It seemed to be with difficulty that he said this, and to Ruth’s sympathetic ear there was an evidence of physical exhaustion in his tone. There was in it, also, for her, a confession of failure, the cry of the preacher, in sorrow and entreaty, that says, “I have called so long, and ye would not listen.”

As he went on, still with an effort and feebly, there came over the little group a feeling of awe and wonderment, and the silence was profound. Still steadying himself by the reading-desk, he went on to speak of other things, of those of his followers who listened, of the great mass swirling about them in the streets who did not listen and did not care; of the little life that now is so full of pain and hardship and disappointment, of good intentions frustrated, of hopes that deceive, and of fair prospects that turn to ashes, of good lives that go wrong, of sweet natures turned to bitterness in the unaided struggle. His voice grew stronger and clearer, as his body responded to the kindling theme in his soul. He stepped away from the desk nearer the rail, the bowed head was raised. “What does it matter?” he said. “It is only for a little while, my children.” Those who heard him that day say that his face shone like that of an angel, and that his voice was like a victorious clarion, so clear, so sweet, so inspiring, as he spoke of the life that is to come, and the fair certainty of that City where he with them all wished to be.

As he closed, some were kneeling, many were crying; all, profoundly moved, watched him as, with the benediction and the sign of the cross, he turned and walked swiftly to the door of the sacristy. It opened, and then Ruth Leigh heard a cry, “Father Damon! Father Damon!” and there was a rush into the chancel. Hastening through the throng, which promptly made way for the doctor, she found Father Damon lying across the threshold, as he had fallen, colorless and unconscious. She at once took command of the situation. The body was lifted to the plain couch in the room, a hasty examination was made of pulse and heart, a vial of brandy was produced from her satchel, and messengers were despatched for things needed, and especially for beef-tea.

“Is he dead, Dr. Leigh? Is he any better, doctor? What is the matter, doctor?”

“Want of nourishment,” replied Dr. Leigh, savagely.

The room was cleared of all except a couple of stout lads and a friendly German woman whom the doctor knew. The news of the father’s sudden illness had spread rapidly, with the report that he had fallen dead while standing at the altar; and the church was thronged, and the street rapidly blocked up with a hushed crowd, eager for news and eager to give aid. So great was the press that the police had to interfere, and push back the throng from the door. It was useless to attempt to disperse it with the assurance that Father Damon was better; it patiently waited to see for itself. The sympathy of the neighborhood was most impressive, and perhaps the thing that the public best remembers about this incident is the pathetic solicitude of the people among whom Father Damon labored at the rumor of his illness, a matter which was greatly elaborated by the reporters from the city journals and the purveyors of telegraphic news for the country.

With the application of restoratives the patient revived. When he opened his eyes he saw figures in the room as in a dream, and his mind struggled to remember where he was and what had happened; but one thing was not a dream: Dr. Leigh stood by his bedside, with her left hand on his brow and the right grasping his own right hand, as if to pull him back to life. He saw her face, and then he lost it again in sheer weariness at the effort. After a few moments, in a recurring wave of strength, he looked up again, still bewildered, and said, faintly:

“Where am I?”

“With friends,” said the doctor. “You were a little faint, that is all; you will be all right presently.”

She quickly prepared some nourishment, which was what he most needed, and fed him from time to time, as he was able to receive it. Gradually he could feel a little vigor coming into his frame; and regaining control of himself, he was able to hear what had happened. Very gently the doctor told him, making light of his temporary weakness.

“The fact is, Father Damon,” she said, “you’ve got a disease common in this neighborhood—hunger.”

The father smiled, but did not reply. It might be so. For the time he felt his dependence, and he did not argue the point. This dependence upon a woman—a sort of Sister of Charity, was she not?—was not altogether unpleasant. When he attempted to rise, but found that he was too weak, and she said “Not yet,” he submitted, with the feeling that to be commanded with such gentleness was a sort of luxury.

But in an hour’s time he declared that he was almost himself again, and it was decided that he was well enough to be removed to his own apartments in the neighborhood. A carriage was sent for, and the transfer was made, and made through a crowd in the streets, which stood silent and uncovered as his carriage passed through it. Dr. Leigh remained with him for an hour longer, and then left him in charge of a young gentleman from the Neighborhood Guild, who gladly volunteered to watch for the night.

Ruth walked slowly home, weary now that the excitement was over, and revolving many things in her mind, as is the custom of women. She heard again that voice, she saw again that inspired face; but the impression most indelible with her was the prostrate form, the pallid countenance, the helplessness of this man whose will had before been strong enough to compel the obedience of his despised body. She had admired his strength; but it was his weakness that drew upon her woman’s heart, and evolved a tenderness dangerous to her peace of mind. Yet it was the doctor and not the woman that replied to the inquiries at the dispensary.

“Yes, it was fasting and overwork. Men are so stupid; they think they can defy all the laws of nature, especially priests.” And she determined to be quite plain with him next day.

And Father Damon, lying weary in his bed, before he fell asleep, saw the faces in the dim chapel turned to him in strained eagerness the moment before he lost consciousness; but the most vivid image was that of a woman bending over him, with eyes of tenderness and pity, and the smile with which she greeted his awakening. He could feel yet her hand upon his brow.

When Dr. Leigh called next day, on her morning rounds, she found a brother of the celibate order, Father Monies, in charge. He was sitting by the window reading, and when the doctor came up the steps he told her in a low voice to enter without knocking. Father Damon was better, much better; but he had advised him not to leave his bed, and the patient had been dozing all the morning. The doctor asked if he had eaten anything, and how much. The apartment was small and scantily furnished—a sort of anchorite cell. Through the drawn doors of the next room the bed was in sight. As they were talking in low voices there came from this room a cheerful:

“Good-morning, doctor.”

“I hope you ate a good breakfast,” she said, as she arose and went to his bedside.

“I suppose you mean better than usual,” he replied, with a faint attempt at a smile. “No doubt you and Father Monies are satisfied, now you’ve got me laid up.”

“That depends upon your intentions.”

“Oh, I intend to get up tomorrow.”

“If you do, without other change in your intentions, I am going to report you to the Organized Charity as a person who has no visible means of support.”

She had brought a bunch of violets, and as they talked she had filled a glass with water and put them on a stand by the head of the bed. Then—oh, quite professionally—she smoothed out his pillows and straightened the bedclothes, and, talking all the time, and as if quite unconscious of what she was doing, moved about the room, putting things to rights, and saying, in answer to his protest, that perhaps she should lose her reputation as a physician in his eyes by appearing to be a professional nurse.

There was a timid knock at the door, and a forlorn little figure, clad in a rumpled calico, with an old shawl over her head, half concealing an eager and pretty face, stood in the doorway, and hesitatingly came in.

“Meine Mutter sent me to see how Father Damon is,” she explained; “she could not come, because she washes.”

She had a bunch of flowers in her hand, and encouraged by the greeting of the invalid, she came to the bedside and placed them in his outstretched hand—a faded blossom of scarlet geranium, a bachelor’s button, and a sprig of parsley, probably begged of a street dealer as she came along. “Some blooms,” she said.

“Bless you, my dear,” said Father Damon; “they are very pretty.”

“Dey smells nice,” the child exclaimed, her eyes dancing with pleasure at the reception of her gift. She stood staring at him, and then, her eye catching the violets, she added, “Dose is pooty, too.”

“If you can stay half an hour or so, I should like to step round to the chapel,” Father Monies said to the doctor in the front room, taking up his hat.

The doctor could stay. The little girl had moved a chair up to the bedside, and sat quite silent, her grimy little hand grasped in the father’s. Ruth, saying that she hoped the father wouldn’t mind, began to put in order the front room, which the incidents of the night had somewhat disturbed. Father Damon, holding fast by that little hand to the world of poverty to which he had devoted his life, could not refrain from watching her, as she moved about with the quick, noiseless way that a woman has when she is putting things to rights. This was indeed a novel invasion of his life. He was still too weak to reason about it much. How good she was, how womanly! And what a sense of peace and repose she brought into his apartment! The presence of Brother Monies was peaceful also, but hers was somehow different. His eyes had not cared to follow the brother about the room. He knew that she was unselfish, but he had not noticed before that her ways were so graceful. As she turned her face towards him from time to time he thought its expression beautiful. Ruth Leigh would have smiled grimly if any one had called her beautiful, but then she did not know how she looked sometimes when her feelings were touched. It is said that the lamp of love can illumine into beauty any features of clay through which it shines. As he gazed, letting himself drift as in a dream, suddenly a thought shot through his mind that made him close his eyes, and such a severe priestly look came upon his face that the little girl, who had never taken her eyes off him, exclaimed:

“It is worse?”

“No, my dear,” he replied, with a reassuring smile; “at least, I hope not.”

But when the doctor, finishing her work, drew a chair into the doorway, and sat by the foot of his bed, the stern look still remained on his pale face. And the doctor, she also was the doctor again, as matter of fact as in any professional visit.

“You are very kind,” he said.

There was a shade of impatience on her face as she replied, “But you must be a little kind to yourself.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“But it does matter. You defeat the very work you want to do. I’m going to report you to your order.” And then she added, more lightly, “Don’t you know it is wrong to commit suicide?”

“You don’t understand,” he replied. “There is more than one kind of suicide; you don’t believe in the suicide of the soul. Ah, me!” And a shade of pain passed over his face.

She was quick to see this. “I beg your pardon, Father Damon. It is none of my business, but we are all so anxious to have you speedily well again.”

Just then Father Monies returned, and the doctor rose to go. She took the little girl by the hand and said, “Come, I was just going round to see your father. Good-by. I shall look in again tomorrow.”

“Thank you—thank you a thousand times. But you have so much to do that you must not bother about me.”

Whether he said this to quiet his own conscience, secretly hoping that he might see her again on the morrow, perhaps he himself could not have decided.

Late the next afternoon, after an unusually weary round of visits, made in the extreme heat and in a sort of hopeless faithfulness, Dr. Leigh reached the tenement in which Father Damon lodged: In all the miserable scenes of the day it had been in her mind, giving to her work a pleasure that she did not openly acknowledge even to herself, that she should see him.

The curtains were down, and there was no response to her knock, except from a door in the passage opposite. A woman opened the door wide enough to show her head and to make it evident that she was not sufficiently dressed to come out, and said that Father Damon had gone. He was very much better, and his friend had taken him up-town. Dr. Leigh thanked her, and said she was very glad.

She was so glad that, as she walked away, scarcely heeding her steps or conscious of the chaffing, chattering crowd, all interest in her work and in that quarter of the city seemed dead.

XIII

It is well that there is pleasure somewhere in the world. It is possible for those who have a fresh-air fund of their own to steam away in a yacht, out of the midsummer ennui and the weary gayety of the land. It is a costly pleasure, and probably all the more enjoyed on that account, for if everybody had a yacht there would be no more feeling of distinction in sailing one than in going to any of the second-rate resorts on the coast. There is, to be sure, some ennui in yachting on a rainy coast, and it might be dull but for the sensation created by arrivals at watering-places and the telegraphic reports of these sensations.

If there was any dullness on the Delancy yacht, means were taken to dispel it. While still in the Sound a society was formed for the suppression of total abstinence, and so successful was this that Point Judith was passed, in a rain and a high and chopping sea, with a kind of hilarious enjoyment of the commotion, which is one of the things desired at sea. When the party came round to Newport it declared that it had had a lovely voyage, and inquiry brought out the great general principle, applicable to most coast navigation for pleasure, that the enjoyable way to pass Point Judith is not to know you are passing Point Judith.

Except when you land, and even after you have got your sea-legs on, there is a certain monotony in yachting, unless the weather is very bad, and unless there are women aboard. A party of lively women make even the sea fresh and entertaining. Otherwise, the game of poker is much what it is on land, and the constant consulting of charts and reckoning of speed evince the general desire to get somewhere—that is, to arrive at a harbor. In the recollections of this voyage, even in Jack’s recollections of it after he had paid the bills, it seemed that it had been simply glorious, free from care, generally a physical setting-up performance, and a lark of enormous magnitude. And everybody envied the fortunate sailors.

Mavick actually did enjoy it, for he had that brooding sort of nature, that self-satisfied attitude, that is able to appropriate to its own uses whatever comes. And being an unemotional and very tolerable sailor, he was able to be as cynical at sea as on land, and as much of an oracle, in his wholly unobtrusive way. The perfect personal poise of Mavick, which gave him an air of patronizing the ocean, and his lightly held skeptical view of life, made his company as full of flavor on ship as it was on shore. He didn’t know anything more about the weather than the Weather Bureau knows, yet the helmsman of the yacht used to consult him about the appearances of the sky and a change of wind with a confidence in his opinion that he gave to no one else on board. And Mavick never forfeited this respect by being too positive. It was so with everything; he evidently knew a great deal more than he cared to tell. It is pleasing to notice how much credit such men as Mavick obtain in the world by circumspect reticence and a knowing manner. Jack, blundering along in his free-hearted, emotional way, and never concealing his opinion, was really right twice where Mavick was right once, but he never had the least credit for wisdom.

It was late in August that the Delancy yacht steamed into the splendid Bar Harbor, making its way slowly through one of the rare fogs which are sometimes seen by people who do not own real estate there. Even before they could see an island those on board felt the combination of mountain and sea air that makes this favored place at once a tonic and a sedative to the fashionable world.

The party were expected at Bar Harbor. It had been announced that the yacht was on its way, and some of the projected gayeties were awaiting its coming, for the society reenforcement of the half-dozen men on board was not to be despised. The news went speedily round that Captain Delancy’s flag was flying at the anchorage off the landing.

Among the first to welcome them as they landed and strolled up to the hotel was Major Fairfax.

“Oh yes,” he said; “we are all here—that is, all who know where they ought to be at the right moment.”

To the newcomers the scene was animated. The exotic shops sparkled with cheap specialties; landaus, pony-phaetons, and elaborate buckboards dashed through the streets; aquatic and law-tennis costumes abounded. If there was not much rowing and lawn-tennis, there was a great deal of becoming morning dressing for these sports, and in all the rather aimless idleness there was an air of determined enjoyment. Even here it was evident that there was a surplus of women. These lovers of nature, in the summer season, who had retired to this wild place to be free from the importunities of society, betrayed, Mavick thought, the common instinct of curiosity over the new arrival, and he was glad to take it as an evidence that they loved not nature less but man more. Jack tripped up this ungallant speech by remarking that if Mavick was in this mood he did not know why he came ashore. And Van Dam said that sooner or later all men went ashore. This thin sort of talk was perhaps pardonable after the weariness of a sea voyage, but the Major promptly said it wouldn’t do. And the Major seemed to be in charge of the place.

“No epigrams are permitted. We are here to enjoy ourselves. I’m ordered to bring the whole crew of you to tea at the Tavish cottage.”

“Anybody else there?” asked Jack, carelessly.

“Well, it’s the most curious coincidence, but Mrs. Henderson arrived last night; Henderson has gone to Missouri.”

“Yes, he wrote me to look out for his wife on this coast,” said Mavick.

“You kept mighty still about it,” said Jack.

“So did you,” retorted Mavick.

“It is very curious,” the Major explained, “how fashionable intelligence runs along this coast, apparently independent of the telegraph; everybody knows where everybody else is.”

The Tavish cottage was a summer palace of the present fashion, but there was one good thing about it: it had no tower, nor any make-believe balconies hung on the outside like bird-cages. The rooms were spacious, and had big fireplaces, and ample piazzas all round, so that the sun could be courted or the wind be avoided at all hours of the day. It was, in short, not a house for retirement and privacy, but for entertainment. It was furnished luxuriously but gayly, and with its rugs and portieres and divans it reminded Mavick of an Oriental marquee. Miss Tavish called it her tepee, an evolution of the aboriginal dwelling. She liked to entertain, and she never appeared to better advantage than when her house was full, and something was going on continually-lively breakfasts and dinners, dances, theatricals, or the usual flowing in and out of callers and guests, chattering groups, and flirtatious couples. It was her idea of repose from the winter’s gayety, and in it she sustained the role of the non-fatigueable society girl. It is a performance that many working-girls regard with amazement.

There was quite a flutter in the cottage, as there always is when those who know each other well meet under new circumstances after a short separation.

“We are very glad to see you,” Miss Tavish said, cordially; “we have been awfully dull.”

“That is complimentary to me,” said the Major.

“You can judge the depths we have been in when even the Major couldn’t pull us out,” she retorted. “Without him we should have simply died.”

“And it would have been the liveliest obsequies I ever attended.”

Carmen was not effusive in her greeting; she left that role to Miss Tavish, taking for herself that of confidential friend. She was almost retiring in her manner, but she made Jack feel that she had a strong personal interest in his welfare, and she asked a hundred questions about the voyage and about town and about Edith.

“I’m going to chaperon you up here,” she said, “for Miss Tavish will lead you into all sorts of wild adventures.”

There was that in the manner of the demure little woman when she made this proposal that convinced Jack that under her care he would be perfectly safe—from Miss Tavish.

After cigarettes were lighted she contrived to draw Mavick away to the piazza. She was very anxious to know what Henderson’s latest moves were. Mavick was very communicative, and told her nothing that he knew she did not already know. And she was clever enough to see, without any apparent distrust, that whatever she got from him must be in what he did not say. As to Jack’s speculations, she made little more progress. Jack gave every sign of being prosperous; he entertained royally on his yacht.

Mavick himself was puzzled to know whether Carmen really cared for Jack, or whether she was only interested as in a game, one of the things that amused her life to play, to see how far he would go, and to watch his ascension or his tumble. Mavick would have been surprised if he had known that as a result of this wholly agreeable and confidential talk, Carmen wrote that night in a letter to her husband:

“Your friend Mavick is here. What a very clever man he is! If I were you I would keep an eye on him.”

A dozen plans were started at the tea for relieving the tedium of the daily drives and the regulation teas and receptions. For one thing, weather permitting, they would all breakfast at twelve on the yacht, and then sail about the harbor, and come home in the sunset.

The day was indeed charming, so stimulating as to raise the value of real estate, and incite everybody to go off in search of adventure, in wagons, in walking parties, in boats. There is no happiness like the anticipation of pleasure begot by such a morning. Those who live there said it was regular Bar Harbor weather.

Captain Delancy was on deck to receive his guests, who came out in small boats, chattering and fluttering and “ship-ahoying,” as gay in spirits as in apparel. Anything but high spirits and nonsense would be unpardonable on such a morning. Breakfast was served on deck, under an awning, in sight of the mountains, the green islands, the fringe of breaking sea in the distant opening, the shimmer and sparkle of the harbor, the white sails of pleasure-boats, the painted canoes, the schooners and coal-boats and steamers swinging at anchor just enough to make all the scene alive. “This is my idea,” said the Major, “of going to sea in a yacht; it would be perfect if we were tied up at the dock.”

“I move that we throw the Major overboard,” cried Miss Tavish.

“No,” Jack exclaimed; “it is against the law to throw anything into the harbor.”

“Oh, I expected Miss Tavish would throw me overboard when Mavick appeared.”

Mavick raised his glass and proposed the health of Miss Tavish.

“With all my heart,” the Major said; “my life is passed in returning good for evil.”

“I never knew before,” and Miss Tavish bowed her acknowledgments, “the secret of the Major’s attractions.”

“Yes,” said Carmen, sweetly, “he is all things to all women.”

“You don’t appear to have a friend here, Major,” Mavick suggested.

“No; my friends are all foul-weather friends; come a bright day, they are all off like butterflies. That comes of being constant.”

“That’s no distinction,” Carmen exclaimed; “all men are that till they get what they want.”

“Alas! that women also in these days here become cynical! It was not so when I was young. Here’s to the ever young,” and he bowed to Carmen and Miss Tavish.

“He’s been with Ponce de Leon!” cried Miss Tavish.

“He’s the dearest man living, except a few,” echoed Carmen. “The Major’s health.”

The yellow wine sparkled in the glasses like the sparkling sea, the wind blew softly from the south, the sails in the bay darkened and flashed, and the breakfast, it seemed to go along of itself, and erelong the convives were eating ambrosia and sipping nectar. Van Dam told a shark story. Mavick demonstrated its innate improbability. The Major sang a song—a song of the forties, with a touch of sentiment. Jack, whose cheerful voice was a little of the cider-cellar order, and who never sang when he was sad, struck up the latest vaudeville ditty, and Carmen and Miss Tavish joined in the chorus.

“I like the sea,” the Major declared. They all liked it. The breakfast lasted a long time, and when they rose from the table Jack said that presently they would take a course round the harbor. The Major remarked that that would suit him. He appeared to be ready to go round the world.

While they were preparing to start, Carmen and Jack strolled away to the bow, where she perched herself, holding on by the rigging. He thought he had never seen her look so pretty as at that moment, in her trim nautical costume, sitting up there, swinging her feet like a girl, and regarding him with half-mocking, half-admiring eyes.

What were they saying? Heaven only knows. What nonsense do people so situated usually talk? Perhaps she was warning him against Miss Tavish. Perhaps she was protesting that Julia Tavish was a very, very old friend. To an observer this admirable woman seemed to be on the defensive—her most alluring attitude. It was not, one could hear, exactly sober talk; there was laughter and raillery and earnestness mingled. It might be said that they were good comrades. Carmen professed to like good comradeship and no nonsense. But she liked to be confidential.

Till late in the afternoon they cruised about among the islands, getting different points of view of the coast, and especially different points of view of each other, in the freedom of talk and repartee permitted on an excursion. Before sunset they were out in the open, and could feel the long ocean swell. The wind had risen a little, and there was a low band of clouds in the south. The skipper told Mr. Delancy that it would be much fresher with the sinking of the sun, but Jack replied that it wouldn’t amount to anything; the glass was all right.

“Now the great winds shoreward blow;

Now the salt tides seaward flow;

Now the wild white horses play,

Champ and chafe and toss in the spray.”

Miss Tavish was in the wheel-house, and had taken the wheel. This clever girl knew her right hand from her left, instantly, without having to stop and think and look at her rings, and she knew what port and starboard meant, as orders, and exactly how to meet a wave with a turn of the wheel.

“I say, Captain Delancy,” she cried out, “the steamer is about due. Let’s go down and meet her, and race in.”

“All right,” replied Jack. “We can run round her three times and then beat her in.”

The steamer’s smoke was seen at that instant, and the yacht was headed for it. The wind was a little fresher, but the tight little craft took the waves like a duck, and all on board enjoyed the excitement of the change, except the Major, who said he didn’t mind, but he didn’t believe the steamer needed any escort.

By the time the steamer was reached the sun was going down in a band of clouds. There was no gale, but the wind increased in occasional puffs of spite, and the waves were getting up. The skipper took the wheel to turn the yacht in a circle to her homeward course. As this operation created strange motions, and did not interest the Major, he said he would go below and reflect.

In turning, the yacht came round on the seaward side of the steamer, but far behind. But the little craft speedily showed her breeding and overhauled her big rival, and began to forge ahead. The little group on the yacht waved their handkerchiefs as if in good-by, and the passengers on the steamer cheered. As the wind was every moment increasing, the skipper sheered away to allow plenty of sea-room between the boats. The race appeared to be over.

“It’s a pity,” said Miss Tavish.

“Let’s go round her,” said Jack; “eh, skipper?”

“If you like, sir,” responded the skipper. “She can do it.”

The yacht was well ahead, but the change in the direction brought the vessels nearer together. But there was no danger. The speed they were going would easily bring her round away ahead of the steamer.

But just then something happened. The yacht would not answer to her helm. The wheel flew around without resistance. The wind, hauled now into the east, struck her with violence and drove her sideways. The little thing was like a chip on the sea. The rudder-chain had broken. The yacht seemed to fly towards the long, hulking steamer. The danger was seen there, and her helm was put hard down, and her nose began to turn towards the shore. But it was too late. It seemed all over in an instant. The yacht dashed bow on to the side of the steamer, quivered an instant, and then dropped away. At the same moment the steamer slowed down and began to turn to assist the wounded.

The skipper of the yacht and a couple of hands rushed below. A part of the bow had been carried away and a small hole made just above the waterline, through which the water spurted whenever she encountered a large wave. It was enough to waterlog her and sink her in such a sea. The two seamen grasped whatever bedding was in reach below, rammed it into the opening, and held it there. The skipper ran on deck, and by the aid of the men hauled out a couple of sails and dropped them over the bow. These would aid in keeping out the water. They could float now, but where were they going? “Going ashore,” said Mavick, grimly. And so they were.

“Was there a panic on board?” it was asked afterwards. Not exactly. Among well-bred people a panic is never good form. But there were white faces and trembling knees and anxious looks. The steamer was coming towards them, and all eyes were fixed on that rather than on the rocks of the still distant shore.

The most striking incident of the moment—it seemed so to some of those who looked back upon it—was a singular test of character, or rather of woman’s divination of character. Carmen instinctively flew to Jack and grasped and held his arm. She knew, without stopping to reason about it, that he would unhesitatingly imperil his life to save that of any woman. Whatever judgment is passed upon Jack, this should not be forgotten. And Miss Tavish; to whom did she fly in this peril? To the gallant Major? No. To the cool and imperturbable Mavick, who was as strong and sinewy as he was cool? No. She ran without hesitation to Van Dam, and clung to him, recognizing instinctively, with the woman’s feeling, the same quality that Jack had. There are such men, who may have no great gifts, but who will always fight rather than run under fire, and who will always protect a woman.

Mavick saw all this, and understood it perfectly, and didn’t object to it at the time—but he did not forget it.

The task of rescue was not easy in that sea and wind, but it was dexterously done. The steamer approached and kept at a certain distance on the windward side. A boat was lowered, and a line was brought to the yacht, which was soon in tow with a stout cable hitched to the steamer’s anchor windlass.

It was all done with much less excitement than appeared from the telegraphic accounts, and while the party were being towed home the peril seemed to have been exaggerated, and the affair to look like an ordinary sea incident. But the skipper said that it was one escape in a hundred.

The captain of the steamer raised his hat gravely in reply to the little cheer from the yacht, when Carmen and Miss Tavish fluttered their handkerchiefs towards him. The only chaff from the steamer was roared out by a fat Boston man, who made a funnel of his hands and shouted, “The race is not always to the swift.”

As soon as Jack stepped ashore he telegraphed to Edith that the yacht had had an accident in the harbor, but that no one was hurt. When he reached the hotel he found a letter from Edith of such a tenor that he sent another despatch, saying that she might expect him at once, leaving the yacht behind. There was a buzz of excitement in the town, and there were a hundred rumors, which the sight of the yacht and its passengers landed in safety scarcely sufficed to allay.

When Jack called at the Tavish cottage to say good-by, both the ladies were too upset to see him. He took a night train, and as he was whirled away in the darkness the events of the preceding forty-eight hours seemed like a dream. Even the voyage up the coast was a little unreal—an insubstantial episode in life. And the summer city by the sea, with its gayety and gossip and busy idleness, sank out of sight like a phantom. He drew his cap over his eyes, and was impatient that the rattling train did not go faster, for Edith, waiting there in the Golden House, seemed to stretch out her arms for him to come. Still behind him rose a picture of that bacchanalian breakfast—the Major and Carmen and Mavick and Miss Tavish dancing a reel on the sloping deck, then the rising wind, the reckless daring of the race, and a vision of sudden death. He shuddered for the first time in a quick realization of how nearly it came to being all over with life and its pleasures.

XIV

Edith had made no appeal to Jack to come home. His going, therefore, had the merit in his eyes of being a voluntary response to the promptings of his better nature. Perhaps but for the accident at Mount Desert he might have felt that his summer pleasure was needlessly interfered with, but the little shock of that was a real, if still temporary, moral turning-point for him. For the moment his inclination seemed to run with his duty, and he had his reward in Edith’s happiness at his coming, the loving hunger in her eyes, the sweet trust that animated her face, the delightful appropriation of him that could scarcely brook a moment’s absence from her sight. There could not be a stronger appeal to his manhood and his fidelity.

“Yes, Jack dear, it was a little lonesome.” She was swinging in her hammock on the veranda in sight of the sea, and Jack sat by her with his cigar. “I don’t mind telling you now that there were times when I longed for you dreadfully, but I was glad, all the same, that you were enjoying yourself, for it is tiresome down here for a man with nothing to do but to wait.”

“You dear thing!” said Jack, with his hand on her head, smoothing her glossy hair and pushing it back from her forehead, to make her look more intellectual—a thing which she hated. “Yes, dear, I was a brute to go off at all.”

“But you wanted to comeback?” And there was a wistful look in her eyes.

“Indeed I did,” he answered, fervently, as he leaned over the hammock to kiss the sweet eyes into content; and he was quite honest in the expression of a desire that was nearly forty-eight hours old, and by a singular mental reaction seemed to have been always present with him.

“It was so good of you to telegraph me before I could see the newspaper.”

“Of course I knew the account would be greatly exaggerated;” and he made light of the whole affair, knowing that the facts would still be capable of shocking her, giving a comic picture of the Major’s seafaring qualities, and Carmen’s and Miss Tavish’s chaff of the gallant old beau.

Even with this light sketching of the event she could not avoid a retrospective pang of apprehension, and the tightened grasp of his hand was as if she were holding him fast from that and all other peril.

The days went by in content, on the whole, shaded a little by anxiety and made grave by a new interest. It could not well be but that the prospect of the near future, with its increase of responsibility, should create a little uneasiness in Jack’s mind as to his own career. Of this future they talked much, and in Jack’s attitude towards her Edith saw, for the first time since her marriage, a lever of suggestion, and it came naturally in the contemplation of their future life that she should encourage his discontent at having no occupation. Facing, in this waiting-time of quiet, certain responsibilities, it was impressed upon him that the collecting of bric-a-brac was scarcely an occupation, and that idling in clubs and studios and dangling about at the beck of society women was scarcely a career that could save him from ultimate ennui. To be sure, he had plenty of comrades, young fellows of fortune, who never intended to do anything except to use it for their personal satisfaction; but they did not seem to be of much account except in the little circle that they ornamented. Speaking of one of them one day, Father Damon had said that it seemed a pity a fellow of such family and capacity and fortune should go to the devil merely for the lack of an object in life. In this closer communion with Edith, whose ideas he began to comprehend, Jack dimly apprehended this view, and for the moment impulsively accepted it.

“I’m half sorry,” he said one day, “that I didn’t go in for a profession. But it is late now. Law, medicine, engineering, architecture, would take years of study.”

“There was Armstrong,” Edith suggested, “who studied law after he was married.”

“But it looks sort of silly for a fellow who has a wife to go to school, unless,” said Jack, with a laugh, “he goes to school to his wife. Then there’s politics. You wouldn’t like to see me in that.”

“I rather think, Jack”—she spoke musingly—“if I were a man I should go into politics.”

“You would have nice company!”

“But it’s the noblest career—government, legislation, trying to do something to make the world better. Jack, I don’t see how the men of New York can stand it to be governed by the very worst elements.”

“My dear, you have no idea what practical politics is.”

“I’ve an idea what I’d make it. What is the good of young men of leisure if they don’t do anything for the country? Too fine to do what Hamilton did and Jay did! I wish you could have heard my father talk about it. Abdicate their birthright for a four-in-hand!”

“Or a yacht,” suggested Jack.

“Well, I don’t see why a man cannot own a yacht and still care something about the decent management of his city.”

“There’s Mavick in politics.”

“Not exactly. Mavick is in office for what he can make. No, I will not say that. No doubt he is a good civil servant, and we can’t expect everybody to be unselfish. At any rate, he is intelligent. Do you remember what Mr. Morgan said last winter?” And Edith lifted herself up on her elbow, as if to add the weight of her attitude to her words, as Jack was still smiling at her earnestness.

“No; you said he was a delightful sort of pessimist.”

“Mr. Morgan said that the trouble with the governing and legislation now in the United States is that everybody is superficially educated, and that the people are putting their superficial knowledge into laws, and that we are going to have a nice time with all these wild theories and crudities on the statute-book. And then educated people say that politics is so corrupt and absurd that they cannot have anything to do with it.”

“And how far do you think we could get, my dear, in the crusade you propose?”

“I don’t know that you would get anywhere. Yet I should think the young men of New York could organize its intelligence and do something. But you think I’m nothing but a woman.” And Edith sank back, as if abandoning the field.

“I had thought that; but it is hard to tell, these days. Never mind, when we go back to town I’ll stir round; you’ll see.”

This was an unusual sort of talk. Jack had never heard Edith break out in this direction before, and he wondered if many women were beginning to think of men in this way, as cowardly about their public duties. Not many in his set, he was sure. If Edith had urged him to go into Neighborhood Guild work, he could have understood that. Women and ethical cranks were interested in that. And women were getting queerer every day, beginning, as Mavick said, to take notice. However, it was odd, when you thought over it, that the city should be ruled by the slums.

It was easy to talk about these things; in fact, Jack talked a great deal about them in the clubs, and occasionally with a knot of men after dinner in a knowing, pessimistic sort of way. Sometimes the discussions were very animated and even noisy between these young citizens. It seemed, sometimes, about midnight, that something might be done; but the resolution vanished next morning when another day, to be lived through, confronted them. They illustrated the great philosophic observation that it is practically impossible for an idle man who has nothing to do to begin anything today.

To do Jack justice, this enforced detention in the country he did not find dull exactly. To be sure it was vacation-time, and his whole life was a vacation, and summer was rather more difficult to dispose of than winter, for one had to make more of an effort to amuse himself. But Edith was never more charming than in this new dependence, and all his love and loyalty were evoked in caring for her. This was occupation enough, even if he had been the busiest man in the world-to watch over her, to read to her, to anticipate her fancies, to live with her in that dream of the future which made life seem almost ideal. There came a time when he looked back upon this month at the Golden House as the happiest in his life.

The talk about an occupation was not again referred to. Edith seemed entirely happy to have Jack with her, more entirely her own than he had ever been, and to have him just as he was. And yet he knew, by a sure instinct, that she saw him as she thought he would be, with some aim and purpose in life. And he made many good resolutions.

That which was nearest him attracted him most, and very feeble now were the allurements of the life and the company he had just left. Not that he would break with it exactly; it was not necessary to do that; but he would find something to do, something worth a man’s doing, or, at any rate, some occupation that should tax his time and his energies. That, he knew, would make Edith happy, and to make her happy seemed now very much like a worthy object in life. She was so magnanimous, so unsuspicious, so full of all nobility. He knew she would stand by him whatever happened. Down here her attitude to life was no longer a rebuke to him nor a restraint upon him. Everything seemed natural and wholesome. Perhaps his vanity was touched, for there must be something in, him if such a woman could love him. And probably there was, though he himself had never yet had a chance to find it out. Brought up in the expectation of a fortune, bred to idleness as others are to industry, his highest ambition having been to amuse himself creditably and to take life easily, what was to hinder his being one of the multitude of “good-for-nothings” in our modern life? If there had been war, he had spirit enough to carry him into it, and it would have surprised no one to hear that Jack had joined an exploring expedition to the North Pole or the highlands of Central Asia. Something uncommon he might do if opportunity offered.

About his operations with Henderson he had never told Edith, and he did not tell her now. Perhaps she divined it, and he rather wondered that she had never asked him about his increased expenditures, his yacht, and all that. He used to look at her steadily at times, as if he were trying to read the secrets of her heart.

“What are you looking at, Jack?”

“To see if I can find out how much you know, you look so wise.”

“Do I? I was just thinking about you. I suppose that made me look so.”

“No; about life and the world generally.”

“Mighty little, Jack, except—well, I study you.”

“Do you? Then you’ll presently lose your mind:”

Jack and most men have little idea that they are windows through which their wives see the world; and how much more of the world they know in that way than men usually suspect or wives ever tell!

He did not tell her about Henderson, but he almost resolved that when his present venture was over he would let stocks alone as speculations, and go into something that he could talk about to his wife as he talked about stocks to Carmen.

From the stranded mariners at Bar Harbor Captain Jack had many and facetious letters. They wanted to know if his idea was that they should stick by the yacht until he got leisure to resume the voyage, or if he expected them to walk home. He had already given orders to the skipper to patch it up and bring it to New York if possible, and he advised his correspondents to stay by the yacht as long as there was anything in the larder, but if they were impatient, he offered them transportation on any vessel that would take able-bodied seamen. He must be excused from commanding, because he had been assigned to shore duty. Carmen and Miss Tavish wrote that it was unfair to leave them to sustain all the popularity and notoriety of the shipwreck, and that he owed it to the public to publish a statement, in reply to the insinuations of the newspapers, in regard to the sea-worthiness of the yacht and the object of this voyage. Jack replied that the only object of the voyage was to relieve the tedium of Bar Harbor, and, having accomplished this, he would present the vessel to Miss Tavish if she would navigate it back to the city.

The golden autumn days by the sea were little disturbed by these echoes of another life, which seemed at the moment to be a very shallow one. Yet the time was not without its undertone of anxieties, of grave perils that seemed to sanctify it and heighten its pleasures of hope. Jack saw and comprehended for the first time in his life the real nature of a pure woman, the depths of tenderness and self-abnegation, the heroism and calm trust and the nobility of an unworldly life. No wonder that he stood a little in awe of it, and days when he wandered down on the beach, with only the waves for company, or sat smoking in the arbor, with an unread book in his hand, his own career seemed petty and empty. Such moods, however, are not uncommon in any life, and are not of necessity fruitful. It need not be supposed that Jack took it too seriously, on the one hand, or, on the other, that a vision of such a woman’s soul is ever without influence.

By the end of October they returned to town, Jack, and Edith with a new and delicate attractiveness, and young Fletcher Delancy the most wonderful and important personage probably who came to town that season. It seemed to Edith that his advent would be universally remarked, and Jack felt relieved when the boy was safely housed out of the public gaze. Yes, to Edith’s inexpressible joy it was a boy, and while Jack gallantly said that a girl would have suited him just as well, he was conscious of an increased pride when he announced the sex to his friends. This undervaluation of women at the start is one of the mysteries of life. And until women themselves change their point of view, it is to be feared that legislation will not accomplish all that many of them wish.

“So it is a boy. I congratulate you,” was the exclamation of Major Fairfax the first time Jack went down to the Union.

“I’m glad, Major, to have your approval.”

“Oh, it’s what is expected, that’s all. For my part, I prefer girls. The announcement of boys is more expensive.”

Jack understood, and it turned out in all the clubs that he had hit upon the most expensive sex in the view of responding to congratulations.

“It used to seem to me,” said the Major, “that I must have a male heir to my estates. But, somehow, as the years go on, I feel more like being an heir myself. If I had married and had a boy, he would have crowded me out by this time; whereas, if it had been a girl, I should no doubt have been staying at her place in Lenox this summer instead of being shipwrecked on that desert island. There is nothing, my dear boy, like a girl well invested.”

“You speak with the feelings of a father.”

“I speak, sir, from observation. I look at society as it is, not as it would be if we had primogeniture and a landed aristocracy. A daughter under our arrangements is more likely to be a comfort to her parent in his declining years than a son.”

“But you seem, Major, to have preferred a single life?”

“Circumstances—thank you, just a drop more—we are the creatures of circumstances. It is a long story. There were misrepresentation and misunderstanding. It is true, sir, that at that time my property was encumbered, but it was not unproductive. She died long ago. I have reason to believe that her married life was not happy. I was hot-blooded in those days, and my honor was touched, but I never blamed her. She was, at twenty, the most beautiful woman in Virginia. I have never seen her equal.”

This was more than the Major had ever revealed about his private life before. He had created an illusion about himself which society accepted, and in which he lived in apparent enjoyment of metropolitan existence. This was due to a sanguine temperament and a large imagination. And he had one quality that made him a favorite—a hearty enjoyment of the prosperity of others. With regard to himself, his imagination was creative, and Jack could not now tell whether this “most beautiful woman of Virginia” was not evoked by the third glass, about which the Major remarked, as he emptied it, that only this extraordinary occasion could justify such an indulgence at this time of day.

The courtly old gentleman had inquired about madam—indeed, the second glass had been dedicated to “mother and child”—and he exhibited a friendly and almost paternal interest, as he always did, in Jack.

“By-the-way,” he said, after a silence, “is Henderson in town?”

“I haven’t heard. Why?”

“There’s been a good deal of uneasiness in the Street as to what he is doing. I hope you haven’t got anything depending on him.”

“I’ve got something in his stocks, if that is what you mean; but I don’t mind telling you I have made something.”

“Well, it’s none of my business, only the Henderson stocks have gone off a little, as you know.”

Jack knew, and he asked the Major a little nervously if he knew anything further. The Major knew nothing except Street rumors. Jack was uneasy, for the Major was a sort of weathercock, and before he left the club he wrote to Mavick.

He carried home with him a certain disquiet, to which he had been for months a stranger. Even the sight of Edith, who met him with a happy face, and dragged him away at once to see how lovely the baby looked asleep, could not remove this. It seemed strange that such a little thing should make a change, introduce an alien element into this domestic peace. Jack was like some other men who lose heart not when they are doing a doubtful thing, but when they have to face the consequences—cases of misplaced conscience. The peace and content that he had left in the house in the morning seemed to have gone out of it when he returned at night.

Next day came a reassuring letter from Mavick.

Henderson was going on as usual. It was only a little bear movement, which wouldn’t amount to anything. Still, day after day, the bears kept clawing down, and Jack watched the stock-list with increasing eagerness. He couldn’t decide to sacrifice anything as long as he had a margin of profit.

In this state of mind it was impossible to consider any of the plans he had talked over with Edith before the baby was born. Inquiries he did make about some sort of position or regular occupation, and these he reported to Edith; but his heart was not in it.

As the days went by there was a little improvement in his stocks, and his spirits rose. But this mood was no more favorable than the other for beginning a new life, nor did there seem to be, as he went along, any need of it. He had an appearance of being busy every day; he rose late and went late to bed. It was the old life. Stocks down, there was a necessity of bracing up with whomever he met at any of the three or four clubs in which he lounged in the afternoon; and stocks up, there was reason for celebrating that fact in the same way.

It was odd how soon he became accustomed to consider himself and to be regarded as the father of a family. That, also, like his marriage, seemed something done, and in a manner behind him. There was a commonplaceness about the situation. To Edith it was a great event. To Jack it was a milestone in life. He was proud of the boy; he was proud of Edith. “I tell you, fellows,” he would say at the club, “it’s a great thing,” and so on, in a burst of confidence, and he was quite sincere in this. But he preferred to be at the club and say these things rather than pass the same hours with his adorable family. He liked to think what he would do for that family—what luxuries he could procure for them, how they should travel and see the world. There wasn’t a better father anywhere than Jack at this period. And why shouldn’t a man of family amuse himself? Because he was happy in his family he needn’t change all the habits of his life.

Presently he intended to look about him for something to do that would satisfy Edith and fill up his time; but meantime he drifted on, alternately anxious and elated, until the season opened. The Blunts and the Van Dams and the Chesneys and the Tavishes and Mrs. Henderson had called, invitations had poured in, subscriptions were asked, studies and gayeties were projected, and the real business of life was under way.

XV

To the nurse of the Delancy boy and to his mother he was by no means an old story or merely an incident of the year. He was an increasing wonder—new every morning, and exciting every evening. He was the centre of a world of solicitude and adoration. It would be scarcely too much to say that his coming into the world promised a new era, and his traits, his likes and dislikes, set a new standard in his court. If he had apprehended his position his vanity would have outgrown his curiosity about the world, but he displayed no more consciousness of his royalty than a kicking Infanta of Spain. This was greatly to his credit in the opinion of the nurse, who devoted herself to the baby with that enthusiasm of women for infants which fortunately never fails, and won the heart of Edith by her worship. And how much they found to say about this marvel! To hear from the nurse, over and over again, what the baby had done and had not done, in a given hour, was to Edith like a fresh chapter out of an exciting romance.

And the boy’s biographer is inclined to think that he had rare powers of discrimination, for one day when Carmen had called and begged to be permitted to go up into the nursery, and had asked to take him in her arms just for a moment, notwithstanding her soft dress and her caressing manner, Fletcher had made a wry face and set up a howl. “How much he looks like his father” (he didn’t look like anything), Carmen said, handing him over to the nurse. What she thought was that in manner and disposition he was totally unlike Jack Delancy.

When they came down-stairs, Mrs. Schuyler Blunt was in the drawing-room. “I’ve had such a privilege, Mrs. Blunt, seeing the baby!” cried Carmen, in her sweetest manner.

“It must have been,” that lady rejoined, stiffly.

Carmen, who hated to be seen through, of all things, did not know whether to resent this or not. But Edith hastened to the rescue of her guest.

“I think it’s a privilege.”

“And you know, Mrs. Blunt,” said Carmen, recovering herself and smiling, “that I must have some excitement this dull season.”

“I see,” said Mrs. Blunt, with no relaxation of her manner; “we are all grateful to Mrs. Delancy.”

“Mrs. Henderson does herself injustice,” Edith again interposed. “I can assure you she has a great talent for domesticity.”

Carmen did not much fancy this apology for her, but she rejoined: “Yes, indeed. I’m going to cultivate it.”

“How is this privileged person?” Mrs. Blunt asked.

“You shall see,” said Edith. “I am glad you came, for I wanted very much to consult you. I was going to send for you.”

“Well, here I am. But I didn’t come about the baby. I wanted to consult you. We miss you, dear, every day.” And then Mrs. Blunt began to speak about some social and charitable arrangements, but stopped suddenly. “I’ll see the baby first. Good-morning, Mrs. Henderson.” And she left the room.

Carmen felt as much left out socially as about the baby, and she also rose to go.

“Don’t go,” said Edith. “What kind of a summer have you had?”

“Oh, very good. Some shipwrecks.”

“And Mr. Henderson? Is he well?”

“Perfectly. He is away now. Husbands, you know, haven’t so much talent for domesticity as we have.”

“That depends,” Edith replied, simply, but with that spirit and air of breeding before which Carmen always inwardly felt defeat—“that depends very much upon ourselves.”

Naturally, with this absorption in the baby, Edith was slow to resume her old interests. Of course she knew of the illness of Father Damon, and the nurse, who was from the training-school in which Dr. Leigh was an instructor, and had been selected for this important distinction by the doctor, told her from time to time of affairs on the East Side. Over there the season had opened quite as usual; indeed, it was always open; work must go on every day, because every day food must be obtained and rent-money earned, and the change from summer to winter was only a climatic increase of hardships. Even an epidemic scare does not essentially vary the daily monotony, which is accepted with a dogged fatality:

There had been no vacation for Ruth Leigh, and she jokingly said, when at length she got a half-hour for a visit to Edith, that she would hardly know what to do with one if she had it.

“We have got through very well,” she added. “We always dread the summer, and we always dread the winter. Science has not yet decided which is the more fatal, decayed vegetables or unventilated rooms. City residence gives both a fair chance at the poor.”

“Are not the people learning anything?” Edith asked.

“Not much, except to bear it, I am sorry to say. Even Father Damon—”

“Is he at work again? Do you see him often?”

“Yes, occasionally.”

“I should so like to see him. But I interrupted you.”

“Well, Father Damon has come to see that nothing can be done without organization. The masses”—and there was an accent of bitterness in her use of the phrase—“must organize and fight for anything they want.”

“Does Father Damon join in this?”

“Oh, he has always been a member of the Labor League. Now he has been at work with the Episcopal churches of the city, and got them to agree, when they want workmen for any purpose, to employ only union men.”

“Isn’t that,” Edith exclaimed, “a surrender of individual rights and a great injustice to men not in the unions?”

“You would see it differently if you were in the struggle. If the working-men do not stand by each other, where are they to look for help? What have the Christians of this city done?” and the little doctor got up and began to pace the room. “Charities? Yes, little condescending charities. And look at the East Side! Is its condition any better? I tell you, Mrs. Delancy, I don’t believe in charities—in any charities.”

“It seems to me,” said Edith, with a smile calculated to mollify this vehemence, “that you are a standing refutation of your own theory.”

“Me? No, indeed. I’m paid by the dispensary. And I make my patients pay—when they are able.”

“So I have heard,” Edith retorted. “Your bills must be a terror to the neighborhood.”

“You may laugh. But I’m establishing a reputation over there as a working-woman, and if I have any influence, or do any little good, it’s owing to that fact. Do you think they care anything about Father Damon’s gospel?”

“I should be sorry to think they did not,” Edith said, gravely.

“Well, very little they care. They like the man because they think he shares their feelings, and does not sympathize with them because they are different from him. That is the only kind of gospel that is good for anything over there.”

“I don’t think Father Damon would agree with you in that.”

“Of course he would not. He’s as mediaeval as any monk. But then he is not blind. He sees that it is never anything but personal influence that counts. Poor fellow,” and the doctor’s voice softened, “he’ll kill himself with his ascetic notions. He is trying to take up the burden of this life while struggling under the terror of another.”

“But he must be doing a great deal of good.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Nothing seems to do much good. But his presence is a great comfort. That is something. And I’m glad he is going about now rousing opposition to what is, rather than all the time preaching submission to the lot of this life for the sake of a reward somewhere else. That’s a gospel for the rich.”

Edith was accustomed to hear Ruth Leigh talk in this bitter strain when this subject was introduced, and she contrived to turn the conversation upon what she called practical work, and then to ask some particulars of Father Damon’s sudden illness.

“He did rest,” the doctor said, “for a little, in his way. But he will not spare himself, and he cannot stand it. I wish you could induce him to come here often—to do anything for diversion. He looks so worn.”

There was in the appeal to Edith a note of personal interest which her quick heart did not fail to notice. And the thought came to her with a painful apprehension. Poor thing! Poor Father Damon!

Does not each of them have to encounter misery enough without this?

Doesn’t life spare anybody?

She told her apprehension to Jack when he came home.

Jack gave a long whistle. “That is a deadlock!”

“His vows, and her absolute materialism! Both of them would go to the stake for what they believe, or don’t believe. It troubles me very much.”

“But,” said Jack, “it’s interesting. It’s what they call a situation. There. I didn’t mean to make light of it. I don’t believe there is anything in it. But it would be comical, right here in New York.”

“It would be tragical.”

“Comedy usually is. I suppose it’s the human nature in it. That is so difficult to get rid of. But I thought the missionary business was safe. Though, do you know, Edith, I should think better of both of them for having some human feeling. By-the-way, did Dr. Leigh say anything about Henderson?”

“No. What?”

“He has given Father Damon ten thousand dollars. It’s in strict secrecy, but Father Damon said I might tell you. He said it was providential.”

“I thought Mr. Henderson was wholly unscrupulous and cold as ice.”

“Yes, he’s got a reputation for freeze-outs. If the Street knew this it would say it was insurance money. And he is so cynical that he wouldn’t care what the Street said.”

“Do you think it came about through Mrs. Henderson?”

“I don’t think so. She was speaking of Father Damon this morning in the Loan Exhibition. I don’t believe she knows anything about it. Henderson is a good deal shut up in himself. They say at the Union that years ago he used to do a good many generous things—that he is a great deal harder than he used to be.”

This talk was before dinner. She did not ask anything now about Carmen, though she knew that Jack had fallen into his old habit of seeing much of her. He was less and less at home, except at dinner-time, and he was often restless, and, she saw, often annoyed. When he was at home he tried to make up for his absence by extra tenderness and consideration for Edith and the boy. And this effort, and its evidence of a double if not divided life, wounded her more than the neglect. One night, when he came home late, he had been so demonstrative about the baby that Edith had sent the nurse out of the room until she could coax Jack to go into his own apartment. His fits of alternate good-humor and depression she tried to attribute to his business, to which he occasionally alluded without confiding in her.

The next morning Father Damon came in about luncheon-time. He apologized for not coming before since her return, but he had been a little upset, and his work was more and more interesting. His eyes were bright and his manner had quite the usual calm, but he looked pale and thinner, and so exhausted that Edith ran immediately for a glass of wine, and began to upbraid him for not taking better care of himself.

“I take too much care of myself. We all do. The only thing I’ve got to give is myself.”

“But you will not last.”

“That is of little moment; long or short, a man can only give himself. Our Lord was not here very long.” And then Father Damon smiled, and said “My dear friend, I’m really doing very well. Of course I get tired. Then I come up again. And every now and then I get a lift. Did Jack tell you about Henderson?”

“Yes. Wasn’t it strange?”

“I never was more surprised. He sent for me to come to his office. Without any circumlocution, he asked me how I was getting on, and, before I could answer, he said, in the driest business way, that he had been thinking over a little plan, and perhaps I could help him. He had a little money he wanted to invest—RR“‘In our mission chapel?’ I asked.

“‘No,’ he said, without moving a muscle. ‘Not that. I don’t know much about chapels, Father Damon. But I’ve been hearing what you are doing, and it occurred to me that you must come across a good many cases not in the regular charities that you could help judiciously, get them over hard spots, without encouraging dependence. I’m going to put ten thousand dollars into your hands, if you’ll be bothered with it, to use at your discretion.’

“I was taken aback, and I suppose I showed it, and I said that was a great deal of money to intrust to one man.

“Henderson showed a little impatience. It depended upon the man. That was his lookout. The money would be deposited, he said, in bank to my order, and he asked me for my signature that he could send with the deposit.

“Of course I thanked him warmly, and said I hoped I could do some good with it. He did not seem to pay much attention to what I was saying. He was looking out of the window to the bare trees in the court back of his office, and his hands were moving the papers on his table aimlessly about.

“‘I shall know,’ he said, ‘when you have drawn this out. I’ve got a fancy for keeping a little fund of this sort there.’ And then he added, still not looking at me, but at the dead branches, ‘You might call it the Margaret Fund.’”

“That was the name of his first wife!” Edith exclaimed.

“Yes, I remember. I said I would, and began to thank him again as I rose from my chair. He was still looking away, and saying, as if to himself, ‘I think she would like that.’ And then he turned, and, in his usual abrupt office manner, said: ‘Good-morning, good-morning. I am very much obliged to you.’”

“Wasn’t it all very strange!” Edith spoke, after a moment. “I didn’t suppose he cared. Do you think it was just sentiment?”

“I shouldn’t wonder. Men like Henderson do queer things. In the hearts of such hardened men there are sometimes roots of sentiment that you wouldn’t suspect. But I don’t know. The Lord somehow looks out for his poor.”

Notwithstanding this windfall of charity, Father Damon seemed somewhat depressed. “I wish,” he said, after a pause, “he had given it to the mission. We are so poor, and modern philanthropy all runs in other directions. The relief of temporary suffering has taken the place of the care of souls.”

“But Dr. Leigh said that you were interesting the churches in the labor unions.”

“Yes. It is an effort to do something. The church must put herself into sympathetic relations with these people, or she will accomplish nothing. To get them into the church we must take up their burdens. But it is a long way round. It is not the old method of applying the gospel to men’s sins.”

“And yet,” Edith insisted, “you must admit that such people as Dr. Leigh are doing a good work.”

Father Damon did not reply immediately. Presently he asked: “Do you think, Mrs. Delancy, that Dr. Leigh has any sympathy with the higher life, with spiritual things? I wish I could think so.”

“With the higher life of humanity, certainly.”

“Ah, that is too vague. I sometimes feel that she and those like her are the worst opponents to our work. They substitute humanitarianism for the gospel.”

“Yet I know of no one who works more than Ruth Leigh in the self-sacrificing spirit of the Master.”

“Whom she denies!” The quick reply came with a flush in his pale face, and he instantly arose and walked away to the window and stood for some moments in silence. When he turned there was another expression in his eyes and a note of tenderness in his voice that contradicted the severity of the priest. It was the man that spoke. “Yes, she is the best woman I ever knew. God help me! I fear I am not fit for my work.”

This outburst of Father Damon to her, so unlike his calm and trained manner, surprised Edith, although she had already some suspicion of his state of mind. But it would not have surprised her if she had known more of men, the necessity of the repressed and tortured soul for sympathy, and that it is more surely to be found in the heart of a pure woman than elsewhere.

But there was nothing that she could say, as she took his hand to bid him good-by, except the commonplace that Dr. Leigh had expressed anxiety that he was overworking, and that for the sake of his work he must be more prudent. Yet her eyes expressed the sympathy she did not put in words.

Father Damon understood this, and he went away profoundly grateful for her forbearance of verbal expression as much as for her sympathy. But he did not suspect that she needed sympathy quite as much as he did, and consequently he did not guess the extent of her self-control. It would have been an immense relief to have opened her heart to him—and to whom could she more safely do this than to a priest set apart from all human entanglements?—and to have asked his advice. But Edith’s peculiar strength—or was it the highest womanly instinct?—lay in her discernment of the truth that in one relation of life no confidences are possible outside of that relation except to its injury, and that to ask interference is pretty sure to seal its failure. As its highest joys cannot be participated in, so its estrangements cannot be healed by any influence outside of its sacred compact. To give confidence outside is to destroy the mutual confidence upon which the relation rests, and though interference may patch up livable compromises, the bloom of love and the joy of life are not in them. Edith knew that if she could not win her own battle, no human aid could win it for her.

And it was all the more difficult because it was vague and indefinite, as the greater part of domestic tragedies are. For the most part life goes on with external smoothness, and the public always professes surprise when some accident, a suit at law, a sudden death, a contested will, a slip from apparent integrity, or family greed or feminine revenge, turns the light of publicity upon a household, to find how hollow the life has been; in the light of forgotten letters, revealing check-books, servants’ gossip, and long-established habits of aversion or forbearance, how much sordidness and meanness!

Was not everything going on as usual in the Delancy house and in the little world of which it was a part? If there had been any open neglect or jealousy, any quarrel or rupture, or any scene, these could be described. These would have an interest to the biographer and perhaps to the public. But at this period there was nothing of this sort to tell. There were no scenes. There were no protests or remonstrances or accusations, nor to the world was there any change in the daily life of these two.

It was more pitiful even than that. Here was a woman who had set her heart in all the passionate love of a pure ideal, and day by day she felt that the world, the frivolous world, with its low and selfish aims, was too strong for her, and that the stream was wrecking her life because it was bearing Jack away from her. What could one woman do against the accepted demoralizations of her social life? To go with them, not to care, to accept Jack’s idle, good-natured, easy philosophy of life and conduct, would not that have insured a peaceful life? Why shouldn’t she conform and float, and not mind?

To be sure, a wise woman, who has been blessed or cursed with a long experience of life, would have known that such a course could not forever, or for long, secure happiness, and that a man’s love ultimately must rest upon a profound respect for his wife and a belief in her nobility. Perhaps Edith did not reason in this way. Probably it was her instinct for what was pure and true-showing, indeed, the quality of her love-that guided her.

To Jack’s friends he was much the same as usual. He simply went on in his ante-marriage ways. Perhaps he drank a little more, perhaps he was a little more reckless at cards, and it was certain that his taste for amusing himself in second-hand book-shops and antiquity collections had weakened. His talked-of project for some regular occupation seemed to have been postponed, although he said to himself that it was only postponed until his speculations, which kept him in a perpetual fever, should put him in a position to command a business.

Meantime he did not neglect social life—that is, the easy, tolerant company which lived as he liked to live. There was at first some pretense of declining invitations which Edith could not accept, but he soon fell into the habit of a man whose family has temporarily gone abroad, with the privileges of a married man, without the responsibilities of a bachelor. Edith could see that he took great credit to himself for any evenings he spent at home, and perhaps he had a sort of support in the idea that he was sacrificing himself to his family. Major Fairfax, whom Edith distrusted as a misleader of youth, did not venture to interfere with Jack again, but he said to himself that it was a blank shame that with such a wife he should go dangling about with women like Carmen and Miss Tavish, not that the Major himself had any objection to their society, but, hang it all, that was no reason why Jack should be a fool.

In midwinter Jack went to Washington on business. It was necessary to see Mavick, and Mr. Henderson, who was also there. To spend a few weeks at the capital, in preparation for Lent, has become a part of the program of fashion. There can be met people like-minded from all parts of the Union, and there is gayety, and the entertainment to be had in new acquaintances, without incurring any of the responsibilities of social continuance. They meet there on neutral ground. Half Jack’s set had gone over or were going. Young Van Dam would go with him. It will be only for a few days, Jack had said, gayly, when he bade Edith good-by, and she must be careful not to let the boy forget him.

It was quite by accident, apparently, that in the same train were the Chesneys, Miss Tavish, and Carmen going over to join her husband. This gave the business expedition the air of an excursion. And indeed at the hotel where they stayed this New York contingent made something of an impression, promising an addition to the gayety of the season, and contributing to the importance of the house as a centre of fashion. Henderson’s least movements were always chronicled and speculated on, and for years he had been one of the stock subjects, out of which even the dullest interviewers, who watch the hotel registers in all parts of the country, felt sure that they could make an acceptable paragraph. The arrival of his wife, therefore, was a newspaper event.

They said in Washington at the time that Mrs. Henderson was one of the most fascinating of women, amiable, desirous to please, approachable, and devoted to the interests of her husband. If some of the women, residents in established society, were a little shy of her, if some, indeed, thought her dangerous—women are always thinking this of each other, and surely they ought to know-nothing of this appeared in the reports. The men liked her. She had so much vivacity, such esprit, she understood men so well, and the world, and could make allowances, and was always an entertaining companion. More than one Senator paid marked court to her, more than one brilliant young fellow of the House thought himself fortunate if he sat next her at dinner, and even cabinet officers waited on her at supper. It could not be doubted that a smile and a confidential or a witty remark from Mrs. Henderson brightened many an evening. Wherever she went her charming toilets were fully described, and the public knew as well as her jewelers the number and cost of her diamonds, her necklaces, her tiaras. But this was for the world and for state occasions. At home she liked simplicity. And this was what impressed the reporters when, in the line of their public duty, they were admitted to her presence. With them she was very affable, and she made them feel that they could almost be classed with her friends, and that they were her guardians against the vulgar publicity, which she disliked and shrank from.

There went abroad, therefore, an impression of her amiability, her fabulous wealth in jewels and apparel, her graciousness and her cleverness and her domesticity. Her manners seemed to the reporters those of a “lady,” and of this both her wit and freedom from prudishness and her courteous treatment of them convinced them. And the best of all this was that while it was said that Henderson was one of the boldest and shrewdest of operators, and a man to be feared in the Street, he was in his family relations one of the most generous and kind-hearted of men.

Henderson himself had not much time for the frivolities of the season, and he evaded all but the more conspicuous social occasions, at which Carmen, sometimes with a little temper, insisted that he should accompany her. “You would come here,” he once said, “when you knew I was immersed in most perplexing business.”

“And now I am here,” she had replied, in a tone equally wanting in softness, “you have got to make the best of me.”

Was Jack happy in the whirl he was in? Some days exceedingly so. Some days he sulked, and some days he threw himself with recklessness born of artificial stimulants into the always gay and rattling moods of Miss Tavish. Somehow he could get no nearer to Henderson or to Mavick than when he was in New York. Not that he could accuse Mavick of trying to conceal anything; Mavick bore to him always the open, “all right” attitude, but there were things that he did not understand.

And then Carmen? Was she a little less dependent on him, in this wide horizon, than in New York? And had he noticed a little disposition to patronize on two or three occasions? It was absurd. He laughed at himself for such an idea. Old Eschelle’s daughter patronize him! And yet there was something. She was very confidential with Mavick. They seemed to have a great deal in common. It so happened that even in the little expeditions of sightseeing these two were thrown much together, and at times when the former relations of Jack and Carmen should have made them comrades. They had a good deal to say to each other, and momentarily evidently serious things, and at receptions Jack had interrupted their glances of intelligence. But what stuff this was! He jealous of the attentions of his friend to another man’s wife! If she was a coquette, what did it matter to him? Certainly he was not jealous. But he was irritated.

One day after a round of receptions, in which Jack had been specially disgruntled, and when he was alone in the drawing-room of the hotel with Carmen, his manner was so positively rude to her that she could not but notice it. There was this trait of boyishness in Jack, and it was one of the weaknesses that made him loved, that he always cried out when he was hurt.

Did Carmen resent this? Did she upbraid him for his manner? Did she apologize, as if she had done anything to provoke it? She sank down wearily in a chair and said:

“I’m so tired. I wish I were back in New York.”

“You don’t act like it,” Jack replied, gruffly.

“No. You don’t understand. And now you want to make me more miserable. See here, Mr. Delancy,” and she started up in her seat and turned to him, “you are a man of honor. Would you advise me to make an enemy of Mr. Mavick, knowing all that he does know about Mr. Henderson’s affairs?”

“I don’t see what that has got to do with it,” said Jack, wavering. “Lately your manner—”

“Nonsense!” cried Carmen, springing up and approaching Jack with a smile of animation and trust, and laying her hand on his shoulder. “We are old, old friends. And I have just confided to you what I wouldn’t to any other living being. There!” And looking around at the door, she tapped him lightly on the cheek and ran out of the room.

Whatever you might say of Carmen, she had this quality of a wise person, that she never cut herself loose from one situation until she was entirely sure of a better position.

For one reason or another Jack’s absence was prolonged. He wrote often, he made bright comments on the characters and peculiarities of the capital, and he said that he was tired to death of the everlasting whirl and scuffle. People plunged in the social whirlpool always say they are weary of it, and they complain bitterly of its exactions and its tax on their time and strength. Edith judged, especially from the complaints, that her husband was enjoying himself. She felt also that his letters were in a sense perfunctory, and gave her only the surface of his life. She sought in vain in them for those evidences of spontaneous love, of delight in writing to her of all persons in the world, the eagerness of the lover that she recalled in letters written in other days. However affectionate in expression, these were duty letters. Edith was not alone. She had no lack of friends, who came and went in the common round of social exchange, and for many of them she had a sincere affection. And there were plenty of relatives on the father’s and on the mother’s side. But for the most part they were old-fashioned, home-keeping New-Yorkers, who were sufficient to themselves, and cared little for the set into which Edith’s marriage had more definitely placed her. In any real trouble she would not have lacked support. She was deemed fortunate in her marriage, and in her apparent serene prosperity it was believed that she was happy. If she had had mother or sister or brother, it is doubtful if she would have made either a confidant of her anxieties, but high-spirited and self-reliant as she was, there were days when she longed with intolerable heartache for the silent sympathy of a mother’s presence.

It is singular how lonely a woman of this nature can be in a gay and friendly world. She had her interests, to be sure. As she regained her strength she took up her social duties, and she tried to resume her studies, her music, her reading, and she occupied herself more and more with the charities and the fortunes of her friends who were giving their lives to altruistic work. But there was a sense of unreality in all this. The real thing was the soul within, the longing, loving woman whose heart was heavy and unsatisfied. Jack was so lovable, he had in his nature so much nobility, if the world did not kill it, her life might be so sweet, and so completely fulfill her girlish dreams. All these schemes of a helpful, altruistic life had been in her dream, but how empty it was without the mutual confidence, the repose in the one human love for which she cared.

Though she was not alone, she had no confidant. She could have none. What was there to confide? There was nothing to be done. There was no flagrant wrong or open injustice. Some women in like circumstances become bitter and cynical. Others take their revenge in a career reckless, but within social conventions, going their own way in a sort of matrimonial truce. These are not noticeable tragedies. They are things borne with a dumb ache of the heart. There are lives into which the show of spring comes, but without the song of birds or the scent of flowers. They are endured bravely, with a heroism for which the world does not often give them credit. Heaven only knows how many noble women-noble in this if in nothing else—carry through life this burden of an unsatisfied heart, mocked by the outward convention of love.

But Edith had one confidant—the boy. And he was perfectly safe; he would reveal nothing. There were times when he seemed to understand, and whether he did or not she poured out her heart to him. Often in the twilight she sat by him in this silent communion. If he were asleep—and he was not troubled with insomnia—he was still company. And when he was awake, his efforts to communicate the dawning ideas of the queer world into which he had come were a never-failing delight. He wanted so many more things than he could ask for, which it was his mother’s pleasure to divine; later on he would ask for so many things he could not get. The nurse said that he had uncommon strength of will.

These were happy hours, imagining what the boy would be, planning what she would make his life, hours enjoyed as a traveler enjoys wayside flowers, snatched before an approaching storm. It is a pity, the nurse would say, that his father cannot see him now. And at the thought Edith could only see the child through tears, and a great weight rested on her heart in all this happiness.

XVI

When Father Damon parted from Edith he seemed to himself strengthened in his spirit. His momentary outburst had shown him where he stood-the strength of his fearful temptation. To see it was to be able to conquer it. He would humiliate himself; he would scourge himself; he would fast and pray; he would throw himself more unreservedly into the service of his Master. He had been too compromising with sin and sinners, and with his own weakness and sin, the worst of all.

The priest walked swiftly through the wintry streets, welcoming as a sort of penance the biting frost which burned his face and penetrated his garments. He little heeded the passers in the streets, those who hurried or those who loitered, only, if he met or passed a woman or a group of girls, he instinctively drew himself away and walked more rapidly. He strode on uncompromisingly, and his clean-shaved face was set in rigid lines. Those who saw him pass would have said that there went an ascetic bent on judgment. Many who did know him, and who ordinarily would have saluted him, sure of a friendly greeting, were repelled by his stern face and determined air, and made no sign. The father had something on his mind.

As he turned into Rivington Street there approached him from the opposite direction a girl, walking slowly and undecidedly. When he came near her she looked up, with an appealing recognition. In a flash of the quick passing he thought he knew her—a girl who had attended his mission and whom he had not seen for several months-but he made no sign and passed on.

“Father Damon!”

He turned about short at the sound of the weak, pleading voice, but with no relaxation of his severe, introverted mood. “Well?”

It was the girl he remembered. She wore a dress of silk that had once been fine, and over it an ample cloak that had quite lost its freshness, and a hat still gay with cheap flowers. Her face, which had a sweet and almost innocent expression, was drawn and anxious. The eyes were those of a troubled and hunted animal.

“I thought,” she said, hesitatingly, “you didn’t know me.”

“Yes, I know you. Why haven’t you been at the mission lately?”

“I couldn’t come. I—”

“I’m afraid you have fallen into bad ways.”

