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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Precipice, by Elia Wilkinson Peattie
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Precipice
+
+Author: Elia Wilkinson Peattie
+
+Release Date: April 27, 2004 [EBook #12177]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PRECIPICE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Charlie Kirschner and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+THE PRECIPICE
+
+_A Novel_
+
+BY
+
+ELIA W. PEATTIE
+
+BOSTON AND NEW YORK
+
+HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
+
+The Riverside Press Cambridge
+
+1914
+
+
+
+
+     _A fanfare of trumpets is blowing to which women the world
+     over are listening. They listen even against their wills, and
+     not all of them answer, though all are disturbed. Shut their
+     ears to it as they will, they cannot wholly keep out the
+     clamor of those trumpets, but whether in thrall to love or to
+     religion, to custom or to old ideals of self-obliterating
+     duty, they are stirred. They move in their sleep, or spring
+     to action, and they present to the world a new problem, a new
+     force--or a new menace_....
+
+
+
+
+THE PRECIPICE
+
+
+
+I
+
+It was all over. Kate Barrington had her degree and her graduating
+honors; the banquets and breakfasts, the little intimate farewell
+gatherings, and the stirring convocation were through with. So now she
+was going home.
+
+With such reluctance had the Chicago spring drawn to a close that, even
+in June, the campus looked poorly equipped for summer, and it was a
+pleasure, as she told her friend Lena Vroom, who had come with her to
+the station to see her off, to think how much further everything would
+be advanced "down-state."
+
+"To-morrow morning, the first thing," she declared, "I shall go in the
+side entry and take down the garden shears and cut the roses to put in
+the Dresden vases on the marble mantelshelf in the front room."
+
+"Don't try to make me think you're domestic," said Miss Vroom with
+unwonted raillery.
+
+"Domestic, do you call it?" cried Kate. "It isn't being domestic; it's
+turning in to make up to lady mother for the four years she's been
+deprived of my society. You may not believe it, but that's been a
+hardship for her. I say, Lena, you'll be coming to see me one of
+these days?"
+
+Miss Vroom shook her head.
+
+"I haven't much feeling for a vacation," she said. "I don't seem to fit
+in anywhere except here at the University."
+
+"I've no patience with you," cried Kate. "Why you should hang around
+here doing graduate work year after year passes my understanding. I
+declare I believe you stay here because it's cheap and passes the time;
+but really, you know, it's a makeshift."
+
+"It's all very well to talk, Kate, when you have a home waiting for you.
+You're the kind that always has a place. If it wasn't your father's
+house it would be some other man's--Ray McCrea's, for example. As for
+me, I'm lucky to have acquired even a habit--and that's what college
+_is_ with me--since I've no home."
+
+Kate Barrington turned understanding and compassionate eyes upon her
+friend. She had seen her growing a little thinner and more tense
+everyday; had seen her putting on spectacles, and fighting anaemia with
+tonics, and yielding unresistingly to shabbiness. Would she always be
+speeding breathlessly from one classroom to another, palpitantly yet
+sadly seeking for the knowledge with which she knew so little what
+to do?
+
+The train came thundering in--they were waiting for it at one of the
+suburban stations--and there was only a second in which to say good-bye.
+Lena, however, failed to say even that much. She pecked at Kate's cheek
+with her nervous, thin lips, and Kate could only guess how much anguish
+was concealed beneath this aridity of manner. Some sense of it made Kate
+fling her arms about the girl and hold her in a warm embrace.
+
+"Oh, Lena," she cried, "I'll never forget you--never!"
+
+Lena did not stop to watch the train pull out. She marched away on her
+heelless shoes, her eyes downcast, and Kate, straining her eyes after
+her friend, smiled to think there had been only Lena to speed her
+drearily on her way. Ray McCrea had, of course, taken it for granted
+that he would be informed of the hour of her departure, but if she had
+allowed him to come she might have committed herself in some absurd
+way--said something she could not have lived up to.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As it was, she felt quite peaceful and more at leisure than she had for
+months. She was even at liberty to indulge in memories and it suited her
+mood deliberately to do so. She went back to the day when she had
+persuaded her father and mother to let her leave the Silvertree Academy
+for Young Ladies and go up to the University of Chicago. She had been
+but eighteen then, but if she lived to be a hundred she never could
+forget the hour she streamed with five thousand others through Hull
+Gate and on to Cobb Hall to register as a student in that young,
+aggressive seat of learning.
+
+She had tried to hold herself in; not to be too "heady"; and she hoped
+the lank girl beside her--it had been Lena Vroom, delegated by the
+League of the Young Women's Christian Association--did not find her
+rawly enthusiastic. Lena conducted her from chapel to hall, from office
+to woman's building, from registrar to dean, till at length Kate stood
+before the door of Cobb once more, fagged but not fretted, and able to
+look about her with appraising eyes.
+
+Around her and beneath her were swarms, literally, of fresh-faced,
+purposeful youths and maidens, an astonishingly large number of whom
+were meeting after the manner of friends long separated. Later Kate
+discovered how great a proportion of that enthusiasm took itself out in
+mere gesture and vociferation; but it all seemed completely genuine to
+her that first day and she thought with almost ecstatic anticipation of
+the relationships which soon would be hers. Almost she looked then to
+see the friend-who-was-to-be coming toward her with miraculous
+recognition in her eyes.
+
+But she was none the less interested in those who for one reason or
+another were alien to her--in the Japanese boy, concealing his
+wistfulness beneath his rigid breeding; in the Armenian girl with the
+sad, beautiful eyes; in the Yiddish youth with his bashful earnestness.
+Then there were the women past their first youth, abstracted, and
+obviously disdainful of their personal appearance; and the girls with
+heels too high and coiffures too elaborate, who laid themselves open to
+the suspicion of having come to college for social reasons. But all
+appealed to Kate. She delighted in their variety--yes, and in all these
+forms of aspiration. The vital essence of their spirits seemed to
+materialize into visible ether, rose-red or violet-hued, and to rise
+about them in evanishing clouds.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She was recalled to the present by a brisk conductor who asked for her
+ticket. Kate hunted it up in a little flurry. The man had broken into
+the choicest of her memories, and when he was gone and she returned to
+her retrospective occupation, she chanced upon the most irritating of
+her recollections. It concerned an episode of that same first day in
+Chicago. She had grown weary with the standing and waiting, and when
+Miss Vroom left her for a moment to speak to a friend, Kate had taken a
+seat upon a great, unoccupied stone bench which stood near Cobb door.
+Still under the influence of her high idealization of the scene she lost
+herself in happy reverie. Then a widening ripple of laughter told her
+that something amusing was happening. What it was she failed to imagine,
+but it dawned upon her gradually that people were looking her way. Knots
+of the older students were watching her; bewildered newcomers were
+trying, like herself, to discover the cause of mirth. At first she
+smiled sympathetically; then suddenly, with a thrill of mortification,
+she perceived that she was the object of derision.
+
+What was it? What had she done?
+
+She knew that she was growing pale and she could feel her heart pounding
+at her side, but she managed to rise, and, turning, faced a blond young
+man near at hand, who had protruding teeth and grinned at her like a
+sardonic rabbit.
+
+"Oh, what is it, please?" she asked.
+
+"That bench isn't for freshmen," he said briefly.
+
+Scarlet submerged the pallor in Kate's face.
+
+"Oh, I didn't know," she gasped. "Excuse me."
+
+She moved away quickly, dropping her handbag and having to stoop for it.
+Then she saw that she had left her gloves on the bench and she had to
+turn back for those. At that moment Lena hastened to her.
+
+"I'm so sorry," she cried. "I ought to have warned you about that old
+senior bench."
+
+Kate, disdaining a reply, strode on unheeding. Her whole body was
+running fire, and she was furious with herself to think that she could
+suffer such an agony of embarrassment over a blunder which, after all,
+was trifling. Struggling valiantly for self-command, she plunged toward
+another bench and dropped on it with the determination to look her world
+in the face and give it a fair chance to stare back.
+
+Then she heard Lena give a throaty little squeak.
+
+"Oh, my!" she said.
+
+Something apparently was very wrong this time, and Kate was not to
+remain in ignorance of what it was. The bench on which she was now
+sitting had its custodian in the person of a tall youth, who lifted his
+hat and smiled upon her with commingled amusement and commiseration.
+
+"Pardon," he said, "but--"
+
+Kate already was on her feet and the little gusts of laughter that came
+from the onlookers hit her like so many stones.
+
+"Isn't this seat for freshmen either?" she broke in, trying not to let
+her lips quiver and determined to show them all that she was, at any
+rate, no coward.
+
+The student, still holding his hat, smiled languidly as he shook his
+head.
+
+"I'm new, you see," she urged, begging him with her smile to be on her
+side,--"dreadfully new! Must I wait three years before I sit here?"
+
+"I'm afraid you'll not want to do it even then," he said pleasantly.
+"You understand this bench--the C bench we call it--is for men; any man
+above a freshman."
+
+Kate gathered the hardihood to ask:--
+
+"But why is it for men, please?"
+
+"I don't know why. We men took it, I suppose." He wasn't inclined to
+apologize apparently; he seemed to think that if the men wanted it they
+had a right to it.
+
+"This bench was given to the men, perhaps?" she persisted, not knowing
+how to move away.
+
+"No," admitted the young man; "I don't believe it was. It was presented
+to the University by a senior class."
+
+"A class of men?"
+
+"Naturally not. A graduating class is composed of men and women. C
+bench," he explained, "is the center of activities. It's where the drum
+is beaten to call a mass meeting, and the boys gather here when they've
+anything to talk over. There's no law against women sitting here, you
+know. Only they never do. It isn't--oh, I hardly know how to put it--it
+isn't just the thing--"
+
+"Can't you break away, McCrea?" some one called.
+
+The youth threw a withering glance in the direction of the speaker.
+
+"I can conduct my own affairs," he said coldly.
+
+But Kate had at last found a way to bring the interview to an end.
+
+"I said I was new," she concluded, flinging a barbed shaft. "I thought
+it was share and share alike here--that no difference was made between
+men and women. You see--I didn't understand."
+
+The C bench came to be a sort of symbol to her from then on. It was the
+seat of privilege if not of honor, and the women were not to sit on it.
+
+Not that she fretted about it. There was no time for that. She settled
+in Foster Hall, which was devoted to the women, and where she expected
+to make many friends. But she had been rather unfortunate in that. The
+women were not as cooeperative as she had expected them to be. At table,
+for example, the conversation dragged heavily. She had expected to find
+it liberal, spirited, even gay, but the girls had a way of holding back.
+Kate had to confess that she didn't think men would be like that. They
+would--most of them--have understood that the chief reason a man went to
+a university was to learn to get along with his fellow men and to hold
+his own in the world. The girls labored under the idea that one went to
+a university for the exclusive purpose of making high marks in their
+studies. They put in stolid hours of study and were quietly glad at
+their high averages; but it actually seemed as if many of them used
+college as a sort of shelter rather than an opportunity for the exercise
+of personality.
+
+However, there were plenty of the other sort--gallant, excursive
+spirits, and as soon as Kate became acquainted she had pleasure in
+picking and choosing. She nibbled at this person and that like a
+cautious and discriminating mouse, venturing on a full taste if she
+liked the flavor, scampering if she didn't.
+
+Of course she had her furores. Now it was for settlement work, now for
+dramatics, now for dancing. Subconsciously she was always looking about
+for some one who "needed" her, but there were few such. Patronage would
+have been resented hotly, and Kate learned by a series of
+discountenancing experiences that friendship would not come--any more
+than love--at beck and call.
+
+Love!
+
+That gave her pause. Love had not come her way. Of course there was Ray
+McCrea. But he was only a possibility. She wondered if she would turn to
+him in trouble. Of that she was not yet certain. It was pleasant to be
+with him, but even for a gala occasion she was not sure but that she was
+happier with Honora Daley than with him. Honora Daley was Honora Fulham
+now--married to a "dark man" as the gypsy fortune-tellers would have
+called him. He seemed very dark to Kate, menacing even; but Honora found
+it worth her while to shed her brightness on his tenebrosity, so that
+was, of course, Honora's affair.
+
+Kate smiled to think of how her mother would be questioning her about
+her "admirers," as she would phrase it in her mid-Victorian parlance.
+There was really only Ray to report upon. He would be the beau ideal
+"young gentleman,"--to recur again to her mother's phraseology,--the son
+of a member of a great State Street dry-goods firm, an excellently
+mannered, ingratiating, traveled person with the most desirable social
+connections. Kate would be able to tell of the two mansions, one on the
+Lake Shore Drive, the other at Lake Forest, where Ray lived with his
+parents. He had not gone to an Eastern college because his father
+wished him to understand the city and the people among whom his life was
+to be spent. Indeed, his father, Richard McCrea, had made something of a
+concession to custom in giving his son four years of academic life. Ray
+was now to be trained in every department of that vast departmental
+concern, the Store, and was soon to go abroad as the promising cadet of
+a famous commercial establishment, to make the acquaintance of the
+foreign importers and agents of the house. Oh, her mother would quite
+like all that, though she would be disappointed to learn that there had
+thus far been no rejected suitors. In her mother's day every fair damsel
+carried scalps at her belt, figuratively speaking--and after marriage,
+became herself a trophy of victory. Dear "mummy" was that, Kate thought
+tenderly--a willing and reverential parasite, "ladylike" at all costs,
+contented to have her husband provide for her, her pastor think for her,
+and Martha Underwood, the domineering "help" in the house at Silvertree,
+do the rest. Kate knew "mummy's" mind very well--knew how she looked on
+herself as sacred because she had been the mother to one child and a
+good wife to one husband. She was all swathed around in the
+chiffon-sentiment of good Victoria's day. She didn't worry about being a
+"consumer" merely. None of the disturbing problems that were shaking
+femininity disturbed her calm. She was "a lady," the "wife of a
+professional man." It was proper that she should "be well cared for."
+She moved by her well-chosen phrases; they were like rules set in a
+copybook for her guidance.
+
+Kate seemed to see a moving-picture show of her mother's days. Now she
+was pouring the coffee from the urn, seasoning it scrupulously to suit
+her lord and master, now arranging the flowers, now feeding the
+goldfish; now polishing the glass with tissue paper. Then she answered
+the telephone for her husband, the doctor,--answered the door, too,
+sometimes. She received calls and paid them, read the ladies' magazines,
+and knew all about what was "fitting for a lady." Of course, she had her
+prejudices. She couldn't endure Oriental rugs, and didn't believe that
+smuggling was wrong; at least, not when done by the people one knew and
+when the things smuggled were pretty.
+
+Kate, who had the spirit of the liberal comedian, smiled many times
+remembering these things. Then she sighed, for she realized that her
+ability to see these whimsicalities meant that she and her mother were,
+after all, creatures of diverse training and thought.
+
+
+
+II
+
+What! Silver tree? She hadn't realized how the time had been flying. But
+there was the sawmill. She could hear the whir and buzz! And there was
+the old livery-stable, and the place where farm implements were sold,
+and the little harness shop jammed in between;--and there, to convince
+her no mistake had been made, was the lozenge of grass with "Silvertree"
+on it in white stones. Then, in a second, the station appeared with the
+busses backed up against it, and beyond them the familiar surrey with a
+woman in it with yearning eyes.
+
+Kate, the specialized student of psychology, the graduate with honors,
+who had learned to note contrasts and weigh values, forgot everything
+(even her umbrella) and leaped from the train while it was still in
+motion. Forgotten the honors and degrees; the majors were mere minor
+affairs; and there remained only the things which were from the
+beginning.
+
+She and her mother sat very close together as they drove through the
+familiar village streets. When they did speak, it was incoherently.
+There was an odor of brier roses in the air and the sun was setting in a
+"bed of daffodil sky." Kate felt waves of beauty and tenderness breaking
+over her and wanted to cry. Her mother wanted to and did. Neither
+trusted herself to speak, but when they were in the house Mrs.
+Barrington pulled the pins out of Kate's hat and then Kate took the
+faded, gentle woman in her strong arms and crushed her to her.
+
+"Your father was afraid he wouldn't be home in time to meet you," said
+Mrs. Barrington when they were in the parlor, where the Dresden vases
+stood on the marble mantel and the rose-jar decorated the three-sided
+table in the corner. "It was just his luck to be called into the
+country. If it had been a really sick person who wanted him, I wouldn't
+have minded, but it was only Venie Sampson."
+
+"Still having fits?" asked Kate cheerfully, as one glad to recognize
+even the chronic ailments of a familiar community.
+
+"Well, she thinks she has them," said Mrs. Barrington in an easy,
+gossiping tone; "but my opinion is that she wouldn't be troubled with
+them if only there were some other way in which she could call attention
+to herself. You see, Venie was a very pretty girl."
+
+"Has that made her an invalid, mummy?"
+
+"Well, it's had something to do with it. When she was young she received
+no end of attention, but some way she went through the woods and didn't
+even pick up a crooked stick. But she got so used to being the center of
+interest that when she found herself growing old and plain, she couldn't
+think of any way to keep attention fixed on her except by having these
+collapses. You know you mustn't call the attacks 'fits.' Venie's far too
+refined for that."
+
+Kate smiled broadly at her mother's distinctive brand of humor. She
+loved it all--Miss Sampson's fits, her mother's jokes; even the fact
+that when they went out to supper she sat where she used in the old days
+when she had worn a bib beneath her chin.
+
+"Oh, the plates, the cups, the everything!" cried Kate, ridiculously
+lifting a piece of the "best china" to her lips and kissing it.
+
+"Absurdity!" reproved her mother, but she adored the girl's
+extravagances just the same.
+
+"Everything's glorious," Kate insisted. "Cream cheese and parsley! Did
+you make it, mummy? Currant rolls--oh, the wonders! Martha Underwood,
+don't dare to die without showing me how to make those currant rolls.
+Veal loaf--now, what do you think of that? Why, at Foster we went hungry
+sometimes--not for lack of quantity, of course, but because of the
+quality. I used to be dreadfully ashamed of the fact that there we were,
+dozens of us women in that fine hall, and not one of us with enough
+domestic initiative to secure a really good table. I tried to head an
+insurrection and to have now one girl and now another supervise the
+table, but the girls said they hadn't come to college to keep house."
+
+"Yes, yes," chimed in her mother excitedly; "that's where the whole
+trouble with college for women comes in. They not only don't go to
+college to keep house, but most of them mean not to keep it when they
+come out. We allowed you to go merely because you overbore us. You used
+to be a terrible little tyrant, Katie,--almost as bad as--"
+
+She brought herself up suddenly.
+
+"As bad as whom, mummy?"
+
+There was a step on the front porch and Mrs. Barrington was spared the
+need for answering.
+
+"There's your father," she said, signaling Kate to meet him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Dr. Barrington was tall, spare, and grizzled. The torpor of the little
+town had taken the light from his eyes and reduced the tempo of his
+movements, but, in spite of all, he had preserved certain vivid features
+of his personality. He had the long, educated hands of the surgeon and
+the tyrannical aspect of the physician who has struggled all his life
+with disobedience and perversity. He returned Kate's ardent little storm
+of kisses with some embarrassment, but he was unfeignedly pleased at her
+appearance, and as the three of them sat about the table in their old
+juxtaposition, his face relaxed. However, Kate had seen her mother look
+up wistfully as her husband passed her, as if she longed for some
+affectionate recognition of the occasion, but the man missed his
+opportunity and let it sink into the limbo of unimproved moments.
+
+"Well, father, we have our girl home again," Mrs. Barrington said with
+pardonable sentiment.
+
+"Well, we've been expecting her, haven't we?" Dr. Barrington replied,
+not ill-naturedly but with a marked determination to make the episode
+matter-of-fact.
+
+"Indeed we have," smiled Mrs. Barrington. "But of course it couldn't
+mean to you, Frederick, what it does to me. A mother's--"
+
+Dr. Barrington raised his hand.
+
+"Never mind about a mother's love," he said decisively. "If you had seen
+it fail as often as I have, you'd think the less said on the subject the
+better. Women are mammal, I admit; maternal they are not, save in a
+proportion of cases. Did you have a pleasant journey down, Kate?"
+
+He had the effect of shutting his wife out of the conversation; of
+definitely snubbing and discountenancing her. Kate knew it had always
+been like that, though when she had been young and more passionately
+determined to believe her home the best and dearest in the world, as
+children will, she had overlooked the fact--had pretended that what was
+a habit was only a mood, and that if "father was cross" to-day, he would
+be pleasant to-morrow. Now he began questioning Kate about college, her
+instructors and her friends. There was conversation enough, but the
+man's wife sat silent, and she knew that Kate knew that he expected
+her to do so.
+
+Custard was brought on and Mrs. Barrington diffidently served it. Her
+husband gave one glance at it.
+
+"Curdled!" he said succinctly, pushing his plate from him. "It's a pity
+it couldn't have been right Kate's first night home."
+
+Kate thought there had been so much that was not right her first night
+home, that a spoiled confection was hardly worth comment.
+
+"I'm dreadfully sorry," Mrs. Barrington said. "I suppose I should have
+made it myself, but I went down to the train--"
+
+"That didn't take all the afternoon, did it?" the doctor asked.
+
+"I was doing things around the house--"
+
+"Putting flowers in my room, I know, mummy," broke in Kate, "and
+polishing up the silver toilet bottles, the beauties. You're one of
+those women who pet a home, and it shows, I can tell you. You don't see
+many homes like this, do you, dad,--so ladylike and brier-rosy?"
+
+She leaned smilingly across the table as she addressed her father,
+offering him not the ingratiating and seductive smile which he was
+accustomed to see women--his wife among the rest--employ when they
+wished to placate him. Kate's was the bright smile of a comradely fellow
+creature who asked him to play a straight game. It made him take fresh
+stock of his girl. He noted her high oval brow around which the dark
+hair clustered engagingly; her flexible, rather large mouth, with lips
+well but not seductively arched, and her clear skin with its uniform
+tinting. Such beauty as she had, and it was far from negligible, would
+endure. She was quite five feet ten inches, he estimated, with a good
+chest development and capable shoulders. Her gestures were free and
+suggestive of strength, and her long body had the grace of flexibility
+and perfect unconsciousness. All of this was good; but what of the
+spirit that looked out of her eyes? It was a glance to which the man was
+not accustomed--feminine yet unafraid, beautiful but not related to sex.
+The physician was not able to analyze it, though where women were
+concerned he was a merciless analyst. Gratified, yet unaccountably
+disturbed, he turned to his wife.
+
+"Martha has forgotten to light up the parlor," he said testily. "Can't
+you impress on her that she's to have the room ready for us when we've
+finished inhere?"
+
+"She's so excited over Kate's coming home," said Mrs. Barrington with a
+placatory smile. "Perhaps you'll light up to-night, Frederick."
+
+"No, I won't. I began work at five this morning and I've been going all
+day. It's up to you and Martha to run the house."
+
+"The truth is," said Mrs. Barrington, "neither Martha nor I can reach
+the gasolier."
+
+Dr. Barrington had the effect of pouncing on this statement.
+
+"That's what's the matter, then," he said. "You forgot to get the
+tapers. I heard Martha telling you last night that they were out."
+
+A flush spread over Mrs. Barrington's delicate face as she cast about
+her for the usual subterfuge and failed to find it. In that moment Kate
+realized that it had been a long programme of subterfuges with her
+mother--subterfuges designed to protect her from the onslaughts of the
+irritable man who dominated her.
+
+"I'll light the gas, mummy," she said gently. "Let that be one of my
+fixed duties from now on."
+
+"You'll spoil your mother, Kate," said the doctor with a whimsical
+intonation.
+
+His jesting about what had so marred the hour of reunion brought a surge
+of anger to Kate's brain.
+
+"That's precisely what I came home to do, sir," she said significantly.
+"What other reason could I have for coming back to Silvertree? The town
+certainly isn't enticing. You've been doctoring here for forty years,
+but you havn't been able to cure the local sleeping-sickness yet."
+
+It stung and she had meant it to. To insult Silvertree was to hurt the
+doctor in his most tender vanity. It was one of his most fervid beliefs
+that he had selected a growing town, conspicuous for its enterprise. In
+his young manhood he had meant to do fine things. He was
+public-spirited, charitable, a death-fighter of courage and persistence.
+Though not a religious man, he had one holy passion, that of the
+physician. He respected himself and loved his wife, but he had from
+boyhood confused the ideas of masculinity and tyranny. He believed that
+women needed discipline, and he had little by little destroyed the
+integrity of the woman he would have most wished to venerate. That she
+could, in spite of her manifest cowardice and moral circumventions,
+still pray nightly and read the book that had been the light to
+countless faltering feet, furnished him with food for acrid sarcasm. He
+saw in this only the essential furtiveness, inconsistency, and
+superstition of the female.
+
+The evening dragged. The neighbors who would have liked to visit them
+refrained from doing so because they thought the reunited family would
+prefer to be alone that first evening. Kate did her best to preserve
+some tattered fragments of the amenities. She told college stories,
+talked of Lena Vroom and of beautiful Honora Fulham,--hinted even at Ray
+McCrea,--and by dint of much ingenuity wore the evening away.
+
+"In the morning," she said to her father as she bade him good-night,
+"we'll both be rested." She had meant it for an apology, not for herself
+any more than for him, but he assumed no share in it.
+
+Up in her room her mother saw her bedded, and in kissing her
+whispered,--
+
+"Don't oppose your father, Kate. You'll only make me unhappy. Anything
+for peace, that's what I say."
+
+
+
+III
+
+It was sweet to awaken in the old room. Through the open window she
+could see the fork in the linden tree and the squirrels making free in
+the branches. The birds were at their opera, and now and then the shape
+of one outlined itself against the holland shade. Kate had been
+commanded to take her breakfast in bed and she was more than willing to
+do so. The after-college lassitude was upon her and her thoughts moved
+drowsily through her weary brain.
+
+Her mother, by an unwonted exercise of self-control, kept from the room
+that morning, stopping only now and then at the door for a question or a
+look. That was sweet, too. Kate loved to have her hovering about like
+that, and yet the sight of her, so fragile, so fluttering, added to the
+sense of sadness that was creeping over her. After a time it began to
+rain softly, the drops slipping down into the shrubbery and falling like
+silver beads from the window-hood. At that Kate began to weep, too, just
+as quietly, and then she slept again. Her mother coming in on tiptoe saw
+tears on the girl's cheek, but she did not marvel. Though her experience
+had been narrow she was blessed with certain perceptions. She knew that
+even women who called themselves happy sometimes had need to weep.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The little pensive pause was soon over. There was no use, as all the
+sturdier part of Kate knew, in holding back from the future. That very
+afternoon the new life began forcing itself on her. The neighbors
+called, eager to meet this adventurous one who had turned her back on
+the pleasant conventions and had refused to content herself with the
+Silvertree Seminary for Young Ladies. They wanted to see what the new
+brand of young woman was like. Moreover, there was no one who was not
+under obligations to be kind to her mother's daughter. So, presently the
+whole social life of Silvertree, aroused from its midsummer torpor by
+this exciting event, was in full swing.
+
+Kate wrote to Honora a fortnight later:--
+
+     I am trying to be the perfect young lady according to dear
+     mummy's definition. You should see me running baby ribbon in
+     my _lingerie_ and combing out the fringe on tea-napkins.
+     Every afternoon we are 'entertained' or give an
+     entertainment. Of course we meet the same people over and
+     over, but truly I like the cordiality. Even the
+     inquisitiveness has an affectionate quality to it. I'm
+     determined to enjoy my village and I do appreciate the homely
+     niceties of the life here. Of course I have to 'pretend'
+     rather hard at times--pretend, for example, that I care about
+     certain things which are really of no moment to me whatever.
+     To illustrate, mother and I have some recipes which nobody
+     else has and it's our role to be secretive about them! And we
+     have invented a new sort of 'ribbon sandwich.' Did you ever
+     hear of a ribbon sandwich? If not, you must be told that it
+     consists of layers and layers of thin slices of bread all
+     pressed down together, with ground nuts or dressed lettuce in
+     between. Each entertainer astonishes her guests with a new
+     variety. That furnishes conversation for several minutes.
+
+     "How long can I stand it, Honora, my dear old defender of
+     freedom? The classrooms are mine no more; the campus is a
+     departed glory; I shall no longer sing the 'Alma Mater' with
+     you when the chimes ring at ten. The whole challenge of the
+     city is missing. Nothing opposes me, there is no task for me
+     to do. I must be supine, acquiescent, smiling, non-essential.
+     I am like a runner who has trained for a race, and, ready for
+     the speeding, finds that no race is on. But I've no business
+     to be surprised. I knew it would be like this, didn't I? the
+     one thing is to ¸make and keep mummy happy. She needs me _so_
+     much. And I am happy to be with her. Write me often--write me
+     everything. Gods, how I'd like a walk and talk with you!"
+
+Mrs. Barrington did not attempt to conceal her interest in the letters
+which Ray McCrea wrote her daughter. She was one of those women who
+thrill at a masculine superscription on a letter. Perhaps she got more
+satisfaction out of these not too frequent missives than Kate did
+herself. While the writer didn't precisely say that he counted on Kate
+to supply the woof of the fabric of life, that expectation made itself
+evident between the lines to Mrs. Barrington's sentimental perspicacity.
+
+Kate answered his letters, for it was pleasant to have a masculine
+correspondent. It provided a needed stimulation. Moreover, in the back
+of her mind she knew that he presented an avenue of escape if Silvertree
+and home became unendurable. It seemed piteous enough that her life with
+her parents should so soon have become a mere matter of duty and
+endurance, but there was a feeling of perpetually treading on eggs in
+the Barrington house. Kate could have screamed with exasperation as one
+eventless day after another dawned and the blight of caution and
+apprehension was never lifted from her mother and Martha. She writhed
+with shame at the sight of her mother's cajolery of the tyrant she
+served--and loved. To have spoken out once, recklessly, to have entered
+a wordy combat without rancor and for the mere zest of tournament, to
+have let the winnowing winds of satire blow through the house with its
+stale sentimentalities and mental attitudes, would have reconciled her
+to any amount of difference in the point of view. But the hushed voice
+and covertly held position afflicted her like shame.