She did not answer immediately. She looked away, and, still avoiding his gaze, said, timidly: “I thought I would tell you, Father Damon, that I’m—that I’m in trouble. I don’t know what to do.”

“Have you repented of your sin?” asked he, with a little softening of his tone. “Did you want to come to me for help?”

“He’s deserted me,” said the girl, looking down, absorbed in her own misery, and not heeding his question.

“Ah, so that is what you are sorry for?” The severe, reproving tone had come back to his voice.

“And they don’t want me in the shop any more.”

The priest hesitated. Was he always to preach against sin, to strive to extirpate it, and yet always to make it easy for the sinner? This girl must realize her guilt before he could do her any good. “Are you sorry for what you have done?”

“Yes, I’m sorry,” she replied. Wasn’t to be in deep trouble to be sorry? And then she looked up, and continued with the thought in her mind, “I didn’t know who else to go to.”

“Well, my child, if you are sorry, and want to lead a different life, come to me at the mission and I will try to help you.”

The priest, with a not unkindly good-by, passed on. The girl stood a moment irresolute, and then went on her way heavily and despondent. What good would it do her to go to the mission now?

Three days later Dr. Leigh was waiting at the mission chapel to speak with the rector after the vesper service. He came out pale and weary, and the doctor hesitated to make known her errand when she saw how exhausted he was.

“Did you wish me for anything?” he asked, after the rather forced greeting.

“If you feel able. There is a girl at the Woman’s Hospital who wants to see you.”

“Who is it?”

“It is the girl you saw on the street the other afternoon; she said she had spoken to you.”

“She promised to come to the mission.”

“She couldn’t. I met the poor thing the same afternoon. She looked so aimless and forlorn that, though I did not remember her at first, I thought she might be ill, and spoke to her, and asked her what was the matter. At first she said nothing except that she was out of work and felt miserable; but the next moment she broke down completely, and said she hadn’t a friend in the world.”

“Poor thing!” said the priest, with a pang of self-reproach.

“There was nothing to do but to take her to the hospital, and there she has been.”

“Is she very ill?”

“She may live, the house surgeon says. But she was very weak for such a trial.”

Little more was said as they walked along, and when they reached the hospital, Father Damon was shown without delay into the ward where the sick girl lay. Dr. Leigh turned back from the door, and the nurse took him to the bedside. She lay quite still in her cot, wan and feeble, with every sign of having encountered a supreme peril.

She turned her head on the low pillow as Father Damon spoke, saying he was very glad he could come to her, and hoped she was feeling better.

“I knew you would come,” she said, feebly. “The nurse says I’m better. But I wanted to tell you—” And she stopped.

“Yes, I know,” he said. “The Lord is very good. He will forgive all your sins now, if you repent and trust Him.”

“I hope—” she began. “I’m so weak. If I don’t live I want him to know.”

“Want whom to know?” asked the father, bending over her.

She signed for him to come closer, and then whispered a name.

“Only if I never see him again, if you see him, you will tell him that I was always true to him. He said such hard words. I was always true.”

“I promise,” said the father, much moved. “But now, my child, you ought to think of yourself, of your—”

“He is dead. Didn’t they tell you? There is nothing any more.”

The nurse approached with a warning gesture that the interview was too prolonged.

Father Damon knelt for a moment by the bedside, uttering a hardly articulate prayer. The girl’s eyes were closed. When he rose she opened them with a look of gratitude, and with the sign of blessing he turned away.

He intended to hasten from the house. He wanted to be alone. His trouble seemed to him greater than that of the suffering girl. What had he done? What was he in thought better than she? Was this intruding human element always to cross the purpose of his spiritual life?

As he was passing through the wide hallway the door of the reception-room was open, and he saw Dr. Leigh seated at the table, with a piece of work in her hands. She looked up, and stopped him with an unspoken inquiry in her face. It was only civil to pause a moment and tell her about the patient, and as he stepped within the room she rose.

“You should rest a moment, Father Damon. I know what these scenes are.”

Yielding weakly, as he knew, he took the offered chair. But he raised his hand in refusal of the glass of wine which she had ready for him on the table, and offered before he could speak.

“But you must,” she said, with a smile. “It is the doctor’s prescription.”

She did not look like a doctor. She had laid aside the dusty walking-dress, the business-jacket, the ugly little hat of felt, the battered reticule. In her simple house costume she was the woman, homelike, sympathetic, gentle, with the everlasting appeal of the strong feminine nature. It was not a temptress who stood before him, but a helpful woman, in whose kind eyes-how beautiful they were in this moment of sympathy—there was trust—and rest—and peace.

“So,” she said, when he had taken the much-needed draught; “in the hospital you must obey the rules, one of which is to let no one sink in exhaustion.”

She had taken her seat now, and resumed her work. Father Damon was looking at her, seeing the woman, perhaps, as he never had seen her before, a certain charm in her quiet figure and modest self-possession, while the thought of her life, of her labors, as he had seen her now for months and months of entire sacrifice of self, surged through his brain in a whirl of emotion that seemed sweeping him away. But when he spoke it was of the girl, and as if to himself.

“I was sorry to let her go that day. Friendless, I should have known. I did know. I should have felt. You—”

“No,” she said, gently, interrupting him; “that was my business. You should not accuse yourself. It was a physician’s business.”

“Yes, a physician—the great Physician. The Master never let the sin hinder his compassion for the sinner.”

To this she could make no reply. Presently she looked up and said: “But I am sure your visit was a great comfort to the poor girl! She was very eager to see you.”

“I do not know.”

His air was still abstracted. He was hardly thinking of the girl, after all, but of himself, of the woman who sat before him. It seemed to him that he would have given the world to escape—to fly from her, to fly from himself. Some invisible force held him—a strong, new, and yet not new, emotion, a power that seemed to clutch his very life. He could not think clearly about it. In all his discipline, in his consecration, in his vows of separation from the world, there seemed to have been no shield prepared for this. The human asserted itself, and came in, overwhelming his guards and his barriers like a strong flood in the spring-time of the year, breaking down all artificial contrivances. “They reckon ill who leave me out,” is the everlasting cry of the human heart, the great passion of life, incarnate in the first man and the first woman.

With a supreme effort of his iron will—is the Will, after all, stronger than Love?—Father Damona rose. He stretched out his hand to say farewell. She also stood, and she felt the hand tremble that held hers.

“God bless you!” he said. “You are so good.”

He was going. He took her other hand, and was looking down upon her face. She looked up, and their eyes met. It was for an instant, a flash, glance for glance, as swift as the stab of daggers.

All the power of heaven and earth could not recall that glance nor undo its revelations. The man and the woman stood face to face revealed.

He bent down towards her face. Affrighted by his passion, scarcely able to stand in her sudden emotion, she started back. The action, the instant of time, recalled him to himself. He dropped her hands, and was gone. And the woman, her knees refusing any longer to support her, sank into a chair, helpless, and saw him go, and knew in that moment the height of a woman’s joy, the depth of a woman’s despair.

It had come to her! Steeled by her science, shielded by her philanthropy, schooled in indifference to love, it had come to her! And it was hopeless. Hopeless? It was absurd. Her life was determined. In no event could it be in harmony with his opinions, with his religion, which was dearer to him than life. There was a great gulf between them which she could not pass unless she ceased to be herself. And he? A severe priest! Vowed and consecrated against human passion! What a government of the world—if there were any government—that could permit such a thing! It was terrible.

And yet she was loved! That sang in her heart with all the pain, with all the despair. And with it all was a great pity for him, alone, gone into the wilderness, as it would seem to him, to struggle with his fierce temptation.

It had come on darker as she sat there. The lamps were lighted, and she was reminded of some visits she must make. She went, mechanically, to her room to prepare for going. The old jacket, which she took up, did look rather rusty. She went to the press—it was not much of a wardrobe—and put on the one that was reserved for holidays. And the hat? Her friends had often joked her about the hat, but now for the first time she seemed to see it as it might appear to others. As she held it in her hand, and then put it on before the mirror, she smiled a little, faintly, at its appearance. And then she laid it aside for her better hat. She never had been so long in dressing before. And in the evening, too, when it could make no difference! It might, after all, be a little more cheerful for her forlorn patients. Perhaps she was not conscious that she was making selections, that she was paying a little more attention to her toilet than usual. Perhaps it was only the woman who was conscious that she was loved.

It would be difficult to say what emotion was uppermost in the mind of Father Damon as he left the house—mortification, contempt of himself, or horror. But there was a sense of escape, of physical escape, and the imperative need of it, that quickened his steps almost into a run. In the increasing dark, at this hour, in this quarter of the town, there were comparatively few whose observation of him would recall him to himself. He thought only of escape, and of escape from that quarter of the city that was the witness of his labors and his failure. For the moment to get away from this was the one necessity, and without reasoning in the matter, only feeling, he was hurrying, stumbling in his haste, northward. Before he went to the hospital he had been tired, physically weary. He was scarcely conscious of it now; indeed, his body, his hated body, seemed lighter, and the dominant spirit now awakened to contempt of it had a certain pleasure in testing it, in drawing upon its vitality, to the point of exhaustion if possible. It should be seen which was master. His rapid pace presently brought him into one of the great avenues leading to Harlem. That was the direction he wished to go. That was where he knew, without making any decision, he must go, to the haven of the house of his order, on the heights beyond Harlem. A train was just clattering along on the elevated road above him. He could see the faces at the windows, the black masses crowding the platforms. It went pounding by as if it were freight from another world. He was in haste, but haste to escape from himself. That way, bearing him along with other people, and in the moving world, was to bring him in touch with humanity again, and so with what was most hateful in himself. He must be alone. But there was a deeper psychological reason than that for walking, instead of availing himself of the swiftest method of escape. He was not fleeing from justice or pursuit. When the mind is in torture and the spirit is torn, the instinctive effort is to bodily activity, to force physical exertion, as if there must be compensation for the mental strain in the weariness of nature. The priest obeyed this instinct, as if it were possible to walk away from himself, and went on, at first with almost no sense of weariness.

And the shame! He could not bear to be observed. It seemed to him that every one would see in his face that he was a recreant priest, perjured and forsworn. And so great had been his spiritual pride! So removed he had deemed himself from the weakness of humanity! And he had yielded at the first temptation, and the commonest of all temptations! Thank God, he had not quite yielded. He had fled. And yet, how would it have been if Ruth Leigh had not had a moment of reserve, of prudent repulsion! He groaned in anguish. The sin was in the intention. It was no merit of his that he had not with a kiss of passion broken his word to his Lord and lost his soul.

It was remorse that was driving him along the avenue; no room for any other thought yet, or feeling. Perhaps it is true in these days that the old-fashioned torture known as remorse is rarely experienced except under the name of detection. But it was a reality with this highly sensitive nature, with this conscience educated to the finest edge of feeling. The world need never know his moment’s weakness; Ruth Leigh he could trust as he would have trusted his own sister to guard his honor—that was all over—never, he was sure, would she even by a look recall the past; but he knew how he had fallen, and the awful measure of his lapse from loyalty to his Master. And how could he ever again stand before erring, sinful men and women and speak about that purity which he had violated? Could repentance, confession, penitence, wipe away this stain?

As he went on, his mind in a whirl of humiliation, self-accusation, and contempt, at length he began to be conscious of physical weariness. Except the biscuit and the glass of wine at the hospital, he had taken nothing since his light luncheon. When he came to the Harlem Bridge he was compelled to rest. Leaning against one of the timbers and half seated, with the softened roar of the city in his ears, the lights gleaming on the heights, the river flowing dark and silent, he began to be conscious of his situation. Yes, he was very tired. It seemed difficult to go on without help of some sort. At length he crossed the bridge. Lights were gleaming from the saloons along the street. He paused in front of one, irresolute. Food he could not taste, but something he must have to carry him on. But no, that would not do; he could not enter that in his priest’s garb. He dragged himself along until he came to a drug-shop, the modern saloon of the respectably virtuous. That he entered, and sat down on a stool by the soda-water counter. The expectant clerk stared at him while waiting the order, his hand tentatively seeking one of the faucets of refreshment.

“I feel a little feverish,” said the father. “You may give me five grains of quinine in whisky.”

“That’ll put you all right,” said the boy as he handed him the mixture. “It’s all the go now.”

It seemed to revive him, and he went out and walked on towards the heights. Somehow, seeing this boy, coming back to common life, perhaps the strong and unaccustomed stimulant, gave a new shade to his thoughts. He was safe. Presently he would be at the Retreat. He would rest, and then gird up his loins and face life again. The mood lasted for some time. And when the sense of physical weariness came back, that seemed to dull the acuteness of his spiritual torment. It was late when he reached the house and rang the night-bell. No one of the brothers was up except Father Monies, and it was he who came to the door.

“You! So late! Is anything the matter?”

“I needed to come,” the father said, simply, and he grasped the door-post, steadying himself as he came in.

“You look like a ghost.”

“Yes. I’m tired. I walked.”

“Walked? From Rivington Street?”

“Nearly. I felt like it.”

“It’s most imprudent. You dined first?”

“I wasn’t hungry.”

“But you must have something at once.” And Father Monies hurried away, heated some bouillon by a spirit-lamp, and brought it, with bread, and set it before his unexpected guest.

“There, eat that, and get to bed as soon as you can. It was great nonsense.”

And Father Damon obeyed. Indeed, he was too exhausted to talk.

XVII

Father Damon slept the sleep of exhaustion. In this for a time the mind joined in the lethargy of the body. But presently, as the vital currents were aroused, the mind began to play its fantastic tricks. He was a seminary student, he was ordained, he was taking his vows before the bishop, he was a robust and consecrated priest performing his first service, shining, it seemed to him, before the congregation in the purity of his separation from the world. How strong he felt. And then came perplexities, difficulties, interests, and conflicting passions in life that he had not suspected, good that looked like evil, and evil that had an alloy of virtue, and the way was confused. And then there was a vision of a sort of sister of charity working with him in the evil and the good, drawing near to him, and yet repelling him with a cold, scientific skepticism that chilled him like blasphemy; but so patient was she, so unconscious of self, that gradually he lost this feeling of repulsion and saw only the woman, that wonderful creation, tender, pitiful comrade, the other self. And then there was darkness and blindness, and he stood once more before his congregation, speaking words that sounded hollow, hearing responses that mocked him, stared at by accusing eyes that knew him for a hypocrite. And he rushed away and left them, hearing their laughter as he went, and so into the street—plainly it was Rivington Street—and faces that he knew had a smile and a sneer, and he heard comments as he passed “Hulloa, Father Damon, come in and have a drink.” “I say, Father Damon, I seen her going round into Grand Street.”

When Father Monies looked in, just before daylight, Father Damon was still sleeping, but tossing restlessly and muttering incoherently; and he did not arouse him for the early devotions.

It was very late when he awoke, and opened his eyes to a confused sense of some great calamity. Father Monies was standing by the bedside with a cup of coffee.

“You have had a good sleep. Now take this, and then you may get up. The breakfast will wait for you.”

Father Damon started up. “Why didn’t you call me? I am late for the mission.”

“Oh, Bendes has gone down long ago. You must take it easy; rest today. You’ll be all right. You haven’t a bit of fever.”

“But,” still declining the coffee, “before I break my fast, I have something to say to you. I—”

“Get some strength first. Besides, I have an engagement. I cannot wait. Pull yourself together; I may not be back before evening.”

So it was fated that he should be left still with himself. After his coffee he dressed slowly, as if it were not he, but some one else going through this familiar duty, as if it were scarcely worth while to do anything any more. And then, before attempting his breakfast, he went into the little oratory, and remained long in the attitude of prayer, trying to realize what he was and what he had done. He prayed for himself, for help, for humility, and he prayed for her; he had been used of late to pray for her guidance, now he prayed that she might be sustained.

When he came forth it was in a calmer frame of mind. It was all clear now. When Father Monies returned he would confess, and take his penance, and resolutely resume his life. He understood life better now. Perhaps this blow was needed for his spiritual pride.

It was a mild winter day, bright, and with a touch of summer, such as sometimes gets shuffled into our winter calendar. The book that he took up did not interest him; he was in no mood for the quiet meditation that it usually suggested to him, and he put it down and strolled out, directing his steps farther up the height, and away from the suburban stir. As he went on there was something consonant with his feelings in the bare wintry landscape, and when he passed the ridge and walked along the top of the river slope, he saw, as it seemed to him he had not seen it before, that lovely reach of river, the opposite wooded heights, the noble pass above, the peacefulness and invitation of nature. Had he a new sense to see all this? There was a softness in the distant outline, villas peeped out here and there, carriages were passing in the road below, there was a cheerful life in the stream—there was a harmony in the aspect of nature and humanity from this height. Was not the world beautiful? and human emotion, affection, love, were they alien to the Divine intention?

She loved beauty; she was fond of flowers; often she had spoken to him of her childish delight in her little excursions, rarely made, into the country. He could see her now standing just there and feasting her eyes on this noble panorama, and he could see her face all aglow, as she might turn to him and say, “Isn’t it beautiful, Father Damon?” And she was down in those reeking streets, climbing about in the foul tenement-houses, taking a sick child in her arms, speaking a word of cheer—a good physician going about doing good!

And it might have been! Why was it that this peace of nature should bring up her image, and that they should seem in harmony? Was not the love of beauty and of goodness the same thing? Did God require in His service the atrophy of the affections? As long as he was in the world was it right that he should isolate himself from any of its sympathies and trials? Why was it not a higher life to enter into the common lot, and suffer, if need be, in the struggle to purify and ennoble all? He remembered the days he had once passed in the Trappist monastery of Gethsemane. The perfect peace of mind of the monks was purchased at the expense of the extirpation of every want, all will, every human interest. Were these men anything but specimens in a Museum of Failures? And yet, for the time being, it had seemed attractive to him, this simple vegetable existence, whose only object was preparation for death by the extinction of all passion and desire. No, these were not soldiers of the Lord, but the fainthearted, who had slunk into the hospital.

All this afternoon he was drifting in thought, arraigning his past life, excusing it, condemning it, and trying to forecast its future. Was this a trial of his constancy and faith, or had he made a mistake, entered upon a slavish career, from which he ought to extricate himself at any cost of the world’s opinion? But presently he was aware that in all these debates with himself her image appeared. He was trying to fit his life to the thought of her. And when this became clearer in his tortured mind, the woman appeared as a temptation. It was not, then, the love of beauty, not even the love of humanity, and very far from being the service of his Master, that he was discussing, but only his desire for one person. It was that, then, that made him, for that fatal instant, forget his vow, and yield to the impulse of human passion. The thought of that moment stung him with confusion and shame. There had been moments in this afternoon wandering—when it had seemed possible for him to ask for release, and to take up a human, sympathetic life with her, in mutual consecration in the service of the Lord’s poor. Yes, and by love to lead her into a higher conception of the Divine love. But this breaking a solemn vow at the dictates of passion was a mortal sin—there was no other name for it—a sin demanding repentance and expiation.

As he at last turned homeward, facing the great city and his life there, this became more clear to him. He walked rapidly. The lines of his face became set in a hard judgment of himself. He thought no more of escaping from himself, but of subduing himself, stamping out the appeals of his lower nature. It was in this mood that he returned.

Father Monies was awaiting him, and welcomed him with that look of affection, of more than brotherly love, which the good man had for the younger priest.

“I hope your walk has done you good.”

“Perhaps,” Father Damon replied, without any leniency in his face; “but that does not matter. I must tell you what I could not last night. Can you hear me?”

They went together into the oratory. Father Damon did not spare himself. He kept nothing back that could heighten the enormity of his offense.

And Father Monies did not attempt to lessen the impression upon himself of the seriousness of the scandal. He was shocked. He was exceedingly grave, but he was even more pitiful. His experience of life had been longer than that of the penitent. He better knew its temptations. His own peace had only been won by long crucifixion of the natural desires.

“I have nothing to say as to your own discipline. That you know. But there is one thing. You must face this temptation, and subdue it.”

“You mean that I must go back to my labor in the city?”

“Yes. You can rest here a few days if you feel too weak physically.”

“No; I am well enough.” He hesitated. “I thought perhaps some other field, for a time?”

“There is no other field for you. It is not for the moment the question of where you can do most good. You are to reinstate yourself. You are a soldier of the Lord Jesus, and you are to go where the battle is most dangerous.”

That was the substance of it all. There was much affectionate counsel and loving sympathy mingled with all the inflexible orders of obedience, but the sin must be faced and extirpated in presence of the enemy.

On the morrow Father Damon went back to his solitary rooms, to his chapel, to the round of visitations, to his work with the poor, the sinful, the hopeless. He did not seek her; he tried not to seem to avoid her, or to seem to shun the streets where he was most likely to meet her, and the neighborhoods she frequented. Perhaps he did avoid them a little, and he despised himself for doing it. Almost involuntarily he looked to the bench by the chapel door which she occasionally occupied at vespers. She was never there, and he condemned himself for thinking that she might be; but yet wherever he walked there was always the expectation that he might encounter her. As the days went by and she did not appear, his expectation became a kind of torture. Was she ill, perhaps? It could not be that she had deserted her work.

And then he began to examine himself with a morbid introspection. Had the hope that he should see her occasionally influenced him at all in his obedience to Father Monies? Had he, in fact, a longing to be in the streets where she had walked, among the scenes that had witnessed her beautiful devotion? Had his willingness to take up this work again been because it brought him nearer to her in spirit?

No, she could not be ill. He heard her spoken of, here and there, in his calls and ministrations to the sick and dying. Evidently she was going about her work as usual. Perhaps she was avoiding him. Or perhaps she did not care, after all, and had lost her respect for him when he discovered to her his weakness. And he had put himself on a plane so high above her.

There was no conscious wavering in his purpose. But from much dwelling upon the thought, from much effort rather to put it away, his desire only to see her grew stronger day by day. He had no fear. He longed to test himself. He was sure that he would be impassive, and be all the stronger for the test. He was more devoted than ever in his Work. He was more severe with himself, more charitable to others, and he could not doubt that he was gaining a hold-yes, a real hold-upon the lives of many about him. The attendance was better at the chapel; more of the penitent and forlorn came to him for help. And how alone he was! My God, never even to see her!

In fact, Ruth Leigh was avoiding him. It was partly from a womanly reserve—called into expression in this form for the first time—and partly from a wish to spare him pain. She had been under no illusion from the first about the hopelessness of the attachment. She comprehended his character so thoroughly that she knew that for him any fall from his ideal would mean his ruin. He was one of the rare spirits of faith astray in a skeptical age. For a time she had studied curiously his efforts to adapt himself to his surroundings. One of these was joining a Knights of Labor lodge. Another was his approach to the ethical-culture movement of some of the leaders in the Neighborhood Guild. Another was his interest in the philanthropic work of agnostics like herself. She could see that he, burning with zeal to save the souls of men, and believing that there was no hope for the world except in the renunciation of the world, instinctively shrank from these contacts, which, nevertheless, he sought in the spirit of a Jesuit missionary to a barbarous tribe.

It was possible for such a man to be for a time overmastered by human passion; it was possible even that he might reason himself temporarily into conduct that this natural passion seemed to justify; yet she never doubted that there would follow an awakening from that state of mind as from a horrible delusion. It was simply because Ruth Leigh was guided by the exercise of reason, and had built up her scheme of life upon facts that she believed she could demonstrate, that she saw so clearly their relations, and felt that the faith, which was to her only a vagary of the material brain, was to him an integral part of his life.

Love, to be sure, was as unexpected in her scheme of life as it was in his; but there was on her part no reason why she should not yield to it. There was every reason in her nature and in her theory why she should, for, bounded as her vision of life was by this existence, love was the highest conceivable good in life. It had been with a great shout of joy that the consciousness had come to her that she loved and was loved. Though she might never see him again, this supreme experience for man or woman, this unsealing of the sacred fountain of life, would be for her an enduring sweetness in her lonely and laborious pilgrimage. How strong love is they best know to whom it is offered and denied.

And why, so far as she was concerned, should she deny it? An ordinary woman probably would not. Love is reason enough. Why should artificial conventions defeat it? Why should she sacrifice herself, if he were willing to brave the opinion of the world for her sake? Was it any new thing for good men to do this? But Ruth Leigh was not an ordinary woman. Perhaps if her intellect had not been so long dominant over her heart it would have been different. But the habit of being guided by reason was second nature. She knew that not only his vow, but the habit of life engendered by the vow, was an insuperable barrier. And besides, and this was the touchstone of her conception of life and duty, she felt that if he were to break his vow, though she might love him, her respect for him would be impaired.

It was a singular phenomenon—very much remarked at the time—that the women who did not in the least share Father Damon’s spiritual faith, and would have called themselves in contradistinction materialists, were those who admired him most, were in a way his followers, loved to attend his services, were inspired by his personality, and drawn to him in a loving loyalty. The attraction to these very women was his unworldliness, his separateness, his devotion to an ideal which in their reason seemed a delusion. And no women would have been more sensitive than they to his fall from his spiritual pinnacle.

It was easy with a little contrivance to avoid meeting him. She did not go to the chapel or in its neighborhood when he was likely to be going to or from service. She let others send for him when in her calls his ministration was required, and she was careful not to linger where he was likely to come. A little change in the time of her rounds was made without neglecting her work, for that she would not do, and she trusted that if accident threw him in her way, circumstances would make it natural and not embarrassing. And yet his image was never long absent from her thoughts; she wondered if he were dejected, if he were ill, if he were lonely, and mostly there was for him a great pity in her heart, a pity born, alas! of her own sense of loneliness.

How much she was repressing her own emotions she knew one evening when she returned from her visits and found a letter in his handwriting. The sight of it was a momentary rapture, and then the expectation of what it might contain gave her a feeling of faintness. The letter was long. Its coming needs a word of explanation.

Father Damon had begun to use the Margaret Fund. He found that its judicious use was more perplexing than he had supposed. He needed advice, the advice of those who had more knowledge than he had of the merits of relief cases. And then there might be many sufferers whom he in his limited field neglected. It occurred to him that Dr. Leigh would be a most helpful co-almoner. No sooner did this idea come to him than he was spurred to put it into effect. This common labor would be a sort of bond between them, a bond of charity purified from all personal alloy. He went at once to Mr. Henderson’s office and told him his difficulties, and about Dr. Leigh’s work, and the opportunities she would have. Would it not be possible for Dr. Leigh to draw from the fund on her own checks independent of him? Mr. Henderson thought not. Dr. Leigh was no doubt a good woman, but he didn’t know much about woman visitors and that sort; their sympathies were apt to run away with them, and he should prefer at present to have the fund wholly under Father Damon’s control. Some time, he intimated, he might make more lasting provisions with trustees. It would be better for Father Damon to give Dr. Leigh money as he saw she needed it.

The letter recited this at length; it had a check endorsed, and the writer asked the doctor to be his almoner. He dwelt very much upon the relief this would be to him, and the opportunity it would give her in many emergencies, and the absolute confidence he had in her discretion, as well as in her quick sympathy with the suffering about them. And also it would be a great satisfaction to him to feel that he was associated with her in such a work.

In its length, in its tone of kindliness, of personal confidence, especially in its length, it was evident that the writing of it had been a pleasure, if not a relief, to the sender. Ruth read it and reread it. It was as if Father Damon were there speaking to her. She could hear the tones of his voice. And the glance of love—that last overmastering appeal and cry thrilled through her soul.

But in the letter there was no love; to any third person it would have read like an ordinary friendly philanthropic request. And her reply, accepting gratefully his trust, was almost formal, only the writer felt that she was writing out of her heart.

XVIII

The Roman poet Martial reckons among the elements of a happy life “an income left, not earned by toil,” and also “a wife discreet, yet blythe and bright.” Felicity in the possession of these, the epigrammatist might have added, depends upon content in the one and full appreciation of the other.

Jack Delancy returned from Washington more discontented than when he went. His speculation hung fire in a most tantalizing way; more than that, it had absorbed nearly all the “income not earned by toil,” which was at the hazard of operations he could neither control nor comprehend. And besides, this little fortune had come to seem contemptibly inadequate. In his associations of the past year his spendthrift habits had increased, and he had been humiliated by his inability to keep pace with the prodigality of those with whom he was most intimate. Miss Tavish was an heiress in her own right, who never seemed to give a thought to the cost of anything she desired; the Hendersons, for any whim, drew upon a reservoir of unknown capacity; and even Mavick began to talk as if he owned a flock of geese that laid golden eggs.

To be sure, it was pleasant coming home into an atmosphere of sincerity, of worship—was it not? It was very flattering to his self-esteem. The master had come! The house was in commotion. Edith flew to meet him, hugged him, shook him, criticised his appearance, rallied him for a recreant father. How well she looked-buoyant, full of vivacity, running over with joy, asking a dozen questions before he could answer one, testifying her delight, her affection, in a hundred ways. And the boy! He was so eager to see his papa. He could converse now—that is, in his way. And that prodigy, when Jack was dragged into his presence, and also fell down with Edith and worshiped him in his crib, did actually smile, and appear to know that this man belonged to him, was a part of his worldly possessions.

“Do you know,” said Edith, looking at the boy critically, “I think of making Fletcher a present, if you approve.”

“What’s that?”

“He’ll want some place to go to in the summer. I want to buy that old place where he was born and give it to him. Don’t you think it would be a good investment?”

“Yes, permanent,” replied Jack, laughing at such a mite of a real-estate owner.

“I know he would like it. And you don’t object?”

“Not in the least. It’s next to an ancestral feeling to be the father of a land-owner.”

They were standing close to the crib, his arm resting lightly across her shoulders. He drew her closer to him, and kissed her tenderly. “The little chap has a golden-hearted mother. I don’t know why he should not have a Golden House.”

Her eyes filled with sudden tears. She could not speak. But both arms were clasped round his neck now. She was too happy for words. And the baby, looking on with large eyes, seemed to find nothing unusual in the proceeding. He was used to a great deal of this sort of nonsense himself.

It was a happy evening. In truth, after the first surprise, Jack was pleased with this contemplated purchase. It was something removed beyond temptation. Edith’s property was secure to her, and it was his honorable purpose never to draw it into his risks. But he knew her generosity, and he could not answer for himself if she should offer it, as he was sure she would do, to save him from ruin.

There was all the news to tell, the harmless gossip of daily life, which Edith had a rare faculty of making dramatically entertaining, with her insight and her feeling for comedy. There had been a musicale at the Blunts’—oh, strictly amateur—and Edith ran to the piano and imitated the singers and took off the players, until Jack declared that it beat the Conventional Club out of sight. And she had been to a parlor mind-cure lecture, and to a Theosophic conversation, and to a Reading Club for the Cultivation of a Feeling for Nature through Poetry. It was all immensely solemn and earnest. And Jack wondered that the managers did not get hold of these things and put them on the stage. Nothing could draw like them. Not burlesques, though, said Edith; not in the least. If only these circles would perform in public as they did in private, how they would draw!

And then Father Damon had been to consult her about his fund. He had been ill, and would not stay, and seemed more severe and ascetic than ever. She was sure something was wrong. For Dr. Leigh, whom she had sought out several times, was reserved, and did not voluntarily speak of Father Damon; she had heard that he was throwing himself with more than his usual fervor into his work. There was plenty to talk about. The purchase of the farm by the sea had better not be delayed; Jack might have to go down and see the owner. Yes, he would make it his first business in the morning. Perhaps it would be best to get some Long-Islander to buy it for them.

By the time it was ten o’clock, Jack said he thought he would step down to the Union a moment. Edith’s countenance fell. There might be letters, he explained, and he had a little matter of business; he wouldn’t be late.

It was very agreeable, home was, and Edith was charming. He could distinctly feel that she was charming. But Jack was restless. He felt the need of talking with somebody about what was on his mind. If only with Major Fairfax. He would not consult the Major, but the latter was in the way of picking up all sorts of gossip, both social and Street gossip.

And the Major was willing to unpack his budget. It was not very reassuring, what he had to tell; in fact, it was somewhat depressing, the general tightness and the panicky uncertainty, until, after a couple of glasses of Scotch, the financial world began to open a little and seem more hopeful.

“The Hendersons are going to build,” Jack said at length, after a remark of the Major’s about that famous operator.

“Build? What for? They’ve got a palace.”

“Carmen says it’s for an object-lesson. To show New York millionaires how to adorn their city.”

“It’s like that little schemer. What does Henderson say?”

“He appears to be willing. I can’t get the hang of Henderson. He doesn’t seem to care what his wife does. He’s a cynical cuss. The other night, at dinner, in Washington, when the thing was talked over, he said: ‘My dear, I don’t know why you shouldn’t do that as well as anything. Let’s build a house of gold, as Nero did; we are in the Roman age.’ Carmen looked dubious for a moment, but she said, ‘You know, Rodney, that you always used to say that some time you would show New York what a house ought to be in this climate.’ ‘Well, go on,’ and he laughed. ‘I suppose lightning will not strike that sooner than anything else.’” “Seems to me,” said the Major, reflectively, reaching out his hand for the brown mug, “the way he gives that woman her head, and doesn’t care what she does, he must have a contempt for her.”

“I wish somebody had that sort of contempt for me,” said Jack, filling up his glass also.

“But, I tell you,” he continued, “Mrs. Henderson has caught on to the new notions. Her idea is the union of all the arts. She has already got the refusal of a square ‘way up-town, on the rise opposite the Park, and has been consulting architects about it. It is to be surrounded with the building, with a garden in the interior, a tropical garden, under glass in the winter. The facades are to be gorgeous and monumental. Artists and sculptors are to decorate it, inside and out. Why shouldn’t there be color on the exterior, gold and painting, like the Fugger palaces in Augsburg, only on a great scale? The artists don’t see any reason why there should not. It will make the city brilliant, that sort of thing, in place of our monotonous stone lanes. And it’s using her wealth for the public benefit-the architects and artists all say that. Gad, I don’t know but the little woman is beginning to regard herself as a public benefactor.”

“She is that or nothing,” echoed the Major, warmly.

“And do you know,” continued Jack, confidentially, “I think she’s got the right idea. If I have any luck—of course I sha’n’t do that—but if I have any luck, I mean to build a house that’s got some life in it—color, old boy—something unique and stunning.”

“So you will,” cried the Major, enthusiastically, and, raising his glass, “Here’s to the house that Jack built!”

It was later than he thought it would be when he went home, but Jack was attended all the way by a vision of a Golden House—all gold wouldn’t be too good, and he will build it, damme, for Edith and the boy. The next morning not even the foundations of this structure were visible. The master of the house came down to a late breakfast, out of sorts with life, almost surly. Not even Edith’s bright face and fresh toilet and radiant welcome appealed to him. No one would have thought from her appearance that she had waited for him last night hour after hour, and had at last gone to bed with a heavy heart, and not to sleep-to toss, and listen, and suffer a thousand tortures of suspense. How many tragedies of this sort are there nightly in the metropolis, none the less tragic because they are subjects of jest in the comic papers and on the stage! What would be the condition of social life if women ceased to be anxious in this regard, and let loose the reins in an easy-going indifference? What, in fact, is the condition in those households where the wives do not care? One can even perceive a tender sort of loyalty to women in the ejaculation of that battered old veteran, the Major, “Thank God, there’s nobody sitting up for me!”

Jack was not consciously rude. He even asked about the baby. And he sipped his coffee and glanced over the morning journal, and he referred to the conversation of the night before, and said that he would look after the purchase at once. If Edith had put on an aspect of injury, and had intimated that she had hoped that his first evening at home might have been devoted to her and the boy, there might have been a scene, for Jack needed only an occasion to vent his discontent. And for the chronicler of social life a scene is so much easier to deal with, an outburst of temper and sharp language, of accusation and recrimination, than the well-bred commonplace of an undefined estrangement.

And yet estrangement is almost too strong a word to use in Jack’s case. He would have been the first to resent it. But the truth was that Edith, in the life he was leading, was a rebuke to him; her very purity and unworldliness were out of accord with his associations, with his ventures, with his dissipations in that smart and glittering circle where he was more welcome the more he lowered his moral standards. Could he help it if after the first hours of his return he felt the restraint of his home, and that the life seemed a little flat? Almost unconsciously to himself, his interests and his inclinations were elsewhere.

Edith, with the divination of a woman, felt this. Last night her love alone seemed strong enough to hold him, to bring him back to the purposes and the aspirations that only last summer had appeared to transform him. Now he was slipping away again. How pitiful it is, this contest of a woman who has only her own love, her own virtue, with the world and its allurements and seductions, for the possession of her husband’s heart! How powerless she is against these subtle invitations, these unknown and all-encompassing temptations! At times the whole drift of life, of the easy morality of the time, is against her. The current is so strong that no wonder she is often swept away in it. And what could an impartial observer of things as they are say otherwise than that John Delancy was leading the common life of his kind and his time, and that Edith was only bringing trouble on herself by being out of sympathy with it?

He might not be in at luncheon, he said, when he was prepared to go downtown. He seldom was. He called at his broker’s. Still suspense. He wrote to the Long Island farmer. At the Union he found a scented note from Carmen. They had all returned from the capital. How rejoiced she was to be at home! And she was dying to see him; no, not dying, but very much living; and it was very important. She should expect him at the usual hour. And could he guess what gown she would wear?

And Jack went. What hold had this woman on him? Undoubtedly she had fascinations, but he knew—knew well enough by this time—that her friendship was based wholly on calculation. And yet what a sympathetic comrade she could be! How freely he could talk with her; there was no subject she did not adapt herself to. No doubt it was this adaptability that made her such a favorite. She did not demand too much virtue or require too much conventionality. The hours he was with her he was wholly at his ease. She made him satisfied with himself, and she didn’t disturb his conscience.

“I think,” said Jack—he was holding both her hands with a swinging motion—when she came forward to greet him, and looking at her critically—“I think I like you better in New York than in Washington.”

“That is because you see more of me here.”

“Oh, I saw you enough in Washington.”

“But that was my public manner. I have to live up to Mr. Henderson’s reputation.”

“And here you only have to live up to mine?”

“I can live for my friends,” she replied, with an air of candor, giving a very perceptible pressure with her little hands. “Isn’t that enough?”

Jack kissed each little hand before he let it drop, and looked as if he believed.

“And how does the house get on?”

“Famously. The lot is bought. Mr. Van Brunt was here all the morning. It’s going to be something Oriental, mediaeval, nineteenth-century, gorgeous, and domestic. Van Brunt says he wants it to represent me.”

“How?” inquired Jack; “all the four facades different?”

“With an interior unity—all the styles brought to express an individual taste, don’t you know. A different house from the four sides of approach, and inside, home—that’s the idea.”

“It appears to me,” said Jack, still bantering, “that it will look like an apartment-house.”

“That is just what it will not—that is, outside unity, and inside a menagerie. This won’t look gregarious. It is to have not more than three stories, perhaps only two. And then exterior color, decoration, statuary.”

“And gold?”

“Not too much—not to give it a cheap gilded look. Oh, I asked him about Nero’s house. As I remember it, that was mostly caverns. Mr. Van Brunt laughed, and said they were not going to excavate this house. The Roman notion was barbarous grandeur. But in point of beauty and luxury, this would be as much superior to Nero’s house as the electric light is to a Roman lamp.”

“Not classic, then?”

“Why, all that’s good in classic form, with the modern spirit. You ought to hear Mr. Van Brunt talk. This country has never yet expressed itself in domestic inhabitation.”

“It’s going to cost! What does Mr. Henderson say?”

“I think he rather likes it. He told Mr. Van Brunt to consult me and go ahead with his plans. But he talks queerly. He said he thought he would have money enough at least for the foundation. Do you think, Jack,” asked Carmen, with a sudden change of manner, “that Mr. Henderson is really the richest man in the United States?”

“Some people say so. Really, I don’t know how any one can tell. If he let go his hand from his affairs, I don’t know what a panic would do.”

Carmen looked thoughtful. “He said to me once that he wasn’t afraid of the Street any more. I told him this morning that I didn’t want to begin this if it was going to incommode him.”

“What did he say?”

“He was just going out. He looked at me a moment with that speculative sort of look-no, it isn’t cynical, as you say; I know it so well—and then said: ‘Oh, go ahead. I guess it will be all right. If anything happens, you can turn it into a boardinghouse. It will be an excellent sanitarium.’ That was all. Anyway, it’s something to do. Come, let’s go and see the place.” And she started up and touched the bell for the carriage. It was more than something to do. In those days before her marriage, when her mother was living, and when they wandered about Europe, dangerously near to the reputation of adventuresses, the girl had her dream of chateaux and castles and splendor. Her chance did not come in Europe, but, as she would have said, Providence is good to those who wait.

The next day Jack went to Long Island, and the farm was bought, and the deed brought to Edith, who, with much formality, presented it to the boy, and that young gentleman showed his appreciation of it by trying to eat it. It would have seemed a pretty incident to Jack, if he had not been absorbed in more important things.

But he was very much absorbed, and apparently more idle than ever. As the days went on, and the weeks, he was less and less at home, and in a worse humor—that is, at home. Carmen did not find him ill-humored, nor was there any change towards the fellows at the Union, except that it was noticed that he had his cross days. There was nothing specially to distinguish him from a dozen others, who led the same life of vacuity, of mild dissipation, of enforced pleasure. A wager now and then on an “event”; a fictitious interest in elections; lively partisanship in society scandals: Not much else. The theatres were stale, and only endurable on account of the little suppers afterwards; and really there wasn’t much in life except the women who made it agreeable.

Major Fairfax was not a model; there had not much survived out of his checkered chances and experiences, except a certain instinct of being a gentleman, sir; the close of his life was not exactly a desirable goal; but even the Major shook his head over Jack.

XIX

The one fact in which men universally agree is that we come into the world alone and we go out of the world alone; and although we travel in company, make our pilgrimage to Canterbury or to Vanity Fair in a great show of fellowship, and of bearing one another’s burdens, we carry our deepest troubles alone. When we think of it, it is an awful lonesomeness in this animated and moving crowd. Each one either must or will carry his own burden, which he commonly cannot, or by pride or shame will not, ask help in carrying.

Henderson drew more and more apart from confidences, and was alone in building up the colossal structure of his wealth. Father Damon was carrying his renewed temptation alone, after all his brave confession and attempt at renunciation. Ruth Leigh plodded along alone, with her secret which was the joy and the despair of her life—the opening of a gate into the paradise which she could never enter. Jack Delancy, the confiding, open-hearted good fellow, had come to a stage in his journey where he also was alone. Not even to Carmen could he confess the extent of his embarrassments, nor even in her company, nor in the distraction of his increasingly dissipated life, could he forget them. Not only had his investments been all transferred to his speculations, but his home had been mortgaged, and he did not dare tell Edith of the lowering cloud that hung over it; and that his sole dependence was the confidence of the Street, which any rumor might shatter, in that one of Henderson’s schemes to which he had committed himself. Edith, the one person who could have comforted him, was the last person to whom he could have told this, for he had the most elementary, and the common conception of what marriage is.

But Edith’s lot was the most pitiful of all. She was not only alone, but compelled to inaction. She saw the fair fabric of her life dissolving, and neither by cries nor tears, by appeals nor protest, by show of anger nor by show of suffering, could she hinder the dissolution. Strong in herself and full of courage, day by day and week by week she felt her powerlessness. Heaven knows what it cost her—what it costs all women in like circumstances—to be always cheerful, never to show distrust. If her love were not enough, if her attractions were not enough, there was no human help to which she could appeal.

And what, pray, was there to appeal? There was no visible neglect, no sufficient alienation for gossip to take hold of. If there was a little talk about Jack’s intimacy elsewhere, was there anything uncommon in that? Affairs went on as usual. Was it reasonable to suppose that society should notice that one woman’s heart was full of foreboding, heavy with a sense of loss and defeat, and with the ruin of two lives? Could simple misery like this rise to the dignity of tragedy in a world that has its share of tragedies, shocking and violent, but is on the whole going on decorously and prosperously?

The season wore on. It was the latter part of May. Jack had taken Edith and the boy down to the Long Island house, and had returned to the city and was living at his club, feverishly waiting for some change in his affairs. It was a sufficient explanation of his anxiety that money was “tight,” that failures were daily announced, and that there was a general fear of worse times. It was fortunate for Jack and other speculators that they could attribute their ill-luck to the general financial condition. There were reasons enough for this condition. Some attributed it to want of confidence, others to the tariff, others to the action of this or that political party, others to over-production, others to silver, others to the action of English capitalists in withdrawing their investments. It could all be accounted for without referring to the fact that most of the individual sufferers, like Jack, owed more than they could pay.

Henderson was much of the time absent—at the West and at the South. His every move was watched, his least sayings were reported as significant, and the Street was hopeful or depressed as he seemed to be cheerful or unusually taciturn. Uncle Jerry was the calmest man in town, and his observation that Henderson knew what he was about was reassuring. His serenity was well founded. The fact was that he had been pulling in and lowering canvas for months. Or, as he put it, he hadn’t much hay out… “It’s never a good plan,” said Uncle Jerry, “to put off raking up till the shower begins.”

It seems absurd to speak of the East Side in connection with the financial situation. But that was where the pinch was felt, and felt first. Work was slack, and that meant actual hunger for many families. The monetary solidarity of the town is remarkable. No one flies a kite in Wall Street that somebody in Rivington Street does not in consequence have to go without his dinner. As Dr. Leigh went her daily rounds she encountered painful evidence of the financial disturbance. Increased number of cases for the doctor followed want of sufficient food and the eating of cheap, unwholesome food. She was often obliged to draw upon the Margaret Fund, and to invoke the aid of Father Damon when the responsibility was too great for her. And Father Damon found that his ministry was daily diverted from the cure of souls to the care of bodies. Among all those who came to the mission as a place of refuge and rest, and to whom the priest sought to offer the consolations of religion and of his personal sympathy, there were few who did not have a tale of suffering to tell that wrung his heart. Some of them were actually ill, or had at home a sick husband or a sick daughter. And such cases had to be reported to Dr. Leigh.

It became necessary, therefore, that these two, who had shunned each other for months, should meet as often as they had done formerly. This was very hard for both, for it meant only the renewal of heart-break, regret, and despair. And yet it had been almost worse when they did not see each other. They met; they talked of nothing but their work; they tried to forget themselves in their devotion to humanity. But the human heart will not be thus disposed of. It was impossible that some show of personal interest, some tenderness, should not appear. They were walking towards Fourth Avenue one evening—the priest could not resist the impulse to accompany her a little way towards her home—after a day of unusual labor and anxiety.

“You are working too hard,” he said, gently; “you look fatigued.”

“Oh no,” she replied, looking up cheerfully; “I’m a regular machine. I get run down, and then I wind up. I get tired, and then I get rested. It isn’t the work,” she added, after a moment, “if only I could see any good of it. It seems so hopeless.”

“From your point of view, my dear doctor,” he answered, but without any shade of reproof in his tone. “But no good deed is lost. There is nothing else in the world—nothing for me.” The close of the sentence seemed wholly accidental, and he stopped speaking as if he could not trust himself to go on.

Ruth Leigh looked up quickly. “But, Father Damon, it is you who ought to be rebuked for overwork. You are undertaking too much. You ought to go off for a vacation, and go at once.”

The father looked paler and thinner than usual, but his mouth was set in firm lines, and he said: “It cannot be. My duty is here. And”—he turned, and looked her full in the face—“I cannot go.”

No need to explain that simple word. No need to interpret the swift glance that their eyes exchanged—the eager, the pitiful glance. They both knew. It was not the work. It was not the suffering of the world. It was the pain in their own hearts, and the awful chasm that his holy vows had put between them. They stood so only an instant. He was trembling in the extort to master himself, and in a second she felt the hot blood rising to her face. Her woman’s wit was the first to break the hopeless situation. She turned, and hailed a passing car. “I cannot walk any farther. Goodnight.” And she was gone.

The priest stood as if a sudden blow had struck him, following the retreating car till it was out of sight, and then turned homeward, dazed, and with feeble steps. What was this that had come to him to so shake his life? What devil was tempting him to break his vows and forsake his faith? Should he fly from the city and from his work, or should he face what seemed to him, in the light of his consecration, a monstrous temptation, and try to conquer himself? He began to doubt his power to do this. He had always believed that it was easy to conquer nature. And now a little brown woman had taught him that he reckons ill who leaves out the strongest human passion. And yet suppose he should break his solemn vows and throw away his ideal, and marry Ruth Leigh, would he ever be happy? Here was a mediaeval survival confronted by a nineteenth-century skepticism. The situation was plainly insoluble. It was as plainly so to the clear mind of the unselfish little woman without faith as it was to him. Perhaps she could not have respected him if he had yielded. Strangely enough, the attraction of the priest for her and for other women who called themselves servants of humanity was in his consecration, in his attitude of separation from the vanities and passions of this world. They believed in him, though they did not share his faith. To Ruth Leigh this experience of love was as unexpected as it was to the priest. Perhaps because her life was lived on a less exalted plane she could bear it with more equanimity. But who knows? The habit of her life was endurance, the sturdy meeting of the duty of every day, with at least only a calm regard of the future. And she would go on. But who can measure the inner change in her life? She must certainly be changed by this deep experience, and, terrible as it was, perhaps ennobled by it. Is there not something supernatural in such a love itself? It has a wonderful transforming power. It is certain that a new light, a tender light, was cast upon her world. And who can say that some time, in the waiting and working future, this new light might not change life altogether for this faithful soul?

There was one person upon whom the tragedy of life thus far sat lightly. Even her enemies, if she had any, would not deny that Carmen had an admirable temperament. If she had been a Moslem, it might be predicted that she would walk the wire ‘El Serat’ without a tremor. In these days she was busy with the plans of her new house. The project suited her ambition and her taste. The structure grew in her mind into barbaric splendor, but a barbaric splendor refined, which reveled in the exquisite adornment of the Alhambra itself. She was in daily conferences with her architect and her artists, she constantly consulted Jack about it, and Mavick whenever he was in town, and occasionally she awakened the interest of Henderson himself, who put no check upon her proceedings, although his mind was concerned with a vaster structure of his own. She talked of little else, until in her small world there grew up a vast expectation of magnificence, of which hints appeared from time to time in the newspapers, mysterious allusions to Roman luxury, to Nero and his Golden House. Henderson read these paragraphs, as he read the paragraphs about his own fortune, with a grim smile.

“Your house is getting a lot of free advertising,” he said to Carmen one evening after dinner in the library, throwing the newspaper on the table as he spoke.

“They all seem to like the idea,” replied Carmen. “Did you see what one of the papers said about the use of wealth in adorning the city? That’s my notion.”

“I suppose,” said Henderson, with a smile, “that you put that notion into the reporter’s head.”

“But he thought he suggested it to me.”

“Let’s look over the last drawing.” Henderson half rose from his chair to pull the sheet towards him, but instantly sank back, and put his hand to his heart. Carmen saw that he was very pale, and ran round to his chair.

“What is it?”

“Nothing,” he said, taking a long breath. “Just a stitch. Indigestion. It must have been the coffee.”

Carmen ran to the diningroom, and returned with a wineglass of brandy.

“There, take that.”

He drank it. “Yes, that’s better. I’m all right now.” And he sat still, slowly recovering color and control of himself.

“I’m going to send for the doctor.”

“No, no; nonsense. It has all passed,” and he stretched out his arms and threw them back vigorously. “It was only a moment’s faintness. It’s quite gone.”

He rose from his chair and took a turn or two about the room. Yes, he was quite himself, and he patted Carmen’s head as he passed and took his seat again. For a moment or two there was silence. Then he said, still as if reflecting:

“Isn’t it queer? In that moment of faintness all my life flashed through my mind.”

“It has been a very successful life,” Carmen said, by way of saying something.

“Yes, yes; but I wonder if it was worth while?”

“If I were a man, I should enjoy the power you have, the ability to do what you will.”

“I suppose I do. That is all there is. I like to conquer obstacles, and I like to command. And money; I never did care for money in itself. But there is a fascination in building up a great fortune. It is like conducting a political or a military campaign. Now, I haven’t much interest in anything else.”

As he spoke he looked round upon the crowded shelves of his library, and, getting up, went to the corner where there was a shelf of rare editions and took down a volume.

“Do you remember when I got this, Carmen? It was when I was a bachelor. It was rare then. I saw it quoted the other day as worth twice the price I gave for it.”

He replaced it carefully, and walked along the shelves looking at the familiar titles.

“I used to read then. And you read still; you have time.”

“Not those books,” she replied, with a laugh. “Those belong to the last generation.”

“That is where I belong,” he said, smiling also. “I don’t think I have read a book, not really read it, in ten years. This modern stuff that pretends to give life is so much less exciting than my own daily experience that I cannot get interested in it. Perhaps I could read these calm old books.”

“It is the newspapers that take your time,” Carmen suggested.

“Yes, they pass the time when I am thinking. And they are full of suggestions. I suppose they are as accurate about other things as about me. I used to think I would make this library the choicest in the city. It is good as far as it goes. Perhaps I will take it up some day—if I live.” And he turned away from the shelves and sat down. Carmen had never seen him exactly in this humor and was almost subdued by it.

He began to talk again, philosophizing about life generally and his own life. He seemed to like to recall his career, and finally said: “Uncle Jerry is successful too, and he never did care for anything else—except his family. There is a clerk in my office on five thousand a year who is never without a book when he comes to the office and when I see him on the train. He has a wife and a nice little family in Jersey. I ask him sometimes about his reading. He is collecting a library, but not of rare books; says he cannot afford that. I think he is successful too, or will be if he never gets more than five thousand a year, and is content with his books and his little daily life, coming and going to his family. Ah, well! Everybody must live his life. I suppose there is some explanation of it all.”

“Has anything gone wrong?” asked Carmen, anxiously.

“No, not at all. Nothing to interfere with the house of gold.” He spoke quite gently and sincerely. “I don’t know what set me into this moralizing. Let’s look at the plans.”

The next day—it was the first of June—in consultation with the architect, a project was broached that involved such an addition of cost that Carmen hesitated. She declared that it was a question of ways and means, and that she must consult the chairman. Accordingly she called her carriage and drove down to Henderson’s office.

It was a beautiful day, a little warm in the narrow streets of the lower city, but when she had ascended by the elevator to the high story that Henderson occupied in one of the big buildings that rise high enough to give a view of New York Harbor, and looked from the broad windows upon one of the most sparkling and animated scenes in the world, it seemed to her appreciative eyes a day let down out of Paradise.

The clerks all knew Mrs. Henderson, and they rose and bowed as she tripped along smiling towards her husband’s rooms. It did not seem to be a very busy day, and she found no one waiting in the anteroom, and passed into the room of his private secretary.

“Is Mr. Henderson in?”

“Yes, madam.”

“And busy?”

“Probably busy,” replied the secretary, with a smile, “but he is alone. No one has disturbed him for over half an hour.”

“Then I will go in.”

She tapped lightly at the door. There was no response. She turned the knob softly and looked in, and then, glancing back at the secretary, with a finger uplifted, “I think he is asleep,” opened the door, stepped in, and closed it carefully.

The large room was full of light, and through the half-dozen windows burst upon her the enchanting scene of the Bay, Henderson sat at his table, which was covered with neatly arranged legal documents, but bowed over it, his head resting upon his arms.

“So, Rodney, this is the way, old boy, that you wear yourself out in business!”

She spoke laughingly, but he did not stir, and she tiptoed along to awaken him.

She touched his hand. It moved heavily away from her hand. The left arm, released, dropped at his side.

She started back, her eyes round with terror, and screamed.

Instantly the secretary was at her side, and supported her, fainting, to a seat. Other clerks rushed in at the alarm. Henderson was lifted from his chair and laid upon a lounge. When the doctor who had been called arrived, Carmen was in a heap by the low couch, one arm thrown across the body, and her head buried in the cushion close to his.

The doctor instantly applied restoratives; he sent for an electric battery; everything was done that science could suggest. But all was of no avail. There was no sign of life. He must have been dead half an hour, said the doctor. It was evidently heart-failure.

Before the doctor had pronounced his verdict there was a whisper in the Stock Exchange.

“Henderson is dead!”

“It is not possible,” said one.

“I saw him only yesterday,” said another.

“I was in his office this morning,” said a third. “I never saw him looking in better health.”

The whisper was confirmed. There was no doubt of it. Henderson’s private secretary had admitted it. Yet it seemed incredible. No provision had been made for it. Speculation had not discounted it. A panic set in. No one knew what to do, for no one knew well the state of Henderson’s affairs. In the first thirty minutes there was a tremendous drop in Henderson stocks. Then some of them rallied, but before the partial recovery hundreds of men had been ruined. It was a wild hour in the Exchange. Certain stocks were hopelessly smashed for the time, and some combinations were destroyed; among them was one that Uncle Jerry had kept out of; and Jack Delancy was hopelessly ruined.

The event was flashed over the wires of the continent; it was bulletined; it was cried in the streets; it was the all-absorbing talk of the town. Already, before the dead man was removed to his own house, people were beginning to moralize about him and his career. Perhaps the truest thing was said by the old broker in the board whose reputation for piety was only equaled by his reputation of always having money to loan at exorbitant rates in a time of distress. He said to a group of downcast operators, “In the midst of life we are in death.”

XX

The place that Rodney Henderson occupied in the mind of the public was shown by the attention the newspapers paid to his death. All the great newspapers in all the cities of importance published long and minute biographies of him, with pictorial illustrations, and day after day characteristic anecdotes of his remarkable career. Nor was there, it is believed, a newspaper in the United States, secular, religious, or special, that did not comment upon his life. This was the more remarkable in that he was not a public man in the common use of the word: he had never interested himself in politics, or in public affairs, municipal or State or national; he had devoted himself entirely to building up his private fortune. If this is the duty of a citizen, he had discharged it with singleness of purpose; but no other duty of the citizen had he undertaken, if we except his private charities. And yet no public man of his day excited more popular interest or was the subject of more newspaper comment.

And these comments were nearly all respectful, and most of them kindly. There was some justice in this, for Henderson had been doing what everybody else was trying to do, usually without his good-fortune. If he was more successful than others in trying to get rich, surely a great deal of admiration was mingled with the envy of his career. To be sure, some journals were very severe upon his methods, and some revived the old stories of his unscrupulousness in transactions which had laid him open to criminal prosecution, from the effects of which he was only saved by uncommon adroitness and, some said, by legal technicalities. His career also was denounced by some as wholly vicious in its effect upon the youth of the republic, and as lowering the tone of public morals. And yet it was remembered that he had been a frank, open-hearted friend, kind to his family, and generous in contrast with some of his close-fisted contemporaries. There was nothing mean about him; even his rascalities, if you chose to call his transactions by that name, were on a grand scale. To be sure, he would let nothing stand between him and the consummation of his schemes—he was like Napoleon in that—but those who knew him personally liked him. The building up of his colossal fortune—which the newspapers were saying was the largest that had been accumulated in one lifetime in America—had ruined thousands of people, and carried disaster into many peaceful houses, and his sudden death had been a cyclone of destruction for an hour. But it was hardly fair, one journal pointed out, to hold Henderson responsible for his untimely death.

Even Jack Delancy, when the crushing news was brought him at the club, where he sat talking with Major Fairfax, although he saw his own ruin in a flash, said, “It wouldn’t have happened if Henderson had lived.”

“Not so soon,” replied the Major, hesitatingly.

“Do you mean to say that Henderson and Mavick and Mrs. Henderson would have thrown me over?”

“Why, no, not exactly; but a big machine grinds on regardless, and when the crash comes everybody looks out for himself.”

“I think I’ll telegraph to Mavick.”

“That wouldn’t do any good now. He couldn’t have stopped the panic. I tell you what, you’d better go down to your brokers and see just how matters stand.”

And the two went down to Wall Street. It was after hours, but the brokers’ office was full of excitement. No one knew what was left from the storm, nor what to expect. It was some time before Jack could get speech with one of the young men of the firm.

“How is it?” he asked.

“It’s been a–-of a time.”

“And Henderson?”

“Oh, his estate is all right, so far as we know. He was well out of the Missouris.”

“And the Missouri?”

“Bottom dropped out; temporarily, anyway.”

“And my account?”

“Wiped out, I am sorry to say. Might come up by-and-by, if you’ve got a lot of money to put up, and wait.”

“Then it’s all up,” said Jack, turning to the Major. He was very pale. He knew now that his fortune was gone absolutely—house, everything.

Few words were exchanged as they made their way back to the club. And here the Major did a most unusual thing for him. He ordered the drinks. But he did this delicately, apologetically.

“I don’t know as you care for anything, but Wall Street has made me thirsty. Eh?”

“I don’t mind if I do,” Jack replied.

And they sat down.

The conversation was not cheerful; it was mainly ejaculatory. After a second glass, Jack said, “I don’t suppose it would do any good, but I should like to see Mavick.” And then, showing the drift of his thoughts, “I wonder what Carmen will do?”

“I should say that will depend upon the will,” replied the Major.

“She is a good-hearted woman,” and Jack’s tone was one of inquiry.

“She hasn’t any, Jack. Not the least bit of a heart. And I believe Henderson found it out. I shall be surprised if his will doesn’t show that he knew it.”

A servant came to the corner where they were sitting and handed Jack a telegram.

“What’s this? Mavick?” He tore it open. “No; Edith.” He read it with something like a groan, and passed it over to the Major.

What he read was this: “Don’t be cast down, Jack. The boy and I are well. Come. Edith.”

“That is splendid; that is just like her,” cried the Major. “I’d be out of this by the first train.”

“It is no use,” replied Jack gloomily. “I couldn’t ‘face Edith now. I couldn’t do it. I wonder how she knew?”

He called back the servant, and penned as reassuring a message as he could, but said that it was impossible to leave town. She must not worry about him. This despatched, they fell again into a talk about the situation. After another glass Jack was firm in his resolution to stay and watch things. It seemed not impossible that something might turn up.

On the third day after, both the Major and Jack attended the funeral at the house. Carmen was not visible. The interment was private. The day following, Jack left his card of condolence at the door; but one day passed, and another and another, and no word of acknowledgment came from the stricken widow. Jack said to himself that it was not natural to expect it. But he did expect it, and without reason, for he should have known that Carmen was not only overwhelmed with the sudden shock of her calamity, but that she would necessarily be busy with affairs that even grief would not permit her to neglect. Jack heard that Mavick had been in the city, and that he went to the Henderson house, but he had not called at the club, and the visit must have been a flying one.

A week passed, and Jack received no message from Carmen. His note offering his services if she needed the services of any one had not been answered.

Carmen was indeed occupied. It could not be otherwise. The state of Henderson’s affairs could not wait upon conventionalities. The day after the funeral Mr. Henderson’s private secretary came to the house, and had a long interview with Mrs. Henderson. He explained to her that the affairs should be immediately investigated, the will proved, and the estate put into the hands of the executors. It would be best for Mrs. Henderson herself to bring his keys down to the office, and to see the opening of his desk and boxes. Meantime it would be well for her to see if there were any papers of importance in the house; probably everything was in the office safe.

The next morning Carmen nerved herself to the task. With his keys in hand she went alone into the library and opened his writing-desk. Everything was in perfect order; letters and papers filed and labeled, and neatly arranged in drawers and pigeonholes. There lay his letter-book as he had last used it, and there lay fresh memoranda of his projects and engagements. She found in one of the drawers some letters of her own, mostly notes, and most of them written before her marriage. In another drawer were some bundles of letters, a little yellow with age, endorsed with the name of “Margaret.” She shut the drawer without looking at them. She continued to draw papers from the pigeonholes and glance at them. Most of them related to closed transactions. At length she drew out one that instantly fixed her attention. It was endorsed, “Last Will and Testament.” She looked first at the date at the end—it was quite recent—and then leaned back in her chair and set herself deliberately to read it.

The document was long and full of repetitions and technicalities, but the purport of it was plain. As she read on she was at first astonished, then she was excited to trembling, and felt herself pale and faint; but when she had finished and fully comprehended it her pretty face was distorted with rage. The great bulk of the property was not for her. She sprang up and paced the floor. She came back and took up the document with a motion of tearing it in pieces. No—it would be better to burn it. Of course there must be another will deposited in the safe. Henderson had told her so. It was drawn up shortly after their marriage. It could not be worse for her than this. She lighted the gas-jet by the fireplace, and held the paper in her hand. Then a thought struck her. What if somebody knew of this will, and its execution could be proved! She looked again at the end. It was signed and sealed. There were the names of two witnesses. One was the name of their late butler, who had been long in Henderson’s service, and who had died less than a month ago. The other name was Thomas Mavick. Evidently the will had been signed recently, on some occasion when Mavick was in the house. And Henderson’s lawyer probably knew it also!

She folded the document carefully, put it back in the pigeonhole, locked the desk, and rang the bell for her carriage. She was ready when the carriage came to the door, and told the coachman to drive to the office of Mr. Sage in Nassau Street. Mr. Sage had been for many years Henderson’s most confidential lawyer.

He received Carmen in his private office, with the subdued respect due to her grief and the sudden tragedy that had overtaken her. He was a man well along in years, a small man, neat in his dress, a little formal and precise in his manner, with a smoothly shaven face and gray eyes, keen, but not unkindly in expression. He had the reputation, which he deserved, for great ability and integrity. After the first salutations and words of condolence were spoken, Carmen said, “I have come to consult you, Mr. Sage, about my husband’s affairs.”

“I am quite at your service, madam.”

“I wanted to see you before I went to the office with the keys of his safe.”

“Perhaps,” said Mr. Sage, “I could spare you that trouble.”

“Oh no; his secretary thought I had better come myself, if I could.”

“Very well,” said Mr. Sage.

Carmen hesitated a moment, and then said, in an inquiring tone, “I suppose the first thing is the will. He told me long ago that his will was made. I suppose it is in the safe. Didn’t you draw it, Mr. Sage?”

“Oh yes,” the lawyer replied, leaning back in his chair, “I drew that; a long time ago; shortly after your marriage. And about a year ago I drew another one. Did he ever speak of that?”

“No,” Carmen replied, with a steady voice, but trembling inwardly at her narrow escape.

“I wonder,” continued Mr. Sage, “if it was ever executed? He took it, and said he would think it over.”

“Executed?” queried Carmen, looking up. “How do you mean, before a magistrate?”

“Oh, no; signed and witnessed. It is very simple. The law requires two witnesses; the testator and the witnesses must declare that they sign in the presence of each other. The witnesses prove the will, or, if they are dead, their signatures can be proved. I was one of the witnesses of the first will, and a clerk of Henderson’s, who is still in his office, was the other.”

“The last one is probably in the safe if it was executed.”

“Probably,” the lawyer assented. “If not, you’d better look for it in the house.”

“Of course. Whether it exists or not, I want to carry out my husband’s intention,” Carmen said, sweetly. “Have you any memorandum of it?”

“I think so, somewhere, but the leading provisions are in my mind. It would astonish the public.”

“Why?” asked Carmen.

“Well, the property was greater than any of us supposed, and—perhaps I ought not to speak to you of this now, Mrs. Henderson.”

“I think I have a right to know what my husband’s last wishes were,” Carmen answered, firmly.

“Well, he had a great scheme. The greater part of his property after the large legacies—” The lawyer saw that Carmen looked pale, and he hesitated a moment, and then said, in a cheery manner: “Oh, I assure you, madam, that this will gave you a great fortune; all the establishment, and a very great fortune. But the residue was in trust for the building and endowment of an Industrial School on the East Side, with a great library and a reading-room, all to be free. It was a great scheme, and carefully worked out.”

“I am so glad to know this,” said Carmen. “Was there anything else?”

“Only some legacies.” And Mr. Sage went on, trying to recall details that his attentive listener already knew. There were legacies to some of his relatives in New Hampshire, and there was a fund, quite a handsome fund, for the poor of the city, called the “Margaret Fund.” And there was something also for a relative of the late Mrs. Henderson.

Carmen again expressed her desire to carry out her husband’s wishes in everything, and Mr. Sage was much impressed by her sweet manner. When she had found out all that he knew or remembered of the new will, and arose to go, Mr. Sage said he would accompany her to the office. And Carmen gratefully accepted his escort, saying that she had wished to ask him to go with her, but that she feared to take up so much of his time.

At the office the first will was found, but no other. The lawyer glanced through it, and then handed it to Mrs. Henderson, with the remark, “It leaves you, madam, pretty much everything of which he died possessed.” Carmen put it aside. She did not care to read it now. She would go home and search for the other one.

“If no other is found,” said Mr. Sage, in bidding her good-morning, “this one ought to be proved tomorrow. I may tell you that you and Mr. Hollowell are named as executors.”

On her way home Carmen stopped at a telegraph station, and sent a message to Mavick, in Washington, to take an afternoon train and come to New York.

When Carmen reached home she was in a serious but perfectly clear frame of mind. The revelation in the last will of Henderson’s change of mind towards her was mortifying to a certain extent. It was true that his fortune was much increased since the first will was made, and that it justified his benevolent scheme. But he might have consulted her about it. If she had argued the matter with her conscience, she would have told her conscience that she would carry out this new plan in her own way and time. She was master of the situation, and saw before her a future of almost unlimited opportunity and splendor, except for one little obstacle. That obstacle was Mr. Mavick. She believed that she understood him thoroughly, but she could not take the next step until she had seen him. It was true that no one except herself positively knew that a second will now existed, but she did not know how much he might choose to remember.

She was very impatient to see Mr. Mavick. She wandered about the house, restless and feverish. Presently it occurred to her that it would be best to take the will wholly into her own keeping. She unlocked the desk, took it out with a trembling hand, but did not open it again. It was not necessary. A first reading had burned every item of it into her brain. It seemed to be a sort of living thing. She despised herself for being so agitated, and for the furtive feeling that overcame her as she glanced about to be sure that she was alone, and then she ran up stairs to her room and locked the document in her own writing-desk.

What was that? Oh, it was only the door-bell. But who could it be? Some one from the office, from her lawyer? She could see nobody. In two minutes there was a rap at her door. It was only the servant with a despatch. She took it and opened it without haste.

“Very well, Dobson; no answer. I expect Mr. Mavick on business at ten. I am at home to no one else.”

At ten o’clock Mr. Mavick came, and was shown into the library, where Carmen awaited him.

“It was very good of you to come,” she said, as she advanced to meet him and gave him her hand in the natural subdued manner that the circumstances called for.

“I took the first train after I received your despatch.”

“I am sorry to inconvenience you so,” she said, after they were seated, “but you know so much of Mr. Henderson’s affairs that your advice will be needed. His will is to be proved tomorrow.”

“Yes?” said Mavick.

“I went to see—Mr. Sage today, and he went with me to the office. The will was in the safe. I did not read it, but Mr. Sage said that it left everything to me except a few legacies.”

“Yes?”

“He said it should be proved tomorrow, unless a later will turned up.”

“Was there a later will?”

“That is what he did not know. He had drawn a new will about a year ago, but he doubted if it had ever been executed. Mr. Henderson was considering it. He thought he had a memorandum of it somewhere, but he remembered the principal features of it.”

“Was it a great change from the first?” Mavick asked.

“Yes, considerable. In fact, the greater part of his property, as far as I could make out, was to go to endow a vast training-school, library, and reading-room on the East Side. Of course that would be a fine thing.”

“Of course,” said Mavick. “And no such will has been found?”

“I’ve looked everywhere,” replied Carmen, simply; “all over the house. It should be in that desk if anywhere. We can look again, but I feel pretty sure there is no such document there.”

She took in her hand the bunch of keys that lay on the table, as if she were about to rise and unlock the desk. Then she hesitated, and looked Mavick full in the face.

“Do you think, Mr. Mavick, that will was ever executed?”

For a moment they looked steadily at each other, and then he said, deliberately, their eyes squarely meeting, “I do not think it was.” And in a moment he added, “He never said anything to me about such a disposition of his property.”

Two things were evident to Carmen from this reply. He saw her interests as she saw them, and it was pretty certain that the contents of the will were not made known to him when he witnessed it. She experienced an immense feeling of relief as she arose and unlocked the desk. They sat down before it together, and went over its contents. Mavick made a note of the fresh business memoranda that might be of service next day, since Mrs. Henderson had requested him to attend the proving of the will, and to continue for the present the business relations with her that he had held with Mr. Henderson.

It was late when he left the house, but he took with him a note to Mr. Sage to drop into the box for morning delivery. The note said that she had searched the house, that no second will existed there, and that she had telegraphed to Mr. Mavick, who had much knowledge of Mr. Henderson’s affairs, to meet him in the morning. And she read the note to Mavick before she sealed it.

Before the note could have been dropped into the box, Carmen was in her room, and the note was literally true. No second will existed.

The will was proved, and on the second day its contents were in all the newspapers. But with it went a very exciting story. This was the rumor of another will, and of Henderson’s vast scheme of benevolence. Mr. Sage had been interviewed and Carmen had been interviewed. The memorandum (which was only rough and not wholly legible notes) had been found and sent to Carmen. There was no concealment about it. She gave the reporters all the details, and to every one she said that it was her intention to carry out her husband’s wishes, so far as they could be ascertained from this memorandum, when his affairs had been settled. The thirst of the reporters for information amused even Carmen, who had seen much of this industrious tribe. One of them, to whom she had partially explained the situation, ended by asking her, “Are you going to contest the will?”

“Contest the will?” cried Carmen. “There is nothing to contest.”

“I didn’t know,” said the young man, whose usual occupation was reporting sports, and who had a dim idea that every big will must be contested.

Necessarily the affair made a great deal of talk. The newspapers discussed it for days, and turned over the scheme in every light, the most saying that it was a noble gift to the city that had been intended, while only one or two doubted if charity institutions of this sort really helped the poor. Regret, of course, was expressed that the second will had never been executed, but with this regret was the confidence that the widow would carry out, eventually, Henderson’s plans.

This revelation modified the opinion in regard to Henderson. He came to be regarded as a public benefactor, and his faithful wife shared the credit of his noble intention.

XXI

Waiting for something to turn up, Jack found a weary business. He had written to Mavick after the newspaper report that that government officer had been in the city on Henderson’s affairs, and had received a very civil and unsatisfactory reply. In the note Mavick had asked him to come to Washington and spend a little time, if he had nothing better on hand, as his guest. Perhaps no offense was intended, but the reply enraged Jack. There was in the tone of the letter and in the manner of the invitation a note of patronage that was unendurable.

“Confound the fellow’s impudence!” said Jack to himself; and he did not answer the invitation.

Personally his situation was desperate enough, but he was not inclined to face it. In a sort of stupor he let the law take its course. There was nothing left of his fortune, and his creditors were in possession of his house and all it contained. “Do not try to keep anything back that legally belongs to them,” Edith had written when he informed her of this last humiliation. Of course decency was observed. Jack’s and Edith’s wardrobes, and some pieces of ancestral furniture that he pointed out as belonging to his wife, were removed before the auction flag was hung out. When this was over he still temporized. Edith’s affectionate entreaties to him to leave the dreadful city and come home were evaded on one plea or another. He had wild schemes of going off West or South—of disappearing. Perhaps he would have luck somewhere. He couldn’t ask aid or seek occupation of his friends, but some place where he was not known he felt that he might do something to regain his position, get some situation, or make some money—lots of men had done it in a new country and reinstate himself in Edith’s opinion.

But he did not go, and days and weeks went by in irresolution. No word came from Carmen, and this humiliated Jack more than anything else—not the loss of her friendship, but the remembrance that he had ever danced attendance on her and trusted her. He was getting a good many wholesome lessons in these days.

One afternoon he called upon Miss Tavish. There was no change in her. She received him with her usual gay cordiality, and with no affectation.

“I didn’t know what had become of you,” she said.

“I’ve been busy,” he replied, with a faint attempt at a smile.

“Yes, I know. It’s been an awful time, what with Henderson’s death and everything else. Almost everybody has been hit. But,” and she looked at him cheerfully, “they will come up again; up and down; it is always so. Why, even I got a little twist in that panic.” The girl was doing what she could in her way to cheer him up.

“I think of going off somewhere to seek my fortune,” said Jack, with a rueful smile.

“Oh, I hope not; your friends wouldn’t like that. There is no place like New York, I’m sure.” And there was a real note of friendliness and encouragement in her tone. “Only,” and she gave him another bright smile, “I think of running away from it myself, for a time. It’s a secret yet. Carmen wants me to go abroad with her.”

“I have not seen Mrs. Henderson since her husband’s death. How is she?”

“Oh, she bears up wonderfully. But then she has so much to do, poor thing. And then the letters she gets, the begging letters. You’ve no idea. I don’t wonder she wants to go abroad. Don’t stay away so long again,” she said as Jack rose to go. “And, oh, can’t you come in to dinner tomorrow night—just Carmen—I think I can persuade her—and nobody else?”

“I’m sorry that I have an engagement,” Jack answered.

“Well, some other time. Only soon.”

This call did Jack temporarily a world of good. It helped his self-esteem. But it was only temporary. The black fact stared him in the face every morning that he was ruined. And it came over him gradually that he was a useless member of society. He never had done anything; he was not trained or fitted to do anything. And this was impressed upon him in the occasional attempts he made to get employment. He avoided as much as possible contact with those who knew him. Shame prevented him from applying to them for occupation, and besides he very well knew that to those who knew him his idle career was no recommendation. Yet he formed a habit of going downtown every day and looking for work. His appearance commanded civility, but everywhere he met with refusal, and he began to feel like a well-bred tramp. There had been in his mind before no excuse for tramps. He could see now how they were made.

It was not that he lacked capacity. He knew a great deal, in an amateurish way, about pictures, books, bric-a-brac, and about society. Why shouldn’t he write? He visited the Loan Exhibition, and wrote a careful criticism on the pictures and sent it to a well-known journal. It was returned with thanks: the journal had its own art critic. He prepared other articles about curious books, and one about porcelain and pottery. They were all returned, except one which gave the history of a rare bit of majolica, which had been picked up forty cents and then sold for five hundred dollars, and was now owned by a collector who had paid four thousand dollars for it. For that the newspaper sent him five dollars. That was not encouraging, and his next effort for the same journal was returned. Either he hadn’t the newspaper knack, or the competition was too great.

He had ceased going to his club. It was too painful to meet his acquaintances in his altered circumstances, and it was too expensive. It even annoyed him to meet Major Fairfax. That philosopher had not changed towards him any more than Miss Tavish had, but it was a melancholy business to talk of his affairs, and to listen to the repeated advice to go down to the country to Edith, and wait for some good opening. That was just what he could not do. His whole frivolous life he began now to see as she must have seen it. And it seemed to him that he could only retain a remnant of his self-respect by doing something that would reinstate him in her opinion.

“Very well,” said the Major, at the close of the last of their talks at the club; “what are you going to do?”

“I’m going into some business,” said Jack, stiffly.

“Have you spoken to any of your friends?”

“No. It’s no use,” he said, bitterly; “they are all like me, or they know me.”

“And hasn’t your wife some relations who are in business?”

“The last people I should apply to. No. I’m going to look around. Major, do you happen to know a cheap lodging-house that is respectable?”

“I don’t know any that is not respectable,” the Major replied, in a huffy manner.

“I beg your pardon,” said Jack. “I want to reduce expenses.”

The Major did know of a place in the neighborhood where he lived. He gave Jack the address, and thereafter the club and his usual resorts knew him no more.

As the days went by and nothing happened to break the monotony of his waiting and his fruitless search, he became despondent. Day after day he tramped about the city, among the business portions, and often on the East Side, to see misery worse than his own. He had saved out of the wreck his ample wardrobe, his watch, and some jewelry, and upon these he raised money for his cheap lodgings and his cheap food. He grew careless of his personal appearance. Every morning he rose and went about the city, always with less hope, and every night he returned to his lodging, but not always sober.

One day he read the announcement that Mrs. Rodney Henderson and Miss Tavish had sailed for Europe. That ended that chapter. What exactly he had expected he could not say. Help from Carmen? Certainly not. But there had never been a sign from her, nor any word from Mavick lately. There evidently was nothing. He had been thrown over. Carmen evidently had no more use for him. She had other plans. The thought that he had been used and duped was almost more bitter than his loss.

In after-days Jack looked back upon this time with a feeling akin to thankfulness for Carmen’s utter heartlessness in regard to his affairs. He trembled to think what might have happened to him if she had sent for him and consulted him and drawn him again into the fatal embrace of her schemes and her fascinations. Now he was simply enraged when he thought of her, and irritated with himself.

These were dark days, days to which he looked back with a shudder. He wrote to Edith frequently—a brief note. He was straightening out his affairs; he was busy. But he did not give her his address, and he only got her letters when the Major forwarded them from the club, which was irregularly. A stranger, who met him at his lodgings or elsewhere, would have said that he was an idle and rather dissipated-looking man. He was idle, except in his feeble efforts to get work; he was worn and discouraged, but he was not doing anything very bad. In his way of looking at it, he was carrying out his notion of honor. He was only breaking a woman’s heart.

He was conscious of little except his own misfortunes and misery. He did not yet apprehend his own selfishness nor her nobility. He did not yet comprehend the unselfishness of a good woman’s love.

On the East Side one day, as he was sauntering along Grand Street, he encountered Dr. Leigh, his wife’s friend, whom he had seen once at his house. She did not at first recognize him until he stopped and spoke his name.

“Oh,” she said, with surprise at seeing him, and at his appearance, “I didn’t expect to see you here. I thought everybody had gone from the city. Perhaps you are going to the Neighborhood Guild?”

“No,” and Jack forced a little laugh, “I’m not so good as that. I’m kept in town on business. I strolled over here to see how the other side of life looks.”

“It doesn’t improve. It is one of the worst summers I ever saw. Since Mr. Henderson’s death—”

“What difference did Henderson’s death make over here?”

“Why, he had deposited a little fund for Father Damon to draw on, and the day after his death the bank returned a small check with the notice that there was no deposit to draw on. It had been such a help in extraordinary cases. Perhaps you saw some allusion to it in the newspapers?”

“Wasn’t it the Margaret Fund?”

“Yes. Father Damon dropped a note to Mrs. Henderson explaining about it. No reply came.”

“As he might have expected.” Dr. Leigh looked up quickly as if for an explanation, but Jack ignored the query, and went on. “And Father Damon, is he as active as ever?”

“He has gone.”

“What, left the city, quit his work? And the mission?”

“I don’t suppose he will ever quit his work while he lives, but he is much broken down. The mission chapel is not closed, but a poor woman told me that it seemed so.”

“And he will not return? Mrs. Delancy will be so sorry.”

“I think not. He is in retreat now, and I heard that he might go to Baltimore. I thought of your wife. She was so interested in his work. Is she well this summer?”

“Yes, thank you,” said Jack, and they parted. But as she went on her way his altered appearance struck her anew, and she wondered what had happened.

This meeting with Mr. Delancy recalled most forcibly Edith, her interest in the East Side work, her sympathy with Father Damon and the mission, the first flush of those days of enthusiasm. When Father Damon began his work the ladies used to come in their carriages to the little chapel with flowers and money and hearts full of sympathy with the devoted priest. Alone of all these Edith had been faithful in her visits, always, when she was in town. And now the whole glittering show of charity had vanished for the time, and Father Damon—The little doctor stopped, consulted a memorandum in her hand-bag, looked up at the tenement-house she was passing, and then began to climb its rickety stairway.

Yes, Father Damon had gone, and Ruth Leigh simply went on with her work as before. Perhaps in all the city that summer there was no other person whose daily life was so little changed as hers. Others were driven away by the heat, by temporary weariness, by the need of a vacation and change of scene. Some charities and some clubs and schools were temporarily suspended; other charities, befitting the name, were more active, the very young children were most looked after, and the Good Samaritans of the Fresh-Air Funds went about everywhere full of this new enthusiasm of humanity. But the occupation of Ruth Leigh remained always the same, in a faithful pertinacity that nothing could wholly discourage, in a routine that no projects could kindle into much enthusiasm. Day after day she went about among the sick and the poor, relieving and counseling individuals, and tiring herself out in that personal service, and more and more conscious, when she had time, at night, for instance, to think, of the monstrous injustice somewhere, and at times in a mood of fierce revolt against the social order that made all this misery possible and hopeless.

Yet a great change had come into her life—the greatest that can come to any man or woman in the natural order. She loved and she was loved. An ideal light had been cast upon her commonplace existence, the depths of her own nature had been revealed to herself. In this illuminating light she walked about in the misery of this world. This love must be denied, this longing of the heart for companionship could never be gratified, yet after all it was a sweet self-sacrifice, and the love itself brought its own consolation. She had not to think of herself as weak, and neither was her lover’s image dimmed to her by any surrender of his own principle or his own ideal. She saw him, as she had first seen him, a person consecrated and set apart, however much she might disagree with his supernatural vagaries—set apart to the service of humanity. She had bitter thoughts sometimes of the world, and bitter thoughts of the false system that controlled his conduct, but never of him.

It was unavoidable that she should recall her last interview with him, and that the image of his noble, spiritual face should be ever distinct in her mind. And there was even a certain comfort in this recollection.

Father Damon had indeed striven, under the counsel of his own courage and of Brother Monies, to conquer himself on the field of his temptation. But with his frail physique it was asking too much. This at last was so evident that the good brother advised him, and the advice was in the nature of a command in his order, to retire for a while, and then take up his work in a fresh field.

When this was determined on, his desire was nearly irresistible to see Ruth Leigh; he thought it would be cowardly to disappear and not say good-by. Indeed, it was necessary to see her and explain the stoppage of help from the Margaret Fund. The check that he had drawn, which was returned, had been for one of Dr. Leigh’s cases. With his failure to elicit any response from Mrs. Henderson, the hope, raised by the newspaper comments on the unexecuted will, that the fund would be renewed was dissipated.

In the interview which Father Damon sought with Dr. Leigh at the Women’s Hospital all this was explained, and ways and means were discussed for help elsewhere.

“I wanted to talk this over with you,” said Father Damon, “because I am going away to take a rest.”

“You need it, Father Damon,” was Ruth’s answer, in a professional manner.

“And—and,” he continued, with some hesitation, “probably I shall not return to this mission.”

“Perhaps that will be best,” she said, simply, but looking up at him now, with a face full of tender sympathy.

“I am sure of it,” he replied, turning away from her gaze. “The fact is, doctor, I am a little hipped—overworked, and all that. I shall pull myself together with a little rest. But I wanted to tell you how much I appreciate your work, and—and what a comfort you have been to me in my poor labors. I used to hope that some time you would see this world in relation to the other, and—”

“Yes, I know,” she interrupted, hastily, “I cannot think as you do, but—” And she could not go on for a great lump in her throat. Involuntarily she rose from her seat. The interview was too trying. Father Damon rose also. There was a moment’s painful silence as they looked in each other’s faces. Neither could trust the voice for speech. He took her hand and pressed it, and said “God bless you!” and went out, closing the door softly.

A moment after he opened it again and stood on the threshold. She was in her chair, her head bowed upon her arms on the table. As he spoke she looked up, and she never forgot the expression of his face.

“I want to say, Ruth”—he had never before called her by her first name, and his accent thrilled her—“that I shall pray for you as I pray for myself, and though I may never see you again in this world, the greatest happiness that can come to me in this life will be to hear that you have learned to say Our Father which art in heaven.”

As she looked he was gone, and his last words remained a refrain in her mind that evening and afterwards—“Our Father which art in heaven”—a refrain recurring again and again in all her life, inseparable from the memory of the man she loved.

XXII

Along the Long Island coast lay the haze of early autumn. It was the time of lassitude. In the season of ripening and decay Nature seemed to have lost her spring, and lay in a sort of delicious languor. Sea and shore were in a kind of truce, and the ocean south wind brought cool refreshment but no incentive.

From the sea the old brown farmhouse seemed a snug haven of refuge; from the inland road it appeared, with its spreading, sloping roofs, like an ancient sea-craft come ashore, which had been covered in and then embowered by kindly Nature with foliage. In those days its golden-brown color was in harmony with the ripening orchards and gardens.

Surely, if anywhere in the world, peace was here. But to its owner this very peace and quietness was becoming intolerable. The waiting days were so long, the sleepless nights of uncertainty were so weary. When her work was done, and Edith sat with a book or some sewing under the arbor where the grape clusters hung, growing dark and transparent, and the boy played about near her, she had a view of the blue sea, and about her were the twitter of birds and the hum of the cicada. The very beauty made her heart ache. Seaward there was nothing—nothing but the leaping little waves and the sky. From the land side help might come at any hour, and at every roll of wheels along the road her heart beat faster and hope sprang up anew. But day after day nothing came.

Perhaps there is no greater bravery than this sort of waiting, doing the daily duty and waiting. Endurance is woman’s bravery, and Edith was enduring, with an almost broken but still with a courageous heart. It was all so strange. Was it simply shame that kept him away, or had he ceased to love her? If the latter, there was no help for her. She had begged him to come, she had offered to leave the boy with her cousin companion and go to him. Perhaps it was pride only. In one of his short letters he had said, “Thank God, your little fortune is untouched.” If it were pride only, how could she overcome it? Of this she thought night and day. She thought, and she was restless, feverish, and growing thin in her abiding anxiety.

It was true that her own fortune was safe and in her control. But with the usual instinct of women who know they have an income not likely to be ever increased, she began to be economical. She thought not of herself; but of the boy. It was the boy’s fortune now. She began to look sharply after expenses; she reduced her household; she took upon herself the care of the boy, and other household duties. This was all well for her, for it occupied her time, and to some extent diverted her thoughts.

So the summer passed—a summer of anxiety, longing, and dull pain for Edith. The time came when the uncertainty of it could no longer be endured. If Jack had deserted her, even if he should die, she could order her life and try to adjust her heavy burden. But this uncertainty was quite beyond her power to sustain.

She made up her mind that she would go to the city and seek him. It was what he had written that she must not on any account do, but nothing that could happen to her there could be so bad as this suspense. Perhaps she could bring him back. If he refused, and was angry at her interference, that even would be something definite. And then she had carefully thought out another plan. It might fail, but some action had now become for her a necessity.

Early one morning—it was in September-she prepared for a journey to the city. This little trip, which thousands of people made daily, took on for her the air of an adventure. She had been immured so long that it seemed a great undertaking. And when she bade good-by to the boy for the day she hugged him and kissed him again and again, as if it were to be an eternal farewell. To her cousin were given the most explicit directions for his care, and after she had started for the train she returned to give further injunctions. So she told herself, but it was really for one more look at the boy.

But on the whole there was a certain exhilaration in the preparation and the going, and her spirits rose as they had not done in months before. Arrived in the city, she drove at once to the club Jack most frequented. “He is not in,” the porter said; “indeed, Mr. Delancy has not been here lately.”

“Is Major Fairfax in?” Edith asked.

Major Fairfax was in, and he came out immediately to her carriage. From him she learned Jack’s address, and drove to his lodging-house. The Major was more than civil; he was disposed to be sympathetic, but he had the tact to see that Mrs. Delancy did not wish to be questioned, nor to talk.

“Is Mr. Delancy at home?” she asked the small boy who ran the elevator.

“No’me.”

“And he did not say where he was going?”

“No’me.”

“Is he not sometimes at home in the daytime?”

“No’me.”

“And what time does he usually come home in the evening?”

“Don’t know. After I’ve gone, I guess.”

Edith hesitated whether she should leave a card or a note, but she decided not to do either, and ordered the cabman to take her to Pearl Street, to the house of Fletcher & Co.

Mr. Fletcher, the senior partner, was her cousin, the son of her father’s elder brother, and a man now past sixty years. Circumstances had carried the families apart socially since the death of her father and his brother, but they were on the most friendly terms, and the ties of blood were not in any way weakened. Indeed, although Edith had seen Gilbert Fletcher only a few times since her marriage, she felt that she could go to him any time if she were in trouble, with the certainty of sympathy and help. He had the reputation of the old-fashioned New York merchants, to whom her father belonged, for integrity and conservatism.

It was to him that she went now. The great shop, or wholesale warehouse rather, into which she entered from the narrow and cart-encumbered street, showed her at once the nature of the business of Fletcher & Co. It was something in the twine and cordage way. There were everywhere great coils of ropes and bales of twine, and the dark rooms had a tarry smell. Mr. Fletcher was in his office, a little space partitioned off in the rear, with half a dozen clerks working by gaslight, and a little sanctum where the senior partner was commonly found at his desk.

Mr. Fletcher was a little, round-headed man, with a shrewd face, vigorous and cheerful, thoroughly a man of business, never speculating, and who had been slowly gaining wealth by careful industry and cautious extension of his trade. Certain hours of the day—from ten to three—he gave to his business. It was a habit, and it was a habit that he enjoyed. He had now come back, as he told Edith, from a little holiday at the sea, where his family were, to get into shape for the fall trade.

Edith was closeted with him for a full hour. When she came out her eyes were brighter and her step more elastic. At sundown she reached home, almost in high spirits. And when she snatched up the boy and hugged him, she whispered in his ear, “Baby, we have done it, and we shall see.”

One night when Jack returned from his now almost aimless tramping about the city he found a letter on his table. It seemed from the printing on the envelope to be a business letter; and business, in the condition he was in—and it was the condition in which he usually came home—did not interest him. He was about to toss the letter aside, when the name of Fletcher caught his eye, and he opened it.

It was a brief note, written on an office memorandum, which simply asked Mr. Delancy to call at the office as soon as it was convenient, as the writer wished to talk with him on a matter of business, and it was signed “Gilbert Fletcher.”

“Why don’t he say what his business is?” said Jack, throwing the letter down impatiently. “I am not going to be hauled over the coals by any of the Fletchers.” And he tumbled into bed in an injured and yet independent frame of mind.

But the next morning he reread the formal little letter in a new light. To be sure, it was from Edith’s cousin. He knew him very well; he was not a person to go out of his way to interfere with anybody, and more than likely it was in relation to Edith’s affairs that he was asked to call. That thought put a new aspect on the matter. Of course if it concerned her interests he ought to go. He dressed with unusual care for him in these days, breakfasted at the cheap restaurant which he frequented, and before noon was in the Fletcher warehouse in Pearl Street.

He had never been there before, and he was somewhat curious to see what sort of a place it was where Gilbert carried on the string business, as he used to call it when speaking to Edith of her cousin’s occupation. It was a much more dingy and smelly place than he expected, but the carts about the doors, and the bustle of loading and unloading, of workmen hauling and pulling, and of clerks calling out names and numbers to be registered and checked, gave him the impression that it was not a dull place.

Mr. Fletcher received him in the little dim back office with a cordial shake of the hand, gave him a chair, and reseated himself, pushing back the papers in front of him with the air of a very busy man who was dropping for a moment one thing in order to give his mind promptly to another.

“Our fall trade is just starting up,” he said, “and it keeps us all pretty busy.”

“Yes,” said Jack. “I could drop in any other time—”

“No, no,” interrupted Mr. Fletcher; “it is just because I am busy that I wanted to see you. Are you engaged in anything?”

“Nothing in particular,” replied Jack, hesitating. “I’d thought of going into some business.” And then, after a pause: “It’s no use to mince matters. You know—everybody knows, I suppose—that I got hit in that Henderson panic.”

“So did lots of others,” replied Mr. Fletcher, cheerfully. “Yes, I know about it. And I’m not sure but it was a lucky thing for me.” He spoke still more cheerfully, and Jack looked at him inquiringly.

“Are you open to an offer?”

“I’m open to almost anything,” Jack answered, with a puzzled look.

“Well,” and Mr. Fletcher settled back in his chair, “I can give you the situation in five minutes. I’ve been in this business over thirty years—yes; over thirty-five years. It has grown, little by little, until it’s a pretty big business. I’ve a partner, a first-rate man—he is in Europe now—who attends to most of the buying. And the business keeps spreading out, and needs more care. I’m not as young as I was I shall be sixty-four in October—and I can’t work right along as I used to. I find that I come later and go away earlier. It isn’t the ‘work exactly, but the oversight, the details; and the fact is that I want somebody near me whom I can trust, whether I’m here or whether I’m away. I’ve got good, honest, faithful clerks—if there was one I did not trust, I wouldn’t have him about. But do you know, Jack,” it was the first time in the interview that he had used this name—“there is something in blood.”

“Yes,” Jack assented.

“Well, I want a confidential clerk. That’s it.”

“Me?” he asked. He was thinking rapidly while Mr. Fletcher had been speaking; something like a revolution was taking place in his mind, and when he asked this, the suggestion took on a humorous aspect—a humorous view of anything had not occurred to him in months.

“You are just the man.”

“I can be confidential,” Jack rejoined, with the old smile on his face that had been long a stranger to it, “but I don’t know that I can be a clerk.”

Mr. Fletcher was good enough to laugh at this pleasantry.

“That’s all right. It isn’t much of a position. We can make the salary twenty-five hundred dollars for a starter. Will you try it?”

Jack got up and went to the area window, and looked out a moment upon the boxes in the dim court. Then he came back and stood by Mr. Fletcher, and put his hand on the desk.

“Yes, I’ll try.”

“Good. When will you begin?”

“Now.”

“That’s good. No time like now. Wait a bit, and I’ll show you about the place before we go to lunch. You’ll get hold of the ropes directly.”

This was Mr. Fletcher’s veteran joke.

At three o’clock Mr. Fletcher closed his desk. It was time to take his train. “Tomorrow, then,” he said, “we will begin in earnest.”

“What are the business hours here?” asked Jack.

“Oh, I am usually here from ten to three, but the business hours are from nine till the business is done. By-the-way, why not run out with me and spend the night, and we can talk the thing over?”

There was no reason why he should not go, and he went. And that was the way John Corlear Delancy was initiated in the string business in the old house of Fletcher & Co.

XXII

Few battles are decisive, and perhaps least of all those that are won by a sudden charge or an accident, and not as the result of long-maturing causes. Doubtless the direction of a character or a career is often turned by a sudden act of the will or a momentary impotence of the will. But the battle is not over then, nor without long and arduous fighting, often a dreary, dragging struggle without the excitement of novelty.

It was comparatively easy for Jack Delancy in Mr. Fletcher’s office to face about suddenly and say yes to the proposal made him. There was on him the pressure of necessity, of his own better nature acting under a sense of his wife’s approval; and besides, there was a novelty that attracted him in trying something absolutely new to his habits.

But it was one thing to begin, and another, with a man of his temperament, to continue. To have regular hours, to attend to the details of a traffic that was to the last degree prosaic, in short, to settle down to hard work, was a very different thing from the “business” about which Jack and his fellows at the club used to talk so much, and to fancy they were engaged in. When the news came to the Union that Delancy had gone into the house of Fletcher & Co. as a clerk, there was a general smile, and a languid curiosity expressed as to how long he would stick to it.

In the first day or two Jack was sustained not only by the original impulse, but by a real instinct in learning about business ways and details that were new to him. To talk about the business and about the markets, to hear plans unfolded for extension and for taking advantage of fluctuations in prices, was all very well; but the drudgery of details—copying, comparing invoices, and settling into the routine of a clerk’s life, even the life of a confidential clerk—was contrary to the habits of his whole life. It was not to be expected that these habits would be overcome without a long struggle and many back-slidings.

The little matter of being at his office desk at nine o’clock in the morning began to seem a hardship after the first three or four days. For Mr. Fletcher not to walk into his shop on the stroke of ten would have been such a reversal of his habits as to cause him as much annoyance as it caused Jack to be bound to a fixed hour. It was only the difference in training. But that is saying everything.

Besides, while the details of his work, the more he got settled in them, were not to his taste, he was daily mortified to find himself ignorant of matters which the stupidest clerk in the office seemed to know by instinct. This acted, however, as a sort of stimulus, and touched his pride. He determined that he would not be humiliated in this way, and during office hours he worked as diligently as Mr. Fletcher could have desired. He had pledged himself to the trial, and he summoned all his intelligence to back his effort.

And it is true that the satisfaction of having a situation, of doing something, the relief to the previous daily anxiety and almost despair, raised his spirits. It was only when he thought of the public opinion of his little world, of some other occupation more befitting his education, of the vast change from his late life of ease and luxury to this of daily labor with a clerk’s pay, that he had hours of revolt and cursed his luck.

No, Jack’s battle was not won in a day, or a week, or a year. And before it was won he needed more help than his own somewhat irresolute will could give. It is the impression of his biographer that he would have failed in the end if he had been married to a frivolous and selfish woman.

Mr. Fletcher was known as a very strict man of business, and as little else. But he was a good judge of character, and under his notions of discipline and of industry he was a kindly man, as his clerks, who feared his sharp oversight, knew. And besides, he had made a compact with Edith, for whom he had something more than family affection, and he watched Jack’s efforts to adjust himself to the new life with sympathy. If it was an experiment for Jack, it was also an experiment for him, the result of which gave him some anxiety. The situation was not a very heroic one, but a life is often decided for good or ill by as insignificant a matter as Jack’s ability to persevere in learning about the twine and cordage trade. This was a day of trial, and the element of uncertainty in it kept both Mr. Fletcher and Jack from writing of the new arrangement to Edith, for fear that only disappointment to her would be the ultimate result. Jack’s brief notes to her were therefore, as usual, indefinite, but with the hint that he was beginning to see a way out of his embarrassment.

After the passage of a couple of weeks, during which Mr. Fletcher had been quietly studying his new clerk, he suddenly said to him, one Saturday morning, after they had looked over and estimated the orders by the day’s mail, “Jack, I think you’d better let up a little, and run down and see Edith.”

“Oh!” said Jack, a little startled by the proposal, but recovering himself; “I didn’t suppose the business could spare me.”

“I didn’t mean a vacation, but run down for over Sunday. It must be lovely there, and the change will make you as keen as a brier for business. It always does me. Stay over Monday if the weather is good. I have to be away myself the week after.” As Jack hesitated and did not reply, Mr. Fletcher continued:

“I really think you’d better go, Jack. You have hardly had a breath of fresh air this summer. There’s plenty of time to go up-town and get your grip and catch the afternoon train.”

Jack was still silent. The thought of seeing Edith created a tumult in his mind. It seemed as if he were not quite ready, not exactly settled. He had been procrastinating so long, putting off going, on one pretext or another, that he had fallen into a sort of fear of going. At first, absorbed in his speculations, enthralled by the company of Carmen and the luxurious, easy-going view of life that her society created for him; he had felt Edith and his house as an irritating restraint. Later, when the smash came, he had been still more relieved that she was out of town. And finally he had fallen into a reckless apathy, and had made himself believe that he never would see her again until some stroke of fortune should set him on his feet and restore his self-respect.

But since he had been with Fletcher & Co. his feelings had gradually undergone a change. With a regular occupation and regular hours, and in contact with the sensible mind and business routine of Mr. Fletcher, he began to have saner views of life, and to realize that Edith would approve what he was now attempting to do much more than any effort to relieve himself by speculation.

As soon as he felt himself a little more firmly established, a little more sure of himself, he would go to Edith, and confess everything, and begin life anew. This had been his mood, but he was still irresolute, and it needed some outside suggestion to push him forward to overcome his lingering reluctance to go home.

But this had come suddenly. It seemed to him at first thought that he needed time to prepare for it. Mr. Fletcher pulled out his watch. “There is a later train at four. Take that, and we will get some lunch first.”

An hour of postponement was such a relief! Why, of course he could go at four. And instantly his heart leaped up with desire.

“All right,” he said, as he rose and closed his desk. “But I think I’d better not stay for lunch. I want to get something for the boy on my way uptown.”

“Very good. Tuesday, then. My best regards to Edith.”

As Jack came down the stairway from the elevated road at Twenty-third Street he ran against a man who was hurrying up—a man in a pronounced traveling-suit, grip-sack and umbrella in hand, and in haste. It was Mavick. Recognition was instantaneous, and it was impossible for either to avoid the meeting if he had desired to do so.

“You in town!” said Mavick.

“And you!” Jack retorted.

“No, not really. I’m just going to catch the steamer. Short leave. We have all been kept by that confounded Chile business.”

“Going for the government?”

“No, not publicly. Of course shall confer with our minister in London. Any news here?”

“Yes; Henderson’s dead.” And Jack looked Mavick squarely in the face.

“Ah!” And Mavick smiled faintly, and then said, gravely: “It was an awful business. So sudden, you know, that I couldn’t do anything.” He made a movement to pass on. “I suppose there has been no—no—”

“I suppose not,” said Jack, “except that Mrs. Henderson has gone to Europe.”

“Ah!” And Mr. Mavick didn’t wait for further news, but hurried up, with a “Good-by.”

So Mavick was following Carmen to Europe. Well, why not? What an unreal world it all was, that of a few months ago! The gigantic Henderson; Jack’s own vision of a great fortune; Carmen and her house of Nero; the astute and diplomatic Mavick, with his patronizing airs! It was like a scene in a play.

He stepped into a shop and selected a toy for the boy. It was a real toy, and it was for a real boy. Jack experienced a genuine pleasure at the thought of pleasing him. Perhaps the little fellow would not know him.

And then he thought of Edith—not of Edith the mother, but of Edith the girl in the days of his wooing. And he went into Maillard’s. The pretty girl at the counter knew him. He was an old customer, and she had often filled orders for him. She had despatched many a costly box to addresses he had given her. It was in the recollection of those transactions that he said: “A box of marrons glaces, please. My wife prefers that.”

“Shall I send it?” asked the girl, when she had done it up.

“No, thanks; we are not in town.”

“Of course,” she said, beaming upon him; “nobody is yet.”

And this girl also seemed a part of the old life, with her little affectation of familiarity with its ways.

He went to his room—it seemed a very mean little room now—packed his bag, told the janitor he should be absent a few days, and hurried to the ferry and the train as if he feared that some accident would delay him. When he was seated and the train moved off, his thoughts took another turn. He was in for it now.

He began to regret that he had not delayed, to think it all out more thoroughly; perhaps it would have been better to have written.

He bought an evening journal, but he could not read it. What he read between the lines was his own life. What a miserable failure! What a mess he had made of his own affairs, and how unworthy of such a woman as Edith he had been! How indifferent he had been to her happiness in the pursuit of his own pleasure! How would she receive him? He could hardly doubt that; but she must know, she must have felt cruelly his estrangement. What if she met him with a royal forgiveness, as if he were a returned prodigal? He couldn’t stand that. If now he were only going back with his fortune recovered, with brilliant prospects to spread before her, and could come into the house in his old playful manner, with the assumed deference of the master, and say: “Well, Edith dear, the storm is over. It’s all right now. I am awfully glad to get home. Where’s the rascal of an heir?”

Instead of that, he was going with nothing, humiliated, a clerk in a twine-store. And not much of a clerk at that, he reflected, with his ready humorous recognition of the situation.

And yet he was for the first time in his life earning his living. Edith would like that. He had known all along that his idle life had been a constant grief to her. No, she would not reproach him; she never did reproach him. No doubt she would be glad that he was at work. But, oh, the humiliation of the whole thing! At one moment he was eager to see her, and the next the rattling train seemed to move too fast, and he welcomed every wayside stop that delayed his arrival. But even the Long Island trains arrive some time, and all too soon the cars slowed up at the familiar little station, and Jack got out.

“Quite a stranger in these parts, Mr. Delancy,” was the easy salutation of the station-keeper.

“Yes. I’ve been away. All right down here?”

“Right as a trivet. Hot summer, though. Calculate it’s goin’ to be a warm fall—generally is.”

It was near sunset. When the train had moved on, and its pounding on the rails became a distant roar and then was lost altogether, the country silence so impressed Jack, as he walked along the road towards the sea, that he became distinctly conscious of the sound of his own footsteps. He stopped and listened. Yes, there were other sounds—the twitter of birds in the bushes by the roadside, the hum of insects, and the faint rhythmical murmur of lapsing waves on the shore.

And now the house came in view—first the big roof, and then the latticed windows, the balconies, where there were pots of flowers, and then the long veranda with its hammocks and climbing vines. There was a pink tone in the distant water answering to the flush in the sky, and away to the west the sand-dune that made out into the Sound was a point of light.

But the house! Jack’s steps were again arrested. The level last rays of the disappearing sun flashed upon the window-panes so that they glowed like painted windows illuminated from within, with a reddish lustre, and the roofs and the brown sides of the building, painted by those great masters in color, the sun and the sea-wind, in that moment were like burnished gold. Involuntarily Jack exclaimed:

“It is the Golden House!”

He made his way through the little fore yard. No one was about. The veranda was deserted. There was Edith’s workbasket; there were the baby’s playthings. The door stood open, and as he approached it he heard singing—not singing, either, but a fitful sort of recitation, with the occasional notes of an accompaniment struck as if in absence of mind. The tune he knew, and as he passed through the first room towards the sitting-room that looked on the sea he caught a line:

“Wely, wely, but love is bonny, for a little while—when it is new.”

It was an old English ballad, the ballad of the “Cockle-shells,” that Edith used to sing often in the old days, when its note of melancholy seemed best to express her happiness. It was only that line, and the voice seemed to break, and there was silence.

He stole along and looked in. There was Edith, seated, her head bowed on her hands, at the piano.

In an instant, before she could turn to the sound of his quick footsteps, he was at her side, kneeling, his head bowed in the folds of her dress.

“Edith! I’ve been such a fool!”

She turned, slid from her seat, and was kneeling also, with her arms thrown about his neck.

“Oh, Jack! You’ve come. Thank God! Thank God!”

And presently they stood, and his arms were still around her, and she was looking up into his face, with her hands on his shoulders, and saying “You’ve come to stay.”

“Yes, dear, forever.”

XXIV

The whole landscape was golden, the sea was silver, on that October morning. It was the brilliant decline of the year. Edith stood with Jack on the veranda. He had his grip-sack in hand and was equipped for town. Both were silent in the entrancing scene.

The birds, twittering in the fruit-trees and over the vines, had the air of an orchestra, the concerts of the season over, gathering their instruments and about to depart. One could detect in the lapse of the waves along the shore the note of weariness preceding the change into the fretfulness and the tumult of tempests. In the soft ripening of the season there was peace and hope, but it was the hope of another day. The curtain was falling on this.

Was life beginning, then, or ending? If life only could change and renew itself like the seasons, with the perpetually recurring springs! But youth comes only once, and thereafter the man gathers the fruit of it, sweet or bitter.

Jack was not given to moralizing, but perhaps a subtle suggestion of this came to him in the thought that an enterprise, a new enterprise, might have seemed easier in May, when the forces of nature were with him, than in October. There was something, at least, that fell in with his mood, a mood of acquiescence in failure, in this closing season of the year, when he stood empty-handed in the harvest-time.

“Edith,” he said, as they paced down the walk which was flaming with scarlet and crimson borders, and turned to look at the peaceful brown house, “I hate to go.”

“But you are not going,” said Edith, brightly. “I feel all the time as if you were just coming back. Jack, do you know,” and she put her hand on his shoulder, “this is the sweetest home in the world now!”

“It is the only one, dear;” and Jack made the statement with a humorous sense of its truth. “Well, there’s the train, and I’m off with the other clerks.”

“Clerk, indeed!” cried Edith, putting up her face to his; “you are going to be a Merchant Prince, Jack, that is what you are going to be.”

On the train there was an atmosphere of business. Jack felt that he was not going to the New York that he knew—not to his New York, but to a city of traffic; down into the streets of commercial enterprise, not at all to the metropolis of leisure, of pleasure, to the world of clubs and drawing-rooms and elegant loiterings and the rivalries of society life. That was all ended. Jack was hurrying to catch the downtown car for the dingy office of Fletcher & Co. at an hour fixed.

It was ended, to be sure, but the struggle with Jack in his new life was not ended, his biographer knows, for months and years.

It was long before he could pass his club windows without a pang of humiliation, or lift his hat to a lady of his acquaintance in her passing carriage without a vivid feeling of separateness from his old life. For the old life—he could see that any day in the Avenue, any evening by the flaming lights—went by in its gilded chariots and entrancing toilets, the fascinating whirl of Vanity Fair crowned with roses and with ennui. Did he regret it? No doubt. Not to regret would have been to change his nature, and that were a feat impossible for his biographer to accomplish. In a way his life was gone, and to build up a new life, serene and enduring, was not the work of a day.

One thing he did not regret in the shock he had received, and that was the absence of Carmen and her world. When he thought of her he had a sense of escape. She was still abroad, and he heard from time to time that Mavick was philandering about from capital to capital in her train. Certainly he would have envied neither of them if he had been aware, as the reader is aware, of the guilty secret that drew them together and must be forever their torment. They knew each other.

But this glittering world, to attain a place in which is the object of most of the struggles and hungry competition of modern life, seemed not so real nor so desirable when he was at home with Edith, and in his gradually growing interest in nobler pursuits. They had decided to take a modest apartment in town for the winter, and almost before the lease was signed, Edith, in her mind, had transformed it into a charming home. Jack used to rally her on her enthusiasm in its simple furnishing; it reminded him, he said, of Carmen’s interest in her projected house of Nero. It was a great contrast, to be sure, to their stately house by the Park, but it was to them both what that had never been. To one who knows how life goes astray in the solicitations of the great world, there was something pathetic in Edith’s pleasure. Even to Jack it might some day come with the force of keen regret for years wasted, that it is enough to break a body’s heart to see how little a thing can make a woman happy.

It was another summer. Major Fairfax had come down with Jack to spend Sunday at the Golden House. Edith was showing the Major the view from the end of the veranda. Jack was running through the evening paper. “Hi!” he cried; “here’s news. Mavick is to have the mission to Rome, and it is rumored that the rich and accomplished Mrs. Henderson, as the wife of the minister, will make the Roman season very gay.”

“It’s too bad,” said Edith. “Nothing is said about the training-school?”

“Nothing.” “Poor Henderson!” was the Major’s comment. “It was for this that he drudged and schemed and heaped up his colossal fortune! His life must look to him like a burlesque.”

THAT FORTUNE

By

Charles Dudley Warner

I

On a summer day, long gone among the summer days that come but to go, a lad of twelve years was idly and recklessly swinging in the top of a tall hickory, the advance picket of a mountain forest. The tree was on the edge of a steep declivity of rocky pasture-land that fell rapidly down to the stately chestnuts, to the orchard, to the cornfields in the narrow valley, and the maples on the bank of the amber river, whose loud, unceasing murmur came to the lad on his aerial perch like the voice of some tradition of nature that he could not understand.

He had climbed to the topmost branch of the lithe and tough tree in order to take the full swing of this free creature in its sport with the western wind. There was something exhilarating in this elemental battle of the forces that urge and the forces that resist, and the harder the wind blew, and the wider circles he took in the free air, the more stirred the boy was in the spring of his life. Nature was taking him by the hand, and it might be that in that moment ambition was born to achieve for himself, to conquer.

If you had asked him why he was there, he would very likely have said, “To see the world.” It was a world worth seeing. The prospect might be limited to a dull eye, but not to this lad, who loved to climb this height, in order to be with himself and indulge the dreams of youth. Any pretense would suffice for taking this hour of freedom: to hunt for the spicy checker-berries and the pungent sassafras; to aggravate the woodchucks, who made their homes in mysterious passages in this gravelly hillside; to get a nosegay of columbine for the girl who spelled against him in school and was his gentle comrade morning and evening along the river road where grew the sweet-flag and the snap-dragon and the barberry bush; to make friends with the elegant gray squirrel and the lively red squirrel and the comical chipmunk, who were not much afraid of this unarmed naturalist. They may have recognized their kinship to him, for he could climb like any squirrel, and not one of them could have clung more securely to this bough where he was swinging, rejoicing in the strength of his lithe, compact little body. When he shouted in pure enjoyment of life, they chattered in reply, and eyed him with a primeval curiosity that had no fear in it. This lad in short trousers, torn shirt, and a frayed straw hat above his mobile and cheerful face, might be only another sort of animal, a lover like themselves of the beech-nut and the hickory-nut.

It was a gay world up here among the tossing branches. Across the river, on the first terrace of the hill, were weather-beaten farmhouses, amid apple orchards and cornfields. Above these rose the wooded dome of Mount Peak, a thousand feet above the river, and beyond that to the left the road wound up, through the scriptural land of Bozrah, to high and lonesome towns on a plateau stretching to unknown regions in the south. There was no bar to the imagination in that direction. What a gracious valley, what graceful slopes, what a mass of color bathing this lovely summer landscape! Down from the west, through hills that crowded on either side to divert it from its course, ran the sparkling Deerfield, from among the springs and trout streams of the Hoosac, merrily going on to the great Connecticut. Along the stream was the ancient highway, or lowway, where in days before the railway came the stage-coach and the big transport-wagons used to sway and rattle along on their adventurous voyage from the gate of the Sea at Boston to the gate of the West at Albany.

Below, where the river spread wide among the rocks in shallows, or eddies in deep, dark pools, was the ancient, long, covered, wooden bridge, striding diagonally from rock to rock on stone columns, a dusky tunnel through the air, a passage of gloom flecked with glints of sunlight, that struggled in crosscurrents through the interstices of the boards, and set dancing the motes and the dust in a golden haze, a stuffy passage with odors a century old—who does not know the pungent smell of an old bridge?—a structure that groaned in all its big timbers when a wagon invaded it. And then below the bridge the lad could see the historic meadow, which was a cornfield in the eighteenth century, where Captain Moses Rice and Phineas Arms came suddenly one summer day to the end of their planting and hoeing. The house at the foot of the hill where the boy was cultivating his imagination had been built by Captain Rice, and in the family burying-ground in the orchard above it lay the body of this mighty militia-man, and beside him that of Phineas Arms, and on the headstone of each the legend familiar at that period of our national life, “Killed by the Indians.” Happy Phineas Arms, at the age of seventeen to exchange in a moment the tedium of the cornfield for immortality.

There was a tradition that years after, when the Indians had disappeared through a gradual process of intoxication and pauperism, a red man had been seen skulking along the brow of this very hill and peering down through the bushes where the boy was now perched on a tree, shaking his fist at the hated civilization, and vengefully, some said pathetically, looking down into this valley where his race had been so happy in the natural pursuits of fishing, hunting, and war. On the opposite side of the river was still to be traced an Indian trail, running to the western mountains, which the boy intended some time to follow; for this highway of warlike forays, of messengers of defiance, along which white maidens had been led captive to Canada, appealed greatly to his imagination.

The boy lived in these traditions quite as much as in those of the Revolutionary War into which they invariably glided in his perspective of history, the redskins and the redcoats being both enemies of his ancestors. There was the grave of the envied Phineas Arms—that ancient boy not much older than he—and there were hanging in the kitchen the musket and powder-horn that his great-grandfather had carried at Bunker Hill, and did he not know by heart the story of his great-grandmother, who used to tell his father that she heard when she was a slip of a girl in Plymouth the cannonading on that awful day when Gage met his victorious defeat?

In fact, according to his history-book there had been little but wars in this peaceful nation: the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the incessant frontier wars with the Indians, the Kansas War, the Mormon War, the War for the Union. The echoes of the latter had not yet died away. What a career he might have had if he had not been born so late in the world! Swinging in this tree-top, with a vivid consciousness of life, of his own capacity for action, it seemed a pity that he could not follow the drum and the flag into such contests as he read about so eagerly.

And yet this was only a corner of the boy’s imagination. He had many worlds and he lived in each by turn. There was the world of the Old Testament, of David and Samson, and of those dim figures in the dawn of history, called the Patriarchs. There was the world of Julius Caesar and the Latin grammar, though this was scarcely as real to him as the Old Testament, which was brought to his notice every Sunday as a necessity of his life, while Caesar and AEneas and the fourth declension were made to be a task, for some mysterious reason, a part of his education. He had not been told that they were really a part of the other world which occupied his mind so much of the time, the world of the Arabian Nights and Robinson Crusoe, and Coleridge and Shelley and Longfellow, and Washington Irving and Scott and Thackeray, and Pope’s Iliad and Plutarch’s Lives. That this was a living world to the boy was scarcely his fault, for it must be confessed that those were very antiquated book-shelves in the old farmhouse to which he had access, and the news had not been apprehended in this remote valley that the classics of literature were all as good as dead and buried, and that the human mind had not really created anything worth modern notice before about the middle of the nineteenth century. It was not exactly an ignorant valley, for the daily newspapers were there, and the monthly magazine, and the fashion-plate of Paris, and the illuminating sunshine of new science, and enough of the uneasy throb of modern life. Yet somehow the books that were still books had not been sent to the garret, to make room for the illustrated papers and the profound physiological studies of sin and suffering that were produced by touching a scientific button. No, the boy was conscious in a way of the mighty pulsation of American life, and he had also a dim notion that his dreams in his various worlds would come to a brilliant fulfillment when he was big enough to go out and win a name and fame. But somehow the old books, and the family life, and the sedate ways of the community he knew, had given him a fundamental and not unarmed faith in the things that were and had been.

Every Sunday the preacher denounced the glitter and frivolity and corruption of what he called Society, until the boy longed to see this splendid panorama of cities and hasting populations, the seekers of pleasure and money and fame, this gay world which was as fascinating as it was wicked. The preacher said the world was wicked and vain. It did not seem so to the boy this summer day, not at least the world he knew. Of course the boy had no experience. He had never heard of Juvenal nor of Max Nordau. He had no philosophy of life. He did not even know that when he became very old the world would seem to him good or bad according to the degree in which he had become a good or a bad man.

In fact, he was not thinking much about being good or being bad, but of trying his powers in a world which seemed to offer to him infinite opportunities. His name—Philip Burnett—with which the world, at least the American world, is now tolerably familiar, and which he liked to write with ornamental flourishes on the fly-leaves of his schoolbooks, did not mean much to him, for he had never seen it in print, nor been confronted with it as something apart from himself. But the Philip that he was he felt sure would do something in the world. What that something should be varied from day to day according to the book, the poem, the history or biography that he was last reading. It would not be difficult to write a poem like “Thanatopsis” if he took time enough, building up a line a day. And yet it would be better to be a soldier, a man who could use the sword as well as the pen, a poet in uniform. This was a pleasing imagination. Surely his aunt and his cousins in the farmhouse would have more respect for him if he wore a uniform, and treat him with more consideration, and perhaps they would be very anxious about him when he was away in battles, and very proud of him when he came home between battles, and went quite modestly with the family into the village church, and felt rather than saw the slight flutter in the pews as he walked down the aisle, and knew that the young ladies, the girl comrades of the district school, were watching him from the organ gallery, curious to see Phil, who had gone into the army. Perhaps the preacher would have a sermon against war, and the preacher should see how soldierlike he would take this attack on him. Alas! is such vanity at the bottom of even a reasonable ambition? Perhaps his town would be proud of him if he were a lawyer, a Representative in Congress, come back to deliver the annual oration at the Agricultural Fair. He could see the audience of familiar faces, and hear the applause at his witty satires and his praise of the nobility of the farmer’s life, and it would be sweet indeed to have the country people grasp him by the hand and call him Phil, just as they used to before he was famous. What he would say, he was not thinking of, but the position he would occupy before the audience. There were no misgivings in any of these dreams of youth.

II

The musings of this dreamer in a tree-top were interrupted by the peremptory notes of a tin horn from the farmhouse below. The boy recognized this not only as a signal of declining day and the withdrawal of the sun behind the mountains, but as a personal and urgent notification to him that a certain amount of disenchanting drudgery called chores lay between him and supper and the lamp-illumined pages of The Last of the Mohicans. It was difficult, even in his own estimation, to continue to be a hero at the summons of a tin horn—a silver clarion and castle walls would have been so different—and Phil slid swiftly down from his perch, envying the squirrels who were under no such bondage of duty.

Recalled to the world that now is, the lad hastily gathered a bouquet of columbine and a bunch of the tender leaves and the red berries of the wintergreen, called to “Turk,” who had been all these hours watching a woodchuck hole, and ran down the hill by leaps and circuits as fast as his little legs could carry him, and, with every appearance of a lad who puts duty before pleasure, arrived breathless at the kitchen door, where Alice stood waiting for him. Alice, the somewhat feeble performer on the horn, who had been watching for the boy with her hand shading her eyes, called out upon his approach:

“Why, Phil, what in the world—”

“Oh, Alice!” cried the boy, eagerly, having in a moment changed in his mind the destination of the flowers; “I’ve found a place where the checker-berries are thick as spatter.” And Phil put the flowers and the berries in his cousin’s hand. Alice looked very much pleased with this simple tribute, but, as she admired it, unfortunately asked—women always ask such questions:

“And you picked them for me?”

This was a cruel dilemma. Phil was more devoted to his sweet cousin than to any one else in the world, and he didn’t want to hurt her feelings, and he hated to tell a lie. So he only looked a lie, out of his affectionate, truthful eyes, and said:

“I love to bring you flowers. Has uncle come home yet?”

“Yes, long ago. He called and looked all around for you to unharness the horse, and he wanted you to go an errand over the river to Gibson’s. I guess he was put out.”

“Did he say anything?”

“He asked if you had weeded the beets. And he said that you were the master boy to dream and moon around he ever saw.” And she added, with a confidential and mischievous smile: “I think you’d better brought a switch along; it would save time.”

Phil had a great respect for his uncle Maitland, but he feared him almost more than he feared the remote God of Abraham and Isaac. Mr. Maitland was not only the most prosperous man in all that region, but the man of the finest appearance, and a bearing that was equity itself. He was the first selectman of the town, and a deacon in the church, and however much he prized mercy in the next world he did not intend to have that quality interfere with justice in this world. Phil knew indeed that he was a man of God, that fact was impressed upon him at least twice a day, but he sometimes used to think it must be a severe God to have that sort of man. And he didn’t like the curt way he pronounced the holy name—he might as well have called Job “job.”

Alice was as unlike her father, except in certain race qualities of integrity and commonsense, as if she were of different blood. She was the youngest of five maiden sisters, and had arrived at the mature age of eighteen. Slender in figure, with a grace that was half shyness, soft brown hair, gray eyes that changed color and could as easily be sad as merry, a face marked with a moving dimple that every one said was lovely, retiring in manner and yet not lacking spirit nor a sly wit of her own. Now and then, yes, very often, out of some paradise, no doubt, strays into New England conditions of reticence and self-denial such a sweet spirit, to diffuse a breath of heaven in its atmosphere, and to wither like a rose ungathered. These are the New England nuns, not taking any vows, not self-consciously virtuous, apparently untouched by the vanities of the world. Marriage? It is not in any girl’s nature not to think of that, not to be in a flutter of pleasure or apprehension at the attentions of the other sex. Who has been able truly to read the thoughts of a shrinking maiden in the passing days of her youth and beauty? In this harmonious and unselfish household, each with decided individual character, no one ever intruded upon the inner life of the other. No confidences were given in the deep matters of the heart, no sign except a blush over a sly allusion to some one who had been “attentive.” If you had stolen a look into the workbasket or the secret bureau-drawer, you might have found a treasured note, a bit of ribbon, a rosebud, some token of tenderness or of friendship that was growing old with the priestess who cherished it. Did they not love flowers, and pets, and had they not a passion for children? Were there not moonlight evenings when they sat silent and musing on the stone steps, watching the shadows and the dancing gleams on the swift river, when the air was fragrant with the pink and the lilac? Not melancholy this, nor poignantly sad, but having in it nevertheless something of the pathos of life unfulfilled. And was there not sometimes, not yet habitually, coming upon these faces, faces plain and faces attractive, the shade of renunciation?

Phil loved Alice devotedly. She was his confidante, his defender, but he feared more the disapproval of her sweet eyes when he had done wrong than the threatened punishment of his uncle.

“I only meant to be gone just a little while,” Phil went on to say.

“And you were away the whole afternoon. It is a pity the days are so short. And you don’t know what you lost.”

“No great, I guess.”

“Celia and her mother were here. They stayed all the afternoon.”

“Celia Howard? Did she wonder where I was?”

“I don’t know. She didn’t say anything about it. What a dear little thing she is!”

“And she can say pretty cutting things.”

“Oh, can she? Perhaps you’d better run down to the village before dark and take her these flowers.”

“I’m not going. I’d rather you should have the flowers.” And Phil spoke the truth this time.

Celia, who was altogether too young to occupy seriously the mind of a lad of twelve, had nevertheless gained an ascendancy over him because of her willful, perverse, and sometimes scornful ways, and because she was different from the other girls of the school. She had read many more books than Phil, for she had access to a library, and she could tell him much of a world that he only heard of through books and newspapers, which latter he had no habit of reading. He liked, therefore, to be with Celia, not withstanding her little airs of superiority, and if she patronized him, as she certainly did, probably the simple-minded young gentleman, who was unconsciously bred in the belief that he and his own kin had no superiors anywhere, never noticed it. To be sure they quarreled a good deal, but truth to say Phil was never more fascinated with the little witch, whom he felt himself strong enough to protect, than when she showed a pretty temper. He rather liked to be ordered about by the little tyrant. And sometimes he wished that Murad Ault, the big boy of the school, would be rude to the small damsel, so that he could show her how a knight would act under such circumstances. Murad Ault stood to Phil for the satanic element in his peaceful world. He was not only big and strong of limb and broad of chest, but he was very swarthy, and had closely curled black hair. He feared nothing, not even the teacher, and was always doing some dare-devil thing to frighten the children. And because he was dark, morose, and made no friends, and wished none, but went solitary his own dark way, Phil fancied that he must have Spanish blood in his veins, and would no doubt grow up to be a pirate. No other boy in the winter could skate like Murad Ault, with such strength and grace and recklessness—thin ice and thick ice were all one to him, but he skated along, dashing in and out, and sweeping away up and down the river in a whirl of vigor and daring, like a black marauder. Yet he was best and most awesome in the swimming pond in summer—though it was believed that he dared go in in the bitter winter, either by breaking the ice or through an air-hole, and there was a story that he had ventured under the ice as fearless as a cold fish. No one could dive from such a height as he, or stay so long under water; he liked to stay under long enough to scare the spectators, and then appear at a distance, thrashing about in the water as if he were rescuing himself from drowning, sputtering out at the same time the most diabolical noises—curses, no doubt, for he had been heard to swear. But as he skated alone he swam alone, appearing and disappearing at the swimming-place silently, with never a salutation to any one. And he was as skillful a fisher as he was a swimmer. No one knew much about him. He lived with his mother in a little cabin up among the hills, that had about it scant patches of potatoes and corn and beans, a garden fenced in by stumproots, as ill-cared for as the shanty. Where they came from no one knew. How they lived was a matter of conjecture, though the mother gathered herbs and berries and bartered them at the village store, and Murad occasionally took a hand in some neighbor’s hay-field, or got a job of chopping wood in the winter. The mother was old and small and withered, and they said evil-eyed. Probably she was no more evil-eyed than any old woman who had such a hard struggle for existence as she had. An old widow with an only son who looked like a Spaniard and acted like an imp! Here was another sort of exotic in the New England life.

Celia had been brought to Rivervale by her mother about a year before this time, and the two occupied a neat little cottage in the village, distinguished only by its neatness and a plot of syringas, and pinks, and marigolds, and roses, and bachelor’s-buttons, and boxes of the tough little exotics, called “hen-and-chickens,” in the door-yard, and a vigorous fragrant honeysuckle over the front porch. She only dimly remembered her father, who had been a merchant in a small way in the city, and dying left to his widow and only child a very moderate fortune. The girl showed early an active and ingenious mind, and an equal love for books and for having her own way; but she was delicate, and Mrs. Howard wisely judged that a few years in a country village would improve her health and broaden her view of life beyond that of cockney provincialism. For, though Mrs. Howard had more refinement than strength of mind, and passed generally for a sweet and inoffensive little woman, she did not lack a certain true perception of values, due doubtless to the fact that she had been a New England girl, and, before her marriage and emigration to the great city, had passed her life among unexciting realities, and among people who had leisure to think out things in a slow way. But the girl’s energy and self-confidence had no doubt been acquired from her father, who was cut off in mid-career of his struggle for place in the metropolis, or from some remote ancestor. Before she was eleven years old her mother had listened with some wonder and more apprehension to the eager forecast of what this child intended to do when she became a woman, and already shrank from a vision of Celia on a public platform, or the leader of some metempsychosis club. Through her affections only was the child manageable, but in opposition to her spirit her mother was practically powerless. Indeed, this little sprout of the New Age always spoke of her to Philip and to the Maitlands as “little mother.”

The epithet seemed peculiarly tender to Philip, who had lost his father before he was six years old, and he was more attracted to the timid and gentle little widow than to his equable but more robust Aunt Eusebia, Mrs. Maitland, his father’s elder sister, whom Philip fancied not a bit like his father except in sincerity, a quality common to the Maitlands and Burnetts. Yet there was a family likeness between his aunt and a portrait of his father, painted by a Boston artist of some celebrity, which his mother, who survived her husband only three years, had saved for her boy. His father was a farmer, but a man of considerable cultivation, though not college-bred—his last request on his death-bed was that Phil should be sent to college—a man who made experiments in improving agriculture and the breed of cattle and horses, read papers now and then on topics of social and political reform, and was the only farmer in all the hill towns who had what might be called a library.

It was all scattered at the time of the winding up of the farm estate, and the only jetsam that Philip inherited out of it was an annotated copy of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Young’s Travels in France, a copy of The Newcomes, and the first American edition of Childe Harold. Probably these odd volumes had not been considered worth any considerable bid at the auction. From his mother, who was fond of books, and had on more than one occasion, of the failure of teachers, taught in the village school in her native town before her marriage, Philip inherited his love of poetry, and he well remembered how she used to try to inspire him with patriotism by reading the orations of Daniel Webster (she was very fond of orations), and telling him war stories about Grant and Sherman and Sheridan and Farragut and Lincoln. He distinctly remembered also standing at her knees and trying, at intervals, to commit to memory the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. He had learned it all since, because he thought it would please his mother, and because there was something in it that appealed to his coming sense of the mystery of life. When he repeated it to Celia, who had never heard of it, and remarked that it was all made up, and that she never tried to learn a long thing like that that wasn’t so, Philip could see that her respect for him increased a little. He did not know that the child got it out of the library the next day and never rested till she knew it by heart. Philip could repeat also the books of the Bible in order, just as glibly as the multiplication-table, and the little minx, who could not brook that a country boy should be superior to her in anything, had surprised her mother by rattling them all off to her one Sunday evening, just as if she had been born in New England instead of in New York. As to the other fine things his mother read him, out of Ruskin and the like; Philip chiefly remembered what a pretty glow there was in his mother’s face when she read them, and that recollection was a valuable part of the boy’s education.

Another valuable part of his education was the gracious influence in his aunt’s household, the spirit of candor, of affection, and the sane commonsense with which life was regarded, the simplicity of its faith and the patience with which trials were borne. The lessons he learned in it had more practical influence in his life than all the books he read. Nor were his opportunities for the study of character so meagre as the limit of one family would imply. As often happens in New England households, individualities were very marked, and from his stern uncle and his placid aunt down to the sweet and nimble-witted Alice, the family had developed traits and even eccentricities enough to make it a sort of microcosm of life. There, for instance, was Patience, the maiden aunt, his father’s sister, the news-monger of the fireside, whose powers of ratiocination first gave Philip the Greek idea and method of reasoning to a point and arriving at truth by the process of exclusion. It did not excite his wonder at the time, but afterwards it appeared to him as one of the New England eccentricities of which the novelists make so much. Patience was a home-keeping body and rarely left the premises except to go to church on Sunday, although her cheerfulness and social helpfulness were tinged by nothing morbid. The story was—Philip learned it long afterwards—that in her very young and frisky days Patience had one evening remained out at some merry-making very late, and in fact had been escorted home in the moonlight by a young gentleman when the tall, awful-faced clock, whose face her mother was watching, was on the dreadful stroke of eleven. For this delinquency her mother had reproved her, the girl thought unreasonably, and she had quickly replied, “Mother, I will never go out again.” And she never did. It was in fact a renunciation of the world, made apparently without rage, and adhered to with cheerful obstinacy.

But although for many years Patience rarely left her home, until the habit of seclusion had become as fixed as that of a nun who had taken the vows, no one knew so well as she the news and gossip of the neighborhood, and her power of learning or divining it seemed to increase with her years. She had a habit of sitting, when her household duties permitted, at a front window, which commanded a long view of the river road, and gathering the news by a process peculiar to herself. From this peep-hole she studied the character and destination of all the passers-by that came within range of her vision, and made her comments and deductions, partly to herself, but for the benefit of those who might be listening.

“Why, there goes Thomas Henry,” she would say (she always called people by their first and middle names). “Now, wherever can he be going this morning in the very midst of getting in his hay? He can’t be going to the Browns’ for vegetables, for they set great store by their own raising this year; and they don’t get their provisions up this way either, because Mary Ellen quarreled with Simmons’s people last year. No!” she would exclaim, rising to a climax of certainty on this point, “I’ll be bound he is not going after anything in the eating line!”

Meantime Thomas Henry’s wagon would be disappearing slowly up the sandy road, giving Patience a chance to get all she could out of it, by eliminating all the errands Thomas Henry could not possibly be going to do in order to arrive at the one he must certainly be bound on.

“They do say he’s courting Eliza Merritt,” she continued, “but Eliza never was a girl to make any man leave his haying. No, he’s never going to see Eliza, and if it isn’t provisions or love it’s nothing short of sickness. Now, whoever is sick down there? It can’t be Mary Ellen, because she takes after her father’s family and they are all hearty. It must be Mary Ellen’s little girls, and the measles are going the rounds. It must be they’ve all got the measles.”

If the listeners suggested that possibly one of the little girls might have escaped, the suggestion was decisively put aside.

“No; if one of them had been well, Mary Ellen would have sent her for the doctor.”

Presently Thomas Henry’s cart was heard rumbling back, and sure enough he was returning with the doctor, and Patience hailed him from the gate and demanded news of Mary Ellen.

“Why, all her little girls have the measles,” replied Thomas Henry, “and I had to leave my haying to fetch the doctor.”

“I want to know,” said Patience.

Being the eldest born, Patience had appropriated to herself two rooms in the rambling old farmhouse before her brother’s marriage, from which later comers had never dislodged her, and with that innate respect for the rights and peculiarities of others which was common in the household, she was left to express her secluded life in her own way. As the habit of retirement grew upon her she created a world of her own, almost as curious and more individually striking than the museum of Cluny. There was not a square foot in her tiny apartment that did not exhibit her handiwork. She was very fond of reading, and had a passion for the little prints and engravings of “foreign views,” which she wove into her realm of natural history. There was no flower or leaf or fruit that she had seen that she could not imitate exactly in wax or paper. All over the walls hung the little prints and engravings, framed in wreaths of moss and artificial flowers, or in elaborate square frames made of pasteboard. The pasteboard was cut out to fit the picture, and the margins, daubed with paste, were then strewn with seeds of corn and acorns and hazelnuts, and then the whole was gilded so that the effect was almost as rich as it was novel. All about the rooms, in nooks and on tables, stood baskets and dishes of fruit-apples and plums and peaches and grapes-set in proper foliage of most natural appearance, like enough to deceive a bird or the Sunday-school scholars, when on rare occasions they were admitted into this holy of holies. Out of boxes, apparently filled with earth in the corners of the rooms, grew what seemed to be vines trained to run all about the cornices and to festoon the pictures, but which were really strings, colored in imitation of the real vine, and spreading out into paper foliage. To complete the naturalistic character of these everlasting vines, which no scale-bugs could assail, there were bunches of wonderful grapes depending here and there to excite the cupidity of both bird and child. There was no cruelty in the nature of Patience, and she made prisoners of neither birds nor squirrels, but cunning cages here and there held most lifelike counterfeits of their willing captives. There was nothing in the room that was alive, except the dainty owner, but it seemed to be a museum of natural history. The rugs on the floor were of her own devising and sewing together, and rivaled in color and ingenuity those of Bokhara.