+
+Were all women who became good wives asked to falsify themselves? Was
+furtive diplomacy, or, at least, spiritual compromise, the miserable
+duty of woman? Was it her business to placate her mate, and, by
+exercising the cunning of the weak, to keep out from under his heel?
+
+There was no one in all Silvertree whom the discriminating would so
+quickly have mentioned as the ideal wife as Mrs. Barrington. She
+herself, no doubt, so Kate concluded with her merciless young
+psychology, regarded herself as noble. But the people in Silvertree had
+a passion for thinking of themselves as noble. They had, Kate said to
+herself bitterly, so few charms that they had to fall back on their
+virtues. In the face of all this it became increasingly difficult to
+think of marriage as a goal for herself, and her letters to McCrea were
+further and further apart as the slow weeks passed. She had once read
+the expression, "the authentic voice of happiness," and it had lived
+hauntingly in her memory. Could Ray speak that? Would she, reading his
+summons from across half the world, hasten to him, choose him from the
+millions, face any future with him? She knew she would not. No, no;
+union with the man of average congeniality was not her goal. There must
+be something more shining than that for her to speed toward it.
+
+However, one day she caught, opportunely, a hint of the further meanings
+of a woman's life. Honora provided a great piece of news, and
+illuminated with a new understanding, Kate wrote:--
+
+     "MY DEAR, DEAR GIRL:--
+
+     "You write me that something beautiful is going to happen to
+     you. I can guess what it is and I agree that it is glorious,
+     though it does take my breath away. Now there are two of
+     you--and by and by there will be three, and the third will be
+     part you and part David and all a miracle. I can see how it
+     makes life worth living, Honora, as nothing else
+     could--nothing else!
+
+     "Mummy wouldn't like me to write like this. She doesn't
+     approve of women whose understanding jumps ahead of their
+     experiences. But what is the use of pretending that I don't
+     encompass your miracle? I knew all about it from the
+     beginning of the earth.
+
+     "This will mean that you will have to give up your laboratory
+     work with David, I suppose. Will that be a hardship? Or are
+     you glad of the old womanly excuse for passing by the outside
+     things, and will you now settle down to be as fine a mother
+     as you were a chemist? Will you go further, my dear, and make
+     a fuss about your house and go all delicately bedizened after
+     the manner of the professors' nice little wives--go in, I
+     mean, for all the departments of the feminine profession?
+
+     "I do hope you'll have a little son, Honora, not so much on
+     your account as on his. During childhood a girl's feet are as
+     light as a boy's bounding over the earth; but when once
+     childhood is over, a man's life seems so much more coherent
+     than a woman's, though it is not really so important. But it
+     takes precisely the experience you are going through to give
+     it its great significance, doesn't it?
+
+     "What other career is there for real women, I wonder? What,
+     for example, am I to do, Honora? There at the University I
+     prepared myself for fine work, but I'm trapped here in this
+     silly Silvertree cage. If I had a talent I could make out
+     very well, but I am talentless, and all I do now is to answer
+     the telephone for father and help mummy embroider the towels.
+     They won't let me do anything else. Some one asked me the
+     other day what colors I intended wearing this autumn. I
+     wanted to tell them smoke-of-disappointment, ashes-of-dreams,
+     and dull-as-wash-Monday. But I only said ashes-of-roses.
+     "'Not all of your frocks, surely, Kate,' one of the girls
+     cried. 'All,' I declared; 'street frocks, evening gowns,
+     all.' 'But you mustn't be odd,' my little friend warned.
+     'Especially as people are a little suspicious that you will
+     be because of your going to a co-educational college.'
+
+     "I thought it would be so restful here, but it doesn't offer
+     peace so much as shrinkage. Silvertree isn't pastoral--it's
+     merely small town. Of course it is possible to imagine a
+     small town that would be ideal--a community of quiet souls
+     leading the simple life. But we aren't great or quiet souls
+     here, and are just as far from simple as our purses and
+     experience will let us be.
+
+     "I dare say that you'll be advising me, as a student of
+     psychology, to stop criticizing and to try to do something
+     for the neighbors here--go in search of their submerged
+     selves. But, honestly, it would require too much
+     paraphernalia in the way of diving-bells and air-pumps.
+
+     "I have, however, a reasonable cause of worry. Dear little
+     mummy isn't well. At first we thought her indisposition of
+     little account, but she seems run down. She has been flurried
+     and nervous ever since I came home; indeed, I may say she has
+     been so for years. Now she seems suddenly to have broken
+     down. But I'm going to do everything I can for her, and I
+     know father will, too; for he can't endure to have any one
+     sick. It arouses his great virtue, his physicianship."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     A week later Kate mailed this:--
+
+     "I am turning to you in my terrible fear. Mummy won't answer
+     our questions and seems lost in a world of thought. Father
+     has called in other physicians to help him. I can't tell you
+     how like a frightened child I feel. Oh, my poor little
+     bewildered mummy! What do you suppose she is thinking about?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Then, a week afterward, this--on black-bordered paper:--
+
+     "SISTER HONORA:--
+
+     "She's been gone three days. To the last we couldn't tell why
+     she fell ill. We only knew she made no effort to get well. I
+     am tormented by the fear that I had something to do with her
+     breaking like that. She was appalled--shattered--at the idea
+     of any friction between father and me. When I stood up for my
+     own ideas against his, it was to her as sacrilegious as if I
+     had lifted my hand against a king. I might have
+     capitulated--ought, I suppose, to have foregone everything!
+
+     "There is one thing, however, that gives me strange comfort.
+     At the last she had such dignity! Her silence seemed fine and
+     brave. She looked at us from a deep still peace as if, after
+     all her losing of the way, she had at last found it and
+     Herself. The search has carried her beyond our sight.
+
+     "Oh, we are so lonely, father and I. We silently accuse each
+     other. He thinks my reckless truth-telling destroyed her
+     timid spirit; I think his twenty-five years of tyranny did
+     it. We both know how she hated our rasping, and we hate it
+     ourselves. Yet, even at that hour when we stood beside her
+     bed and knew the end was coming, he and I were at sword's
+     points. What a hackneyed expression, but how terrible! Yes,
+     the hateful swords of our spirits, my point toward his breast
+     and his toward mine, gleamed there almost visibly above that
+     little tired creature. He wanted her for himself even to the
+     last: I wanted her for Truth--wanted her to walk up to God
+     dressed in her own soul-garments, not decked out in the rags
+     and tags of those father had tossed to her.
+
+     "She spoke only once. She had been dreaming, I suppose, and a
+     wonderful illuminated smile broke over her face. In the midst
+     of what seemed a sort of ecstasy, she looked up and saw
+     father watching her. She shivered away from him with one of
+     those apologetic gestures she so often used. 'It wasn't a
+     heavenly vision,' she said--she knew he wouldn't have
+     believed in that--'it was only that I thought my little brown
+     baby was in my arms.' She meant me, Honora,--think of it. She
+     had gone back to those tender days when I had been dependent
+     on her for all my well-being. My mummy! I gathered her close
+     and held her till she was gone, my little, strange,
+     frightened love.
+
+     "Now father and I hide our thoughts from each other. He
+     wanted to know if I was going to keep house for him. I said
+     I'd try, for six months. He flew in one of his rages because
+     I admitted that it would be an experiment. He wanted to know
+     what kind of a daughter I was, and I told him the kind he had
+     made me. Isn't that hideous?
+
+     "I've no right to trouble you, but I must confide in some one
+     or my heart will break. There's no one here I can talk to,
+     though many are kind. And Ray--perhaps you think I should
+     have written all this to him. But I wasn't moved to do so,
+     Honora. Try to forgive me for telling you these troubles now
+     in the last few days before your baby comes. I suppose I turn
+     to you because you are one of the blessed corporation of
+     mothers--part and parcel of the mother-fact. It's like being
+     a part of the good rolling earth, just as familiar and
+     comforting. Thinking of you mysteriously makes me good. I'm
+     going to forget myself, the way you do, and 'make a home'
+     for father.
+
+     "Your own
+
+     KATE."
+
+In September she sent Honora a letter of congratulation.
+
+     "So it's twins! Girls! Were you transported or amused?
+     Patience and Patricia--very pretty. You'll stay at home with
+     the treasures, won't you? You see, there's something about
+     you I can't quite understand, if you'll forgive me for saying
+     it. You were an exuberant girl, but after marriage you grew
+     austere--put your lips together in a line that discouraged
+     kissing. So I'm not sure of you even now that the babies have
+     come. Some day you'll have to explain yourself to me.
+
+     "I'm one who needs explanations all along the road. Why? Why?
+     Why? That is what my soul keeps demanding. Why couldn't I go
+     back to Chicago with Ray McCrea? He was down here the other
+     day, but I wouldn't let him say the things he obviously had
+     come to say, and now he's on his way abroad and very likely
+     we shall not meet again. I feel so numb since mummy died that
+     I can't care about Ray. I keep crying 'Why?' about Death
+     among other things. And about that horrid gulf between father
+     and me. If we try to get across we only fall in. He has me
+     here ready to his need. He neither knows nor cares what my
+     thoughts are. So long as I answer the telephone faithfully,
+     sterilize the drinking-water, and see that he gets his
+     favorite dishes, he is content. I have no liberty to leave
+     the house and my restlessness is torture. The neighbors no
+     longer flutter in as they used when mummy was here. They
+     have given me over to my year of mourning--which
+     means vacuity.
+
+     "Partly for lack of something better to do I have cleaned the
+     old house from attic to cellar, and have been glad to creep
+     to bed lame and sore from work, because then I could sleep.
+     Father won't let me read at night--watches for signs of the
+     light under my door and calls out to me if it shows. It is
+     golden weather without, dear friend, and within is order and
+     system. But what good? I am stagnating, perishing. I can see
+     no release--cannot even imagine in what form I would like it
+     to come. In your great happiness remember my sorrow. And with
+     your wonderful sweetness forgive my bitter egotism. But
+     truly, Honora, I die daily."
+
+The first letter Honora Fulham wrote after she was able to sit at her
+desk was to Kate. No answer came. In November Mrs. Fulham telephoned to
+Lena Vroom to ask if she had heard, but Lena had received no word.
+
+"Go down to Silvertree, Lena, there's a dear," begged her old
+schoolmate. But Lena was working for her doctor's degree and could not
+spare the time. The holidays came on, and Mrs. Fulham tried to imagine
+her friend as being at last broken to her galling harness. Surely there
+must be compensations for any father and daughter who can dwell
+together. Her own Christmas was a very happy one, and she was annoyed
+with herself that her thoughts so continually turned to Kate. She had
+an uneasy sense of apprehension in spite of all her verbal assurances to
+Lena that Kate could master any situation.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What really happened in Silvertree that day changed, as it happened, the
+course of Kate's life. Sorrow came to her afterward, disappointment,
+struggle, but never so heavy and dragging a pain as she knew that
+Christmas Day.
+
+She had been trying in many unsuspected ways to relieve her father's
+grim misery,--a misery of which his gaunt face told the tale,--and
+although he had said that he wished for "no flubdub about Christmas,"
+she really could not resist making some recognition of a day which found
+all other homes happy. When the doctor came in for his midday meal, Kate
+had a fire leaping in the old grate with the marble mantel and a turkey
+smoking on a table which was set forth with her choicest china and
+silver. She had even gone so far as to bring out a dish distinctly
+reminiscent of her mother,--the delicious preserved peaches, which had
+awaked unavailing envy in the breasts of good cooks in the village.
+There was pudding, too, and brandy sauce, and holly for decorations. It
+represented a very mild excursion into the land of festival, but it was
+too much for Dr. Barrington.
+
+He had come in cold, tired, hungry, and, no doubt, bitterly sorrowful at
+the bottom of his perverse heart. He discerned Kate in white--it was
+the first time she had laid off her mourning--and with a chain of her
+mother's about her neck. Beyond, he saw the little Christmas feast and
+the old silver vase on the table, red with berries.
+
+"You didn't choose to obey my orders," he said coldly, turning his
+unhappy blue eyes on her.
+
+"Your orders?" she faltered.
+
+"There was to be no fuss and feathers of any sort," he said. "Christmas
+doesn't represent anything recognized in my philosophy, and you know it.
+We've had enough of pretense in this house. I've been working to get
+things on a sane basis and I believed you were sensible enough to help
+me. But you're just like the rest of them--you're like all of your sex.
+You've got to have your silly play-time. I may as well tell you now that
+you don't give me any treat when you give me turkey, for I don't
+like it."
+
+"Oh, dad!" cried Kate; "you do! I've seen you eat it many times! Come,
+really it's a fine dinner. I helped to get it. Let's have a good time
+for once."
+
+"I have plenty of good times, but I have them in my own way."
+
+"They don't include me!" cried Kate, her lips quivering. "You're too
+hard on me, dad,--much too hard. I can't stand it, really."
+
+He sat down to the table and ran his finger over the edge of the
+carving-knife.
+
+"It wouldn't cut butter," he declared. "Martha, bring me the steel!"
+
+"I sharpened it, sir," protested Martha.
+
+"Sharpened it, did you? I never saw a woman yet who could sharpen a
+knife."
+
+He began flashing the bright steel, and the women, their day already in
+ashes, watched him fascinatedly. He was waiting to pounce on them. They
+knew that well enough. The spirit of perversity had him by the throat
+and held him, writhing. He carved and served, and then turned again to
+his daughter.
+
+"So I'm too hard on you, am I?" he said, looking at her with a cold
+glint in his eye. "I provide you with a first-class education, I house
+you, clothe you, keep you in idleness, and I'm too hard on you. What do
+you expect?"
+
+"Why, I want you to like me," cried Kate, her face flushing. "I simply
+want to be your daughter. I want you to take me out with you, to give me
+things. I wanted you to give me a Christmas present. I want other
+things, too,--things that are not favors."
+
+She paused and he looked at her with a tightening of the lips.
+
+"Go on," he said.
+
+"I am not being kept in idleness, as I think you know very well. My time
+and energies are given to helping you. I look after your office and your
+house. My time is not my own. I devote it to you. I want some
+recognition of my services--I want some money."
+
+She leaned back in her chair, answering his exasperated frown with a
+straight look, which was, though he did not see it, only a different
+sort of anger from his own.
+
+"Well, you won't get it," he said. "You won't get it. When you need
+things you can tell me and I'll get them for you. But there's been
+altogether too much money spent in this house in years gone by for
+trumpery. You know that well enough. What's in that chest out there in
+the hall? Trumpery! What's in those bureau drawers upstairs? Truck!
+Hundreds of dollars, that might have been put out where it would be
+earning something, gone into mere flubdub."
+
+He paused to note the effect of his words and saw that he had scored.
+Poor Mrs. Barrington, struggling vaguely and darkly in her own feminine
+way for some form of self-expression, had spent her household allowance
+many a time on futile odds and ends. She had haunted the bargain
+counter, and had found herself unable to get over the idea that a thing
+cheaply purchased was an economic triumph. So in drawers and chests and
+boxes she had packed her pathetic loot--odds and ends of embroidery, of
+dress goods, of passementerie, of chair coverings; dozens of spools of
+thread and crochet cotton; odd dishes; jars of cold cream; flotsam and
+jetsam of the shops, a mere wreckage of material. Kate remembered it
+with vicarious shame and the blood that flowed to her face swept on into
+her brain. She flamed with loyalty to that little dead, bewildered
+woman, whose feet had walked so falteringly in her search for the roses
+of life. And she said--
+
+But what matter what she said?
+
+Her father and herself were at the antipodes, and they were separated no
+less by their similarities than by their differences. Their wistful and
+inexpressive love for each other was as much of a blight upon them as
+their inherent antagonism. The sun went down that bleak Christmas night
+on a house divided openly against itself.
+
+The next day Kate told her father he might look for some one else to run
+his house for him. He said he had already done so. He made no inquiry
+where she was going. He would not offer her money, though he secretly
+wanted her to ask for it. But it was past that with her. The miserable,
+bitter drama--the tawdry tragedy, whose most desperate accent was its
+shameful approach to farce--wore itself to an end.
+
+Kate took her mother's jewelry, which had been left to her, and sold it
+at the local jeweler's. All Silvertree knew that Kate Barrington had
+left her home in anger and that her father had shown her the back of
+his hand.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+Honora Fulham, sitting in her upper room and jealously guarding the
+slumbers of Patience and Patricia, her tiny but already remarkable twin
+daughters, heard a familiar voice in the lower hallway. She dropped her
+book, "The Psychological Significance of the Family Group," and ran to
+the chamber door. A second later she was hanging over the banisters.
+
+"Kate!" she called with a penetrating whisper. "You!"
+
+"Yes, Honora, it's bad Kate. She's come to you--a penny nobody else
+wanted."
+
+Honora Fulham sailed down the stairs with the generous bearing of a ship
+answering a signal of distress. The women fell into each other's arms,
+and in that moment of communion dismissed all those little alien
+half-feelings which grow up between friends when their enlarging
+experience has driven them along different roads. Honora led the way to
+her austere drawing-room, from which, with a rigorous desire to
+economize labor, she had excluded all that was superfluous, and there,
+in the bare, orderly room, the two women--their girlhood definitely
+behind them--faced each other. Kate noted a curious retraction in
+Honora, an indescribable retrenchment of her old-time self, as if her
+florescence had been clipped by trained hands, so that the bloom should
+not be too exuberant; and Honora swiftly appraised Kate's suggestion of
+freedom and force.
+
+"Kate," she announced, "you look like a kind eagle."
+
+"A wounded one, then, Honora."
+
+"You've a story for me, I see. Sit down and tell it."
+
+So Kate told it, compelling the history of her humiliating failure to
+stand out before the calm, adjudging mind of her friend.
+
+"But oughtn't we to forgive everything to the old?" cried Honora at the
+conclusion of the recital.
+
+"Oh, is father old?" responded Kate in anguish. "He doesn't seem
+old--only formidable. If I'd thought I'd been wrong I never would have
+come up here to ask you to sustain me in my obstinacy. Truly, Honora, it
+isn't a question of age. He's hardly beyond his prime, and he has been
+using all of his will, which has grown strong with having his own way,
+to break me down the way most of the men in Silvertree have broken their
+women down. I was getting to be just like the others, and to start when
+I heard him coming in at the door, and to hide things from him so that
+he wouldn't rage. I'd have been lying next."
+
+"Kate!"
+
+"Oh, you think it isn't decent for me to speak that way of my father!
+You can't think how it seems to me--how--how irreligious! But let me
+save my soul, Honora! Let me do that!"
+
+The girl's pallid face, sharpened and intensified, bore the imprint of
+genuine misery. Honora Fulham, strong of nerve and quick of
+understanding, embraced her with a full sisterly glance.
+
+"I always liked and trusted you, Kate," she said. "I was sorry when our
+ways parted, and I'd be happy to have them joined again. I see it's to
+be a hazard of new fortune for you, and David and I will stand by. I
+don't know, of course, precisely what that may mean, but we're yours
+to command."
+
+A key turned in the front door.
+
+"There's David now," said his wife, her voice vibrating, and she
+summoned him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+David Fulham entered with something almost like violence, although the
+violence did not lie in his gestures. It was rather in the manner in
+which his personality assailed those within the room. Dark, with an
+attractive ugliness, arrogant, with restive and fathomless eyes, he
+seemed to unite the East and the West in his being. Had his mother been
+a Jewess of pride and intellect, and his father an adventurous American
+of the superman type? Kate, looking at him with fresh interest, found
+her thoughts leaping to the surmise. She knew that he was, in a way, a
+great man--a man with a growing greatness. He had promulgated ideas so
+daring that his brother scientists were embarrassed to know where to
+place him. There were those who thought of him as a brilliant charlatan;
+but the convincing intelligence and self-control of his glance
+repudiated that idea. The Faust-like aspect of the man might lay him
+open to the suspicion of having too experimental and inquisitive a mind.
+But he had, it would seem, no need for charlatanism.
+
+He came forward swiftly and grasped Kate's hand.
+
+"I remember you quite well," he said in his deep, vibratory tones. "Are
+you here for graduate work?"
+
+"No," said Kate; "I'm not so humble."
+
+"Not so humble?" He showed his magnificent teeth in a flashing but
+somewhat satiric smile.
+
+"I'm here for Life--not for study."
+
+"Not 'in for life,' but 'out' for it," he supplemented. "That's
+interesting. What is Honora suggesting to you? She's sure to have a
+theory of what will be best. Honora knows what will be best for almost
+everybody, but she sometimes has trouble in making others see it the
+same way."
+
+Honora seemed not to mind his chaffing.
+
+"Yes," she agreed, "I've already thought, but I haven't had time to tell
+Kate. Do you remember that Mrs. Goodrich said last night at dinner that
+her friend Miss Addams was looking about for some one to take the place
+of a young woman who was married the other day? She was an officer of
+the Children's Protective League, you remember."
+
+"Oh, that--" broke in Fulham. He turned toward Kate and looked her over
+from head to foot, till the girl felt a hot wave of indignation sweep
+over her. But his glance was impersonal, apparently. He paid no
+attention to her embarrassment. He seemed merely to be getting at her
+qualities by the swiftest method. "Well," he said finally, "I dare say
+you're right. But--" he hesitated.
+
+"Well?" prompted his wife.
+
+"But won't it be rather a--a waste?" he asked. And again he smiled, this
+time with some hidden meaning.
+
+"Of course it won't be a waste," declared Honora. "Aren't women to serve
+their city as well as men? It's a practical form of patriotism,
+according to my mind."
+
+Kate broke into a nervous laugh.
+
+"I hope I'm to be of some use," she said. "Work can't come a moment too
+soon for me. I was beginning to think--"
+
+She paused.
+
+"Well?" supplied Fulham, still with that watchful regard of her.
+
+"Oh, that I had made a mistake about myself--that I wasn't going to be
+anything in particular, after all."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They were interrupted. A man sprang up the outside steps and rang the
+doorbell imperatively.
+
+"It's Karl Wander," announced Fulham, who had glanced through the
+window. "It's your cousin, Honora."
+
+He went to the door, and Kate heard an emphatic and hearty voice making
+hurried greetings.
+
+"Stopped between trains," it was saying. "Can stay ten minutes
+precisely--not a second longer. Came to see the babies."
+
+Honora had arisen with a little cry and gone to the door. Now she
+returned, hanging on to the arm of a weather-tanned man.
+
+"Miss Barrington," she said, "my cousin, Mr. Wander. Oh, Karl, you're
+not serious? You don't really mean that you can't stay--not even
+over night?"
+
+The man turned his warm brown eyes on Kate and she looked at him
+expectantly, because he was Honora's cousin. For the time it takes to
+draw a breath, they gazed at each other. Oddly enough, Kate thought of
+Ray McCrea, who was across the water, and whose absence she had not
+regretted. She could not tell why her thoughts turned to him. This man
+was totally unlike Ray. He was, indeed, unlike any one she ever had
+known. There was that about him which held her. It was not quite
+assertion; perhaps it was competence. But it was competence that seemed
+to go without tyranny, and that was something new in her experience of
+men. He looked at her on a level, spiritually, querying as to who
+she might be.
+
+The magical moment passed. Honora and David were talking. They ran away
+up the stairs with their guest, inviting Kate to follow.
+
+"I'll only be in the way now," she called. "By and by I'll have the
+babies all to myself."
+
+Yet after she had said this, she followed, and looked into the nursery,
+which was at the rear of the house. Honora had thrust the two children
+into her cousin's big arms and she and David stood laughing at him.
+Another man might have appeared ridiculous in this position; but it did
+not, apparently, occur to Karl Wander to be self-conscious. He was
+wrapped in contemplation of the babies, and when he peered over their
+heads at Kate, he was quite grave and at ease.
+
+Then, before it could be realized, he was off again. He had kissed
+Honora and congratulated her, and he and Kate had again clasped hands.
+
+"Sorry," he said, in his explosive way, "that we part so soon." He held
+her hand a second longer, gave it a sudden pressure, and was gone.
+
+Honora shut the door behind him reluctantly.
+
+"So like Karl!" she laughed. "It's the second time he's been in my house
+since I was married."
+
+"You'd think we had the plague, the way he runs from us," said David.
+
+"Oh," responded Honora, not at all disturbed, "Karl is forever on
+important business. He's probably been to New York to some directors'
+meeting. Now he's on his way to Denver, he says--'men waiting.' That's
+Karl's way. To think of his dashing up here between trains to see my
+babies!" The tears came to her eyes. "Don't you think he's fine, Kate?"
+
+The truth was, there seemed to be a sort of vacuum in the air since he
+had left--as if he had taken the vitality of it with him.
+
+"But where does he live?" she asked Honora.
+
+"Address him beyond the Second Divide, and he'll be reached. Everybody
+knows him there. His post-office bears his own name--Wander."
+
+"He's a miner?"
+
+"How did you know?"
+
+"Oh, by process of elimination. What else could he be?"
+
+"Nothing else in all the world," agreed David Fulham. "I tell Honora
+he's a bit mad."
+
+"No, no," Honora laughed; "he's not mad; he's merely Western. How
+startled you look, Kate--as if you had seen an apparition."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was decided that Kate was to stay there at the Fulhams', and to use
+one of their several unoccupied rooms. Kate chose one that looked over
+the Midway, and her young strength made nothing of the two flights of
+stairs which she had to climb to get to it. At first the severity of the
+apartment repelled her, but she had no money with which to make it more
+to her taste, and after a few hours its very barrenness made an appeal
+to her. It seemed to be like her own life, in need of decoration, and
+she was content to let things take their course. It seemed probable that
+roses would bloom in their time.
+
+No one, it transpired, ate in the house.
+
+"I found out," explained Honora, "that I couldn't be elaborately
+domestic and have a career, too, so I went, with some others of similar
+convictions and circumstances, into a cooeperative dining-room scheme."
+
+Kate gave an involuntary shrug of her shoulders.
+
+"You think that sounds desolate? Wait till you see us all together. This
+talk about 'home' is all very well, but I happen to know--and I fancy
+you do, too--that home can be a particularly stultifying place. When
+people work as hard as we do, a little contact with outsiders is
+stimulating. But you'll see for yourself. Mrs. Dennison, a very fine
+woman, a widow, looks after things for us. Dr. von Shierbrand, one of
+our number, got to calling the place 'The Caravansary,' and now we've
+all fallen into the way of it."
+
+The Caravansary was but a few doors from the Fulhams'; an old-fashioned,
+hospitable affair, with high ceilings, white marble mantels, and narrow
+windows. Mrs. Dennison, the house-mother, suited the place well. Her
+widow's cap and bands seemed to go with the grave pretentiousness of the
+rooms, to which she had succeeded in giving almost a personal
+atmosphere. There was room for her goldfish and her half-dozen canary
+cages as well as for her "cooeperators"--no one there would permit
+himself to be called a boarder.
+
+Kate, sensitive from her isolation and sore from her sorrows, had
+imagined that she would resent the familiarities of those she would be
+forced to meet on table terms. But what was the use in trying, to resent
+Marna Cartan, the young Irish girl who meant to make a great singer of
+herself, and who evidently looked upon the world as a place of rare and
+radiant entertainment? As for Mrs. Barsaloux, Marna's patron and
+benefactor, with her world-weary eyes and benevolent smile, who could
+turn a cold shoulder to her solicitudes? Then there were Wickersham and
+Von Shierbrand, members, like Fulham, of the faculty of the University.
+The Applegates and the Goodriches were pleasant folk, rather settled in
+their aspect, and all of literary leanings. The Applegates were
+identified--both husband and wife--with a magazine of literary
+criticism; Mr. Goodrich ran a denominational paper with an academic
+flavor; Mrs. Goodrich was president of an orphan asylum and spent her
+days in good works. Then, intermittently, the company was joined by
+George Fitzgerald, a preoccupied young physician, the nephew of
+Mrs. Dennison.
+
+They all greeted Kate with potential friendship in their faces, and she
+could not keep back her feeling of involuntary surprise at the absence
+of anything like suspicion. Down in Silvertree if a new woman had come
+into a boarding-house, they would have wondered why. Here they seemed
+tacitly to say, "Why not?"
+
+Mrs. Dennison seated Kate between Dr. von Shierbrand and Marna Cartan.
+Opposite to her sat Mrs. Goodrich with her quiet smile. Everyone had
+something pleasant to say; when Kate spoke, all were inclined to listen.
+The atmosphere was quiet, urbane, gracious. Even David Fulham's exotic
+personality seemed to soften under the regard of Mrs. Dennison's
+gray eyes.
+
+"Really," Kate concluded, "I believe I can be happy here. All I need is
+a chance to earn my bread and butter."
+
+And what with the intervention of the Goodriches and the recommendation
+of the Fulhams, that opportunity soon came.
+
+
+
+V
+
+A fortnight later she was established as an officer of the Children's
+Protective Association, an organization with a self-explanatory name,
+instituted by women, and chiefly supported by them. She was given an
+inexhaustible task, police powers, headquarters at Hull House, and a
+vocation demanding enough to satisfy even her desire for spiritual
+adventure.
+
+It was her business to adjust the lives of children--which meant that
+she adjusted their parents' lives also. She arranged the disarranged;
+played the providential part, exercising the powers of intervention
+which in past times belonged to the priest, but which, in the days of
+commercial feudalism, devolve upon the social workers.
+
+Her work carried her into the lowest strata of society, and her
+compassion, her efficiency, and her courage were daily called upon.
+Perhaps she might have found herself lacking in the required measure of
+these qualities, being so young and inexperienced, had it not been that
+she was in a position to concentrate completely upon her task. She knew
+how to listen and to learn; she knew how to read and apply. She went
+into her new work with a humble spirit, and this humility offset
+whatever was aggressive and militant in her. The death of her mother and
+the aloofness of her father had turned all her ardors back upon
+herself. They found vent now in her new work, and she was not long in
+perceiving that she needed those whom she was called upon to serve quite
+as much as they needed her.
+
+Mrs. Barsaloux and Marna Carton, who had been shopping, met Kate one day
+crossing the city with a baby in her arms and two miserable little
+children clinging to her skirts. Hunger and neglect had given these poor
+small derelicts that indescribable appearance of depletion and shame
+which, once seen, is never to be confused with anything else.