But Patience was a student of the heavens as well as of the earth, and it was upon the ceiling that her imagination expanded. There one could see in their order the constellations of the heavens, represented by paper-gilt stars, of all magnitudes, most wonderful to behold. This part of her decorations was the most difficult of all. The constellations were not made from any geography of the heavens, but from actual nightly observation of the positions of the heavenly bodies. Patience confessed that the getting exactly right of the Great Dipper had caused her most trouble. On the night that was constructed she sat up till three o’clock in the morning, going out and studying it and coming in and putting up one star at a time. How could she reach the high ceiling? Oh, she took a bean-pole, stuck the gilt star on the end of it, having paste on the reverse side, and fixed it in its place. That was easy, only it was difficult to remember when she came into the house the correct positions of the stars in the heavens. What the astronomer and the botanist and the naturalist would have said of this little kingdom is unknown, but Patience herself lived among the glories of the heavens and the beauties of the earth which she had created. Probably she may have had a humorous conception of this, for she was not lacking in a sense of humor. The stone step that led to her private door she had skillfully painted with faint brown spots, so that when visitors made their exit from this part of the house they would say, “Why, it rains!” but Patience would laugh and say, “I guess it is over by now.”

III

“I’m not going to follow you about any more through the brush and brambles, Phil Burnett,” and Celia, emerging from the thicket into a clearing, flung herself down on a knoll under a beech-tree.

Celia was cross. They were out for a Saturday holiday on the hillside, where Phil said there were oceans of raspberries and blueberries, beginning to get ripe, and where you could hear the partridges drumming in the woods, and see the squirrels.

“Why, I’m not a bit tired,” said Phil; “a boy wouldn’t be.” And he threw himself down on the green moss, with his heels in the air, much more intent on the chatter of a gray squirrel in the tree above him than on the complaints of his comrade.

“Why don’t you go with a boy, then?” asked Celia, in a tone intended to be severe and dignified.

“A boy isn’t so nice,” said Philip, with the air of stating a general proposition, but not looking at her.

“Oh,” said Celia, only half appeased, “I quite agree with you.” And she pulled down some beech leaves from a low, hanging limb and began to plait a wreath.

“Who are you making that for?” asked Philip, who began to be aware that a cloud had come over his holiday sky.

“Nobody in particular; it’s just a wreath.” And then there was silence, till Philip made another attempt.

“Celia, I don’t mind staying here if you are tired. Tell me something about New York City. I wish we were there.”

“Much you know about it,” said Celia, but with some relaxation of her severity, for as she looked at the boy in his country clothes and glanced at her own old frock and abraded shoes, she thought what a funny appearance the pair would make on a fashionable city street.

“Would you rather be there?” asked Philip. “I thought you liked living here.”

“Would I rather? What a question! Everybody would. The country is a good place to go to when you are tired, as mamma is. But the city! The big fine houses, and the people all going about in a hurry; the streets all lighted up at night, so that you can see miles and miles of lights; and the horses and carriages, and the lovely dresses, and the churches full of nice people, and such beautiful music! And once mamma took me to the theatre. Oh, Phil, you ought to see a play, and the actors, all be-a-u-ti-fully dressed, and talking just like a party in a house, and dancing, and being funny, and some of it so sad as to make you cry, and some of it so droll that you had to laugh—just such a world as you read of in books and in poetry. I was so excited that I saw the stage all night and could hardly sleep.” The girl paused and looked away to the river as if she saw it all again, and then added in a burst of confidence:

“Do you know, I mean to be an actress some day, when mamma will let me.”

“Play-actors are wicked,” said Phil, in a tone of decision; “our minister says so, and my uncle says so.”

“Fudge!” returned Celia. “Much they know about it. Did Alice say so?”

“I never asked her, but she said once that she supposed it was wrong, but she would like to see a play.”

“There, everybody would. Mamma says the people from the country go to the theatre always, a good deal more than the people in the city go. I should like to see your aunt Patience in a theatre and hear what she said about it. She’s an actress if ever there was one.”

Philip opened his eyes in protest.

“Mamma says it is as good as a play to hear her go on about people, and what they are like, and what they are going to do, and then her little rooms are just like a scene on a stage. If they were in New York everybody would go to see them and to hear her talk.”

This was such a new view of his home life to Philip that he could neither combat it nor assent to it, further than to say, that his aunt was just like everybody else, though she did have some peculiar ways.

“Well, she acts,” Celia insisted, “and most people act. Our minister acts all the time, mamma says.” Celia had plenty of opinions of her own, but when she ventured a startling statement she had the habit of going under the shelter of “little mother,” whose casual and unconsidered remarks the girl turned to her own uses. Perhaps she would not have understood that her mother merely meant that the minister’s sacerdotal character was not exactly his own character. Just as Philip noticed without being able to explain it that his uncle was one sort of a man in his religious exercises and observances and another sort of man in his dealings with him. Children often have recondite thoughts that do not get expression until their minds are more mature; they even accept contradictory facts in their experience. There was one of the deacons who was as kind as possible, and Philip believed was a good and pious man, who had the reputation of being sharp and even tricky in a horse-trade. And Philip used to think how lucky it was for him that he had been converted and was saved!

“Are you going to stay here always?” asked Philip, pursuing his own train of thought about the city.

“Here? I should think not. If I were a boy I wouldn’t stay here, I can tell you. What are you going to do, Phil, what are you going to be?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Philip, turning over on his back and looking up into the blue world through the leaves; “go to college, I suppose.” Children are even more reticent than adults about revealing their inner lives, and Philip would not, even to Celia, have confessed the splendid dreams about his career that came to him that day in the hickory-tree, and that occupied him a great deal.

“Of course,” said this wise child, “but that’s nothing. I mean, what are you going to do? My cousin Jim has been all through college, and he doesn’t do a thing except wear nice clothes and hang around and talk. He says I’m a little chatter-box. I hate the sight of him.”

“If he doesn’t like you, then I don’t like him,” said Philip, as if he were making a general and not a personal assertion. “Oh, I should like to travel.”

“So should I, and see things and find things. Jim says he’s going to be an explorer. He never will. He wouldn’t find anything. He twits me, and wants to know what is the good of my reading about Africa and such things. Phil, don’t you love to read about Africa, and the desert, and the lions and the snakes, and bananas growing, and palm-trees, and the queerest black men and women, real dwarfs some of them? I just love it.”

“So do I,” said Philip, “as far as I have read. Alice says it’s awful dangerous—fevers and wild beasts and savages and all that. But I shouldn’t mind.”

“Of course you wouldn’t. But it costs like everything to go to Africa, or anywhere.”

“I’d make a book about it, and give lectures, and make lots of money.”

“I guess,” said Celia, reflecting upon this proposition, “I’d be an engineer or a railroad man, or something like that, and make a heap of money, and then I could go anywhere I liked. I just hate to be poor. There!”

“Is Jim poor?”

“No; he can do what he pleases. I asked him, then, why he didn’t go to Africa, and he wanted to know what was the good of finding Livingstone, anyway. I’ll bet Murad Ault would go to Africa.”

“I wish he would,” said Philip; and then, having moved so that he could see Celia’s face, “Do you like Murad Ault?”

“No,” replied Celia, promptly; “he’s horrid, but he isn’t afraid of anything.”

“Well, I don’t care,” said Philip, who was nettled by this implication. And Celia, who had shown her power of irritating, took another tack.

“You don’t think I’d be seen going around with him? Aren’t we having a good time up here?”

“Bully!” replied Philip. And not seeing the way to expand this topic any further, he suddenly said:

“Celia, the next time I go on our hill I’ll get you lots of sassafras.”

“Oh, I love sassafras, and sweet-flag!”

“We can get that on the way home. I know a place.” And then there was a pause. “Celia, you didn’t tell me what you are going to do when you grow up.”

“Go to college.”

“You? Why, girls do, don’t they? I never thought of that.”

“Of course they do. I don’t know whether I’ll write or be a doctor. I know one thing—I won’t teach school. It’s the hatefulest thing there is! It’s nice to be a doctor and have your own horse, and go round like a man. If it wasn’t for seeing so many sick people! I guess I’ll write stories and things.”

“So would I,” Philip confessed, “if I knew any.”

“Why, you make ‘em up. Mamma says they are all made up. I can make ‘em in my head any time when I’m alone.”

“I don’t know,” Philip said, reflectively, “but I could make up a story about Murad Ault, and how he got to be a pirate and got in jail and was hanged.”

“Oh, that wouldn’t be a real story. You have got to have different people in it, and have ‘em talk, just as they do in books; and somebody is in love and somebody dies, and the like of that.”

“Well, there are such stories in The Pirate’s Own Book, and it’s awful interesting.”

“I’d be ashamed, Philip Burnett, to read such a cruel thing, all about robbers and murders.”

“I didn’t read it through; Alice said she was going to burn it up. I shouldn’t wonder if she did.”

“Boys make me tired!” exclaimed this little piece of presumption; and this attitude of superiority exasperated Philip more than anything else his mentor had said or done, and he asserted his years of seniority by jumping up and saying, decidedly, “It’s time to go home. Shall I carry your wreath?”

“No, I thank you!” replied Celia, with frigid politeness.

“Down in the meadow,” said Philip, making one more effort at conciliation, “we can get some tigerlilies, and weave them in and make a beautiful wreath for your mother.”

“She doesn’t like things fussed up,” was the gracious reply. And then the children trudged along homeward, each with a distinct sense of injury.

IV

Traits that make a child disagreeable are apt to be perpetuated in the adult. The bumptious, impudent, selfish, “hateful” boy may become a man of force, of learning, of decided capacity, even of polish and good manners, and score success, so that those who know him say how remarkable it is that such a “knurly” lad should have turned out so well. But some exigency in his career, it may be extraordinary prosperity or bitter defeat, may at any moment reveal the radical traits of the boy, the original ignoble nature. The world says that it is a “throwing back”; it is probably only a persistence of the original meanness under all the overlaid cultivation and restraint.

Without bothering itself about the recondite problems of heredity or the influence of environment, the world wisely makes great account of “stock.” The peasant nature, which may be a very different thing from the peasant condition, persists, and shows itself in business affairs, in literature, even in the artist. No marriage is wisely contracted without consideration of “stock.” The admirable qualities which make a union one of mutual respect and enduring affection—the generosities, the magnanimities, the courage of soul, the crystalline truthfulness, the endurance of ill fortune and of prosperity—are commonly the persistence of the character of the stock.

We can get on with surface weaknesses and eccentricities, and even disagreeable peculiarities, if the substratum of character is sound. There is no woman or man so difficult—to get on with, whatever his or her graces or accomplishments, as the one “you don’t know where to find,” as the phrase is. Indeed, it has come to pass that the highest and final eulogy ever given to a man, either in public or private life, is that he is one “you can tie to.” And when you find a woman of that sort you do not need to explain to the cynical the wisdom of the Creator in making the most attractive and fascinating sex.

The traits, good and bad, persist; they may be veneered or restrained, they are seldom eradicated. All the traits that made the great Napoleon worshiped, hated, and feared existed in the little Bonaparte, as perfectly as the pea-pod in the flower. The whole of the First Empire was smirched with Corsican vulgarity. The world always reckons with these radical influences that go to make up a family. One of the first questions asked by an old politician, who knew his world thoroughly, about any man becoming prominent, when there was a discussion of his probable action, was, “Whom did he marry?”

There are exceptions to this general rule, and they are always noticeable when they occur—this deviation from the traits of the earliest years—and offer material fox some of the subtlest and most interesting studies of the novelist.

It was impossible for those who met Philip Burnett after he had left college, and taken his degree in the law-school, and spent a year, more or less studiously, in Europe, to really know him if they had not known the dreaming boy in his early home, with all the limitations as well as the vitalizing influences of his start in life. And on the contrary, the error of the neighbors of a lad in forecasting his career comes from the fact that they do not know him. The verdict about Philip would probably have been that he was a very nice sort of a boy, but that he would never “set the North River on fire.” There was a headstrong, selfish, pushing sort of boy, one of Philip’s older schoolmates, who had become one of the foremost merchants and operators in New York, and was already talked of for mayor. This success was the sort that fulfilled the rural idea of getting on in the world, whereas Philip’s accomplishments, seen through the veneer of conceit which they had occasioned him to take on, did not commend themselves as anything worth while. Accomplishments rarely do unless they are translated into visible position or into the currency of the realm. How else can they be judged? Does not the great public involuntarily respect the author rather for the sale of his books than for the books themselves?

The period of Philip’s novitiate—those most important years from his acquaintance with Celia Howard to the attainment of his professional degree—was most interesting to him, but the story of it would not detain the reader of exciting fiction. He had elected to use his little patrimony in making himself instead of in making money—if merely following his inclination could be called an election. If he had reasoned about it he would have known that the few thousands of dollars left to him from his father’s estate, if judiciously invested in business, would have grown to a good sum when he came of age, and he would by that time have come into business habits, so that all he would need to do would be to go on and make more money. If he had reasoned more deeply he would have seen that by this process he would become a man of comparatively few resources for the enjoyment of life, and a person of very little interest to himself or to anybody else. So perhaps it was just as well that he followed his instincts and postponed the making of money until he had made himself, though he was to have a good many bitter days when the possession of money seemed to him about the one thing desirable.

It was Celia, who had been his constant counselor and tormentor, about the time when she was beginning to feel a little shy and long-legged, in her short skirts, who had, in a romantic sympathy with his tastes, opposed his going into a “store” as a clerk, which seemed to the boy at one time an ideal situation for a young man.

“A store, indeed!” cried the young lady; “pomatum on your hair, and a grin on your face; snip, snip, snip, calico, ribbons, yard-stick; ‘It’s very becoming, miss, that color; this is only a sample, only a remnant, but I shall have a new stock in by Friday; anything else, ma’am, today?’ Sho! Philip, for a man!”

Fortunately for Philip there lived in the village an old waif, a scholarly oddity, uncommunicative, whose coming to dwell there had excited much gossip before the inhabitants got used to his odd ways.

Usually reticent and rough of speech—the children thought he was an old bear—he was nevertheless discovered to be kindly and even charitable in neighborhood emergencies, and the minister said he was about the most learned man he ever knew. His history does not concern us, but he was doubtless one of the men whose talents have failed to connect with success in anything, who had had his bout with the world, and retired into peaceful seclusion in an indulgence of a mild pessimism about the world generally.

He lived alone, except for the rather neutral presence of Aunt Hepsy, who had formerly been a village tailoress, and whose cottage he had bought with the proviso that the old woman should continue in it as “help.” With Aunt Hepsy he was no more communicative than with anybody else. “He was always readin’, when he wasn’t goin’ fishin’ or off in the woods with his gun, and never made no trouble, and was about the easiest man to get along with she ever see. You mind your business and he’ll mind his’n.” That was the sum of Aunt Hepsy’s delivery about the recluse, though no doubt her old age was enriched by constant “study” over his probable history and character. But Aunt Hepsy, since she had given up tailoring, was something of a recluse herself.

The house was full of books, mostly queer books, “in languages nobody knows what,” as Aunt Hepsy said, which made Philip open his eyes when he went there one day to take to the old man a memorandum-book which he had found on Mill Brook. The recluse took a fancy to the ingenuous lad when he saw he was interested in books, and perhaps had a mind not much more practical than his own; the result was an acquaintance, and finally an intimacy—at which the village wondered until it transpired that Philip was studying with the old fellow, who was no doubt a poor shack of a schoolteacher in disguise.

It was from this gruff friend that Philip learned Greek and Latin enough to enable him to enter college, not enough drill and exact training in either to give him a high stand, but an appreciation of the literatures about which the old scholar was always enthusiastic. Philip regretted all his life that he had not been severely drilled in the classics and mathematics, for he never could become a specialist in anything. But perhaps, even in this, fate was dealing with him according to his capacities. And, indeed, he had a greater respect for the scholarship of his wayside tutor than for the pedantic acquirements of many men he came to know afterwards. It was from him that Philip learned about books and how to look for what he wanted to know, and it was he who directed Philip’s taste to the best. When he went off to college the lad had not a good preparation, but he knew a great deal that would not count in the entrance examinations.

“You will need all the tools you can get the use of, my boy, in the struggle,” was the advice of his mentor, “and the things you will need most may be those you have thought least of. I never go fishing without both fly and bait.”

Philip was always grateful that before he entered college he had a fine reading knowledge of French, and that he knew enough German to read and enjoy Heine’s poems and prose, and that he had read, or read in, pretty much all the English classics.

He used to recall the remark of a lad about his own age, who was on a vacation visit to Rivervale, and had just been prepared for college at one of the famous schools. The boys liked each other and were much together in the summer, and talked about what interested them during their rambles, carrying the rod or the fowling-piece. Philip naturally had most to say about the world he knew, which was the world of books—that is to say, the stored information that had accumulated in the world. This more and more impressed the trained student, who one day exclaimed:

“By George! I might have known something if I hadn’t been kept at school all my life.”

Philip’s career in college could not have been called notable. He was not one of the dozen stars in the classroom, but he had a reputation of another sort. His classmates had a habit of resorting to him if they wanted to “know anything” outside the text-books, for the range of his information seemed to them encyclopaedic. On the other hand, he escaped the reputation of what is called “a good fellow.” He was not so much unpopular as he was unknown in the college generally, but those who did know him were tolerant of the fact that he cared more for reading than for college sports or college politics. It must be confessed that he added little to the reputation of the university, since his name was never once mentioned in the public prints—search has been made since the public came to know him as a writer—as a hero in any crew or team on any game field. Perhaps it was a little selfish that his muscle developed in the gymnasium was not put into advertising use for the university. The excuse was that he had not time to become an athlete, any more than he had time to spend three years in the discipline of the regular army, which was in itself an excellent thing.

Celia, in one of her letters—it was during her first year at a woman’s college, when the development of muscle in gymnastics, running, and the vigorous game of ball was largely engaging the attention of this enthusiastic young lady—took him to task for his inactivity. “This is the age of muscle,” she wrote; “the brain is useless in a flabby body, and probably the brain itself is nothing but concentrated intelligent muscle. I don’t know how men are coming out, but women will never get the position they have the right to occupy until they are physically the equals of men.”

Philip had replied, banteringly, that if that were so he had no desire to enter in a physical competition with women, and that men had better look out for another field.

But later on, when Celia had got into the swing of the classics, and was training for a part in the play of “Antigone,” she wrote in a different strain, though she would have denied that the change had any relation to the fact that she had strained her back in a rowing-match. She did not apologize for her former advice, but she was all aglow about the Greek drama, and made reference to Aspasia as an intellectual type of what women might become. “I didn’t ever tell you how envious I used to be when you were studying Greek with that old codger in Rivervale, and could talk about Athens and all that. Next time we meet, I can tell you, it will be Greek meets Greek. I do hope you have not dropped the classics and gone in for the modern notion of being real and practical. If I ever hear of your writing ‘real’ poetry—it is supposed to be real if it is in dialect or misspelled! never will write you again, much less speak to you.”

Whatever this decided young woman was doing at the time she was sure was the best for everybody to do, and especially for Master Phil.

Now that the days of preparation were over, and Philip found himself in New York, face to face with the fact that he had nowhere to look for money to meet the expense of rent, board, and clothes except to his own daily labor, and that there was another economy besides that which he had practiced as to luxuries, there were doubtless hours when his faith wavered a little in the wisdom of the decision that had invested all his patrimony in himself. He had been fortunate, to be sure, in securing a clerk’s desk in the great law-office of Hunt, Sharp & Tweedle, and he had the kindly encouragement of the firm that, with close application to business, he would make his way. But even in this he had his misgivings, for a great part of his acquirements, and those he most valued, did not seem to be of any use in his office-work. He had a lofty conception of his chosen profession, as the right arm in the administration of justice between man and man. In practice, however, it seemed to him that the object was to win a case rather than to do justice in a case. Unfortunately, also, he had cultivated his imagination to the extent that he could see both sides of a case. To see both sides is indeed the requisite of a great lawyer, but to see the opposite side only in order to win, as in looking over an opponent’s hand in a game of cards. It seemed to Philip that this clear perception would paralyze his efforts for one side if he knew it was the wrong side. The argument was that every cause a man’s claim or his defense—ought to be presented in its fullness and urged with all the advocate’s ingenuity, and that the decision was in the bosom of an immaculate justice on the bench and the unbiased intelligence in the jury-box. This might be so. But Philip wondered what would be the effect on his own character and on his intellect if he indulged much in the habit of making the worse appear the better cause, and taking up indifferently any side that paid. For himself, he was inclined always to advise clients to “settle,” and he fancied that if the occupation of the lawyer was to explain the case to people ignorant of it, and to champion only the right side, as it appeared to an unprejudiced, legally trained mind, and to compose instead of encouraging differences, the law would indeed be a noble profession, and the natural misunderstandings, ignorance, and different points of view would make business enough.

“Stuff!” said Mr. Sharp. “If you begin by declining causes you disapprove of, the public will end by letting you alone in your self-conceited squeamishness. It’s human nature you’ve got to deal with, not theories about law and justice. I tell you that men like litigation. They want to have it out with somebody. And it is better than fisticuffs.”

From Mr. Hunt, who moved in the serener upper currents of the law, Philip got more satisfaction.

“Of course, Mr. Burnett, there are miserable squabbles in the law practice, and contemptible pettifoggers and knaves, and men who will sell themselves for any dirty work, as there are in most professions and occupations, but the profession could not exist for a day if it was not on the whole on the side of law and order and justice.

“No doubt it needs from time to time criticism and reformation. So does the church. You look at the characters of the really great lawyers! And there is another thing. In dealing with the cases of our complex life, there is no accomplishment, no learning in science, art, or literature, that the successful practitioner will not find it very advantageous to possess. And a lawyer will never be eminent who has not imagination.”

Philip thought he had a very good chance of exercising his imagination in the sky chamber where he slept—a capital situation from which to observe the world. There could not have been an uglier view created—a shapeless mass of brick and stone and painted wood, a collected, towering monstrosity of rectangular and inharmonious lines, a realized dream of hideousness—but for the splendid sky, always changing and doing all that was possible in the gleams and shadows and the glowing colors of morning and evening to soften the ambitious work of man; but for the wide horizon, with patches of green shores and verdant flats washed by the kindly tide; but for the Highlands and Staten Island, the gateway to the ocean; but for the great river and the mighty bay shimmering and twinkling and often iridescent, and the animated life of sails and steamers, the leviathans of commerce and the playthings of pleasure, and the beetle-like, monstrous ferry-boats that pushed their noses through all the confusion, like intelligent, businesslike saurians that knew how to keep an appointed line by a clumsy courtesy of apparent yielding. Yes, there was life enough in all this, and inspiration, if one only knew what to be inspired about.

When Philip came home from the office at sunset, through the bustling streets, and climbed up to his perch, he insensibly brought with him something of the restless energy and strife of the city, and in this mood the prospect before him took on a certain significance of great things accomplished, of the highest form of human energy and achievement; he was a part of this exuberant, abundant life, to succeed in the struggle seemed easy, and for the moment he possessed what he saw.

The little room had space enough for a cot bed, a toilet-stand, a couple of easy-chairs—an easy-chair is the one article of furniture absolutely necessary to a reflecting student—some well-filled book-shelves, a small writing-desk, and a tiny closet quite large enough for a wardrobe which seemed to have no disposition to grow. Except for the books and the writing-desk, with its heterogeneous manuscripts, unfinished or rejected, there was not much in the room to indicate the taste of its occupant, unless you knew that his taste was exhibited rather by what he excluded from the room than by what it contained. It must be confessed that, when Philip was alone with his books and his manuscripts, his imagination did not expand in the directions that would have seemed profitable to the head of his firm. That life of the town which was roaring in his ears, that panorama of prosperity spread before him, related themselves in his mind not so much as incitements to engage in the quarrels of his profession as something demanding study and interpretation, something much more human than processes and briefs and arguments. And it was a dark omen for his success that the world interested him much more for itself than for what he could make out of it. Make something to be sure he must—so long as he was only a law clerk on a meagre salary—and it was this necessity that had much to do with the production of the manuscripts. It was a joke on Philip in his club—by-the-way, the half-yearly dues were not far off—that he was doing splendidly in the law; he already had an extensive practice in chambers!

The law is said to be a jealous mistress, but literature is a young lady who likes to be loved for herself alone, and thinks permission to adore is sufficient reward for her votary. Commonsense told Philip that the jealous mistress would flout him and land him in failure if he gave her a half-hearted service; but the other young lady, the Helen of the professions, was always beckoning him and alluring him by the most subtle arts, occupying all his hours with meditations on her grace and beauty, till it seemed the world were well lost for her smile. And the fascinating jade never hinted that devotion to her brought more drudgery and harassment and pain than any other service in the world. It would not have mattered if she had been frank, and told him that her promise of eternal life was illusory and her rewards commonly but a flattering of vanity. There was no resisting her enchantments, and he would rather follow her through a world of sin and suffering, pursuing her radiant form over bog and moor, in penury and heartache, for one sunrise smile and one glimpse of her sunset heaven, than to walk at ease with a commonplace maiden on any illumined and well-trod highway.

V

It is the desire of every ambitious soul to, enter Literature by the front door, and the few who have patience and money enough to live without the aid of the beckoning Helen may enter there. But a side entrance is the destiny of most aspirants, even those with the golden key of genius, and they are a long time in working their way to be seen coming out, of the front entrance. It is true that a man can attract considerable and immediate attention by trying to effect an entrance through the sewer, but he seldom gains the respect of the public whom he interests, any more than an exhibitor of fireworks gains the reputation of an artist that is accorded to the painter of a good picture.

Philip was waiting at the front door, with his essays and his prose symphonies and his satirical novel—the satire of a young man is apt to be very bitter—but it was as tightly shut against him as if a publisher and not the muse of literature kept the door.

There was a fellow-boarder with Philip, whose acquaintance he had made at the common table in the basement, who appeared to be free of the world of letters and art. He was an alert, compact, neatly dressed little fellow, who had apparently improved every one of his twenty-eight years in the study of life, in gaining assurance and confidence in himself, and also presented himself as one who knew the nether world completely but was not of it. He would have said of himself that he knew it profoundly, that he frequented it for “material,” but that his home was in another sphere. The impression was that he belonged among those brilliant guerrillas of both sexes, in the border-land of art and society, who lived daintily and talked about life with unconventional freedom. Slight in figure, with very black hair, and eyes of cloudy gray, an olive complexion, and features trained to an immobility proof against emotion or surprise, the whole poised as we would say in the act of being gentlemanly, it is needless to say that he took himself seriously. His readiness, self-confidence, cocksureness, Philip thought all expressed in his name—Olin Brad.

Mr. Brad was not a Bohemian—that is, not at all a Bohemian of the recognized type. His fashionable dress, closely trimmed hair, and dainty boots took him out of that class. He belonged to the new order, which seems to have come in with modern journalism—that is, Bohemian in principle, but of the manners and apparel of the favored of fortune. Mr. Brad was undoubtedly clever, and was down as a bright young man in the list of those who employed talent which was not dulled by conscientious scruples. He had stood well in college, during three years in Europe he had picked up two or three languages, dissipated his remaining small fortune, acquired expensive tastes, and knowledge, both esoteric and exoteric, that was valuable to him in his present occupation. Returning home fully equipped for a modern literary career, and finding after some bitter experience that his accomplishments were not taken or paid for at their real value by the caterers for intellectual New York, he had dropped into congenial society on the staff of the Daily Spectrum, a mighty engine of public opinion, which scattered about the city and adjacent territory a million of copies, as prodigally as if they had been auctioneers’ announcements. Fastidious people who did not read it gave it a bad name, not recognizing the classic and heroic attitude of those engaged in pitchforking up and turning over the muck of the Augean stables under the pretense of cleaning them.

Mr. Brad had a Socratic contempt for this sort of fault-finding. It was answer enough to say, “It pays. The people like it or they wouldn’t buy it. It commands the best talent in the market and can afford to pay for it; even clergymen like to appear in its columns—they say it’s a providential chance to reach the masses. And look at the ‘Morning GooGoo’ (this was his nickname for one of the older dailies), it couldn’t pay its paper bills if it hadn’t such a small circulation.”

Mr. Brad, however, was not one of the editors, though the acceptance of an occasional short editorial, sufficiently piquant and impudent and vivid in language—to suit, had given him hopes. He was salaried, but under orders for special service, and was always in the hope that the execution of each new assignment would bring him into popular notice, which would mean an advance of position and pay.

Philip was impressed with the ready talent, the adaptable talent, and the facility of this accomplished journalist, and as their acquaintance improved he was let into many of the secrets of success in the profession.

“It isn’t an easy thing,” said Mr. Brad, “to cater to a public that gets tired of anything in about three days. But it is just as well satisfied with a contradiction as with the original statement. It calls both news. You have to watch out and see what the people want, and give it to ‘em. It is something like the purveying of the manufacturers and the dry-goods jobber for the changing trade in fashions; only the newspaper has the advantage that it can turn a somersault every day and not have any useless stock left on hand.

“The public hasn’t any memory, or, if it has, this whirligig process destroys it. What it will not submit to is the lack of a daily surprise. Keep that in your mind and you can make a popular newspaper. Only,” continued Mr. Brad, reflectively, “you’ve got to hit a lot of different tastes.”

“You’d laugh,” this artist in emotions went on, after a little pause, “at some of my assignments. There was a run awhile ago on elopements, and my assignment was to have one every Monday morning. The girl must always be lovely and refined and moving in the best society; elopement with the coachman preferred, varied with a teacher in a Sunday-school. Invented? Not always. It was surprising how many you could find ready made, if you were on the watch. I got into the habit of locating them in the interior of Pennsylvania as the safest place, though Jersey seemed equally probable to the public. Did I never get caught? That made it all the more lively and interesting. Denials, affidavits, elaborate explanations, two sides to any question; if it was too hot, I could change the name and shift the scene to a still more obscure town. Or it could be laid to the zeal of a local reporter, who could give the most ingenious reasons for his story. Once I worked one of those imaginary reporters up into such prominence for his clever astuteness that my boss was taken in, and asked me to send for him and give him a show on the paper.

“Oh, yes, we have to keep up the domestic side. A paper will not go unless the women like it. One of the assignments I liked was ‘Sayings of Our Little Ones.’ This was for every Tuesday morning. Not more than half a column. These always got copied by the country press solid. It is really surprising how many bright things you can make children of five and six years say if you give your mind to it. The boss said that I overdid it sometimes and made them too bright instead of ‘just cunning.’

“‘Psychological Study of Children’ had a great run. This is the age of science. Same with animals, astronomy—anything. If the public wants science, the papers will give it science.

“After all, the best hold for a lasting sensation is an attack upon some charity or public institution; show up the abuses, and get all the sentimentalists on your side. The paper gets sympathy for its fearlessness in serving the public interests. It is always easy to find plenty of testimony from illused convicts and grumbling pensioners.”

Undoubtedly Olin Brad was a clever fellow, uncommonly well read in the surface literatures of foreign origin, and had a keen interest in what he called the metaphysics of his own time. He had many good qualities, among them friendliness towards men and women struggling like himself to get up the ladder, and he laid aside all jealousy when he advised Philip to try his hand at some practical work on the Spectrum. What puzzled Philip was that this fabricator of “stories” for the newspaper should call himself a “realist.” The “story,” it need hardly be explained, is newspaper slang for any incident, true or invented, that is worked up for dramatic effect. To state the plain facts as they occurred, or might have occurred, and as they could actually be seen by a competent observer, would not make a story. The writer must put in color, and idealize the scene and the people engaged in it, he must invent dramatic circumstances and positions and language, so as to produce a “picture.” And this picture, embroidered on a commonplace incident, has got the name of “news.” The thread of fact in this glittering web the reader must pick out by his own wits, assisted by his memory of what things usually are. And the public likes these stories much better than the unadorned report of facts. It is accustomed to this view of life, so much so that it fancies it never knew what war was, or what a battle was, until the novelists began to report them.

Mr. Brad was in the story stage of his evolution as a writer. His light facility in it had its attraction for Philip, but down deep in his nature he felt and the impression was deepened by watching the career of several bright young men and women on the press—that indulgence in it would result in such intellectual dishonesty as to destroy the power of producing fiction that should be true to life. He was so impressed by the ability and manifold accomplishments of Mr. Brad that he thought it a pity for him to travel that road, and one day he asked him why he did not go in for literature.

“Literature!” exclaimed Mr. Brad, with some irritation; “I starved on literature for a year. Who does live on it, till he gets beyond the necessity of depending on it? There is a lot of humbug talked about it. You can’t do anything till you get your name up. Some day I will make a hit, and everybody will ask, ‘Who is this daring, clever Olin Brad?’ Then I can get readers for anything I choose to write. Look at Champ Lawson. He can’t write correct English, he never will, he uses picturesque words in a connection that makes you doubt if he knows what they mean. But he did a dare-devil thing picturesquely, and now the publishers are at his feet. When I met him the other day he affected to be bored with so much attention, and wished he had stuck to the livery-stable. He began at seventeen by reporting a runaway from the point of view of the hostler.”

“Well,” said Philip, “isn’t it quite in the line of the new movement that we should have an introspective hostler, who perhaps obeys Sir Philip Sidney’s advice, ‘Look into your heart and write’? I chanced the other night in a company of the unconventional and illuminated, the ‘poster’ set in literature and art, wild-eyed and anaemic young women and intensely languid, ‘nil admirari’ young men, the most advanced products of the studios and of journalism. It was a very interesting conclave. Its declared motto was, ‘We don’t read, we write.’ And the members were on a constant strain to say something brilliant, epigrammatic, original. The person who produced the most outre sentiment was called ‘strong.’ The women especially liked no writing that was not ‘strong.’ The strongest man in the company, and adored by the women, was the poet-artist Courci Cleves, who always seems to have walked straight out of a fashion-plate, much deferred to in this set, which affects to defer to nothing, and a thing of beauty in the theatre lobbies. Mr. Cleves gained much applause for his well-considered wish that all that has been written in the world, all books and libraries, could be destroyed, so as to give a chance to the new men and the fresh ideas of the new era.”

“My dear sir,” said Brad, who did not like this caricature of his friends, “you don’t make any allowance for the eccentricities of genius.”

“You would hit it nearer if you said I didn’t make allowance for the eccentricities without genius,” retorted Philip.

“Well,” replied Mr. Brad, taking his leave, “you don’t understand your world. You go your own way and see where you will come out.”

And when Philip reflected on it, he wondered if it were not rash to offend those who had the public ear, and did up the personals and minor criticisms for the current prints. He was evidently out of view. No magazine paper of his had gained the slightest notice from these sublimated beings, who discovered a new genius every month.

A few nights after this conversation Mr. Brad was in uncommon spirits at dinner.

“Anything special turned up?” asked Philip.

“Oh, nothing much. I’ve thrown away the chance of the biggest kind of a novel of American life. Only it wouldn’t keep. You look in the Spectrum tomorrow morning. You’ll see something interesting.”

“Is it a—” and Philip’s incredulous expression supplied the word.

“No, not a bit. And the public is going to be deceived this time, sure, expecting a fake. You know Mavick?”

“I’ve heard of him—the operator, a millionaire.”

“A good many times. Used to be minister or consul or something at Rome. A great swell. It’s about his daughter, Evelyn, a stunning girl about sixteen or seventeen—not out yet.”

“I hope it’s no scandal.”

“No, no; she’s all right. It’s the way she’s brought up—shows what we’ve come to. They say she’s the biggest heiress in America and a raving beauty, the only child. She has been brought up like the Kohinoor, never out of somebody’s sight. She has never been alone one minute since she was born. Had three nurses, and it was the business of one of them, in turn, to keep an eye on her. Just think of that. Never was out of the sight of somebody in her life. Has two maids now—always one in the room, night and day.”

“What for?”

“Why, the parents are afraid she’ll be kidnapped, and held for a big ransom. No, I never saw her, but I’ve got the thing down to a dot. Wouldn’t I like to interview her, though, get her story, how the world looks to her. Under surveillance for sixteen years! The ‘Prisoner of Chillon’ is nothing to it for romance.”

“Just the facts are enough, I should say.”

“Yes, facts make a good basis, sometimes. I’ve got ‘em all in, but of course I’ve worked the thing up for all it is worth. You’ll see. I kept it one day to try and get a photograph. We’ve got the house and Mavick, but the girl’s can’t be found, and it isn’t safe to wait. We are going to blow it out tomorrow morning.”

VI

The Mavick mansion was on Fifth Avenue in the neighborhood of Central Park. It was one of the buildings in the city that strangers were always taken to see. In fact, this was a palace not one kind of a palace, but all kinds of a palace. The clever and ambitious architect of the house had grouped all the styles of architecture he had ever seen, or of which he had seen pictures. Here was not an architectural conception, like a sonnet or a well-constructed novel, but if all the work could have been spread out in line, in all its variety, there would have been produced a panorama. The sight of the mansion always caused wonder and generally ignorant admiration. Its vastness and splendor were felt to be somehow typical of the New World and of the cosmopolitan city.

The cost, in the eyes of the spectators, was a great part of its merits. No doubt this was a fabulous sum. “You can form a little idea of it,” said a gentleman to his country friend, “when I tell you that that little bit there, that little corner of carving and decoration, cost two hundred thousand dollars! I had this from the architect himself.”

“My!”

The interior was as fully representative of wealth and of the ambition to put under one roof all the notable effects of all the palaces in the world. But it had, what most palaces have not, all the requisites for luxurious living. The variety of styles in the rooms was bewildering. Artists of distinction, both foreign and native, had vied with each other in the decoration of the rooms given over to the display of their genius. All paganism and all Christianity, history, myth, and the beauties of nature were spread upon the walls and ceilings. Rare woods, rare marbles, splendid textures, the product of ancient handiwork and modern looms, added a certain dignity to the more airy creations of the artists. Many of the rooms were named from the nations whose styles of decoration and furnishing were imitated in them, but others had the simple designation of the gold room, the silver room, the lapis-lazuli room, and so on. It was not only the show-rooms, the halls, passages, stairways, and galleries (both of pictures and of curios) that were thus enriched, but the boudoirs, retiring-rooms, and more private apartments as well. It was not simply a house of luxury, but of all the comfort that modern invention can furnish. It was said that the money lavished upon one or two of the noble apartments would have built a State-house (though not at Albany), and that the fireplace in the great hall cost as much as an imitation mediaeval church. These were the things talked about, and yet the portions of this noble edifice, rich as they were, habitually occupied by the family had another character—the attractions and conveniences of what we call a home. Mrs. Mavick used to say that in her apartments she found refuge in a sublimated domesticity. Mavick’s own quarters—not the study off the library where he received visitors whom it was necessary to impress—had an executive appearance, and were, in the necessary appliances, more like the interior bureau of a board of trade. In fact, the witty brokers who were admitted to its mysteries called it the bucketshop.

Mr. Brad’s article on “A Prisoned Millionaire” more than equaled Philip’s expectations. No such “story” had appeared in the city press in a long time. It was what was called, in the language of the period, a work of art—that is, a sensation, heightened by all the words of color in the language, applied not only to material things, but to states and qualities of mind, such as “purple emotions” and “scarlet intrepidity.” It was also exceedingly complimentary. Mavick himself was one of the powers and pillars of American society, and the girl was an exquisite exhibition of woodland bloom in the first flush of spring-time. As he read it over, Philip thought what a fine advertisement it is to every impecunious noble in Europe.

That morning, before going to his office, Philip strolled up Fifth Avenue to look at that now doubly, famous mansion. Many others, it appeared, were moved by the same curiosity. There was already a crowd assembled. A couple of policemen, on special duty, patrolled the sidewalk in front in order to keep a passage open, and perhaps to prevent a too impudent inspection. Opposite the house, on the sidewalk and on doorsteps, was a motley throng, largely made up of toughs and roughs from the East Side, good-natured spectators who merely wanted to see this splendid prison, and a moving line of gentlemen and ladies who simply happened to be passing that way at this time. The curbstone was lined with a score of reporters of the city journals, each with his notebook. Every window and entrance was eagerly watched. It was hoped that one of the family might be seen, or that some servant might appear who could be interviewed. Upon the windows supposed by the reporters to be those from which the heiress looked, a strict watch was kept. The number, form, and location of these windows were accurately noted, the stuff of the curtains described in the phrase of the upholsterer, and much good language was devoted to the view from these windows. The shrewdest of the reporters had already sought information as to the interior from the flower dealers, from upholsterers, from artists who had been employed in the decorations, and had even assailed, in the name of the rights of the public whom they represented, the architects of the building; but their chief reliance was upon the waiters furnished by the leading caterers on occasions of special receptions and great dinners, and milliners and dress-makers, who had penetrated the more domestic apartments. By reason of this extraordinary article in the newspaper, the public had acquired the right to know all about the private life of the Mavick family.

This right was not acknowledged by Mr. Mavick and his family. Of course the object of the excitement was wholly ignorant of the cause of it, as no daily newspaper was ever seen by her that had not been carefully inspected by the trusted and intelligent governess. The crowd in front of the mansion was accounted for by the statement that a picture of it had appeared in one of the low journals, and there was naturally a curiosity to see it. And Evelyn was told that this was one of the penalties a man paid for being popular.

Mrs. Mavick, who seldom lost her head, was thoroughly frightened and upset, and it was a rare occasion that could upset the equanimity of the late widow, Mrs. Carmen Henderson. She gave way to her passion and demanded that the offending editor should be pursued with the utmost rigor of the law. Mr. Mavick was not less annoyed and angry, but he smiled when his wife talked of pursuing the press with the utmost rigor of the law, and said that he would give the matter prompt attention. That day he had an interview with the editor of the Daily Spectrum; which was satisfactory to both parties. The editor would have said that Mavick behaved like a gentleman. The result of the interview appeared in the newspaper of the following morning.

Mr. Mavick had requested that the offending reporter should be cautioned; he was too wise to have further attention called to the matter by demanding his dismissal. Accordingly the reporter was severely reprimanded, and then promoted.

The editorial, which was written by Mr. Olin Brad, and was in his best Macaulay style, began somewhat humorously by alluding to the curious interest of the public in ancient history, citing Mr. Froude and Mr. Carlyle, and the legend of Casper Hauser. It was true, gradually approaching the case in point, that uncommon precautions had been taken in the early years of the American heiress, and it was the romance of the situation that had been laid before the readers of the Spectrum. But there had been really no danger in our chivalrous, free American society, and all these precautions were long a thing of the past (which was not true). In short, with elaboration and great skill, and some humor, the exaggerations of the former article were minimized, and put in an airy and unsubstantial light. And then this friend of the people, this exposer of abuses and champion of virtue, turned and justly scored the sensational press for prying into the present life of one of the first families in the country.

Incidentally, it was mentioned that the ladies of the family had before this incident bespoken their passage for their annual visit to Europe, and that this affair had not disturbed their arrangements (which also was not true). This casual announcement was intended to draw away attention from the Fifth Avenue house, and to notify the roughs that it would be useless to lay any plans.

The country press, which had far and wide printed the interesting story, softened it in accordance with the later development. Possibly no intelligent person was deceived, but in the estimation of the mass of the people the Spectrum increased its reputation for enterprise and smartness and gave also an impression of its fairness. The manager, told Mr. Brad that the increased sales of the two days permitted the establishment to give him a vacation of two weeks on full pay, and during these weeks the manager himself set up a neat and modest brougham.

All of which events, only partially understood, Mr. Philip Burnett revolved in his mind, and wondered if what was called success was worth the price paid for it.

VII

The name of Thomas Mavick has lost the prominence and significance it had at the time the events recorded in this history were taking place. It seems incredible that the public should so soon have lost interest in him. His position in the country was most conspicuous. No name was more frequently in the newspapers. No other person not in official life was so often interviewed. The reporters instinctively turned to him for information in matters financial, concerning deals, and commercial, which were so commonly connected with political, enterprises. No loan was negotiated without consulting him, no operation was considered safe without knowing how he was affected towards it, and to ascertain what Mavick was doing or thinking was a constant anxiety in the Street. Of course the opinion of a man so powerful was very important in politics, and any church or sect would be glad to have his support. The fact that he and his family worshiped regularly at St. Agnes’s was a guarantee of the stability of that church, and incidentally marked the success of the Christian religion in the metropolis.

But the condition of the presence in the public mind of the name of a great operator and accumulator of money who is merely that is either that he go on accumulating, so that the magnitude of his wealth has few if any rivals, or that his name become synonymous with some gigantic cleverness, if not rascality, so that it is used as an adjective after he and his wealth have disappeared from the public view. It is different with the reputation of an equally great financier who has used his ability for the service of his country. There is no Valhalla for the mere accumulators of money. They are fortunate if their names are forgotten, and not remembered as illustrations of colossal selfishness.

Mavick may have been the ideal of many a self-made man, but he did not make his fortune—he married it. And it was suspected that the circumstances attending that marriage put him in complete control of it. He came into possession, however, with cultivated shrewdness and tact and large knowledge of the world, the world of diplomacy as well as of business. And under his manipulation the vast fortune so acquired was reported to have been doubled. It was at any rate almost fabulous in the public estimation.

When the charming widow of the late Rodney Henderson, then sojourning in Rome, placed her attractive self and her still more attractive fortune in the hands of Mr. Thomas Mavick, United States Minister to the Court of Italy, she attained a position in the social world which was in accord with her ambition, and Mavick acquired the means of making the mission, in point of comparison with the missions of the other powers at the Italian capital, a credit to the Great Republic. The match was therefore a brilliant one, and had a sort of national importance.

Those who knew Mrs. Mavick in the remote past, when she was the fascinating and not definitely placed Carmen Eschelle, and who also knew Mr. Mavick when he was the confidential agent of Rodney Henderson, knew that their union was a convenient and material alliance, in which the desire of each party to enjoy in freedom all the pleasures of the world could be gratified while retaining the social consideration of the world. Both had always been circumspect. And it may be added, for the information of strangers, that they thoroughly knew each other, and were participants in a knowledge that put each at disadvantage, so that their wedded life was a permanent truce. This bond of union was not ideal, and not the best for the creation of individual character, but it avoided an exhibition of those public antagonisms which so grieve and disturb the even flow of the current of society, and give occasion to so much witty comment on the institution of marriage itself.

When, some two years after Mr. Mavick relinquished the mission to Italy to another statesman who had done some service to the opposite party, an heiress was born to the house of Mavick, her appearance in the world occasioned some disappointment to those who had caused it. Mavick naturally wished a son to inherit his name and enlarge the gold foundation upon which its perpetuity must rest; and Mrs. Mavick as naturally shrank from a responsibility that promised to curtail freedom of action in the life she loved. Carmen—it was an old saying of the danglers in the time of Henderson—was a domestic woman except in her own home.

However, it is one of the privileges of wealth to lighten the cares and duties of maternity, and the enlarged household was arranged upon a basis that did not interfere with the life of fashion and the charitable engagements of the mother. Indeed, this adaptable woman soon found that she had become an object of more than usual interest, by her latest exploit, in the circles in which she moved, and her softened manner and edifying conversation showed that she appreciated her position. Even the McTavishes, who were inclined to be skeptical, said that Carmen was delightful in her new role. This showed that the information Mrs. Mavick got from the women who took care of her baby was of a kind to touch the hearts of mothers and spinsters.

Moreover, the child was very pretty, and early had winning ways. The nurse, before the baby was a year old, discovered in her the cleverness of the father and the grace and fascination of the mother. And it must be said that, if she did not excite passionate affection at first, she enlisted paternal and maternal pride in her career. It dawned upon both parents that a daughter might give less cause for anxiety than a son, and that in an heiress there were possibilities of an alliance that would give great social distinction. Considering, therefore, all that she represented, and the settled conviction of Mrs. Mavick that she would be the sole inheritor of the fortune, her safety and education became objects of the greatest anxiety and precaution.

It happened that about the time Evelyn was christened there was a sort of epidemic of stealing children, and of attempts to rob tombs of occupants who had died rich or distinguished, in the expectation of a ransom. The newspapers often chronicled mysterious disappearances; parents whose names were conspicuous suffered great anxiety, and extraordinary precautions were taken in regard to the tombs of public men. And this was the reason that the heiress of the house of Mavick became the object of a watchful vigilance that was probably never before exercised in a republic, and that could only be paralleled in the case of a sole heir-apparent of royalty.

These circumstances resulted in an interference with the laws of nature which it must be confessed destroyed one of the most interesting studies in heredity that was ever offered to an historian of social life. What sort of a child had we a right to expect from Thomas Mavick, diplomatist and operator, successor to the rights and wrongs of Rodney Henderson, and Carmen Mavick, with the past of Carmen Eschelle and Mrs. Henderson? Those who adhered to the strictest application of heredity, in considering the natural development of Evelyn Mavick, sought refuge in the physiological problem of the influence of Rodney Henderson, and declared that something of his New England sturdiness and fundamental veracity had been imparted to the inheritor of his great fortune.

But the visible interference took the form of Ann McDonald, a Scotch spinster, to whom was intrusted the care of Evelyn as soon as she was christened. It was merely a piece of good fortune that brought a person of the qualifications of Ann McDonald into the family, for it is not to be supposed that Mrs. Mavick had given any thought to the truth that the important education of a child begins in its cradle, or that in selecting a care-taker and companion who should later on be a governess she was consulting her own desire of freedom from the duties of a mother. It was enough for her that the applicant for the position had the highest recommendations, that she was prepossessing in appearance, and it was soon perceived that the guardian was truthful, faithful, vigilant, and of an affectionate disposition and an innate refinement.

Ann McDonald was the only daughter of a clergyman of the Scotch Church, and brought up in the literary atmosphere common in the most cultivated Edinburgh homes. She had been accurately educated, and always with the knowledge that her education might be her capital in life. After the death of her mother, when she was nineteen, she had been her father’s housekeeper, and when in her twenty-fourth year her father relinquished his life and his salary, she decided, under the advice of influential friends, to try her fortune in America. And she never doubted that it was a providential guidance that brought her into intimate relations with the infant heiress. It seemed probable that a woman so attractive and so solidly accomplished would not very long remain a governess, but in fact her career was chosen from the moment she became interested in the development of the mind and character of the child intrusted to her care. It is difficult to see how our modern life would go on as well as it does if there were not in our homes a good many such faithful souls. It sometimes seems, in this shifting world, that about the best any of us can do is to prepare some one else for doing something well.

Miss McDonald had a pretty comprehensive knowledge of English literature and history, and, better perhaps than mere knowledge, a discriminating and cultivated taste. If her religious education had twisted her view of the fine arts, she had nevertheless a natural sympathy for the beautiful, and she would not have been a Scotchwoman if she had not had a love for the romances of her native land and at heart a “ballad” sentiment for the cavaliers. If Evelyn had been educated by her in Edinburgh, she might have been in sentiment a young Jacobite. She had through translations a sufficient knowledge of the classics to give her the necessary literary background, and her study of Latin had led her into the more useful acquisition of French.

If she had been free to indulge her own taste, she would have gone far in natural history, as was evident from her mastery of botany and her interest in birds.

She inspired so much confidence by her good sense, clearheadedness, and discretion, that almost from the first Evelyn was confided to her sole care, with only the direction that the baby was never for an instant, night or day, to be left out of the sight of a trusty attendant. The nurse was absolutely under her orders, she selected the two maids, and no person except the parents and the governess could admit visitors to the nursery. This perfect organization was maintained for many years, and though it came to be relaxed in details, it was literally true that the heiress was never alone, and never out of the sight of some trusted person responsible for her safety. But whatever the changes or relaxation, in holidays, amusements, travel, or education, the person who formed her mind was the one who had taught her to obey, to put words together into language, and to speak the truth, from infancy.

It is not necessary to consider Ann McDonald as a paragon. She was simply an intelligent, disciplined woman, with a strong sense of duty. If she had married and gone about the ordinary duties of life at the age of twenty-four, she would probably have been in no marked way distinguished among women. Her own development was largely due to the responsibility that was put upon her in the training of another person. In this sense it was true that she had learned as much as she had imparted. And in nothing was this more evident than in the range of her literary taste and judgment. Whatever risks, whatever latitude she might have been disposed to take with regard to her own mind, she would not take as to the mind of another, and as a consequence her own standards rose to meet the situation. That is to say, in a conscientious selection of only the best for Evelyn, she became more fastidious as to the food for her own mind. Or, to put it in still another way, in regard to character and culture generally, the growth of Miss McDonald could be measured by that of Evelyn.

When, from the time Evelyn was seven years old, it became necessary in her education to call in special tutors in the languages and in mathematics, and in certain arts that are generally called accomplishments, Miss McDonald was always present when the lessons were given, so that she maintained her ascendency and her influence in the girl’s mind. It was this inseparable companionship, at least in all affairs of the mind, that gave to this educational experiment an exceptional interest to students of psychology. Nothing could be more interesting than to come into contact with a mind that from infancy onward had dwelt only upon what is noblest in literature, and from which had been excluded all that is enervating and degrading. A remarkable illustration of this is the familiar case of Helen Keller, whose acquisitions, by reason of her blindness and deafness, were limited to what was selected for her, and that mainly by one person, and she was therefore for a long time shielded from a knowledge of the evil side of life. Yet all vital literature is so close to life, and so full of its passion and peril, that it supplies all the necessary aliment for the growth of a sound, discriminating mind; and that knowledge of the world, as knowledge of evil is euphemistically called, can be safely left out of a good education. This may be admitted without going into the discussion whether good principles and standards in literature and morals are a sufficient equipment for the perils of life.

This experiment, of course, was limited in Evelyn’s case. She came in contact with a great deal of life. Her little world was fairly representative, for it contained her father, her mother, her governess, the maids and the servants, and occasional visitors, whom she saw freely as she grew older. The interesting fact was that she was obliged to judge this world according to the standards of literature, morals, and manners that had been implanted in her mainly by the influence of one person. The important part of this experiment of partial exclusion, in which she was never alone’ an experiment undertaken solely for her safety and not for her training-was seen in her when she became conscious of its abnormal character, and perceived that she was always under surveillance. It might have made her exceedingly morbid, aside from its effect of paralyzing her self-confidence and power of initiation, had it not been for the exceptionally strong and cheerful nature of her companion. A position more hateful, even to a person not specially socially inclined, cannot be imagined than that of always being watched, and never having any assured privacy. And under such a tutelage and dependence, how in any event could she be able to take care of herself? What weapons had this heiress of a great fortune with which to defend herself? What sort of a girl had this treatment during seventeen years produced?

VIII

To the private apartment of Mr. Mavick, in the evening of the second eventful day, where, over his after-dinner cigar, he was amusing himself with a French novel, enters, after a little warning tap, the mistress of the house, for, what was a rare occurrence, a little family chat.

“So you didn’t horsewhip and you didn’t prosecute. You preferred to wriggle out!”

“Yes,” said Mavick, too much pleased with the result to be belligerent, “I let the newspaper do the wriggling.”

“Oh, my dear, I can trust you for that. Have you any idea how it got hold of the details?”

“No; you don’t think McDonald—”

“McDonald! I’d as soon suspect myself. So would you.”

“Well, everybody knew it already, for that matter. I only wonder that some newspaper didn’t get on to it before. What did Evelyn say?”

“Nothing more than what you heard at dinner. She thought it amusing that there should be such a crowd to gaze at the house, simply because a picture of it had appeared in a newspaper. She thought her father must be a very important personage. I didn’t undeceive her. At times, you know, dear, I think so myself.”

“Yes, I’ve noticed that,” said Mavick, with a good-natured laugh, in which Carmen joined, “and those times usually coincide with the times that you want something specially.”

“You ought to be ashamed to take me up that way. I just wanted to talk about the coming-out reception. You know I had come over to your opinion that seventeen was perhaps better than eighteen, considering Evelyn’s maturity. When I was seventeen I was just as good as I am now.”

“I don’t doubt it,” said Mavick, with another laugh.

“But don’t you see this affair upsets all our arrangements? It’s very vexatious.”

“I don’t see it exactly. By-the-way, what do you think of the escape suggested by the Spectrum, in the assertion that you and Evelyn had arranged to go to Europe? The steamer sails tomorrow.”

“Think!” exclaimed Carmen. “Do you think I am going to be run, as you call it, by the newspapers? They run everything else. I’m not politics, I’m not an institution, I’m not even a revolution. No, I thank you. It answers my purpose for them to say we have gone.”

“I suppose you can keep indoors a few days. As to the reception, I had arranged my business for it. I may be in Mexico or Honolulu the following winter.”

“Well, we can’t have it now. You see that.”

“Carmen, I don’t care a rap what the public thinks or says. The child’s got to face the world some time, and look out for herself. I fancy she will not like it as much as you did.”

“Very likely. Perhaps I liked it because I had to fight it. Evelyn never will do that.”

“She hasn’t the least idea what the world is like.”

“Don’t you be too sure of that, my dear; you don’t understand yet what a woman feels and knows. You think she only sees and thinks what she is told. The conceit of men is most amusing about this. Evelyn is deeper than you think. The discrimination of that child sometimes positively frightens me—how she sees into things. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if she actually knew her father and mother!”

“Then she beats me,” said Mavick, with another laugh, “and I’ve been at it a long time. Carmen, just for fun, tell me a little about your early life.”

“Well”—there was a Madonna-like smile on her lips, and she put out the toe of her slender foot and appeared to study it for a moment—“I was intended to be a nun.”

“Spanish or French?”

“Just a plain nun. But mamma would not hear of it. Mamma was just a bit worldly.”

“I never should have suspected it,” said Mavick, with equal gravity. “But how did you live in those early days, way back there?”

“Oh!” and Carmen looked up with the most innocent, open-eyed expression, “we lived on our income.”

“Naturally. We all try to do that.” The tone in Mavick’s voice showed that he gave it up.

“But, of course,” and Carmen was lively again, “it’s much nicer to have a big income that’s certain than a small one that is uncertain.”

“It would seem so.”

“Ah, deary me, it’s such a world! Don’t you think, dear, that we have had enough domestic notoriety for one year?”

“Quite. It would do for several.”

“And we will put it off a year?”

“Arrange as you like.” And Mavick stretched up his arms, half yawned, and took up another cigar.

“It will be such a relief to McDonald. She insisted it was too soon.” And Carmen whirled out of her chair, went behind her husband, lifted with her delicate fingers a lock of grayish hair on his forehead, deposited the lightest kiss there—“Nobody in the world knows how good you are except me,” and was gone.

And the rich man, who had gained everything he wanted in life except happiness, lighted his cigar and sought refuge in a tale of modern life, that was, however, too much like his own history to be consoling.

It must not be supposed from what she said that Mrs. Mavick stood in fear of her daughter, but it was only natural that for a woman of the world the daily contact of a pure mind should be at times inconvenient. This pure mind was an awful touchstone of conduct, and there was a fear that Evelyn’s ignorance of life would prevent her from making the proper allowances. In her affectionate and trusting nature, which suspected little evil anywhere, there was no doubt that her father and mother had her entire confidence and love. But the likelihood was that she would not be pliant. Under Miss McDonald’s influence she had somewhat abstract notions of what is right and wrong, and she saw no reason why these should not be applied in all cases. What her mother would have called policy and reasonable concessions she would have given different names. For getting on in the world, this state of mind has its disadvantages, and in the opinion of practical men, like Mavick, it was necessary to know good and evil. But it was the girl’s power of discernment that bothered her mother, who used often to wonder where the child came from.

On the other hand, it must not be supposed that the singular training of Evelyn had absolutely destroyed her inherited tendencies, or made her as she was growing into womanhood anything but a very real woman, with the reserves, the weaknesses, the coquetries, the defenses which are the charm of her sex. Nor was she so ignorant of life as such a guarded personality might be thought. Her very wide range of reading had liberalized her mind, and given her a much wider outlook upon the struggles and passions and failures and misery of life than many another girl of her age had gained by her limited personal experience. Those who hold the theory that experience is the only guide are right as a matter of fact, since every soul seems determined to try for itself and not to accept the accumulated wisdom of literature or of experienced advisers; but those who come safely out of their experiences are generally sound by principle which has been instilled in youth. But it is useless to moralize. Only the event could show whether such an abnormal training as Evelyn had received was wise.

When Mrs. Mavick went to her daughter’s apartments she found Evelyn reading aloud and Miss McDonald at work on an elaborate piece of Bulgarian embroidery.

“How industrious! What a rebuke to me!”

“I don’t see, mamma, how we could be doing less; I’ve only an audience of one, and she is wasting her time.”

“Well, carissima, it is settled. It’s off for a year.”

“The reception? Why so?”

“Your father cannot arrange it. He has too much on hand this season, and may be away.”

“There, McDonald, we’ve got a reprieve,” and Evelyn gave a sigh of relief.

The Scotch woman smiled, and only said, “Then I shall have time to finish this.”

Evelyn jumped up, threw herself into her mother’s lap, and began to smooth her hair and pet her. “I’m awfully glad. I’d ever so much rather stay in than come out. Yes, dear little mother.”

“Little?”

“Yes.” And the girl pulled her mother from her chair, and made her stand up to measure. “See, McDonald, almost an inch taller than mamma, and when I do my hair on top!”

“And see, mamma”—the girl was pirouetting on the floor—“I can do those steps you do. Isn’t it Spanish?”

“Rather Spanish-American, I guess. This is the way.”

Evelyn clapped her hands. “Isn’t that lovely!”

“You are only a little brownie, after all.” Her mother was holding her at arm’s—length and studying her critically, wondering if she would ever be handsome.

The girl was slender, but not tall. Her figure had her mother’s grace, but not its suggestion of yielding suppleness. She was an undoubted brunette—complexion olive, hair very dark, almost black except in the sunlight, and low on her forehead-chin a little strong, and nose piquant to say the least of it. Certainly features not regular nor classic. The mouth, larger than her mother’s, had full lips, the upper one short, and admirable curves, strong in repose, but fascinating when she smiled. A face not handsome, but interesting. And the eyes made you hesitate to say she was not handsome, for they were large, of a dark hazel and changeable, eyes that flashed with merriment, or fell into sadness under the long eyelashes; and it would not be safe to say that they could not blaze with indignation. Not a face to go wild about, but when you felt her character through it, a face very winning in its dark virgin purity.

“I do wonder where she came from?” Mrs. Mavick was saying to herself, as she threw herself upon a couch in her own room and took up the latest Spanish novel.

IX

Celia Howard had been, in a way, Philip’s inspiration ever since the days when they quarreled and made up on the banks of the Deer field. And a fortunate thing for him it was that in his callow years there was a woman in whom he could confide. Her sympathy was everything, even if her advice was not always followed. In the years of student life and preparation they had not often met, but they were constant and painstaking correspondents. It was to her that he gave the running chronicle of his life, and poured out his heart and aspirations. Unconsciously he was going to school to a woman, perhaps the most important part of his education. For, though in this way he might never hope to understand woman, he was getting most valuable knowledge of himself.

As a guide, Philip was not long in discovering that Celia was somewhat uncertain. She kept before him a very high ideal; she expected him to be distinguished and successful, but, her means varied from time to time. Now she would have him take one path and now another. And Philip learned to read in this varying advice the changes in her own experience. There was a time when she hoped he would be a great scholar: there was no position so noble as that of a university professor or president. Then she turned short round and extolled the business life: get money, get a position, and then you can study, write books, do anything you like and be independent. Then came a time—this was her last year in college—when science seemed the only thing. That was really a benefit to mankind: create something, push discovery, dispel ignorance.

“Why, Phil, if you could get people to understand about ventilation, the necessity of pure air, you would deserve a monument. And, besides—this is an appeal to your lower nature—science is now the thing that pays.” Theology she never considered; that was just now too uncertain in its direction. Law she had finally approved; it was still respectable; it was a very good waiting-ground for many opportunities, and it did not absolutely bar him from literature, for which she perceived he had a sneaking fondness.

Philip wondered if Celia was not thinking of the law for herself. She had tried teaching, she had devoted herself for a time to work in a College Settlement, she had learned stenography, she had talked of learning telegraphy, she had been interested in women’s clubs, in a civic club, in the political education of women, and was now a professor of economics in a girl’s college.

It finally dawned upon Philip, who was plodding along, man fashion, in one of the old ruts, feeling his way, like a true American, into the career that best suited him, that Celia might be a type of the awakened American woman, who does not know exactly what she wants. To be sure, she wants everything. She has recently come into an open place, and she is distracted by the many opportunities. She has no sooner taken up one than she sees another that seems better, or more important in the development of her sex, and she flies to that. But nothing, long, seems the best thing. Perhaps men are in the way, monopolizing all the best things. Celia had never made a suggestion of this kind, but Philip thought she was typical of the women who push individualism so far as never to take a dual view of life.

“I have just been,” Celia wrote in one of her letters, when she was an active club woman, “out West to a convention of the Federation of Women’s Clubs. Such a striking collection of noble, independent women! Handsome, lots of them, and dressed—oh, my friend, dress is still a part of it! So different from a man’s convention! Cranks? Yes, a few left over. It was a fine, inspiring meeting. But, honestly, I could not exactly make out what they were federating about, and what they were going to do when they got federated. It sort of came over me, I am such a weak sister, that there is such a lot of work done in this world with no object except the doing of it.”

A more recent letter:—“Do you remember Aunt Hepsy, who used to keep the little thread-and-needle and candy shop in Rivervale? Such a dear, sweet, contented old soul! Always a smile and a good word for every customer. I can see her now, picking out the biggest piece of candy in the dish that she could afford to give for a little fellow’s cent. It never came over me until lately how much good that old woman did in the world. I remember what a comfort it was to go and talk with her. Well, I am getting into a frame of mind to want to be an Aunt Hepsy. There is so much sawdust in everything—No, I’m not low-spirited. I’m just philosophical—I’ve a mind to write a life of Aunt Hepsy, and let the world see what a real useful life is.”

And here is a passage from the latest:—“What an interesting story your friend—I hope he isn’t you friend, for I don’t half like him—has made out of that Mavick girl! If I were the girl’s mother I should want to roast him over the coals. Is there any truth in it?

“Of course I read it, as everybody did and read the crawl out, and looked for more. So it is partly our fault, but what a shame it is, the invasion of family life! Do tell me, if you happen to see her—the girl—driving in the Park or anywhere—of course you never will—what she looks like. I should like to see an unsophisticated millionaire-ess! But it is an awfully interesting problem, invented or not I’m pretty deep in psychology these days, and I’d give anything to come in contact with that girl. You would just see a woman, and you wouldn’t know. I’d see a soul. Dear me, if I’d only had the chance of that Scotch woman! Don’t you see, if we could only get to really know one mind and soul, we should know it all. I mean scientifically. I know what you are thinking, that all women have that chance. What you think is impertinent—to the subject.”

Indeed, the story of Evelyn interested everybody. It was taken up seriously in the country regions. It absorbed New York gossip for two days, and then another topic took possession of the mercurial city; but it was the sort of event to take possession of the country mind. New York millionaires get more than their share of attention in the country press at all times, but this romance became the subject of household talk and church and sewing-circle gossip, and all the women were eager for more details, and speculated endlessly about the possible character and career of the girl.

Alice wrote Philip from Rivervale that her aunt Patience was very much excited by it. “‘The poor thing,’ she said, ‘always to have somebody poking round, seeing every blessed thing you do or don’t do; it would drive me crazy. There is that comfort in not having anything much—you have yourself. You tell Philip that I hope he doesn’t go there often. I’ve no objection to his being kind to the poor thing when they meet, and doing neighborly things, but I do hope he won’t get mixed up with that set.’ It is very amusing,” Alice continued, “to hear Patience soliloquize about it and construct the whole drama.

“But you cannot say, Philip, that you are not warned (!) and you know that Patience is almost a prophet in the way she has of putting things together. Celia was here recently looking after the little house that has been rented ever since the death of her mother. I never saw her look so well and handsome, and yet there was a sort of air about her as if she had been in public a good deal and was quite capable of taking care of herself. But she was that way when she was little.

“I think she is a good friend of yours. Well, Phil, if you do ever happen to see that Evelyn in the opera, or anywhere, tell me how she looks and what she has on—if you can.”

The story had not specially interested Philip, except as it was connected with Brad’s newspaper prospects, but letters, like those referred to, received from time to time, began to arouse a personal interest. Of course merely a psychological interest, though the talk here and there at dinner-tables stimulated his desire, at least, to see the subject of them. But in this respect he was to be gratified, in the usual way things desired happen in life—that is, by taking pains to bring them about.

When Mr. Brad came back from his vacation his manner had somewhat changed. He had the air of a person who stands on firm ground. He felt that he was a personage. He betrayed this in a certain deliberation of speech, as if any remark from him now might be important. In a way he felt himself related to public affairs.

In short, he had exchanged the curiosity of the reporter for the omniscience of the editor. And for a time Philip was restrained from intruding the subject of the Mavick sensation. However, one day after dinner he ventured:

“I see, Mr. Brad, that your hit still attracts attention.” Mr. Brad looked inquiringly blank.

“I mean about the millionaire heiress. It has excited a wide interest.”

“Ah, that! Yes, it gave me a chance,” replied Brad, who was thinking only of himself.

“I’ve had several letters about it from the country.”

“Yes? Well, I suppose,” said Brad, modestly, “that a little country notoriety doesn’t hurt a person.”

Philip did not tell his interlocutor that, so far as he knew, nobody in the country had ever heard the name of Olin Brad, or knew there was such a person in existence. But he went on:

“Certainly. And, besides, there is a great curiosity to know about the girl. Did you ever see her?”

“Only in public. I don’t know Mavick personally, and for reasons,” and Mr. Brad laughed in a superior manner. “It’s easy enough to see her.”

“How?”

“Watch out for a Wagner night, and go to the opera. You’ll see where Mavick’s box is in the bill. She is pretty sure to be there, and her mother. There is nothing special about her; but her mother is still a very fascinating woman, I can tell you. You’ll find her sure on a ‘Carmen’ night, but not so sure of the girl.”

On this suggestion Philip promptly acted. The extra expense of an orchestra seat he put down to his duty to keep his family informed of anything that interested them in the city. It was a “Siegfried” night, and a full house. To describe it all would be very interesting to Alice. The Mavick box was empty until the overture was half through. Then appeared a gentleman who looked as if he were performing a public duty, a lady who looked as if she were receiving a public welcome, and seated between them a dark, slender girl, who looked as if she did not see the public at all, but only the orchestra.

Behind them, in the shadow, a middle-aged woman in plainer attire. It must be the Scotch governess. Mrs. Mavick had her eyes everywhere about the house, and was graciously bowing to her friends. Mr. Mavick coolly and unsympathetically regarded the house, quite conscious of it, but as if he were a little bored. You could not see him without being aware that he was thinking of other things, probably of far-reaching schemes. People always used to say of Mavick, when he was young and a clerk in a Washington bureau, that he looked omniscient. At least the imagination of spectators invested him with a golden hue, and regarded him through the roseate atmosphere that surrounds a many-millioned man. The girl had her eyes always on the orchestra, and was waiting for the opening of the world that lay behind the drop-curtain. Philip noticed that all the evening Mrs. Mavick paid very little attention to the stage, except when the rest of the house was so dark that she could distinguish little in it.

Fortunately for Philip, in his character of country reporter, the Mavick box was near the stage, and he could very well see what was going on in it, without wholly distracting his attention from Wagner’s sometimes very dimly illuminated creation.

There are faces and figures that compel universal attention and admiration. Commonly there is one woman in a theatre at whom all glances are leveled. It is a mystery why one face makes only an individual appeal, and an appeal much stronger than that of one universally admired. The house certainly concerned itself very little about the shy and dark heiress in the Mavick box, having with regard to her only a moment’s curiosity. But the face instantly took hold of Philip. He found it more interesting to read the play in her face than on the stage. He seemed instantly to have established a chain of personal sympathy with her. So intense was his regard that it seemed as if she must, if there is anything in the telepathic theory of the interchange of feeling, have been conscious of it. That she was, however, unconscious of any influence reaching her except from the stage was perfectly evident. She was absorbed in the drama, even when the drama was almost lost in darkness, and only an occasional grunting ejaculation gave evidence that there was at least animal life responsive to the continual pleading, suggesting, inspiring strains of the orchestra. In the semi-gloom and groping of the under-world, it would seem that the girl felt that mystery of life which the instruments were trying to interpret.

At any rate, Philip could see that she was rapt away into that other world of the past, to a practical unconsciousness of her immediate surroundings. Was it the music or the poetic idea that held her? Perhaps only the latter, for it is Wagner’s gift to reach by his creations those who have little technical knowledge of music. At any rate, she was absorbed, and so perfectly was the progress of the drama repeated in her face that Philip, always with the help of the orchestra, could trace it there.

But presently something more was evident to this sympathetic student of her face. She was not merely discovering the poet’s world, she was finding out herself. As the drama unfolded, Philip was more interested in this phase than in the observation of her enjoyment and appreciation. To see her eyes sparkle and her cheeks glow with enthusiasm during the sword-song was one thing, but it was quite another when Siegfried began his idyl, that nature and bird song of the awakening of the whole being to the passion of love. Then it was that Evelyn’s face had a look of surprise, of pain, of profound disturbance; it was suffused with blushes, coming and going in passionate emotion; the eyes no longer blazed, but were softened in a melting tenderness of sympathy, and her whole person seemed to be carried into the stream of the great life passion. When it ceased she sank back in her seat, and blushed still more, as if in fear that some one had discovered her secret.

Afterwards, when Philip had an opportunity of knowing Evelyn Mavick, and knowing her very well, and to some extent having her confidence, he used to say to himself that he had little to learn—the soul of the woman was perfectly revealed to him that night of “Siegfried.”

As the curtain went down, Mrs. Mavick, whose attention had not been specially given to the artists before, was clapping her hands in a great state of excitement.

“Why don’t you applaud, child?”

“Oh, mother,” was all the girl could say, with heaving breast and downcast eyes.

X

All winter long that face seemed to get between Philip and his work. It was an inspiration to his pen when it ran in the way of literature, but a distinct damage to progress in his profession. He had seen Evelyn again, more than once, at the opera, and twice been excited by a passing glimpse of her on a crisp, sunny afternoon in the Mavick carriage in the Park-always the same bright, eager face. So vividly personal was the influence upon him that it seemed impossible that she should not be aware of it—impossible that she could not know there was such a person in the world as Philip Burnett.

Fortunately youth can create its own world. Between the secluded daughter of millions and the law clerk was a great gulf, but this did not prevent Evelyn’s face, and, in moments of vanity, Evelyn herself, from belonging to Philip’s world. He would have denied—we have a habit of lying to ourselves quite as much as to others—that he ever dreamed of possessing her, but nevertheless she entered into his thoughts and his future in a very curious way. If he saw himself a successful lawyer, her image appeared beside him. If his story should gain the public attention, and his occasional essays come to be talked of, it was Evelyn’s interest and approval that he caught himself thinking about. And he had a conviction that she was one to be much more interested in him as a man of letters than as a lawyer. This might be true. In Philip’s story, which was very slowly maturing, the heroine fell in love with a young man simply for himself, and regardless of the fact that he was poor and had his career to make. But he knew that if his novel ever got published the critics would call it a romance, and not a transcript of real life. Had not women ceased to be romantic and ceased to indulge in vagaries of affection?

Was it that Philip was too irresolute to cut either law or literature, and go in, single-minded, for a fortune of some kind, and a place? Or was it merely that he had confidence in the winning character of his own qualities and was biding his time? If it was a question of making himself acceptable to a woman—say a woman like Evelyn—was it not belittling to his own nature to plan to win her by what he could make rather than by what he was?

Probably the vision he had of Evelyn counted for very little in his halting decision. “Why don’t you put her into a novel?” asked Mr. Brad one evening. The suggestion was a shock. Philip conveyed the idea pretty plainly that he hadn’t got so low as that yet. “Ah, you fellows think you must make your own material. You are higher-toned than old Dante.” The fact was that Philip was not really halting. Every day he was less and less in love with the law as it was practiced, and, courting reputation, he would much rather be a great author than a great lawyer. But he kept such thoughts to himself. He had inherited a very good stock of commonsense. Apparently he devoted himself to his office work, and about the occupation of his leisure hours no one was in his confidence except Celia, and now and then, when he got something into print, Alice. Professedly Celia was his critic, but really she was the necessary appreciator, for probably most writers would come to a standstill if there was no sympathetic soul to whom they could communicate, while they were fresh, the teeming fancies of their brains.

The winter wore along without any incident worth recording, but still fruitful for the future, as Philip fondly hoped. And one day chance threw in his way another sensation. Late in the afternoon of a spring day he was sent from the office to Mavick’s house with a bundle of papers to be examined and signed.

“You will be pretty sure to find him,” said Mr. Sharp, “at home about six. Wait till you do see him. The papers must be signed and go to Washington by the night mail.”

Mr. Mavick was in his study, and received Philip very civilly, as the messenger of his lawyers, and was soon busy in examining the documents, flinging now and then a short question to Philip, who sat at the table near him.

Suddenly there was a tap at the door, and, not waiting for a summons, a young girl entered, and stopped after a couple of steps.

“Oh, I didn’t know—”

“What is it, dear?” said Mr. Mavick, looking up a moment, and then down at the papers.

“Why, about the coachman’s baby. I thought perhaps—” She had a paper in her hand, and advanced towards the table, and then stopped, seeing that her father was not alone.

Philip rose involuntarily. Mr. Mavick looked up quickly. “Yes, presently. I’ve just now got a little business with Mr. Burnett.”

It was not an introduction. But for an instant the eyes of the young people met. It seemed to Philip that it was a recognition. Certainly the full, sweet eyes were bent on him for the second she stood there, before turning away and leaving the room. And she looked just as true and sweet as Philip dreamed she would look at home. He sat in a kind of maze for the quarter of an hour while Mavick was affixing his signature and giving some directions. He heard all the directions, and carried away the papers, but he also carried away something else unknown to the broker. After all, he found himself reflecting, as he walked down the avenue, the practice of the law has its good moments!

What was there in this trivial incident that so magnified it in Philip’s mind, day after day? Was it that he began to feel that he had established a personal relation with Evelyn because she had seen him? Nothing had really happened. Perhaps she had not heard his name, perhaps she did not carry the faintest image of him out of the room with her. Philip had read in romances of love at first sight, and he had personal experience of it. Commonly, in romances, the woman gives no sign of it, does not admit it to herself, denies it in her words and in her conduct, and never owns it until the final surrender. “When was the first moment you began to love me, dear?” “Why, the first moment, that day; didn’t you know it then?” This we are led to believe is common experience with the shy and secretive sex. It is enough, in a thousand reported cases, that he passed her window on horseback, and happened to look her way. But with such a look! The mischief was done. But this foundation was too slight for Philip to build such a hope on.

Looking back, we like to trace great results to insignificant, momentary incidents—a glance, a word, that turned the current of a life. There was a definite moment when the thought came to Alexander that he would conquer the world! Probably there was no such moment. The great Alexander was restless, and at no initial instant did he conceive his scheme of conquest. Nor was it one event that set him in motion. We confound events with causes. It happened on such a day. Yes, but it might have happened on another. But if Philip had not been sent on that errand to Mavick probably Evelyn would never have met him. What nonsense this is, and what an unheroic character it makes Philip! Is it supposable that, with such a romance as he had developed about the girl, he would not some time have come near her, even if she had been locked up with all the bars and bolts of a safety deposit?

The incident of this momentary meeting was, however, of great consequence. There is no such feeder of love as the imagination. And fortunate it was for Philip that his romance was left to grow in the wonderworking process of his own mind. At first there had been merely a curiosity in regard to a person whose history and education had been peculiar. Then the sight of her had raised a strange tumult in his breast, and his fancy began to play about her image, seen only at a distance and not many times, until his imagination built up a being of surpassing loveliness, and endowed with all the attractions that the poets in all ages have given to the sex that inspires them. But this sort of creation in the mind becomes vague, and related to literature only, unless it is sustained by some reality. Even Petrarch must occasionally see Laura at the church door, and dwell upon the veiled dreamer that passed and perhaps paused a moment to regard him with sad eyes. Philip, no doubt, nursed a genuine passion, which grew into an exquisite ideal in the brooding of a poetic mind, but it might in time have evaporated into thin air, remaining only as an emotional and educational experience. But this moment in Mr. Mavick’s library had given a solid body to his imaginations, and a more definite turn to his thought of her.

If, in some ordinary social chance, Philip had encountered the heiress, without this previous wonderworking of his imagination in regard to her, the probability is that he would have seen nothing especially to distinguish her from the other girls of her age and newness in social experience. Certainly the thought that she was the possessor of uncounted millions would have been, on his side, an insuperable barrier to any advance. But the imagination works wonders truly, and Philip saw the woman and not the heiress. She had become now a distinct personality; to be desired above all things on earth, and that he should see her again he had no doubt.

This thought filled his mind, and even when he was not conscious of it gave a sort of color to life, refined his perceptions, and gave him almost sensuous delight in the masterpieces of poetry which had formerly appealed only to his intellectual appreciation of beauty.

He had not yet come to a desire to share his secret with any confidant, but preferred to be much alone and muse on it, creating a world which was without evil, without doubt, undisturbed by criticism. In this so real dream it was the daily office work that seemed unreal, and the company and gossip of his club a kind of vain show. He began to frequent the picture-galleries, where there was at least an attempt to express sentiment, and to take long walks to the confines of the city-confines fringed with all the tender suggestions of the opening spring. Even the monotonous streets which he walked were illumined in his eyes, glorified by the fullness of life and achievement. “Yes,” he said again and again, as he stood on the Heights, in view of the river, the green wall of Jersey and the great metropolis spread away to the ocean gate, “it is a beautiful city! And the critics say it is commonplace and vulgar.” Dear dreamer, it is a beautiful city, and for one reason and another a million of people who have homes there think so. But take out of it one person, and it would have for you no more interest than any other huge assembly of ugly houses. How, in a lover’s eyes, the woman can transfigure a city, a landscape, a country!

Celia had come up to town for the spring exhibitions, and was lodging at the Woman’s Club. Naturally Philip saw much of her, indeed gave her all his time that the office did not demand. Her company was always for him a keen delight, an excitement, and in its way a rest. For though she always criticised, she did not nag, and just because she made no demands, nor laid any claims on him, nor ever reproached him for want of devotion, her society was delightful and never dull. They dined together at the Woman’s Club, they experimented on the theatres, they visited the galleries and the picture-shops, they took little excursions into the suburbs and came back impressed with the general cheapness and shabbiness, and they talked—talked about all they saw, all they had read, and something of what they thought. What was wanting to make this charming camaraderie perfect? Only one thing.

It may have occurred to Philip that Celia had not sufficient respect for his opinions; she regarded them simply as opinions, not as his.

One afternoon, in the Metropolitan Picture-Gallery, Philip had been expressing enthusiasm for some paintings that Celia thought more sentimental than artistic, and this reminded her that he was getting into a general way of admiring everything.

“You didn’t use, Philip, to care so much for pictures.”

“Oh, I’ve been seeing more.”

“But you don’t say you like that? Look at the drawing.”

“Well, it tells the story.”

“A story is nothing; it’s the way it’s told. This is not well told.”

“It pleases me. Look at that girl.”

“Yes, she is domestic. I admit that. But I’m not sure I do not prefer an impressionistic girl, whom you can’t half see, to such a thorough bread-and-butter miss as this.”

“Which would you rather live with?”

“I’m not obliged to live with either. In fact, I’d rather live with myself. If it’s art, I want art; if it’s cooking and sewing, I want cooking and sewing. If the artist knew enough, he’d paint a woman instead of a cook.”

“Then you don’t care for real life?”

“Real life! There is no such thing. You are demonstrating that. You transform this uninteresting piece of domesticity into an ideal woman, ennobling her surroundings. She doesn’t do it. She is level with them.”

“It would be a dreary world if we didn’t idealize things.”

“So it would. And that is what I complain of in such ‘art’ as this. I don’t know what has got into you, Phil. I never saw you so exuberant. You are pleased with everything. Have you had a rise in the office? Have you finished your novel?”

“Neither. No rise. No novel. But Tweedle is getting friendly. Threw an extra job in my way the other day. Do you think I’d better offer my novel, when it is done, to Tweedle?”

“Tweedle, indeed!”

“Well, one of our clients is one of the great publishing firms, and Tweedle often dines with the publisher.”

“For shame, Phil!”

Philip laughed. “At any rate, that is no meaner than a suggestion of Brad’s. He says if I will just weave into it a lot of line scenery, and set my people traveling on the great trunk, stopping off now and then at an attractive branch, the interested railroads would gladly print it and scatter it all over the country.”

“No doubt,” said Celia, sinking down upon a convenient seat. “I begin to feel as if there were no protection for anything. And, Phil, that great monster of a Mavick, who is eating up the country, isn’t he a client also?”

“Occasionally only. A man like Mavick has his own lawyers and judges.”

“Did you ever see him?”

“Just glimpses.”

“And that daughter of his, about whom such a fuss was made, I suppose you never met her?”

“Oh, as I wrote you, at the opera; saw her in her box.”

“And—?”

“Oh, she’s rather a little thing; rather dark, I told you that; seems devoted to music.”

“And you didn’t tell what she wore.”

“Why, what they all wear. Something light and rather fluffy.”

“Just like a man. Is she pretty?”

“Ye-e-s; has that effect. You’d notice her eyes.” If Philip had been frank he would have answered,

“I don’t know. She’s simply adorable,” and Celia would have understood all about it.

“And probably doesn’t know anything. Yes, highly educated? I heard that. But I’m getting tired of ‘highly educated’; I see so many of them. I’ve been making them now for years. Perhaps I’m one of them. And where am I? Don’t interrupt. I tell you it is a relief to come across a sweet, womanly ignoramus. What church does she go to?”

“Who?”

“That Mavick girl.”

“St. Thomas’, I believe.”

“That’s good—that’s devotional. I suppose you go there too, being brought up a Congregationalist?”

“At vespers, sometimes. But, Celia, what is the matter with you? I thought you didn’t care—didn’t care to belong to anything?”

“I? I belong to everything. Didn’t I write you reams about my studies in psychology? I’ve come to one conclusion. There are only two persons in the world who stand on a solid foundation, the Roman Catholic and the Agnostic. The Roman Catholic knows everything, the Agnostic doesn’t know anything.”

Philip was never certain when the girl was bantering him; nor, when she was in earnest, how long she would remain in that mind and mood. So he ventured, humorously:

“The truth is, Celia, that you know too much to be either. You are what they call emancipated.”

“Emancipated!” And Celia sat up energetically, as if she were now really interested in the conversation. “Become the slave of myself instead of the slave of somebody else! That’s the most hateful thing to be, emancipated. I never knew a woman who said she was emancipated who wasn’t in some ridiculous folly or another. Now, Phil, I’m going to tell you something. I can tell you. You know I’ve been striving to have a career, to get out of myself somehow, and have a career for myself. Well, today—mind, I don’t say tomorrow”—(and there was a queer little smile on her lips)—“I think I will just try to be good to people and things in general, in a human way.”

“And give up education?”

“No, no. I get my living by education, just as you do, or hope to do, by law or by letters; it’s all the same. But wait. I haven’t finished what I was going to say. The more I go into psychology, trying to find out about my mind and mind generally, the more mysterious everything is. Do you know, Phil, that I’m getting into the supernatural? You can’t help running into it. For me, I am not side-tracked by any of the nonsense about magnetism and telepathy and mind-reading and other psychic imponderabilities. Isn’t it queer that the further we go into science the deeper we go into mystery?

“Now, don’t be shocked, I mean it reverently, just as an illustration. Do you think any one knows really anything more about the operation in the world of electricity than he does about the operation of the Holy Ghost? And yet people talk about science as if it were something they had made themselves.”

“But, Celia—”

“No, I’ve talked enough. We are in this world and not in some other, and I have to make my living. Let’s go into the other room and see the old masters. They, at least, knew how to paint—to paint passion and character; some of them could paint soul. And then, Phil, I shall be hungry. Talking about the mind always makes me hungry.”

XI

Philip was always welcome at his uncle’s house in Rivervale. It was, of course, his home during his college life, and since then he was always expected for his yearly holiday. The women of the house made much of him, waited on him, deferred to him, petted him, with a flattering mingling of tenderness to a little boy and the respect due to a man who had gone into the world. Even Mr. Maitland condescended to a sort of equality in engaging Philip in conversation about the state of the country and the prospects of business in New York.

It was July. When Philip went to sleep at night—he was in the front chamber reserved for guests—the loud murmur of the Deerfield was in his ears, like a current bearing him away into sweet sleep and dreams in a land of pleasant adventures. Only in youth come such dreams. Later on the sophisticated mind, left to its own guidance in the night, wanders amid the complexities of life, calling up in confusion scenes long forgotten or repented of, images only registered by a subconscious process, dreams to perplex, irritate, and excite.

In the morning the same continuous murmur seemed to awake him into a peaceful world. Through the open window came in the scents of summer, the freshness of a new day. How sweet and light was the air! It was indeed the height of summer. The corn, not yet tasseled, stood in green flexible ranks, moved by the early breeze. In the river-meadows haying had just begun. Fields of timothy and clover, yellowing to ripeness, took on a fresh bloom from the dew, and there was an odor of new-mown grass from the sections where the scythes had been. He heard the call of the crow from the hill, the melody of the bobolink along the meadow-brook; indeed, the birds of all sorts were astir, skimming along the ground or rising to the sky, keeping watch especially over the garden and the fruit-trees, carrying food to their nests, or teaching their young broods to fly and to chirp the songs of summer. And from the woodshed the shrill note of the scythe under the action of the grindstone. No such vivid realization of summer as that.

Philip stole out the unused front door without disturbing the family. Whither? Where would a boy be likely to go the first thing? To the barn, the great cavernous barn, its huge doors now wide open, the stalls vacant, the mows empty, the sunlight sifting in through the high shadowy spaces. How much his life had been in that barn! How he had stifled and scrambled mowing hay in those lofts! On the floor he had hulled heaps of corn, thrashed oats with a flail—a noble occupation—and many a rainy day had played there with girls and boys who could not now exactly describe the games or well recall what exciting fun they were. There were the racks where he put the fodder for cattle and horses, and there was the cutting-machine for the hay and straw and for slicing the frozen turnips on cold winter mornings.

In the barn-yard were the hens, just as usual, walking with measured step, scratching and picking in the muck, darting suddenly to one side with an elevated wing, clucking, chattering, jabbering endlessly about nothing. They did not seem to mind him as he stood in the open door. But the rooster, in his oriental iridescent plumage, jumped upon a fence-post and crowed defiantly, in warning that this was his preserve. They seemed like the same hens, yet Philip knew they were all strangers; all the hens and flaunting roosters he knew had long ago gone to Thanksgiving. The hen is, or should be, an annual. It is never made a pet. It forms no attachments. Man is no better acquainted with the hen, as a being, than he was when the first chicken was hatched. Its business is to live a brief chicken life, lay, and be eaten. And this reminded Philip that his real occupation was hunting hens’ eggs. And this he did, in the mows, in the stalls, under the floor-planks, in every hidden nook. The hen’s instinct is to be orderly, and have a secluded nest of her own, and bring up a family. But in such a communistic body it is a wise hen who knows her own chicken. Nobody denies to the hen maternal instincts or domestic proclivities, but what an ill example is a hen community!

And then Philip climbed up the hill, through the old grass-plot and the orchard, to the rocks and the forest edge, and the great view. It had more meaning to him than when he was a boy, and it was more beautiful. In a certain peaceful charm, he had seen nothing anywhere in the world like it. Partly this was because his boyish impressions, the first fresh impressions of the visible world, came back to him; but surely it was very beautiful. More experienced travelers than Philip felt its unique charm.

When he descended, Alice was waiting to breakfast with him. Mrs. Maitland declared, with an approving smile on her placid, aging face, that he was the same good-for-nothing boy. But Alice said, as she sat down to the little table with Philip, “It is different, mother, with us city folks.” They were in the middle room, and the windows opened to the west upon the river-meadows and the wooded hills beyond, and through one a tall rose-bush was trying to thrust its fragrant bloom.

What a dainty breakfast! Alice flushed with pleasure. It was so good of him to come to them. Had he slept well? Did it seem like home at all? Philip’s face showed that it was home without the need of saying so. Such coffee-yes, a real aroma of the berry! Just a little more, would he have? And as Alice raised the silver pitcher, there was a deep dimple in her sweet cheek. How happy she was! And then the butter, so fresh and cool, and the delicious eggs—by the way, he had left a hatful in the kitchen as he came in. Alice explained that she did not make the eggs. And then there was the journey, the heat in the city, the grateful sight of the Deerfield, the splendid morning, the old barn, the watering-trough, the view from the hill everything just as it used to be.

“Dear Phil, it is so nice to have you here,” and there were tears in Alice’s eyes, she was so happy.

After breakfast Philip strolled down the country road through the village. How familiar was every step of the way!—the old houses jutting out at the turns in the road; the glimpse of the river beyond the little meadow where Captain Rice was killed; the spring under the ledge over which the snap-dragon grew; the dilapidated ranks of fence smothered in vines and fireweeds; the cottages, with flower-pots in front; the stores, with low verandas ornamented with boxes and barrels; the academy in its green on the hill; the old bridge over which the circus elephant dared not walk; the new and the old churches, with rival steeples; and, not familiar, the new inn.

And he knew everybody, young and old, at doorways, in the fields or gardens, and had for every one a hail and a greeting. How he enjoyed it all, and his self-consciousness added to his pleasure, as he swung along in his well-fitting city clothes, broad-shouldered and erect—it is astonishing how much a tailor can do for a man who responds to his efforts. It is a pleasure to come across such a hero as this in real life, and not have to invent him, as the saying is, out of the whole cloth. Philip enjoyed the world, and he enjoyed himself, because it was not quite his old self, the farmer’s boy going on an errand. There must be knowledge all along the street that he was in the great law office of Hunt, Sharp & Tweedle. And, besides, Philip’s name must be known to all the readers of magazines in the town as a writer, a name in more than one list of “contributors.” That was fame. Translated, however, into country comprehension it was something like this, if he could have heard the comments after he had passed by:

“Yes, that’s Phil Burnett, sure enough; but I’d hardly know him; spruced up mightily. I wonder what he’s at?”

“I heard he was down in New York trying to law it. I heard he’s been writin’ some for newspapers. Accordin’ to his looks, must pay a durn sight better’n farmin’.”

“Well, I always said that boy wa’n’t no skeezics.”

Almost the first question Philip asked Alice on his return was about the new inn, the Peacock Inn.

“There seemed a good deal of stir about it as I passed.”

“Why, I forgot to tell you about it. It’s the great excitement. Rivervale is getting known. The Mavicks are there. I hear they’ve taken pretty much the whole of it.”

“The Mavicks?

“Yes, the New York Mavicks, that you wrote us about, that were in the paper.”

“How long have they been there?”

“A week. There is Mrs. Mavick and her daughter, and the governess, and two maids, and a young fellow in uniform—yes, livery—and a coachman in the same, and a stableful of horses and carriages. It upset the village like a circus. And they say there’s a French chef in white cap and apron, who comes to the side-door and jabbers to the small boys like fireworks.”

“How did it come about?”

“Naturally, I guess; a city family wanting a quiet place for summer in the country. But you will laugh. Patience first discovered it. One day, sitting at the window, she saw a two-horse buggy driven by the landlord of the Peacock, and a gentleman by his side. ‘Well, I wonder who that is-city man certainly. And wherever is he going? May be a railroad man. But there is nothing the matter with the railroad. Shouldn’t wonder if he is going to see the tunnel. If it was just that, the landlord wouldn’t drive him; he’d send a man. And they keep stopping and pointing and looking round. No, it isn’t the railroad, it’s scenery. And what can a man like that want with scenery?

“He does look like a railroad man. It may be tunnel, but it isn’t all tunnel. When the team came back in the afternoon, Patience was again at the window; she had heard meantime from Jabez that a city man was stopping at the Peacock. There he goes, and looking round more than ever. They’ve stopped by the bridge and the landlord is pointing out. It’s not tunnel, it’s scenery. I tell you, he is a city boarder. Not that he cares about scenery; it’s for his family. City families are always trying to find a grand new place, and he has heard of Rivervale and the Peacock Inn. Maybe the tunnel had something to do with it.”

“Why, it’s like second sight.”

“No, Patience says it’s just judgment. And she generally hits it. At any rate, the family is here.”

The explanation of their being there—it seemed to Philip providential—was very simple. Mr. Mavick had plans about the Hoosac Tunnel that required him to look at it. Mrs. Mavick took advantage of this to commission him to look at a little inn in a retired village of which she had heard, and to report on scenery and climate. Warm days and cool nights and simplicity was her idea. Mavick reported that the place seemed made for the family.

Evelyn was not yet out, but she was very nearly out, and after the late notoriety Mrs. Mavick dreaded the regular Newport season. And, in the mood of the moment, she was tired of the Newport palace. She always said that she liked simplicity—a common failing among people who are not compelled to observe it. Perhaps she thought she was really fond of rural life and country ways. As she herself said,

“If you have a summer cottage at Newport or Lenox, it is necessary to go off somewhere and rest.” And then it would be good for Evelyn to live out-of-doors and see the real country, and, as for herself, as she looked in the mirror, “I shall drink milk and go to bed early. Henderson used to say that a month in New Hampshire made another woman of me.”

Oh, to find a spot where we could be undisturbed, alone and unknown. That was the program. But Carmen simply could not be anywhere content if she were unnoticed. It was not so easy to give up daily luxury, and habits of ease at the expense of attendants, or the ostentation which had become a second nature. Therefore the “establishment” went along with her to Rivervale, and the shy, modest little woman, who had dropped down into the country simplicity that she so dearly loved, greatly enjoyed the sensation that her coming produced. It needed no effort on her part to produce the sensation. The carriage, and coachman and footman in livery, would have been sufficient; and then the idea of one family being rich enough to take the whole hotel!

The liveries, the foreign cook in his queer cap and apron, and all the goings-on at the Peacock were the inexhaustible topic of talk in every farmhouse for ten miles around. Rivervale was a self-respecting town, and principled against luxury and self-indulgence, and judged with a just and severe judgment the world of fashion and of the grasping, wicked millionaires. And now this world with all its vain show had plumped down in the midst of them. Those who had traveled and seen the ostentation of cities smiled a superior smile at the curiosity and wonder exhibited, but even those who had never seen the like were cautious about letting their surprise appear. Especially in the presence of fashion and wealth would the independent American citizen straighten his backbone, reassuring himself that he was as good as anybody. To be sure, people flew to windows when the elegant equipage dashed by, and everybody found frequent occasion to drive or walk past the Peacock Inn. It was only the novelty of it, in a place that rather lacked novelties.

And yet there prevailed in the community a vague sense that millions were there, and a curious expectation of some individual benefit from them. All the young berry-pickers were unusually active, and poured berries into the kitchen door of the inn. There was not a housewife who was not a little more anxious about the product of her churning; not a farmer who did not think that perhaps cord-wood would rise, that there would be a better demand for garden “sass,” and more market for chickens, and who did not regard with more interest his promising colt. When he drove to the village his rig was less shabby and slovenly in appearance. The young fellows who prided themselves upon a neat buggy and a fast horse made their turnouts shine, and dashed past the inn with a self-conscious air. Even the stores began to “slick up” and arrange their miscellaneous notions more attractively, and one of them boldly put in a window a placard, “Latest New York Style.” When the family went to the Congregational church on Sunday not the slightest notice was taken of them—though every woman could have told to the last detail what the ladies wore—but some of the worshipers were for the first time a little nervous about the performance of the choir, and the deacons heard the sermon chiefly with reference to what a city visitor would think of it.

Mrs. Mavick was quite equal to the situation. In the church she was devout, in the village she was affable and friendly. She made acquaintances right and left, and took a simple interest in everybody and everything. She was on easy terms with the landlord, who declared, “There is a woman with no nonsense in her.” She chatted with the farmers who stopped at the inn door, she bought things at the stores that she did not want, and she speedily discovered Aunt Hepsy, and loved to sit with her in the little shop and pick up the traditions and the gossip of the neighborhood. And she did not confine her angelic visits to the village. On one pretense and another she made her way into every farmhouse that took her fancy, penetrated the kitchens and dairies, and got, as she told McDonald, into the inner life of the people.

She must see the grave of Captain Moses Rice. And on this legitimate errand she one day carried her fluttering attractiveness and patchouly into the Maitland house. Mrs. Maitland was civil, but no more. Alice was civil but reserved—a great many people, she said, came to see the graves in the old orchard. But Mrs. Mavick was not a bit abashed. She expressed herself delighted with everything. It was such a rest, such a perfectly lovely country, and everybody was so hospitable! And Aunt Hepsy had so interested her in the history of the region! But it was difficult to get her talk responded to.

However, when Miss Patience came in she made better headway. She had heard so much of Miss Maitland’s apartments. She herself was interested in decorations. She had tried to do something in her New York home. But there were so many ideas and theories, and it was so hard to be natural and artificial at the same time. She had no doubt she could get some new ideas from Miss Maitland. Would it be asking too much to see her apartments? She really felt like a stranger nowhere in Rivervale. Patience was only too delighted, and took her into her museum of natural history, art, religion, and vegetation.

“She might have gone to the graveyard without coming into the house,” Alice remarked.

“Oh, well,” said her mother, “I think she is very amusing. You shouldn’t be so exclusive, Alice.”

“Mother, I do believe she paints.”

With Patience, Mrs. Mavick felt on surer ground.

“How curious, how very curious and delightful it is! Such knowledge of nature, such art in arrangement.”

“Oh, I just put them up,” said Patience, “as I thought they ought by rights to be put up.”

“That’s it. And you have combined everything here. You have given me an idea. In our house we have a Japan room, and an Indian room, and a Chinese room, and an Otaheite, and I don’t know what—Egyptian, Greek, and not one American, not a really American. That is, according to American ideas, for you have everything in these two rooms. I shall write to Mr. Mavick.” (Mr. Mavick never received the letter.)

When she came away it was with a profusion of thanks, and repeated invitations to drop in at the inn. Alice accompanied her to the first stone that marked the threshold of the side door, and was bowing her away, when Mr. Philip swung over the fence by the woodshed, with a shot-gun on his shoulder, and swinging in his left hand a gray squirrel by its bushy tail, and was immediately in front of the group.

“Ah!” involuntarily from Mrs. Mavick. An introduction was inevitable.

“My cousin, Mr. Burnett, Mrs. Mavick.” Philip raised his cap and bowed.

“A hunter, I see.”

“Hardly, madam. In vacations I like to walk in the woods with a gun.”

“Then you are not—”

“No,” said Philip, smiling, “unfortunately I cannot do this all the time.”

“You are of the city, then?”

“With the firm of Hunt, Sharp & Tweedle.”

“Ah, my husband knows them, I believe.”

“I have seen Mr. Mavick,” and Philip bowed again.

“How lucky!”

Mrs. Mavick had an eye for a fine young fellow—she never denied that—and Philip’s manly figure and easy air were not lost on her. Presently she said:

“We are here for a good part of the summer. Mr. Mavick’s business keeps him in the city and we have to poke about a good deal alone. Now, Miss Alice, I am so glad I have met your cousin. Perhaps he will show us some of the interesting places and the beauties of the country he knows so well.” And she looked sideways at Philip.

“Yes, he knows the country,” said Alice, without committing herself.

“I am sure I shall be delighted to do what I can for you whenever you need my services,” said Philip, who had reasons for wishing to know the Mavicks which Alice did not share.

“That’s so good of you! Excursions, picnics oh, we will arrange. You must come and help me arrange. And I hope,” with a smile to Alice, “you can persuade your cousin to join us sometimes.”

Alice bowed, they all bowed, and Mrs. Mavick said au revoir, and went swinging her parasol down the driveway. Then she turned and called back, “This is the first long walk I have taken.” And then she said to herself, “Rather stiff, except the young man and the queer old maid. But what a pretty girl the younger must have been ten years ago! These country flowers!”

XII

Mrs. Mavick thought herself fortunate in finding, in the social wilderness of Rivervale, such a presentable young gentleman as Philip. She had persuaded herself that she greatly enjoyed her simple intercourse with the inhabitants, and she would have said that she was in deep sympathy with their lives. No doubt in New York she would relate her summer adventures as something very amusing, but for the moment this adaptable woman seemed to herself in a very ingenuous, receptive, and sympathetic state of mind. Still, there was a limit to the entertaining power of Aunt Hepsy, which was perceived when she began to repeat her annals of the neighborhood, and to bring forward again and again the little nuggets of wisdom which she had evolved in the small circle of her experience. And similarly Mrs. Mavick became aware that there was a monotony in the ideas brought forward by the farmers and the farmers’ wives, whether in the kitchen or the best room, which she lighted up by her gracious presence, that it was possible to be tired of the most interesting “peculiarities” when once their novelty was exhausted, and that so-called “characters” in the country fail to satisfy the requirements of intimate or long companionship. Their world is too narrowly circumscribed.

The fact that Philip was a native of the place, and so belonged to a world that was remote from her own, made her free to seek his aid in making the summer pass agreeably without incurring any risk of social obligations. Besides, when she had seen more of him, she experienced a good deal of pleasure in his company. His foreign travel, his reading, his life in the city, offered many points of mutual interest, and it was a relief to her to get out of the narrow range of topics in the provincial thought, and to have her allusions understood. Philip, on his part, was not slow to see this, or to perceive that in the higher intellectual ranges, the serious topics which occupied the attention of the few cultivated people in the neighborhood, Mrs. Mavick had little interest or understanding, though there was nothing she did not profess an interest in when occasion required. Philip was not of a suspicious nature, and it may not have occurred to him that Mrs. Mavick was simply amusing herself, as she would do with any agreeable man, young or old, who fell in her way, and would continue to do so if she reached the age of ninety.

On the contrary, it never seemed to occur to Mrs. Mavick, who was generally suspicious, that Philip was making himself agreeable to the mother of Evelyn. In her thought Evelyn was still a child, in leading-strings, and would be till she was formally launched, and the social gulf between the great heiress and the law clerk and poor writer was simply impassable. All of which goes to show that the most astute women are not always the wisest.

To one person in Rivervale the coming of Mrs. Mavick and her train of worldliness was unwelcome. It disturbed the peaceful simplicity of the village, and it was likely to cloud her pleasure in Philip’s visit. She felt that Mrs. Mavick was taking him away from the sweet serenity of their life, and that in everything she said or did there was an element of unrest and excitement. She was careful, however, not to show any of this apprehension to Philip; she showed it only by an increased affectionate interest in him and his concerns, and in trying to make the old home more dear to him. Mrs. Mavick was loud in her praise of Alice to her cousin, and sought to win her confidence, but she was, after all, a little shy of her, and probably would have characterized her to a city friend as a sort of virgin in the Bible.

It so happened that day after day went by without giving Philip anything more than passing glimpses of Evelyn, when she was driving with her mother or her governess. Yet Rivervale never seemed so ravishingly beautiful to all his senses. Surely it was possessed by a spirit of romance and poetry, which he had never perceived before, and he wasted a good deal of time in gazing on the river, on the gracious meadows, on the graceful contours of the hills. When he was a lad, in the tree-top, there had been something stimulating and almost heroic in the scene, which awakened his ambition. Now it was the idyllic beauty that took possession of him, transformed as it was by the presence of a woman, that supreme interpreter of nature to a youth. And yet scarcely a woman—rather a vision of a girl, impressible still to all the influences of such a scene and to the most delicate suggestions of unfolding life. Probably he did not analyze this feeling, but it was Evelyn he was thinking of when he admired the landscape, breathed with exhilaration the fresh air, and watched the white clouds sail along the blue vault; and he knew that if she were suddenly to leave the valley all the light would go out of it and the scene would be flat to his eyes and torturing to his memory.

Mrs. Mavick he encountered continually in the village. He had taken many little strolls with her to this or that pretty point of view, they had exchanged reminiscences of foreign travel, and had dipped a little into current popular books, so that they had come to be on easy, friendly terms. Philip’s courtesy and deference, and a certain wit and humor of suggestion applied to ordinary things, put him more and more on a good footing with her, so much so that she declared to McDonald that really young Burnett was a genuine “find” in the country.

It seems a pity that the important events in our lives are so commonplace. Philip’s meeting with Evelyn, so long thought of and dramatized in his mind, was not in the least as he had imagined it. When one morning he went to the Peacock Inn at the summons of Mrs. Mavick, in order to lay out a plan of campaign, he found Evelyn and her governess seated on the veranda, with their books. It was Evelyn who rose first and came forward, without, so far as Philip could see, the least embarrassment of recognition.

“Mr. Burnett? Mamma will be here in a moment. This is our friend, Miss McDonald.”

The girl’s morning costume was very simple, and in her short walking-skirt she seemed younger even than in the city. She spoke and moved—Philip noticed that—without the least self-consciousness, and she had a way of looking her interlocutor frankly in the eyes, or, as Philip expressed it, “flashing” upon him.

Philip bowed to the governess, and, still standing and waving his hand towards the river, hoped they liked Rivervale, and then added:

“I see you can read in the country.”

“We pretend to,” said Evelyn, who had resumed her seat and indicated a chair for Philip, “but the singing of that river, and the bobolinks in the meadow, and the light on the hills are almost too much for us. Don’t you think, McDonald, it is like Scotland?”

“It would be,” the governess replied, “if it rained when it didn’t mist, and there were moors and heather, and—”

“Oh, I didn’t mean all that, but a feeling like that, sweet and retired and sort of lonesome?”

“Perhaps Miss McDonald means,” said Philip, “that there isn’t much to feel here except what you see.”

Miss McDonald looked sharply around at Philip and remarked: “Yes, that’s just it. It is very lovely, like almost any outdoors, if you will give yourself up to it. You remember, Evelyn, how fascinating the Arizona desert was? But there was a romantic addition to the colored desolation because the Spaniards and the Jesuits had been there. Now this place lacks traditions, legends, romance. You have to bring your romance with you.”

“And that is the reason you read here?”

“One reason. Especially romances. This charming scenery and the summer sounds of running water and birds make a nice accompaniment to the romance.”

“But mamma says,” Evelyn interrupted, “there is plenty of legend here, and tradition and flavor, Indians and early settlers, and even Aunt Hepsy.”

“Well, I confess they don’t appeal to me. And as for Indians, Parkman’s descriptions of those savages made me squirm. And I don’t believe there was much more romance about the early settlers than about their descendants. Isn’t it true, Mr. Burnett, that you must have a human element to make any country interesting?”

Philip glanced at Evelyn, whose bright face was kindled with interest in the discussion, and thought, “Good heavens! if there is not human interest here, I don’t know where to look for it,” but he only said:

“Doubtless.”

“And why don’t you writers do something about it? It is literature that does it, either in Scotland or Judea.”

“Well,” said Philip, stoutly, “they are doing something. I could name half a dozen localities, even sections of country, that travelers visit with curiosity just because authors have thrown that glamour over them. But it is hard to create something out of nothing. It needs time.”

“And genius,” Miss McDonald interjected.

“Of course, but it took time to transform a Highland sheep-stealer into a romantic personage.”

Miss McDonald laughed. “That is true. Take a modern instance. Suppose Evangeline had lived in this valley! Or some simple Gretchen about whose simple story all the world is in sympathy!”

“Or,” thought Philip, “some Evelyn.” But he replied, looking at Evelyn, “I believe that any American community usually resents being made the scene of a romance, especially if it is localized by any approach to reality.”

“Isn’t that the fault mostly of the writer, who vulgarizes his material?”

“The realists say no. They say that people dislike to see themselves as they are.”

“Very likely,” said Miss McDonald; “no one sees himself as others see him, and probably the poet who expressed the desire to do so was simply attitudinizing.—[Robert Burns: ‘O wha gift the Giftie gie us; to see o’rselves as others see us.’ Ed.]—By the way, Mr. Burnett, you know there is one place of sentiment, religious to be sure, not far from here. I hope we can go some day to see the home of the ‘Mountain Miller.’”

“Yes, I know the place. It is beyond the river, up that steep road running into the sky, in the next adjoining hill town. I doubt if you find any one there who lays it much to heart. But you can see the mill.”

“What is the Mountain Miller?” asked Evelyn.

“A tract that, when I was a girl,” answered Miss McDonald, “used to be bound up with ‘The Dairyman’s Daughter’ and ‘The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain.’ It was the first thing that interested me in New England.”

“Well,” said Philip, “it isn’t much. Just a tract. But it was written by Parson Halleck, a great minister and a sort of Pope in this region for fifty years. It is, so far as I know, the only thing of his that remains.”

This tractarian movement was interrupted by the arrival of Mrs. Mavick.

“Good-morning, Mr. Burnett. I’ve been down to see Jenkins about his picnic wagon. Carries six, besides the driver and my man, and the hampers. So, you see, Miss Alice will have to go. We couldn’t go rattling along half empty. I’ll go up and see her this afternoon. So, that’s settled. Now about the time and place. You are the director. Let’s sit down and plan it out. It looks like good weather for a week.”

“Miss McDonald says she wants to see the Mountain Miller,” said Philip, with a smile.

“What’s that? A monument like your Pulpit Rock?”

“No, a tract about a miller.”

“Ah, something religious. I never heard of it. Well, perhaps we had better begin with something secular, and work round to that.”

So an excursion was arranged for the next day. And as Philip walked home, thinking how brilliant Evelyn had been in their little talk, he began to dramatize the excursion.

All excursions are much alike, exhilarating in the outset, rarely up to expectation in the object, wearisome in the return; but, nevertheless, delightful in the memory, especially if attended with some hardship or slight disaster. To be free, in the open air, and for a day unconventional and irresponsible, is the sufficient justification of a country picnic; but its common attraction is in the opportunity for bringing young persons of the opposite sex into natural and unrestrained relations. To Philip it was the first time in his life that a picnic had ever seemed a defensible means of getting rid of a day.

The two persons to whom this excursion was most novel and exciting were Evelyn and the elder maiden, Alice, who sat together and speedily developed a sympathy with each other in the enjoyment of the country, and in a similar poetic temperament, very shy on the part of Alice and very frank on the part of Evelyn. The whole wild scene along the river was quite as novel to Alice as to the city girl, because, although she was familiar with every mile of it and had driven through it a hundred times, she had never in all her life before, of purpose, gone to see it. No doubt she had felt its wildness and beauty, but now for the first time she looked at it as scenery, as she might have looked at a picture in a gallery. And in the contagion of Evelyn’s outspoken enthusiasm she was no longer afraid to give timid expression to the latent poetry in her own soul. And daring to express this, she seemed to herself for the first time to realize vividly the nobility and grace of the landscape. And yet there was a difference in the appreciation of the two. More widely read and traveled, Evelyn’s imagination took a wider range of comparison and of admiration, she was appealed to by the large features and the grandiose effects; while Alice noted more the tenderer aspects, the wayside flowers and bushes, the exotic-looking plants, which she longed to domesticate in what might be called the Sunday garden on the terraces in front of her house. For it is in these little cultivated places by the doorstep, places of dreaming in the summer hours after meeting and at sunset, that the New England maiden experiences something of that tender religious sentiment which was not much fed in the barrenness of the Congregational meeting-house.

The Pulpit Rock, in the rough pasture land of Zoar, was reached by a somewhat tedious climb from the lonely farmhouse, in a sheltered nook, through straggling woods and gray pastures. It was a vast exposed surface rising at a slight angle out of the grass and undergrowth. Along the upper side was a thin line of bushes, and, pushing these aside, the observer was always startled at the unexpected scene—as it were the raising of a curtain upon another world. He stood upon the edge of a sheer precipice of a thousand feet, and looked down upon a green amphitheatre through the bottom of which the brawling river, an amber thread in the summer foliage, seemed trying to get an outlet from this wilderness cul de sac. From the edge of this precipice the first impulse was to start back in surprise and dread, but presently the observer became reassured of its stability, and became fascinated by the lonesome wildness of the scene.

“Why is it called Pulpit Rock?” asked Mrs. Mavick; “I see no pulpit.”

“I suppose,” said Philip, “the name was naturally suggested to a religious community, whose poetic images are mainly Biblical, and who thought it an advantageous place for a preacher to stand, looking down upon a vast congregation in the amphitheatre.”

“So it is,” exclaimed Evelyn. “I can see John the Baptist standing here now, and hear his voice crying in the wilderness.”

“Very likely,” said Mrs. Mavick, persisting in her doubt, “of course in Zoar. Anywhere else in the world it would be called the Lover’s Leap.”

“That is odd,” said Alice; “there was a party of college girls came here two years ago and made up a story about it which was printed, how an Indian maiden pursued by a white man ran up this hill as if she had been a deer, disappeared from his sight through these bushes, and took the fatal leap. They called it the Indian Maiden’s Rock. But it didn’t take. It will always be Pulpit Rock.”

“So you see, Miss McDonald,” said Philip, “that writers cannot graft legends on the old stock.”

“That depends upon the writer,” returned the Scotch woman, shortly. “I didn’t see the schoolgirl’s essay.”

When the luncheon was disposed of, with the usual adaptation to nomadic conditions, and the usual merriment and freedom of personal comment, and the wit that seems so brilliant in the open air and so flat in print, Mrs. Mavick declared that she was tired by the long climb and the unusual excitement.

“Perhaps it is the Pulpit,” she said, “but I am sleepy; and if you young people will amuse yourselves, I will take a nap under that tree.”

Presently, also, Alice and the governess withdrew to the edge of the precipice, and Evelyn and Philip were left to the burden of entertaining each other. It might have been an embarrassing situation but for the fact that all the rest of the party were in sight, that the girl had not the least self-consciousness, having had no experience to teach her that there was anything to be timid about in one situation more than in another, and that Philip was so absolutely content to be near Evelyn and hear her voice that there was room for nothing else in his thought. But rather to his surprise, Evelyn made no talk about the situation or the day, but began at once with something in her mind, a directness of mental operation that he found was characteristic of her.

“It seems to me, Mr. Burnett, that there is something of what Miss McDonald regards as the lack of legend and romance in this region in our life generally.”

“I fancy everybody feels that who travels much elsewhere. You mean life seems a little thin, as the critics say?”

“Yes, lacks color and background. But, you see, I have no experience. Perhaps it’s owing to Miss McDonald. I cannot get the plaids and tartans and Jacobins and castles and what-not out of my head. Our landscapes are just landscapes.”

“But don’t you think we are putting history and association into them pretty fast?”

“Yes, I know, but that takes a long time. I mean now. Take this lovely valley and region, how easily it could be made romantic.”

“Not so very easy, I fancy.”

“Well, I was thinking about it last night.” And then, as if she saw a clear connection between this and what she was going to say, “Miss McDonald says, Mr. Burnett, that you are a writer.”

“I? Why, I’m… I’m—a lawyer.”

“Of course, that’s business. That reminds me of what papa said once: ‘It’s lucky there is so much law, or half the world, including the lawyers, wouldn’t have anything to do, trying to get around it and evade it.’ And you won’t mind my repeating it—I was a mite of a girl—I said, ‘Isn’t that rather sophistical, papa?’ And mamma put me down’—It seems to me, child, you are using pretty big words.’”

They both laughed. But suddenly Evelyn added:

“Why don’t you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Write a story about it—what Miss McDonald calls ‘invest the region with romance.’”

The appeal was very direct, and it was enforced by those wonderful eyes that seemed to Philip to discern his powers, as he felt them, and his ambitions, and to express absolute confidence in him. His vanity was touched in its most susceptible spot. Here seemed to be a woman, nay, a soul, who understood him, understood him even better than Celia, the lifelong confidante. It is a fatal moment for men and women, that in which they feel the subtle flattery of being understood by one of the opposite sex. Philip’s estimation of himself rose ‘pari passu’ with his recognition of the discernment and intellectual quality of the frank and fascinating girl who seemed to believe in him. But he restrained himself and only asked, after a moment of apparent reflection upon the general proposition:

“Well, Miss Mavick, you have been here some time. Have you discovered any material for such use?”

“Why, perhaps not, and I might not know what to do with it if I had. But perhaps you don’t mean what I mean. I mean something fitting the setting. Not the domestic novel. Miss McDonald says we are vulgarized in all our ideals by so much domesticity. She says that Jennie Deans would have been just an ordinary, commonplace girl but for Walter Scott.”

“Then you want a romance?”

“No. I don’t know exactly what I do want. But I know it when I see it.” And Evelyn looked down and appeared to be studying her delicate little hands, interlacing her taper, ivory fingers—but Philip knew she did not see them—and then looked up in his face again and said:

“I’ll tell you. This morning as we came up I was talking all the way with your cousin. It took some time to break the ice, but gradually she began to say things, half stories, half poetic, not out of books; things that, if said with assurance, in the city would be called wit. And then I began to see her emotional side, her pure imagination, such a refinement of appreciation and justice—I think there is an immovable basis of justice in her nature—and charity, and I think she’d be heroic, with all her gentleness, if occasion offered.”

“I see,” said Philip, rather lightly, “that you improved your time in finding out what a rare creature Alice is. But,” and this more gravely, “it would surprise her that you have found it out.”

“I believe you. I fancy she has not the least idea what her qualities are, or her capacities of doing or of suffering, and the world will never know—that is the point-unless some genius comes along and reveals them.”

“How?”

“Why, through a tragedy, a drama, a story, in which she acts out her whole self. Some act it out in society. She never will. Such sweetness and strength and passion—yes, I have no doubt, passion under all the reserve! I feel it but I cannot describe it; I haven’t imagination to make you see what I feel.”

“You come very near it,” said Philip, with a smile. And after a moment the girl broke out again:

“Materials! You writers go searching all round for materials, just as painters do, fit for your genius.”

“But don’t you know that the hardest thing to do is the obvious, the thing close to you?”

“I dare say. But you won’t mind? It is just an illustration. I went the other day with mother to Alice’s house. She was so sort of distant and reserved that I couldn’t know her in the least as I know her now. And there was the rigid Puritan, her father, representing the Old Testament; and her placid mother, with all the spirit of the New Testament; and then that dear old maiden aunt, representing I don’t know what, maybe a blind attempt through nature and art to escape out of Puritanism; and the typical old frame farmhouse—why, here is material for the sweetest, most pathetic idyl. Yes, the Story of Alice. In another generation people would come long distances to see the valley where Alice lived, and her spirit would pervade it.”

There could be but one end to such a burst of enthusiasm, and both laughed and felt a relief in a merriment that was, after all, sympathetic. But Evelyn was a persistent creature, and presently she turned to Philip, again with those appealing eyes.

“Now, why don’t you do it?”

Philip hesitated a moment and betrayed some embarrassment under the questioning of the truthful eyes.

“I’ve a good mind to tell you. I have—I am writing something.”

“Yes?”

“Not that exactly. I couldn’t, don’t you see, betray and use my own relatives in that way.”

“Yes, I see that.”

“It isn’t much. I cannot tell how it will come out. I tell you—I don’t mean that I have any right to ask you to keep it as a secret of mine, but it is this way: If a writer gives away his imagination, his idea, before it is fixed in form on paper, he seems to let the air of all the world upon it and it disappears, and isn’t quite his as it was before to grow in his own mind.”

“I can understand that,” Evelyn replied.

“Well—” and Philip found himself launched. It is so easy to talk about one’s self to a sympathetic listener. He told Evelyn a little about his life, and how the valley used to seem to him as a boy, and how it seemed now that he had had experience of other places and people, and how his studies and reading had enabled him to see things in their proper relations, and how, finally, gradually the idea for a story in this setting had developed in his mind. And then he sketched in outline the story as he had developed it, and left the misty outlines of its possibilities to the imagination.

The girl listened with absorbing interest, and looked the approval which she did not put in words. Perhaps she knew that a bud will never come to flower if you pull it in pieces. When Philip had finished he had a momentary regret for this burst of confidence, which he had never given to any one else. But in the light of Evelyn’s quick approval and understanding, it was only momentary. Perhaps neither of them thought what a dangerous game this is, for two young souls to thus unbosom themselves to each other.

A call from Mrs. Mavick brought them to their feet. It was time to go. Evelyn simply said:

“I think the valley, Mr. Burnett, looks a little different already.”

As they drove home along the murmuring river through the golden sunset, the party were mostly silent. Only Mrs. Mavick and Philip, who sat together, kept up a lively chatter, lively because Philip was elated with the event of the day, and because the nap under the beech-tree in the open air had brightened the wits of one of the cleverest women Philip had ever met.

If the valley did seem different to Evelyn, probably she did not think so far as to own to herself whether this was owing to the outline of the story, which ran in her mind, or to the presence of the young author.

Alice and Philip were set down at the farmhouse, and the company parted with mutual enthusiasm over the success of the excursion.

“She is a much more interesting girl than I thought,” Alice admitted. “Not a bit fashionable.”

“And she likes you.”

“Me?”

“Yes, your ears would have burned.”

“Well, I am glad, for I think she is sincere.”

“And I can tell you another thing. I had a long talk while you were taking your siesta. She takes an abstract view of things, judging the right and wrong of them, without reference to conventionalities or the practical obstacles to carrying out her ideas, as if she had been educated by reading and not by society. It is very interesting.”

“Philip,” and Alice laid her hand on his shoulder, “don’t let it be too interesting.”

XIII

When Philip said that Evelyn was educated in the world of literature and not in the conflicts of life he had hit the keynote of her condition at the moment she was coming into the world and would have to act for herself. The more he saw of her the more was he impressed with the fact that her discrimination, it might almost be called divination, and her judgment were based upon the best and most vital products of the human mind. A selection had evidently been made for her, until she had acquired the taste, or the habit rather, of choosing only the best for herself. Very little of the trash of literature, or the ignoble—that is to say, the ignoble view of life—had come into her mind. Consequently she judged the world as she came to know it by high standards. And her mind was singularly pure and free from vulgar images.

It might be supposed that this sort of education would have its disadvantages. The word is firmly fixed in the idea that both for its pleasure and profit it is necessary to know good and evil. Ignorance of the evil in the world is, however, not to be predicated of those who are familiar only with the great masterpieces of literature, for if they are masterpieces, little or great, they exhibit human nature in all its aspects. And, further than this, it ought to be demonstrable, a priori, that a mind fed on the best and not confused by the weak and diluted, or corrupted by images of the essentially vulgar and vile, would be morally healthy and best fitted to cope with the social problems of life. The Testaments reveal about everything that is known about human nature, but such is their clear, high spirit, and their quality, that no one ever traced mental degeneration or low taste in literature, or want of virility in judgment, to familiarity with them. On the contrary, the most vigorous intellects have acknowledged their supreme indebtedness to them.

It is not likely that Philip made any such elaborate analysis of the girl with whom he was in love, or attempted, except by a general reference to the method of her training, to account for the purity of her mind and her vigorous discernment. He was in love with her more subtle and hidden personality, with the girl just becoming a woman, with the mysterious sex that is the inspiration of most of the poetry and a good part of the heroism in the world. And he would have been in love with her, let her education have been what it might. He was in love before he heard her speak. And whatever she would say was bound to have a quality of interest and attraction that could be exercised by no other lips. It might be argued—a priori again, for the world is bound to go on in its own way—that there would be fewer marriages if the illusion of the sex did not suffice for the time to hide intellectual poverty, and, what is worse, ignobleness of disposition.

It was doubtless fortunate for this particular lovemaking, though it did not seem so to Philip, that it was very much obstructed by lack of opportunities, and that it was not impaired in its lustre by too much familiarity. In truth, Philip would have said that he saw very little of Evelyn, because he never saw her absolutely alone. To be sure he was much in her presence, a welcome member of the group that liked to idle on the veranda of the inn, and in the frequent excursions, in which Philip seemed to be the companion of Mrs. Mavick rather than of her daughter. But she was never absent from his thought, his imagination was wholly captive to her image, and the passion grew in these hours of absence until she became an indispensable associate in all that he was or could ever hope to be. Alice, who discerned very clearly Mrs. Mavick and her ambition, was troubled by Philip’s absorption and the cruel disappointment in store for him. To her he was still the little boy, and all her tenderness for him was stirred to shield him from the suffering she feared.

But what could she do? Philip liked to talk about Evelyn, to dwell upon her peculiarities and qualities, to hear her praised; to this extent he was confidential with his cousin, but never in regard to his own feeling. That was a secret concerning which he was at once too humble and too confident to share with any other. None knew better than he the absurd presumption of aspiring to the hand of such a great heiress, and yet he nursed the vanity that no other man could ever appreciate and love her as he did.

Alice was still more distracted and in sympathy with Philip’s evident aspirations by her own love for Evelyn and her growing admiration for the girl’s character. It so happened that mutual sympathy—who can say how it was related to Philip?—had drawn them much together, and chance had given them many opportunities for knowing each other. Alice had so far come out of her shell, and broken the reserve of her life, as to make frequent visits at the inn, and Mrs. Mavick and Evelyn found it the most natural and agreeable stroll by the river-side to the farmhouse, where naturally, while the mother amused herself with the original eccentricities of Patience, her daughter grew into an intimacy with Alice.

As for the feelings of Evelyn in these days—her first experience of something like freedom in the world—the historian has only universal experience to guide him. In her heart was working the consciousness that she had been singled out as worthy to share the confidence of a man in his most secret ambitions and aspirations, in the dreams of youth which seemed to her so noble. For these aspirations and dreams concerned the world in which she had lived most and felt most.

If Philip had talked to her as he had to Celia about his plans for success in life she would have been less interested. But there was nothing to warn her personally in these unworldly confessions. Nor did Philip ever seem to ask anything of her except sympathy in his ideas. And then there was the friendship of Alice, which could not but influence the girl. In the shelter of that the intercourse of the summer took on natural relations. For some natures there is no nurture of love like the security of family protection, under cover of which there is so little to excite the alarm of a timid maiden.

It was fortunate for Philip that Miss McDonald took a liking to him. They were thrown much together. They were both good walkers, and liked to climb the hills and explore the wild mountain streams. Philip would have confessed that he was fond of nature, and fancied there was a sort of superiority in his attitude towards it to that of his companion, who was merely interested in plants-just a botanist. This attitude, which she perceived, amused Miss McDonald.

“If you American students,” she said one day when they were seated on a fallen tree in the forest, and she was expatiating on a rare plant she had found, “paid no more attention to the classics than to the world you live in, few of you would get a degree.”

“Oh, some fellows go in for that sort of thing,” Philip replied. “But I have noticed that all English women have some sort of fad—plants, shells, birds, something special.”

“Fad!” exclaimed the Scotchwoman. “Yes, I suppose it is, if reading is a fad. It is one way of finding out about things. You admire what the Americans call scenery; we, since you provoke me to say it, love nature—I mean its individual, almost personal manifestations. Every plant has a distinct character of its own. I saw the other day an American landscape picture with a wild, uncultivated foreground. There was not a botanical thing in it. The man who painted it didn’t know a sweetbrier from a thistle.

“Just a confused mass of rubbish. It was as if an animal painter should compose a group and you could not tell whether it was made up of sheep or rabbits or dogs or foxes or griffins.”

“So you want things picked out like a photograph?”

“I beg your pardon, I want nature. You cannot give character to a bit of ground in a landscape unless you know the characters of its details. A man is no more fit to paint a landscape than a cage of monkeys, unless he knows the language of the nature he is dealing with down to the alphabet. The Japanese know it so well that they are not bothered with minutia, but give you character.”

“And you think that science is an aid to art?”

“Yes, if there is genius to transform it into art. You must know the intimate habits of anything you paint or write about. You cannot even caricature without that. They talk now about Dickens being just a caricaturist. He couldn’t have been that if he hadn’t known the things he caricatured. That is the reason there is so little good caricature.”

“Isn’t your idea of painting rather anatomical?” Philip ventured to ask.

“Do you think that if Raphael had known nothing of anatomy the world would have accepted his Sistine Madonna for the woman she is?” was the retort.

“I see it is interesting,” said Philip, shifting his ground again, “but what is the real good of all these botanical names and classifications?”

Miss McDonald gave a weary sigh. “Well, you must put things in order. You studied philology in Germany? The chief end of that is to trace the development, migration, civilization of the human race. To trace the distribution of plants is another way to find out about the race. But let that go. Don’t you think that I get more pleasure in looking at all the growing things we see, as we sit here, than you do in seeing them and knowing as little about them as you pretend to?”

Philip said that he could not analyze the degree of pleasure in such things, but he seemed to take his ignorance very lightly. What interested him in all this talk was that, in discovering the mind of the governess, he was getting nearer to the mind of her pupil. And finally he asked (and Miss McDonald smiled, for she knew what this conversation, like all others with him, must ultimately come to):

“Does the Mavick family also take to botany?”

“Oh yes. Mrs. Mavick is intimate with all the florists in New York. And Miss Evelyn, when I take home these specimens, will analyze them and tell all about them. She is very sharp about such things. You must have noticed that she likes to be accurate?”

“But she is fond of poetry.”

“Yes, of poetry that she understands. She has not much of the emotional vagueness of many young girls.”

All this was very delightful for Philip, and for a long time, on one pretext or another, he kept the conversation revolving about this point. He fancied he was very deep in doing this. To his interlocutor he was, however, very transparent. And the young man would have been surprised and flattered if he had known how much her indulgence of him in this talk was due to her genuine liking for him.

When they returned to the inn, Mrs. Mavick began to rally Philip about his feminine taste in woodsy things. He would gladly have thrown botany or anything else overboard to win the good opinion of Evelyn’s mother, but botany now had a real significance and a new meaning for him. Therefore he put in a defense, by saying:

“Botany, in the hands of Miss McDonald, cannot be called very feminine; it is a good deal more difficult to understand and master than law.”

“Maybe that’s the reason,” said Mrs. Mavick, “why so many more girls are eager to study law now than botany.”

“Law?” cried Evelyn; “and to practice?”

“Certainly. Don’t you think that a bright, clever woman, especially if she were pretty, would have an advantage with judge and jury?”

“Not if judge and jury were women,” Miss McDonald interposed.

“And you remember Portia?” Mrs. Mavick continued.

“Portia,” said Evelyn; “yes, but that is poetry; and, McDonald, wasn’t it a kind of catch? How beautifully she talked about mercy, but she turned the sharp edge of it towards the Jew. I didn’t like that.”

“Yes,” Miss McDonald replied, “it was a kind of trick, a poet’s law. What do you say, Mr. Burnett?”

“Why,” said Philip, hesitating, “usually it is understood when a man buys or wins anything that the appurtenances necessary to give him full possession go with it. Only in this case another law against the Jew was understood. It was very clever, nothing short of woman’s wit.”

“Are there any women in your firm, Mr. Burnett?” asked Mrs. Mavick.

“Not yet, but I think there are plenty of lawyers who would be willing to take Portia for a partner.”

“Make her what you call a consulting partner. That is just the way with you men—as soon as you see women succeeding in doing anything independently, you head them off by matrimony.”

“Not against their wills,” said the governess, with some decision.

“Oh, the poor things are easily hypnotized. And I’m glad they are. The funniest thing is to hear the Woman’s Rights women talk of it as a state of subjection,” and Mrs. Mavick laughed out of her deep experience.

“Rights, what’s that?” asked Evelyn.

“Well, child, your education has been neglected. Thank McDonald for that.”

“Don’t you know, Evelyn,” the governess explained, “that we have always said that women had a right to have any employment, or do anything they were fitted to do?”

“Oh, that, of course; I thought everybody said that. That is natural. But I mean all this fuss. I guess I don’t understand what you all are talking about.” And her bright face broke out of its look of perplexity into a smile.

“Why, poor thing,” said her mother, “you belong to the down-trodden sex. Only you haven’t found it out.”

“But, mamma,” and the girl seemed to be turning the thing over in her mind, as was her wont with any new proposition, “there seem to be in history a good many women who never found it out either.”

“It is not so now. I tell you we are all in a wretched condition.”

“You look it, mamma,” replied Evelyn, who perfectly understood when her mother was chaffing.

“But I think I don’t care so much for the lawyers,” Mrs. Mavick continued, with more air of conviction; “what I can’t stand are the doctors, the female doctors. I’d rather have a female priest about me than a female doctor.”

This was not altogether banter, for there had been times in Carmen’s career when the externals of the Roman Church attracted her, and she wished she had an impersonal confidant, to whom she could confess—well, not everything-and get absolution. And she could make a kind of confidant of a sympathetic doctor. But she went on:

“To have a sharp woman prying into all my conditions and affairs! No, I thank you. Don’t you think so, McDonald?”

“They do say,” the governess admitted, “that women doctors haven’t as much consideration for women’s whims as men.” And, after a moment, she continued:

“But, for all that, women ought to understand about women better than men can, and be the best doctors for them.”

“So it seems to me,” said Evelyn, appealing to her mother. “Don’t you remember that day you took me down to the infirmary in which you are interested, and how nice it was, nobody but women for doctors and nurses and all that? Would you put that in charge of men?”

“Oh, you child!” cried Mrs. Mavick, turning to her daughter and patting her on the head. “Of course there are exceptions. But I’m not going to be one of the exceptions. Ah, well, I suppose I am quite behind the age; but the conduct of my own sex does get on my nerves sometimes.”

Evelyn was silent. She was often so when discussions arose. They were apt to plunge her into deep thought. To those who knew her history, guarded from close contact with anything but the world of ideas, it was very interesting to watch her mental attitude as she was day by day emerging into a knowledge of the actual world and encountering its crosscurrents. To Philip, who was getting a good idea of what her education had been, an understanding promoted by his knowledge of the character and attainments of her governess, her mental processes, it may be safely said, opened a new world of thought. Not that mental processes made much difference to a man in his condition, still, they had the effect of setting her personality still further apart from that of other women. One day when they happened to be tete-a-tete in one of their frequent excursions—a rare occasion—Evelyn had said:

“How strange it is that so many things that are self-evident nobody seems to see, and that there are so many things that are right that can’t be done.”

“That is the way the world is made,” Philip had replied. She was frequently coming out with the sort of ideas and questions that are often proposed by bright children, whose thinking processes are not only fresh but undisturbed by the sophistries or concessions that experience has woven into the thinking of our race. “Perhaps it hasn’t your faith in the abstract.”

“Faith? I wonder. Do you mean that people do not dare go ahead and do things?”

“Well, partly. You see, everybody is hedged in by circumstances.”

“Yes. I do begin to see circumstances. I suppose I’m a sort of a goose—in the abstract, as you say.” And Evelyn laughed. It was the spontaneous, contagious laugh of a child. “You know that Miss McDonald says I’m nothing but a little idealist.”

“Did you deny it?”

“Oh, no. I said, so were the Apostles, all save one—he was a realist.”

It was Philip’s turn to laugh at this new definition, and upon this the talk had drifted into the commonplaces of the summer situation and about Rivervale and its people. Philip regretted that his vacation would so soon be over, and that he must say good-by to all this repose and beauty, and to the intercourse that had been so delightful to him.

“But you will write,” Evelyn exclaimed.

Philip was startled.

“Write?”

“Yes, your novel.”

“Oh, I suppose so,” without any enthusiasm.

“You must. I keep thinking of it. What a pleasure it must be to create a real drama of life.”

So this day on the veranda of the inn when Philip spoke of his hateful departure next day, and there was a little chorus of protest, Evelyn was silent; but her silence was of more significance to him than the protests, for he knew her thoughts were on the work he had promised to go on with.

“It is too bad,” Mrs. Mavick exclaimed; “we shall be like a lot of sheep without a shepherd.”

“That we shall,” the governess joined in. “At any rate, you must make us out a memorandum of what is to be seen and done and how to do it.”

“Yes,” said Philip, gayly, “I’ll write tonight a complete guide to Rivervale.”

“We are awfully obliged to you for what you have done.” Mrs. Mavick was no doubt sincere in this. And she added, “Well, we shall all be back in the city before long.”