+
+"My goodness!" cried Mrs. Barsaloux, glowering at Kate through her veil;
+"what sort of work is this you are doing, Miss Barrington? Aren't you
+afraid of becoming infected with some dreadful disease? Wherever do you
+find the fortitude to be seen in the company of such wretched little
+creatures? I would like to help them myself, but I'd never be willing to
+carry such filthy little bags of misery around with me."
+
+Kate smiled cheerfully.
+
+"We've just put their mother in the Bridewell," she said, "and their
+father is in the police station awaiting trial. The poor dears are going
+to be clean for once in their lives and have a good supper in the
+bargain. Maybe they'll be taken into good homes eventually. They're
+lovely children, really. You haven't looked at them closely enough, Mrs.
+Barsaloux."
+
+"I'm just as close to them as I want to be, thank you," said the lady,
+drawing back involuntarily. But she reached for her purse and gave
+Kate a bill.
+
+"Would this help toward getting them something?" she asked.
+
+Marna laughed delightedly.
+
+"I'm sure they're treasures," she said. "Mayn't I help Miss Barrington
+take them to wherever they're going, _tante_? I shan't catch a thing,
+and I love to know what becomes of homeless children."
+
+Kate saw a look of acute distress on Mrs. Barsaloux's face.
+
+"This isn't your game just now, Miss Cartan," Kate said in her downright
+manner. "It's mine. I'm moving my pawns here and there, trying to find
+the best places for them. It's quite exhilarating."
+
+Her arms were aching and she moved the heavy baby from one shoulder to
+the other.
+
+"A game, is it?" asked the Irish girl. "And who wins?"
+
+"The children, I hope. I'm on the side of the children first and last."
+
+"Oh, so am I. I think it's just magnificent of you to help them."
+
+Kate disclaimed the magnificence.
+
+"You mustn't forget that I'm doing it for money," she said. "It's my
+job. I hope I'll do it well enough to win the reputation of being
+honest, but you mustn't think there's anything saintly about me,
+because there isn't. Good-bye. Hold on tight, children!"
+
+She nodded cheerfully and moved on, fresh, strong, determined, along the
+crowded thoroughfare, the people making way for her smilingly. She saw
+nothing of the attention paid her. She was wondering if her arms would
+hold out or if, in some unguarded moment, the baby would slip from them.
+Perhaps the baby was fearful, too, for it reached up its little clawlike
+hands and clasped her tight about the neck. Kate liked the feeling of
+those little hands, and was sorry when they relaxed and the weary little
+one fell asleep.
+
+Each day brought new problems. If she could have decided these by mere
+rule of common sense, her new vocation might not have puzzled her as
+much as it did. But it was uncommon, superfine, intuitive sense that was
+required. She discovered, for example, that not only was sin a virtue in
+disguise, but that a virtue might be degraded into a sin.
+
+She put this case to Honora and David one evening as the three of them
+sat in Honora's drawing-room.
+
+"It's the case of Peggy Dunn," she explained. "Peggy likes life. She has
+brighter eyes than she knows what to do with and more smiles than she
+has a chance to distribute. She has finished her course at the parochial
+school and she's clerking in a downtown store. That is slow going for
+Peggy, so she evens things up by attending the Saturday night dances.
+When she's whirling around the hall on the tips of her toes, she really
+feels like herself. She gets home about two in the morning on these
+occasions and finds her mother waiting up for her and kneeling before a
+little statue of the Virgin that stands in the corner of the
+sitting-room. As soon as the mother sees Peggy, she pounces on her and
+weeps on her shoulder, and after Peggy's in bed and dead with the tire
+in her legs, her mother gets down beside the bed and prays some more.
+'What would you do, please,' says Peggy to me, 'if you had a mother that
+kept crying and praying every time you had a bit of fun? Wouldn't you
+run away from home and get where they took things aisier?'"
+
+David threw back his head and roared in sympathetic commendation of
+Peggy's point of view.
+
+"Poor little mother," sighed Honora. "I suppose she'll send her girl
+straight on the road to perdition and never know what did it."
+
+"Not if I can help it," said Kate. "I don't believe in letting her go to
+perdition at all. I went around to see the mother and I put the
+responsibility on her. 'Every time you make Peggy laugh,' I said, 'you
+can count it for glory. Every time you make her swear,--for she does
+swear,--you can know you've blundered. Why don't you give her some
+parties if you don't want her to be going out to them?'"
+
+"How did she take that?" asked Honora.
+
+"It bothered her a good deal at first, but when I went down to meet
+Peggy the other day as she came out of the store, she told me her mother
+had had the little bisque Virgin moved into her own bedroom and that she
+had put a talking-machine in the place where it had stood. I told Peggy
+the talking-machine was just a new kind of prayer, meant to make her
+happy, and that it wouldn't do for her to let her mother's prayers go
+unanswered. 'Any one with eyes like yours,' I said to her, 'is bound to
+have beaux in plenty, but you've only one mother and you'd better hang
+on to her.'"
+
+"Then what did she say?" demanded the interested Honora.
+
+"She's an impudent little piece. She said, 'You've some eyes yourself,
+Miss Barrington, but I suppose you know how to make them behave."
+
+"Better marry that girl as soon as you can, Miss Barrington," counseled
+David; "that is, if any hymeneal authority is vested in you."
+
+"That's what Peggy wanted to know," admitted Kate. "She said to me the
+other day: 'Ain't you Cupid, Miss Barrington? I heard about a match you
+made up, and it was all right--the real thing, sure enough.' 'Have you a
+job for me--supposing I was Cupid?' I asked. That set her off in a gale.
+So I suppose there's something up Peggy's very short sleeves."
+
+The Fulhams liked to hear her stories, particularly as she kept the
+amusing or the merely pathetic ones for them, refraining from telling
+them of the unspeakable, obscene tragedies which daily came to her
+notice. It might have been supposed that scenes such as these would so
+have revolted her that she could not endure to deal with them; but this
+was far from being the case. The greater the need for her help, the more
+determined was she to meet the demand. She had plenty of superiors whom
+she could consult, and she suffered less from disgust or timidity than
+any one could have supposed possible.
+
+The truth was, she was grateful for whatever absorbed her and kept her
+from dwelling upon that dehumanized house at Silvertree. Her busy days
+enabled her to fight her sorrow very well, but in the night, like a
+wailing child, her longing for her mother awoke, and she nursed it,
+treasuring it as those freshly bereaved often do. The memory of that
+little frustrated soul made her tender of all women, and too prone,
+perhaps, to lay to some man the blame of their shortcomings. She had no
+realization that she had set herself in this subtle and subconscious way
+against men. But whether she admitted it or not, the fact remained that
+she stood with her sisters, whatever their estate, leagued secretly
+against the other sex.
+
+By way of emphasizing her devotion to her work, she ceased answering Ray
+McCrea's letters. She studiously avoided the attentions of the men she
+met at the Settlement House and at Mrs. Dennison's Caravansary.
+Sometimes, without her realizing it, her thoughts took on an almost
+morbid hue, so that, looking at Honora with her chaste, kind, uplifted
+face, she resented her close association with her husband. It seemed
+offensive that he, with his curious, half-restrained excesses of
+temperament, should have domination over her friend who stood so
+obviously for abnegation. David manifestly was averse to bounds and
+limits. All that was wild and desirous of adventure, in Kate informed
+her of like qualities in this man. But she held--and meant always to
+hold--the restless falcons of her spirit in leash. Would David Fulham do
+as much? She could not be quite sure, and instinctively she avoided
+anything approaching intimacy with him.
+
+He was her friend's husband. "Friend's husband" was a sort of limbo into
+which men were dropped by scrupulous ladies; so Kate decided, with a
+frown at herself for having even thought that David could wish to emerge
+from that nondescript place of spiritual residence. Anyway, she did not
+completely like him, though she thought him extraordinary and
+stimulating, and when Honora told her something of the great discovery
+which the two of them appeared to be upon the verge of making concerning
+the germination of life without parental interposition, she had little
+doubt that David was wizard enough to carry it through. He would have
+the daring, and Honora the industry, and--she reflected--if renown came,
+that would be David's beyond all peradventure.
+
+No question about it, Kate's thoughts were satiric these days. She was
+still bleeding from the wound which her father had inflicted, and she
+did not suspect that it was wounded affection rather than hurt
+self-respect which was tormenting her. She only knew that she shrank
+from men, and that at times she liked to imagine what sort of a world it
+would be if there were no men in it at all.
+
+Meantime she met men every day, and whether she was willing to admit it
+or not, the facts were that they helped her on her way with brotherly
+good will, and as they saw her going about her singular and heavy tasks,
+they gave her their silent good wishes, and hoped that the world of pain
+and shame would not too soon destroy what was gallant and trustful
+in her.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But here has been much anticipation. To go back to the beginning, at the
+end of her first week in the city she had a friend. It was Marna Cartan.
+They had fallen into the way of talking together a few minutes before or
+after dinner, and Kate would hasten her modest dinner toilet in order to
+have these few marginal moments with this palpitating young creature who
+moved to unheard rhythms, and whose laughter was the sweetest thing she
+had yet heard in a city of infinite dissonances.
+
+"You don't know how to account for me very well, do you?" taunted Marna
+daringly, when they had indulged their inclination for each other's
+society for a few days. "You wonder about me because I'm so streaked. I
+suppose you see vestiges of the farm girl peeping through the operatic
+student. Wouldn't you like me to explain myself?"
+
+She had an iridescent personality, made up of sudden shynesses, of
+bright flashes of bravado, of tenderness and hauteur, and she contrived
+to be fascinating in all of them. She held Kate as the Ancient Mariner
+held the wedding-guest.
+
+"Of course I'd love to know all about you," answered Kate.
+"Inquisitiveness is the most marked of my characteristics. But I don't
+want you to tell me any more than I deserve to hear."
+
+"You deserve everything," cried Marna, seizing Kate's firm hand in her
+own soft one, "because you understand friendship. Why, I always said it
+could be as swift and surprising as love, and just as mysterious. You
+take it that way, too, so you deserve a great deal. Well, to begin with,
+I'm Irish."
+
+Kate's laugh could be heard as far as the kitchen, where Mrs. Dennison
+was wishing the people would come so that she could dish up the soup.
+Marna laughed, too.
+
+"You guessed it?" she cried. She didn't seem to think it so obvious as
+Kate's laugh indicated.
+
+"You don't leave a thing to the imagination in that direction," Kate
+cried. "Irish? As Irish as the shamrock! Go on."
+
+"Dear me, I want to begin so far back! You see, I don't merely belong to
+modern Ireland. I'm--well, I'm traditional. At least, Great-Grandfather
+Cartan, who came over to Wisconsin with a company of immigrants, could
+tell you things about our ancestors that would make you feel as if we
+came up out of the Irish hills. And great-grandfather, he actually
+looked legendary himself. Why, do you know, he came over with these
+people to be their story-teller!"
+
+"Their story-teller?"
+
+"Yes, just that--their minstrel, you understand. And that's what my
+people were, 'way back, minstrels. All the way over on the ship, when
+the people were weeping for homesickness, or sitting dreaming about the
+new land, or falling sick, or getting wild and vicious, it was
+great-granddaddy's place to bring them to themselves with his stories.
+Then when they all went on to Wisconsin and took up their land, they
+selected a small beautiful piece for great-grandfather, and built him a
+log house, and helped him with his crops. He, for his part, went over
+the countryside and was welcomed everywhere, and carried all the
+friendly news and gossip he could gather, and sat about the fire nights,
+telling tales of the old times, and keeping the ancient stories and the
+ancient tongue alive for them."
+
+"You mean he used the Gaelic?"
+
+"What else would he be using, and himself the descendant of minstrels?
+But after a time he learned the English, too, and he used that in his
+latter years because the understanding of the Gaelic began to die out."
+
+"How wonderful he must have been!"
+
+"Wonderful? For eighty years he held sway over the hearts of them, and
+was known as the best story-teller of them all. This was the more
+interesting, you see, because every year they gathered at a certain
+place to have a story-telling contest; and great-grandfather was voted
+the master of them until--"
+
+Marna hesitated, and a flush spread over her face.
+
+"Until--" urged Kate.
+
+"Until a young man came along. Finnegan, his name was. He was no more
+than a commercial traveler who heard of the gathering and came up there,
+and he capped stories with great-grandfather, and it went on till all
+the people were thick about them like bees around a flower-pot. Four
+days it lasted, and away into the night; and in the end they took the
+prize from great-grandfather and gave it to Gerlie Finnegan. And that
+broke great-granddad's heart."
+
+"He died?"
+
+"Yes, he died. A hundred and ten he was, and for eighty years had been
+the king of them. When he was gone, it left me without anybody at all,
+you see. So that was how I happened to go down to Baraboo to earn
+my living."
+
+"What were you doing?"
+
+Marna looked at the tip of her slipper for a moment, reflectively. Then
+she glanced up at Kate, throwing a supplicating glance from the blue
+eyes which looked as if they were snared behind their long dark lashes.
+
+"I wouldn't be telling everybody that asked me," she said. "But I was
+singing at the moving-picture show, and Mrs. Barsaloux came in there and
+heard me. Then she asked me to live with her and go to Europe, and I
+did, and she paid for the best music lessons for me everywhere,
+and now--"
+
+She hesitated, drawing in a long breath; then she arose and stood before
+Kate, breathing deep, and looking like a shining butterfly free of its
+chrysalis and ready to spread its emblazoned wings.
+
+"Yes, bright one!" cried Kate, glowing with admiration. "What now?"
+
+"Why, now, you know, I'm to go in opera. The manager of the Chicago
+Opera Company has been Mrs. Barsaloux's friend these many years, and she
+has had him try out my voice. And he likes it. He says he doesn't care
+if I haven't had the usual amount of training, because I'm really born
+to sing, you see. Perhaps that's my inheritance from the old
+minstrels--for they chanted their ballads and epics, didn't they?
+Anyway, I really can sing. And I'm to make my debut this winter in
+'Madame Butterfly.' Just think of that! Oh, I love Puccini! I can
+understand a musician like that--a man who makes music move like
+thoughts, flurrying this way and blowing that. It's to be very soon--my
+debut. And then I can make up to Mrs. Barsaloux for all she's done for
+me. Oh, there come all the people! You mustn't let Mrs. Fulham know how
+I've chattered. I wouldn't dare talk about myself like that before her.
+This is just for you--I _knew_ you wanted to know about me. I want to
+know all about you, too."
+
+"Oh," said Kate, "you mustn't expect me to tell my story. I'm different
+from you. I'm not born for anything in particular--I've no talents to
+point out my destiny. I keep being surprised and frustrated. It looks to
+me as if I were bound to make mistakes. There's something wrong with me.
+Sometimes I think that I'm not womanly enough--that there's too much of
+the man in my disposition, and that the two parts of me are always going
+to struggle and clash."
+
+Chairs were being drawn up to the table.
+
+"Come!" called Dr. von Shierbrand. "Can't you young ladies take time
+enough off to eat?"
+
+He looked ready for conversation, and Kate went smilingly to sit beside
+him. She knew he expected women to be amusing, and she found it
+agreeable to divert him. She understood the classroom fag from which he
+was suffering; and, moreover, after all those austere meals with her
+father, it really was an excitement and a pleasure to talk with an
+amiable and complimentary man.
+
+
+
+VI
+
+"We're to have a new member in the family, Kate," Honora said one
+morning, as she and Kate made their way together to the Caravansary.
+"It's my cousin, Mary Morrison. She's a Californian, and very charming,
+I understand."
+
+"She's to attend the University?"
+
+"I don't quite know as to that," admitted Honora, frowning slightly.
+"Her father and mother have been dead for several years, and she has
+been living with her brother in Santa Barbara. But he is to go to the
+Philippines on some legal work, and he's taking his family with him.
+Mary begs to stay here with me during his absence."
+
+"Is she the sort of a person who will need a chaperon? Because I don't
+seem to see you in that capacity, Honora."
+
+"No, I don't know that I should care to sit against the wall smiling
+complacently while other people were up and doing. I've always felt I
+wouldn't mind being a chaperon if they'd let me set up some sort of a
+workshop in the ballroom, or even if I could take my mending, or a book
+to read. But slow, long hours of vacuous smiling certainly would wear me
+out. However, I don't imagine that Mary will call upon me for any
+such service."
+
+"But if your cousin isn't going to college, and doesn't intend to go
+into society, how will she amuse herself?"
+
+"I haven't an idea--not an idea. But I couldn't say no to her, could I?
+I've so few people belonging to me in this world that I can't, for
+merely selfish reasons, bear to turn one of my blood away. Mary's mother
+and my mother were sisters, and I think we should be fond of each other.
+Of course she is younger than I, but that is immaterial."
+
+"And David--does he like the idea? She may be rather a fixture, mayn't
+she? Haven't you to think about that?"
+
+"Oh, David probably won't notice her particularly. People come and go
+and it's all the same to him. He sees only his great problems." Honora
+choked a sigh.
+
+"Who wants him to do anything else!" defended Kate quickly. "Not you,
+surely! Why, you're so proud of him that you're positively offensive!
+And to think that you are working beside him every day, and helping
+him--you know it's all just the way you would have it, Honora."
+
+"Yes, it is," agreed Honora contritely, "and you should see him in the
+laboratory when we two are alone there, Kate! He's a changed man. It
+almost seems as if he grew in stature. When he bends over those tanks
+where he is making his great experiments, all of my scientific training
+fails to keep me from seeing him as one with supernatural powers. And
+that wonderful idea of his, the finding out of the secret of life, the
+prying into this last hidden place of Nature, almost overwhelms me. I
+can work at it with a matter-of-fact countenance, but when we begin to
+approach the results, I almost shudder away from it. But you must never
+let David know I said so. That's only my foolish, feminine, reverent
+mind. All the trained and scientific part of me repudiates such
+nonsense."
+
+They turned in at the door of the Caravansary.
+
+"I don't want to see you repudiating any part of yourself," cried Kate
+with sudden ardor. "It's so sweet of you, Honora, to be a mere woman in
+spite of all your learning and your power."
+
+Honora stopped and grasped Kate's wrist in her strong hand.
+
+"But am I that?" she queried, searching her friend's face with her
+intense gaze. "You see, I've tried--I've tried--"
+
+She choked on the words.
+
+"I've tried not to be a woman!" she declared, drawing her breath sharply
+between her teeth. "It's a strange, strange story, Kate."
+
+"I don't understand at all," Kate declared.
+
+"I've tried not to be a woman because David is so completely and
+triumphantly a man."
+
+"Still I don't understand."
+
+"No, I suppose not. It's a hidden history. Sometimes I can't believe it
+myself. But let me ask you, am I the woman you thought I would be?"
+
+Kate smiled slowly, as her vision of Honora as she first saw her came
+back to her.
+
+"How soft and rosy you were!" she cried. "I believe I actually began my
+acquaintance with you by hugging you. At any rate, I wanted to. No, no;
+I never should have thought of you in a scientific career, wearing
+Moshier gowns and having curtain-less windows. Never!"
+
+Honora stood a moment there in the dim hall, thinking. In her eyes
+brooded a curiously patient light.
+
+"Do you remember all the trumpery I used to have on my toilet-table?"
+she demanded. "I sent it to Mary Morrison. They say she looks like me."
+
+She put her hand on the dining-room door and they entered. The others
+were there before them. There were growing primroses on the table, and
+the sunlight streamed in at the window. A fire crackled on the hearth;
+and Mrs. Dennison, in her old-fashioned widow's cap, sat smiling at the
+head of her table.
+
+Kate knew it was not really home, but she had to admit that these busy
+undomestic moderns had found a good substitute for it: or, at least,
+that, taking their domesticity through the mediumship of Mrs. Dennison,
+they contrived to absorb enough of it to keep them going. But, no, it
+was not really home. Kate could not feel that she, personally, ever had
+been "home." She thought of that song of songs, "The Wanderer."
+
+     "Where art thou? Where art thou, O home so dear?"
+
+She was thinking of this still as, her salutation over, she seated
+herself in the chair Dr. von Shierbrand placed for her.
+
+"Busy thinking this morning, Miss Barrington?" Mrs. Dennison asked
+gently. "That tells me you're meaning to do some good thing to-day. I
+can't say how splendid you social workers seem to us common folks."
+
+"Oh, my dear Mrs. Dennison!" Kate protested. "You and your kind are the
+true social workers. If only women--all women--understood how to make
+true homes, there wouldn't be any need for people like us. We're only
+well-intentioned fools who go around putting plasters over the sores. We
+don't even reach down as far as the disease--though I suppose we think
+we do when we get a lot of statistics together. But the men and women
+who go about their business, doing their work well all of the time, are
+the preventers of social trouble. Isn't that so, Dr. von Shierbrand?"
+
+That amiable German readjusted his glasses upon his handsome nose and
+began to talk about the Second Part of "Faust." The provocation, though
+slight, had seemed to him sufficient.
+
+"My husband has already eaten and gone!" observed Honora with some
+chagrin. "Can't you use your influence, Mrs. Dennison, to make him spend
+a proper amount of time at the table?"
+
+"Oh, he doesn't need to eat except once in a great while. He has the
+ways of genius, Mrs. Fulham. Geniuses like to eat at odd times, and my
+own feeling is that they should be allowed to do as they please. It is
+very bad for geniuses to make them follow a set plan," said Mrs.
+Dennison earnestly.
+
+"That woman," observed Dr. von Shierbrand under his breath to Kate, "has
+the true feminine wisdom. She should have been the wife of a great man.
+It was such qualities which Goethe meant to indicate in his Marguerite."
+
+Honora, who had overheard, lifted her pensive gray eyes and interchanged
+a long look with Dr. von Shierbrand. Each seemed to be upon the verge of
+some remark.
+
+"Well," said Kate briskly, "if you want to speak, why don't you? Are
+your thoughts too deep for words?"
+
+Von Shierbrand achieved a laugh, but Honora was silent. She seemed to
+want to say that there was more than one variety of feminine wisdom;
+while Von Shierbrand, Kate felt quite sure, would have maintained that
+there was but one--the instinctive sort which "Marguerite knew."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The day that Mary Morrison was to arrive conflicted with the visit of a
+very great Frenchman to Professor Fulham's laboratory.
+
+"I really don't see how I'm to meet the child, Kate," Honora said
+anxiously to her friend. "Do you think you could manage to get down to
+the station?"
+
+Kate could and did go. This girl, like herself, was very much on her
+own resources, she imagined. She was coming, as Kate had come only the
+other day, to a new and forbidding city, and Kate's heart warmed to her.
+It seemed rather a tragedy, at best, to leave the bland Californian
+skies and to readjust life amid the iron compulsion of Chicago. Kate
+pictured her as a little thing, depressed, weary with her long journey,
+and already homesick.
+
+The reality was therefore somewhat of a surprise. As Kate stood waiting
+by the iron gate watching the outflowing stream of people with anxious
+eyes, she saw a little furore centered about the person of an opulent
+young woman who had, it appeared, many elaborate farewells to make to
+her fellow-passengers. Two porters accompanied her, carrying her smart
+bags, and, even with so much assistance, she was draped with extra
+garments, which hung from her arms in varying and seductive shades of
+green. She herself was in green of a subtle olive shade, and her plumes
+and boa, her chains and chatelaine, her hand-bags and camera, marked her
+as the traveler triumphant and expectant. Like an Arabian princess,
+borne across the desert to the home of her future lord, she came
+panoplied with splendor. The consciousness of being a personage, by the
+mere right conferred by regal womanhood-in-flower, emanated from her.
+And the world accepted her smilingly at her own estimate. She wished to
+play at being queen. What more simple? Let her have her game. On every
+hand she found those who were--or who delightedly pretended to
+be--her subjects.
+
+Once beyond the gateway, this exuberant creature paused. "And now," she
+said to a gentleman more assiduous than the rest, who waited upon her
+and who was laden with her paraphernalia, "you must help me to identify
+my cousin. That will be easy enough, too, for they say we resemble
+each other."
+
+That gave Kate her cue. She went forward with outstretched hand.
+
+"I am your cousin's emissary, Miss Morrison," she said. "I am Kate
+Barrington, and I came to greet you because your cousin was unable to
+get here, and is very, very sorry about it."
+
+Miss Morrison revealed two deep dimples when she smiled, and held out so
+much of a hand as she could disengage from her draperies. She presented
+her fellow-traveler; she sent a porter for a taxi. All was
+exhilaratingly in commotion about her; and Kate found herself
+apportioning the camera and some of the other things to herself.
+
+They had quite a royal setting-forth. Every one helped who could find
+any excuse for doing so; others looked on. Miss Morrison nodded and
+smiled; the chauffeur wheeled his machine splendidly, making dramatic
+gestures which had the effect of causing commerce to pause till the
+princess was under way.
+
+"Be sure," warned Miss Morrison, "to drive through the pleasantest
+streets."
+
+Then she turned to Kate with a deliciously reproachful expression on
+her face.
+
+"Why didn't you order blue skies for me?" she demanded.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Kate never forgot the expression of Miss Morrison's face when she was
+ushered into Honora's "sanitary drawing-room," as Dr. von Shierbrand had
+dubbed it. True, the towers of Harper Memorial Library showed across the
+Plaisance through the undraped windows, mitigating the gravity of the
+outlook, and the innumerable lights of the Midway already began to
+render less austere the January twilight. But the brown walls, the brown
+rug, the Mission furniture in weathered oak, the corner clock,--an
+excellent time-piece,--the fireplace with its bronze vases, the etchings
+of foreign architecture, and the bookcase with Ruskin, Eliot, Dickens,
+and all the Mid-Victorian celebrities in sets, produced but a grave and
+unillumined interior.
+
+"Oh!" cried Miss Morrison with ill-concealed dismay. And then, after a
+silence: "But where do you sit when you're sociable?"
+
+"Here," said Kate. She wasn't going to apologize for Honora to a pair of
+exclamatory dimples!
+
+"But you can be intimate here?" Miss Morrison inquired.
+
+"We're not intimate," flashed Kate. "We're too busy--and we respect each
+other too much."
+
+Miss Morrison sank into a chair and revealed the tint of her
+lettuce-green petticoat beneath her olive-green frock.
+
+"I'm making you cross with me," she said regretfully. "Please don't
+dislike me at the outset. You see, out in California we're not so up and
+down as you are here. If you were used to spending your days in the
+shade of yellow walls, with your choice of hammocks, and with nothing to
+do but feed the parrot and play the piano, why, I guess you'd--"
+
+She broke off and stared about her.
+
+"Why, there isn't any piano!" she cried. "Do you mean Honora has no
+piano?"
+
+"What would be the use? She doesn't play."
+
+"I must order one in the morning, then. Honora wouldn't care, would she?
+Oh, when do you suppose she'll be home? Does she like to stay over in
+that queer place you told me of, fussing around with those frogs?"
+
+Kate had been rash enough to endeavor to explain something of the
+Fulhams' theories regarding the mechanistic conception of life. There
+was nothing to do but accord Miss Morrison the laugh which she appeared
+to think was coming to her.
+
+"I can see that I shouldn't have told you about anything like that,"
+Kate said. "I see how mussy you would think any scientific experiment to
+be. And, really, matters of greater importance engage your attention."
+
+She was quite serious. She had swiftly made up her mind that Mary
+Morrison, with her conscious seductions, was a much more important
+factor in the race than austere Honora Fulham. But Miss Morrison was
+suspicious of satire.
+
+"Oh, I think science important!" she protested.
+
+"No, you don't," declared Kate; "you only wish you did. Come, we'll go
+to your room."
+
+It was the rear room on the second floor, and it presented a stern
+parallelogram occupied by the bare necessaries of a sleeping-apartment.
+The walls and rug were gray, the furniture of mahogany. Mary Morrison
+looked at it a moment with a slow smile. Then she tossed her green coat
+and her hat with its sweeping veil upon the bed. She flung her camera
+and her magazines upon the table. She opened her traveling-bag, and,
+with hands that almost quivered with impatience, placed upon the
+toilet-table the silver implements that Honora had sent her and
+scattered broadcast among them her necklaces and bracelets.
+
+"I'll have some flowering plants to-morrow," she told Kate. "And when my
+trunks and boxes come, I'll make the wilderness blossom like a rose. How
+have you decorated your room?"
+
+"I haven't much money," said Kate bluntly; "but I've--well, I've
+ventured on my own interpretations of what a bed-sitting-room
+should be."
+
+Miss Morrison threw her a bright glance.
+
+"I'll warrant you have," she said. "I should think you'd contrive a very
+original sort of a place. Thank you so much for looking after me. I
+brought along a gown for dinner. Naturally, I didn't want to make a
+dull impression at the outset. Haven't I heard that you dine out at some
+sort of a place where geniuses congregate?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Years afterward, Kate used to think about the moment when Honora and her
+cousin met. Honora had come home, breathless from the laboratory. It had
+been a stirring afternoon for her. She had heard words of significant
+appreciation spoken to David by the men whom, out of all the world, she
+would have chosen to have praise him. She looked at Miss Morrison, who
+had come trailing down in a cerise evening gown as if she were a bright
+creature of another species, somewhat, Kate could not help whimsically
+thinking, as a philosophic beaver might have looked at a bird of
+paradise. Then Honora had kissed her cousin.
+
+"Dear blue-eyed Mary!" she had cried. "Welcome to a dull and busy home."
+
+"How good of you to take me in," sighed Miss Morrison. "I hated to
+bother you, Honora, but I thought you might keep me out of mischief."
+
+"Have you been getting into mischief?" Honora asked, still laughing.
+
+"Not quite," answered her cousin, blushing bewitchingly. "But I'm always
+on the verge of it. It's the Californian climate, I think."
+
+"So exuberant!" cried Honora.
+
+"That's it!" agreed "Blue-eyed Mary." "I thought you'd understand.
+Here, I'm sure, you're all busy and good."
+
+"Some of us are," agreed Honora. "There's my Kate, for example. She's
+one of the most useful persons in town, and she's just as interesting as
+she is useful."
+
+Miss Morrison turned her smiling regard on Kate. "But, Honora, she's
+been quite abrupt with me. She doesn't approve of me. I suppose she
+discovered at once that I _wasn't_ useful."