It was a natural thing to say, and Philip understood that there was no invitation in it, more than that of the most conventional acquaintance. For Mrs. Mavick the chapter was closed.

There were the most cordial hand-shakings and goodbys, and Philip said good-by as lightly as anybody. But as he walked along the road he knew, or thought he was sure, that the thoughts of one of the party were going along with him into his future, and the peaceful scene, the murmuring river, the cat-birds and the blackbirds calling in the meadow, and the spirit of self-confident youth in him said not good-by, but au revoir.

XIV

Of course Philip wrote to Celia about his vacation intimacy with the Mavicks. It was no news to her that the Mavicks were spending the summer there; all the world knew that, and society wondered what whim of Carmen’s had taken her out of the regular summer occupations and immured her in the country. Not that it gave much thought to her, but, when her name was mentioned, society resented the closing of the Newport house and the loss of her vivacity in the autumn at Lenox. She is such a hand to set things going, don’t you know? Mr. Mavick never made a flying visit to his family—and he was in Rivervale twice during the season—that the newspapers did not chronicle his every movement, and attribute other motives than family affection to these excursions into New England. Was the Central system or the Pennsylvania system contemplating another raid? It could not be denied that the big operator’s connection with any great interest raised suspicion and often caused anxiety.

Naturally, thought Celia, in such a little village, Philip would fall in with the only strangers there, so that he was giving her no news in saying so. But there was a new tone in his letters; she detected an unusual reserve that was in itself suspicious. Why did he say so much about Mrs. Mavick and the governess, and so little about the girl?

“You don’t tell me,” she wrote, “anything about the Infant Phenomenon. And you know I am dying to know.”

This Philip resented. Phenomenon! The little brown girl, with eyes that saw so much and were so impenetrably deep, and the mobile face, so alert and responsive. If ever there was a natural person, it was Evelyn. So he wrote:

“There is nothing to tell; she is not an infant and she is not a phenomenon. Only this: she has less rubbish in her mind than any person you ever saw. And I guess the things she does not know about life are not worth knowing.”

“I see,” replied Celia; “poor boy! it’s the moth and the star. [That’s just like her, muttered Philip, she always assumed to be the older.] But don’t mind. I’ve come to the conclusion that I am a moth myself, and some of the lights I used to think stars have fallen. And, seriously, dear friend, I am glad there is a person who does not know the things not worth knowing. It is a step in the right direction. I have been this summer up in the hills, meditating. And I am not so sure of things as I was. I used to think that all women needed was what is called education—science, history, literature—and you could safely turn them loose on the world. It certainly is not safe to turn them loose without education—but I begin to wonder what we are all coming to. I don’t mind telling you that I have got into a pretty psychological muddle, and I don’t see much to hold on to.

“I suppose that Scotch governess is pious; I mean she has a backbone of what they call dogma; things are right or wrong in her mind—no haziness. Now, I am going to make a confession. I’ve been thinking of religion. Don’t mock. You know I was brought up religious, and I am religious. I go to church—well, you know how I feel and especially the things I don’t believe. I go to church to be entertained. I read the other day that Cardinal Manning said: ‘The three greatest evils in the world today are French devotional books, theatrical music, and the pulpit orator. And the last is the worst.’ I wonder. I often feel as if I had been to a performance. No. It is not about sin that I am especially thinking, but the sinner. One ought to do something. Sometimes I think I ought to go to the city. You know I was in a College Settlement for a while. Now I mean something permanent, devoted to the poor as a life occupation, like a nun or something of that sort. You think this is a mood? Perhaps. There have always been so many things before me to do, and I wanted to do them all. And I do not stick to anything? You must not presume to say that, because I confide to you all my errant thoughts. You have not confided in me—I don’t insinuate that you have anything to confide but I cannot help saying that if you have found a pure and clear-minded girl—Heaven knows what she will be when she is a woman I—I am sorry she is not poor.”

But if Philip did not pour out his heart to his old friend, he did open a lively and frequent correspondence with Alice. Not about the person who was always in his thoughts—oh, no—but about himself, and all he was doing, in the not unreasonable expectation that the news would go where he could not send it directly—so many ingenious ways has love of attaining its object. And if Alice, no doubt, understood all this, she was nevertheless delighted, and took great pleasure in chronicling the news of the village and giving all the details that came in her way about the millionaire family. This connection with the world, if only by correspondence, was an outlet to her reserved and secluded life. And her letters recorded more of her character, of her feeling, than he had known in all his boyhood. When Alice mentioned, as it were by chance, that Evelyn had asked, more than once, when she had spoken of receiving letters, if her cousin was going on with his story, Philip felt that the connection was not broken.

Going on with his story he was, and with good heart. The thought that “she” might some day read it was inspiration enough. Any real creation, by pen or brush or chisel, must express the artist and be made in independence of the demands of a vague public. Art is vitiated when the commercial demand, which may be a needed stimulus, presides at the creation. But it is doubtful if any artist in letters, or in form or color, ever did anything well without having in mind some special person, whose approval was desired or whose criticism was feared. Such is the universal need of human sympathy. It is, at any rate, true that Philip’s story, recast and reinspired, was thenceforth written under the spell of the pure divining eyes of Evelyn Mavick. Unconsciously this was so. For at this time Philip had not come to know that the reason why so many degraded and degrading stories and sketches are written is because the writers’ standard is the approval of one or two or a group of persons of vitiated tastes and low ideals.

The Mavicks did not return to town till late in the autumn. By this time Philip’s novel had been submitted to a publisher, or, rather, to state the exact truth, it had begun to go the rounds of the publishers. Mr. Brad, to whose nineteenth-century and newspaper eye Philip had shrunk from confiding his modest creation, but who was consulted in the business, consoled him with the suggestion that this was a sure way of getting his production read. There was already in the city a considerable body of professional “readers,” mostly young men and women, to whom manuscripts were submitted by the publishers, so that the author could be sure, if he kept at it long enough, to get a pretty fair circulation for his story. They were selected because they were good judges of literature and because they had a keen appreciation of what the public wanted at the moment. Many of them are overworked, naturally so, in the mass of manuscripts turned over to their inspection day after day, and are compelled often to adopt the method of tea-tasters, who sip but do not swallow, for to drink a cup or two of the decoction would spoil their taste and impair their judgment, especially on new brands. Philip liked to imagine, as the weeks passed away—the story is old and need not be retold here—that at any given hour somebody was reading him. He did not, however, dwell with much delight upon this process, for the idea that some unknown Rhadamanthus was sitting in judgment upon him much more wounded his ‘amour propre’, and seemed much more like an invading of his inner, secret life and feeling, than would be an instant appeal to the general public. Why, he thought, it is just as if I had shown it to Brad himself—apiece of confidence that he could not bring himself to. He did not know that Brad himself was a reader for a well-known house—which had employed him on the strength of his newspaper notoriety—and that very likely he had already praised the quality of the work and damned it as lacking “snap.”

It was, however, weary waiting, and would have been intolerable if his duties in the law office had not excluded other thoughts from his mind a good part of the time. There were days when he almost resolved to confine himself to the solid and remunerative business of law, and give up the vague aspirations of authorship. But those vague aspirations were in the end more enticing than the courts. Commonsense is not an antidote to the virus of the literary infection when once a young soul has taken it. In his long walks it was not on the law that Philip was ruminating, nor was the fame of success in it occupying his mind. Suppose he could write one book that should touch the heart of the world. Would he exchange the sweetness of that for the fleeting reputation of the most brilliant lawyer? In short, he magnified beyond all reason the career and reputation of the author, and mistook the consideration he occupies in the great world. And what a world it would be if there had not been a continuous line of such mistaken fools as he!

That it was not literature alone that inflated his dreams was evidenced by the direction his walks took. Whatever their original destination or purpose, he was sure to pass through upper Fifth Avenue, and walk by the Mavick mansion. And never without a lift in his spirits. What comfort there is to a lover in gazing at the blank and empty house once occupied by his mistress has never been explained; but Philip would have counted the day lost in which he did not see it.

After he heard from Alice that the Mavicks had returned, the house had still stronger attractions for him, for there was added the chance of a glimpse of Evelyn or one of the family. Many a day passed, however, before he mustered up courage to mount the steps and touch the button.

“Yes, sir,” said the servant, “the family is returned, but they is h’out.”

Philip left his card. But nothing came of it, and he did not try again. In fact, he was a little depressed as the days went by. How much doubt and anxiety, even suffering, might have been spared him if the historian at that moment could have informed him of a little shopping incident at Tiffany’s a few days after the Mavicks’ return.

A middle-aged lady and a young girl were inspecting some antiques. The girl, indeed, had been asking for ancient coins, and they were shown two superb gold staters with the heads of Alexander and Philip.

“Aren’t they beautiful?” said the younger. “How lovely one would be for a brooch!”

“Yes, indeed,” replied the elder, “and quite in the line of our Greek reading.”

The girl held them in her hand and looked at one and the other with a student’s discrimination.

“Which would you choose?”

“Oh, both are fine. Philip of Macedon has a certain youthful freshness, in the curling hair and uncovered head. But, of course, Alexander the Great is more important, and then there is the classic casque. I should take the Alexander.” The girl still hesitated, weighing the choice in her mind from the classic point of view.

“Doubtless you are right. But”—and she held up the lovely head—“this is not quite so common, and—and—I think I’ll take the Macedon one. Yes, you may set that for me,” turning to the salesman.

“Diamonds or pearls?” asked the jeweler.

“Oh, dear, no!” exclaimed the girl; “just the head.”

Evelyn’s education was advancing. For the first time in her life she had something to conceal. The privilege of this sort of secret is, however, an inheritance of Eve. The first morning she wore it at breakfast Mrs. Mavick asked her what it was.

“It’s a coin, antique Greek,” Evelyn replied, passing it across the table.

“How pretty it is; it is very pretty. Ought to have pearls around it. Seems to be an inscription on it.”

“Yes, it is real old. McDonald says it is a stater, about the same as a Persian daric-something like the value of a sovereign.”

“Oh, indeed; very interesting.”

To give Evelyn her due, it must be confessed that she blushed at this equivocation about the inscription, and she got quite hot with shame thinking what would become of her if Philip should ever know that she was regarding him as a stater and wearing his name on her breast.

One can fancy what philosophical deductions as to the education of women Celia Howard would have drawn out of this coin incident; one of them doubtless being that a classical education is no protection against love.

But for Philip’s connection with the thriving firm of Hunt, Sharp & Tweedle, it is safe to say that he would have known little of the world of affairs in Wall Street, and might never have gained entrance into that other world, for which Wall Street exists, that society where its wealth and ambitious vulgarity are displayed. Thomas Mavick was a client of the firm. At first they had been only associated with his lawyer, and consulted occasionally. But as time went on Mr. Mavick opened to them his affairs more and more, as he found the advantage of being represented to the public by a firm that combined the highest social and professional standing with all the acumen and adroitness that his complicated affairs required.

It was a time of great financial feverishness and uncertainty, and of opportunity for the most reckless adventurers. Houses the most solid were shaken and crippled, and those which were much extended in a variety of adventures were put to their wits’ ends to escape shipwreck. Financial operations are perpetual war. It is easy to calculate about the regular forces, but the danger is from the unexpected “raids” and the bushwhackers and guerrillas. And since politics has become inextricably involved in financial speculations (as it has in real war), the excitement and danger of business on a large scale increase.

Philip as a trusted clerk, without being admitted into interior secrets, came to know a good deal about Mavick’s affairs, and to be more than ever impressed with his enormous wealth and the magnitude of his operations. From time to time he was sent on errands to Mavick’s office, and gradually, as Mavick became accustomed to him as a representative of the firm, they came on a somewhat familiar footing, and talked of other things than business. And Mavick, who was not a bad judge of the capacities of men, conceived a high idea of Philip’s single-mindedness, of his integrity and general culture, and, as well, of his agreeableness (for Philip had a certain charm where he felt at ease), while at the same time he discovered that his mind was more upon something else than law, and that, if his success in his profession depended upon his adoption of the business methods of the Street, he could not go very far. Consequently he did not venture upon the same confidences with him that he habitually did with Mr. Sharp. Yet, business aside, he had an intellectual pleasure in exchanging views with Philip which Mr. Sharp’s conversation did not offer him.

When, therefore, Mrs. Mavick came to consult her husband about the list for the coming-out reception of Evelyn, Philip found a friend at court.

“It is all plain enough,” said Carmen, as she sat down with book and pencil in hand, “till you come to the young men, the unattached young men. Here is my visiting-list, that of course. But for the young ladies we must have more young men. Can’t you suggest any?”

“Perhaps. I know a lot of young fellows.”

“But I mean available young men, those that count socially. I don’t want a broker’s board or a Chamber of Commerce here.”

Mr. Mavick named half a dozen, and Carmen looked for their names in the social register. “Any more?”

“Why, you forgot young Burnett, who was with you last summer at Rivervale. I thought you liked him.”

“So I did in Rivervale. Plain farmer people. Yes, he was very nice to us. I’ve been thinking if I couldn’t send him something Christmas and pay off the debt.”

“He’d think a great deal more of an invitation to your reception.”

“But you don’t understand. You never think of Evelyn’s future. We are asking people that we think she ought to know.”

“Well, Burnett is a very agreeable fellow.”

“Fiddlesticks! He is nothing but a law clerk. Worse than that, he is a magazine writer.”

“I thought you liked his essays and stories.”

“So I do. But you don’t want to associate with everybody you like that way. I am talking about society. You must draw the line somewhere. Oh, I forgot Fogg—Dr. LeRoy Fogg, from Pittsburg.” And down went the name of Fogg.

“You mean that young swell whose business it is to drive a four-in-hand to Yonkers and back, and toot on a horn?”

“Well, what of that? Everybody who is anybody, I mean all the girls, want to go on his coach.”

“Oh, Lord! I’d rather go on the Elevated.” And Mavick laughed very heartily, for him. “Well, I’ll make a compromise. You take Fogg and I’ll take Burnett. He is in a good firm, he belongs to a first-rate club, he goes to the Hunts’ and the Scammels’, I hear of him in good places. Come.”

“Well, if you make a point of it. I’ve nothing against him. But if you knew the feelings of a mother about her only daughter you would know, that you cannot be too careful.”

When, several days after this conversation, Philip received his big invitation, gorgeously engraved on what he took to be a sublimated sort of wrapping-paper, he felt ashamed that he had doubted the sincere friendship and the goodness of heart of Mrs. Mavick.

XV

One morning in December, Philip was sent down to Mr. Mavick’s office with some important papers. He was kept waiting a considerable time in the outer room where the clerks were at work. A couple of clerks at desks near the chair he occupied were evidently discussing some one and he overheard fragments of sentences—“Yes, that’s he.” “Well, I guess the old man’s got his match this time.”

When he was admitted to the private office, he encountered coming out in the anteroom a man of striking appearance. For an instant they were face to face, and then bowed and passed on. The instant seemed to awaken some memory in Philip which greatly puzzled him.

The man had closely cropped black hair, black Whiskers, a little curling, but also closely trimmed, piercing black eyes, and the complexion of a Spaniard. The nose was large but regular, the mouth square-cut and firm, and the powerful jaw emphasized the decision of the mouth. The frame corresponded with the head. It was Herculean, and yet with no exaggerated developments. The man was over six feet in height, the shoulders were square, the chest deep, the hips and legs modeled for strength, and with no superfluous flesh. Philip noticed, as they fronted each other for an instant and the stranger raised his hat, that his hands and feet were smaller than usually accompany such a large frame. The impression was that of great physical energy, self-confidence, and determined will. The face was not bad, certainly not in detail, and even the penetrating eyes seemed at the moment capable of a humorous expression, but it was that of a man whom you would not like to have your enemy. He wore a business suit of rough material and fashionable cut, but he wore it like a man who did not give much thought to his clothes.

“What a striking-looking man,” said Philip, motioning with his hand towards the anteroom as he greeted Mr. Mavick.

“Who, Ault?” answered Mavick, indifferently.

“Ault! What, Murad Ault?”

“Nobody else.”

“Is it possible? I thought I saw a resemblance. Several times I have wondered, but I fancied it only a coincidence of names. It seemed absurd. Why, I used to know Murad Ault when we were boys. And to think that he should be the great Murad Ault.”

“He hasn’t been that for more than a couple of years,” Mavick answered, with a smile at the other’s astonishment, and then, with more interest, “What do you know about him?”

“If this is the same person, he used to live at Rivervale. Came there, no one knew where from, and lived with his mother, a little withered old woman, on a little cleared patch up in the hills, in a comfortable sort of shanty. She used to come to the village with herbs and roots to sell. Nobody knew whether she was a gypsy or a decayed lady, she had such an air, and the children were half afraid of her, as a sort of witch. Murad went to school, and occasionally worked for some farmer, but nobody knew him; he rarely spoke to any one, and he had the reputation of being a perfect devil; his only delight seemed to be in doing some dare-devil feat to frighten the children. We used to say that Murad Ault would become either a pirate or—”

“Broker,” suggested Mr. Mavick, with a smile.

“I didn’t know much about brokers at that time,” Philip hastened to say, and then laughed himself at his escape from actual rudeness.

“What became of him?”

“Oh, he just disappeared. After I went away to school I heard that his mother had died, and Murad had gone off—gone West it was said. Nothing was ever heard of him.”

The advent and rise of Murad Ault in New York was the sort of phenomenon to which the metropolis, which picks up its great men as Napoleon did his marshals, is accustomed. The mystery of his origin, which was at first against him, became at length an element of his strength and of the fear he inspired, as a sort of elemental force of unknown power. Newspaper biographies of him constantly appeared, but he had evaded every attempt to include him and his portrait in the Lives of Successful Men. The publishers of these useful volumes for stimulating speculation and ambition did not dare to take the least liberties with Murad Ault.

The man was like the boy whom Philip remembered. Doubtless he appreciated now as then the value of the mystery that surrounded his name and origin; and he very soon had a humorous conception of the situation that made him decline to be pilloried with others in one of those volumes, which won from a reviewer the confession that “lives of great men all remind us we may make our lives sublime.” One of the legends current about him was that he first appeared in New York as a “hand” on a canal-boat, that he got employment as a check-clerk on the dock, that he made the acquaintance of politicians in his ward, and went into politics far enough to get a city contract, which paid him very well and showed him how easily a resolute man could get money and use it in the city. He was first heard of in Wall Street as a curbstone broker, taking enormous risks and always lucky. Very soon he set up an office, with one clerk or errand-boy, and his growing reputation for sagacity and boldness began to attract customers; his ventures soon engaged the attention of guerrillas like himself, who were wont to consult him. They found that his advice was generally sound, and that he had not only sensitiveness but prescience about the state of the market. His office was presently enlarged, and displayed a modest sign of “Murad Ault, Banker and Broker.”

Mr. Ault’s operations constantly enlarged, his schemes went beyond the business of registering other people’s bets and taking a commission on them; he was known as a daring but successful promoter, and he had a visible ownership in steamships and railways, and projected such vast operations as draining the Jersey marshes. If he had been a citizen of Italy he would have attacked the Roman Campagna with the same confidence. At any rate, he made himself so much felt and seemed to command so many resources that it was not long before he forced his way into the Stock Exchange and had a seat in the Board of Brokers. He was at first an odd figure there. There was something flash about his appearance, and his heavy double watch-chain and diamond shirt-studs gave him the look of an ephemeral adventurer. But he soon took his cue, the diamonds disappeared, and the dress was toned down. There seemed to be two models in the Board, the smart and neat, and the hayseed style adopted by some of the most wily old operators, who posed as honest dealers who retained their rural simplicity. Mr. Ault adopted a middle course, and took the respectable yet fashionable, solid dress of a man of affairs.

There is no other place in the world where merit is so quickly recognized as in the Stock Exchange, especially if it is backed by brass and a good head. Ault’s audacity made him feared; he was believed to be as unscrupulous as he was reckless, but this did not much injure his reputation when it was seen that he was marvelously successful. That Ault would wreck the market, if he could and it was to his advantage, no one doubted; but still he had a quality that begot confidence. He kept his word. Though men might be shy of entering into a contract with Ault, they learned that what he said he would do he would do literally. He was not a man of many words, but he was always decided and apparently open, and, as whatever he touched seemed to thrive, his associates got the habit of saying, “What Ault says goes.”

Murad Ault had married, so it was said, the daughter of a boardinghouse keeper on the dock. She was a pretty girl, had been educated in a convent (perhaps by his aid after he was engaged to marry her), and was a sweet mother to a little brood of charming children, and a devout member of her parish church. Those who had seen Mrs. Ault when her carriage took her occasionally to Ault’s office in the city were much impressed by her graceful manner and sweet face, and her appearance gave Ault a sort of anchorage in the region of respectability. No one would have accused Ault of being devoted to any special kind of religious worship; but he was equally tolerant of all religions, and report said was liberal in his wife’s church charities. Besides the fact that he owned a somewhat pretentious house in Sixtieth Street, society had very little knowledge of him.

It was, however, undeniable that he was a power in the Street. No other man’s name was oftener mentioned in the daily journals in connection with some bold and successful operation. He seemed to thrive on panics, and to grow strong and rich with every turn of the wheel. There is only one stock expression in America for a man who is very able and unscrupulous, and carries things successfully with a high hand—he is Napoleonic. It needed only a few brilliant operations, madly reckless in appearance but successful, to give Ault the newspaper sobriquet of the Young Napoleon.

“Papa, what does he mean?” asked the eldest boy. “Jim Dustin says the papers call you Napoleon.”

“It means, my boy,” said Ault, with a grim smile, “that I am devoted to your mother, St. Helena.”

“Don’t say that, Murad,” exclaimed his wife; “I’m far enough from a saint, and your destiny isn’t the Island.”

“What’s the Island, mamma?”

“It’s a place people are sent to for their health.”

“In a boat? Can I go?”

“You ask too many questions, Sinclair,” said Mr. Ault; “it’s time you were off to school.”

There seems to have been not the least suspicion in this household that the head of it was a pirate.

It must be said that Mavick still looked upon Ault as an adventurer, one of those erratic beings who appear from time to time in the Street, upset everything, and then disappear. They had been associated occasionally in small deals, and Ault had more than once appealed to Mavick, as a great capitalist, with some promising scheme. They had, indeed, cooperated in reorganizing a Western railway, but seemed to have come out of the operation without increased confidence in each other. What had occurred nobody knew, but thereafter there developed a slight antagonism between the two operators. Ault went no more to consult the elder man, and they had two or three little bouts, in which Mavick did not get the best of it. This was not an unusual thing in the Street. Mr. Ault never expressed his opinion of Mr. Mavick, but it became more and more apparent that their interests were opposed. Some one who knew both men, and said that the one was as cold and selfish as a pike, and the other was a most unscrupulous dare-devil, believed that Mavick had attempted some sort of a trick on Ault, and that it was the kind of thing that the Spaniard (his complexion had given him this nickname) never forgot.

It is not intended to enter into a defense of the local pool known as the New York Stock Exchange. It needs none. Some regard it as a necessary standpipe to promote and equalize distribution, others consult it as a sort of Nilometer, to note the rise and fall of the waters and the probabilities of drought or flood. Everybody knows that it is full of the most gamy and beautiful fish in the world—namely, the speckled trout, whose honest occupation it is to devour whatever is thrown into the pool—a body governed by the strictest laws of political economy in guarding against over-population, by carrying out the Malthusian idea, in the habit the big ones have of eating the little ones. But occasionally this harmonious family, which is animated by one of the most conspicuous traits of human nature—to which we owe very much of our progress—namely, the desire to get hold of everything within reach, and is such a useful object-lesson of the universal law of upward struggle that results in the survival of the fittest, this harmonious family is disturbed by the advent of a pickerel, which makes a raid, introduces confusion into all the calculations of the pool, roils the water, and drives the trout into their holes.

The presence in the pool of a slimy eel or a blundering bullhead or a lethargic sucker is bad enough, but the rush in of the pickerel is the advent of the devil himself. Until he is got rid of, all the delicate machinery for the calculation of chances is hopelessly disturbed; and no one could tell what would become of the business of the country if there were not a considerable number of devoted men engaged in registering its fluctuations and the change of values, and willing to back their opinions by investing their own capital or, more often, the capital of others.

This somewhat mixed figure cannot be pursued further without losing its analogy, becoming fantastic, and violating natural law. For it is matter of observation that in this arena the pickerel, if he succeeds in clearing out the pool, suddenly becomes a trout, and is respected as the biggest and most useful fish in the pond.

What is meant is simply that Murad Ault was fighting for position, and that for some reason, known to himself, Thomas Mavick stood in his way. Mr. Mavick had never been under the necessity of making such a contest. He stepped into a commanding position as the manager if not the owner of the great fortune of Rodney Henderson. His position was undisputed, for the Street believed with the world in the magnitude of that fortune, though there were shrewd operators who said that Mavick had more chicane but not a tenth part of the ability of Rodney Henderson. Mr. Ault had made the fortune the object of keen scrutiny, when his antagonism was aroused, and none knew better than he its assailable points. Henderson had died suddenly in the midst of vast schemes which needed his genius to perfect. Apparently the Mavick estate was second to only a few fortunes in the country. Mr. Ault had set himself to find out whether this vast structure stood upon rock foundations. The knowledge he acquired about it and his intentions he communicated to no one. But the drift of his mind might be gathered from a remark he made to his wife one day, when some social allusion was made to Mavick: “I’ll bring down that snob.”

The use of such men as Ault in the social structure is very doubtful, as doubtful as that of a summer tempest or local cyclone, which it is said clears the air and removes rubbish, but is a scourge that involves the innocent as often as the guilty. It is popularly supposed that the disintegration and distribution of a great fortune, especially if it has been accumulated by doubtful methods, is a benefit to mankind. Mr. Ault may have shared this impression, but it is unlikely that he philosophized on the subject. No one, except perhaps his own family, had ever discovered that he had any sensibilities that could be appealed to, and, if he had known the ideas beginning to take shape in the mind of the millionaire heiress in regard to this fortune, he would have approved or comprehended them as little as did her mother.

Evelyn had lived hitherto with little comprehension of her peculiar position. That the world went well with her, and that no obstacle was opposed to the gratification of her reasonable desires, or to her impulses of charity and pity, was about all she knew of her power. But she was now eighteen and about to appear in the world. Her mother, therefore, had been enlightening her in regard to her expectations and the career that lay open to her. And Carmen thought the girl a little perverse, in that this prospect, instead of exciting her worldly ambition, seemed to affect her only seriously as a matter of responsibility.

In their talks Mrs. Mavick was in fact becoming acquainted with the mind of her daughter, and learning, somewhat to her chagrin, the limitations of her education produced by the policy of isolation.

To her dismay, she found that the girl did not care much for the things that she herself cared most for. The whole world of society, its strifes, ambitions, triumphs, defeats, rewards, did not seem to Evelyn so real or so important as that world in which she had lived with her governess and her tutors. And, worse than this, the estimate she placed upon the values of material things was shockingly inadequate to her position.

That her father was a very great man was one of the earliest things Evelyn began to know, exterior to herself. This was impressed upon her by the deference paid to him not only at home but wherever they went, and by the deference shown to her as his daughter. And she was proud of this. He was not one of the great men whose careers she was familiar with in literature, not a general or a statesman or an orator or a scientist or a poet or a philanthropist she never thought of him in connection with these heroes of her imagination—but he was certainly a great power in the world. And she had for him a profound admiration, which might have become affection if Mavick had ever taken the pains to interest himself in the child’s affairs. Her mother she loved, and believed there could be no one in the world more sweet and graceful and attractive, and as she grew up she yearned for more of the motherly companionship, for something more than the odd moments of petting that were given to her in the whirl of the life of a woman of the world. What that life was, however, she had only the dimmest comprehension, and it was only in the last two years, since she was sixteen, that she began to understand it, and that mainly in contrast to her own guarded life. And she was now able to see that her own secluded life had been unusual.

Not till long after this did she speak to any one of her experience as a child, of the time when she became conscious that she was never alone, and that she was only free to act within certain limits.

To McDonald, indeed, she had often shown her irritation, and it was only the strong good sense of the governess that kept her from revolt. It was not until very recently that it could be explained to her, without putting her in terror hourly, why she must always be watched and guarded.

It had required all the tact and sophistry of her governess to make her acquiesce in a system of education—so it was called-that had been devised in order to give her the highest and purest development. That the education was mainly left to McDonald, and that her parents were simply anxious about her safety, she did not learn till long afterwards. In the first years Mrs. Mavick had been greatly relieved to be spared all the care of the baby, and as the years went on, the arrangement seemed more and more convenient, and she gave little thought to the character that was being formed. To Mr. Mavick, indeed, as to his wife, it was enough to see that she was uncommonly intelligent, and that she had a certain charm that made her attractive. Mrs. Mavick took it for granted that when it came time to introduce her into the world she would be like other girls, eager for its pleasures and susceptible to all its allurements. Of the direction of the undercurrents of the girl’s life she had no conception, until she began to unfold to her the views of the world that prevailed in her circle, and what (in the Carmen scheme of life) ought to be a woman’s ambition.

That she was to be an heiress Evelyn had long known, that she would one day have a great fortune at her disposal had indeed come into her serious thought, but the brilliant use of it in relation to herself, at which her mother was always lately hinting, came to her as a disagreeable shock. For the moment the fortune seemed to her rather a fetter than an opportunity, if she was to fulfill her mother’s expectations. These hints were conveyed with all the tact of which her mother was master, but the girl was nevertheless somewhat alarmed, and she began to regard the “coming out” as an entrance into servitude rather than an enlargement of liberty. One day she surprised Miss McDonald by asking her if she didn’t think that rich people were the only ones not free to do as they pleased?

“Why, my dear, it is not generally so considered. Most people fancy that if they had money enough they could do anything.”

“Yes, of course,” said the girl, putting down her stitching and looking up; “that is not exactly what I mean. They can go in the current, they can do what they like with their money, but I mean with themselves. Aren’t they in a condition that binds them half the time to do what they don’t wish to do?”

“It’s a condition that all the world is trying to get into.”

“I know. I’ve been talking with mamma about the world and about society, and what is expected and what you must live up to.”

“But you have always known that you must one day go into the world and take your share in life.”

“That, yes. But I would rather live up to myself. Mamma seems to think that society will do a great deal for me, that I will get a wider view of life, that I can do so much for society, and, with my position, mamma says, have such a career. McDonald, what is society for?”

That was such a poser that the governess threw up her hands, and then laughed aloud, and then shook her head. “Wiser people than you have asked that question.”

“I asked mamma that, for she is in it all the time. She didn’t like it much, and asked, ‘What is anything for?’ You see, McDonald, I’ve been with mamma many a time when her friends came to see her, and they never have anything to say, never—what I call anything. I wonder if in society they go about saying that? What do they do it for?”

Miss McDonald had her own opinion about what is called society and its occupations and functions, but she did not propose to encourage this girl, who would soon take her place in it, in such odd notions.

“Don’t you know, child, that there is society and society? That it is all sorts of a world, that it gets into groups and circles about, and that is the way the world is stirred up and kept from stagnation. And, my dear, you have just to do your duty where you are placed, and that is all there is about it.”

“Don’t be cross, McDonald. I suppose I can think my thoughts?”

“Yes, you can think, and you can learn to keep a good deal that you think to yourself. Now, Evelyn, haven’t you any curiosity to see what this world we are talking about is like?”

“Indeed I have,” said Evelyn, coming out of her reflective mood into a girlish enthusiasm. “And I want to see what I shall be like in it. Only—well, how is that?” And she held out the handkerchief she had been plying her needle on.

Miss McDonald looked at the stitches critically, at the letters T.M. enclosed in an oval.

“That is very good, not too mechanical. It will please your father. The oval makes a pretty effect; but what are those signs between the letters?”

“Don’t you see? It is a cartouche, and those are hieroglyphics—his name in Egyptian. I got it out of Petrie’s book.”

“It certainly is odd.”

“And every one of the twelve is going to be different. It is so interesting to hunt up the signs for qualities. If papa can read it he will find out a good deal that I think about him.”

The governess only smiled for reply. It was so like Evelyn, so different from others even in the commonplace task of marking handkerchiefs, to work a little archaeology into her expression of family affection.

Mrs. Mavick’s talks with her daughter in which she attempted to give Evelyn some conception of her importance as the heiress of a great fortune, of her position in society, what would be expected of her, and of the brilliant social career her mother imagined for her, had an effect opposite to that intended. There had been nothing in her shielded life, provided for at every step without effort, that had given her any idea of the value and importance of money.

To a girl in her position, educated in the ordinary way and mingling with school companions, one of the earliest lessons would be a comprehension of the power that wealth gave her; and by the time that she was of Evelyn’s age her opinion of men would begin to be colored by the notion that they were polite or attentive to her on account of her fortune and not for any charm of hers, and so a cruel suspicion of selfishness would have entered her mind to poison the very thought of love.

No such idea had entered Evelyn’s mind. She would not readily have understood that love could have any sort of relation to riches or poverty. And if, deep down in her heart, not acknowledged, scarcely recognized, by herself, there had begun to grow an image about which she had sweet and tender thoughts, it certainly did not occur to her that her father’s wealth could make any difference in the relations of friendship or even of affection. And as for the fortune, if she was, as her mother said, some day to be mistress of it, she began to turn over in her mind objects quite different from the display and the career suggested by her mother, and to think how she could use it.

In her ignorance of practical life and of what the world generally values, of course the scheme that was rather hazy in her mind was simply Quixotic, as appeared in a conversation with her father one evening while he smoked his cigar. He had called Evelyn to the library, on the suggestion of Carmen that he should “have a little talk with the girl.”

Mr. Mavick began, when Evelyn was seated beside him, and he had drawn her close to him and she had taken possession of his big hand with both her little hands, about the reception and about balls to come, and the opera, and what was going on in New York generally in the season, and suddenly asked:

“My dear, if you had a lot of money, what would you do with it?”

“What would you?” said the girl, looking up into his face. “What do people generally do?”

“Why,” and Mavick hesitated, “they use it to add more to it.”

“And then?” pursued the girl.

“I suppose they leave it to somebody. Suppose it was left to you?”

“Don’t think me silly, papa; I’ve thought a lot about it, and I shall do something quite different.”

“Different from what?”

“You know mamma is in the Orthopedic Hospital, and in the Ragged Schools, and in the Infirmary, and I don’t know what all.”

“And wouldn’t you help them?”

“Of course, I would help. But everybody does those things, the practical things, the charities; I mean to do things for the higher life.”

Mr. Mavick took his cigar from his mouth and looked puzzled. “You want to build a cathedral?”

“No, I don’t mean that sort of higher life, I mean civilization, the things at the top. I read an essay the other day that said it was easy to raise money for anything mechanical and practical in a school, but nobody wanted to give for anything ideal.”

“Quite right,” said her father; “the world is full of cranks. You seem as vague as your essayist.”

“Don’t you remember, papa, when we were in Oxford how amused you were with the master, or professor, who grumbled because the college was full of students, and there wasn’t a single college for research?

“I asked McDonald afterwards what he meant; that is how I first got my idea, but I didn’t see exactly what it was until recently. You’ve got to cultivate the high things—that essay says—the abstract, that which does not seem practically useful, or society will become low and material.”

“By George!” cried Mavick, with a burst of laughter, “you’ve got the lingo. Go on, I want to see where you are going to light.”

“Well, I’ll tell you some more. You know my tutor is English. McDonald says she believes he is the most learned man in eighteenth-century literature living, and his dream is to write a history of it. He is poor, and engaged all the time teaching, and McDonald says he will die, no doubt, and leave nothing of his investigations to the world.”

“And you want to endow him?”

“He is only one. There is the tutor of history. Teach, teach, teach, and no time or strength left for investigation. You ought to hear him tell of the things just to be found out in American history. You see what I mean? It is plainer in the sciences. The scholars who could really make investigations, and do something for the world, have to earn their living and have no time or means for experiments. It seems foolish as I say it, but I do think, papa, there is something in it.”

“And what would you do?”

Evelyn saw that she was making no headway, and her ideas, exposed to so practical a man as her father, did seem rather ridiculous. But she struck out boldly with the scheme that she had been evolving.

“I’d found Institutions of Research, where there should be no teaching, and students who had demonstrated that they had anything promising in them, in science, literature, languages, history, anything, should have the means and the opportunity to make investigations and do work. See what a hard time inventors and men of genius have; it is pitiful.”

“And how much money do you want for this modest scheme of yours?”

“I hadn’t thought,” said Evelyn, patting her father’s hand. And then, at a venture, “I guess about ten millions.”

“Whew! Have you any idea how much ten millions are, or how much one million is?”

“Why, ten millions, if you have a hundred, is no more than one million if you have only ten. Doesn’t it depend?”

“If it depends upon you, child, I don’t think money has any value for you whatever. You are a born financier for getting rid of a surplus. You ought to be Secretary of the Treasury.”

Mavick rose, lifted up his daughter, and, kissing her with more than usual tenderness, said, “You’ll learn about the world in time,” and bade her goodnight.

XVI

Law and love go very well together as occupations, but, when literature is added, the trio is not harmonious. Either of the two might pull together, but the combination of the three is certainly disastrous.

It would be difficult to conceive of a person more obviously up in the air than Philip at this moment. He went through his office duties intelligently and perfunctorily, but his heart was not in the work, and reason as he would his career did not seem to be that way. He was lured too strongly by that siren, the ever-alluring woman who sits upon the rocks and sings so deliciously to youth of the sweets of authorship. He who listens once to that song hears it always in his ears, through disappointment and success—and the success is often the greatest disappointment—through poverty and hope deferred and heart-sickness for recognition, through the hot time of youth and the creeping incapacity of old age. The song never ceases. Were the longing and the hunger it arouses ever satisfied with anything, money for instance, any more than with fame?

And if the law had a feeble hold on him, how much more uncertain was his grasp on literature. He had thrown his line, he had been encouraged by nibbles, but publishers were too wary to take hold. It seemed to him that he had literally cast his bread upon the waters, and apparently at an ebb tide, and his venture had gone to the fathomless sea. He had put his heart into the story, and, more than that, his hope of something dearer than any public favor. As he went over the story in his mind, scene after scene, and dwelt upon the theme that held the whole in unity, he felt that Evelyn would be touched by the recognition of her part in the inspiration, and that the great public must give some heed to it. Perhaps not the great public—for its liking now ran in quite another direction, but a considerable number of people like Celia, who were struggling with problems of life, and the Alices in country homes who still preserved in their souls a belief in the power of a noble life, and perhaps some critics who had not rid themselves of the old traditions. If the publishers would only give him a chance!

But if law and literature were to him little more than unsubstantial dreams, the love he cherished was, in the cool examination of reason, preposterous. What! the heiress of so many millions, brought up doubtless in the expectation of the most brilliant worldly alliance, the heiress with the world presently at her feet, would she look at a lawyer’s clerk and an unsuccessful scribbler? Oh, the vanity of youth and the conceit of intellect!

Down in his heart Philip thought that she might. And he went on nursing this vain passion, knowing as well as any one can know the social code, that Mr. Mavick and Mrs. Mavick would simply laugh in his face at such a preposterous idea. And yet he knew that he had her sympathy in his ambition, that to a certain extent she was interested in him. The girl was too guileless to conceal that. And then suppose he should become famous—well, not exactly famous, but an author who was talked about, and becoming known, and said to be promising? And then he could fancy Mavick weighing this sort of reputation in his office scales against money, and Mrs. Mavick weighing it in her boudoir against social position. He was a fool to think of it. And yet, suppose, suppose the girl should come to love him. It would not be lightly. He knew that, by looking into her deep, clear, beautiful eyes. There were in them determination and tenacity of purpose as well as the capability of passion. Heavens and earth, if that girl once loved, there was a force that no opposition could subdue! That was true. But what had he to offer to evoke such a love?

In those days Philip saw much of Celia, who at length had given up teaching, and had come to the city to try her experiment, into which she was willing to embark her small income. She had taken a room in the midst of poverty and misery on the East Side, and was studying the situation.

“I am not certain,” she said, “whether I or any one else can do anything, or whether any organization down there can effect much. But I will find out.”

“Aren’t you lonesome—and disgusted?” asked Philip.

“Disgusted? You might as well be disgusted with one thing as another. I am generally disgusted with the way things go. But, lonely? No, there is too much to do and to learn. And do you know, Philip, that people are more interesting over there, more individual, have more queer sorts of character. I begin to believe, with a lovely philanthropist I know, who had charge of female criminals, that ‘wicked women are more interesting than good women.’”

“You have struck a rich mine of interest in New York, then.”

“Don’t be cynical, Phil. There are different kinds of interest. Stuff! But I won’t explain.” And then, abruptly changing the subject, “Seems to me you have something on your mind lately. Is it the novel?”

“Perhaps.”

“The publishers haven’t decided?”

“I am afraid they have.”

“Well, Philip, do you know that I think the best thing that could happen to you would be to have the story rejected.”

“It has been rejected several times,” said Philip. “That didn’t seem to do me any good.”

“But finally, so that you would stop thinking about it, stop expecting anything that way, and take up your profession in earnest.”

“You are a nice comforter!” retorted Philip, with a sort of smirking grin and a look of keen inspection, as if he saw something new in the character of his adviser. “What has come over you? Suppose I should give you that sort of sympathy in the projects you set your heart on?”

“It does seem hard and mean, doesn’t it? I knew you wouldn’t like it. That is, not now. But it is for your lifetime. As for me, I’ve wanted so many things and I’ve tried so many things. And do you know, Phil, that I have about come to the conclusion that the best things for us in this world are the things we don’t get.”

“You are always coming to some new conclusion.”

“Yes, I know. But just look at it rationally. Suppose your story is published, cast into the sea of new books, and has a very fair sale. What will you get out of it? You can reckon how many copies at ten cents a copy it will need to make as much as some writers get for a trivial magazine paper. Recognition? Yes, from a very few people. Notoriety? You would soon find what that is. Suppose you make what is called a ‘hit.’ If you did not better that with the next book, you would be called a failure. And you must keep at it, keep giving the public something new all the time, or you will drop out of sight. And then the anxiety and the strain of it, and the temptation, because you must live, to lower your ideal, and go down to what you conceive to be the buying public. And if your story does not take the popular fancy, where will you be then?”

“Celia, you have become a perfect materialist. You don’t allow anything for the joy of creation, for the impulse of a man’s mind, for the delight in fighting for a place in the world of letters.”

“So it seems to you now. If you have anything that must be said, of course you ought to say it, no matter what comes after. If you are looking round for something you can say in order to get the position you covet, that is another thing. People so deceive themselves about this. I know literary workers who lead a dog’s life and are slaves to their pursuit, simply because they have deceived themselves in this. I want you to be free and independent, to live your own life and do what work you can in the world. There, I’ve said it, and of course you will go right on. I know you. And maybe I am all wrong. When I see the story I may take the other side and urge you to go on, even if you are as poor as a church-mouse, and have to be under the harrow of poverty for years.”

“Then you have some curiosity to see the story?”

“You know I have. And I know I shall like it. It isn’t that, Phil; it is what is the happiest career for you.”

“Well, I will send it to you when it comes back.”

But the unexpected happened. It did not come back. One morning Philip received a letter from the publishers that set his head in a whirl. The story was accepted. The publisher wrote that the verdict of the readers was favorable, and he would venture on it, though he cautioned Mr. Burnett not to expect a great commercial success. And he added, as to terms, it being a new name, though he hoped one that would become famous, that the copyright of ten per cent. would not begin until after the sale of the first thousand copies.

The latter part of the letter made no impression on Philip. So long as the book was published, and by a respectable firm, he was indifferent as a lord to the ignoble details of royalty. The publisher had recognized the value of the book, and it was accepted on its merits. That was enough. The first thing he did was to enclose the letter to Celia, with the simple remark that he would try to sympathize with her in her disappointment.

Philip would have been a little less jubilant if he had known how the decision of the publishing house was arrived at. It was true that the readers had reported favorably, but had refused to express any opinion on the market value. The manuscript had therefore been put in the graveyard of manuscripts, from which there is commonly no resurrection except in the funeral progress of the manuscript back to the author. But the head of the house happened to dine at the house of Mr. Hunt, the senior of Philip’s law firm. Some chance allusion was made by a lady to an article in a recent magazine which had pleased her more than anything she had seen lately. Mr. Hunt also had seen it, for his wife had insisted on reading it to him, and he was proud to say that the author was a clerk in his office—a fine fellow, who, he always fancied, had more taste for literature than for law, but he had the stuff in him to succeed in anything. The publisher pricked up his ears and asked some questions. He found that Mr. Burnett stood well in the most prominent law firm in the city, that ladies of social position recognized his talent, that he dined here and there in a good set, and that he belonged to one of the best clubs. When he went to his office the next morning he sent for the manuscript, looked it over critically, and then announced to his partners that he thought the thing was worth trying.

In a day or two it was announced in the advertising lists as forthcoming. There it stared Philip in the face and seemed to be the only conspicuous thing in the journal. He had not paid much attention before to the advertisements, but now this department seemed the most interesting part of the paper, and he read every announcement, and then came back and read his over and over. There it stood:—“On Saturday, The Puritan Nun. An Idyl. By Philip Burnett.”

The naming of the book had been almost as difficult as the creation. His first choice had been “The Lily of the Valley,” but Balzac had pre-empted that. And then he had thought of “The Enclosed Garden” (Hortus Clausus), the title of a lovely picture he had seen. That was Biblical, but in the present ignorance of the old scriptures it would be thought either agricultural or sentimental. It is not uncommon that a book owes its notoriety and sale to its title, and it is not easy to find a title that will attract attention without being too sensational. The title chosen was paradoxical, for while a nun might be a puritan, it was unthinkable that a Puritan should be a nun.

Mr. Brad said he liked it, because it looked well and did not mean anything; he liked all such titles, the “Pious Pirate,” the “Lucid Lunatic,” the “Sympathetic Siren,” the “Guileless Girl,” and so on.

The announcement of publication had the effect of putting Philip in high spirits for the Mavick reception-spirits tempered, however, by the embarrassment natural to a modest man that he would be painfully conspicuous. This first placarding of one’s name is a peculiar and mixed sensation. The letters seem shamefully naked, and the owner seems exposed and to have parted with a considerable portion of his innate privacy. His first fancy is that everybody will see it. But this fancy only comes once. With experience he comes to doubt if anybody except himself will see it.

To those most concerned the Mavick reception was the event of a lifetime. To the town—that is, to a thousand or two persons occupying in their own eyes an exclusive position it was one of the events of the season, and, indeed, it was the sensation for a couple of days. The historian of social life formerly had put upon him the task of painfully describing all that went to make such an occasion brilliant—the house itself, the decorations, the notable company, men distinguished in the State or the Street, women as remarkable for their beauty as for their courage in its exhibition, the whole world of fashion and of splendid extravagance upon which the modiste and the tailor could look with as much pride as the gardener does upon a show of flowers which his genius has brought to perfection.

The historian has no longer this responsibility. It is transferred to a kind of trust. A race of skillful artists has arisen, who, in combination with the caterers, the decorators, and the milliners, produce a composite piece of literature in which all details are woven into a splendid whole—a composition rhetorical, humorous, lyrical, a noble apotheosis of wealth and beauty which carefully satisfies individual vanity and raises in the mind a noble picture of modern civilization. The pen and the pencil contribute to this splendid result in the daily chronicle of our life. Those who are not present are really witnesses of the scene, and this pictorial and literary triumph is justified in the fact that no other effort of the genius of reproduction is so eagerly studied by the general public. Not only in the city, but in the remote villages, these accounts are perused with interest, and it must be taken as an evidence of the new conception of the duties of the favored of fortune to the public pleasure that the participants in these fetes overcome, though reluctantly, their objection to notoriety.

No other people in the world are so hospitable as the Americans, and so willing to incur discomfort in showing hospitality. No greater proof of this can be needed than the effort to give princely entertainments in un-princely houses, where opposing streams of guests fight for progress in scant passages and on narrow stairways, and pack themselves in stifling rooms. The Mavick house, it should be said, was perfectly adapted to the throng that seemed to fill but did not crowd it. The spacious halls, the noble stairways, the ample drawing-rooms, the ballroom, the music-room, the library, the picture-gallery, the diningroom, the conservatory—into these the crowd flowed or lingered without confusion or annoyance and in a continual pleasure of surprise. “The best point of view,” said an artist of Philip’s acquaintance, “is just here.” They were standing in the great hall looking up at that noble gallery from which flowed down on either hand a broad stairway.

“I didn’t know there was so much beauty in New York. It never before had such an opportunity to display itself. There is room for the exhibition of the most elaborate toilets, and the costumes really look regal in such a setting.”

When Philip was shown to the dressing-room, conscious that the servant was weighing him lightly in the social scale on account of his early arrival, he found a few men who were waiting to make their appearance more seasonable. They were young men, who had the air of being bored by this sort of thing, and greeted each other with a look of courteous surprise, as much as to say, “Hello! you here?” One of them, whom Philip knew slightly, who had the reputation of being the distributer if not the fountain of social information, and had the power of attracting gossip as a magnet does iron filings, gave Philip much valuable information concerning the function.

“Mrs. Mavick has done it this time. Everybody has tumbled in. Washington is drained of its foreign diplomats, the heavy part of the cabinet is moved over to represent the President, who sent a gracious letter, the select from Boston, the most ancient from Philadelphia, and I know that Chicago comes in a special train. Oh, it’s the thing. I assure you there was a scramble for invitations in the city. Lots of visiting nobility—Count de l’Auney, I know, and that little snob, Lord Montague.”

“Who is he?”

“Lord Crewe Monmouth Fitzwilliam, the Marquis of Montague, eldest son of the Duke of Tewkesbury. He’s a daisy.

“They say he is over here looking for capital to carry on his peer business when he comes into it. Don’t know who put up the money for the trip. These foreigners keep a sharp eye on our market, I can tell you. They say she is a nice little girl, rather a blue-stocking, face rather intelligent than pretty, but Montague won’t care for that—excuse the old joke, but it is the figure Monte is after. He hasn’t any manners, but he’s not a bad sort of a fellow, generally good-natured, immensely pleased with New York, and an enthusiastic connoisseur in club drinks.”

At the proper hour—the hour, it came into, his mind, when the dear ones at Rivervale had been long in sleep, lulled by the musical flow of the Deerfield—Philip made his way to the reception room, where there actually was some press of a crowd, in lines, to approach the attraction of the evening, and as he waited his turn he had leisure to observe the brilliant scene. There was scarcely a person in the room he knew. One or two ladies gave him a preoccupied nod, a plain little woman whom he had talked with about books at a recent dinner smiled upon him encouragingly. But what specially impressed him at the moment was the seriousness of the function, the intentness upon the presentation, and the look of worry on the faces of the women in arranging trains and avoiding catastrophes.

As he approached he fancied that Mr. Mavick looked weary and bored, and that a shade of abstraction occasionally came over his face as if it were difficult to keep his thoughts on the changing line.

But his face lighted up a little when he took Philip’s hand and exchanged with him the commonplaces of the evening. But before this he had to wait a moment, for he was preceded by an important personage. A dapper little figure, trim, neat, at the moment drew himself up before Mrs. Mavick, brought his heels together with a click, and made a low bow. Doubtless this was the French count. Mrs. Mavick was radiant. Philip had never seen her in such spirits or so fascinating in manner.

“It is a great honor, count.”

“It ees to me,” said the count, with a marked accent; “I assure you it is like Paris in ze time of ze monarchy. Ah, ze Great Republic, madame—so it was in France in ze ancien regime. Ah, mademoiselle! Permit me,” and he raised her hand to his lips; “I salute—is it not” (turning to Mrs. Mavick)—“ze princess of ze house?”

The next man who shook hands with the host, and then stood in an easy attitude before the hostess, attracted Philip’s attention strongly, for he fancied from the deference shown him it must be the lord of whom he had heard. He was a short, little man, with heavy limbs and a clumsy figure, reddish hair, very thin on the crown, small eyes that were not improved in expression by white eyebrows, a red face, smooth shaven and freckled. It might have been the face of a hostler or a billiard-marker.

“I am delighted, my lord, that you could make room in your engagements to come.”

“Ah, Mrs. Mavick, I wouldn’t have missed it,” said my lord, with easy assurance; “I’d have thrown over anything to have come. And, do you know” (looking about him coolly), “it’s quite English, ‘pon my honor, quite English—St. James and that sort of thing.”

“You flatter me, my lord,” replied the lady of the house, with a winning smile.

“No, I do assure you, it’s bang-up. Ah, Miss Mavick, delighted, delighted. Most charming. Lucky for me, wasn’t it? I’m just in time.”

“You’ve only recently come over, Lord Montague?” asked Evelyn.

“Been here before—Rockies, shooting, all that. Just arrived now—beastly trip, beastly.”

“And so you were glad to land?”

“Glad to land anywhere. But New York suits me down to the ground. It goes, as you say over here. You know Paris?”

“We have been in Paris. You prefer it?”

“For some thing. Paris as it was in the Empire. For sport, no. For horses, no. And” (looking boldly into her face) “when you speak of American women, Paris ain’t in it, as you say over here.”

And the noble lord, instead of passing on, wheeled about and took a position near Evelyn, so that he could drop his valuable observations into her ear as occasion offered.

To Philip Mrs. Mavick was civil, but she did not beam upon him, and she did not detain him longer than to say, “Glad to see you.” But Evelyn—could Philip be deceived?—she gave him her hand cordially and looked into his eyes trustfully, as she had the habit of doing in the country, and as if it were a momentary relief to her to encounter in all this parade a friend.

“I need not say that I am glad you could come. And oh” (there was time only for a word), “I saw the announcement. Later, if you can, you will tell me more about it.”

Lord Montague stared at him as if to say, “Who the deuce are you?” and as Philip met his gaze he thought, “No, he hasn’t the manner of a stable boy; no one but a born nobleman could be so confident with women and so supercilious to men.”

But my lord, was little in his thought. It was the face of Evelyn that he saw, and the dainty little figure; the warmth of the little hand still thrilled him. So simple, and only a bunch of violets in her corsage for all ornament! The clear, dark complexion, the sweet mouth, the wonderful eyes! What could Jenks mean by intimating that she was plain?

Philip drifted along with the crowd. He was very much alone. And he enjoyed his solitude. A word and a smile now and then from an acquaintance did not tempt him to come out of his seclusion. The gay scene pleased him. He looked for a moment into the ballroom. At another time he would have tried his fortune in the whirl. But now he looked on as at a spectacle from which he was detached. He had had his moment and he waited for another. The voluptuous music, the fascinating toilets, the beautiful faces, the graceful forms that were woven together in this shifting kaleidoscope, were, indeed, a part of his beautiful dream. But how unreal they all were! There was no doubt that Evelyn’s eyes had kindled for him as for no one else whom she had greeted. She singled him out in all this crush, her look, the cordial pressure of her hand, conveyed the feeling of comradeship and understanding. This was enough to fill his thought with foolish anticipations. Is there any being quite so happy, quite so stupid, as a lover? A lover, who hopes everything and fears everything, who goes in an instant from the heights of bliss to the depths of despair.

When the “reception” was over and the company was breaking up into groups and moving about, Philip again sought Evelyn. But she was the centre of a somewhat noisy group, and it was not easy to join it.

Yet it was something that he could feast his eyes on her and was rewarded by a look now and then that told him she was conscious of his presence. Encouraged by this, he was making his way to her, when there was a movement towards the supper-room, and Mrs. Mavick had taken the arm of the Count de l’Auney, and the little lord was jauntily leading away Evelyn. Philip had a pang of disgust and jealousy. Evelyn was actually chatting with him and seemed amused. Lord Montague was evidently laying himself out to please and exerting all the powers of his subtle humor and exploiting his newly acquired slang. That Philip could hear as they moved past him. “The brute!” Philip said to himself, with the injustice which always clouds the estimate of a lover of a rival whose accomplishments differ from his own.

In the supper-room, however, in the confusion and crowding of it, Philip at length found his opportunity to get to the side of Evelyn, whose smile showed him that he was welcome. It was in that fortunate interval when Lord Montague was showing that devotion to women was not incompatible with careful attention to terrapin and champagne. Philip was at once inspired to say:

“How lovely it is! Aren’t you tired?”

“Not at all. Everybody is very kind, and some are very amusing. I am learning a great deal,” and there was a quizzical look in her eyes, “about the world.”

“Well,” said Philip, “t’s all here.”

“I suppose so. But do you know,” and there was quite an ingenuous blush in her cheeks as she said it, “it isn’t half so nice, Mr. Burnett, as a picnic in Zoar.”

“So you remember that?” Philip had not command of himself enough not to attempt the sentimental.

“You must think I have a weak memory,” she replied, with a laugh. “And the story? When shall we have it?”

“Soon, I hope. And, Miss Mavick, I owe so much of it to you that I hope you will let me send you the very first copy from the press.”

“Will you? And do you Of course I shall be pleased and” (making him a little curtsy) “honored, as one ought to say in this company.”

Lord Montague was evidently getting uneasy, for his attention was distracted from the occupation of feeding.

“No, don’t go Lord Montague, an old friend, Mr. Burnett.”

“Much pleased,” said his lordship, looking round rather inquiringly at the intruder. “I can’t say much for the champagne—ah, not bad, you know—but I always said that your terrapin isn’t half so nasty as it looks.” And his lordship laughed most good-humoredly, as if he were paying the American nation a deserved compliment.

“Yes,” said Philip, “we have to depend upon France for the champagne, but the terrapin is native.”

“Quite so, and devilish good! That ain’t bad, ‘depend upon France for the champagne!’ There is nothing like your American humor, Miss Mavick.”

“It needs an Englishman to appreciate it,” replied Evelyn, with a twinkle in her eyes which was lost upon her guest.

In the midst of these courtesies Philip bowed himself away. The party was over for him, though he wandered about for a while, was attracted again by the music to the ballroom, and did find there a dinner acquaintance with whom he took a turn. The lady must have thought him a very uninteresting or a very absent-minded companion.

As for Lord Montague, after he had what he called a “go” in the dancing-room, he found his way back to the buffet in the supper-room, and the historian says that he greatly enjoyed himself, and was very amusing, and that he cultivated the friendship of an obliging waiter early in the morning, who conducted his lordship to his cab.

XVII

The morning after The Puritan Nun was out, as Philip sat at his office desk, conscious that the eyes of the world were on him, Mr. Mavick entered, bowed to him absent-mindedly, and was shown into Mr. Hunt’s room.

Philip had dreaded to come to the office that morning and encounter the inquisition and perhaps the compliments of his fellow-clerks. He had seen his name in staring capitals in the book-seller’s window as he came down, and he felt that it was shamefully exposed to the public gaze, and that everybody had seen it. The clerks, however, gave no sign that the event had disturbed them. He had encountered many people he knew on the street, but there had been no recognition of his leap into notoriety. Not a fellow in the club, where he had stopped a moment, had treated him with any increased interest or deference. In the office only one person seemed aware of his extraordinary good fortune. Mr. Tweedle had come to the desk and offered his hand in his usual conciliatory and unctuous manner.

“I see by the paper, Mr. Burnett, that we are an author. Let me congratulate you. Mrs. Tweedle told me not to come home without bringing your story. Who publishes it?”

“I shall be much honored,” said Philip, blushing, “if Mrs. Tweedle will accept a copy from me.”

“I didn’t mean that, Mr. Burnett; but, of course, gift of the author—Mrs. Tweedle will be very much pleased.”

In half an hour Mr. Mavick came out, passed him without recognition, and hurried from the office, and Philip was summoned to Mr. Hunt’s room.

“I want you to go to Washington immediately, Mr. Burnett. Return by the night train. You can do without your grip? Take these papers to Buckston Higgins—you see the address—who represents the British Argentine syndicate. Wait till he reads them and get his reply. Here is the money for the trip. Oh, after Mr. Higgins writes his answer, ask him if you can telegraph me ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ Good-morning.”

While Philip was speeding to Washington, an important conference was taking place in Murad Ault’s office. He was seated at his desk, and before him lay two despatches, one from Chicago and a cable from London. Opposite him, leaning forward in his chair, was a lean, hatchet-faced man, with keen eyes and aquiline nose, who watched his old curbstone confidant like a cat.

“I tell you, Wheatstone,” said Mr. Ault, with an unmoved face, bringing his fist down on the table, “now is the time to sell these three stocks.”

“Why,” said Mr. Wheatstone, with a look of wonder, “they are about the strongest on the list. Mavick controls them.”

“Does he?” said Ault. “Then he can take care of them.”

“Have you any news, Mr. Ault?”

“Nothing to speak of,” replied Ault, grimly. “It just looks so to me. All you’ve got to do is to sell. Make a break this afternoon, about two or three points off.”

“They are too strong,” protested Mr. Wheatstone.

“That is just the reason. Everybody will think something must be the matter, or nobody would be fool enough to sell. You keep your eye on the Spectrum this afternoon and tomorrow morning. About Organization and one or two other matters.”

“Ah, they do say that Mavick is in Argentine up to his neck,” said the broker, beginning to be enlightened.

“Is he? Then you think he would rather sell than buy?”

Mr. Wheatstone laughed and looked admiringly at his leader. “He may have to.”

Mr. Ault took up the cable cipher and read it to himself again. If Mr. Hunt had known its contents he need not have waited for Philip to telegraph “no” from Washington.

“It’s all right, Wheatstone. It’s the biggest thing you ever struck. Pitch ‘em overboard in the morning. The Street is shaky about Argentine. There’ll be h–to pay before half past twelve. I guess you can safely go ten points. Lower yet, if Mavick’s brokers begin to unload. I guess he will have to unless he can borrow. Rumor is a big thing, especially in a panic, eh? Keep your eye peeled. And, oh, won’t you ask Babcock to step round here?”

Mr. Babcock came round, and had his instructions when to buy. He had the reputation of being a reckless broker, and not a safe man to follow.

The panic next day, both in London and New York, was long remembered. In the unreasoning scare the best stocks were sacrificed. Small country “investors” lost their stakes. Some operators were ruined. Many men were poorer at the end of the scrimmage, and a few were richer. Murad Ault was one of the latter. Mavick pulled through, though at an enormous cost, and with some diminution of the notion of his solidity. The wise ones suspected that his resources had been overestimated, or that they were not so well at his command as had been supposed.

When he went home that night he looked five years older, and was too worn and jaded to be civil to his family. The dinner passed mostly in silence. Carmen saw that something serious had happened. Lord Montague had called.

“Eh, what did he want?” said Mavick, surlily.

Carmen looked up surprised. “What does anybody after a reception call for?”

“The Lord only knows.”

“He is the funniest little man,” Evelyn ventured to say.

“That is no way, child, to speak of the son of a duke,” said Mavick, relaxing a little.

Carmen did not like the tone in which this was said, but she prudently kept silent. And presently Evelyn continued:

“He asked for you, papa, and said he wanted to pay his respects.”

“I am glad he wants to pay anything,” was the ungracious answer. Still Evelyn was not to be put down.

“It was such a bright day in the Park. What were you doing all day, papa?”

“Why, my dear, I was engaged in Research; you will be pleased to know. Looking after those ten millions.”

When the dinner was over, Carmen followed Mr. Mavick to his study.

“What is the matter, Tom?”

“Nothing uncommon. It’s a beastly hole down there. The Board used to be made up of gentlemen. Now there are such fellows as Ault, a black-hearted scoundrel.”

“But he has no influence. He is nothing socially,” said Carmen.

“Neither is a wolf or a cyclone. But I don’t care to talk about him. Don’t you see, I don’t want to be bothered?”

While these great events were taking place Philip was enjoying all the tremors and delights of expectation which attend callow authorship. He did not expect much, he said to himself, but deep down in his heart there was that sweet hope, which fortunately always attends young writers, that his would be an exceptional experience in the shoal of candidates for fame, and he was secretly preparing himself not to be surprised if he should “awake one morning and find himself famous.”

The first response was from Celia. She wrote warm-heartedly. She wrote at length, analyzing the characters, recalling the striking scenes, and praising without stint the conception and the working out of the character of the heroine. She pointed out the little faults of construction and of language, and then minimized them in comparison with the noble motive and the unity and beauty of the whole. She told Philip that she was proud of him, and then insisted that, when his biography, life, and letters was published, it would appear, she hoped, that his dear friend had just a little to do with inspiring him. It was exactly the sort of letter an author likes to receive, critical, perfectly impartial, and with entire understanding of his purpose. All the author wants is to be understood.

The letter from Alice was quite of another sort, a little shy in speaking of the story, but full of affection. “Perhaps, dear Phil,” she wrote, “I ought not to tell you how much I like it, how it quite makes me blush in its revelation of the secrets of a New England girl’s heart. I read it through fast, and then I read it again slowly. It seemed better even the second time. I do think, Phil, it is a dear little book. Patience says she hopes it will not become common; it is too fine to be nosed about by the ordinary. I suppose you had to make it pathetic. Dear me! that is just the truth of it. Forgive me for writing so freely. I hope it will not be long before we see you. To think it is done by little Phil!”

The most eagerly expected acknowledgment was, however, a disappointment. Philip knew Mrs. Mavick too well by this time to expect a letter from her daughter, but there might have been a line. But Mrs. Mavick wrote herself. Her daughter, she said, had asked her to acknowledge the receipt of his very charming story. When he had so many friends it was very thoughtful in him to remember the acquaintances of last summer. She hoped the book would have the success it deserved.

This polite note was felt to be a slap in the face, but the effect of it was softened a little later by a cordial and appreciative letter from Miss McDonald, telling the author what great delight and satisfaction they had had in reading it, and thanking him for a prose idyl that showed in the old-fashioned way that common life was not necessarily vulgar.

The critics seemed to Philip very slow in letting the public know of the birth of the book. Presently, however, the little notices, all very much alike, began to drop along, longer or shorter paragraphs, commonly in undiscriminating praise of the beauty of the story, the majority of them evidently written by reviewers who sat down to a pile of volumes to be turned off, and who had not more than five or ten minutes to be lost. Rarely, however, did any one condemn it, and that showed that it was harmless. Mr. Brad had given it quite a lift in the Spectrum. The notice was mainly personal—the first work of a brilliant young man at the bar who was destined to go high in his profession, unless literature should, fortunately for the public, have stronger attractions for him. That such a country idyl should be born amid law-books was sufficiently remarkable. It was an open secret that the scene of the story was the birthplace of the author—a lovely village that was brought into notice a summer ago as the chosen residence of Thomas Mavick and his family.

Eagerly looked for at first, the newspaper notices soon palled upon Philip, the uniform tone of good-natured praise, unanimous in the extravagance of unmeaning adjectives. Now and then he welcomed one that was ill-natured and cruelly censorious. That was a relief. And yet there were some reviews of a different sort, half a dozen in all, and half of them from Western journals, which took the book seriously, saw its pathos, its artistic merit, its failure of construction through inexperience. A few commended it warmly to readers who loved ideal purity and could recognize the noble in common life. And some, whom Philip regarded as authorities, welcomed a writer who avoided sensationalism, and predicted for him an honorable career in letters, if he did not become self-conscious and remained true to his ideals. The book clearly had not made a hit, the publishers had sold one edition and ordered half another, and no longer regarded the author as a risk. But, better than this, the book had attracted the attention of many lovers of literature. Philip was surprised day after day by meeting people who had read it. His name began to be known in a small circle who are interested in the business, and it was not long before he had offers from editors, who were always on the lookout for new writers of promise, to send something for their magazines. And, perhaps more flattering than all, he began to have society invitations to dine, and professional invitations to those little breakfasts that publishers give to old writers and to young whose names are beginning to be spoken of. All this was very exhilarating and encouraging. And yet Philip was not allowed to be unduly elated by the attention of his fellow-craftsmen, for he soon found that a man’s consequence in this circle, as well as with the great public, depended largely upon the amount of the sale of his book. How else should it be rated, when a very popular author, by whom Philip sat one day at luncheon, confessed that he never read books?

“So,” said Mr. Sharp, one morning, “I see you have gone into literature, Mr. Burnett.”

“Not very deep,” replied Philip with a smile, as he rose from his desk.

“Going to drop law, eh?”

“I haven’t had occasion to drop much of anything yet,” said Philip, still smiling.

“Oh well, two masters, you know,” and Mr. Sharp passed on to his room.

It was not, however, Mr. Sharp’s opinion that Philip was concerned about. The polite note from Mrs. Mavick stuck in his mind. It was a civil way of telling him that all summer debts were now paid, and that his relations with the house of Mavick were at an end. This conclusion was forced upon him when he left his card, a few days after the reception, and had the ill luck not to find the ladies at home. The situation had no element of tragedy in it, but Philip was powerless. He could not storm the house. He had no visible grievance. There was nothing to fight. He had simply run against one of the invisible social barriers that neither offer resistance nor yield. No one had shown him any discourtesy that society would recognize as a matter of offense. Nay, more than that, it could have no sympathy with him. It was only the case of a presumptuous and poor young man who was after a rich girl. The position itself was ignoble, if it were disclosed.

Yet fortune, which sometimes likes to play the mischief with the best social arrangements, did give Philip an unlooked-for chance. At a dinner given by the lady who had been Philip’s only partner at the Mavick reception, and who had read his story and had written to “her partner” a most kind little note regretting that she had not known she was dancing with an author, and saying that she and her husband would be delighted to make his acquaintance, Philip was surprised by the presence of the Mavicks in the drawing-room. Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Mavick seemed especially pleased when they encountered him, and in fact his sole welcome from the family was in the eyes of Evelyn.

The hostess had supposed that the Mavicks would be pleased to meet the rising author, and in still further carrying out her benevolent purpose, and with, no doubt, a sympathy in the feelings of the young, Mrs. Van Cortlandt had assigned Miss Mavick to Mr. Burnett. It was certainly a natural arrangement, and yet it called a blank look to Mrs. Mavick’s face, that Philip saw, and put her in a bad humor which needed an effort for her to conceal it from Mr. Van Cortlandt. The dinner-party was large, and her ill-temper was not assuaged by the fact that the young people were seated at a distance from her and on the same side of the table.