+
+"I didn't," protested Kate. "I think decorative things are of the utmost
+use."
+
+"There!" cried Miss Morrison; "you can see for yourself that she doesn't
+like me!"
+
+"Nonsense," said Kate, really irritated. "I shall like you if Honora
+does. Let me help you dress, Honora dear. Are you tired or happy that
+your cheeks are so flushed?"
+
+"I'm both tired and happy, Kate. Excuse me, Mary, won't you? If David
+comes in you'll know him by instinct. Believe me, you are very welcome."
+
+Up in Honora's bedroom, Kate asked, as she helped her friend into the
+tidy neutral silk she wore to dinner: "Is the blue-eyed one going to be
+a drain on you, girl? You oughtn't to carry any more burdens. Are you
+disturbed? Is she more of a proposition than you counted on?"
+
+Honora turned her kind but troubled eyes on Kate.
+
+"I can't explain," she said in _so_ low a voice that Kate could hardly
+catch the words. "She's like me, isn't she? I seemed to see--"
+
+"What?"
+
+"Ghosts--bright ghosts. Never mind."
+
+"You're not thinking that you are old, are you?" cried Kate. "Because
+that's absurd. You're wonderful--wonderful."
+
+Laughter arose to them--the mingled voices of David Fulham and his
+newfound cousin by marriage.
+
+"Good!" cried Honora with evident relief. "They seem to be taking to
+each other. I didn't know how David would like her."
+
+He liked her very well, it transpired, and when the introductions had
+been made at the Caravansary, it appeared that every one was delighted
+with her. If their reception of her differed from that they had given to
+Kate, it was nevertheless kindly--almost gay. They leaped to the
+conclusion that Miss Morrison was designed to enliven them. And so it
+proved. She threw even the blithe Marna Cartan temporarily into the
+shade; and Dr. von Shierbrand, who was accustomed to talking with Kate
+upon such matters as the national trait of incompetence, or the
+reprehensible modern tendency of coddling the unfit, turned his
+attention to Miss Morrison and to lighter subjects.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Two days later a piano stood in Honora's drawing-room, and Miss Morrison
+sat before it in what may be termed occult draperies, making lovely
+music. Technically, perhaps, the music left something to be desired.
+Mrs. Barsaloux and Marna Cartan thought so, at any rate. But the
+habitues of Mrs. Dennison's near-home soon fell into the way of trailing
+over to the Fulhams' in Mary Morrison's wake, and as they grouped
+themselves about on the ugly Mission furniture, in a soft light produced
+by many candles, and an atmosphere drugged with highly scented flowers,
+they fell under the spell of many woven melodies.
+
+When Mary Morrison's tapering fingers touched the keys they brought
+forth a liquid and caressing sound like falling water in a fountain, and
+when she leaned over them as if to solicit them to yield their kind
+responses, her attitude, her subtle garments, the swift interrogative
+turns of her head, brought visions to those who watched and listened.
+Kate dreamed of Italian gardens--the gardens she never had seen; Von
+Shierbrand thought of dark German forests; Honora, of a moonlit glade.
+These three confessed so much. The others did not tell their visions,
+but obviously they had them. Blue-eyed Mary was one of those women who
+inspire others. She was the quintessence of femininity, and she
+distilled upon the air something delicately intoxicating, like the odor
+of lotus-blossoms.
+
+It was significant that the Fulhams' was no longer a house of suburban
+habits. Ten o'clock and lights out had ceased to be the rule. After
+music there frequently was a little supper, and every one was pressed
+into service in the preparation of it. Something a trifle fagged and
+hectic began to show in the faces of Mrs. Dennison's family, and that
+good woman ventured to offer some reproof.
+
+"You all are hard workers," she said, "and you ought to be hard resters,
+too. You're not acting sensibly. Any one would think you were the
+idle rich."
+
+"Well, we're entitled to all the pleasure we can get," Mary Morrison had
+retorted. "There are people who think that pleasure isn't for them. But
+I am just the other way--I take it for granted that pleasure is my
+right. I always take everything in the way of happiness that I can get
+my hands on."
+
+"You mean, of course, my dear child," said the gentle Mrs. Goodrich,
+"all that you can get which does not belong to some one else."
+
+Blue-eyed Mary laughed throatily.
+
+"Fortunately," she said, "there's pleasure enough to go around. It's
+like air, every one can breathe it in."
+
+
+
+VII
+
+But though Miss Morrison had made herself so brightly, so almost
+universally at home, there was one place into which she did not venture
+to intrude. This was Kate's room. Mary had felt from the first a lack of
+encouragement there, and although she liked to talk to Kate, and
+received answers in which there appeared to be no lack of zest and
+response, yet it seemed to be agreed that when Miss Barrington came
+tramping home from her hard day's work, she was to enjoy the solitude of
+her chamber.
+
+Mary used to wonder what went on there. Miss Barrington could be very
+still. The hours would pass and not a sound would issue from that high
+upper room which looked across the Midway and included the satisfactory
+sight of the Harper Memorial and the massed University buildings. Kate
+would, indeed, have had difficulty in explaining that she was engaged in
+the mere operation of living. Her life, though lonely, and to an extent
+undirected, seemed abundant. Restless she undoubtedly was, but it was a
+restlessness which she succeeded in holding in restraint. At first when
+she came up to the city the daze of sorrow was upon her. But this was
+passing. A keen awareness of life suffused her now and made her
+observant of everything about her. She felt the tremendous incongruities
+of city life, and back of these incongruities, the great, hidden,
+passionate purpose which, ultimately, meant a city of immeasurable
+power. She rejoiced, as the young and gallant dare to do, that she was
+laboring in behalf of that city. Not one bewildered, wavering, piteous
+life was adjusted through her efforts that she did not feel that her
+personal sum of happiness had received an addition. That deep and
+burning need for religion, or for love, or for some splendid and
+irresistible impetus, was satisfied in part by her present work.
+
+To start out each morning to answer the cry of distress, to understand
+the intricate yet effective machinery of benevolent organizations, so
+that she could call for aid here and there, and have instant and
+intelligent cooeperation, to see broken lives mended, the friendless
+befriended, the tempted lifted up, the evil-doer set on safe paths,
+warmed and sustained her. That inquisitive nature of hers was now so
+occupied with the answering of practical and immediate questions that it
+had ceased to beat upon the hollow doors of the Unknown with unavailing
+inquiries.
+
+So far as her own life was concerned, she seemed to have found, not a
+haven, but a broad sea upon which she could triumphantly sail. That
+shame at being merely a woman, with no task, no utility, no
+independence, had been lifted from her. So, in gratitude, everywhere, at
+all times, she essayed to help other women to a similar independence.
+She did not go so far as to say that it was the panacea for all ills,
+but she was convinced that more than half of the incoherent pain of
+women's lives could be avoided by the mere fact of financial
+independence. It became a religion with her to help the women with whom
+she came in contact, to find some unguessed ability or applicability
+which would enable them to put money in their purses. With liberty to
+leave a miserable condition, one often summoned courage to remain and
+face it. She pointed that out to her wistful constituents, the poor
+little wives who had found in marriage only a state of supine drudgery,
+and of unexpectant, monotonous days. She was trying to give them some
+game to play. That was the way she put it to them. If one had a game to
+play, there was use in living. If one had only to run after the balls of
+the players, there was not zest enough to carry one along.
+
+She began talking now and then at women's clubs and at meetings of
+welfare workers. Her abrupt, picturesque way of saying things "carried,"
+as an actor would put it. Her sweet, clear contralto held the ear; her
+aquiline comeliness pleased the eye without enticing it; her capable,
+fit-looking clothes were so happily secondary to her personality that
+even the women could not tell how she was dressed. She was the least
+seductive person imaginable; and she looked so self-sufficient that it
+seldom occurred to any one to offer her help. Yet she was in no sense
+bold or aggressive. No one ever thought of accusing her of being any of
+those things. Many loved her--loved her wholesomely, with a love in
+which trust was a large element. Children loved her, and the sick, and
+the bad. They looked to her to help them out of their helplessness. She
+was very young, but, after all, she was maternal. A psychologist would
+have said that there was much of the man about her, and her love of the
+fair chance, her appetite for freedom, her passion for using her own
+capabilities might, indeed, have seemed to be of the masculine variety
+of qualities; but all this was more than offset by this inherent impulse
+for maternity. She was born, apparently, to care for others, but she had
+to serve them freely. She had to be the dispenser of good. She was
+unconsciously on the outlook against those innumerable forms of
+slavishness which affection or religion gilded and made to seem like
+noble service.
+
+Among those who loved her was August von Shierbrand. He loved her
+apparently in spite of himself. She did not in the least accord with his
+romantic ideas of what a woman should be. He was something of a poet,
+and a specialized judge of poetry, and he liked women of the sort who
+inspired a man to write lyrics. He had tried unavailingly to write
+lyrics about Kate, but they never would "go." He confessed his
+fiascoes to her.
+
+"Nothing short of martial measures seems to suit you," he said
+laughingly.
+
+"But why write about me at all, Dr. von Shierbrand?" she inquired. "I
+don't want any one writing about me. What I want to do is to learn how
+to write myself--not because I feel impelled to be an author, but
+because I come across things almost every day which ought to be
+explained."
+
+"You are completely absorbed in this extraordinary life of yours!" he
+complained.
+
+"Why not!" demanded Kate. "Aren't you completely absorbed in your life?"
+
+"Of course I am. But teaching is my chosen profession."
+
+"Well, life is my chosen profession. I want to see, feel, know, breathe,
+Life. I thought I'd never be able to get at it. I used to feel like a
+person walking in a mist. But it's different now. Everything has taken
+on a clear reality to me. I'm even beginning to understand that I myself
+am a reality and that my thoughts as well as my acts are entities. I'm
+getting so that I can define my own opinions. I don't believe there's
+anybody in the city who would so violently object to dying as I would,
+Dr. von Shierbrand."
+
+The sabre cut on Von Shierbrand's face gleamed.
+
+"You certainly seem at the antipodes of death, Miss Barrington," he said
+with a certain thickness in his utterance. "And I, personally, can think
+of nothing more exhilarating than in living beside you. I meant to
+wait--to wait a long time before asking you. But what is the use of
+waiting? I want you to marry me. I feel as if it must be--as if I
+couldn't get along without you to help me enjoy things."
+
+Kate looked at him wonderingly. It was before the afternoon concert and
+they were sitting in Honora's rejuvenated drawing-room while they waited
+for the others to come downstairs.
+
+"But, Dr. von Shierbrand!" she cried, "I don't like a city without
+suburbs!"
+
+"I beg your pardon!"
+
+"I like to see signs of my City of Happiness as I approach--outlying
+villas, and gardens, and then straggling, pleasant neighborhoods, and
+finally Town."
+
+"Oh, I see. You mean I've been too unexpected. Can't you overlook that?
+You're an abrupt person yourself, you know. I'm persuaded that we could
+be happy together."
+
+"But I'm not in love, Dr. von Shierbrand. I'm sorry. Frankly, I'd like
+to be."
+
+"And have you never been? Aren't you nursing a dream of--"
+
+"No, no; I haven't had a hopeless love if that's what you mean. I'm all
+lucid and clear and comfortable nowadays--partly because I've stopped
+thinking about some of the things to which I couldn't find answers, and
+partly because Life is answering some of my questions."
+
+"How to be happy without being in love, perhaps."
+
+"Well, I am happy--temperately so. Perhaps that's the only degree of
+happiness I shall ever know. Of course, when I was younger I thought I
+should get to some sort of a place where I could stand in swimming glory
+and rejoice forever, but I see now how stupid I was to think anything of
+the sort. I hoped to escape the commonplace by reaching some beatitude,
+but now I have found that nothing really is commonplace. It only seems
+so when you aren't understanding enough to get at the essential truth
+of things."
+
+"Oh, that's true! That's true!" cried Von Shierbrand.
+
+"Oh, Kate, I do love you. You seem to complete me. When I'm with you I
+understand myself. Please try to love me, dear. We'll get a little home
+and have a garden and a library--think how restful it will be. I can't
+tell you how I want a place I can call home."
+
+"There they come," warned Kate as she heard footsteps on the stairs.
+"You must take 'no' for your answer, dear man. I feel just like a
+mother to you."
+
+Dr. von Shierbrand arose, obviously offended, and he allied himself with
+Mary Morrison on the way to the concert. Kate walked with Honora and
+David until they met with Professor Wickersham, who was also bound for
+Mandel Hall and the somewhat tempered classicism which the Theodore
+Thomas Orchestra offered to "the University crowd."
+
+"Please walk with me, Miss Barrington," said Wickersham. "I want you to
+explain the universe to me."
+
+"I can do that nicely," retorted Kate, "because Dr. von Shierbrand has
+already explained it to me."
+
+Blue-eyed Mary was pouting. She never liked any variety of amusement,
+conversational or otherwise, in which she was not the center.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So Kate's life sped along. It was not very significant, perhaps, or it
+would not have seemed so to the casual onlooker, but life is measured by
+its inward rather than its outward processes, and Kate felt herself
+being enriched by her experiences.
+
+She enjoyed being brought into contact with the people she met in her
+work--not alone the beneficiaries of her ministrations, but the
+policemen and the police matrons and the judges of the police court. She
+joined a society of "welfare workers," and attended their suppers and
+meetings, and tried to learn by their experience and to keep her own
+ideas in abeyance.
+
+She could not help noticing that she differed in some particulars from
+most of these laborers in behalf of the unfortunate. They brought
+practical, unimaginative, and direct minds to bear upon the problems
+before them, while she never could escape her theories or deny herself
+the pleasure of looking beyond the events to the causes which underlay
+them. This led her to jot down her impressions in a notebook, and to
+venture on comments concerning her experiences.
+
+Moreover, not only was she deeply moved by the disarrangement and
+bewilderment which she saw around her, but she began to awaken to
+certain great events and developing powers in the world. She read the
+sardonic commentators upon modern life--Ibsen, Strindberg, and many
+others; and if she sometimes passionately repudiated them, at other
+times she listened as if she were finding the answers to her own
+inquiries. It moved her to discover that men, more often than women, had
+been the interpreters of women's hidden meanings, and that they had been
+the setters-forth of new visions of sacredness and fresh definitions
+of liberty.
+
+It was these men--these aloof and unsentimental ones--who had pointed
+out that the sin of sins committed by women had been the indifference to
+their own personalities. They had been echoers, conformers, imitators;
+even, in their own way, cowards. They had feared the conventions, and
+had been held in thrall by their own carefully nursed ideals of
+themselves. They had lacked the ability to utilize their powers of
+efficiency; had paid but feeble respect to their own ideals; had
+altogether measured themselves by too limited a standard. Failing wifely
+joy, they had too often regarded themselves as unsuccessful, and had
+apologized tacitly to the world for using their abilities in any
+direction save one. They had not permitted themselves that strong,
+clean, robust joy of developing their own powers for mere delight in the
+exercise of power.
+
+But now, so Kate believed,--so her great instructors informed
+her,--they were awakening to their privileges. An intenser awareness of
+life, of the right to expression, and of satisfaction in constructive
+performances was stirring in them. If they desired enfranchisement, they
+wanted it chiefly for spiritual reasons. This was a fact which the
+opponents of the advancing movement did not generally recognize. Kate
+shrank from those fruitless arguments at the Caravansary with the
+excellent men who gravely and kindly rejected suffrage for women upon
+the ground that they were protecting them by doing so. They did not seem
+to understand that women desired the ballot because it was a symbol as
+well as because it was an instrument and an argument. If it was to
+benefit the working woman in the same way in which it benefited the
+working man, by making individuality a thing to be considered; if it was
+to give the woman taxpayer certain rights which would put her on a par
+with the man taxpayer, a thousand times more it was to benefit all women
+by removing them from the class of the unconsidered, the superfluous,
+and the negligible.
+
+Yes, women were wanting the ballot because it included potentiality, and
+in potentiality is happiness. No field seems fair if there is no gateway
+to it--no farther field toward which the steps may be turned. Kate was
+getting hold of certain significant similes. She saw that it was past
+the time of walls and limits. Walled cities were no longer endurable,
+and walled and limited possibilities were equally obsolete. If the
+departure of the "captains and the kings" was at hand, if the new forces
+of democracy had routed them, if liberty for all men was now an ethic
+need of civilization, so political recognition was necessary for women.
+Women required the ballot because the need was upon them to perform
+great labors. Their unutilized benevolence, their disregarded powers of
+organization, their instinctive sense of economy, their
+maternal-oversoul, all demanded exercise. Women were the possessors of
+certain qualities so abundant, so ever-renewing, that the ordinary
+requirements of life did not give them adequate employment. With a
+divine instinct of high selfishness, of compassion, of realization, they
+were seeking the opportunity to exercise these powers.
+
+"The restlessness of women," "the unquiet sex," were terms which were
+becoming glorious in Kate's ears. She saw no reason why women as well as
+men should not be allowed to "dance upon the floor of chance." All about
+her were women working for the advancement of their city, their country,
+and their race. They gave of their fortunes, of their time, of all the
+powers of their spirit. They warred with political machines, with base
+politicians, with public contumely, with custom. What would have crushed
+women of equally gentle birth a generation before, seemed now of little
+account to these workers. They looked beyond and above the irritation
+of the moment, holding to the realization that their labors were of
+vital worth. Under their administration communities passed from
+shameless misery to self-respect; as the result of their generosity,
+courts were sustained in which little children could make their plea and
+wretched wives could have justice. Servants, wantons, outcasts, the
+insane, the morally ill, all were given consideration in this new
+religion of compassion. It was amazing to Kate to see light come to dull
+eyes--eyes which had hitherto been lit only with the fires of hate. As
+she walked the gray streets in the performance of her tasks, weary and
+bewildered though she often was, she was sustained by the new discovery
+of that ancient truth that nothing human can be foreign to the person of
+good will. Neither dirt nor hate, distrust, fear, nor deceit should be
+permitted to blind her to the essential similarity of all who were
+"bound together in the bundle of life."
+
+It was not surprising that at this time she should begin writing short
+articles for the women's magazines on the subjects which presented
+themselves to her in her daily work. Her brief, spontaneous, friendly
+articles, full of meat and free from the taint of bookishness, won favor
+from the first. She soon found her evenings occupied with her somewhat
+matter-of-fact literary labors. But this work was of such a different
+character from that which occupied her in the daytime that so far from
+fatiguing her it gave an added zest to her days.
+
+She was not fond of idle evenings. Sitting alone meant thinking, and
+thought meant an unconquerable homesickness for that lonely man back in
+Silvertree from whom she had parted peremptorily, and toward whom she
+dared not make any overtures. Sometimes she sent him an article clipped
+from the magazines or newspapers dealing with some scientific subject,
+and once she mailed him a number of little photographs which she had
+taken with her own camera and which might reveal to him, if he were
+inclined to follow their suggestions, something of the life in which she
+was engaged. But no recognition of these wordless messages came from
+him. He had been unable to forgive her, and she beat down the question
+that would arise as to whether she also had been at fault. She was under
+the necessity of justifying herself if she would be happy. It was only
+after many months had passed that she learned how a heavy burden may
+become light by the confession of a fault.
+
+Meantime, she was up early each morning; she breakfasted with the most
+alert residents of the Caravansary; then she took the street-car to
+South Chicago and reported at a dismal office. Here the telephone served
+to put her into communication with her superior at Settlement House. She
+reported what she had done the day before (though, to be sure, a written
+report was already on its way), she asked advice, she talked over ways
+and means. Then she started upon her daily rounds. These might carry
+her to any one of half a dozen suburbs or to the Court of Domestic
+Relations, or over on the West Side of the city to the Juvenile Court.
+She appeared almost daily before some police magistrate, and not long
+after her position was assumed, she was called upon to give evidence
+before the grand jury.
+
+"However do you manage it all?" Honora asked one evening when Kate had
+been telling a tale of psychically sinister import. "How can you bring
+yourself to talk over such terrible and revolting subjects as you have
+to, before strange men in open court?"
+
+"A nice old man asked me that very question to-day as I was coming out
+of the courtroom," said Kate. "He said he didn't like to see young women
+doing such work as I was doing. 'Who will do it, then?' I asked. 'The
+men,' said he. 'Do you think we can leave it to them?' I asked. 'Perhaps
+not,' he admitted. 'But at least it could be left to older women.' 'They
+haven't the strength for it,' I told him, and then I gave him a notion
+of the number of miles I had ridden the day before in the street-car-it
+was nearly sixty, I believe. 'Are you sure it's worth it?' he asked. He
+had been listening to the complaint I was making against a young man who
+has, to my knowledge, completely destroyed the self-respect of five
+girls--and I've known him but a short time. You can make an estimate of
+the probable number of crimes of his if it amuses you. 'Don't you think
+it's worth while if that man is shut up where he can't do any more
+mischief?' I asked him. Of course he thought it was; but he was still
+shaking his head over me when I left him. He still thought I ought to be
+at home making tidies. I can't imagine that it ever occurred to him that
+I was a disinterested economist in trying to save myself from waste."
+
+She laughed lightly in spite of her serious words.
+
+"Anyway," she said, "I find this kind of life too amusing to resign. One
+of the settlement workers was complaining to me this morning about the
+inherent lack of morals among some of our children. It appears that the
+Harrigans--there are seven of them--commandeered some old clothes that
+had been sent in for charitable distribution. They poked around in the
+trunks when no one was watching and helped themselves to what they
+wanted. The next day they came to a party at the Settlement House togged
+up in their plunder. My friend reproved them, but they seemed to be
+impervious to her moral comments, so she went to the mother. 'Faith,'
+said Mrs. Harrigan, 'I tould them not to be bringing home trash like
+that. "It ain't worth carryin' away," says I to them.'"
+
+About this time Kate was invited to become a resident of Hull House. She
+was touched and complimented, but, with a loyalty for which there was,
+perhaps, no demand, she remained faithful to her friends at the
+Caravansary. She was loath to take up her residence with a group which
+would have too much community of interest. The ladies at Mrs. Dennison's
+offered variety. Life was dramatizing itself for her there. In Honora
+and Marna and Mrs. Barsaloux and those quiet yet intelligent
+gentlewomen, Mrs. Goodrich and Mrs. Applegate, in the very servants
+whose pert individualism distressed the mid-Victorian Mrs. Dennison,
+Kate saw working those mysterious world forces concerning which she was
+so curious. The frequent futility of Nature's effort to throw to the top
+this hitherto unutilized feminine force was no less absorbing than the
+success which sometimes attended the impulsion. To the general and
+widespread convulsion, the observer could no more be oblivious than to
+an earthquake or a tidal wave.
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+Kate had not seen Lena Vroom for a long time, and she had indefinitely
+missed her without realizing it until one afternoon, as she was
+searching for something in her trunk, she came across a package of
+Lena's letters written to her while she was at Silvertree. That night at
+the table she asked if any one had seen Lena recently.
+
+"Seen her?" echoed David Fulham. "I've seen the shadow of her blowing
+across the campus. She's working for her doctor's degree, like a lot of
+other silly women. She's living by herself somewhere, on crackers and
+cheese, no doubt."
+
+"Would she really be so foolish?" cried Kate. "I know she's devoted to
+her work, but surely she has some sense of moderation."
+
+"Not a bit of it," protested the scientist. "A person of mediocre
+attainments who gets the Ph.D. bee in her bonnet has no sense
+of any sort. I see them daily, men and women,--but women
+particularly,--stalking about the grounds and in and out of classes,
+like grotesque ghosts. They're staggering under a mental load too heavy
+for them, and actually it might be a physical load from its effects.
+They get lop-sided, I swear they do, and they acquire all sorts of
+miserable little personal habits that make them both pitiable and
+ridiculous. For my part, I believe the day will come when no woman will
+be permitted to try for the higher degrees till her brain has been
+scientifically tested and found to be adequate for the work."
+
+"But as for Lena," said Kate, "I thought she was quite a wonder at her
+lessons."
+
+"Up to a certain point," admitted Fulham, "I've no doubt she does very
+well. But she hasn't the capacity for higher work, and she'll be the
+last one to realize it. My advice to you, Miss Barrington, is to look up
+your friend and see what she is doing with herself. You haven't any of
+you an idea of the tragedies of the classroom, and I'll not tell them to
+you. But they're serious enough, take my word for it."
+
+"Yes, do look her up, Kate," urged Honora.
+
+"It's hard to manage anything extra during the day," said Kate. "I must
+go some evening."
+
+"Perhaps Cousin Mary could go with you," suggested Honora. Honora threw
+a glance of affectionate admiration at her young cousin, who had
+blossomed out in a bewitching little frock of baby blue, and whose eyes
+reflected the color.
+
+She was, indeed, an entrancing thing, was "Blue-eyed Mary." The
+tenderness of her lips, the softness of her complexion, the glamour of
+her glance increased day by day, and without apparent reason. She seemed
+to be more eloquent, with the sheer eloquence of womanly emotion.
+Everything that made her winning was intensified, as if Love, the
+Master, had touched to vividness what hitherto had been no more than a
+mere promise.
+
+What was the secret of this exotic florescence? She went out only to
+University affairs with Honora or Kate, or to the city with Marna
+Cartan. Her interests appeared to be few; and she was neither a writer
+nor a receiver of letters. Altogether, the sources of that hidden joy
+which threw its enchantment over her were not to be guessed.
+
+But what did it all matter? She was an exhilarating companion--and what
+a contrast to poor Lena! That night, lying in bed, Kate reproached
+herself for her neglect of her once so faithful friend. Lena might be
+going through some severe experience, alone and unaided. Kate determined
+to find out the truth, and as she had a half-holiday on Saturday, she
+started on her quest.
+
+Lena, it transpired, had moved twice during the term and had neglected
+to register her latest address. So she was found only after much
+searching, and twilight was already gathering when Kate reached the
+dingy apartment in which Lena had secreted herself. It was a rear room
+up three flights of stairs, approached by a long, narrow corridor which
+the economical proprietor had left in darkness. Kate rapped softly at
+first; then, as no one answered, most sharply. She was on the point of
+going away when the door was opened a bare crack and the white, pinched
+face of Lena Vroom peered out.
+
+"It's only Kate, Lena!" Then, as there was no response: "Aren't you
+going to let me in?"
+
+Still Lena did not fling wide the door.
+
+"Oh, Kate!" she said vaguely, in a voice that seemed to drift from a
+Maeterlinckian mist. "How are you?"
+
+"Pretty sulky, thank you. Why don't you open the door, girl?"
+
+At that Lena drew back; but she was obviously annoyed. Kate stepped into
+the bare, unkempt room. Remnants of a miserable makeshift meal were to
+be seen on a rickety cutting-table; the bed was unmade; and on the desk,
+in the center of the room, a drop-lamp with a leaking tube polluted the
+air. There was a formidable litter of papers on a great table, and
+before it stood a swivel chair where Lena Vroom had been sitting
+preparing for her degree.
+
+Kate deliberately took this all in and then turned her gaze on her
+friend.
+
+"What's the use, girl?" she demanded with more than her usual
+abruptness. "What are you doing it all for?"
+
+Lena threw a haggard glance at her.
+
+"We won't talk about that," she said in that remote, sunken voice. "I
+haven't the strength to discuss it. To be perfectly frank, Kate, you
+mustn't visit me now. You see, I'm studying night and day for the
+inquisition."
+
+"The--"
+
+"Yes, inquisition. You see, it isn't enough that my thesis should be
+finished. I can't get my degree without a last, terrible ordeal. Oh,
+Kate, you can't imagine what it is like! Girls who have been through it
+have told me. You are asked into a room where the most important members
+of the faculty are gathered. They sit about you in a semicircle and for
+hours they hurl questions at you, not necessarily questions relating to
+anything you have studied, but inquiries to test your general
+intelligence. It's a fearful experience."
+
+She sank on her unmade cot, drawing a ragged sweater about her
+shoulders, and looked up at Kate with an almost furtive gaze. She always
+had been a small, meagre creature, but now she seemed positively
+shriveled. The pride and plenitude of womanhood were as far from her
+realization as they could be from a daughter of Eve. Sexless, stranded,
+broken before an undertaking too great for her, she sat there in the
+throes of a sudden, nervous chill. Then, after a moment or two, she
+began to weep and was rent and torn with long, shuddering sobs.
+
+"I'm so afraid," she moaned. "Oh, Kate, I'm so terribly, terribly
+afraid! I know I'll fail."
+
+Kate strangled down, "The best thing that could happen to you"; and said
+instead, "You aren't going about the thing in the best way to succeed."
+
+"I've done all I could," moaned her friend. "I've only allowed myself
+four hours a night for sleep; and have hardly taken out time for meals.
+I've concentrated as it seems to me no one ever concentrated before."
+
+"Oh, Lena, Lena!" Kate cried compassionately. "Can it really be that you
+have so little sense, after all? Oh, you poor little drowned rat, you."
+She bent over her, pulled the worn slippers from her feet, and thrust
+her beneath the covers.
+
+"No, no!" protested Lena. "You mustn't, Kate! I've got to get at my
+books."
+
+"Say another word and I'll throw them out of the window," cried Kate,
+really aroused. "Lie down there."
+
+Lena began again to sob, but this time with helpless anger, for Kate
+looked like a grenadier as she towered there in the small room and it
+was easy to see that she meant to be obeyed. She explored Lena's
+cupboard for supplies, and found, after some searching, a can of soup
+and the inevitable crackers. She heated the soup, toasted the crackers,
+and forced Lena to eat. Then she extinguished the lamp, with its
+poisonous odor, and, wrapping herself in her cloak threw open the window
+and sat in the gloom, softly chatting about this and that. Lena made no
+coherent answers. She lay in sullen torment, casting tearful glances at
+her benevolent oppressor.
+
+But Kate had set her will to conquer that of her friend and Lena's
+hysteric opposition was no match for it. Little by little the tense form
+beneath the blankets relaxed. Her stormily drawn breath became more
+even. At last she slept, which gave Kate an opportunity to slip out to
+buy a new tube for the lamp and adjust it properly. She felt quite safe
+in lighting it, for Lena lay in complete exhaustion, and she took the
+liberty of looking over the clothes which were bundled into an
+improvised closet on the back of the door. Everything was in wretched
+condition. Buttons and hooks were lacking; a heap of darning lay
+untouched; Lena's veil, with which she attempted to hide the ruin of her
+hat, was crumpled into the semblance of a rain-soaked cobweb; and her
+shoes had gone long without the reassurance of a good blacking.
+
+Kate put some irons over the stove which served Lena as a cooking-range,
+and proceeded on a campaign of reconstruction. It was midnight when she
+finished, and she was weary and heartsick. The little, strained face on
+the pillow seemed to belong to one whom the furies were pursuing. Yet
+nothing was pursuing her save her own fanatical desire for a thing
+which, once obtained, would avail her nothing. She had not personality
+enough to meet life on terms which would allow her one iota of
+leadership. She was discountenanced by her inherent drabness:
+beaten by the limits of her capacity. When Kate had ordered the
+room,--scrupulously refraining from touching any of Lena's papers,--she
+opened the window and, putting the catch on the door, closed it softly
+behind her.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Kate's frequent visits to Lena, though brief, were none too welcome.
+Even the food she brought with her might better, in Lena's estimation,
+be dispensed with than that the all-absorbing reading and research
+should be interrupted. Finally Kate called one night to find Lena gone.
+She had taken her trunk and oil-stove and the overworked gas-lamp and
+had stolen away. To ferret her out would have been inexcusable.
+
+"It shows how changed she is," Kate said to Honora. "Fancy the old-time
+Lena hiding from me!"
+
+"You must think of her as having a run of fever, Kate. Whatever she does
+must be regarded as simply symptomatic," said Honora, understandingly.
+"She's really half-mad. David says the graduates are often like
+that--the feminine ones."
+
+Kate tried to look at it in a philosophic way, but her heart yearned and
+ached over the poor, infatuated fugitive. The February convocation was
+drawing near, and with it Lena's dreaded day of examination. The night
+before its occurrence, the conversation at the Caravansary turned to the
+candidates for the honors.
+
+"There are some who meet the quiz gallantly enough," David Fulham
+remarked. "But the majority certainly come like galley slaves scourged
+to their dungeon. Some of them would move a heart of stone with their
+sufferings. Honora, why don't you and Miss Barrington look up your
+friend Miss Vroom once more? She's probably needing you pretty badly."
+
+"I don't mind being a special officer, Mr. Fulham," said Kate, "and
+it's my pride and pleasure to make child-beaters tremble and to arrest
+brawny fathers,--I make rather a specialty of six-foot ones,--but really
+I'm timid about going to Lena's again. She has given me to understand
+that she doesn't want me around, and I'm not enough of a pachyderm to
+get in the way of her arrows again."
+
+But David Fulham couldn't take that view of it.
+
+"She's not sane," he declared. "Couldn't be after such a course as she's
+been putting herself through. She needs help."
+
+However, neither Kate nor Honora ventured to offer it. They spent the
+evening together in Honora's drawing-room. The hours passed more rapidly
+than they realized, and at midnight David came stamping in. His face
+was white.
+
+"You haven't been to the laboratory, David?" reproached his wife.
+"Really, you mustn't. I thought it was agreed between us that we'd act
+like civilized householders in the evening." She was regarding him with
+an expression of affectionate reproof.
+
+"I've been doing laboratory work," he said shortly, "but it wasn't in
+the chemical laboratory. Wickersham and I hunted up your friend--and we
+found her in a state of collapse."
+
+"No!" cried Kate, starting to her feet.
+
+"I told you, didn't I?" returned David. "Don't I know them, the geese?
+We had to break in her door, and there she was sitting at her
+study-table, staring at her books and seeing nothing. She couldn't talk
+to us--had a temporary attack of severe aphasia, I suppose. Wickersham
+said he'd been anxious about her for weeks--she's been specializing with
+him, you know."
+
+"What did you do with her?" demanded Honora.
+
+"Bundled her up in her outside garments and dragged her out of doors
+between us and made her walk. She could hardly stand at first. We had to
+hold her up. But we kept right on hustling her along, and after a time
+when the fresh air and exercise had got in their work, she could find
+the right word when she tried to speak to us. Then we took her to a
+restaurant and ordered a beefsteak and some other things. She wanted to
+go back to her room--said she had more studying to do; but we made it
+clear to her at last that it wasn't any use,--that she'd have to stand
+or fall on what she had. She promised us she wouldn't look at a book,
+but would go to bed and sleep, and anybody who has the hardihood to wish
+that she wins her degree may pray for a good night for her."
+
+Honora was looking at her husband with a wide, shining gaze.
+
+"How did you come to go to her, David?" she asked admiringly. "She
+wasn't in any of your classes."
+
+"Now, don't try to make out that I'm benevolent, Honora," Fulham said
+petulantly. "I went because I happened to meet Wickersham on the
+Midway. She's been hiding, but he had searched her out and appealed to
+me to go with him. What I did was at his request."
+
+"But she'll be refreshed in the morning," said Honora. "She'll come out
+all right, won't she?"
+
+"How do I know?" demanded Fulham. "I suppose she'll feel like a man
+going to execution when she enters that council-room. Maybe she'll stand
+up to it and maybe she'll not. She'll spend as much nervous energy on
+the experience as would carry her through months of sane, reasonable
+living in the place she ought to be in--that is to say, in a millinery
+store or some plain man's kitchen."
+
+"Oh, David!" said Honora with gentle wifely reproach.
+
+But Fulham was making no apologies.
+
+"If we men ill-treated women as they ill-treat themselves," he said,
+"we'd be called brutes of the worst sort."
+
+"Of course!" cried Kate. "A person may have some right to ill-treat
+himself, but he never has any right to ill-treat another."
+
+"If we hitched her up to a plough," went on Fulham, not heeding, "we
+shouldn't be overtaxing her physical strength any more than she
+overtaxes her mental strength when she tries--the ordinary woman, I
+mean, like Miss Vroom--to keep up to the pace set by men of
+first-rate caliber."
+
+He went up to bed on this, still disturbed, and Honora and Kate, much
+depressed, talked the matter over. But they reached no conclusion. They
+wanted to go around the next morning and help Lena,--get her breakfast
+and see that she was properly dressed,--but they knew they would be
+unwelcome. Later they heard that she had come through the ordeal after a
+fashion. She had given indications of tremendous research. But her eyes,
+Wickersham told Kate privately, looked like diseased oysters, and it was
+easy to see that she was on the point of collapse.
+
+Kate saw nothing of her until the day of convocation, though she tried
+several times to get into communication with her. There must have been
+quite two hundred figures in the line that wound before the President
+and the other dignitaries to receive their diplomas; and the great hall
+was thronged with interested spectators. Kate could have thrilled with
+pride of her _alma mater_ had not her heart been torn with sympathy for
+her friend whose emaciated figure looked more pathetic than ever before.
+Now and then a spasmodic movement shook her, causing her head to quiver
+like one with the palsy and her hands to make futile gestures. And
+although she was the most touching and the least joyous of those who
+went forward to victory, she was not, after all, so very exceptional.
+
+Kate could not help noticing how jaded and how spent were many of the
+candidates for the higher degrees. They seemed to move in a tense
+dream, their eyes turning neither to right nor left, and the whole of
+them bent on the one idea of their dear achievement. Although there were
+some stirring figures among them,--men and women who seemed to have come
+into the noble heritage which had been awaiting them,--there were more
+who looked depleted and unfit. It grew on Kate, how superfluous
+scholarship was when superimposed on a feeble personality. The colleges
+could not make a man, try as they might. They could add to the capacity
+of an endowed and adventurous individual, but for the inept, the
+diffident, their learning availed nothing. They could cram bewildered
+heads with facts and theories, but they could not hold the mediocre back
+from their inevitable anticlimax.
+
+"A learned derelict is no better than any other kind," mused Kate
+compassionately. She resolved that now, at last, she would command
+Lena's obedience. She would compel her to take a vacation,--would find
+out what kind of a future she had planned. She would surround her with
+small, friendly offices; would help her to fit herself out in new
+garments, and would talk over ways and means with her.
+
+She went the next day to the room where Lena's compassionate professors
+had found her that night of dread and terror before her examination. But
+she had disappeared again, and the landlady could give no information
+concerning her.
+
+
+
+IX
+
+The day was set. Marna was to sing. It seemed to the little group of
+friends as if the whole city palpitated with the fact. At any rate, the
+Caravansary did so. They talked of little else, and Mary Morrison wept
+for envy. Not that it was mean envy. Her weeping was a sort of tribute,
+and Marna felt it to be so.
+
+"You're going to be wonderful," Mary sobbed. "The rest of us are merely
+young, or just women, or men. We can't be anything more no matter how
+hard we try, though we keep feeling as if we were something more. But
+you're going to SING! Oh, Marna!"
+
+Time wore on, and Marna grew hectic with anticipation. Her lips were too
+red, her breath came too quickly; she intensified herself; and she
+practiced her quivering, fitful, passionate songs with religious
+devotion. So many things centered around the girl that it was no wonder
+that she began to feel a disproportionate sense of responsibility. All
+of her friends were taking it for granted that she would make a success.
+
+Mrs. Barsaloux was giving a supper at the Blackstone after the
+performance. The opera people were coming and a number of other
+distinguished ones; and Marna was having a frock made of the color of a
+gold-of-Ophir rose satin which was to clothe her like sunshine. Honora
+brought out a necklace of yellow opals whimsically fashioned.
+
+"I no longer use such things, child," she said with a touch of emotion.
+"And I want you to wear them with your yellow dress."
+
+"Why, they're like drops of water with the sun in them!" cried Marna.
+"How good you all are to me! I can't imagine why."
+
+When the great night came, the audience left something to be desired,
+both as to numbers and fashion. Although Marna's appearance had been
+well advertised, it was evident that the public preferred to listen to
+the great stars. But the house was full enough and enthusiastic enough
+to awaken in the little Irish girl's breast that form of elation which
+masks as self-obliteration, and which is the fuel that feeds the
+fires of art.
+
+Kate had gone with the Fulhams and they, with Blue-eyed Mary and Dr. von
+Shierbrand, sat together in the box which Mrs. Barsaloux had given them,
+and where, from time to time, she joined them. But chiefly she hovered
+around Marna in that dim vast world back of the curtain.
+
+They said of Marna afterward that she was like a spirit. She seemed less
+and more than a woman, an evanescent essence of feminine delight. Her
+laughter, her tears, her swift emotions were all as something held for a
+moment before the eye and snatched away, to leave but the wavering
+eidolon of their loveliness. She sang with a young Italian who responded
+exquisitely to the swift, bright, unsubstantial beauty of her acting,
+and whom she seemed fairly to bathe in the amber loveliness of
+her voice.
+
+Kate, quivering for her, seeming indefinably to be a part of her,
+suffering at the hesitancies of the audience and shaken with their
+approval, was glad when it was all over. She hastened out to be with the
+crowd and to hear what they were saying. They were warm in their praise,
+but Kate was dissatisfied. She longed for something more emphatic--some
+excess of acclaim. She wondered if they were waiting for more
+authoritative audiences to set the stamp of approval on Marna. It did
+not occur to her that they had found the performance too opalescent
+and elusive.
+
+Kate wondered if the girl would feel that anything had been missing, but
+Marna seemed to be basking in the happiness of the hour. The great
+German prima donna had kissed her with tears in her eyes; the French
+baritone had spoken his compliments with convincing ardor; dozens had
+crowded about her with congratulations; and now, at the head of the
+glittering table in an opulent room, the little descendant of minstrels
+sat and smiled upon her friends. A gilded crown of laurel leaves rested
+on her dark hair; her white neck arose delicately from the yellowed lace
+and the shining silk; the sunny opals rested upon her shoulders.
+
+"I drink," cried the French baritone, "to a voice of honey and an ivory
+throat."
+
+"To a great career," supplemented David Fulham.
+
+"And happiness," Kate broke in, standing with the others and forgetting
+to be abashed by the presence of so many. Then she called to Marna:--
+
+"I was afraid they would leave out happiness."
+
+Kate might have been the belated fairy godmother who brought this gift
+in the nick of time. Those at the table smiled at her indulgently,--she
+was so eager, so young, so almost fierce. She had dressed herself in
+white without frill or decoration, and the clinging folds of her gown
+draped her like a slender, chaste statue. She wore no jewels,--she had
+none, indeed,--and her dark coiled hair in no way disguised the shape of
+her fine head. The elaborate Polish contralto across from her, splendid
+as a mediaeval queen, threw Kate's simplicity into sharp contrast. Marna
+turned adoring eyes upon her; Mrs. Barsaloux, that inveterate encourager
+of genius, grieved that the girl had no specialty for her to foster; the
+foreigners paid her frank tribute, and there was no question but that
+the appraisement upon her that night was high.
+
+As for Mama's happiness, for which Kate had put in her stipulation, it
+was coming post-haste, though by a circuitous road.
+
+Mrs. Dennison, who had received tickets from Marna, and who had begged
+her nephew, George Fitzgerald, to act as her escort, was, in her
+fashion, too, wondering about the question of happiness for the girl.
+She was an old-fashioned creature, mid-Victorian in her sincerity. She
+had kissed one man and one only, and him had she married, and sorrowing
+over her childless estate she had become, when she laid her husband in
+his grave, "a widow indeed." Her abundant affection, disused by this
+accident of fate, had spent itself in warm friendships, and in her
+devotion to her dead sister's child. She had worked for him till the
+silver came into her hair; had sent him through his classical course and
+through the medical college, and the day when she saw him win his title
+of doctor of medicine was the richest one of her middle life.
+
+He sat beside her now, strangely pale and disturbed. The opera, she was
+sorry to note, had not interested him as she had expected it would. He
+had, oddly enough, been reluctant to accompany her, and, as she was
+accustomed to his quick devotion, this distressed her not a little. Was
+he growing tired of her? Was he ashamed to be seen at the opera with a
+quiet woman in widow's dress, a touch shabby? Was her much-tired heart
+to have a last cruel blow dealt it? Accustomed to rather somber pathways
+of thought, she could not escape this one; yet she loyally endeavored to
+turn from it, and from time to time she stole a look at the stern, pale
+face beside her to discover, if she could, what had robbed him of his
+good cheer.
+
+For he had been a happy boy. His high spirits had constituted a large
+part of his attraction for her. When he had come to her orphaned, it had
+been with warm gratitude in his heart, and with the expectation of being
+loved. As he grew older, that policy of life had become accentuated. He
+was expectant in all that he did. His temperamental friendliness had
+carried him through college, winning for him a warm group of friends and
+the genuine regard of his professors. It was helping him to make his way
+in the place he had chosen for his field of action. He had not gone into
+the more fashionable part of town, but far over on the West Side, where
+the slovenliness of the central part of the city shambles into a
+community of parks and boulevards, crude among their young trees
+surrounded by neat, self-respecting apartment houses. Such communities
+are to be found in all American cities; communities which set little
+store by fashion, which prize education (always providing it does not
+prove exotic and breed genius or any form of disturbing beauty), live
+within their incomes and cultivate the manifest virtues. The environment
+suited George Fitzgerald. He had an honest soul without a bohemian
+impulse in him. He recognized himself as being middle-class, and he was
+proud and glad of it. He liked to be among people who kept their feet on
+the earth--people whose yea was yea and whose nay was nay. What was
+Celtic in him could do no more for him than lend a touch of almost
+flaring optimism to the Puritan integrity of his character.
+
+Sundays, as a matter of habit, and occasionally on other days, he was
+his aunt's guest at the Caravansary. The intellectual cooeperatives there
+liked him, as indeed everybody did, everywhere. Invariably Mrs. Dennison
+was told after his departure that she was a fortunate woman to have such
+an adopted son. Yet Fitzgerald knew very well that he was unable to be
+completely himself among his aunt's patrons. Their conversation was too
+glancing; they too often said what they did not mean, for mere
+conversation's sake; they played with ideas, tossing them about like
+juggler's balls; and they attached importance to matters which seemed to
+him of little account.
+
+Of late he had been going to his aunt's but seldom, and he had stayed
+away because he wanted, above all things in the world, to go. It had
+become an agony to go--an anguish to absent himself. Which being
+interpreted, means that he was in love. And whom should he love but
+Marna? Why should any man trouble himself to love another woman when
+this glancing, flashing, singing bird was winging it through the blue?
+Were any other lips so tender, so tremulous, so arched, so sweet? The
+breath that came between them was perfumed with health; the little rows
+of gleaming teeth were indescribably provocative. Actually, the little
+red tongue itself seemed to fold itself upward, at the edges, like a
+tender leaf. As for her nostrils, they were delicately flaring like
+those of some wood creature, and fashioned for the enjoyment of odorous
+banquets undreamed of by duller beings. Her eyes, like pools in shade,
+breathing mystery and dreams, got between him and his sleep and held him
+intoxicated in his bed.
+
+Yes, that was Marna as she looked to the eye of love. She was made for
+one man's love and nothing else, yet she was about to become the
+well-loved of the great world! She was not for him--was not made for a
+man of his mould. She had flashed from obscurity to something rich and
+plenteous, obviously the child of Destiny--a little princess waiting for
+her crown. He had not even talked to her many times, and she had no
+notion that when she entered the room he trembled; and that when she
+spoke to him and turned the swimming loveliness of her eyes upon him, he
+had trouble to keep his own from filling with tears.
+
+And this was the night of her dedication to the world; the world was
+seating her upon her throne, acclaiming her coronation. There was
+nothing for him but to go on through an interminably long life, bearing
+a brave front and hiding his wound.
+
+He loathed the incoherent music; detested the conductor; despised the
+orchestra; felt murderous toward the Italian tenor; and could have slain
+the man who wrote the opera, since it made his bright girl a target for
+praise and blame. He feared his aunt's scrutiny, for she had sharp
+perceptions, and he could have endured anything better than that she
+should spy upon his sacred pain. So he sat by her side, passionately
+solitary amid a crowd and longing to hide himself from the society
+of all men.
+
+But he must be distrait, indeed, if he could forget the claim his good
+aunt had upon him. He knew how she loved gayety; and her daily life
+offered her little save labor and monotony.
+
+"Supper next," he said with forced cheerfulness as they came out of the
+opera-house together. "I'll do the ordering. You'll enjoy a meal for
+once which is served independently of you."
+
+He tried to talk about this and that as they made their way on to a
+glaring below-stairs restaurant, where after-theater folk gathered. The
+showy company jarred hideously on Fitzgerald, yet gave him a chance to
+save his face by pretending to watch it. He could tell his aunt who some
+of the people were, and she would transfer her curiosity from him
+to them.
+
+"They'll be having a glorious time at Miss Cartan's supper," mused Mrs.
+Dennison. "How she shines, doesn't she, George? And when you think of
+her beginnings there on that Wisconsin farm, isn't it astonishing?"
+
+"Those weren't her beginnings, I fancy," George said, venturing to taste
+of discussion concerning her as a brandy-lover may smell a glass he
+swears he will not drink. "Her beginnings were very long ago. She's a
+Celt, and she has the witchery of the Celts. How I'd love to hear her
+recite some of the new Irish poems!"
+
+"She'd do it beautifully, George. She does everything beautifully. If
+I'd had a daughter like that, boy, what a different thing my life would
+be! Or if you were to give me--"
+
+George clicked his ice sharply in his glass. "See," he said, "there's
+Hackett coming in--Hackett the actor. Handsome devil, isn't he?"
+
+"Don't use that tone, George," said his aunt reprovingly. "Handsome
+devil, indeed! He's a good-looking man. Can't you say that in a proper
+way? I don't want you to be sporty in your talk, George. I always tried
+when you were a little boy to keep you from talking foolishly."
+
+"Oh, there's no danger of my being foolish," he said. "I'm as staid and
+dull as ever you could wish me to be!"
+
+For the first time in her life she found him bitter, but she had the
+sense at last to keep silent. His eyes were full of pain, and as he
+looked about the crowded room with its suggestions of indulgent living,
+she saw something in his face leap to meet it--something that seemed to
+repudiate the ideals she had passed on to him. Involuntarily, Anne
+Dennison reached out her firm warm hand and laid it on the quivering one
+of her boy.
+
+"A new thought has just come to you!" she said softly. "Before you were
+through with your boast, lad, your temptation came. I saw it. Are you
+lonely, George? Are you wanting something that Aunt Anne can give you?
+Won't you speak out to me?"
+
+He drew his hand away from hers.
+
+"No one in the world can give me what I want," he said painfully.
+"Forgive me, auntie; and let's talk of other things."
+
+He had pushed her back into that lonely place where the old often must
+stand, and she shivered a little as if a cold wind blew over her. He saw
+it and bent toward her contritely.
+
+"You must help me," he said. "I am very unhappy. I suppose almost
+everybody has been unhappy like this sometime. Just bear with me, Aunt
+Anne, dear, and help me to forget for an hour or two."
+
+Anne Dennison regarded him understandingly.
+
+"Here comes our lobster," she said, "and while we eat it, I'll tell you
+the story of the first time I ever ate at a restaurant."
+
+He nodded gratefully. After all, while she lived, he could not be
+utterly bereft.
+
+
+
+X
+
+He had taken her home and was leaving, when a carriage passed him. He
+could hear the voices of the occupants--the brisk accents of Mrs.
+Barsaloux, and the slow, honey-rich tones of Marna. He had never dreamed
+that he could do such a thing, but he ran forward with an almost frantic
+desire to rest his eyes upon the girl's face, and he was beside the curb
+when the carriage drew up at the door of the house where Mrs. Barsaloux
+and Marna lodged. He flung open the door in spite of the protests of the
+driver, who was not sure of his right to offer such a service, and held
+out his hand to Mrs. Barsaloux. That lady accepted his politeness
+graciously, and, weary and abstracted, moved at once toward the
+house-steps, searching meantime for her key. Fitzgerald had fifteen
+seconds alone with Marna. She stood half-poised upon the carriage-steps,
+her hand in his, their eyes almost on a level. Then he said an
+impossible and insane thing. It was wrung out of his misery, out of his
+knowledge of her loveliness.
+
+"I've lost you!" he whispered. "Do you know that to-night ended my
+happiness?"
+
+Mama's lips parted delicately; her eyes widened; her swift Celtic spirit
+encompassed his grief.
+
+"Oh!" she breathed. "Don't speak so! Don't spoil my beautiful time!"
+
+"Not I," he retorted sharply, speaking aloud this time. "Far be it from
+me! Good-bye."
+
+Mrs. Barsaloux heard him vaguely above the jangling of coins and keys
+and the rushing of a distant train.
+
+"You're not going to leave town, are you, Dr. Fitzgerald?" she inquired
+casually. "I thought your good-bye had a final accent to it."
+
+She was laughing in her easy way, quite unconscious of what was taking
+place. She had made an art of laughing, and it carried her and others
+over many difficult places. But for once it was powerless to lessen the
+emotional strain. Mysteriously, Fitzgerald and Marna were experiencing a
+sweet torment in their parting. It was not that she loved him or had
+thought of him in that way at all. She had seen him often and had liked
+his hearty ways, his gay spirits, and his fine upstanding figure, but he
+had been as one who passed by with salutations. Now, suddenly, she was
+conscious that he was a man to be desired. She saw his wistful eyes, his
+avid lips, his great shoulders. The woman in her awoke to a knowledge of
+her needs. Upon such a shoulder might a woman weep, from such eyes might
+a woman gather dreams; to allay such torment as his might a woman give
+all she had to give. It was incoherent, mad, but not unmeaning. It had,
+indeed, the ultimate meaning.
+
+He said nothing more; she spoke no word. Each knew they would meet on
+the morrow.
+
+The next night, Kate Barrington, making her way swiftly down the Midway
+in a misty gloom, saw the little figure of Marna Cartan fluttering
+before her. It was too early for dinner, and Kate guessed that Marna was
+on her way to pay her a visit--a not rare occurrence these last few
+weeks. She called to her, and Marna waited, turning her face for a
+moment to the mist-bearing wind.
+
+"I was going to you," she said breathlessly.
+
+"So I imagined, bright one."
+
+"Are you tired, Kate, mavourneen?"
+
+"A little. It's been a hard day. I don't see why my heart isn't broken,
+considering the things I see and hear, Marna! I don't so much mind about
+the grown-ups. If they succeed in making a mess of things, why, they can
+take the consequences. But the kiddies--they're the ones that torment
+me. Try as I can to harden myself, and to say that after I've done my
+utmost my responsibility ends, I can't get them off my mind. But what's
+on _your_ mind, bright one?"
+
+"Oh, Kate, so much! But wait till we get to the house. It's not a thing
+to shriek out here on the street."
+
+The wind swept around the corner, buffeting them, and Kate drew Marna's
+arm in her own and fairly bore the little creature along with her. They
+entered the silent house, groped through the darkened hall and up the
+stairs to Kate's own room.
+
+"Honora isn't home, I fancy," she said, in apology for the pervading
+desolation. "She stays late at the laboratory these nights. She says
+she's on the verge of a wonderful discovery. It's something she and
+David have been working out together, but she's been making some
+experiments in secret, with which she means to surprise David. Of course
+she'll give all the credit to him--that's her policy. She's his
+helpmate, she says, nothing more."
+
+"But the babies?" asked Marna with that naivete characteristic of her.
+"Where are they?"
+
+"Up in the nursery at the top of the house. It will be light and warm
+there, I think. Honora had a fireplace put in so that it would be
+cheerful. I always feel sure it's pleasant up there, however forbidding
+the rest of the house may look."
+
+"Mary has made a great difference with it since she came, hasn't she? Of
+course Honora couldn't do the wonderful things she's doing and be
+fussing around the house all the time. Still, she might train her
+servants, mightn't she?"
+
+"Well, there aren't really any to train," said Kate. "There's Mrs. Hays,
+the nurse, a very good woman, but as we take our meals out, and are all
+so independent, there's no one else required, except occasionally.
+Honora wouldn't think of such an extravagance as a parlor maid. We're a
+community of working folk, you see."
+
+Marna had been lighting the candles which Kate usually kept for company;
+and, moreover, since there was kindling at hand, she laid a fire and
+touched a match to it.
+
+"I must have it look homey, Kate--for reasons."
+
+"Do whatever it suits you to do, child."
+
+"But can I tell you what it suits me to do, Kate?"
+
+"How do I know? Are you referring to visible things or talking in
+parables? There's something very eerie about you to-night, Marna. Your
+eyes look phosphorescent. What's been happening to you? Is it the glory
+of last night that's over you yet?"
+
+"No, not that. It's--it's a new glory, Kate."
+
+"A new glory, is it? Since last night? Tell me, then."
+
+Kate flung her long body into a Morris chair and prepared to listen.
+Marna looked about her as if seeking a chair to satisfy her whim, and,
+finding none, sank upon the floor before the blaze. She leaned back,
+resting on one slight arm, and turned her dream-haunted face glowing
+amid its dark maze of hair, till her eyes could hold those of
+her friend.
+
+"Oh, Kate!" she breathed, and made her great confession in those two
+words.
+
+"A man!" cried Kate, alarmed. "Now!"
+
+"Now! Last night. And to-day. It was like lightning out of a clear sky.
+I've seen him often, and now I remember it always warmed me to see him,
+and made me feel that I wasn't alone. For a long time, I believe, I've
+been counting him in, and being happier because he was near. But I
+didn't realize it at all--till last night."
+
+"You saw him after the opera?"
+
+"Only for half a minute, at the door of my house. We only said a word or
+two. He whispered he had lost me--that I had killed him. Oh, I don't
+remember what he said. But we looked straight at each other. I didn't
+sleep all night, and when I lay awake I tried to think of the wonderful
+fact that I had made my debut, and that it wasn't a failure, at any
+rate. But I couldn't think about that, or about my career. I couldn't
+hold to anything but the look in his eyes and the fact that I was to see
+him to-day. Not that he said so. But we both knew. Why, we couldn't have
+lived if we hadn't seen each other to-day."
+
+"And you did?"
+
+"Oh, we did. He called me up on the telephone about two o'clock, and
+said he had waited as long as he could, and that he'd been walking the
+floor, not daring to ring till he was sure that I'd rested enough after
+last night. So I told him to come, and he must have been just around the
+corner, for he was there in a minute. I wanted him to come in and sit
+down, but he said he didn't believe a house could hold such audacity as
+his. So we went out on the street. It was cold and bleak. The Midway was
+a long, gray blankness. I felt afraid of it, actually. All the world
+looked forbidding to me--except just the little place where I walked
+with him. It was as if there were a little warm beautiful radius in
+which we could keep together, and live for each other, and comfort each
+other, and keep harm away."
+
+"Oh, Marna! And you, with a career before you! What do you mean to do?"
+
+"I don't know what to do. We don't either of us know what to do. He says
+he'll go mad with me on the stage, wearing myself out, the object of the
+jealousy of other women and of love-making from the men. He--says it's a
+profanation. I tried to tell him it couldn't be a profanation to serve
+art; but, Kate, he didn't seem to know what I meant. He has such
+different standards. He wanted to know what I was going to do when I was
+old. He said I'd have no real home, and no haven of love; and that I'd
+better be the queen of his home as long as I lived than to rule it a
+little while there on the stage and then--be forgotten. Oh, it isn't
+what he said that counts. All that sounds flat enough as I repeat it.
+It's the wonder of being with some one that loves you like that and of
+feeling that there are two of you who belong--"
+
+"How do you know you belong?" asked Kate with sharp good sense. "Why,
+bright one, you've been swept off your feet by mere--forgive me--by
+mere sex."
+
+That glint of the eyes which Kate called Celtic flashed from Marna.
+
+"Mere sex!" she repeated. "Mere sex! You're not trying to belittle that,
+are you? Why, Kate, that's the beginning and the end of things. What
+I've always liked about you is that you look big facts in the face and
+aren't afraid of truth. Sex! Why, that's home and happiness and all a
+woman really cares for, isn't it?"
+
+"No, it isn't all she cares for," declared Kate valiantly. "She cares
+for a great many other things. And when I said mere sex I was trying to
+put it politely. Is it really home and lifelong devotion that you two
+are thinking about, or are you just drunk with youth and--well, with
+infatuation?"