“How charming your daughter is looking, Mrs. Mavick!” Mr. Van Cortlandt began, by way of being agreeable. Mrs. Mavick inclined her head. “That young Burnett seems to be a nice sort of chap; Mrs. Van Cortlandt says he is very clever.”

“Yes?”

“I haven’t read his book. They say he is a lawyer.”

“Lawyer’s clerk, I believe,” said Mrs. Mavick, indifferently.

“Authors are pretty plenty nowadays.”

“That’s a fact. Everybody writes. I don’t see how all the poor devils live.” Mr. Van Cortlandt had now caught the proper tone, and the conversation drifted away from personalities.

It was a very brilliant dinner, but Philip could not have given much account of it. He made an effort to be civil to his left-hand neighbor, and he affected an ease in replying to cross-table remarks. He fancied that he carried himself very well, and so he did for a man unexpectedly elevated to the seventh heaven, seated for two hours beside the girl whose near presence filled him with indescribable happiness. Every look, every tone of her voice thrilled him. How dear she was! how adorable she was! How radiantly happy she seemed to be whenever she turned her face towards him to ask a question or to make a reply!

At moments his passion seemed so overmastering that he could hardly restrain himself from whispering, “Evelyn, I love you.” In a hundred ways he was telling her so. And she must understand. She must know that this was not an affair of the moment, but that there was condensed in it all the constant devotion of months and months.

A woman, even any girl with the least social experience, would have seen this. Was Evelyn’s sympathetic attention, her evident enjoyment in talking with him, any evidence of a personal interest, or only a young girl’s enjoyment of her new position in the world? That she liked him he was sure. Did she, was she beginning in any degree to return his passion? He could not tell, for guilelessness in a woman is as impenetrable as coquetry.

Of what did they talk? A stenographer would have made a meagre report of it, for the most significant part of this conversation of two fresh, honest natures was not in words. One thing, however, Philip could bring away with him that was not a mere haze of delicious impressions. She had been longing, she said, to talk to him about his story. She told him how eagerly she had read it, and in talking about its meaning she revealed to him her inner thought more completely than she could have done in any other way, her sympathy with his mind, her interest in his work.

“Have you begun another?” she asked, at last.

“No, not on paper.”

“But you must. It must be such a world to you. I can’t imagine anything so fine as that. There is so much about life to be said. To make people see it as it is; yes, and as it ought to be. Will you?”

“You forget that I am a lawyer.”

“And you prefer to be that, a lawyer, rather than an author?”

“It is not exactly what I prefer, Miss Mavick.”

“Why not? Does anybody do anything well if his heart is not in it?”

“But circumstances sometimes compel a man.”

“I like better for men to compel circumstances,” the girl exclaimed, with that disposition to look at things in the abstract that Philip so well remembered.

“Perhaps I do not make myself understood. One must have a career.”

“A career?” And Evelyn looked puzzled for a moment. “You mean for himself, for his own self?” There is a lawyer who comes to see papa. I’ve been in the room sometimes, when they don’t mind. Such talk about schemes, and how to do this and that, and twisting about. And not a word about anything any of the time. And one day when he was waiting for papa I talked with him. You would have been surprised.

“I told papa that I could not find anything to interest him. Papa laughed and said it was my fault, he was one of the sharpest lawyers in the city. Would you rather be that than to write?”

“Oh, all lawyers are not like that. And, don’t you know, literature doesn’t pay.”

“Yes, I have heard that.” And then she thought a minute and with a quizzical look continued: “That is such a queer word, ‘pay.’ McDonald says that it pays to be good. Do you think, Mr. Burnett, that law would pay you?”

Evidently the girl had a standard of judging people that was not much in use.

Before they rose from the table, Philip asked, speaking low, “Miss Mavick, won’t you give me a violet from your bunch in memory of this evening?”

Evelyn hesitated an instant, and then, without looking up, disengaged three, and shyly laid them at her left hand. “I like the number three better.”

Philip covered the flowers with his hand, and said, “I will keep them always.”

“That is a long time,” Evelyn answered, but still without looking up. But when they rose the color mounted to her cheeks, and Philip thought that the glorious eyes turned upon him were full of trust.

“It is all your doing,” said Carmen, snappishly, when Mavick joined her in the drawing-room.

“What is?”

“You insisted upon having him at the reception.”

“Burnett? Oh, stuff, he isn’t a fool!”

There was not much said as the three drove home. Evelyn, flushed with pleasure and absorbed in her own thoughts, saw that something had gone wrong with her mother and kept silent. Mr. Mavick at length broke the silence with:

“Did you have a good time, child?”

“Oh, yes,” replied Evelyn, cheerfully, “and Mrs. Van Cortlandt was very sweet to me. Don’t you think she is very hospitable, mamma?”

“Tries to be,” Mrs. Mavick replied, in no cordial tone. “Good-natured and eccentric. She picks up the queerest lot of people. You can never know whom you will not meet at her house. Just now she goes in for being literary.”

Evelyn was not so reticent with McDonald. While she was undressing she disclosed that she had had a beautiful evening, that she was taken out by Mr. Burnett, and talked about his story.

“And, do you know, I think I almost persuaded him to write another.”

“It’s an awful responsibility,” dryly said the shrewd Scotch woman, “advising young men what to do.”

XVIII

Upon the recollection of this dinner Philip maintained his hope and courage for a long time. The day after it, New York seemed more brilliant to him than it had ever been. In the afternoon he rode down to the Battery. It was a mild winter day, with a haze in the atmosphere that softened all outlines and gave an enchanting appearance to the harbor shores. The water was silvery, and he watched a long time the craft plying on it—the businesslike ferry-boats, the spiteful tugs, the great ocean steamers, boldly pushing out upon the Atlantic through the Narrows or cautiously drawing in as if weary with the buffeting of the waves. The scene kindled in him a vigorous sense of life, of prosperity, of longing for the activity of the great world.

Clearly he must do something and not be moping in indecision. Uncertainty is harder to bear than disaster itself. When he thought of Evelyn, and he always thought of her, it seemed cowardly to hesitate. Celia, after her first outburst of enthusiasm, had returned to her cautious advice. The law was much surer. Literature was a mere chance. Why not be content with his little success and buckle down to his profession? Perhaps by-and-by he would have leisure to indulge his inclination. The advice seemed sound.

But there was Evelyn, with her innocent question.

“Would the law pay you?” Evelyn? Would he be more likely to win her by obeying the advice of Celia, or by trusting to Evelyn’s inexperienced discernment? Indeed, what chance was there to win her at all? What had he to offer her?

His spirits invariably fell when he thought of submitting his pretensions to the great man of Wall Street or to his worldly wife. Already it was the gossip of the clubs that Lord Montague was a frequent visitor at the Mavicks’, that he was often seen in their box at the opera, and that Mrs. Mavick had said to Bob Shafter that it was a scandal to talk of Lord Montague as a fortune-hunter. He was a most kind-hearted, domestic man. She should not join in the newspaper talk about him. He belonged to an old English family, and she should be civil to him. Generally she did not fancy Englishmen, and this one she liked neither better nor worse because he had a title. And when you came to that, why shouldn’t any American girl marry her equal?

As to Montague, he was her friend, and she knew that he had not the least intention at present of marrying anybody. And then the uncharitable gossip went on, that there was the Count de l’Auney, and that Mrs. Mavick was playing the one off against the other.

As the days went on and spring began to appear in the light, fleeting clouds in the blue sky and in the greening foliage in the city squares, Philip became more and more restless. The situation was intolerable. Evelyn he could never see. Perhaps she wondered that he made no effort to see her. Perhaps she never thought of him at all, and simply, like an obedient child, accepted her mother’s leading, and was getting to like that society life which was recorded in the daily journals. What did it matter to him whether he stuck to the law or launched himself into the Bohemia of literature, so long as doubt about Evelyn haunted him day and night? If she was indifferent to him, he would know the worst, and go about his business like a man. Who were the Mavicks, anyway?

Alice had written him once that Evelyn was a dear girl, no one could help loving her; but she did not like the blood of father and mother. “And remember, Phil—you must let me say this—there is not a drop of mean blood in your ancestors.”

Philip smiled at this. He was not in love with Mrs. Mavick nor with her husband. They were for him simply guardians of a treasure he very much coveted, and yet they were to a certain extent ennobled in his mind as the authors of the being he worshiped. If it should be true that his love for her was returned, it would not be possible even for them to insist upon a course that would make their daughter unhappy for life. They might reject him—no doubt he was a wholly unequal match for the heiress—but could they, to the very end, be cruel to her?

Thus the ingenuous young man argued with himself, until it seemed plain to him that if Evelyn loved him, and the conviction grew that she did, all obstacles must give way to this overmastering passion of his life. If he were living in a fool’s paradise he would know it, and he ventured to put his fortune to the test of experiment. The only manly course was to gain the consent of the parents to ask their daughter to marry him; if not that, then to be permitted to see her. He was nobly resolved to pledge himself to make no proposals to her without their approval.

This seemed a very easy thing to do until he attempted it. He would simply happen into Mr. Mavick’s office, and, as Mr. Mavick frequently talked familiarly with him, he would contrive to lead the conversation to Evelyn, and make his confession. He mapped out the whole conversation, and even to the manner in which he would represent his own prospects and ambitions and his hopes of happiness. Of course Mr. Mavick would evade, and say that it would be a long time before they should think of disposing of their daughter’s hand, and that—well, he must see himself that he was in no position to support a wife accustomed to luxury; in short, that one could not create situations in real life as he could in novels, that personally he could give him no encouragement, but that he would consult his wife.

This dream got no further than a private rehearsal. When he called at Mr. Mavick’s office he learned that Mr. Mavick had gone to the Pacific coast, and that he would probably be absent several weeks. But Philip could not wait. He resolved to end his torture by a bold stroke. He wrote to Mrs. Mavick, saying that he had called at Mr. Mavick’s office, and, not finding him at home, he begged that she would give him an interview concerning a matter of the deepest personal interest to himself.

Mrs. Mavick understood in an instant what this meant. She had feared it. Her first impulse was to write him a curt note of a character that would end at once all intercourse. On second thought she determined to see him, to discover how far the affair had gone, and to have it out with him once for all. She accordingly wrote that she would have a few minutes at half past five the next day.

As Philip went up the steps of the Mavick house at the appointed hour, he met coming out of the door—and it seemed a bad omen—Lord Montague, who seemed in high spirits, stared at Philip without recognition, whistled for his cab, and drove away.

Mrs. Mavick received him politely, and, without offering her hand, asked him to be seated. Philip was horribly embarrassed. The woman was so cool, so civil, so perfectly indifferent. He stammered out something about the weather and the coming spring, and made an allusion to the dinner at Mrs. Van Cortlandt’s. Mrs. Mavick was not in the mood to help him with any general conversation, and presently said, looking at her watch:

“You wrote me that you wanted to consult me. Is there anything I can do for you?”

“It was a personal matter,” said Philip, getting control of himself.

“So you wrote. Mr. Mavick is away, and if it is in regard to anything in your office, any promotion, you know, I don’t understand anything about business.” And Mrs. Mavick smiled graciously.

“No, it is not about the office. I should not think of troubling my friends in that way. It is just that—”

“Oh, I see,” Mrs. Mavick interrupted, with good-humor, “it’s about the novel. I hear that it has sold very well. And you are not certain whether its success will warrant your giving up your clerkship. Now as for me,” and she leaned back in her chair, with the air of weighing the chances in her mind, “it doesn’t seem to me that a writer—”

“No, it is not that,” said Philip, leaning forward and looking her full in the face with all the courage he could summon, “it is your daughter.”

“What!” cried Mrs. Mavick, in a tone of incredulous surprise.

“I was afraid you would think me very presumptuous.”

“Presumptuous! Why, she is a child. Do you know what you are talking about?”

“My mother married at eighteen,” said Philip, gently.

“That is an interesting piece of information, but I don’t see its bearing. Will you tell me, Mr. Burnett, what nonsense you have got into your head?”

“I want,” and Philip spoke very gently—“I want, Mrs. Mavick, permission to see your daughter.”

“Ah! I thought in Rivervale, Mr. Burnett, that you were a gentleman. You presume upon my invitation to this house, in an underhand way, to—What right have you?”

Mrs. Mavick was so beside herself that she could hardly speak. The lines in her face deepened into wrinkles and scowls. There was something malevolent and mean in it. Philip was astonished at the transformation. And she looked old and ugly in her passion.

“You!” she repeated.

“It is only this, Mrs. Mavick,” and Philip spoke calmly, though his blood was boiling at her insulting manner—“it is only this—I love your daughter.”

“And you have told her this?”

“No, never, never a word.”

“Does she know anything of this absurd, this silly attempt?”

“I am afraid not.”

“Ah! Then you have spared yourself one humiliation. My daughter’s affections are not likely to be placed where her parents do not approve. Her mother is her only confidante. I can tell you, Mr. Burnett, and when you are over this delusion you will thank me for being so plain with you, my daughter would laugh at the idea of such a proposal. But I will not have her annoyed by impecunious aspirants.”

“Madam!” cried Philip, rising, with a flushed face, and then he remembered that he was talking to Evelyn’s mother, and uttered no other word.

“This is ended.” And then, with a slight change of manner, she went on: “You must see how impossible it is. You are a man of honor.

“I should like to think well of you. I shall trust to your honor that you will never try, by letter or otherwise, to hold any communication with her.”

“I shall obey you,” said Philip, quite stiffly, “because you are her mother. But I love her, and I shall always love her.”

Mrs. Mavick did not condescend to any reply to this, but she made a cold bow of dismissal and turned away from him. He left the house and walked away, scarcely knowing in which direction he went, anger for a time being uppermost in his mind, chagrin and defeat following, and with it the confused feeling of a man who has passed through a cyclone and been landed somewhere amid the scattered remnants of his possessions.

As he strode away he was intensely humiliated. He had been treated like an inferior. He had voluntarily put himself in a position to be insulted. Contempt had been poured upon him, his feelings had been outraged, and there was no way in which he could show his resentment. Presently, as his anger subsided, he began to look at the matter more sanely. What had happened? He had made an honorable proposal. But what right had he to expect that it would be favorably considered? He knew all along that it was most unlikely that Mrs. Mavick would entertain for a moment idea of such a match. He knew what would be the unanimous opinion of society about it. In the case of any other young man aspiring to the hand of a rich girl, he knew very well what he should have thought.

Well, he had done nothing dishonorable. And as he reviewed the bitter interview he began to console himself with the thought that he had not lost his temper, that he had said nothing to be regretted, nothing that he should not have said to the mother of the girl he loved. There was an inner comfort in this, even if his life were ruined.

Mrs. Mavick, on the contrary, had not so good reason to be satisfied with herself. It was a principle of her well-ordered life never to get into a passion, never to let herself go, never to reveal herself by intemperate speech, never to any one, except occasionally to her husband when his cold sarcasm became intolerable. She felt, as soon as the door closed on Philip, that she had made a blunder, and yet in her irritation she committed a worse one. She went at once to Evelyn’s room, resolved to make it perfectly sure that the Philip episode was ended. She had had suspicions about her daughter ever since the Van Cortlandt dinner. She would find out if they were justified, and she would act decidedly before any further mischief was done. Evelyn was alone, and her mother kissed her fondly several times and then threw herself into an easy-chair and declared she was tired.

“My dear, I have had such an unpleasant interview.”

“I am sorry,” said Evelyn, seating herself on the arm of the chair and putting her arm round her mother’s neck. “With whom, mamma?”

“Oh, with that Mr. Burnett.” Mrs. Mavick felt a nervous start in the arm that caressed her.

“Here?”

“Yes, he came to see your father, I fancy, about some business. I think he is not getting on very well.”

“Why, his book—”

“I know, but that amounts to nothing. There is not much chance for a lawyer’s clerk who gets bitten with the idea that he can write.”

“If he was in trouble, mamma,” said Evelyn, softly, “then you were good to him.”

“I tried to be,” Mrs. Mavick half sighed, “but you can’t do anything with such people” (by ‘such people’ Mrs. Mavick meant those who have no money) “when they don’t get on. They are never reasonable. And he was in such an awful bad temper. You cannot show any kindness to such people without exposing yourself. I think he presumes upon his acquaintance with your father. It was most disagreeable, and he was so rude” (a little thrill in the arm again)—“well, not exactly rude, but he was not a bit nice to me, and I am afraid I showed by my looks that I was irritated. He was just as disagreeable as he could be.

“He met Lord Montague on the steps, and he had something spiteful to say about him. I had to tell him he was presuming a good deal on his acquaintance, and that I considered his manner insulting. He flung out of the house very high and mighty.”

“That was not a bit like him, mamma.”

“We didn’t know him. That is all. Now we do, and I am thankful we do. He will never come here again.”

Evelyn was very still for a moment, and then she said: “I’m very sorry for it all. It must be some misunderstanding.”

“Of course, it is dreadful to be so disappointed in people. But we have to learn. I don’t know anything about his misunderstanding, but I did not misunderstand what he said. At any rate, after such an exposition we can have no further intercourse with him. You will not care to see any one who treated your mother in this way? If you love me, you cannot be friendly with him. I know you would not like to be.”

Evelyn did not reply for a moment. Her silence revealed the fact to the shrewd woman that she had not intervened a day too soon.

“You promise me, dear, that you will put the whole thing out of your mind?” and she drew her daughter closer to her and kissed her.

And then Evelyn said slowly: “I shall not have any friends whom you do not approve, but, mamma, I cannot be unjust in my mind.”

And Mrs. Mavick had the good sense not to press the question further. She still regarded Evelyn as a child. Her naivete, her simplicity, her ignorance of social conventions and of the worldly wisdom which to Mrs. Mavick was the sum of all knowledge misled her mother as to her power of discernment and her strength of character. Indeed, Mrs. Mavick had only the slightest conception of that range of thought and feeling in which the girl habitually lived, and of the training which at the age of eighteen had given her discipline, and great maturity of judgment as well. She would be obedient, but she was incapable of duplicity, and therefore she had said as plainly as possible that whatever the trouble might be she would not be unjust to Philip.

The interview with her mother left her in a very distressed state of mind. It is a horrible disillusion when a girl begins to suspect that her mother is not sincere, and that her ideals of life are mean. This knowledge may exist with the deepest affection—indeed, in a noble mind, with an inward tenderness and an almost divine pity. How many times have we seen a daughter loyal to a frivolous, worldly-minded, insincere mother, shielding her and exhibiting to the censorious world the utmost love and trust!

Evelyn was far from suspecting the extent of her mother’s duplicity, but her heart told her that an attempt had been made to mislead her, and that there must be some explanation of Philip’s conduct that would be consistent with her knowledge of his character. And, as she endeavored to pierce this mystery, it dawned upon her that there had been a method in throwing her so much into the society of Lord Montague, and that it was unnatural that such a friend as Philip should be seen so seldom—only twice since the days in Rivervale. Naturally the very reverse of suspicious, she had been dreaming on things to come in the seclusion of her awakening womanhood, without the least notion that the freedom of her own soul was to be interfered with by any merely worldly demands. But now things that had occurred, and that her mother had said, came back to her with a new meaning, and her trustful spirit was overwhelmed. And there, in the silence of her chamber, began the fierce struggle between desire and what she called her duty—a duty imposed from without.

She began to perceive that she was not free, that she was a part of a social machine, the power of which she had not at all apprehended, and that she was powerless in its clutch. She might resist, but peace was gone. She had heretofore found peace in obedience, but when she consulted her own heart she knew that she could not find peace in obedience now. To a girl differently reared, perhaps, subterfuge, or some manoeuvring justified by the situation, might have been resorted to. But such a thing never occurred to Evelyn. Everything looked dark before her, as she more clearly understood her mother’s attitude, and for the first time in years she could do nothing but give way to emotions.

“Why, Evelyn, you have been crying!” exclaimed the governess, who came to seek her. “What is the matter?”

Evelyn arose and threw herself on her friend’s neck for a moment, and then, brushing away the tears, said, with an attempt to smile, “Oh, nothing; I got thinking, thinking, thinking, and Don’t you ever get blue, McDonald?”

“Not often,” said the Scotchwoman, gravely. “But, dear, you have nothing in the world to make you so.”

“No, no, nothing;” and then she broke down again, and threw herself upon McDonald’s bosom in a passion of sobbing. “I can’t help it. Mamma says Phil—Mr. Burnett—is never to come to this house again. What have I done? And he will think—he will think that I hate him.”

McDonald drew the girl into her lap, and with uncommon gentleness comforted her with caresses.

“Dear child,” she said, “crosses must come into our lives; we cannot help that. Your mother is no doubt doing what she thinks best for your own happiness. Nothing can really hurt us for long, you know that well, except what we do to ourselves. I never told you why I came to this country—I didn’t want to sadden you with my troubles—but now I want you to understand me better. It is a long story.”

But it was not very long in the telling, for the narrator found that what seemed to her so long in the suffering could be conveyed to another in only a few words. And the story was not in any of its features new, except to the auditor. There had been a long attachment, passionate love and perfect trust, long engagement, marriage postponed because both were poor, and the lover struggling into his profession, and then, it seemed sudden and unaccountable, his marriage with some one else. “It was not like him,” said the governess in conclusion; “it was his ambition to get on that blinded him.”

“And he, was he happy?” asked Evelyn.

“I heard that he was not” (and she spoke reluctantly); “I fear not. How could he be?” And the governess seemed overwhelmed in a flood of tender and painful memories. “That was over twenty years ago. And I have been happy, my darling, I have had such a happy life with you.

“I never dreamed I could have such a blessing. And you, child, will be happy too; I know it.”

And the two women, locked in each other’s arms, found that consolation in sympathy which steals away half the grief of the world. Ah! who knows a woman’s heart?

For Philip there was in these days no such consolation. It was a man’s way not to seek any, to roll himself up in his trouble like a hibernating bear. And yet there were times when he had an intolerable longing for a confidant, for some one to whom he could relieve himself of part of his burden by talking. To Celia he could say nothing. Instinct told him that he should not go to her. Of the sympathy of Alice he was sure, but why inflict his selfish grief on her tender heart? But he was writing to her often, he was talking to her freely about his perplexities, about leaving the office and trusting himself to the pursuit of literature in some way. And, in answer to direct questions, he told her that he had seen Evelyn only a few times, and, the fact was, that Mrs. Mavick had cut him dead. He could not give to his correspondent a very humorous turn to this situation, for Alice knew—had she not seen them often together, and did she not know the depths of Philip’s passion? And she read between the lines the real state of the case. Alice was indignant, but she did not think it wise to make too much of the incident. Of Evelyn she wrote affectionately—she knew she was a noble and high-minded girl. As to her mother, she dismissed her with a country estimate. “You know, Phil, that I never thought she was a lady.”

But the lover was not to be wholly without comfort. He met by chance one day on the Avenue Miss McDonald, and her greeting was so cordial that he knew that he had at least one friend in the house of Mavick.

It was a warm spring day, a stray day sent in advance, as it were, to warn the nomads of the city that it was time to move on. The tramps in Washington Square felt the genial impulse, and, seeking the shaded benches, began to dream of the open country, the hospitable farmhouses, the nooning by wayside springs, and the charm of wandering at will among a tolerant and not too watchful people. Having the same abundant leisure, the dwellers up-town—also nomads—were casting in their minds how best to employ it, and the fortunate ones were already gathering together their flocks and herds and preparing to move on to their camps at Newport or among the feeding-hills of the New-England coast.

The foliage of Central Park, already heavy, still preserved the freshness of its new birth, and invited the stroller on the Avenue to its protecting shade. At Miss McDonald’s suggestion they turned in and found a secluded seat.

“I often come here,” she said to Philip; “it is almost as peaceful as the wilderness itself.”

To Philip also it seemed peaceful, but the soothing influence he found in it was that he was sitting with the woman who saw Evelyn hourly, who had been with her only an hour ago.

“Yes,” she said, in reply to a question, “everybody is well. We are going to leave town earlier than usual this summer, as soon as Mr. Mavick returns. Mrs. Mavick is going to open her Newport house; she says she has had enough of the country. It is still very amusing to me to see how you Americans move about with the seasons, just like the barbarians of Turkestan, half the year in summer camps and half the year in winter camps.”

“Perhaps,” said Philip, “it is because the social pasturage gets poor.”

“Maybe,” replied the governess, continuing the conceit, “only the horde keeps pretty well together, wherever it is. I know we are to have a very gay season. Lots of distinguished foreigners and all that.”

“But,” said Philip, “don’t England and the Continent long for the presence of Americans in the season in the same way?”

“Not exactly. It is the shop-keepers and hotels that sigh for the Americans. I don’t think that American shop-keepers expect much of foreigners.”

“And you are going soon? I suppose Miss Mavick is eager to go also,” said Philip, trying to speak indifferently.

Miss McDonald turned towards him with a look of perfect understanding, and then replied, “No, not eager; she hasn’t been in her usual spirits lately—no, not ill—and probably the change will be good for her. It is her first season, you know, and that is always exciting to a girl. Perhaps it is only the spring weather.”

It was some moments before either of them spoke again, and then Miss McDonald looked up—“Oh, Mr. Burnett, I have wanted to see you and have a talk with you about your novel. I could say so little in my note. We read it first together and then I read it alone, rather to sit in judgment on it, you know. I liked it better the second time, but I could see the faults of construction, and I could see, too, why it will be more popular with a few people than with the general public. You don’t mind my saying—”

“Go on, the words of a friend.”

“Yes, I know, are sometimes hardest to bear. Well, it is lovely, ideal, but it seems to me you are still a little too afraid of human nature. You are afraid to say things that are common. And the deep things of life are pretty much all common. No, don’t interrupt me. I love the story just as it is. I am glad you wrote it as you did. It was natural, in your state of experience, that you should do it. But in your next, having got rid of what was on top of your mind, so to speak, you will take a firmer, more confident hold of life. You are not offended?”

“No, indeed,” cried Philip. “I am very grateful. No doubt you are right. It seems to me, now that I am detached from it, as if it were only a sort of prelude to something else.”

“Well, you must not let my single opinion influence you too much, for I must in honesty tell you another thing. Evelyn will not have a word of criticism of it. She says it is like a piece of music, and the impudent thing declares that she does not expect a Scotchwoman to understand anything but ballad music.”

Philip laughed at this, such a laugh as he had not indulged in for many days. “I hope you don’t quarrel about such a little thing.”

“Not seriously. She says I may pick away at the story—and I like to see her bristle up—but that she looks at the spirit.”

“God bless her,” said Philip under his breath.

Miss McDonald rose, and they walked out into the Avenue again. How delightful was the genial air, the light, the blue sky of spring! How the brilliant Avenue, now filling up with afternoon equipages, sparkled in the sunshine!

When they parted, Miss McDonald gave him her hand and held his a moment, looking into his eyes. “Mr. Burnett, authors need some encouragement. When I left Evelyn she was going to her room with your book in her hand.”

XIX

Why should not Philip trust the future? He was a free man. He had given no hostages to fortune. Even if he did not succeed, no one else would be involved in his failure. Why not follow his inclination, the dream of his boyhood?

He was at liberty to choose for himself. Everybody in America is; this is the proclamation of its blessed independence. Are we any better off for the privilege of following first one inclination and then another, which is called making a choice? Are they not as well off, and on the whole as likely to find their right place, who inherit their callings in life, whose careers are mapped out from the cradle by circumstance and convention? How much time do we waste in futile experiment? Freedom to try everything, which is before the young man, is commonly freedom to excel in nothing.

There are, of course, exceptions. The blacksmith climbs into a city pulpit. The popular preacher becomes an excellent insurance agent. The saloon-keeper develops into the legislator, and wears the broadcloth and high hat of the politician. The brakeman becomes the railway magnate, and the college graduate a grocer’s clerk, and the messenger-boy, picking up by chance one day the pen, and finding it run easier than his legs, becomes a power on a city journal, and advises society how to conduct itself and the government how to make war and peace. All this adds to the excitement and interest of life. On the whole, we say that people get shaken into their right places, and the predetermined vocation is often a mistake. There is the anecdote of a well-known clergyman who, being in a company with his father, an aged and distinguished doctor of divinity, raised his monitory finger and exclaimed, “Ah, you spoiled a first-rate carpenter when you made a poor minister of me.”

Philip thought he was calmly arguing the matter with himself. How often do we deliberately weigh such a choice as we would that of another person, testing our inclination by solid reason? Perhaps no one could have told Philip what he ought to do, but every one who knew him, and the circumstances, knew what he would do. He was, in fact, already doing it while he was paltering with his ostensible profession. But he never would have confessed, probably he would then have been ashamed to confess, how much his decision to break with the pretense of law was influenced by the thought of what a certain dark little maiden, whose image was always in his mind, would wish him to do, and by the very remarkable fact that she was seen going to her room with his well-read story in her hand. Perhaps it was under her pillow at night!

Good-luck seemed to follow his decision—as it often does when a man makes a questionable choice, as if the devil had taken an interest in his downward road to prosperity. But Philip really gained a permanent advantage. The novel had given him a limited reputation and very little money. Yet it was his stepping-stone, and when he applied to his publishers and told them of his decision, they gave him some work as a reader for the house. At first this was fitful and intermittent, but as he showed both literary discrimination and tact in judging of the market, his services were more in request, and slowly he acquired confidential relations with the house. Whatever he knew, his knowledge of languages and his experience abroad, came into play, and he began to have more confidence in himself, as he saw that his somewhat desultory education had, after all, a market value.

The rather long period of his struggle, which is a common struggle, and often disheartening, need not be dwelt on here. We can anticipate by saying that he obtained in the house a permanent and responsible situation, with an income sufficient for a bachelor without habits of self-indulgence. It was not the crowning of a noble ambition, it was not in the least the career he had dreamed of, but it gave him support and a recognized position, and, above all, did not divert him from such creative work as he was competent to do. Nay, he found very soon that the feeling of security, without any sordid worry, gave freedom to his imagination. There was something stimulating in the atmosphere of books and manuscripts and in that world of letters which seems so large to those who live in it. Fortunately, also, having a support, he was not tempted to debase his talent by sensational ventures. What he wrote for this or that magazine he wrote to please himself, and, although he saw no fortune that way, the little he received was an encouragement as well as an appreciable addition to his income.

There are two sorts of success in letters as in life generally. The one is achieved suddenly, by a dash, and it lasts as long as the author can keep the attention of the spectators upon his scintillating novelties. When the sparks fade there is darkness. How many such glittering spectacles this century has witnessed!

There is another sort of success which does not startlingly or at once declare itself. Sometimes it comes with little observation. The reputation is slowly built up, as by a patient process of nature. It is curious, as Philip wrote once in an essay, to see this unfolding in Lowell’s life. There was no one moment when he launched into great popularity—nay, in detail, he seemed to himself not to have made the strike that ambition is always expecting. But lo! the time came when, by universal public consent, which was in the nature of a surprise to him, he had a high and permanent place in the world of letters.

In anticipating Philip’s career, however, it must not be understood that he had attained any wide public recognition. He was simply enrolled in the great army of readers and was serving his apprenticeship. He was recognized as a capable man by those who purvey in letters to the entertainment of the world. Even this little foothold was not easily gained in a day, as the historian discovered in reading some bundles of old letters which Philip wrote in this time of his novitiate to Celia and to his cousin Alice.

It was against Celia’s most strenuous advice that he had trusted himself to a literary career. “I see, my dear friend,” she wrote, in reply to his announcement that he was going that day to Mr. Hunt to resign his position, “that you are not happy, but whatever your disappointment or disillusion, you will not better yourself by surrendering a regular occupation. You live too much in the imagination already.”

Philip fancied, with that fatuity common to his sex, that he had worn an impenetrable mask in regard to his wild passion for Evelyn, and did not dream that, all along, Celia had read him like an open book. She judged Philip quite accurately. It was herself that she did not know, and she would have repelled as nonsense the suggestion that her own restlessness and her own changing experiments in occupation were due to the unsatisfied longings of a woman’s heart.

“You must not think,” the letter went on, “that I want to dictate, but I have noticed that men—it may be different with women—only succeed by taking one path and diligently walking in it. And literature is not a career, it is just a toss up, a lottery, and woe to you if you once draw a lucky number—you will always be expecting another… You say that I am a pretty one to give advice, for I am always chopping and changing myself. Well, from the time you were a little boy, did I ever give you but one sort of advice? I have been constant in that. And as to myself, you are unjust. I have always had one distinct object in life, and that I have pursued. I wanted to find out about life, to have experience, and then do what I could do best, and what needed most to be done. Why did I not stick to teaching in that woman’s college? Well, I began to have doubts, I began to experiment on my pupils. You will laugh, but I will give you a specimen. One day I put a question to my literature class, and I found out that not one of them knew how to boil potatoes. They were all getting an education, and hardly one of them knew how much the happiness of a home depends upon having the potatoes mealy and not soggy. It was so in everything. How are we going to live when we are all educated, without knowing how to live? Then I found that the masses here in New York did not know any better than the classes how to live. Don’t think it is just a matter of cooking. It is knowing how, generally, to make the most of yourself and of your opportunities, and have a nice world to live in, a thrifty, self-helpful, disciplined world. Is education giving us this? And then we think that organization will do it, organization instead of self-development. We think we can organize life, as they are trying to organize art. They have organized art as they have the production of cotton.

“Did I tell you I was in that? No? I used to draw in school, and after I had worked in the Settlement here in New York, and while I was working down on the East Side, it came over me that maybe I had one talent wrapped in a napkin; and I have been taking lessons in Fifty-seventh Street with the thousand or two young women who do not know how to boil potatoes, but are pursuing the higher life of art. I did not tell you this because I knew you would say that I am just as inconsistent as you are. But I am not. I have demonstrated the fact that neither I nor one in a hundred of those charming devotees to art could ever earn a living by art, or do anything except to add to the mediocrity of the amazing art product of this free country.

“And you will ask, what now? I am going on in the same way. I am going to be a doctor. In college I was very well up in physiology and anatomy, and I went quite a way in biology. So you see I have a good start. I am going to attend lectures and go into a hospital, as soon as there is an opening, and then I mean to practice. One essential for a young doctor I have in advance. That is patients. I can get all I want on the East Side, and I have already studied many of them. Law and medicine are what I call real professions.”

However Celia might undervalue the calling that Philip had now entered on, he had about this time evidence of the growing appreciation of literature by practical business men. He was surprised one day by a brief note from Murad Ault, asking him to call at his office as soon as convenient.

Mr. Ault received him in his private office at exactly the hour named. Evidently Mr. Ault’s affairs were prospering. His establishment presented every appearance of a high-pressure business perfectly organized. The outer rooms were full of industrious clerks, messengers were constantly entering and departing in a feverish rapidity, servants moved silently about, conducting visitors to this or that waiting-room and answering questions, excited speculators in groups were gesticulating and vociferating, and in the anteroom were impatient clients awaiting their turn. In the inner chamber, however, was perfect calm. There at his table sat the dark, impenetrable operator, whose time was exactly apportioned, serene, saturnine, or genial, as the case might be, listening attentively, speaking deliberately, despatching the affair in hand without haste or the waste of a moment.

Mr. Ault arose and shook hands cordially, and then went on, without delay for any conventional talk.

“I sent for you, Mr. Burnett, because I wanted your help, and because I thought I might do you a good turn. You see” (with a grim smile) “I have not forgotten Rivervale days. My wife has been reading your story. I don’t have much time for such things myself, but her constant talk about it has given me an idea. I want to suggest to you the scene of a novel, one that would be bound to be a good seller.

“I could guarantee a big circulation. I have just become interested in one of the great transcontinental lines.” He named the most picturesque of them—one that he, in fact, absolutely controlled. “Well, I want a story, yes, I guess a good love-story—a romance of reality you might call it—strung on that line. You take the idea?”

“Why,” said Philip, half amused at the conceit and yet complimented by the recognition of his talent, “I don’t know anything about railroads—how they are run, cost of building, prospect of traffic, engineering difficulties, all that—nothing whatever.”

“So much the better. It is a literary work I want, not a brag about the road or a description of its enterprise. You just take the line as your scene. Let the story run on that. The company, don’t you see, must not in any way be suspected with having anything to do with it, no mention of its name as a company, no advertisement of the road on a fly-leaf or cover. Just your own story, pure and simple.”

“But,” said Philip, more and more astonished at this unlooked-for expansion of the literary field, “I could not embark on an enterprise of such magnitude.”

“Oh,” said Mr. Ault, complacently, “that will be all arranged. Just a pleasure trip, as far as that goes. You will have a private car, well stocked, a photographer will go along, and I think—don’t you? a water-color artist. You can take your own time, stop when and where you choose—at the more stations the better. It ought to be profusely illustrated with scenes on the line—yes, have colored plates, all that would give life and character to your story. Love on a Special, some such title as that. It would run like oil. I will arrange to have it as a serial in one of the big magazines, and then the book would be bound to go. The company, of course, can have nothing to do with it, but I can tell you privately that it would rather distribute a hundred thousand copies of a book of good literature through the country than to encourage the railway truck that is going now.

“I shouldn’t wonder, Mr. Burnett, if the public would be interested in having the Puritan Nun take that kind of a trip.” And Mr. Ault ended his explanation with an interrogatory smile.

Philip hesitated a moment, trying to grasp the conception of this business use of literature. Mr. Ault resumed:

“It isn’t anything in the nature of an advertisement. Literature is a power. Why, do you know—of course you did not intend it—your story has encouraged the Peacock Inn to double its accommodations, and half the farmhouses in Rivervale are expecting summer boarders. The landlord of the Peacock came to see me the other day, and he says everything is stirred up there, and he has already to enlarge or refuse application.”

“It is very kind in you, Mr. Ault, to think of me in that connection, but I fear you have overestimated my capacity. I could name half a dozen men who could do it much better than I could. They know how to do it, they have that kind of touch. I have been surprised at the literary ability engaged by the great corporations.”

Mr. Ault made a gesture of impatience. “I wouldn’t give a damn for that sort of thing. It is money thrown away. If I should get one of the popular writers you refer to, the public would know he was hired. If you lay your story out there, nobody will suspect anything of the sort. It will be a clean literary novel. Not travel, you understand, but a story, and the more love in it the better. It will be a novelty. You can run your car sixty miles an hour in exciting passages, everything will work into it. When people travel on the road the pictures will show them the scenes of the story. It is a big thing,” said Mr. Ault in conclusion.

“I see it is,” said Philip, rising at the hint that his time had expired. “I am very much obliged to you, Mr. Ault, for your confidence in me. But it is a new idea. I will have to think it over.”

“Well, think it over. There is money in it. You would not start till about midsummer. Good-day.”

A private car! Travel like a prince! Certainly literature was looking up in the commercial world. Philip walked back to his publishers with a certain elasticity of step, a new sense of power. Yes, the power of the pen. And why not? No doubt it would bring him money and spread his name very widely. There was nothing that a friendly corporation could not do for a favorite. He would then really be a part of the great, active, enterprising world. Was there anything illegitimate in taking advantage of such an opportunity? Surely, he should remain his own master, and write nothing except what his own conscience approved. But would he not feel, even if no one else knew it, that he was the poet-laureate of a corporation?

And suddenly, as he thought how the clear vision of Evelyn would plunge to the bottom of such a temptation, he felt humiliated that such a proposition should have been made to him. Was there nothing, nobody, that commercialism did not think for sale and to be trafficked in?

Nevertheless, he wrote to Alice about it, describing the proposal as it was made to him, without making any comment on it.

Alice replied speedily. “Isn’t it funny,” she wrote, “and isn’t it preposterous? I wonder what such people think? And that horrid young pirate, Ault, a patron of literature! My dear, I cannot conceive of you as the Pirate’s Own. Dear Phil, I want you to succeed. I do want you to make money, a lot of it. I like to think you are wanted and appreciated, and that you can get paid better and better for what you do. Sell your manuscripts for as good a price as you can get. Yes, dear, sell your manuscripts, but don’t sell your soul.”

XX

Did Miss McDonald tell Evelyn of her meeting with Philip in Central Park? The Scotch loyalty to her service would throw a doubt upon this. At the same time, the Scotch affection, the Scotch sympathy with a true and romantic passion, and, above all, the Scotch shrewdness, could be trusted to do what was best under the circumstances. That she gave the least hint of what she said to Mr. Burnett concerning Evelyn is not to be supposed for a moment. Certainly she did not tell Mrs. Mavick. Was she a person to run about with idle gossip? But it is certain that Evelyn knew that Philip had given up his situation in the office, that he had become a reader for a publishing house, that he had definitely decided to take up a literary career. And somehow it came into her mind that Philip knew that this decision would be pleasing to her.

According to the analogy of other things in nature, it would seem that love must have something to feed on to sustain it. But it is remarkable upon how little it can exist, can even thrive and become strong, and develop a power of resistance to hostile influences. Once it gets a lodgment in a woman’s heart, it is an exclusive force that transforms her into a heroine of courage and endurance. No arguments, no reason, no considerations of family, of position, of worldly fortune, no prospect of immortal life, nothing but doubt of faith in the object can dislodge it. The woman may yield to overwhelming circumstances, she may even by her own consent be false to herself, but the love lives, however hidden and smothered, so long as the vital force is capable of responding to a true emotion. Perhaps nothing in human life is so pathetic as this survival in old age of a youthful, unsatisfied love. It may cease to be a passion, it may cease to be a misery, it may have become only a placid sentiment, yet the heart must be quite cold before this sentiment can cease to stir it on occasion—for the faded flower is still in the memory the bloom of young love.

They say that in the New Education for women love is not taken into account in the regular course; it is an elective study. But the immortal principle of life does not care much for organization, and says, as of old, they reckon ill who leave me out.

In the early season at Newport there was little to distract the attention and much to calm the spirit. Mrs. Mavick was busy in her preparation for the coming campaign, and Evelyn and her governess were left much alone, to drive along the softly lapping sea, to search among the dells of the rocky promontory for wild flowers, or to sit on the cliffs in front of the gardens of bloom and watch the idle play of the waves, that chased each other to the foaming beach and in good-nature tossed about the cat-boats and schooners and set the white sails shimmering and dipping in the changing lights. And Evelyn, drinking in the beauty and the peace of it, no doubt, was more pensive than joyous. Within the last few months life had opened to her with a suddenness that half frightened her.

It was a woman who sat on the cliffs now, watching the ocean of life, no longer a girl into whose fresh soul the sea and the waves and the air, and the whole beauty of the world, were simply responsive to her own gayety and enjoyment of living. It was not the charming scene that held her thought, but the city with its human struggle, and in that struggle one figure was conspicuous. In such moments this one figure of youth outweighed for her all that the world held besides. It was strange. Would she have admitted this? Not in the least, not even to herself, in her virgin musings; nevertheless, the world was changed for her, it was more serious, more doubtful, richer, and more to be feared.

It was not too much to say that one season had much transformed her. She had been so ignorant of the world a year ago. She had taken for granted all that was abstractly right. Now she saw that the conventions of life were like sand-dunes and barriers in the path she was expected to walk. She had learned for one thing what money was. Wealth had been such an accepted part of her life, since she could remember, that she had attached no importance to it, and had only just come to see what distinctions it made, and how it built a barrier round about her. She had come to know what it was that gave her father position and distinction; and the knowledge had been forced upon her by all the obsequious flattery of society that she was, as a great heiress, something apart from others. This position, so much envied, may be to a sensitive soul an awful isolation.

It was only recently that Evelyn had begun to be keenly aware of the circumstances that hedged her in. They were speaking one day as they sat upon the cliffs of the season about to begin. In it Evelyn had always had unalloyed, childish delight. Now it seemed to her something to be borne.

“McDonald,” the girl said, abruptly, but evidently continuing her line of thought, “mamma says that Lord Montague is coming next week.”

“To be with us?”

“Oh, no. He is to stay with the Danforth-Sibbs. Mamma says that as he is a stranger here we must be very polite to him, and that his being here will give distinction to the season. Do you like him?” There was in Evelyn still, with the penetration of the woman, the naivete of the child.

“I cannot say that he is personally very fascinating, but then I have never talked with him.”

“Mamma says he is very interesting about his family, and their place in England, and about his travels. He has been in the South Sea Islands. I asked him about them. He said that the natives were awfully jolly, and that the climate was jolly hot. Do you know, McDonald, that you can’t get anything out of him but exclamations and slang. I suppose he talks to other people differently. I tried him. At the reception I asked him who was going to take Tennyson’s place. He looked blank, and then said, ‘Er—I must have missed that. What place? Is he out?’”

Miss McDonald laughed, and then said, “You don’t understand the classes in English life. Poetry is not in his line. You see, dear, you couldn’t talk to him about politics. He is a born legislator, and when he is in the House of Lords he will know right well who is in and who is out. You mustn’t be unjust because he seems odd to you and of limited intelligence. Just that sort of youth is liable to turn up some day in India or somewhere and do a mighty plucky thing, and become a hero. I dare say he is a great sportsman.”

“Yes, he quite warmed up about shooting. He told me about going for yak in the snow mountains south of Thibet. Bloody cold it was. Nasty beast, if you didn’t bring him down first shot. No, I don’t doubt his courage nor his impudence. He looks at me so, that I can’t help blushing. I wish mamma wouldn’t ask him.”

“But, my dear, we must live in the world as it is. You are not responsible for Lord Montague.”

“And I know he will come,” the girl persisted in her line of thought.

“When he called the day before we came away, he asked a lot of questions about Newport, about horses and polo and golf, and all that, and were the roads good. And then, ‘Do you bike, Miss Mavick?’

“I pretended not to understand, and said I was still studying with my governess and I hadn’t got all the irregular verbs yet. For once, he looked quite blank, and after a minute he said, ‘That’s very good, you know!’ McDonald, I just hate him. He makes me so uneasy.”

“But don’t you know, child,” said Miss McDonald, laughing, “that we are required to love our enemies?”

“So I would,” replied the girl, quickly, “if he were an enemy and would keep away. Ah, me! McDonald, I want to ask you something. Do you suppose he would hang around a girl who was poor, such a sweet, pretty, dear creature as Alice Maitland, who is a hundred times nicer than I am?”

“He might,” said Miss McDonald, still quizzically. “They say that like goes to like, and it is reported that the Duke of Tewkesbury is as good as ruined.”

“Do be serious, McDonald.” The girl nestled up closer to her and took her hand. “I want to ask you one question more. Do you think—no, don’t look at me, look away off at that sail do you-think that, if I had been poor, Mr. Burnett would have seen me only twice, just twice, all last season?”

Miss McDonald put her arm around Evelyn and clasped the little figure tight. “You must not give way to fancies. We cannot, as life is arranged, be perfectly happy, but we can be true to ourselves, and there is scarcely anything that resolution and patience cannot overcome. I ought not to talk to you about this, Evelyn. But I must say one thing: I think I can read Philip Burnett. Oh, he has plenty of self-esteem, but, unless I mistake him, nothing could so mortify him as to have it said that he was pursuing a girl for the sake of her fortune.”

“And he wouldn’t!” cried the girl, looking up and speaking in an unsteady voice.

“Let me finish. He is, so I think, the sort of man that would not let any fortune, or anything else, stand in the way when his heart was concerned. I somehow feel that he could not change—faithfulness, that is his notion. If he only knew—”

“He never shall! he never shall!” cried the girl in alarm—“never!”

“And you think, child, that he doesn’t know? Come! That sail has been coming straight towards us ever since we sat here, never tacked once. That is omen enough for one day. See how the light strikes it. Come!”

The Newport season was not, after all, very gay. Society has become so complex that it takes more than one Englishman to make a season. Were it the business of the chronicler to study the evolution of this lovely watering-place from its simple, unconventional, animated days of natural hospitality and enjoyment, to its present splendid and palatial isolation of a society—during the season—which finds its chief satisfaction in the rivalry of costly luxury and in an atmosphere of what is deemed aristocratic exclusiveness, he would have a theme attractive to the sociologist. But such a noble study is not for him. His is the humble task of following the fortunes of certain individuals, more or less conspicuous in this astonishing flowering of a democratic society, who have become dear to him by long acquaintance.

It was not the fault of Mrs. Mavick that the season was so frigid, its glacial stateliness only now and then breaking out in an illuminating burst of festivity, like the lighting-up of a Montreal ice-palace. Her spacious house was always open, and her efforts, in charity enterprises and novel entertainments, were untiring to stimulate a circulation in the languid body of society.

This clever woman never showed more courage or more tact than in this campaign, and was never more agreeable and fascinating. She was even popular. If she was not accepted as a leader, she had a certain standing with the leaders, as a person of vivacity and social influence. Any company was eager for her presence. Her activity, spirit, and affability quite won the regard of the society reporters, and those who know Newport only through the newspapers would have concluded that the Mavicks were on the top of the wave. She, however, perfectly understood her position, and knew that the sweet friends, who exchanged with her, whenever they met, the conventional phrases of affection commented sarcastically upon her ambitions for her daughter. It was, at the same time, an ambition that they perfectly understood, and did not condemn on any ethical grounds. Evelyn was certainly a sweet girl, rather queerly educated, and never likely to make much of a dash, but she was an heiress, and why should not her money be put to the patriotic use of increasing the growing Anglo-American cordiality?

Lord Montague was, of course, a favorite, in demand for all functions, and in request for the private and intimate entertainments. He was an authority in the stables and the kennels, and an eager comrade in all the sports of the island. His easy manner, his self-possession everywhere, even his slangy talk, were accepted as evidence that he was above conventionalities. “The little man isn’t a beauty,” said Sally McTabb, “but he shows ‘race.’” He might be eccentric, but when you came to know him you couldn’t help liking the embryo duke in him.

In fact, things were going very well with Mrs. Mavick, except in her own household. There was something there that did not yield, that did not flow with her plans. With Lord Montague she was on the most intimate and confidential relations. He was almost daily at the house. Often she drove with him; frequently Evelyn was with them. Indeed, the three came to be associated in the public mind. There could be no doubt of the intentions of the young nobleman. That he could meet any opposition was not conceived.

The noble lord, since they had been in Newport, had freely opened his mind to Mrs. Mavick, and on a fit occasion had formally requested her daughter’s hand. Needless to say that he was accepted. Nay, more, he felt that he was trusted like a son. He was given every opportunity to press his suit. Somewhat to his surprise, he did not appear to make much headway. He was rarely able to see her alone, even for a moment. Such evasiveness in a young girl to a man of his rank astonished him. There could be no reason for it in himself; there must be some influence at work unknown to his social experience.

He did not reproach Mrs. Mavick with this, but he let her see that he was very much annoyed.

“If I had not your assurance to the contrary, Mrs. Mavick,” he said one day in a pet, “I should think she shunned me.”

“Oh, no, Lord Montague, that could not be. I told you that she had had a peculiar education; she is perfectly ignorant of the world, she is shy, and—well, for a girl in her position, she is unconventional. She is so young that she does not yet understand what life is.”

“You mean she does not know what I offer her?”

“Why, my dear Lord Montague, did you ever offer her anything?”

“Not flat, no,” said my lord, hesitating. “Every time I approach her she shies off like a young filly. There is something I don’t understand.”

“Evelyn,” and Mrs. Mavick spoke with feeling, “is an affectionate and dutiful child. She has never thought of marriage. The prospect is all new to her. But I am sure she would learn to love you if she knew you and her mind were once turned upon such a union. My lord, why not say to her what you feel, and make the offer you intend? You cannot expect a young girl to show her inclination before she is asked.” And Mrs. Mavick laughed a little to dispel the seriousness.

“By Jove! that’s so, good enough. I’ll do it straight out. I’ll tell her to take it or leave it. No, I don’t mean that, of course. I’ll tell her that I can’t live without her—that sort of thing, you know. And I can’t, that’s just the fact.”

“You can leave it confidently to her good judgment and to the friendship of the family for you.”

Lord Montague was silent for a moment, and seemed to be looking at a problem in his shrewd mind. For he had a shrewd mind, which took in the whole situation, Mrs. Mavick and all, with a perspicacity that would have astonished that woman of the world.

“There is one thing, perhaps I ought not to say it, but I have seen it, and it is in my head that it is that—I beg your pardon, madam—that damned governess.”

The shot went home. The suggestion, put into language that could be more easily comprehended than defended, illuminated Mrs. Mavick’s mind in a flash, seeming to disclose the source of an opposition to her purposes which secretly irritated her. Doubtless it was the governess. It was her influence that made Evelyn less pliable and amenable to reason than a young girl with such social prospects as she had would naturally be. Besides, how absurd it was that a young lady in society should still have a governess. A companion? The proper companion for a girl on the edge of matrimony was her mother!

XXI

This idea, once implanted in Mrs. Mavick’s mind, bore speedy fruit. No one would have accused her of being one of those uncomfortable persons who are always guided by an inflexible sense of justice, nor could it be said that she was unintelligently unjust. Facile as she was, in all her successful life she had never acted upon impulse, but from a conscience keenly alive to what was just to herself. Miss McDonald was in the way. And Mrs. Mavick had one quality of good generalship—she acted promptly on her convictions.

When Mr. Mavick came over next day to spend Sunday in what was called in print the bosom of his family, he looked very much worn and haggard and was in an irritated mood. He had been very little in Newport that summer, the disturbed state of business confining him to the city. And to a man of his age, New York in midsummer in a panicky season is not a recreation.

The moment Mrs. Mavick got her husband alone she showed a lively solicitude about his health.

“I suppose it has been dreadfully hot in the city?”

“Hot enough. Everything makes it hot.”

“Has anything gone wrong? Has that odious Ault turned up again?”

“Turned up is the word. Half the time that man is a mole, half the time a bull in a china-shop. He sails up to you bearing your own flag, and when he gets aboard he shows the skull and cross-bones.”

“Is it so bad as that?”

“As bad as what? He is a bad lot, but he is just an adventurer—a Napoleon who will get his Waterloo before fall. Don’t bother about things you don’t understand. How are things down here?”

“Going swimmingly.” “So I judged by the bills. How is the lord?”

“Now don’t be vulgar, Tom. You must keep up your end. Lord Montague is very nice; he is a great favorite here.”

“Does Evelyn like him?”

“Yes, she likes him; she likes him very much.”

“She didn’t show it to me.”

“No, she is awfully shy. And she is rather afraid of him, the big title and all that. And then she has never been accustomed to act for herself. She is old enough to be independent and to take her place in the world. At her age I was not in leading-strings.”

“I should say not,” said Mavick.

“Except in obedience to my mother,” continued Carmen, not deigning to notice the sarcasm. “And I’ve been thinking that McDonald—”

“So you want to get rid of her?”

“What a brutal way of putting it! No. But if Evelyn is ever to be self-reliant it is time she should depend more on herself. You know I am devoted to McDonald. And, what is more, I am used to her. I wasn’t thinking of her. You don’t realize that Evelyn is a young lady in society, and it has become ridiculous for her to still have a governess. Everybody would say so.”

“Well, call her a companion.”

“Ah, don’t you see it would be the same? She would still be under her influence and not able to act for herself.”

“What are you going to do? Turn her adrift after eighteen—what is it, seventeen?—years of faithful service?”

“How brutally you put it. I’m going to tell McDonald just how it is. She is a sensible woman, and she will see that it is for Evelyn’s good. And then it happens very luckily. Mrs. Van Cortlandt asked me last winter if I wouldn’t let her have McDonald for her little girl when we were through with her. She knew, of course, that we couldn’t keep a governess much longer for Evelyn. I am going to write to her. She will jump at the chance.”

“And McDonald?”

“Oh, she likes Mrs. Van Cortlandt. It will just suit her.”

“And Evelyn? That will be another wrench.” Men are so foolishly tender-hearted about women.

“Of course, I know it seems hard, and will be for a little. But it is for Evelyn’s good, I am perfectly sure.”

Mr. Mavick was meditating. It was a mighty unpleasant business. But he was getting tired of conflict. There was an undercurrent in the lives of both that made him shrink from going deep into any domestic difference. It was best to yield.

“Well, Carmen, I couldn’t have the heart to do it. She has been Evelyn’s constant companion all the child’s life. Ah, well, it’s your own affair. Only don’t stir it up till after I am gone. I must go to the city early Monday morning.”

Because Mavick, amid all the demands of business and society, and his ambitions for power in the world of finance and politics, had not had much time to devote to his daughter, it must not be supposed that he did not love her. In the odd moments at her service she had always been a delight to him; and, in truth, many of his ambitions had centred in the intelligent, affectionate, responsive child. But there had been no time for much real comradeship.

This Sunday, however, and it was partly because of pity for the shock he felt was in store for her, he devoted himself to her. They had a long walk on the cliff, and he talked to her of his life, of his travels, and his political experience. She was a most appreciative listener, and in the warmth of his confidence she opened her mind to him, and rather surprised him by her range of intelligence and the singular uprightness of her opinions, and more still by her ready wit and playfulness. It was the first time she had felt really free with her father, and he for the first time seemed to know her as she was in her inner life. When they returned to the house, and she was thanking him with a glow of enthusiasm for such a lovely day, he lifted her up and kissed her, with an emotion of affection that brought tears to her eyes.

A couple of days elapsed before Mrs. Mavick was ready for action. During this time she had satisfied herself, by apparently casual conversation with her daughter and Miss McDonald, that the latter would be wholly out of sympathy with her intentions in regard to Evelyn. Left to herself she judged that her daughter would look with more favor upon the brilliant career offered to her by Lord Montague. When, therefore, one morning the governess was summoned to her room, her course was decided on. She received Miss McDonald with more than usual cordiality. She had in her hand a telegram, and beamed upon her as the bearer of good news.

“I have an excellent offer for you, Miss McDonald.”

“An offer for me?”

“Yes, from Mrs. Van Cortlandt, to be the governess of her daughter, a sweet little girl of six. She has often spoken about it, and now I have an urgent despatch from her. She is in need of some one at once, and she greatly prefers you.”

“Do you mean, Mrs. Mavick, that—you—want—that I am to leave Evelyn, and you?” The room seemed to whirl around her.

“It is not what we want, McDonald,” said Mrs. Mavick calmly and still beaming, “but what is best. Your service as governess has continued much longer than could have been anticipated, and of course it must come to an end some time. You understand how hard this separation is for all of us. Mr. Mavick wanted me to express to you his infinite obligation, and I am sure he will take a substantial way of showing it. Evelyn is now a young lady in society, and of course it is absurd for her to continue under pupilage. It will be best for her, for her character, to be independent and learn to act for herself in the world.”

“Did she—has Evelyn—”

“No, I have said nothing to her of this offer, which is a most advantageous one. Of course she will feel as we do, at first.”

“Why, all these years, all her life, since she was a baby, not a day, not a night, Evelyn, and now—so sweet, so dear—why Mrs. Mavick!” And the Scotch woman, dazed, with a piteous appeal in her eyes, trying in vain to control her face, looked at her mistress.

“My dear McDonald, you must not take it that way. It is only a change. You are not going away really, we shall all be in the same city. I am sure you will—like your new home. Shall I tell Mrs. Van Cortlandt?”

“Tell Mrs. Van Cortlandt? Yes, tell her, thanks. I will go—soon—at once. In a little time, to get-ready. Thanks.” The governess rose and stood a moment to steady herself. All her life was in ruins. The blow crushed her. And she had been so happy. In such great peace. It seemed impossible. To leave Evelyn! She put out her hand as if to speak. Did Mrs. Mavick understand what she was doing? That it was the same as dragging a mother away from her child? But she said nothing. Words would not come. Everything seemed confused and blank. She sank into her chair.

“Excuse me, Mrs. Mavick, I think I am not very strong this morning.” And presently she stood on her feet again and steadied herself. “You will please tell Evelyn before—before I see her.” And she walked out of the room as one in a trance.

The news was communicated to Evelyn, quite incidentally, in the manner that all who knew Mrs. Mavick admired in her. Evelyn had just been in and out of her mother’s room, on one errand and another, and was going out again, when her mother said:

“Oh, by-the-way, Evelyn, at last we have got a splendid place for McDonald.”

Evelyn turned, not exactly comprehending. “A place for McDonald? For what?”

“As governess, of course. With Mrs. Van Cortlandt.”

“What! to leave us?” The girl walked back to her mother’s chair and stood before her in an attitude of wonder and doubt. “You don’t mean, mamma, that she is going away for good?”

“It is a great chance for her. I have been anxious for some time about employment for her, now that you do not need a governess—haven’t really for a year or two.”

“But, mamma, it can’t be. She is part of us. She belongs to the family; she has been in it almost as long as I have. Why, I have been with her every day of my life. To go away? To give her up? Does she know?”

“Does she know? What a child! She has accepted Mrs. Van Cortlandt’s offer. I telegraphed for her this morning. Tomorrow she goes to town to get her belongings together. Mrs. Van Cortlandt needs her at once. I am sorry to see, my dear, that you are thinking only of yourself.”

“Of myself?” The girl had been at first confused, and, as the idea forced itself upon her mind, she felt weak, and trembled, and was deadly pale. But when the certainty came, the enormity and cruelty of the dismissal aroused her indignation. “Myself!” she exclaimed again. Her eyes blazed with a wrath new to their tenderness, and, stepping back and stamping her foot; she cried out: “She shall not go! It is unjust! It is cruel!”

Her mother had never seen her child like that. She was revealing a spirit of resistance, a temper, an independence quite unexpected. And yet it was not altogether displeasing. Mrs. Mavick’s respect for her involuntarily rose. And after an instant, instead of responding with severity, as was her first impulse, she said, very calmly:

“Naturally, Evelyn, you do not like to part with her. None of us do. But go to your room and think it over reasonably. The relations of childhood cannot last forever.”

Evelyn stood for a moment undecided. Her mother’s calm self-control had not deceived her. She was no longer a child. It was a woman reading a woman. All her lifetime came back to her to interpret this moment. In the reaction of the second, the deepest pain was no longer for herself, nor even for Miss McDonald, but for a woman who showed herself so insensible to noble feeling. Protest was useless. But why was the separation desired? She did not fully see, but her instinct told her that it had a relation to her mother’s plans for her; and as life rose before her in the society, in the world, into which she was newly launched, she felt that she was alone, absolutely alone. She tried to speak, but before she could collect her thoughts her mother said:

“There, go now. It is useless to discuss the matter. We all have to learn to bear things.”

Evelyn went away, in a tumult of passion and of shame, and obeyed her impulse to go where she had always found comfort.

Miss McDonald was in her own room. Her trunk was opened. She had taken her clothes from the closet. She was opening the drawers and laying one article here and another there. She was going from closet to bureau, opening this door and shutting that in her sitting-room and bedroom, in an aimless, distracted way. Out of her efforts nothing had so far come but confusion. It seemed an impossible dream that she was actually packing up to go away forever.

Evelyn entered in a haste that could not wait for permission.

“Is it true?” she cried.

McDonald turned. She could not speak. Her faithful face was gray with suffering. Her eyes were swollen with weeping. For an instant she seemed not to comprehend, and then a flood of motherly feeling overcame her. She stretched out her arms and caught the girl to her breast in a passionate embrace, burying her face in her neck in a vain effort to subdue her sobbing.

What was there to say? Evelyn had come to her refuge for comfort, and to Evelyn the comforter it was she herself who must be the comforter. Presently she disengaged herself and forced the governess into an easy chair. She sat down on the arm of the chair and smoothed her hair and kissed her again and again.

“There. I’m going to help you. You’ll see you have not taught me for nothing.” She jumped up and began to bustle about. “You don’t know what a packer I am.”

“I knew it must come some time,” she was saying, with a weary air, as she followed with her eyes the light step of the graceful girl, who was beginning to sort things and to bring order out of the confusion, holding up one article after another and asking questions with an enforced cheerfulness that was more pathetic than any burst of grief.

“Yes, I know. There, that is laid in smooth.” She pretended to be thinking what to put in next, and suddenly she threw herself into McDonald’s lap and began to talk gayly. “It is all my fault, dear; I should have stayed little. And it doesn’t make any difference. I know you love me, and oh, McDonald, I love you more, a hundred times more, than ever. If you did not love me! Think how dreadful that would be. And we shall not be separated-only by streets, don’t you know. They can’t separate us. I know you want me to be brave. And some day, perhaps” (and she whispered in her ear—how many hundred times had she told her girl secrets in that way!), “if I do have a home of my own, then—”

It was not very cheerful talk, however it seemed to be, but it was better than silence, and in the midst of it, with many interruptions, the packing was over, and some sort of serenity was attained even by Miss McDonald. “Yes, dear heart, we have love and trust and hope.” But when the preparations were all made, and Evelyn went to her own room, there did not seem to be so much hope, nor any brightness in the midst of this first great catastrophe of her life.

XXII

The great Mavick ball at Newport, in the summer long remembered for its financial disasters, was very much talked about at the time. Long after, in any city club, a man was sure to have attentive listeners if he, began his story or his gossip with the remark that he was at the Mavick ball.

It attracted great attention, both on account of the circumstances that preceded it and the events which speedily followed, and threw a light upon it that gave it a spectacular importance. The city journals made a feature of it. They summoned their best artists to illustrate it, and illuminate it in pen-and-ink, half-tones, startling colors, and photographic reproductions, sketches theatrical, humorous, and poetic, caricatures, pictures of tropical luxury and aristocratic pretension; in short, all the bewildering affluence of modern art which is brought to bear upon the aesthetic cultivation of the lowest popular taste. They summoned their best novelists to throw themselves recklessly upon the English language, and extort from it its highest expression in color and lyrical beauty, the novelists whose mission it is, in the newspaper campaign against realism, to adorn and dramatize the commonest events of life, creating in place of the old-fashioned “news” the highly spiced “story,” which is the ideal aspiration of the reporter.

Whatever may be said about the power of the press, it is undeniable that it can set the entire public thinking and talking about any topic, however insignificant in itself, that it may elect to make the sensation of the day—a wedding, a murder, a political scandal, a divorce, a social event, a defalcation, a lost child, an unidentified victim of accident or crime, an election, or—that undefined quickener of patriotism called a casus belli. It can impose any topic it pleases upon the public mind. In case there is no topic, it is necessary to make one, for it is an indefeasible right of the public to have news.

These reports of the Mavick ball had a peculiar interest for at least two people in New York. Murad Ault read them with a sardonic smile and an enjoyment that would not have been called altruistic. Philip searched them with the feverish eagerness of a maiden who scans the report of a battle in which her lover has been engaged.

All summer long he had lived upon stray bits of news in the society columns of the newspapers. To see Evelyn’s name mentioned, and only rarely, as a guest at some entertainment, and often in connection with that of Lord Montague, did not convey much information, nor was that little encouraging. Was she well? Was she absorbed in the life of the season? Did she think of him in surroundings so brilliant? Was she, perhaps, unhappy and persecuted? No tidings came that could tell him the things that he ached to know.

Only recently intelligence had come to him that at the same time wrung his heart with pity and buoyed him up with hope. He had not seen Miss McDonald since her dismissal, for she had been only one night in the city, but she had written to him. Relieved by her discharge of all obligations of silence, she had written him frankly about the whole affair, and, indeed, put him in possession of unrecorded details and indications that filled him with anxiety, to be sure, but raised his courage and strengthened his determination. If Evelyn loved him, he had faith that no manoeuvres or compulsion could shake her loyalty. And yet she was but a girl; she was now practically alone, and could she resist the family and the social pressure? Few women could, few women do, effectively resist under such circumstances. With one of a tender heart, duty often takes the most specious and deceiving forms. In yielding to the impulses of her heart, which in her inexperience may be mistaken, has a girl the right—from a purely rational point of view—to set herself against, nay, to destroy, the long-cherished ambitions of her parents for a brilliant social career for her, founded upon social traditions of success? For what had Mr. Mavick toiled? For what had Mrs. Mavick schemed all these years? Could the girl throw herself away? Such disobedience, such disregard for social law, would seem impossible to her mother.

Some of the events that preceded the Mavick ball throw light upon that interesting function. After the departure of Miss McDonald, Mrs. Mavick, in one of her confidential talks with her proposed son-in-law, confessed that she experienced much relief. An obstacle seemed to be removed.

In fact, Evelyn rather surprised her mother by what seemed a calm acceptance of the situation. There was no further outburst. If the girl was often preoccupied and seemed listless, that was to be expected, on the sudden removal of the companion of her lifetime.

But she did not complain. She ceased after a while to speak of McDonald. If she showed little enthusiasm in what was going on around her, she was compliant, she fell in at once with her mother’s suggestions, and went and came in an attitude of entire obedience.

“It isn’t best for you to keep up a correspondence, my dear, now that you know that McDonald is nicely settled—all reminiscent correspondence is very wearing—and, really, I am more than delighted to see that you are quite capable of walking alone. Do you know, Evelyn, that I am more and more proud of you every day, as my daughter. I don’t dare to tell you half the nice things that are said of you. It would make you vain.” And the proud mother kissed her affectionately. The letters ceased. If the governess wrote, Evelyn did not see the letters.

As the days went by, Lord Montague, in high and confident spirits, became more and more a familiar inmate of the house. Daily he sent flowers to Evelyn; he contrived little excursions and suppers; he was marked in his attentions wherever they went. “He is such a dear fellow,” said Mrs. Mavick to one of her friends; “I don’t know how we should get on without him.”

Only, in the house, owing to some unnatural perversity of circumstances, he did not see much of Evelyn, never alone for more than a moment. It is wonderful what efficient, though invisible, defenses most women, when they will, can throw about themselves.

That the affair was “arranged” Lord Montague had no doubt. It was not conceivable that the daughter of an American stock-broker would refuse the offer of a position so transcendent and so evidently coveted in a democratic society. Not that the single-minded young man reasoned about it this way. He was born with a most comfortable belief in himself and the knowledge that when he decided to become a domestic man he had simply, as the phrase is, to throw his handkerchief.