+
+Marna turned from her to the fire.
+
+"Kate," she said, "I don't know what you call it, but when I looked in
+his eyes I felt as if I had just seen the world for the first time. I
+have liked to live, of course, and to study, and it was tremendously
+stirring, singing there before all those people. But, honestly, I can
+see it would lead nowhere. A few years of faint celebrity, an empty
+heart, a homeless life--then weariness. Oh, I know it. I have a trick of
+seeing things. Oh, he's the man for me, Kate. I realized it the moment
+he pointed it out. We could not be mistaken. I shall love him forever
+and he'll love me just as I love him."
+
+"By the way," said Kate, "who is he? Someone from the opera company?"
+
+"Who is he? Why, he's George Fitzgerald, of course."
+
+"Mrs. Dennison's nephew?"
+
+"Certainly. Who else should it be?"
+
+"Why, he's a pleasant enough young man--very cheerful and quite
+intelligent--but, Marna--"
+
+Marna leaped to her feet.
+
+"You're not in a position to pass judgment upon him, Kate. How can you
+know what a wonderful soul he has? Why, there's no one so brave, or so
+humble, or so sweet, or with such a worship for women--"
+
+"For you, you mean."
+
+"Of course I mean for me. You don't suppose I'd endure it to have him
+worshiping anybody else, do you? Oh, it's no use protesting. I only hope
+that Mrs. Barsaloux won't."
+
+"Yes, doesn't that give you pause? Think of all Mrs. Barsaloux has done
+for you; and she did it with the understanding that you were to go on
+the stage. She was going to get her reward in the contribution you
+made to art."
+
+Marna burst into rippling laughter.
+
+"I'll give her something better than art, Kate Crosspatch. I'll give her
+a home--and I'll name my first girl after her."
+
+"Marna!" gasped Kate. "You do go pretty fast for a little thing."
+
+"Oh, I'm Irish," laughed Marna. "We Irish are a very old people. We
+always knew that if you loved a man, you had to have him or die, and
+that if you had him, you'd love to see the look of him coming out in
+your sons and daughters."
+
+Suddenly the look of almost infantile blitheness left her face. The
+sadness which is inherent in the Irish countenance spread over it, like
+sudden mist over a landscape. The ancient brooding aspect of the Celts
+was upon her.
+
+"Yes," she repeated, "we Irish are very old, and there is nothing about
+life--or death--that we do not know."
+
+Kate was not quite sure what she meant, but with a sudden impulse she
+held out her arms to the girl, who, with a low cry, fled to them. Then
+her bright bravery melted in a torrent of tears.
+
+
+
+XI
+
+They had met like flame and wind. It was irrational and wonderful and
+conclusive. But after all, it might not have come to quite so swift a
+climax if Marna, following Kate's advice, had not confided the whole
+thing to Mrs. Barsaloux.
+
+Now, Mrs. Barsaloux was a kind woman, and one with plenty of sentiment
+in her composition. But she believed that there were times when Love
+should not be given the lead. Naturally, it seemed to her that this was
+one of them. She had spent much money upon the education of this girl
+whom she had "assumed," as Marna sometimes playfully put it. Nothing but
+her large, active, and perhaps interfering benevolence and Mama's
+winning and inexplicable charm held the two together, and the very
+slightness of their relationship placed them under peculiar obligations
+to each other.
+
+"It's ungrateful of you," Mrs. Barsaloux explained, "manifestly
+ungrateful! It's your role to love nothing but your career." She was not
+stern, merely argumentative.
+
+"But didn't you expect me ever to love any one?" queried Marna.
+
+Mrs. Barsaloux contemplated a face and figure made for love from the
+beginning, and delicately ripened for it, like a peach in the sun.
+
+"But you could have waited, my dear girl. There's time for both the
+love and the career."
+
+Marna shook her head slowly.
+
+"George says there isn't," she answered with an irritating sweetness.
+"He says I'm not to go on the stage at all. He says--"
+
+"Don't 'he says' me like that, Marna," cried her friend. "It sounds too
+unutterably silly. Here you are with a beautiful talent--every one
+agrees about that--and a chance to develop it. I've made many sacrifices
+to give you that chance. Very well; you've had your trial before the
+public. You've made good. You could repay yourself and me for all that
+has been involved in your development, and you meet a man and come
+smiling to me and say that we're to throw the whole thing over because
+'he says' to."
+
+Marna made no answer at all, but Mrs. Barsaloux saw her settle down in
+the deep chair in which she was sitting as if to huddle away from the
+storm about to break over her.
+
+"She isn't going to offer any resistance," thought the distressed patron
+with dismay. "Her mind is completely made up and she's just crouching
+down to wait till I'm through with my private little hurricane."
+
+So, indeed, it proved. Mrs. Barsaloux felt she had the right to say
+much, and she said it. Marna may or may not have listened. She sat
+shivering and smiling in her chair, and when it was fit for her to
+excuse herself, she did, and walked out bravely; but Mrs. Barsaloux
+noticed that she tottered a little as she reached the door. She did not
+go to her aid, however.
+
+"It's an infatuation," she concluded. "I must treat her as if she had a
+violent disease and take care of her. When people are delirious they
+must be protected against themselves. It's a delirium with her, and the
+best thing I can do is to run off to New York with her. She can make her
+next appearance when the opera company gets there. I'll arrange it this
+afternoon."
+
+She refrained from telling Marna of her plans, but she went straight to
+the city and talked over the situation with her friend the impresario.
+He seemed anything but depressed. On the contrary, he was
+excited--even exalted.
+
+"Spirit her away, madam," he advised. "Of course she will miss her lover
+horribly, and that will be the best thing that can happen to her. Why
+did not the public rise to her the other night? Not because she could
+not sing: far from it. If a nightingale sings, then Miss Cartan does.
+But she left her audience a little cold. Let us face the facts. You saw
+it. We all saw it. And why? Because she was too happy, madam; too
+complaisant; too uninstructed in the emotions. Now it will be different.
+We will take her away; we will be patient with her while she suffers;
+afterward she will bless us, for she will have discovered the secret of
+the artist, and then when she opens her little silver throat we shall
+have SONG."
+
+Mrs. Barsaloux, with many compunctions, and with some pangs of pure
+motherly sympathy, nevertheless agreed.
+
+"If only he had been a man above the average," she said, as she
+tearfully parted from the great man, "perhaps it would not have
+mattered so much."
+
+The impresario lifted his eyebrows and his mustaches at the same time
+and assumed the aspect of a benevolent Mephistopheles.
+
+"The variety of man, madam," he said sententiously, "makes no manner of
+difference. It is the tumult in Miss Marna's soul which I hope we shall
+be able to utilize"--he interrupted himself with a smile and a bow as he
+opened the door for his departing friend--"for the purposes of art."
+
+Mrs. Barsaloux sat in the middle of her taxi seat all the way home, and
+saw neither street, edifice, nor human being. She was looking back into
+her own busy, confused, and frustrated life, and was remembering certain
+things which she had believed were buried deep. Her heart misgave her
+horribly. Yet to hand over this bright singing bird, so exquisite, so
+rare, so fitted for purposes of exposition, to the keeping of a mere
+male being of unfortunate contiguity, to permit him to carry her into
+the seclusion of an ordinary home to wait on him and regulate her life
+according to his whim, was really too fantastic for consideration. So
+she put her memories and her tendernesses out of sight and walked up
+the stairs with purpose in her tread.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She meant to "have it out" with the girl, who was, she believed,
+reasonable enough after all.
+
+"She's been without her mother for so long," she mused, "that it's no
+wonder she's lacking in self-control. I must have the firmness that a
+mother would have toward her. It would be the height of cruelty to let
+her have her own way in this."
+
+If the two could have met at that moment, it would have changed the
+course of both their lives. But a trifle had intervened. Marna Cartan
+had gone walking; and she never came back. Only, the next day, radiantly
+beautiful, with fresh flowers in her hands, Marna Fitzgerald came
+running in begging to be forgiven. She tried to carry the situation with
+her impetuosity. She was laughing, crying, pleading. She got close to
+her old friend as if she would enwrap her in her influence. She had the
+veritable aspect of the bride. Whatever others might think regarding her
+lost career, it was evident that she believed the great hour had just
+struck for her. Her husband was with her.
+
+"Haven't you any apology to make, sir?" poor Mrs. Barsaloux cried to
+him. He looked matter-of-fact, she thought, and as if he ought to be
+able to take a reasonable view of things. But she had misjudged. Perhaps
+it was his plain, everyday, commercial garments which deceived her and
+made her think him open to week-day arguments; for at that moment he
+was really a knight of romance, and at Mrs. Barsaloux's question his
+eyes gleamed with unsuspected fires.
+
+"Who could be so foolish as to apologize for happiness like ours?" he
+demanded.
+
+"Aren't you going to forgive us, dear?" pleaded Marna.
+
+But Mrs. Barsaloux couldn't quite stand that.
+
+"You sound like an old English comedy, Marna," she said impatiently.
+"You're of age; I'm no relation to you; you've a perfect right to be
+married. Better take advantage of being here to pack your things. You'll
+need them."
+
+"You mean that I'm not expected to come here again, _tante_?"
+
+"I shall sail for France in a week," said Mrs. Barsaloux wearily.
+
+"For France, _tante_? When did you decide?"
+
+"This minute," said the lady, and gave the married lovers to understand
+that the interview was at an end.
+
+Marna went weeping down the street, holding on to her George's arm.
+
+"If she'd been Irish, she'd have cursed me," she sobbed, "and then I'd
+have had something to go on, so to speak. Perhaps I could have got her
+to take it off me in time. But what are you going to do with a snubbing
+like that?"
+
+"Oh, leave it for the Arctic explorers to explain. They're used to
+being in below-zero temperature," George said with a troubled laugh.
+"I'm sure I can't waste any time thinking about a woman who could stand
+out against you, Marna, the way you are this day, and the way
+you're looking."
+
+"But, George, she thinks I'm a monster."
+
+"Then there's something wrong with her zoology. You're an--"
+
+"Don't call me an angel, dear, whatever you do! There are some things I
+hate to be called--they're so insipid. If any one called me an angel I'd
+know he didn't appreciate me. Come, let's go to Kate's. She's my court
+of last appeal. If Kate can't forgive me, I'll know I've done wrong."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Kate was never to forget that night. She had come in from a day of
+difficult and sordid work. For once, the purpose back of all her toil
+among the people there in the great mill town was lost sight of in the
+sheer repulsiveness of the tasks she had had to perform. The pathos of
+their temptations, the terrific disadvantages under which they labored,
+their gray tragedies, had some way lost their import. She was merely a
+dreadfully fagged woman, disgusted with evil, with dirt and poverty. She
+was at outs with her world and impatient with the suffering involved in
+the mere living of life.
+
+Moreover, when she had come into the house, she had found it dark as
+usual. The furnace was down, and her own room was cold. But she had set
+her teeth together, determined not to give way to depression, and had
+made her rather severe toilet for dinner when word was brought to her by
+the children's nurse that Dr. and Mrs. Fitzgerald desired to see her.
+For a moment she could not comprehend what that might mean; then the
+truth assailed her, took her by the hand, and ran her down the stairs
+into Mama's arms.
+
+"But it's outrageous," she cried, hugging Marna to her. "How could you
+be so willful?"
+
+"It's glorious," retorted Marna. "And if I ever was going to be willful,
+now's the time."
+
+"Right you are," broke in George. "What does Stevenson say about that?
+'Youth is the time to be up and doing.' You're not going to be severe
+with us, Miss Barrington? We've been counting on you."
+
+"Have you?" inquired Kate, putting Marna aside and taking her husband by
+the hand. "Well, you are your own justification, you two. But haven't
+you been ungrateful?"
+
+Marna startled her by a bit of Dionysian philosophy.
+
+"Is it ungrateful to be happy?" she demanded. "Would anybody have been
+in the right who asked us to be unhappy? Why don't you call us brave? Do
+you imagine it isn't difficult to have people we love disapproving of
+us? But you know yourself, Kate, if we'd waited forty-eight hours, I'd
+have been dragged off to live with my career."
+
+She laughed brightly, sinking back in her chair and throwing wide her
+coat. Kate looked at her appraisingly, and warmed in the doing of it.
+
+"You don't look as if you were devoted to a career, she admitted.
+
+"Oh," sighed Fitzgerald, "I only just barely got her in time!"
+
+"And now what do you propose doing?"
+
+"Why, to-morrow we shall look for a place to live--for a home."
+
+"Do you mean a flat?" asked Kate with a flick of satire.
+
+"A flat, or anything. It doesn't matter much what."
+
+"Or where?"
+
+"It will be on the West Side," said the matter-of-fact Fitzgerald.
+
+"And who'll keep house for you? Must you find servants?"
+
+"Why, Kate, we're dreadfully poor," cried Marna excitedly, as if poverty
+were a mere adventure. "Didn't you know that? I shall do my own work."
+
+"Oh, we've both got to work," added Fitzgerald.
+
+He didn't say he was sorry Marna had to slave with her little white
+hands, or that he realized that he was doing a bold--perhaps an
+impious--thing in snatching a woman from her service to art to go into
+service for him. Evidently he didn't think that way. Neither minded any
+sacrifice apparently. The whole of it was, they were together. Suddenly,
+they seemed to forget Kate. They stood gazing at each other as if their
+sense of possession overwhelmed them. Kate felt something like angry
+resentment stir in her. How dared they, when she was so alone, so weary,
+so homeless?
+
+"Will you stay to dinner with me?" she asked with something like
+asperity.
+
+"To dinner?" they murmured in vague chorus. "No, thanks."
+
+"But where do you intend to have dinner?"
+
+"We--we haven't thought," confessed Marna.
+
+"Oh, anywhere," declared Fitzgerald.
+
+Marna rose and her husband buttoned her coat about her.
+
+They smiled at Kate seraphically, and she saw that they wanted to be
+alone, and that it made little difference to them whether they were
+sitting in a warm room or walking the windy streets. She kissed them
+both, with tears, and said:--
+
+"God bless you."
+
+That seemed to be what they wanted. They longed to be blessed.
+
+"That's what Aunt Dennison said," smiled Fitzgerald.
+
+Then Kate realized that now the exotic Marna would be calling the
+completely domesticated Mrs. Dennison "aunt." But Marna looked as if she
+liked that, too. It was their hour for liking everything. As Kate opened
+the outer door for them, the blast struck through her, but the lovers,
+laughing, ran down the stairs together. They were, in their way,
+outcasts; they were poor; the future might hold bitter disillusion. But
+now, borne by the sharp wind, their laughter drifted back like a song.
+
+Kate wrapped her old coat about her and made her solitary way to Mrs.
+Dennison's depressed Caravansary.
+
+
+
+XII
+
+There was no question about it. Life was supplying Kate Barrington with
+a valuable amount of "data." On every hand the emergent or the
+reactionary woman offered herself for observation, although to say that
+Kate was able to take a detached and objective view of it would be going
+altogether too far. The truth was, she threw herself into every friend's
+trouble, and she counted as friends all who turned to her, or all whom
+she was called upon to serve.
+
+A fortnight after Mama's marriage, an interesting episode came Kate's
+way. Mrs. Barsaloux had introduced to the Caravansary a Mrs. Leger whom
+she had once met on the steamer on her way to Brindisi, and she had
+invited her to join her during a stay in Chicago. Mrs. Barsaloux,
+however, having gone off to France in a hot fit of indignation, Mrs.
+Leger presented herself with a letter from Mrs. Barsaloux to Mrs.
+Dennison. That hospitable woman consented to take in the somewhat
+enigmatic stranger.
+
+That she was enigmatic all were quick to perceive. She was beautiful,
+with a delicate, high-bred grace, and she had the manner of a woman who
+had been courted and flattered. As consciously beautiful as Mary
+Morrison, she bore herself with more discretion. Taste governed all
+that she said and did. Her gowns, her jewels, her speech were
+distinguished. She seemed by all tokens an accomplished worldling; yet
+it was not long before Kate discovered that it was anything but worldly
+matters which were consuming her attention.
+
+She had come to Chicago for the purpose of adjusting her fortune,--a
+large one, it appeared,--and of concluding her relations with the world.
+She had decided to go into a convent, and had chosen one of those
+numerous sisterhoods which pass their devotional days upon the bright
+hill-slopes without Naples. She refrained from designating the
+particular sisterhood, and she permitted no discussion of her motives.
+She only said that she had not been born a Catholic, but had turned to
+Mother Church when the other details of life ceased to interest her. She
+was a widow, but she seemed to regard her estate with quiet regret
+merely. If tragedy had entered her life, it must have been subsequent to
+widowhood. She had a son, but it appeared that he had no great need of
+her. He was in the care of his paternal grandparents, who were giving
+him an education. He was soon to enter Oxford, and she felt confident
+that his life would be happy. She was leaving him an abundance; she had
+halved her fortune and was giving her share to the convent.
+
+If she had not been so exquisite, so skilled in the nuances of life, so
+swift and elusive in conversation, so well fitted for the finest forms
+of enjoyment, her renunciation of liberty would not have proved so
+exasperating to Kate. A youthful enthusiasm for religion might have made
+her step understandable. But enthusiasm and she seemed far apart.
+Intelligent as she unquestionably was, she nevertheless seemed to have
+given herself over supinely to a current of emotions which was sweeping
+her along. She looked both pious and piteous, for all of her
+sophisticated manner and her accomplishments and graces, and Kate felt
+like throwing a rope to her. But Mrs. Leger was not in a mood to seize
+the rope. She had her curiously gentle mind quite made up. Though she
+was still young,--not quite eighteen years older than her son,--she
+appeared to have no further concern for life. To the last, she was
+indulging in her delicate vanities--wore her pearls, walked in charming
+foot-gear, trailed after her the fascinating gowns of the initiate, and
+viewed with delight the portfolios of etchings which Dr. von Shierbrand
+chanced to be purchasing.
+
+She was glad, she said, to be at the Caravansary, quite on a different
+side of the city from her friends. She made no attempt to renew old
+acquaintances or to say farewell to her former associates. Her
+extravagant home on the Lake Shore Drive was passed over to a
+self-congratulatory purchaser; the furnishings were sold at auction; and
+her other properties were disposed of in such a manner as to make the
+transfer of her wealth convenient for the recipients.
+
+She asked Kate to go to the station with her.
+
+"I've given you my one last friendship," she said. "I shall speak with
+no one on the steamer. My journey must be spent in preparation for my
+great change. But it seems human and warm to have you see me off."
+
+"It seems inhuman to me, Mrs. Leger," Kate cried explosively. "Something
+terrible has happened to you, I suppose, and you're hiding away from it.
+You think you're going to drug yourself with prayer. But can you? It
+doesn't seem at all probable to me. Dear Mrs. Leger, be brave and stay
+out in the world with the other living people."
+
+"You are talking of something which you do not understand," said Mrs.
+Leger gently. "There is a secret manna for the soul of which the
+chosen may eat."
+
+"Oh!" cried Kate, almost angrily. "Are these your own words? I cannot
+understand a prepossession like this on your part. It doesn't seem to
+set well on you. Isn't there some hideous mistake? Aren't you under the
+influence of some emotional episode? Might it not be that you were ill
+without realizing it? Perhaps you are suffering from some hidden
+melancholy, and it is impelling you to do something out of keeping with
+the time and with your own disposition."
+
+"I can see how it might appear that way to you, Miss Barrington. But I
+am not ill, except in my soul, which I expect to be healed in the place
+to which I am going. Try to understand that among the many kinds of
+human beings in this world there are the mystics. They have a right to
+their being and to their belief. Their joys and sorrows are different
+from those of others, but they are just as existent. Please do not worry
+about me."
+
+"But you understand so well how to handle the material things in the
+world," protested Kate. "You seem so appreciative and so competent. If
+you have learned so much, what is the sense of shutting it all up in
+a cell?"
+
+"Did you never read of Purun Bhagat," asked Mrs. Leger smilingly, "who
+was rich with the riches of a king; who was wise with the learning of
+Calcutta and of Oxford; who could have held as high an office as any
+that the Government of England could have given him in India, and who
+took his beggar's bowl and sat upon a cavern's rim and contemplated the
+secret soul of things? You know your Kipling. I have not such riches or
+such wisdom, but I have the longing upon me to go into silence."
+
+The lips from which these words fell were both tender and ardent; the
+little gesticulating hands were clad in modish, mouse-colored suede;
+orris root mixed with some faint, haunting odor, barely caressed the air
+with perfume. Kate looked at her companion in despair.
+
+"I must be an outer barbarian!" she cried. "I can imagine religious
+ecstasy, but you are not ecstatic. I can imagine turning to a convent as
+a place of hiding from shame or despair. But you are not going into it
+that way. As for wishing to worship, I understand that perfectly. Prayer
+is a sort of instinct with me, and all the reasoning in the world
+couldn't make me cast myself out of communion with the unknown something
+roundabout me that seems to answer me. But what you are doing seems, as
+I said, so obsolete."
+
+"I am looking forward to it," said Mrs. Leger, "as eagerly as a girl
+looks forward to her marriage. It is a beautiful romance to me. It is
+the completely beautiful thing that is going to make up to me for all
+the ugliness I have encountered in life."
+
+For the first time a look of passion disturbed the serenity of the
+high-bred, conventional face.
+
+Kate threw out her hands with a repudiating gesture.
+
+"Well," she said, "in the midst of my freedom I shall think of you often
+and wonder if you have found something that I have missed. You are
+leaving the world, and books, and friends, and your son for some pale
+white idea. It seems to me you are going to the embrace of a wraith."
+
+Mrs. Leger smiled slowly, and it was as if a lamp showed for a moment in
+a darkened house and then mysteriously vanished.
+
+"Believe me," she reiterated, "you do not understand."
+
+Kate helped her on the train, and left her surrounded by her fashionable
+bags, her flowers, fruit, and literature. She took these things as a
+matter of course. She had looked at her smart little boots as she
+adjusted them on a hassock and had smiled at Kate almost teasingly.
+
+"In a month," she said, "I shall be walking with bared feet, or, if the
+weather demands, in sandals. I shall wear a rope about my waist over my
+brown robe. My hair will be cut, my head coiffed. When you are thinking
+of me, think of me as I really shall be."
+
+"So many things are going to happen that you will not see!" cried Kate.
+"Why, maybe in a little while we shall all be going up in
+flying-machines! You wouldn't like to miss that, would you? Or your son
+will be growing into a fine man and you'll not see him--nor the woman he
+marries--nor his children." She stopped, breathing hard.
+
+"It is like the sound of the surf on a distant shore," smiled Mrs.
+Leger. "Good-bye, Miss Barrington. Don't grieve about me. I shall be
+happier than you can know or dream."
+
+The conductor swung Kate off the train after it was in motion.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So, among other things, she had that to think of. She could explain it
+all merely upon the hypothesis that the sound of the awakening
+trumpets--the trumpets which were arousing woman from her long
+torpor--had not reached the place where this wistful woman dwelt, with
+her tender remorses, her delicate aversions, her hunger for the
+indefinite consolations of religion.
+
+Moreover, she was beginning to understand that not all women were
+maternal. She had, indeed, come across many incidents in her work which
+emphasized this. Good mothers were quite as rare as good fathers; and it
+was her growing belief that more than half of the parents in the world
+were undeserving of the children born to them. Also, she realized that a
+child might be born of the body and not of the spirit, and a mother
+might minister well to a child's corporeal part without once ministering
+to its soul. It was possible that there never had been any bond save a
+physical one between Mrs. Leger and her son. Perhaps they looked at each
+other with strange, uncomprehending eyes. That, she could imagine, would
+be a tantalization from which a sensitive woman might well wish to
+escape. It was within the realm of possibility that he was happier with
+his grandmother than with his mother. There might be temperamental as
+well as physical "throwbacks."
+
+Kate remembered a scene she once had witnessed at a railway station. Two
+meagre, hard-faced, work-worn women were superintending the removal of a
+pine-covered coffin from one train to another, and as the grim box was
+wheeled the length of a long platform, a little boy, wild-eyed,
+gold-haired, and set apart from all the throng by a tragic misery, ran
+after the truck calling in anguish:--
+
+"Grandmother! Grandmother! Don't leave me! I'm so lonesome,
+grandmother! I'm so afraid!"
+
+"Stop your noise," commanded the woman who must have been his mother.
+"Don't you know she can't hear you?"
+
+"Oh, maybe she can! Maybe she can," sobbed the boy. "Oh, grandmother,
+don't you hear me calling? There's nobody left for me now."
+
+The woman caught him sharply by the arm.
+
+"I'm left, Jimmy. What makes you say such a thing as that? Stay with
+mother, that's a good boy."
+
+They were lifting the box into the baggage-car. The boy saw it. He
+straightened himself in the manner of one who tries to endure a
+mortal wound.
+
+"She's gone," he said. He looked at his mother once, as if measuring her
+value to him. Then he turned away. There was no comfort for him there.
+
+Often, since, Kate had wondered concerning the child. She had imagined
+his grim home, his barren days; the plain food; the compulsory task; the
+kind, yet heavy-handed, coarse-voiced mother. She was convinced that the
+grandmother had been different. In the corner where she had sat, there
+must have been warmth and welcome for the child. Perhaps there were
+mellow old tales, sweet old songs, soft strokings of the head, smuggled
+sweets--all the beautiful grandmotherly delights.
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+Since Kate had begun to write, a hundred--a thousand--half-forgotten
+experiences had come back to her. As they returned to her memory, they
+acquired significance. They related themselves with other incidents or
+with opinions. They illustrated life, and however negligible in
+themselves, they attained a value because of their relation to
+the whole.
+
+It was seldom that she felt lonely now. Her newly acquired power of
+self-expression seemed to extend and supplement her personality. August
+von Shierbrand had said that he wished to marry her because she
+completed him. It had occurred to her at the time--though she suppressed
+her inclination to say so--that she was born for other purposes than
+completing him, or indeed anybody. She wished to think of herself as an
+individual, not as an addendum. But, after all, she had sympathized with
+the man. She was beginning to understand that that "solitude of the
+soul," which one of her acquaintances, a sculptor, had put into
+passionate marble, was caused from that sense of incompletion. It was
+not alone that others failed one--it was self-failure, secret shame, all
+the inevitable reticences, which contributed most to that.
+
+She fell into the way of examining the men and women about her and of
+asking:--
+
+"Is he satisfied? Is she companioned? Has this one realized himself? Is
+that one really living?"
+
+She remembered one person--one only--who had given her the impression of
+abounding physical, mental, and spiritual life. True, she had seen him
+but a moment--one swift, absurd, curiously haunting moment. That was
+Karl Wander, Honora's cousin, and the cousin of Mary Morrison. They were
+the children of three sisters, and from what Kate knew of their
+descendants' natures, she felt these sisters must have been palpitating
+creatures.
+
+Yes, Karl Wander had seemed complete--a happy man, seething with plans,
+a wise man who took life as it came; a man of local qualities yet of
+cosmopolitan spirit--one who would not have fretted at his environment
+or counted it of much consequence, whatever it might have been.
+
+If she could have known him--
+
+But Honora seldom spoke of him. Only sometimes she read a brief note
+from him, and added:--
+
+"He wishes to be remembered to you, Kate."
+
+She did not hint: "He saw you only a second." Honora was not one of
+those persons who take pleasure in pricking bubbles. She perceived the
+beauty of iridescence. If her odd friend and her inexplicable cousin had
+any satisfaction in remembering a passing encounter, they could have
+their pleasure of it.
+
+Kate, for her part, would not have confessed that she thought of him.
+But, curiously, she sometimes dreamed of him.
+
+At last Ray McCrea was coming home. His frequent letters, full of good
+comment, announced the fact.
+
+"I've been winning my spurs, commercially speaking," he wrote. "The old
+department heads, whom my father taught me to respect, seem pleased with
+what I have done. I believe that when I come back they will have ceased
+to look on me as a cadet. And if they think I'm fit for
+responsibilities, perhaps you will think so, too, Kate. At any rate, I
+know you'll let me say that I am horribly homesick. This being in a
+foreign land is all very well, but give me the good old American ways,
+crude though they may be. I want a straightforward confab with some one
+of my own sort; I want the feeling that I can move around without
+treading on somebody's toes. I want, above all, to have a comfortable
+entertaining evening with a nice American girl--a girl that takes
+herself and me for granted, and isn't shying off all the time as if I
+were a sort of bandit. What a relief to think that you'll not be
+accompanied by a chaperon! I shall get back my self-respect once I'm
+home again with you nice, self-confident young American women."
+
+"It will be good to see him, I believe," mused Kate. "After all, he
+always looked after me. I can't seem to remember just how much pleasure
+I had in his society. At any rate, we'll have plenty of things to talk
+about. He'll tell me about Europe, and I'll tell him about my work. That
+ought to carry us along quite a while."
+
+She set about making preparations for him. She induced Honora to let
+her have an extra room, and she made her fine front chamber into a
+sitting-room, with a knocker on the door, and some cheerful brasses and
+old prints within. She came across oddities of this sort in her Russian
+and Italian neighborhoods, but until now she had not taken very much
+interest in what she was inclined to term "sublimated junk."
+
+Mary Morrison took an almost vicious amusement in Kate's sudden efforts
+at aesthetic domestication, and Marna Fitzgerald--who was
+delighted--considered it as a frank confession of sentiment. Kate let
+them think what they pleased. She presented to their inspection--even
+Mary was invited up for the occasion--a cheerful room with a cream
+paper, a tawny-colored rug, some comfortable wicker chairs, an
+interesting plaster cast or two, and the previously mentioned "loot."
+Mary, in a fit of friendliness, contributed a Japanese wall-basket
+dripping with vines; Honora proffered a lamp with a soft shade; and
+Marna took pride in bestowing some delicately embroidered cushions,
+white, and beautiful with the beauty of Belfast linen.
+
+It did not appear to occur to Kate, however, that personal adornment
+would be desirable, and it took the united efforts of Marna and Mary to
+persuade her that a new frock or two might be needed. Kate had a way of
+avoiding shabbiness, but of late her interest in decoration had been
+anything but keen. However, she ventured now on a rather beguiling
+dress for evening--a Japanese crepe which a returned missionary sold her
+for something more than a song. Dr. von Shierbrand said it was the color
+of rust, but Marna affirmed that it had the hue of copper--copper that
+was not too bright. It was embroidered gloriously with chrysanthemums,
+and she had great pleasure in it. Mary Morrison drew from her rainbow
+collection a scarf which accentuated the charm of the frock, and when
+Kate had contrived a monk's cape of brown, she was ready for possible
+entertainments--panoplied for sentiment. She would make no further
+concessions. Her practical street clothes and her home-made frocks of
+white linen, with which she made herself dainty for dinner at Mrs.
+Dennison's, had to serve her.
+
+"I'm so poor," she said to Marna, "that I feel like apologizing for my
+inefficiency. I'm getting something now for my talks at the clubs, and
+I'm paid for my writing, too. Now that it's begun to be published, I
+ought to be opulent presently."
+
+"You're no poorer than we," Marna said. "But of course there are two of
+us to be poor together; and that makes it more interesting."
+
+"Love doesn't seem to be flying out of your window," smiled Kate.
+
+"We've bars on the windows," laughed Marna. "Some former occupant of the
+flat put them on to keep the babies from dashing their brains out on the
+pavement below, and we haven't taken them off." She blushed. "No,"
+responded Kate with a _moue_; "what was the use?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Unfortunately McCrea, the much-expected, had not made it quite plain
+when he was to land in New York. To be sure, Kate might have consulted
+the steamer arrivals, but she forgot to do that. So it happened that
+when a wire came from Ray saying that he would be in Chicago on a
+certain Saturday night in mid-May, Kate found herself under compulsion
+to march in a suffrage procession.
+
+David Fulham thought the circumstance uproariously funny, and he told
+them about it at the Caravansary. They made rather an annoying jest of
+it, but Kate held to her promise.
+
+"It's an historic event to my mind," she said with all the dignity she
+could summon. "I wouldn't excuse myself if I could. And I can't. I've
+promised to march at the head of a division. We hope there'll be twenty
+thousand of us."
+
+Perhaps there were. Nobody knew. But all the city did know that down the
+broad boulevard, in the mild, damp air of the May night, regiment upon
+regiment of women marched to bear witness to their conviction and their
+hope. Bands played, choruses sang, transparencies proclaimed watchwords,
+and every woman in the seemingly endless procession swung a yellow
+lantern. The onlookers crowded the sidewalks and hung from the towering
+office buildings, to watch that string of glowing amber beads reaching
+away to north and to south. College girls, working-girls, home-women,
+fine ladies, efficient business women, vague, non-producing,
+half-awakened women,--all sorts, all conditions, black, white, Latin,
+Slav, Germanic, English, American, American, American,--they came
+marching on. They were proud and they were diffident; they were sad and
+they were merry; they were faltering and they were enthusiastic. Some
+were there freely, splendidly, exultantly; more were there because some
+force greater than themselves impelled them. Through bewilderment and
+hesitancy and doubt, they saw the lights of the future shining, and they
+fixed their eyes upon the amber lanterns as upon the visible symbols of
+their faith; they marched and marched. They were the members of a new
+revolution, and, as always, only a portion of the revolutionists knew
+completely what they desired.
+
+At the Caravansary there had been sharp disapproval of the whole thing.
+The men had brought forth arguments to show Kate her folly. Mrs.
+Dennison, Mrs. Goodrich, and Mrs. Applegate had spoken gentle words of
+warning; Honora had vaguely suggested that the matter was immaterial;
+Mary Morrison had smiled as one who avoided ugliness; and Kate had
+laughingly defied them.
+
+"I march!" she had declared. "And I'm not ashamed of my company."
+
+It was, indeed, a company of which she was proud. It included the names
+of the most distinguished, the most useful, the most talented, the most
+exclusive, and the most triumphantly inclusive women in the city.
+
+"Poor McCrea," put in Fulham. "Aren't you making him ridiculous? He'll
+come dashing up here the moment he gets off the train. As a matter of
+fact, he'll be half expecting you to meet him. You're making a mistake,
+Miss Barrington, if you'll let a well-meaning fellow-being say so.
+You're leaving the substance for the shadow."
+
+"I've misled you about Ray, I'm afraid," Kate said with unexpected
+patience. "He hasn't really any right to expect me to be waiting, and I
+don't believe he will. Come to think of it, I don't know that I want to
+be found waiting."
+
+"Oh, well, of course--" said Fulham with a shrug, leaving his sentence
+unfinished.
+
+"Anyway," said Kate flushing, "I march!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They told her afterward how McCrea had come toof-toofing up to the door
+in a taxi, and how he had taken the steps two at a time.
+
+"He wrung my hand," said Honora, "and got through the preliminary
+amenities with a dispatch I never have seen excelled. Then he demanded
+you. 'Is she upstairs?' he asked. 'May I go right up? She wrote me she
+had a parlor of her own.' 'She has a parlor,' I said, 'but she isn't in
+it.' He balanced on the end of a toe. 'Where is she?' I thought he was
+going to fly. 'She's out with the suffragists,' I said. I didn't try to
+excuse you. I thought you deserved something pretty bad. But I did tell
+him you'd promised to go and that you hadn't known he was coming that
+day. 'She's in that mess?' he cried. 'I saw the Amazon march as I came
+along. You don't mean Kate's tramping the streets with those women!'
+'Yes, she is,' I said, 'and she's proud to do it. But she was sorry not
+to be here to welcome you.' 'Sorry!' he said; 'why, Mrs. Fulham, I've
+been dreaming of this meeting for months.' Honestly, Kate, I was ashamed
+for you. I asked him in. I told him you'd be home before long. But he
+would not come in. 'Tell her I--I came,' he said. Then he went."
+
+It was late at night, and Kate was both worn and exhilarated with her
+marching. Honora's words let her down considerably. She sat with tears
+in her eyes staring at her friend.
+
+"But couldn't he see," she pleaded, "that I had to keep my word? Didn't
+he understand how important it was? I can see him to-morrow just
+as well."
+
+"Then you'll have to send for him," said Honora decisively. "He'll not
+come without urging."
+
+She went up to bed with a stern aspect, and left Kate sitting staring
+before her by the light of one of Mary's foolish candles.
+
+"They seem to think I'm a very unnatural woman," said Kate to herself.
+"But can't they see how much more important it was that the
+demonstration should be a success than that two lovers should meet at a
+certain hour?"
+
+The word "lovers" had slipped inadvertently into her mind; and no
+sooner had she really recognized it, looked at it, so to speak, fairly
+in the face, than she rejected it with scorn.
+
+"We're just friends," she protested. "One has many friends."
+
+But her little drawing-room, all gay and fresh, accused her of deceiving
+herself; and a glimpse of the embroidered frock reminded her that she
+was contemptibly shirking the truth. One did not make such preparations
+for a mere "friend." She sat down and wrote a note, put stamps on it to
+insure its immediate delivery, and ran out to the corner to mail it.
+Then she fell asleep arguing with herself that she had been right, and
+that he ought to understand what it meant to give one's word, and that
+it could make no difference that they were to meet a few hours later
+instead of at the impetuous moment of his arrival.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She spent the next day at the Juvenile Court, and came home with the
+conviction that there ought to be no more children until all those now
+wandering the hard ways of the world were cared for. She was in no mood
+for sweethearting, yet she looked with some covert anxiety at the
+mail-box. There was an envelope addressed to her, but the superscription
+was not in Ray's handwriting. The Colorado stamp gave her a hint of whom
+it might have come from, and ridiculously she felt her heart quickening.
+Yet why should Karl Wander write to her? She made herself walk slowly
+up the stairs, and insisted that her hat and gloves and jacket should be
+put scrupulously in their places before she opened her letter. It proved
+not to be a letter, after all, but only a number of photographs, taken
+evidently by the sender, who gave no word of himself. He let the
+snow-capped solitary peaks utter his meanings for him. The pictures were
+beautiful and, in some indescribable way, sad--cold and isolate. Kate
+ran her fingers into the envelope again and again, but she could
+discover no note there. Neither was there any name, save her own on
+the cover.
+
+"At least," said Kate testily, "I might have been told whom to thank."
+
+But she knew whom to thank--and she knew with equal positiveness that
+she would send no thanks. For the gift had been a challenge. It seemed
+to say: "I dare you to open communication with me. I dare you to break
+the conscious silence between us!"
+
+Kate did not lift the glove that had been thrown down. She hid the
+photographs in her clock and told no one about them.
+
+At the close of the third day a note came from Ray. Her line, he said,
+had followed him to Lake Forest and he had only then found time to
+answer it. He was seeing old friends and was very much occupied with
+business and with pleasure, but he hoped to see her before long. Kate
+laughed aloud at the rebuff. It was, she thought, a sort of Silvertree
+method of putting her in her place. But she was sorry, too,--sorry for
+his hurt; sorry, indefinitely and indescribably, for something missed.
+If it had been Karl Wander whom she had treated like that he would have
+waited on her doorstep till she came, and if he had felt himself
+entitled to a quarrel, he would have "had it out" before men and the
+high gods.
+
+At least, so she imagined he would have done; but upon consideration
+there were few persons in the world about whom she knew less than about
+Karl Wander. It seemed as if Honora were actually perverse in the way
+she avoided his name.
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+The spring was coming. Signs of it showed at the park edges, where the
+high willow hedges began to give forth shoots of yellowish-green; at
+times the lake was opalescent and the sky had moments of tenderness and
+warmth. Even through the pavement one seemed to scent the earth; and the
+flower shops set up their out-of-door booths and solicited the passer-by
+with blossoms.
+
+When Kate could spare the money, she bought flowers for Marna--for it
+was flower-time with Marna, and she had seen the Angel of the
+Annunciation. All that was Celtic in her was coming uppermost. She
+dreamed and brooded and heard voices. Kate liked to sit in the little
+West-Side flat and be comforted of the happiness there. She was feeling
+very absurd herself, and she was ashamed of her excursion into the
+realms of feminine folly. That was the way she put her defection from
+"common sense," and her little flare of sentiment for Ray, and all her
+breathless, ridiculous preparation for him. She had never worn the
+chrysanthemum dress, and she so loathed the sight of it that she boxed
+it and put it in the bottom of her trunk.
+
+No word came from Ray. "Sometime" had not materialized and he had failed
+to call. His name was much in the papers as "best man" or cotillion
+leader or host at club dinners. He moved in a world of which Kate saw
+nothing--a rather competitive world, where money counted and where there
+was a brisk exchange of social amenities. Kate's festivities consisted
+of settlement dinners and tea here and there, at odd, interesting places
+with fellow "welfare workers"; and now and then she went with Honora to
+some University affair. A great many ladies sent her cards to their
+"afternoons"--ladies whom she met at the home of the President of the
+University, or with whom she came in contact at Hull House or some of
+the other settlements. But such diversions she was obliged to deny
+herself. They would have taken time from her too-busy hours; and she had
+not the strength to do her work according to her conscience, and then to
+drag herself halfway across town, merely for the amiability of making
+her bow and eating an ice in a charming house. Not but that she enjoyed
+the atmosphere of luxury--the elusive sense of opulence given her by the
+flowers, the distant music, the smiling, luxurious, complimentary women,
+the contrast between the glow within and the chill of twilight
+without--twilight sparkling with the lights of the waiting motors, and
+the glittering procession on the Drive. But, after all, while others
+rode, she walked, and sometimes she was very weary. To be sure, she was
+too gallant, too much at ease in her entertaining world, too expectant
+of the future, to fret even for a moment about the fact that she was
+walking while others rode. She hardly gave it a thought. But her
+disadvantages made her unable to cope with other women socially. She
+was, as she often said, fond of playing a game; but the social game
+pushed the point of achievement a trifle too far.
+
+Moreover, there was the mere bother of "dressing the part." Her handsome
+heavy shoes, her strong, fashionable street gloves, her well-cared-for
+street frock, and becoming, practical hat she could obtain and maintain
+in freshness. She was "well-groomed" and made a sort of point of looking
+competent, as if she felt mistress of herself and her circumstances; she
+could even make herself dainty for a little dinner, but the silks and
+furs, the prodigality of yard-long gloves, the fetching boots and
+whimsical jewels of the ladies who made a fine art of feminine
+entertainments, were quite beyond her. So, sensibly, she counted it
+all out.
+
+That Ray was at home in such surroundings, and that, had she been
+willing to give him the welcome he expected, she might have had a
+welcome at these as yet unopened doors through which he passed with
+conscious suavity, sometimes occurred to her. She was but human--and but
+woman--and she could not be completely oblivious to such things. But
+they did not, after all, wear a very alluring aspect.
+
+When she dreamed of being happy, as she often did, it was not amid such
+scenes. Sometimes, when she was half-sleeping, and vague visions of joy
+haunted the farther chambers of her brain, she saw herself walking
+among mountains. The setting sun glittered on distant, splendid snows;
+the torrent rushed by her, filling the world with its clamor; beneath
+lay the valley, and through the gathering gloom she could see the light
+of homes. Then, as sleep drew nearer and the actual world slipped
+farther away, she seemed to be treading the path--homeward--with some
+companion. Which of those lights spelled home for her she did not know,
+and whenever she tried to see the face of her companion, the shadows
+grew deeper,--as deep as oblivion,--and she slept.
+
+She was lonely. She felt she had missed much in missing Ray. She knew
+her friends disapproved of her; and she was profoundly ashamed that they
+should have seen her in that light, expectant hour in which she awaited
+this lover who appeared to be no lover, after all. But she deserved her
+humiliation. She had conducted herself like the expectant bride, and she
+had no right to any such attitude because her feelings were not those
+of a bride.
+
+The thing that she did desperately care about just now was the
+fitting-up of a home for mothers and babes in the Wisconsin woods. It
+was to be a place where the young Polish mothers of a part of her
+district could go and forget the belching horror of the steel mills, and
+the sultry nights in the crowded, vermin-haunted homes. She hoped for
+much from it--much more than the physical recuperation, though that was
+not to be belittled. There was some hitch, at the last, about the
+endowment. A benevolent spinster had promised to remember the
+prospective home in her will and neglected to do so and now there were
+several thousands to be collected from some unknown source. Kate was
+absorbed with that when she was not engaged with her regular work.
+Moreover, she made a point of being absorbed. She could not endure the
+thought that she might be going about with a love-lorn, he-cometh-not
+expression.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Life has a way of ambling withal for a certain time, and then of
+breaking into a headlong gallop--bolting free--plunging to catastrophe
+or liberty. Kate went her busy ways for a fortnight, somewhat chastened
+in spirit, secretly a little ashamed, and altogether very determined to
+make such a useful person of herself that she could forget her apparent
+lack of attractions (for she told herself mercilessly that if she had
+been very much desired by Ray he would not have been able to leave her
+upon so slight a provocation). Then, one day,--it was the last day of
+May and the world had rejuvenated itself,--she came across him.
+
+A more unlikely place hardly could have been chosen for their meeting
+than an "isle of safety" in mid-street, with motors hissing and
+toof-toofing round about, policemen gesticulating, and the crowd
+ceaselessly surging. The two were marooned with twenty others, and met
+face to face, squarely, like foes who set themselves to combat. At first
+he tried not to see her, and she, noting his impulse, thought it would
+be the part of propriety not to see him. Then that struck her as so
+futile, so childish, so altogether a libel on the good-fellowship which
+they had enjoyed in the old days, that she held out her hand.
+
+He swept his hat from his head and grasped the extended hand in a
+violent yet tremulous clutch.
+
+"We seem to be going in opposite directions," she said. There was just a
+hint of a rising inflection in the accent.
+
+He laughed with nervous delight.
+
+"We are going the same way," he declared. "That's a well-established
+fact."
+
+An irritable policeman broke in on them with:--
+
+"Do you people want to get across the street or not?"
+
+"Personally," said McCrea, smiling at him, "I'm not particular."
+
+The policeman was Irish and he liked lovers. He thought he was looking
+at a pair of them.
+
+"Well, it's not the place I'd be choosing for conversation, sir," he
+said.
+
+"Right you are," agreed Ray. "I suppose you'd prefer a lane in
+Ballamacree?"
+
+"Yes, sir. Good luck to you, sir."
+
+"Same to you," called back Ray.
+
+He and Kate swung into the procession on the boulevard. Kate was smiling
+happily.
+
+"You haven't changed a bit!" she cried. "You keep right on enjoying
+yourself, don't you?"
+
+"Not a bit of it," retorted Ray indignantly. "I've been miserable! You
+know I have. The only satisfaction I got at all was in hoping I was
+making you miserable, too. Was I?"
+
+"I wouldn't own to it if you had," said Kate. "Shall we forgive each
+other?"
+
+"Do you want it to be as easy as that--after all we've been through?
+Wouldn't it be more satisfactory to quarrel?"
+
+"You can if you want, of course," Kate laughed. "But hadn't it better be
+with some other person? Really, I wanted to see you dreadfully--or, at
+least, I wanted to see you pleasantly. I had made preparations. You
+didn't let me know when to expect you, and I had an engagement when you
+did come. Weren't you foolish to get in a rage?"
+
+"But I was so frightfully disappointed. I expected so much and I had
+expected it so long."
+
+"Ray!" Her voice was almost stern, and he turned to look at her half
+with amusement, half with apprehension. "Expect nothing. Enjoy
+yourself to-day."
+
+"But how can I enjoy myself to-day unless I am made to understand that
+there is something I may expect from you? Circumstances have kept us
+playing fast and loose long enough. Can't we come to an
+understanding, Kate?"
+
+Kate stopped to look in a florist's window and fixed her eyes upon a
+vast bouquet of pale pink roses.
+
+"Do say something," he said after a time. "Shall I speak from the
+heart?"
+
+"Oh, yes, please." He drew his breath in sharply between his teeth.
+
+"Well, then, I'm not ready to give up my free life, Ray. I can't seem to
+see my way to relinquishing any part of my liberty. I think you know
+why. I've told you everything in my letters. I feel too experimental to
+settle down."
+
+"You don't love me!"
+
+"Did I ever say I did?"
+
+"You gave me to understand that you might."
+
+"You wanted me to try."
+
+"But you haven't succeeded? Then, for heaven's sake, let me go and make
+out some other programme for myself. I've come back to you because I
+couldn't be satisfied away from you. I've seen women, if it comes to
+that,--cities of women. But there's no one like you, Kate, to my mind;
+no one who so makes me enjoy the hour, or so plan for the future. Ever
+since that day when you stood up by the C Bench and fought for the right
+of women to sit on it,--that silly old C Bench,--I've liked your warring
+spirit. And I come back, by Jove, to find you marching with the militant
+women! Well, I didn't know whether to laugh or swear! Anyway, you do
+beat the world."
+
+"A pretty sweetheart I'd make," cried Kate, disgusted with herself. "I'm
+only good to provide you with amusement, it seems."
+
+"You provide me with the breath of life! Heavens, what a spring you
+have when you walk! And you 're as straight as a grenadier. I'm so sick
+of seeing slouching, die-away women! It's only you American women who
+know how to carry yourselves. Oh, Kate, if you can't answer me, don't,
+but let me see you once in a while. I'm a weak character, and I've got
+to enjoy your society a little longer."
+
+"You can enjoy as much of it as you please, only you mustn't be holding
+me up to some tremendous responsibility, and blaming me by and by for
+things I can't help."
+
+"I give you my word I'll not. Oh, Kate, is this a busy day with you?
+Can't you come out into the country somewhere? We could take the
+electric and in an hour we'd be out where we could see orchards
+in bloom."
+
+"I _could_ go," mused Kate. "I've a half-holiday coming to me, and
+really, if I were to take it to-day, no one would care."
+
+"The ayes have it! Let us go to the station-I'll buy plenty of tickets
+and we can get off at any place where the climate seems mild and the
+natives kind."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It proved to be a day of encounters.
+
+They had traveled well beyond the city, past the straggling suburbs and
+the comfortable, friendly old villages, some of which antedated the city
+of which they were now the fringe, and had reached the wider sweeps of
+the prairie, with the fine country homes of those who sought privacy.
+At length they came to a junction of the road.
+
+"All out here for--"
+
+They could not catch the name.
+
+"Isn't that where we're going?" laughed Kate.
+
+"Of course it is," Ray responded.
+
+They hastened out and looked about them for the train they had supposed
+would be in waiting. It was not yet in, however, but was showing its
+dark nose a mile or two down the track.
+
+"I must see about our tickets," said Ray. "Perhaps we'll have to buy
+others."
+
+Kate had been standing with her back to the ticket station window, but
+now she turned, and through the ticker-seller's window envisaged the
+pale, bitterly sullen face of Lena Vroom. It looked sunken and curiously
+alien, as if its possessor felt herself unfriended of all the world.
+
+"Lena!" cried Kate, too startled to use tact or to wait for Lena to give
+the first sign of recognition.
+
+Lena nodded coolly.
+
+"Oh, is this where you are?" cried Kate. "We've looked everywhere for
+you."
+
+"If I'd wanted to be found, I could have been, you know." The tone was
+muffled and pitifully insolent.
+
+"You are living out here?"
+
+"I live a few miles from here."
+
+"And you like the work? Is it--is it well with you, Lena?"
+
+"It will never be well with me, and you know it. I broke down, that's
+all. I can't stand anything now that takes thought. This just suits
+me--a little mechanical work like this. I'm not fit to talk, Kate.
+You'll have to excuse me. It upsets me. I'm ordered to keep very quiet.
+If I get upset, I'll not be fit even for this."
+
+"I'll go," said Kate contritely. "And I'll tell no one." She battled to
+keep the tears from her eyes. "Only tell me, need you work at all? I
+thought you had enough to get along on, Lena. You often told me
+so--forgive me, but we've _been_ close friends, you know, even if we
+aren't now."
+
+"My money's gone," said Lena in a dead voice. "I used up my principal.
+It wasn't much. I'm in debt, too, and I've got to get that paid off. But
+I've a comfortable place to live, Kate, with a good motherly German
+woman. I tell you for your peace of mind, because I know you--you always
+think you have to be affectionate and to care about what people are
+doing. But you'll serve me best by leaving me alone. Understand?"
+
+"Oh, Lena, yes! I'll not come near you, but I can't help thinking about
+you. And I beg and pray you to write me if you need me at any time."
+
+"I can't talk about anything any more. It tires me. There's your train."
+
+Ray bought his tickets to nowhere in particular. The little train came
+on like a shuttle through the blue loom of the air; they got on, and
+were shot forward through bright green fields, past expectant groves
+and flowering orchards, cheered by the elate singing of
+innumerable birds.
+
+Ray had recognized Lena, but Kate refused to discuss her.
+
+"Life has hurt her," she said, "and she's in hiding like a wounded
+animal. I couldn't talk about her. I--I love her. It's like that with
+me. Once I've loved a person, I can't get it out of my system."
+
+She was staring from the window, trying to get back her happiness. Ray
+snatched her hand and held it in a crushing grip.
+
+"For God's sake, Kate, try to love me, then!" he whispered.
+
+It was spring all about them,--"the pretty ring-time,"--and she had just
+seen what it was to be a defeated and unloved woman. She felt a thrill
+go through her, and she turned an indiscreetly bright face upon her
+companion.
+
+"Don't expect too much," she whispered back, "but I _will_ try."
+
+They went on, almost with the feeling that they were in Arcadia, and
+drew up at a platform in the midst of woods, through which they could
+see a crooked trail winding.
+
+"Here's our place!" cried Ray. "Don't you recognize it? Not that you've
+ever seen it before."
+
+They dashed, laughing, from the train, and found themselves a minute
+later in a bird-haunted solitude, among flowers, at the beginning of the
+woodland walk. There seemed to be no need to comment upon the beauty of
+things. It was quite enough that the bland, caressing air beat upon
+their cheeks in playful gusts, that the robins gave no heed to them, and
+that "the little gray leaves were kind" to them.
+
+Never was there a more capricious trail than the one they set themselves
+to follow. It skirted the edge of a little morass where the young flags
+were coming up; it followed the windings of a brook where the wild
+forget-me-not threw up its little azure buds; it crossed the stream a
+dozen times by means of shaking bridges, or fallen trees; it had
+magnificent gateways between twin oaks--gateways to yet pleasanter
+reaches of leaving woodland.
+
+"Whatever can it lead to?" wondered Kate.
+
+"To some new kind of Paradise, perhaps," answered Ray. "And see, some
+one has been before us! Hush--"
+
+He drew her back into the bushes at the side, beneath a low-hanging
+willow. A man and a woman were coming toward them. The woman was walking
+first, treading proudly, her head thrown back, her body in splendid
+motion, like that of an advancing Victory. The man, taller than she, was
+resting one hand upon her shoulder. He, too, looked like one who had
+mastered the elements and who felt the pangs of translation into some
+more ethereal and liberating world. As they came on, proud as Adam and
+Eve in the first days of their existence, Kate had a blinding
+recognition of them. They were David Fulham and Mary Morrison.
+
+She looked once, saw their faces shining with pagan joy, and, turning
+her gaze from them, sank on the earth behind the screen of bushes. Ray
+perceived her desire to remain unseen, and stepped behind the
+wide-girthed oak. The two passed them, still treading that proud step.
+When they were gone, Kate arose and led the way on along the path. She
+wished to turn back, but she dared not, fearing to meet the others on
+the station platform. Ray had recognized Fulham, but he did not know his
+companion, and Kate would not tell him.
+
+"What a fool!" he said. "I thought he loved his wife. She's a fine
+woman."
+
+"He loves his wife," affirmed Kate stalwartly. "But there's a hedonistic
+fervor in him. He's--"
+
+"He's a fool!" reaffirmed Ray. "Shall we talk of something else?"
+
+"By all means," agreed Kate.
+
+They tried, but the glory of the day was slain. They had seen the
+serpent in their Eden--and where there is one reptile there may always
+be another.
+
+When they thought it discreet, they went back to the junction. Lena
+Vroom was still there. She was nibbling at some dry-looking sandwiches.
+Her glance forbade them to say anything personal to her, and Kate, with
+a clutch at the heart, passed her by as if she had been any
+ticket-seller.
+
+She wondered if any one, seeing that gray-faced, heavy-eyed woman, would
+dream of her so dearly won Ph.D. or of the Phi Beta Kappa key which she
+had won but not claimed! She had not even dared to converse, lest Lena's
+fragile self-possession should break. She evidently was in the clutches
+of nervous fatigue and was fighting it with her last remnant of courage.
+Even the veriest layman could guess as much.
+
+Kate hastened home, and as she opened the door she heard the voice of
+Honora mingled with the happy cries of the twins. They were down in the
+drawing-room, and Honora had bought some colored balloons for them, and
+was running to and fro with them in her hand, while Patience and
+Patricia shrieked with delight.
+
+"What a lovely day it's been, hasn't it?" Honora queried, pausing in her
+play. "I've so longed to be in the country, but matters had reached such
+a critical point at the laboratory that I couldn't get away. Do you
+know, Kate, the great experiment that David and I are making is much
+further along than he surmises! I'm going to have a glorious surprise
+for him one of these days. Business took him over to the Academy of
+Science to-day and I was so glad of it. It gave me the laboratory quite
+to myself. But really, I've got to get out into the country. I'm going
+to ask David if he won't take me next Sunday."
+
+Kate felt herself growing giddy. She dared not venture to reply. She
+kissed the babies and sped up to her room. But Honora's happy laughter
+followed her even there. Then suddenly there was a scurrying. Kate
+guessed that David was coming. The babies were being carried up to the
+nursery lest they should annoy him.
+
+Kate beat the wall with her fists.
+
+"Fool! Fool!" she cried. "Why didn't she let him see her laughing and
+dancing like that? Why didn't she? She'll come down all prim and staid
+for him and he'll never dream what she really is like. Oh, how can she
+be so blind? I don't know how to stand it! And I don't know what to do!
+Why isn't there some one to tell me what I ought to do?"
+
+Mary Morrison was late to dinner. She said she had run across an old
+Californian friend and they had been having tea together and seeing the
+shops. She had no appetite for dinner, which seemed to carry out her
+story. Her eyes were as brilliant as stars, and a magnetic atmosphere
+seemed to emanate from her. The men all talked to her. They seemed
+disturbed--not themselves. There was something in her glowing lips, in
+her swimming glance, in the slow beauty of her motions, that called to
+them like the pipes o' Pan. She was as pagan and as beautiful as the
+spring, and she brought to them thoughts of elemental joys. It was as
+if, sailing a gray sea, they had come upon a palm-shaded isle, and
+glimpsed Calypso lying on the sun-dappled grass.
+
+
+
+XV
+
+That night Kate said she would warn Honora; but in the morning she found
+herself doubtful of the wisdom of such a course. Or perhaps she really
+lacked the courage for it. At any rate, she put it off. She contemplated
+talking to Mary Morrison, and of appealing to her honor, or her
+compassion, and of advising her to go away. But Mary was much from home
+nowadays, and Kate, who had discouraged an intimacy, did not know how to
+cultivate it at this late hour. Several days went by with Kate in a
+tumult of indecision. Sometimes she decided that the romance between
+Mary and David was a mere spring madness, which would wear itself out
+and do little damage. At other moments she felt it was laid upon her to
+speak and avert a catastrophe.
+
+Then, in the midst of her indecision, she was commanded to go to
+Washington to attend a national convention of social workers. She was to
+represent the Children's Protective Agency, and to give an account of
+the method of its support and of its system of operation. She was
+surprised and gratified at this invitation, for she had had no idea that
+her club and settlement-house addresses had attracted attention to that
+extent. She made so little effort when she spoke that she could not feel
+much respect for her achievement. It was as if she were talking to a
+friend, and the size of her audience in no way affected her
+neighborly accent.