At home, where such qualities as distinguished him from the common were appreciated without the need of personal exertion, this might be true; but in America it did seem to be somehow different. American women, at least some of them, did need to be personally wooed; and many of them had a sort of independence in the bestowal of their affections or, what they understood to be the same thing, themselves that must be taken into account. And it gradually dawned upon the mind of this inheritor of privilege that in this case the approval of the family, even the pressure of the mother, was not sufficient; he must have also Evelyn’s consent. If she were a mature woman who knew and appreciated the world, she would perceive the advantages offered to her without argument. But a girl, just released from the care of her governess, unaccustomed to society, might have notions, or, in the vernacular of the scion, might be skittish.

And then, again, to do the wooer entire justice, the dark little girl, so much mistress of herself, so evidently spirited, with such an air of distinction, began to separate herself in his mind as a good goer against the field, and he had a real desire to win her affection. The more indifferent she was to him, the keener was his desire to possess her. His unsuccessful wooing had passed through several stages, first astonishment, then pique, and finally something very like passion, or a fair semblance of devotion, backed, of course, since all natures are more or less mixed, by the fact that this attractive figure of the woman was thrown into high relief by the colossal fortune behind her.

And Evelyn herself? Neither her mother nor her suitor appreciated the uncommon circumstances that her education, her whole training in familiarity with pure and lofty ideals, had rendered her measurably insensible to the social considerations that seemed paramount to them, or that there could be any real obstacle to the bestowal of her person. where her heart was not engaged. Yet she perfectly understood her situation, and, at times, deprived of her lifelong support, she felt powerless in it, and she suffered as only the pure and the noble can suffer. Day after day she fought her battle alone, now and then, as the situation confronted her, assailed by a shudder of fear, as of one awakening in the night from a dream of peril, the clutch of an assassin, or the walking on an icy precipice. If McDonald were only with her! If she could only hear from Philip! Perhaps he had lost hope and was submitting to the inevitable.

The opportunity which Lord Montague had long sought came one day unexpectedly, or perhaps it was contrived. They were waiting in the drawing-room for an afternoon drive. The carriage was delayed, and Mrs. Mavick excused herself to ascertain the cause of the delay. Evelyn and her suitor were left alone. She was standing by a window looking out, and he was standing by the fireplace watching the swing of the figure on the pendulum of the tall mantelpiece clock. He was the first to break the silence.

“Your clock, Miss Mavick, is a little fast.” No reply. “Or else I am slow.” Still no reply. “They say, you know, that I am a little slow, over here.” No reply. “I am not, really, you know. I know my mind. And there was something, Miss Mavick, something particular, that I wanted to say to you.”

“Yes?” without turning round. “The carriage will be here in a minute.”

“Never mind that,” and Lord Montague moved away from the fireplace and approached the girl; “take care of the minutes and the hours will take care of themselves, as the saying is.” At this unexpected stroke of brilliancy Evelyn did turn round, and stood in an expectant attitude. The moment had evidently come, and she would not meet it like a coward.

“We have been friends a long time; not so very long, but it seems to me the best part of my life,” he was looking down and speaking slowly, with the modest deference of a gentleman, “and you must have seen, that is, I wanted you to see, you know well, that is—er—what I was staying on here for.”

“Because you like America, I suppose,” said Evelyn, coolly.

“Because I like some things in America—that is just the fact,” continued the little lord, with more confidence. “And that is why I stayed. You see I couldn’t go away and leave what was best in the world to me.”

There was an air of simplicity and sincerity about this that was unexpected, and could not but be respected by any woman. But Evelyn waited, still immovable.

“It wasn’t reasonable that you should like a stranger right off,” he went on, “just at first, and I waited till you got to know me better. Ways are different here and over there, I know that, but if you came to know me, Miss Mavick, you would see that I am not such a bad sort of a fellow.” And a deprecatory smile lighted up his face that was almost pathetic. To Evelyn this humility seemed genuine, and perhaps it was, for the moment. Certainly the eyes she bent on, the odd little figure were less severe.

“All this is painful to me, Lord Montague.”

“I’m sorry,” he continued, in the same tone. “I cannot help it. I must say it. I—you must know that I love you.” And then, not heeding the nervous start the girl gave in stepping backward, “And—and, will you be my wife?”

“You do me too much honor, Lord Montague,” said Evelyn, summoning up all her courage.

“No, no, not a bit of it.”

“I am obliged to you for your good opinion, but you know I am almost a schoolgirl. My governess has just left me. I have never thought of such a thing. And, Lord Montague, I cannot return your feeling. That is all. You must see how painful this is to me.”

“I wouldn’t give you pain, Miss Mavick, not for the world. Perhaps when you think it over it will seem different to you. I am sure it will. Don’t answer now, for good.”

“No, no, it cannot be,” said Evelyn, with something of alarm in her tone, for the full meaning of it all came over her as she thought of her mother.

“You are not offended?”

“No,” said Evelyn.

“I couldn’t bear to offend you. You cannot think I would. And you will not be hard-hearted. You know me, Miss Mavick, just where I am. I’m just as I said.”

“The carriage is coming,” said Mrs. Mavick, who returned at this moment.

The group for an instant was silent, and then Evelyn said:

“We have waited so long; mamma, that I am a little tired, and you will excuse me from the drive this afternoon?”

“Certainly, my dear.”

When the two were seated in the carriage, Mrs. Mavick turned to Lord Montague:

“Well?”

“No go,” replied my lord, as sententiously, and in evident bad humor.

“What? And you made a direct proposal?”

“Showed her my whole hand. Made a square offer. Damme, I am not used to this sort of thing.”

“You don’t mean that she refused you?”

“Don’t know what you call it. Wouldn’t start.”

“She couldn’t have understood you. What did she say?”

“Said it was too much honor, and that rot. By Jove, she didn’t look it. I rather liked her pluck. She didn’t flinch.”

“Oh, is that all?” And Mrs. Mavick spoke as if her mind were relieved. “What could you expect from such a sudden proposal to a young girl, almost a child, wholly unused to the world? I should have done the same thing at her age. It will look different to her when she reflects, and understands what the position is that is offered her. Leave that to me.”

Lord Montague shook his head and screwed up his keen little eyes. His mind was in full play. “I know women, Mrs. Mavick, and I tell you there is something behind this. Somebody has been in the stable.” The noble lord usually dropped into slang when he was excited.

“I don’t understand your language,” said Mrs. Mavick, straightening herself up in her seat.

“I beg pardon. It is just a way of speaking on the turf. When a favorite goes lame the morning of the race, we know some one has been tampering with him. I tell you there is some one else. She has some one else in her mind. That’s the reason of it.”

“Nonsense.” cried Mrs. Mavick, with the energy of conviction. “It’s impossible. There is nobody, couldn’t be anybody. She has led a secluded life till this hour. She hasn’t a fancy, I know.”

“I hope you are right,” he replied, in the tone of a man wishing to take a cheerful view. “Perhaps I don’t understand American girls.”

“I think I do,” she said, smiling. “They are generally amenable to reason. Evelyn now has something definite before her. I am glad you proposed.”

And this was the truth. Mrs. Mavick was elated. So far her scheme was completely successful. As to Evelyn, she trusted to various influences she could bring to bear. Ultimate disobedience of her own wishes she did not admit as a possible thing.

A part of her tactics was the pressure of public opinion, so far as society represents it—that is, what society expects. And therefore it happened in a few days that a strong suspicion got about that Lord Montague had proposed formally to the heiress. The suspicion was strengthened by appearances. Mrs. Mavick did not deny the rumor. That there was an engagement was not affirmed, but that the honor had been or would be declined was hardly supposable.

In the painful interview between mother and daughter concerning this proposal, Evelyn had no reason to give for her opposition, except that she did not love him. This point Mrs. Mavick skillfully evaded and minimized. Of course she would love him in time. The happiest marriages were founded on social fitness and the judgment of parents, and not on the inexperienced fancies of young girls. And in this case things had gone too far to retreat. Lord Montague’s attentions had been too open and undisguised. He had been treated almost as a son by the house. Society looked upon the affair as already settled. Had Evelyn reflected on the mortification that would fall upon her mother if she persisted in her unreasonable attitude? And Mrs. Mavick shed actual tears in thinking upon her own humiliation.

The ball which followed these private events was also a part of Mrs. Mavick’s superb tactics. It would be in a way a verification of the public rumors and a definite form of pressure which public expectation would exercise upon the lonely girl.

The splendor of this function is still remembered. There were, however, features in the glowing descriptions of it which need to be mentioned. It was assumed that it was for a purpose, that it was in fact, if not a proclamation, at least an intimation of a new and brilliant Anglo-Saxon alliance. No one asserted that an engagement existed. But the prominent figures in the spectacle were the English lord and the young and beautiful American heiress. There were portraits of both in half-tone. The full names and titles expectant of Lord Montague were given, a history of the dukedom of Tewkesbury and its ancient glory, with the long line of noble names allied to the young lord, who was a social star of the first magnitude, a great traveler, a sportsman of the stalwart race that has the world for its field. (“Poor little Monte,” said the managing editor as he passed along these embellishments with his approval.)

On the other hand, the proposed alliance was no fall in dignity or family to the English house. The heiress was the direct descendant of the Eschelles, an old French family, distinguished in camp and court in the glorious days of the Grand Monarch.

XXIII

Probably no man ever wrote and published a book, a magazine story, or a bit of verse without an instant decision to repeat the experiment. The inclination once indulged becomes insatiable. It is not altogether the gratified vanity of seeing one’s self in print, for, before printing was, the composers and reciters of romances and songs were driven along the same path of unrest and anxiety, when once they had the least recognition of their individual distinction. The impulse is more subtle than the desire for wealth or the craving for political place. In some cases it is in simple obedience to the longing to create; in others it is a lower ambition for notoriety, for praise.

In any case the experiment of authorship, in however humble, a way, has an analogy to that other tempting occupation of making “investments” in the stock-market: the first trial is certain to lead to another. If the author succeeds in any degree, his spirit rises to another attempt in the hope of a wider recognition. If he fails, that is a reason why he should convince his fellows that the failure was not inherent in himself, but in ill-luck or a misdirection of his powers. And the experiment has another analogy to the noble occupation of levying toll upon the change of values—a first brilliant success is often a misfortune, inducing an overestimate of capacity, while a very moderate success, recognized indeed only as a trial, steadies a man, and sets him upon that serious diligence upon which alone, either in art or business, any solid fortune is built.

Philip was fortunate in that his first novel won him a few friends and a little recognition, but no popularity. It excited neither envy nor hostility. In the perfunctory and somewhat commercial good words it received, he recognized the good-nature of the world. In the few short reviews that dealt seriously with his work, he was able, when the excitement of seeing himself discussed had subsided, to read between the lines why The Puritan Nun had failed to make a larger appeal. It was idyllic and poetic, but it lacked virility; it lacked also simplicity in dealing with the simple and profound facts of life. He had been too solicitous to express himself, to write beautifully, instead of letting the human emotions with which he had to deal show themselves. One notice had said that it was too “literary”; by which, of course, the critic meant that he did not follow the solid traditions, the essential elements in all the great masterpieces of literature that have been created. And yet he had shown a quality, a facility, a promise, that had gained him a foothold and a support in the world of books and of the making of books. And though he had declined Mr. Ault’s tempting offer to illuminate his transcontinental road with a literary torch, he none the less was pleased with this recognition of his capacity and the value of his name.

To say that Philip lived on hope during this summer of heat, suspensions, and business derangement would be to allow him a too substantial subsistence. Evelyn, indeed, seemed, at the distance of Newport, more unattainable than ever, and the scant news he had of the drama enacted there was a perpetual notice to him of the social gulf that lay between them. And yet his dream was sustained by occasional assurances from Miss McDonald of her confidence in Evelyn’s belief in him, nay, of her trust, and she even went so far as to say affection. So he went on building castles in the air, which melted and were renewed day after day, like the transient but unfailing splendor of the sunset.

There was a certain exaltation in this indulgence of his passion that stimulated his creative faculties, and, while his daily tasks kept him from being morbid, his imagination was free to play with the construction of a new story, to which his recent experience would give a certain solidity and a knowledge of the human struggle as it is.

He found himself observing character more closely than before, looking for it not so much in books as in the people he met. There was Murad Ault, for instance. How he would like to put him into a book! Of course it would not do to copy a model, raw, like’ that, but he fell to studying his traits, trying to see the common humanity exhibited in him. Was he a type or was he a freak? This was, however, too dangerous ground until he knew more of life.

The week’s vacation allowed him by his house was passed in Rivervale. There, in the calmness of country life, and in the domestic atmosphere of affection which believed in him, he was far enough removed from the scene of the spectres of his imagination to see them in proper perspective, and there the lines of his new venture were laid down, to be worked out later on, he well knew, in the anxiety and the toil which should endue the skeleton with life. Rivervale, to be sure, was haunted by the remembrance of Evelyn; very often the familiar scenes filled him with an intolerable longing to see again the eyes that had inspired him, to hear the voice that was like no other in the world, to take the little hand that had often been so frankly placed in his, and to draw to him the form in which was embodied all the grace and tender witchery of womanhood. But the knowledge of what she expected of him was an inspiration, always present in his visions of her.

Something of his hopes and fears Alice divined, and he felt her sympathy, although she did not intrude upon his reticence by any questions. They talked about Evelyn, but it was Evelyn in Rivervale, not in Newport. In fact, the sensible girl could regard her cousin’s passion as nothing more than a romance in a young author’s life, and to her it was a sign of his security that he had projected a new story.

With instinctive perception of his need, she was ever turning his thoughts upon his literary career. Of course she and all the household seemed in a conspiracy to flatter and encourage the vanity of authorship. Was not all the village talking about the reputation he had conferred on it? Was it not proud of him? Indeed, it did imagine that the world outside of Rivervale was very much interested in him, and that he was already an author of distinction. The county Gazette had announced, as an important piece of news, that the author of The Puritan Nun was on a visit to his relatives, the Maitlands. This paragraph seemed to stand out in the paper as an almost immodest exposure of family life, read furtively at first, and not talked of, and yet every member of the family was conscious of an increase in the family importance. Aunt Patience discovered, from her outlook on the road, that summer visitors had a habit of driving or walking past the house and then turning back to look at it again.

So Philip was not only distinguished, but he had the power of conferring distinction. No one can envy a young author this first taste of fame, this home recognition. Whatever he may do hereafter, how much more substantial rewards he may attain, this first sweetness of incense to his ambition will never come to him again.

When Philip returned to town, the city was still a social desert, and he plunged into the work piled up on his desk, the never-ceasing accumulation of manuscripts, most of them shells which the workers have dredged up from the mud of the literary ocean, in which the eager publisher is always expecting to find pearls. Even Celia was still in the country, and Philip’s hours spared from drudgery were given to the new story. His days, therefore, passed without incident, but not without pleasure. For whatever annoyances the great city may have usually, it is in the dull season—that is, the season of its summer out-of-doors animation—a most attractive and, even stimulating place for the man who has an absorbing pursuit, say a work in creative fiction. Undisturbed by social claims or public interests, the very noise and whirl of the gay metropolis seem to hem him in and protect the world of his own imagination.

The first disturbing event in this serenity was the report of the Mavick ball, already referred to, and the interpretation put upon it by the newspapers. In this light his plans seemed the merest moonshine. What became of his fallacious hope of waiting when events were driving on at this rate? What chance had he in such a social current? Would Evelyn be strong enough to stem it and to wait also? And to wait for what? For the indefinite and improbable event of a poor author, hardly yet recognized as an author, coming into position, into an income (for that was the weak point in his aspirations) that would not be laughed at by the millionaire. When he coolly considered it, was it reasonable to expect that Mr. and Mrs. Mavick would ever permit Evelyn to throw away the brilliant opportunity for their daughter which was to be the crowning end of their social ambition? The mere statement of the proposition was enough to overwhelm him.

That this would be the opinion of the world he could not doubt. He felt very much alone. It was not, however, in any resolve to make a confidante of Celia, but in an absolute need of companionship, that he went to see if she had returned. That he had any personal interest in this ball he did not intend to let Celia know, but talk with somebody he must. Of his deep affection for this friend of his boyhood, there was no doubt, nor of his knowledge of her devotion to his interests. Why, then, was he reserved with her upon the absorbing interest of his life?

Celia had returned, before the opening of the medical college, full of a new idea. This was nothing new in her restless nature; but if Philip had not been blinded by the common selfishness of his sex, he might have seen in the gladness of her welcome of him something more than mere sisterly affection.

“Are you real glad to see me, Phil? I thought you might be lonesome by this time in the deserted city.”

“I was, horribly.” He was still holding her hand. “Without a chance to talk with you or Alice, I am quite an orphan.”

“Ah! You or Alice!” A shade of disappointment came over her face as she dropped his hand. But she rallied in a moment.

“Poor boy! You ought to have a guardian. What heroine of romance are you running after now?”

“In my new story?”

“Of course.”

“She isn’t very well defined in my mind yet. But a lovely girl, without anything peculiar, no education to speak of, or career, fascinating in her womanhood, such as might walk out of the Bible. Don’t you think that would be a novelty? But it is the most difficult to do.”

“Negative. That sort has gone out. Philip, why don’t you take the heroine of the Mavick ball? There is a theme.” She was watching him shrewdly, and saw the flush in his face as he hurriedly asked,

“Did you ever see her?”

“Only at a distance. But you must know her well enough for a literary purpose. The reports of the ball give you the setting of the drama.”

“Did you read them?”

“I should say I did. Most amusing.”

“Celia, don’t you think it would be an ungentlemanly thing to take a social event like that?”

“Why, you must take life as it is. Of course you would change the details. You could lay the scene in Philadelphia. Nobody would suspect you then.”

Philip shook his head. The conversation was not taking the turn that was congenial to him. The ball seemed to him a kind of maelstrom in which all his hopes were likely to be wrecked. And here was his old friend, the keenest-sighted woman he knew, looking upon it simply as literary material—a ridiculous social event. He had better change the subject.

“So the college is not open yet?”

“No, I came back because I had a new idea, and wanted time to look around. We haven’t got quite the right idea in our city missions. They have another side. We need country missions.”

“Aren’t they that now?”

“No, I mean for the country. I’ve been about a good deal all this vacation, and my ideas are confirmed. The country towns and villages are full of young hoodlums and toughs, and all sorts of wickedness. They could be improved by sending city boys up there—yes, and girls of tender age. I don’t mean the worst ones, not altogether. The young of a certain low class growing up in the country are even worse than the same class in the city, and they lack a civility of manner which is pretty sure to exist in a city-bred person.”

“If the country is so bad, why send any more unregenerates into it?”

“How do you know that anybody is always to be unregenerate? But I wouldn’t send thieves and imbeciles. I would select children of some capacity, whose circumstances are against them where they are, and I am sure they would make better material than a good deal of the young generation in country villages now. This is what I mean by a mission for the country. We have been bending all our efforts to the reformation of the cities. What we need to go at now is the reforming of the country.”

“You have taken a big contract,” said Philip, smiling at her enthusiasm. “Don’t you intend to go on with medicine?”

“Certainly. At least far enough to be of some use in breaking up people’s ignorance about their own bodies. Half the physical as well as moral misery comes from ignorance. Didn’t I always tell you that I want to know? A good many of my associates pretend to be agnostics, neither believe or disbelieve in anything. The further I go the more I am convinced that there is a positive basis for things. They talk about the religion of humanity. I tell you, Philip, that humanity is pretty poor stuff to build a religion on.”

The talk was wandering far away from what was in Philip’s mind, and presently Celia perceived his want of interest.

“There, that is enough about myself. I want to know all about you, your visit to Rivervale, how the publishing house suits you, how the story is growing.”

And Philip talked about himself, and the rumors in Wall Street, and Mr. Ault and his offer, and at last about the Mavicks—he could not help that—until he felt that Celia was what she had always been to him, and when he went away he held her hand and said what a dear, sweet friend she was.

And when he had gone, Celia sat a long time by the window, not seeing much of the hot street into which she looked, until there were tears in her eyes.

XXIV

There was one man in New York who thoroughly enjoyed the summer. Murad Ault was, as we say of a man who is free to indulge his natural powers, in his element. There are ingenious people who think that if the ordering of nature had been left to them, they could maintain moral conditions, or at least restore a disturbed equilibrium, without violence, without calling in the aid of cyclones and of uncontrollable electric displays, in order to clear the air. There are people also who hold that the moral atmosphere of the world does not require the occasional intervention of Murad Ault.

The conceit is flattering to human nature, but it is not borne out by the performance of human nature in what is called the business world, which is in such intimate alliance with the social world in such great centres of conflict as London, New York, or Chicago. Mr. Ault is everywhere an integral and necessary part of the prevailing system—that is, the system by which the moral law is applied to business. The system, perhaps, cannot be defended, but it cannot be explained without Mr. Ault. We may argue that such a man is a disturber of trade, of legitimate operations, of the fairest speculations, but when we see how uniform he is as a phenomenon, we begin to be convinced that he is somehow indispensable to the system itself. We cannot exactly understand why a cyclone should pick up a peaceful village in Nebraska and deposit it in Kansas, where there, is already enough of that sort, but we cannot conceive of Wall Street continuing to be Wall Street unless it were now and then visited by a powerful adjuster like Mr. Ault.

The advent, then, of Murad Ault in New York was not a novelty, but a continuation of like phenomena in the Street, ever since the day when ingenious men discovered that the ability to guess correctly which of two sparrows, sold for a farthing, lighting on the spire of Trinity Church, will fly first, is an element in a successful and distinguished career. There was nothing peculiar in kind in his career, only in the force exhibited which lifted him among the few whose destructive energy the world condones and admires as Napoleonic. He may have been an instrument of Providence. When we do not know exactly what to do with an exceptional man who is disagreeable, we call him an Instrument of Providence.

It is not, then, in anything exceptional that we are interested in the operations of Murad Ault, but simply on account of his fortuitous connection with a great fortune which had its origin in very much the same cyclonic conditions that Mr. Ault reveled in. Those who know Wall Street best, by reason of sad experience, say that the presiding deity there is not the Chinese god, Luck, but the awful pagan deity, Nemesis. Alas! how many innocent persons suffer in order to get justice done in this world.

Those who have unimpaired memories may recollect the fortune amassed, many years previous to this history, by one Rodney Henderson, gathered and enlarged by means not indictable, but which illustrate the wide divergence between the criminal code and the moral law. This fortune, upon the sudden death of its creator, had been largely diverted from its charitable destination by fraud, by a crime that would have fallen within the code if it had been known. This fortune had been enjoyed by those who seized it for many years of great social success, rising into acknowledged respectability and distinction; and had become the basis of the chance of social elevation, which is dear to the hearts of so many excellent people, who are compelled to wander about in a chaotic society that has no hereditary titles. It was this fortune, the stake in such an ambition, or perhaps destined in a new possessor to a nobler one, that came in the way of Mr. Ault’s extensive schemes.

It is not necessary to infer that Mr. Ault was originally actuated by any greed as to this special accumulation of property, or that he had any malevolence towards Mr. Mavick; but the eagerness of his personal pursuit led him into collisions. There were certain possessions of Mr. Mavick that were desirable for the rounding-out of his plans—these graspings were many of them understood by the public as necessary to the “development of a system”—and in this collision of interests and fierce strength a vindictive feeling was engendered, a feeling born, as has been hinted, by Mr. Mavick’s attempt to trick his temporary ally in a certain operation, so that Mr. Ault’s main purpose was to “down Mavick.” This was no doubt an exaggeration concerning a man with so many domestic virtues as Mr. Ault, meaning by domestic virtues indulgence of his family; but a fight for place or property in politics or in the Street is pretty certain to take on a personal character.

We can understand now why Mr. Ault read the accounts of the Mavick ball with a grim smile. In speaking of it he used the vulgar term “splurge,” a word especially offensive to the refined society in which the Mavicks had gained a foothold. And yet the word was on the lips of a great many men on the Street. The shifting application of sympathy is a very queer thing in this world. Mr. Ault was not a snob. Whatever else he was, he made few pretensions. In his first advent he had been resisted as an intruder and shunned as a vulgarian; but in time respect for his force and luck mingled with fear of his reckless talent, and in the course of events it began to be admitted that the rough diamond was being polished into one of the corner-stones of the great business edifice. At the time of this writing he did not altogether lack the sympathy of the Street, and an increasing number of people were not sorry to see Mr. Mavick get the worst of it in repeated trials of strength. And in each of these trials it became increasingly difficult for Mr. Mavick to obtain the assistance and the credit which are often indispensable to the strongest men in a panic.

The truth was that there were many men in the Street who were not sorry to see Mr. Mavick worried. They remembered perfectly well the omniscient snobbishness of Thomas Mavick when he held a position in the State Department at Washington and was at the same time a secret agent of Rodney Henderson. They did not change their opinion of him when, by his alliance with Mrs. Henderson, he stepped into control of Mr. Henderson’s property and obtained the mission to Rome; but later on he had been accepted as one of the powers in the financial world. There were a few of the old stagers who never trusted him. Uncle Jerry Hollowell, for instance, used to say, “Mavick is smart, smart as lightnin’; I guess he’ll make ducks and drakes of the Henderson property.” They are very superficial observers of Wall Street who think that character does not tell there. Mr. Mavick may have realized that when in his straits he looked around for assistance.

The history of this panic summer in New York would not be worthy the reader’s attention were not the fortunes of some of his acquaintances involved in it. It was not more intense than the usual panics, but it lasted longer on account of the complications with uncertain government policy, and it produced stagnation in social as well as business circles. So quiet a place as Rivervale felt it in the diminution of city visitors, and the great resorts showed it in increased civility to the small number of guests.

The summer at Newport, which had not been distinguished by many great events, was drawing to a close—that is, it was in the period when those who really loved the charming promenade which is so loved of the sea began to enjoy themselves, and those who indulge in the pleasures of hope, based upon a comfortable matrimonial establishment, are reckoning up the results of the campaign.

Mrs. Mavick, according to her own assertion, was one of those who enjoy nature. “Nature and a few friends, not too many, only those whom one trusts and who are companionable,” she had said to Lord Montague.

This young gentleman had found the pursuit of courtship in America attended by a good many incidental social luxuries. It had been a wise policy to impress him with the charm of a society which has unlimited millions to make it attractive. Even to an impecunious noble there is a charm in this, although the society itself has some of the lingering conditions of its money origin. But since the great display of the ball, and the legitimate inferences drawn from it by the press and the fashionable world, Mrs. Mavick had endeavored to surround her intended son-in-law with the toils of domestic peace.

He must be made to feel at home. And this she did. Mrs. Mavick was as admirable in the role of a domestic woman as of a woman of the world. The simple pleasures, the confidences, the intimacies of home life surrounded him. His own mother, the aged duchess, could not have looked upon him with more affection, and possibly not have pampered him with so many luxuries. There was only one thing wanting to make this home complete. In conventional Europe the contracting parties are not the signers of the marriage contract. In the United States the parties most interested take the initiative in making the contract.

Here lay the difficulty of the situation, a situation that puzzled Lord Montague and enraged Mrs. Mavick. Evelyn maintained as much indifference to the domestic as to the worldly situation. Her mother thought her lifeless and insensible; she even went so far as to call her unwomanly in her indifference to what any other woman would regard as an opportunity for a brilliant career.

Lifeless indeed she was, poor child; physically languid and scarcely able to drag herself through the daily demands upon her strength. Her mother made it a reproach that she was so pale and unresponsive. Apparently she did not resist, she did everything she was told to do. She passed, indeed, hours with Lord Montague, occasions contrived when she was left alone in the house with him, and she made heroic efforts to be interested, to find something in his mind that was in sympathy with her own thoughts. With a woman’s ready instinct she avoided committing herself to his renewed proposals, sometimes covert, sometimes direct, but the struggle tired her. At the end of all such interviews she had to meet her mother, who, with a smile of hope and encouragement, always said, “Well, I suppose you and Lord Montague have made it up,” and then to encounter the contempt expressed for her as a “goose.”

She was helpless in such toils. At times she felt actually abandoned of any human aid, and in moods of despondency almost resolved to give up the struggle. In the eyes of the world it was a good match, it would make her mother happy, no doubt her father also; and was it not her duty to put aside her repugnance, and go with the current of the social and family forces that seemed irresistible?

Few people can resist doing what is universally expected of them. This invisible pressure is more difficult to stand against than individual tyranny. There are no tragedies in our modern life so pathetic as the ossification of women’s hearts when love is crushed under the compulsion of social and caste requirements. Everybody expected that Evelyn would accept Lord Montague. It could be said that for her own reputation the situation required this consummation of the intimacy of the season. And the mother did not hesitate to put this interpretation upon the events which were her own creation.

But with such a character as Evelyn, who was a constant puzzle to her mother, this argument had very little weight compared with her own sense of duty to her parents. Her somewhat ideal education made worldly advantages of little force in her mind, and love the one priceless possession of a woman’s heart which could not be bartered. And yet might there not be an element of selfishness in this—might not its sacrifice be a family duty? Mrs. Mavick having found this weak spot in her daughter’s armor, played upon it with all her sweet persuasive skill and show of tenderness.

“Of course, dear,” she said, “you know what would make me happy. But I do not want you to yield to my selfishness or even to your father’s ambition to see his only child in an exalted position in life. I can bear the disappointment. I have had to bear many. But it is your own happiness I am thinking of. And I think also of the cruel blow your refusal will inflict upon a man whose heart is bound up in you.”

“But I don’t love him.” The girl was very pale, and she spoke with an air of weariness, but still with a sort of dogged persistence.

“You will in time. A young girl never knows her own heart, any more than she knows the world.”

“Mother, that isn’t all. It would be a sin to him to pretend to give him a heart that was not his. I can’t; I can’t.”

“My dear child, that is his affair. He is willing to trust you, and to win your love. When we act from a sense of duty the way is apt to open to us. I have never told you of my own earlier experience. I was not so young as you are when I married Mr. Henderson, but I had not been without the fancies and experiences of a young girl. I might have yielded to one of them but for family reasons. My father had lost his fortune and had died, disappointed and broken down. My mother, a lovely woman, was not strong, was not capable of fighting the world alone, and she depended upon me, for in those days I had plenty of courage and spirit. Mr. Henderson was a widower whom we had known as a friend before the death of his accomplished wife. In his lonesomeness he turned to me. In our friendlessness I turned to him. Did I love him? I esteemed him, I respected him, I trusted him, that was all. He did not ask more than that. And what a happy life we had! I shared in all his great plans. And when in the midst of his career, with such large ideas of public service and philanthropy, he was stricken down, he left to me, in the confidence of his love, all that fortune which is some day to be yours.” Mrs. Mavick put her handkerchief to her eyes. “Ah, well, our destiny is not in our hands. Heaven raised up for me another protector, another friend. Perhaps some of my youthful illusions have vanished, but should I have been happier if I had indulged them? I know your dear father does not think so.”

“Mother,” cried Evelyn, deeply moved by this unprecedented confidence, “I cannot bear to see you suffer on my account. But must not every one decide for herself what is right before God?”

At this inopportune appeal to a higher power Mrs. Mavick had some difficulty in restraining her surprise and indignation at what she considered her child’s stubbornness. But she conquered the inclination, and simply looked sad and appealing when she said:

“Yes, yes, you must decide for yourself. You must not consider your mother as I did mine.”

This cruel remark cut the girl to the heart. The world seemed to whirl around her, right and wrong and duty in a confused maze. Was she, then, such a monster of ingratitude? She half rose to throw herself at her mother’s feet, upon her mother’s mercy. And at the moment it was not her reason but her heart that saved her. In the moral confusion rose the image of Philip. Suppose she should gain the whole world and lose him! And it was love, simple, trusting love, that put courage into her sinking heart.

“Mother, it is very hard. I love you; I could die for you. I am so forlorn. But I cannot, I dare not, do such a thing, such a dreadful thing!”

She spoke brokenly, excitedly, she shuddered as she said the last words, and her eyes were full of tears as she bent down and kissed her mother.

When she had gone, Mrs. Mavick sat long in her chair, motionless between bewilderment and rage. In her heart she was saying, “The obstinate, foolish girl must be brought to reason!”

A servant entered with a telegram. Mrs. Mavick took it, and held it listlessly while the servant waited. “You can sign.” After the door closed—she was still thinking of Evelyn—she waited a moment before she tore the envelope, and with no eagerness unfolded the official yellow paper. And then she read:

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“I have made an assignment. T. M.”

A half-hour afterwards when a maid entered the room she found Mrs. Mavick still seated in the armchair, her hands powerless at her side, her eyes staring into space, her face haggard and old.

XXV

The action of Thomas Mavick in giving up the fight was as unexpected in New York as it was in Newport. It was a shock even to those familiar with the Street. It was known that he was in trouble, but he had been in trouble before. It was known that there had been sacrifices, efforts at extension, efforts at compromise, but the general public fancied that the Mavick fortune had a core too solid to be washed away by any storm. Only a very few people knew—such old hands as Uncle Jerry Hollowell, and such inquisitive bandits as Murad Ault—that the house of Mavick was a house of cards, and that it might go down when the belief was destroyed that it was of granite.

The failure was not an ordinary sensation, and, according to the excellent practices and differing humors of the daily newspapers, it was made the most of, until the time came for the heavy weeklies to handle it in its moral aspects as an illustration of modern civilization. On the first morning there was substantial unanimity in assuming the totality of the disaster, and the most ingenious artists in headlines vied with each other in startling effects: “Crash in Wall Street.” “Mavick Runs Up the White Flag.” “King of Wall Street Called Down.” “Ault Takes the Pot.” “Dangerous to Dukes.” “Mavick Bankrupt.” “The House of Mavick a Ruin.” “Dukes and Drakes.” “The Sea Goes Over Him.”

This, however, was only the beginning. The sensation must be prolonged. The next day there were attenuating circumstances.

It might be only a temporary embarrassment. The assets were vastly greater than the liabilities. There was talk in financial circles of an adjustment. With time the house could go on. The next day it was made a reproach to the house that such deceptive hopes were put upon the public. Journalistic enterprise had discovered that the extent of the liabilities had been concealed. This attempt to deceive the public, these defenders of the public interest would expose. The next day the wind blew from another direction. The alarmists were rebuked. The creditors were disposed to be lenient. Doubtful securities were likely to realize more than was expected. The assignees were sharply scored for not taking the newspapers into their confidence.

And so for ten days the failure went on in the newspapers, backward and forward, now hopeless, now relieved, now sunk in endless complications, and fallen into the hands of the lawyers who could be trusted with the most equitable distribution of the property involved, until the reading public were glad to turn, with the same eager zest, to the case of the actress who was found dead in a hotel in Jersey City. She was attended only by her pet poodle, in whose collar was embedded a jewel of great price. This jewel was traced to a New York establishment, whence it had disappeared under circumstances that pointed to the criminality of a scion of a well-known family—an exposure which would shake society to its foundations.

Meantime affairs took their usual course. The downfall of Mavick is too well known in the Street to need explanation here. For a time it was hoped that sacrifices of great interests would leave a modest little fortune, but under the pressure of liquidation these hopes melted away. If anything could be saved it would be only comparatively valueless securities and embarrassed bits of property that usually are only a delusion and a source of infinite worry to a bankrupt. It seemed incredible that such a vast fortune should so disappear; but there were wise men who, so they declared, had always predicted this disaster. For some years after Henderson’s death the fortune had appeared to expand marvelously. It was, however, expanded, and not solidified. It had been risked in many gigantic speculations (such as the Argentine), and it had been liable to collapse at any time if its central credit was doubted. Mavick’s combinations were splendidly conceived, but he lacked the power of coordination. And great as were his admitted abilities, he had never inspired confidence.

“And, besides,” said Uncle Jerry, philosophizing about it in his homely way, “there’s that little devil of a Carmen, the most fascinating woman I ever knew—it would take the Bank of England to run her. Why, when I see that Golden House going up, I said I’d give ‘em five years to balloon in it. I was mistaken. They’ve floated it about eighteen. Some folks are lucky—up to a certain point.”

Grave history gives but a paragraph to a personal celebrity of this sort. When a ship goes down in a tempest off the New England coast, there is a brief period of public shock and sympathy, and then the world passes on to other accidents and pleasures; but for months relics of the great vessel float ashore on lonely headlands or are cast up on sandy beaches, and for years, in many a home made forlorn by the shipwreck, are aching hearts and an ever-present calamity.

The disaster of the house of Mavick was not accepted without a struggle, lasting long after the public interest in the spectacle had abated—a struggle to save the ship and then to pick up some debris from the great wreck. The most pathetic sight in the business world is that of a bankrupt, old and broken, pursuing with always deluded expectations the remnants of his fortune, striving to make new combinations, involved in lawsuits, alternately despairing, alternately hopeful in the chaos of his affairs. This was the fate of Thomas Mavick.

The news was all over Newport in a few hours after it had stricken down Mrs. Mavick. The newspaper details the morning after were read with that eager interest that the misfortunes of neighbors always excite. After her first stupor, Mrs. Mavick refused to believe it. It could not be, and her spirit of resistance rose with the frantic messages she sent to her husband. Alas, the cold fact of the assignment remained. Still her courage was not quite beaten down. The suspension could only be temporary. She would not have it otherwise. Two days she showed herself as usual in Newport, and carried herself bravely. The sympathy looked or expressed was wormwood to her, but she met it with a reassuring smile. To be sure it was very hard to bear such a blow, the result of a stock intrigue, but it would soon pass over—it was a temporary embarrassment—that she said everywhere.

She had not, however, told the news to Evelyn with any such smiling confidence. There was still rage in her heart against her daughter, as if her obstinacy had some connection with this blow of fate, and she did not soften the announcement. She expected to sting her, and she did astonish and she did grieve her, for the breaking-up of her world could not do otherwise; but it was for her mother and not for herself that Evelyn showed emotion. If their fortune was gone, then the obstacle was removed that separated her from Philip. The world well lost! This flashed through her mind before she had fairly grasped the extent of the fatality, and it blunted her appreciation of it as an unmixed ruin.

“Poor mamma!” was what she said.

“Poor me!” cried Mrs. Mavick, looking with amazement at her daughter, “don’t you understand that our life is all ruined?”

“Yes, that part of it, but we are left. It might have been so much worse.”

“Worse? You have no more feeling than a chip. You are a beggar! That is all. What do you mean by worse?”

“If father had done anything dishonorable!” suggested the girl, timidly, a little scared by her mother’s outburst.

“Evelyn, you are a fool!”

And perhaps she was, with such preposterous notions of what is really valuable in life. There could be no doubt of it from Mrs. Mavick’s point of view.

If Evelyn’s conduct exasperated her, the non-appearance of Lord Montague after the publication of the news seriously alarmed her. No doubt he was shocked, but she could explain it to him, and perhaps he was too much interested in Evelyn to be thrown off by this misfortune. The third day she wrote him a note, a familiar, almost affectionate note, chiding him for deserting them in their trouble. She assured him that the news was greatly exaggerated, the embarrassment was only temporary, such things were always happening in the Street. “You know,” she said, playfully, “it is our American way to be up in a minute when we seem to be down.” She asked him to call, for she had something that was important to tell him, and, besides, she needed his counsel as a friend of the house. The note was despatched by a messenger.

In an hour it was returned, unopened, with a verbal message from his host, saying that Lord Montague had received important news from London, and that he had left town the day before.

“Coward!” muttered the enraged woman, with closed teeth. “Men are all cowards, put them to the test.”

The energetic woman judged from a too narrow basis. Because Mavick was weak—and she had always secretly despised him for yielding to her—weak as compared with her own indomitable spirit, she generalized wildly. Her opinion of men would have been modified if she had come in contact with Murad Ault.

To one man in New York besides Mr. Ault the failure did not seem a personal calamity. When Philip saw in the steamer departures the name of Lord Montague, his spirits rose in spite of the thought that the heiress was no longer an heiress. The sky lifted, there was a promise of fair weather, the storm, for him, had indeed cleared the air.

“Dear Philip,” wrote Miss McDonald, “it is really dreadful news, but I cannot be so very downhearted. It is the least of calamities that could happen to my dear child. Didn’t I tell you that it is always darkest just before the dawn?”

And Philip needed the hope of the dawn. Trial is good for any one, but hopeless suffering for none. Philip had not been without hope, but it was a visionary indulgence, against all evidence. It was the hope of youth, not of reason. He stuck to his business doggedly, he stuck to his writing doggedly, but over all his mind was a cloud, an oppression not favorable to creative effort—that is, creative effort sweet and not cynical, sunny and not morbid.

And yet, who shall say that this very experience, this oppression of circumstance, was not the thing needed for the development of the best that was in him? Thrown back upon himself and denied an airy soaring in the heights of a prosperous fancy, he had come to know himself and his limitations. And in the year he had learned a great deal about his art. For one thing he had come to the ground. He was looking more at life as it is. His experience at the publishers had taught him one important truth, and that is that a big subject does not make a big writer, that all that any mind can contribute to the general thought of the world in literature is what is in itself, and if there is nothing in himself it is vain for the writer to go far afield for a theme. He had seen the young artists, fretting for want of subjects, wandering the world over in search of an object fitted to their genius, setting up their easels in front of the marvels of nature and of art, in the expectation that genius would descend upon them.

If they could find something big enough to paint! And he had seen, in exhibition after exhibition, that the artist who cannot paint a rail-fence cannot paint a pyramid. A man does not become a good rider by mounting an elephant; ten to one a donkey would suit him better. Philip had begun to see that the life around him had elements enough of the comic and the tragic to give full play to all his powers.

He began to observe human beings as he had never done before. There were only two questions, and they are at the bottom of all creative literature—could he see them, could he make others see them?

This was all as true before the Mavick failure as after; but, before, what was the use of effort? Now there was every inducement to effort. Ambition to succeed had taken on him the hold of necessity. And with a free mind as to the obstacles that lay between him and the realization of the great dream of his life, the winning of the one woman who could make his life complete, Philip set to work with an earnestness and a clearness of vision that had never been given him before.

In the wreck of the Mavick estate, in its distribution, there are one or two things of interest to the general reader. One of these was the fate of the Golden House, as it was called. Mrs. Mavick had hurried back to her town house, determined to save it at all hazard. The impossibility of this was, however, soon apparent even to her intrepid spirit. She would either sacrifice all else to save it, or—dark thoughts of ending it in a conflagration entered her mind. This was only her first temper. But to keep the house without a vast fortune to sustain it was an impossibility, and, as it was the most conspicuous of Mavick’s visible possessions, perhaps the surrender of it, which she could not prevent, would save certain odds and ends here and there. Whether she liked it or not, the woman learned for once that her will had little to do with the course of events.

Its destination was gall and wormwood both to Carmen and her husband. For it fell into the hands of Murad Ault. He coveted it as the most striking symbol of the position he had conquered in the metropolis. Its semi-barbaric splendor appealed also to his passion for display. And it was notable that the taste of the rude lad of poverty—this uncultivated offspring of a wandering gypsy and herb—collector—perhaps she had ancient and noble blood in her veins—should be the same for material ostentation and luxury as that of the cultivated, fastidious Mavick and his worldly-minded wife. So persistent is the instinct of barbarism in our modern civilization.

When Ault told his wife what he had done, that sweet, domestic, and sensible woman was very far from being elated.

“I am almost sorry,” she said.

“Sorry for what?” asked Mr. Ault, gently, but greatly surprised.

“For the Mavicks. I don’t mean for Mrs. Mavick—I hear she is a worldly and revengeful woman—but for the girl. It must be dreadful to turn her out of all the surroundings of her happy life. And I hear she is as good as she is lovely. Think what it would be for our own girls.”

“But it can’t be helped,” said Ault, persuasively. “The house had to be sold, and it makes no difference who has it, so far as the girl is concerned.”

“And don’t you fear a little for our own girls, launching out that way?”

“You are afraid they will get lost in that big house?” And Mr. Ault laughed. “It isn’t a bit too big or too good for them. At any rate, my dear, in they go, and you must get ready to move. The house will be empty in a week.”

“Murad,” and Mrs. Ault spoke as if she were not thinking of the change for herself, “there is one thing I wish you would do for me, dear.”

“What is that?”

“Go to Mr. Mavick, or to Mrs. Mavick, or the assignees or whoever, and have the daughter—yes, and her mother—free to take away anything they want, anything dear to them by long association. Will you?”

“I don’t see how. Mavick wouldn’t do it for us, and I guess he is too proud to accept anything from me. I don’t owe him anything. And then the property is in the assignment. Whatever is there I bought with the house.”

“I should be so much happier if you could do something about it.”

“Well, it don’t matter much. I guess the assignees can make Mrs. Mavick believe easy enough that certain things belong to her. But I would not do it for any other living being but you.”

“By-the-way,” he added, “there is another bit of property that I didn’t take, the Newport palace.”

“I should have dreaded that more than the other.”

“So I thought. And I have another plan. It’s long been in my mind, and we will carry it out next summer. There is a little plateau on the side of the East Mountain in Rivervale, where there used to stand a shack of a cabin, with a wild sort of garden-patch about it, a tumble-down root fence, all in the midst of brush and briers. Lord, what a habitation it was! But such a view—rivers, mountains, meadows, and orchards in the distance! That is where I lived with my mother. What a life! I hated everything, everybody but her.”

Mr. Ault paused, his strong, dark face working with passion, as the memory of his outlawed boyhood revived. Is it possible that this pirate of the Street had a bit of sentiment at the bottom of his heart? After a moment he continued:

“That was the spot to which my mother took me when I was knee-high. I’ve bought it, bought the whole hillside. Next summer we will put up a house there, not a very big house, just a long, low sort of a Moorish pavilion, the architect calls it. I wish she could see it.”

Mrs. Ault rose, with tears in her gentle eyes, stood by her husband’s chair a moment, ran her fingers through his heavy black locks, bent down and kissed him, and went away without a word.

There was another bit of property that was not included in the wreck. It belonged to Mrs. Mavick. This was a little house in Irving Place, in which Carmen Eschelle lived with her mother, in the days before the death of Henderson’s first wife, not very happy days for that wife. Carmen had a fancy for keeping it after her marriage. Not from any sentiment, she told Mr. Mavick on the occasion of her second marriage, oh, no, but somehow it seemed to her, in all her vast possessions left to her by Henderson, the only real estate she had. It was the only thing that had not passed into the absolute possession and control of Mavick. The great town house, with all the rest, stood in Mavick’s name. What secret influence had he over her that made her submit to such a foolish surrender?

It was in this little house that the reduced family stowed itself after the downfall. The little house, had it been sentient, would have been astonished at the entrance into it of the furniture and the remnants of luxurious living that Mrs. Mavick was persuaded belonged to her personally. These reminders of former days were, after all, a mockery in the narrow quarters and the pinched economy of the bankrupt. Yet they were, for a time useful in preserving to Mrs. Mavick a measure of self-respect, her self-respect having always been based upon what she had and not what she was. In truth, the change of lot was harder for Mrs. Mavick than for Evelyn, since the world in which the latter lived had not been destroyed. She still had her books, she still had a great love in her heart, and hope, almost now a sure hope, that her love would blossom into a great happiness.

But where was Philip? In all this time why did he make no sign? At moments a great fear came over her. She was so ignorant of life. Could he know what misery she was in, the daily witness of her father’s broken condition, of her mother’s uncertain temper?

XXVI

Is justice done in this world only by a succession of injustices? Is there any law that a wrong must right a wrong? Did it rebuke the means by which the vast fortune of Henderson was accumulated, that it was defeated of any good use by the fraud of his wife? Was her action punished by the same unscrupulous tactics of the Street that originally made the fortune? And Ault? Would a stronger pirate arise in time to despoil him, and so act as the Nemesis of all violation of the law of honest relations between men?

The comfort is, in all this struggle of the evil powers, masked as justice, that the Almighty Ruler of the world does not forget his own, and shows them a smiling face in the midst of disaster. There is no mystery in this. For the noble part in man cannot be touched in its integrity by such vulgar disasters as we are considering. In those days when Evelyn saw dissolving about her the material splendors of her old life, while the Golden House was being dismantled, and she was taking sad leave of the scenes of her girlhood, so vivid with memory of affection and of intellectual activity, they seemed only the shell, the casting-off of which gave her freedom. The sun never shone brighter, there was never such singing in her heart, as on the morning when she was free to go to Mrs. Van Cortlandt’s and throw herself into the arms of her dear governess and talk of Philip.

Why not? Perhaps she had not that kind of maidenly shyness, sometimes called conventional propriety, sometimes described as ‘mauvaise honte’ which a woman of the world would have shown. The impulses of her heart followed as direct lines as the reasoning of her brain. Was it due to her peculiar education, education only in the noblest ideas of the race, that she should be a sort of reversion, in our complicated life, to the type of woman in the old societies (we like to believe there was such a type as the poets love, the Nausicaas), who were single-minded, as frank to avow affection as opinion?

“Have you seen him?” she asked.

“No, but he has written.”

“And you think he—” the girl had her arms around her friend’s neck again, and concealed her blushing face, “don’t make me say it, McDonald.”

“Yes, dear, I am sure—I know he does.”

There was a little quiver in her form, but it was not of agony; then she put her hands on the shoulders of her governess, and, looking in her eyes, said:

“When you did see him, how did he look—how did he look?—pretty sad?”

“How could he help it?”

“The dear! But was he well?”

“Splendidly, so he said. Like his old self.”

“Tell me,” said the girl.

And Miss McDonald went into delightful details, how he looked, how he walked, how his voice sounded, how he talked, how melancholy he was, and how full of determination he was, his eyes were so kindly, and his smile was never so sweet as now when there was sadness in it.

“It is very long since,” drearily murmured the girl. And then she continued, partly to herself, partly to Miss McDonald: “He will come now, can’t he? Not to that house. Never would I wish him to set foot in it. But he is not forbidden to come to the place where we are going. Soon, you think? Perhaps you might hint—oh no, not from me—just your idea. Wouldn’t it be natural, after our misfortune? Perhaps mamma would feel differently after what has happened. Oh, that Montague! that horrid little man! I think—I think I shall receive him coolly at first, just to see.”

But it was not immediately that the chance for a guileless woman to show her coolness to her lover was to occur. This postponement was not due to the coolness or to the good sense of Philip. When the catastrophe came, his first impulse was that of a fireman who plunges into a burning building to rescue the imperiled inmates. He pictured in his mind a certain nobility of action in going forward to the unfortunate family with his sympathy, and appearing to them in the heroic attitude of a man whose love has no alloy of self-interest. They should speedily understand that it was not the heiress, but the woman, with whom he was in love.

But Miss McDonald understood human nature better than that, at least the nature of Mrs. Mavick. People of her temperament, humiliated and enraged, are best left alone. The fierceness with which she would have turned upon any of her society friends who should have presumed to offer her condolence, however sweetly the condescension were concealed, would have been vented without mercy upon the man whose presence would have reminded her of her foolish rudeness to him, and of the bitter failure of her schemes for her daughter. “Wait, wait,” said the good counselor, “until the turmoil has subsided, and the hard pressure of circumstances compels her to look at things in their natural relations. She is too sore now in—the wreck of all her hopes.”

But, indeed, her hopes were not all surrendered in a moment. She had more spirit than her husband in their calamity. She was, in fact, a born gambler; she had the qualities of her temperament, and would not believe that courage and luck could not retrieve, at least partially, their fortune. It seemed incredible in the Street that the widow of Henderson should have given over her property so completely to her second husband, and it was a surprise to find that there was very little of value that the assignment of Mavick did not carry with it. The Street did not know the guilty secret between Mavick and his wife that made them cowards to each other. Nor did it understand that Carmen was the more venturesome gambler of the two, and that gradually, for the success of promising schemes, she had thrown one thing after another into the common speculation, until practically all the property stood in Mavick’s name. Was she a fool in this, as so many women are about their separate property, or was she cheated?

The palace on Fifth Avenue was not even in her name. When she realized that, there was a scene—but this is not a history of the quarrels of Carmen and her husband after the break-down.

The reader would not be interested—the public of the time were not—in the adjustment of Mavick and his wife to their new conditions. The broken-down, defeated bankrupt is no novelty in Wall Street, the man struggling to keep his foothold in the business of the Street, and descending lower and lower in the scale. The shrewd curbstone broker may climb to a seat in the Stock Exchange; quite as often a lord of the Board, a commander of millions, may be reduced to the seedy watcher of the bulletin-board in a bucketshop.

At first, in the excitement and the confusion, amid the debris of so much possible wealth, Mavick kept a sort of position, and did not immediately feel the pinch of vulgar poverty. But the day came when all illusion vanished, and it was a question of providing from day to day for the small requirements of the house in Irving Place.

It was not a cheerful household; reproaches are hard to bear when physical energy is wanting to resist them. Mavick had visibly aged during the year. It was only in his office that he maintained anything of the spruce appearance and ‘sang froid’ which had distinguished the diplomatist and the young adventurer. At home he had fallen into the slovenliness that marks a disappointed old age. Was Mrs. Mavick peevish and unreasonable? Very likely. And had she not reason to be? Was she, as a woman, any more likely to be reconciled to her fate when her mirror told her, with pitiless reflection, that she was an old woman?

Philip waited. Under the circumstances would not both Philip and Evelyn have been justified in disregarding the prohibition that forbade their meeting or even writing to each other? It may be a nice question, but it did not seem so to these two, who did not juggle with their consciences. Philip had given his word. Evelyn would tolerate no concealments; she was just that simple-minded in her filial notions.

The girl, however, had one comfort, and that was the knowledge of Philip through Miss McDonald, whom she saw frequently, and to whom even Mrs. Mavick was in a manner reconciled. She was often in the little house in Irving Place. There was nothing in her manner to remind Mrs. Mavick that she had done her a great wrong, and her cheerfulness and good sense made her presence and talk a relief from the monotony of the defeated woman’s life.

It came about, therefore, that one day Philip made his way down into the city to seek an interview with Mr. Mavick. He found him, after some inquiry, in a barren little office, occupying one of the rented desks with three or four habitues of the Street, one of them an old man like himself, the others mere lads who did not intend to remain long in such cramped quarters.

Mr. Mavick arose when his visitor stood at his desk, buttoned up his frock-coat, and extended his hand with a show of business cordiality, and motioned him to a chair. Philip was greatly shocked at the change in Mr. Mavick’s appearance.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, “for disturbing you in business hours.”

“No disturbance,” he answered, with something of the old cynical smile on his lips.

“Long ago I called to see you on the errand I have now, but you were not in town. It was, Mr. Mavick,” and Philip hesitated and looked down, “in regard to your daughter.”

“Ah, I did not hear of it.”

“No? Well, Mr. Mavick, I was pretty presumptuous, for I had no foothold in the city, except a law clerkship.”

“I remember—Hunt, Sharp & Tweedle; why didn’t you keep it?”

“I wasn’t fitted for the law.”

“Oh, literature? Does literature pay?”

“Not in itself, not for many,” and Philip forced a laugh. “But it led to a situation in a first-rate publishing house—an apprenticeship that has now given me a position that seems to be permanent, with prospects beyond, and a very fair salary. It would not seem much to you, Mr. Mavick,” and Philip tried to laugh again.

“I don’t know,” replied Mr. Mavick. “If a fellow has any sort of salary these times, I should advise him to hold on to it. By-the-way, Mr. Burnett, Hunt’s a Republican, isn’t he?”

“He was,” replied Philip, “the last I knew.”

“Do you happen to know whether he knows Bilbrick, the present Collector?”

“Mr. Bilbrick used to be a client of his.”

“Just so. I think I’ll see Hunt. A salary isn’t a bad thing for a—for a man who has retired pretty much from business. But you were saying, Mr. Burnett?”

“I was going to say, Mr. Mavick, that there was a little something more than my salary that I can count on pretty regularly now from the magazines, and I have had another story, a novel, accepted, and—you won’t think me vain—the publisher says it will go; if it doesn’t have a big sale he will—”

“Make it up to you?”

“Not exactly,” and Philip laughed; “he will be greatly mistaken.”

“I suppose it is a kind of lottery, like most things. The publishers have to take risks. The only harm I wish them is that they were compelled to read all the stuff they try to make us read. Ah, well. Mr. Burnett, I hope you have made a hit. It is pretty much the same thing in our business. The publisher bulls his own book and bears the other fellow’s. Is it a New York story?”

“Partly; things come to a focus here, you know.”

“I could give you points. It’s a devil of a place. I guess the novelists are too near to see the romance of it. When I was in Rome I amused myself by diving into the mediaeval records. Steel and poison were the weapons then. We have a different method now, but it comes to the same thing, and we say we are more civilized. I think our way is more devilishly dramatic than the old brute fashion. Yes, I could give you points.”

“I should be greatly obliged,” said Philip, seeing the way to bring the conversation back to its starting point; “your wide experience of life—if you had leisure at home some time.”

“Oh,” replied Mavick, with more good-humor in his laugh than he had shown before, “you needn’t beat about the bush. Have you seen Evelyn?”

“No, not since that dinner at the Van Cortlandts’.”

“Huh! for myself, I should be pleased to see you any time, Mr. Burnett. Mrs. Mavick hasn’t felt like seeing anybody lately. But I’ll see, I’ll see.”

The two men rose and shook hands, as men shake hands when they have an understanding.

“I’m glad you are doing well,” Mr. Mavick added; “your life is before you, mine is behind me; that makes a heap of difference.”

Within a few days Philip received a note from Mrs. Mavick—not an effusive note, not an explanatory note, not an apologetic note, simply a note as if nothing unusual had happened—if Mr. Burnett had leisure, would he drop in at five o’clock in Irving Place for a cup of tea?

Not one minute by his watch after the hour named, Philip rang the bell and was shown into a little parlor at the front. There was only one person in the room, a lady in exquisite toilet, who rose rather languidly to meet him, exactly as if the visitor were accustomed to drop in to tea at that hour.

Philip hesitated a moment near the door, embarrassed by a mortifying recollection of his last interview with Mrs. Mavick, and in that moment he saw her face. Heavens, what a change! And yet it was a smiling face.

There is a portrait of Carmen by a foreign artist, who was years ago the temporary fashion in New York, painted the year after her second marriage and her return from Rome, which excited much comment at the time. Philip had seen it in more than one portrait exhibition.

Its technical excellence was considerable. The artist had evidently intended to represent a woman piquant and fascinating, if not strictly beautiful. Many persons said it was lovely. Other critics said that, whether the artist intended it or not, he had revealed the real character of the subject. There was something sinister in its beauty. One artist, who was out of fashion as an idealist, said, of course privately, that the more he looked at it the more hideous it became to him—like one of Blake’s objective portraits of a “soul”—the naked soul of an evil woman showing through the mask of all her feminine fascinations—the possible hell, so he put it, under a woman’s charm.

It was this in the portrait that Philip saw in the face smiling a welcome—like an old, sweetly smiling Lalage—from which had passed away youth and the sustaining consciousness of wealth and of a place in the great world. The smile was no longer sweet, though the words from the lips were honeyed.

“It is very good of you to drop in in this way, Mr. Burnett,” she said, as she gave him her hand. “It is very quiet down here.”

“It is to me the pleasantest part of the city.”

“You think so now. I thought so once,” and there was a note of sadness in her voice. “But it isn’t New York. It is a place for the people who are left.”

“But it has associations.”

“Yes, I know. We pretend that it is more aristocratic. That means the rents are lower. It is a place for youth to begin and for age to end. We seem to go round in a circle. Mr. Mavick began in the service of the government, now he has entered it again—ah, you did not know?—a place in the Custom-House. He says it is easier to collect other people’s revenues than your own. Do you know, Mr. Burnett, I do not see much use in collecting revenues anyway—so far as New York is concerned the people get little good of them. Look out there at that cloud of dust in the street.”

Mrs. Mavick rambled on in the whimsical, cynical fashion of old ladies when they cease to have any active responsibility in life and become spectators of it. Their remaining enjoyment is the indulgence of frank speech.

“But I thought,” Philip interrupted, “that this part of the town was specially New York.”

“New York!” cried Carmen, with animation. “The New York of the newspapers, of the country imagination; the New York as it is known in Paris is in Wall Street and in the palaces up-town. Who are the kings of Wall Street, and who build the palaces up-town? They say that there are no Athenians in Athens, and no Romans in Rome. How many New-Yorkers are there in New York? Do New-Yorkers control the capital, rule the politics, build the palaces, direct the newspapers, furnish the entertainment, manufacture the literature, set the pace in society? Even the socialists and mobocrats are not native. Successive invaders, as in Rome, overrun and occupy the town.

“No, Mr. Burnett, I have left the existing New York. How queer it is to think about it. My first husband was from New Hampshire. My second husband was from Illinois. And there is your Murad Ault. The Lord knows where he came from.

“Talk about the barbarians occupying Rome! Look at that Ault in a palace! Who was that emperor—Caligula?—I am like the young lady from a finishing-school who said she never could remember which came first in history, Greece or Rome—who stabled his horses with stalls and mangers of gold? The Aults stable themselves that way. Ah, me! Let me give you a cup of tea. Even that is English.”

“It’s an innocent pastime,” she continued, as Philip stirred his tea, in perplexity as to how he should begin to say what he had to say—“you won’t object if I light a cigarette? One ought to retain at least one bad habit to keep from spiritual pride. Tea is an excuse for this. I don’t think it a bad habit, though some people say that civilization is only exchanging one bad habit for another. Everything changes.”

“I don’t think I have changed, Mrs. Mavick,” said Philip, with earnestness.

“No? But you will. I have known lots of people who said they never would change. They all did. No, you need not protest. I believe in you now, or I should not be drinking tea with you. But you must be tired of an old woman’s gossip. Evelyn has gone out for a walk; she didn’t know. I expect her any minute. Ah, I think that is her ring. I will let her in. There is nothing so hateful as a surprise.”

She turned and gave Philip her hand, and perhaps she was sincere—she had a habit of being so when it suited her interests—when she said, “There are no bygones, my friend.”

Philip waited, his heart beating a hundred to the minute. He heard greetings and whisperings in the passage-way, and then—time seemed to stand still—the door opened and Evelyn stood on the threshold, radiant from her walk, her face flushed, the dainty little figure poised in timid expectation, in maidenly hesitation, and then she stepped forward to meet his advance, with welcome in her great eyes, and gave him her hand in the old-fashioned frankness.

“I am so glad to see you.”

Philip murmured something in reply and they were seated.

That was all. It was so different from the meeting as Philip had a hundred times imagined it.

“It has been very long,” said Philip, who was devouring the girl with his eyes, “very long to me.”

“I thought you had been very busy,” she replied, demurely. Her composure was very irritating.

“If you thought about it at all, Miss Mavick.”

“That is not like you, Mr. Burnett,” Evelyn replied, looking up suddenly with troubled eyes.

“I didn’t mean that,” said Philip, moving uneasily in his chair, “I—so many things have happened. You know a person can be busy and not happy.”

“I know that. I was not always happy,” said the girl, with the air of making a confession. “But I liked to hear from time to time of the success of my friends,” she added, ingenuously. And then, quite inconsequently, “I suppose you have news from Rivervale?”

Yes, Philip heard often from Alice, and he told the news as well as he could, and the talk drifted along—how strange it seemed!—about things in which neither of them felt any interest at the moment. Was there no way to break the barrier that the little brown girl had thrown around herself? Were all women, then, alike in parrying and fencing? The talk went on, friendly enough at last, about a thousand things. It might have been any afternoon call on a dear friend. And at length Philip rose to go.

“I hope I may see you again, soon.”

“Of course,” said Evelyn, cheerfully. “I am sure father will be delighted to see you. He enjoys so little now.”

He had taken both her hands to say good-by, and was looking hungrily into her eyes.

“I can’t go so. Evelyn, you know, you must know, I love you.”

And before the girl comprehended him he had drawn her to him and pressed his lips upon hers.

The girl started back as if stung, and looked at him with flashing eyes.

“What have you done, what have you done to me?”

Her eyes were clouded, and she put her hands to her face, trembling, and then with a cry, as of a soul born into the world, threw herself upon him, her arms around his neck—“Philip, Philip, my Philip!”

XXVII

Perhaps Philip’s announcement of his good-fortune to Alice and to Celia was not very coherent, but his meaning was plain. Perhaps he was conscious that the tidings would not increase the cheerfulness of Celia’s single-handed struggle for the ideal life; at least, he would rather write than tell her face to face.

However he put the matter to her, with what protestations of affectionate friendship and trust he wrapped up the statement that he made as matter of fact as possible, he could not conceal the ecstatic state of his mind.

Nothing like it certainly had happened to anybody in the world before. All the dream of his boyhood, romantic and rose-colored, all the aspirations of his manhood, for recognition, honor, a place in the life of his time, were mere illusions compared to this wonderful crown of life—a woman’s love. Where did it come from into this miserable world, this heavenly ray, this pure gift out of the divine beneficence, this spotless flower in a humanity so astray, this sure prophecy of the final redemption of the world? The immeasurable love of a good woman! And to him! Philip felt humble in his exaltation, charitable in his selfish appropriation. He wanted to write to Celia—but he did not—that he loved her more than ever. But to Alice he could pour out his wealth of affection, quickened to all the world by this great love, for he knew that her happiness would be in his happiness.

The response from Alice was what he expected, tender, sweet, domestic, and it was full of praise of Evelyn, of love for her. “Perhaps, dear Phil,” she wrote, “I shall love her more than I do you. I almost think—did I not remember what a bad boy you could be sometimes—that each one of you is too good for the other. But, Phil, if you should ever come to think that she is not too good for you, you will not be good enough for her. I can’t think she is perfect, any more than you are perfect—you will find that she is just a woman—but there is nothing in all life so precious as such a heart as hers. You will come here, of course, and at once, whenever it is. You know that big, square, old-fashioned corner chamber, with the high-poster. That is yours. Evelyn never saw it. The morning and the evening sun shoot across it, and the front windows look on the great green crown of Mount Peak. You know it. There is not such a place in the world to hear the low and peaceful murmur of the river, all night long, rushing, tumbling, crooning, I used to think when I was a little girl and dreamed of things unseen, and still going on when the birds begin to sing in the dawn. And with Evelyn! Dear Phil!”

It was in another strain, but not less full of real affection, that Celia wrote:

“I am not going to congratulate you. You are long past the need of that. But you know that I am happy in having you happy. You thought I never saw anything? I wonder if men are as blind as they seem to be? And I had fears. Do you know a man ought to build his own monument. If he goes into a monument built for him, that is the end of him. Now you can work, and you will. I am so glad she isn’t an heiress any more. I guess there was a curse on that fortune. But she has eluded it. I believe all you tell me about her. Perhaps there are more such women in the world than you think. Some day I shall know her, and soon. I do long to see her. Love her I feel sure I shall.

“You ask about myself. I am the same, but things change. When I get my medical diploma I shall decide what to do. My little property just suffices, with economy, and I enjoy economy. I doubt if I do any general practice for pay. There are so many young doctors that need the money for practice more than I do. And perhaps taking it up as a living would make me sort of hard and perfunctory. And there is so much to do in this great New York among the unfortunate that a woman who knows medicine can do better than any one else.

“Ah, me, I am happy in a way, or I expect to be. Everybody—it isn’t because I am a woman I say this—needs something to lean on now and then. There isn’t much to lean on in the college, nor in many of my zealous and ambitious companions there. There is more faith in the poor people down in the wards where I go. They are kind to each other, and most of them, not all, believe in something. They, have that, at any rate, in all their trials and poverty. Philip, don’t despise the invisible. I have got into the habit of going into a Catholic church down there, when I am tired and discouraged, and getting the peace of it. It is a sort of open door! You need not jump to the conclusion that I am ‘going over.’ Maybe I am going back. I don’t know. I have always you know, been looking for something.

“I like to sit there in that dim quiet and think of things I can’t think of elsewhere. Do you think I am queer? Philip, all women are queer. They haven’t yet been explained. That is the reason why the novelists find it next to impossible, with all the materials at hand, to make a good woman—that is a woman. Do you know what it is to want what you don’t want? Longing is one thing and reason another.

“Perhaps I have depended too much on my reason. If you long to go to a place where you will have peace, why should you let what you call your reason stand in the way? Perhaps your reason is foolishness. You will laugh a little at this, and say that I am tired. No. Only I am not so sure of things as I used to be. Do you remember when we children used to sit under that tree by the Deerfield, how confident I was that I understood all about life, and my airs of superiority?

“Well, I don’t know as much now. But there is one thing that has survived and grown with the years, and that, Philip, is your dear friendship.”

What was it in this unassuming, but no doubt sufficiently conceited and ambitious, young fellow that he should have the affection, the love, of three such women?

Is affection as whimsically, as blindly distributed as wealth? It is the experience of life that it is rare to keep either to the end, but as a man is judged not so much by his ability to make money as to keep it, so it is fair to estimate his qualities by his power to retain friendship. New York is full of failures, bankrupts in fortune and bankrupts in affection, but this melancholy aspect of the town is on the surface, and is not to be considered in comparison with the great body of moderately contented, moderately successful, and on the whole happy households. In this it is a microcosm of the world.

To Evelyn and Philip, judging the world a good deal by each other, in those months before their marriage, when surprising perfection and new tenderness were daily developed, the gay and busy city seemed a sort of paradise.

Mysterious things were going on in the weeks immediately preceding the wedding. There was a conspiracy between Miss McDonald and Philip in the furnishing and setting in order a tiny apartment on the Heights, overlooking the city, the lordly Hudson, and its romantic hills. And when, after the ceremony, on a radiant afternoon in early June, the wedded lovers went to their new home, it was the housekeeper, the old governess, who opened the door and took into her arms the child she had loved and lost awhile.

This fragment of history leaves Philip Burnett on the threshold of his career. Those who know him only by his books may have been interested in his experiences, in the merciful interposition of disaster, before he came into the great fortune of the love of Evelyn Mavick.

Table of Contents

A LITTLE JOURNEY IN THE WORLD

THE GOLDEN HOUSE

THAT FORTUNE