+
+She did not see that it was precisely this thing which was winning favor
+for her. Her lack of self-consciousness, her way of telling people
+precisely what they wished to know about the subject in hand, her sense
+of values, which enabled her to see that a human fact is the most
+interesting thing in the world, were what counted for her. If she had
+been "better trained," and more skilled in the dreary and often
+meaningless science of statistics, or had become addicted to the
+benevolent jargon talked by many welfare workers, her array of facts
+would have fallen on more or less indifferent ears. But she offered not
+vital statistics, but vital documents. She talked in personalities--in
+personalities so full of meaning that, concrete as they were, they took
+on general significance--they had the effect of symbols. She furnished
+watchwords for her listeners, and she did it unconsciously. She would
+have been indignant if she had been told how large a part her education
+in Silvertree played in her present aptitude. She had grown up in a town
+which feasted on dramatic gossip, and which thrived upon the specific
+personal episode. To the vast and terrific city, and to her portion of
+the huge task of mitigating the woe of its unfit, Kate brought the
+quality which, undeveloped, would have made of her no more than an
+entertaining village gossip.
+
+What stories there were to tell! What stories of bravery in defeat, of
+faith in the midst of disaster, of family devotion in spite of squalor
+and subterfuges and all imaginable shiftlessness and shiftiness.
+
+Kate had got hold of the idea of the universality of life--the
+universality of joy and pain and hope. She was finding it easy now to
+forgive "the little brothers" for all possible perversity, all defects,
+all ingratitude. Wayward children they might be,--children uninstructed
+in the cult of goodness, happiness, serenity,--but outside the pale of
+human consideration they could not be. The greater their fault the
+greater their need. Kate was learning, in spite of her native impatience
+and impulsiveness, to be very patient. She was becoming the defender of
+those who stumbled, the explainer of those who themselves lacked
+explanations or who were too defiant to give them.
+
+So she was going to Washington. She was to talk on a proposed school for
+the instruction of mothers. She often had heard her father say that a
+good mother was an exception. She had not believed him--had taken it for
+granted that this idea of his was a part of his habitual pessimism. But
+since she had come up to the city and become an officer of the
+Children's Protective Association, she had changed her mind, and a
+number of times she had been on the point of writing to her father to
+tell him that she was beginning to understand his point of view.
+
+This idea of a school for mothers had been her own, originally, and a
+development of the little summer home for Polish mothers which she had
+helped to establish. She had proposed it, half in earnest, merely, at
+Hull House on a certain occasion when there were a number of influential
+persons present. It had appealed to them, however, as a practical means
+of remedying certain difficulties daily encountered.
+
+Just how large a part Jane Addams had played in the enlightenment of
+Kate's mind and the dissolution of her inherent exclusiveness, Kate
+could not say. Sometimes she gave the whole credit to her. For here was
+a woman with a genius for inclusiveness. She was the sister of all men.
+If a youth sinned, she asked herself if she could have played any part
+in the prevention of that sin had she had more awareness, more
+solicitude. It was she who had, more than others,--though there was a
+great army of men and women of good will to sustain her,--promulgated
+this idea of responsibility. A city, she maintained, was a great home.
+She demanded, then, to know if the house was made attractive,
+instructive, protective. Was it so conducted that the wayward sons and
+daughters, as well as the obedient ones, could find safety and happiness
+within it? Were the privileges only for the rich, the effective, and the
+out-reaching? Or were they for those who lacked the courage to put out
+their hands for joy and knowledge? Were they for those who had not yet
+learned the tongue of the family into which they had newly entered? Were
+they for those who fought the rules and shirked the cares and dug for
+themselves a pit of sorrow? She believed they were for all. She could
+not countenance disinheritance. Yes, always, in high places and low,
+among friends and enemies, this sad, kind, patient, quiet woman, Jane
+Addams, of Hull House, had preached the indissolubility of the civic
+family. Kate had listened and learned. Nay, more, she had added her own
+interpretations. She was young, strong, brave, untaught by rebuff, and
+she had the happy and beautiful insolence of those who have not known
+defeat. She said things Jane Addams would have hesitated to say. She
+lacked the fine courtesy of the elder woman; but she made, for that very
+reason, a more dramatic propaganda.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Kate had known what it was to tramp the streets in rain and wind; she
+had known what it was to face infection and drunken rage; she had looked
+on sights both piteous and obscene; but she had now begun--and much,
+much sooner than was usual with workers in her field--to reap some of
+the rewards of toil.
+
+Soon or late things in this life resolve themselves into a question of
+personality. History and art, success and splendor, plenitude and power,
+righteousness and immortal martyrdom, are all, in the last resolve,
+personality and nothing more. Kate was having her swift rewards because
+of that same indescribable, incontestable thing. The friendship of
+remarkable women and men--women, particularly--was coming to her. Fine
+things were being expected of her. She had a vitality which indicated
+genius--that is, if genius is intensity, as some hold. At any rate, she
+was vividly alert, naturally eloquent, physically capable of impressing
+her personality upon others.
+
+She thought little of this, however. She merely enjoyed the rewards as
+they came, and she was unfeignedly surprised when, on her way to
+Washington, whither she traveled with many others, her society was
+sought by those whom she had long regarded with something akin to awe.
+She did not guess how her enthusiasm and fresh originality stimulated
+persons of lower vitality and more timid imagination.
+
+At Washington she had a signal triumph. The day of her speech found the
+hall in which the convention was held crowded with a company including
+many distinguished persons--among them, the President of the United
+States. Kate had expected to suffer rather badly from stage fright, but
+a sense of her opportunity gave her courage. She talked, in her direct
+"Silvertree method," as Marna called it, of the ignorance of mothers,
+the waste of children, the vast economic blunder which for one reason
+and another even the most progressive of States had been so slow to
+perceive. She said that if the commercial and agricultural interests of
+the country were fostered and protected, why should not the most
+valuable product of all interests, human creatures, be given at least an
+equal amount of consideration. In her own way, which by a happy
+instinct never included what was hackneyed, she drew a picture of the
+potentialities of the child considered merely from an economic point of
+view, and in impulsive words she made plain the need for a bureau, which
+she suggested should be virtually a part of the governmental structure,
+in which should be vested authority for the care of children,--the
+Bureau of Children, she denominated it,--a scientific extension of
+motherhood!
+
+It seemed a part of the whole stirring experience that she should be
+asked with several others to lunch at the White House with the President
+and his wife. The President, it appeared, was profoundly interested. A
+quiet man, with a judicial mind, he perceived the essential truth of
+Kate's propaganda. He had, indeed, thought of something similar himself,
+though he had not formulated it. He went so far as to express a desire
+that this useful institution might attain realization while he was yet
+in the presidential chair.
+
+"I would like to ask you unofficially, Miss Barrington," he said at
+parting, "if you are one to whom responsibility is agreeable?"
+
+"Oh," cried Kate, taken aback, "how do I know? I am so young, Mr.
+President, and so inexperienced!"
+
+"We must all be that at some time or other," smiled the President. "But
+it is in youth that the ideas come; and enthusiasm has a value which is
+often as great as experience."
+
+"Ideas are accidents, Mr. President," answered Kate. "It doesn't follow
+that one can carry out a plan because she has seen a vision."
+
+"No," admitted the President, shaking hands with her. "But you don't
+look to me like a woman who would let a vision go to waste. You will
+follow it up with all the power that is in you."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It happened that Kate's propaganda appealed to the popular imagination.
+The papers took it up; they made much of the President's interest in it;
+they wrote articles concerning the country girl who had come up to town,
+and who, with a simple faith and courage, had worked among the
+unfortunate and the delinquent, and whose native eloquence had made her
+a favorite with critical audiences. They printed her picture and
+idealized her in the interests of news.
+
+A lonely, gruff old man in Silvertree read of it, and when the drawn
+curtains had shut him away from the scrutiny of his neighbors, he walked
+the floor, back and forth, following the worn track in the dingy
+carpet, thinking.
+
+They talked of it at the Caravansary, and were proud; and many men and
+women who had met her by chance, or had watched her with interest,
+openly rejoiced.
+
+"They're coming on, the Addams breed of citizens," said they. "Here's a
+new one with the trick--whatever it is--of making us think and care and
+listen. She's getting at the roots of our disease, and it's partly
+because she's a woman. She sees that it has to be right with the
+children if it's to be right with the family. Long live the
+Addams breed!"
+
+Friends wired their congratulations, and their comments were none the
+less acceptable because they were premature. Many wrote her; Ray McCrea,
+alone, of her intimate associates, was silent. Kate guessed why, but she
+lacked time to worry. She only knew that her great scheme was
+afoot--that it went. But she would have been less than mortal if she had
+not felt a thrill of commingled apprehension and satisfaction at the
+fact that Kate Barrington, late of Silvertree and its gossiping,
+hectoring, wistful circles, was in the foreground. She had had an Idea
+which could be utilized in the high service of the world, and the most
+utilitarian and idealistic public in the world had seized upon it.
+
+So, naturally enough, the affairs of Honora Fulham became somewhat
+blurred to Kate's perception. Besides, she was unable to decide what to
+do. She had heard that one should never interfere between husband and
+wife. Moreover, she was very young, and she believed in her friends.
+Others might do wrong, but not one's chosen. People of her own sort had
+temptations, doubtless, but they overcame them. That was their
+business--that was their obligation. She might proclaim herself a
+democrat, but she was a moral aristocrat, at any rate. She depended upon
+those in her class to do right.
+
+She was a trifle chilled when she returned to find how little time
+Honora had to give to her unfolding of the great new scheme. Honora had
+her own excitement. Her wonderful experiment was drawing to a
+culmination. Honora could talk of nothing else. If Kate wanted to
+promulgate a scheme for the caring for the Born, very well. Honora had a
+tremendous business with the Unborn. So she talked Kate down.
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+Then came the day of Honora's victory!
+
+It had been long expected, yet when it came it had the effect of a
+miracle. It was, however, a miracle which she realized. She was
+burningly aware that her great moment had come.
+
+She left the lights flaring in the laboratory, and, merely stopping to
+put the catch on the door, ran down the steps, fastening her linen coat
+over her working dress as she went. David would be at home. He would be
+resting, perhaps,--she hoped so. For days he had been feverish and
+strange, and she had wondered if he were tormented by that sense of
+world-stress which was forever driving him. Was there no achievement
+that would satisfy him, she wondered. Yes, yes, he must be satisfied
+now! Moreover, he should have all the credit. To have found the origin
+of life, though only in a voiceless creature,--a reptile,--was not that
+an unheard-of victory? She would claim no credit; for without him and
+his daring to inspire her she would not have dreamed of such an
+experiment.
+
+Of course, she might have telephoned to him, but it never so much as
+occurred to her to do that. She wanted to cry the words into his ear:--
+
+"We have it! The secret is ours! There _is_ a hidden door into the house
+of life--and we've opened it!"
+
+Oh, what treasured, ancient ideas fell with the development of this new
+fact! She did not want to think of that, because of those who, in the
+rearrangement of understanding, must suffer. But as for her, she would
+be bold to face it, as the mate and helper of a great scientist should
+be. She would set her face toward the sun and be unafraid of any glory.
+Her thoughts spun in her head, her pulses throbbed. She did not know
+that she was thinking it, but really she was feeling that in a moment
+more she would be in David's arms. Only some such gesture would serve to
+mark the climax of this great moment. Though they so seldom caressed,
+though they had indulged so little in emotion, surely now, after their
+long and heavy task, they could have the sweet human comforts. They
+could be lovers because they were happy.
+
+Perhaps, after all, she would only cry out to him:--"It will be yours,
+David--the Norden prize!" That would tell the whole thing.
+
+People looked after her as she sped down the street. At first they
+thought she was in distress, but a glance at her shining face, its
+nobility accentuated by her elation, made that idea untenable. She was
+obviously the bearer of good tidings.
+
+Dr. von Shierbrand, passing on the other side of the street, called
+out:--
+
+"Carrying the good news from Ghent to Aix?"
+
+An old German woman, with a laden basket on her arm nodded cheerfully.
+
+"It's a baby," she said aloud to whoever might care to corroborate.
+
+But Honora carried happiness greater than any dreamed,--a secret of the
+ages,--and the prize was her man's fame.
+
+She reached her own door, and with sure, swift hands, fitted the key in
+the lock. The house wore a welcoming aspect. The drawing-room was filled
+with blossoming plants, and the diaphanous curtains which Blue-eyed Mary
+had hung at the windows blew softly in the breeze. The piano, with its
+suggestive litter of music, stood open, and across the bench trailed one
+of Mary's flowered chiffon scarfs.
+
+"David!" called Honora. "David!"
+
+Two blithe baby voices answered her from the rear porch. The little ones
+were there with Mrs. Hays, and they excitedly welcomed this variation in
+their day's programme.
+
+"In a minute, babies," called Honora. "Mamma will come in a minute."
+
+Yes, she and David would go together to the babies, and they would "tell
+them," the way people "told the bees."
+
+"David!" she kept calling. "David!"
+
+She looked in the doors of the rooms she passed, and presently reached
+her own. As she entered, a large envelope addressed in David's writing,
+conspicuously placed before the face of her desk-clock, caught her eye.
+She imagined that it contained some bills or memoranda, and did not stop
+for it, but ran on.
+
+"Oh, he's gone to town," she cried with exasperation, "and I haven't an
+idea where to reach him!"
+
+Closing her ears to the calls of the little girls, she returned to her
+own room and shut herself in. She was completely exasperated with the
+need for patience. Never had she so wanted David, and he was not
+there--he was not there to hear that the moment of triumph had come for
+both of them and that they were justified before their world.
+
+Petulantly she snatched the envelope from the desk and opened it. It was
+neither bills nor memoranda which fell out, but a letter. Surprised, she
+unfolded it.
+
+Her eyes swept it, not gathering its meaning. It might have been written
+in some foreign language, so incomprehensible did it seem. But something
+deep down in her being trembled as if at approaching dissolution and
+sent up its wild messages of alarm. Vaguely, afar off, like the shouts
+of a distant enemy on the hills, the import besieged her spirit.
+
+"I must read it again," she said simply.
+
+She went over it slowly, like one deciphering an ancient hieroglyph.
+
+     "My DEAR HONORA:--" (it ran.)
+
+     "I am off and away with Mary Morrison. Will this come to you
+     as a complete surprise? I hardly think so. You have been my
+     good comrade and assistant; but Mary Morrison is my woman. I
+     once thought you were, but there was a mistake somewhere.
+     Either I misjudged, or you changed. I hope you'll come across
+     happiness, too, sometime. I never knew the meaning of the
+     word till I met Mary. You and I haven't been able to make
+     each other out. You thought I was bound up heart and soul in
+     the laboratory. I may as well tell you that only a fractional
+     part of my nature was concerned with it. Mary is an unlearned
+     person compared with you, but she knew that, and it is the
+     great fact for both of us.
+
+     "It is too bad about the babies. We ought never to have had
+     them. See that they have a good education and count on me to
+     help you. You'll find an account at the bank in your name.
+     There'll be more there for you when that is gone.
+
+     "DAVID."
+
+The old German woman was returning, her basket emptied of its load, when
+Honora came down the steps and crossed the Plaisance.
+
+"My God," said the old woman in her own tongue, "the child did not
+live!"
+
+Honora walked as somnambulists walk, seeing nothing. But she found her
+way to the door of the laboratory. The white glare of the chemical
+lights was over everything--over all the significant, familiar litter of
+the place. The workmanlike room was alive and palpitating with the
+personality which had gone out from it--the flaming personality of
+David Fulham.
+
+The woman who had sold her birthright of charm and seduction for his
+sake sat down to eat her mess of pottage. Not that she thought even as
+far as that. Thought appeared to be suspended. As a typhoon has its calm
+center, so the mad tumult of her spirit held a false peace. She rested
+there in it, torpid as to emotion, in a curious coma.
+
+Yet she retained her powers of observation. She took her seat before the
+tanks in which she had demonstrated the correctness of David's amazing
+scientific assumption. Yet now the creatures that he had burgeoned by
+his skill, usurping, as it might seem to a timid mind, the very function
+of the Creator, looked absurd and futile--hateful even. For these
+things, bearing, as it was possible, after all, no relation to actual
+life, had she spent her days in desperate service. Then, suddenly, it
+swept over her, like a blasting wave of ignited gas, that she never had
+had the pure scientific flame! She had not worked for Truth, but that
+David might reap great rewards. With her as with the cave woman, the
+man's favor was the thing! If the cave woman won his approval with base
+service, she, the aspiring creature of modern times, was no less the
+slave of her own subservient instincts! And she had failed as the cave
+woman failed--as all women seemed eventually to fail. The ever-repeated
+tragedy of woman had merely been enacted once more, with herself for the
+sorry heroine.
+
+Yet none of these thoughts was distinct. They passed from her mind like
+the spume puffed from the wave's crest. She knew nothing of time. Around
+her blazed and sputtered the terrible white lights. The day waned; the
+darkness fell; and when night had long passed its dark meridian and the
+anticipatory cocks began to scent the dawn and to make their discovery
+known, there came a sharp knocking at the door.
+
+It shattered Honora's horrible reverie as if it had been an explosion.
+The chambers of her ears quaked with the reverberations. She sprang to
+her feet with a scream which rang through the silent building.
+
+"Let me in! Let me in!" called a voice. "It's only Kate. Let me in,
+Honora, or I'll call some one to break down the door."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Kate had mercy on that distorted face which confronted her. It was not
+the part of loyalty or friendship to look at it. She turned out the
+spluttering, glaring lights, and quiet and shadow stole over the room.
+
+"Well, Honora, I found the note and I know the whole of your trouble.
+Remember," she said quietly, "it's your great hour. You have a chance to
+show what you're made of now."
+
+"What I'm made of!" said Honora brokenly. "I'm like all the women. I'm
+dying of jealousy, Kate,--dying of it."
+
+"Jealousy--you?" cried Kate. "Why, Honora--"
+
+"You thought I couldn't feel it, I suppose,--thought I was above it?
+I'm not above anything--not anything--" Her voice straggled off into a
+curious, shameless sob with a sound in it like the bleating of a lamb.
+
+"Stop that!" said Kate, sharply. "Pull yourself together, woman. Don't
+be a fool."
+
+"Go away," sobbed Honora. "Don't stay here to watch me. My heart is
+broken, that's all. Can't you let me alone?"
+
+"No, I can't--I won't. Stand up and fight, woman. You can be
+magnificent, if you want to. It can't be that you'd grovel, Honora."
+
+"You know very little of what you're talking about," cried Honora,
+whipped into wholesome anger at last. "I've been a fool from the
+beginning. The whole thing's my fault."
+
+"I don't see how."
+
+Kate was getting her to talk; was pulling her up out of the pit of shame
+and anguish into which she had fallen. She sat down in a deal chair
+which stood by the window, and Honora, without realizing it, dropped
+into a chair, too. The neutral morning sky was beginning to flush and
+the rosiness reached across the lead-gray lake, illuminated the windows
+of the sleeping houses, and tinted even the haggard monochrome of the
+laboratory with a promise of day.
+
+"Why, it's my fault because I wouldn't take what was coming to me. I
+wouldn't even be what I was born to be!"
+
+"I know," said Kate, "that you underwent some sort of a transformation.
+What was it?"
+
+She hardly expected an answer, but Honora developed a perfervid
+lucidity.
+
+"Oh, Kate, you've said yourself that I was a very different girl when
+you knew me first. I was a student then, and an ambitious one, too; but
+there wasn't a girl in this city more ready for a woman's role than I. I
+longed to be loved--I lived in the idea of it. No matter how hard I
+tried to devote myself to the notion of a career, I really was dreaming
+of the happiness that was going to come to me when--when Life had done
+its duty by me."
+
+She spoke the words with a dramatic clearness. The terrific excitement
+she had undergone, and which she now held in hand, sharpened her
+faculties. The powers of memory and of expression were intensified. She
+fairly burned upon Kate there in the beautiful, disguising light of the
+morning. Her weary face was flushed; her eyes were luminous. Her
+terrific sorrow put on the mask of joy.
+
+"You see, I loved David almost from the first--I mean from the beginning
+of my University work. The first time I saw him crossing the campus he
+held my attention. There was no one else in the least like him, so
+vivid, so exotic, so almost fierce. When I found out who he was, I
+confess that I directed my studies so that I should work with him. Not
+that I really expected to know him personally, but I wanted to be near
+him and have him enlarge life for me. I felt that it would take on new
+meanings if I could only hear his interpretations of it."
+
+Kate shivered with sympathy at the woman's passion, and something like
+envy stirred in her. Here was a world of delight and torment of which
+she knew nothing, and beside it her own existence, restless and eager
+though it had been, seemed a meager affair.
+
+"Well, the idea burned in me for months and years. But I hid it. No one
+guessed anything about it. Certainly David knew nothing of it. Then,
+when I was beginning on my graduate work, I was with him daily. But he
+never seemed to see me--he saw only my work, and he seldom praised that.
+He expected it to be well done. As for me, I was satisfied. The mere
+fact that we were comrades, forced to think of the same matters several
+hours of each day, contented me. I couldn't imagine what life would be
+away from him; and I was afraid to think of him in relation to myself."
+
+"Afraid?"
+
+"Afraid--I mean just that. I knew others thought him a genius in
+relation to his work. But I knew he was a genius in regard to life. I
+felt sure that, if he turned that intensity of his upon life instead of
+upon science, he would be a destructive force--a high explosive. This
+idea of mine was confirmed in time. It happened one evening when a
+number of us were over in the Scammon Garden listening to the
+out-of-door players. I grew tired of sitting and slipped from my seat
+to wander about a little in the darkness. I had reached the very outer
+edge of seats and was standing there enjoying the garden, when I
+overheard two persons talking together. A man said: 'Fulham will go far
+if he doesn't meet a woman.' 'Nonsense,' the woman said; 'he's an
+anchorite.' 'An inflammatory one,' the man returned. 'Mind, I don't say
+he knows it. Probably he thinks he's cast for the scientific role to the
+end of his days, but I know the fellow better than he does himself. I
+tell you, if a woman of power gets hold of him, he'll be as drunk as
+Abelard with the madness of it. Over in Europe they allow for that sort
+of thing. They let a man make an art of loving. Here they insist that it
+shall be incidental. But Fulham won't care about conventionalities if
+the idea ever grips him. He's born for love, and it's a lucky thing for
+the University that he hasn't found it out.' 'We ought to plan a sane
+and reasonable marriage for him,' said the woman. 'Wouldn't that be a
+good compromise?' 'It would be his salvation,' the man said."
+
+Honora poured the words out with such rapidity that Kate hardly could
+follow her.
+
+"How you remember it all!" broke in Kate.
+
+"If I remember anything, wouldn't it be that? As I say, it confirmed me
+in what I already had guessed. I felt fierce to protect him. My jealousy
+was awake in me. I watched him more closely than ever. His daring in the
+laboratory grew daily. He talked openly about matters that other men
+were hardly daring to dream of, and his brain seemed to expand every
+day like some strange plant under calcium rays. I thought what a
+frightful loss to science it would be if the wilder qualities of his
+nature got the upper hand, and I wondered how I could endure it if--"
+
+She drew herself up with a horror of realization. The thing that so long
+ago she had thought she could not endure was at last upon her! Her teeth
+began to chatter again, and her hands, which had been clasped, to twist
+themselves with the writhing motion of the mentally distraught.
+
+"Go on!" commanded Kate. "What happened next?"
+
+"I let him love me!"
+
+"I thought you said he hadn't noticed you."
+
+"He hadn't; and I didn't talk with him more than usual or coquette with
+him. But I let down the barriers in my mind. I never had been ashamed of
+loving him, but now I willed my love to stream out toward him like--like
+banners of light. If I had called him aloud, he couldn't have answered
+more quickly. He turned toward me, and I saw all his being set my way.
+Oh, it was like a transfiguration! Then, as soon as ever I saw that, I
+began holding him steady. I let him feel that we were to keep on working
+side by side, quietly using and increasing our knowledge. I made him
+scourge his love back; I made him keep his mind uppermost; I saved him
+from himself."
+
+"Oh, Honora! And then you were married?"
+
+"And then we were married. You remember how sudden it was, and how
+wonderful; but not wonderful in the way it might have been. I kept guard
+over myself. I wouldn't wear becoming dresses; I wouldn't even let him
+dream what I really was like--wouldn't let him see me with my hair down
+because I knew it was beautiful. I combed it plainly and dressed like a
+nurse or a nun, and every day I went to the laboratory with him and kept
+him at his work. He had got hold of this dazzling idea of the extraneous
+development of life, and he set himself to prove it. I worked early and
+late to help him. I let him go out and meet people and reap honors, and
+I stayed and did the drudgery. But don't imagine I was a martyr. I liked
+it. I belonged to him. It was my honor and delight to work for him. I
+wanted him to have all of the credit. The more important the result, the
+more satisfaction I should have in proclaiming him the victor. I was
+really at the old business of woman, subordinating myself to a man I
+loved. But I was doing it in a new way, do you see? I was setting aside
+the privilege of my womanhood for him, refraining from making any merely
+feminine appeal. You remember hearing Dr. von Shierbrand say there was
+but one way woman should serve man--the way in which Marguerite served
+Faust? It made me laugh. I knew a harder road than that to walk--a road
+of more complete abnegation."
+
+"But the babies came."
+
+"Yes, the babies came. I was afraid even to let him be as happy in them
+as he wanted to be. I held him away. I wouldn't let him dwell on the
+thought of me as the mother of those darlings. I dared not even be as
+happy myself as I wished, but I had secret joys that I told him nothing
+about, because I was saving him for himself and his work. But at what a
+cost, Kate!"
+
+"Honora, it was sacrilegious!"
+
+Honora leaped to her feet again.
+
+"Yes, yes," she cried, "it was. And now all has happened according to
+prophecy, and he's gone with this woman! He thinks she's his mate, but,
+I--I was his mate. And I defrauded him. So now he's taken her because
+she was kind, because she loved him, because--she was beautiful!"
+
+"She looks like you."
+
+"Don't I know it? It's my beauty that he's gone away with--the beauty I
+wouldn't let him see. Of course, he doesn't realize it. He only knows
+life cheated him, and now he's trying to make up to himself for what
+he's lost."
+
+"Oh, can you excuse him like that?"
+
+The daylight was hardening, and it threw Honora's drawn face into
+repellent relief.
+
+"I don't excuse him at all!" she said. "I condemn him! I condemn him!
+With all his intellect, to be such a fool! And to be so cruel--so
+hideously cruel!"
+
+But she checked herself sharply. She looked around her with eyes that
+seemed to take in things visible and invisible--all that had been
+enacted in that curious room, all the paraphernalia, all the
+significance of those uncompleted, important experiments. Then suddenly
+her face paled and yet burned with light.
+
+"But I know a great revenge," she said. "I know a revenge that will
+break his heart!"
+
+"Don't say things like that," begged Kate. "I don't recognize you when
+you're like that."
+
+"When you hear what the revenge is, you will," said Honora proudly.
+
+"We're going now," Kate told her with maternal decision. "Here's your
+coat."
+
+"Home?" She began trembling again and the haunted look crept back into
+her eyes.
+
+Kate paid no heed. She marched Honora swiftly along the awakened streets
+and into the bereaved house, past the desecrated chamber where David's
+bed stood beside his wife's, up to Kate's quiet chamber. Honora
+stretched herself out with an almost moribund gesture. Then the weight
+of her sorrow covered her like a blanket. She slept the strange deep
+sleep of those who dare not face the waking truth.
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+Kate, who _was_ facing it, telegraphed to Karl Wander. It was all she
+could think of to do.
+
+"Can you come?" she asked. "David Fulham has gone away with Mary
+Morrison. Honora needs you. You are the cousin of both women. Thought I
+had better turn to you." She was brutally frank, but it never occurred
+to her to mince matters there. However, where the public was concerned,
+her policy was one of secrecy. She called, for example, on the President
+of the University, who already knew the whole story.
+
+"Can't we keep it from being blazoned abroad?" she appealed to him.
+"Mrs. Fulham will suffer more if he has to undergo public shame than she
+possibly could suffer from her own desertion. She's tragically angry,
+but that wouldn't keep her from wanting to protect him. We must try to
+prevent public exposure. It will save her the worst of torments." She
+brooded sadly over the idea, her aspect broken and pathetic.
+
+The President looked at her kindly.
+
+"Did she say so?"
+
+"Oh, she didn't need to say so!" cried Kate. "Any one would know that."
+
+"You mean, any good woman would know that. Of course, I can give it out
+that Fulham has been called abroad suddenly, but it places me in a bad
+position. I don't feel very much like lying for him, and I shan't be
+thought any too well of if I'm found out. I should like to place myself
+on record as befriending Mrs. Fulham, not her husband."
+
+"But don't you see that you are befriending her when you shield him?"
+
+"Woman's logic," said the President. "It has too many turnings for my
+feeble masculine intellect. But I've great confidence in you, Miss
+Barrington. You seem to be rather a specialist in domestic relations. If
+you say Mrs. Fulham will be happier for having me bathe neck-deep in
+lies, I suppose I shall have to oblige you. Shall it be the lie
+circumstantial? Do you wish to specify the laboratory to which he
+has gone?"
+
+Kate blushed with sudden contrition.
+
+"Oh, I'll not ask you to do it!" she cried. "Truth is best, of course.
+I'm not naturally a trimmer and a compromiser--but, poor Honora! I
+pity her so!"
+
+Her lips quivered like a child's and the tears stood in her eyes. She
+had arisen to go and the President shook hands with her without making
+any promise. However the next day a paragraph appeared in the University
+Daily to the effect that Professor Fulham had been called to France upon
+important laboratory matters.
+
+At the Caravansary they had scented tragedy, and Kate faced them with
+the paragraph. She laid a marked copy of the paper at each place, and
+when all were assembled, she called attention to it. They looked at her
+with questioning eyes.
+
+"Of course," said Dr. von Shierbrand, flicking his mustache, "this isn't
+true, Miss Barrington."
+
+"No," said Kate, and faced them with her chin tilted high.
+
+"But you wish us to pretend to believe it?"
+
+"If you please, dear friends," Kate pleaded.
+
+"We shall say that Fulham is in France! And what are we to say about
+Miss Morrison?"
+
+"Who will inquire? If any one should, say that a friend desired her as a
+traveling companion."
+
+"Nothing," said Von Shierbrand, "is easier for me than truth."
+
+"Please don't be witty," cried Kate testily, "and don't sneer. Remember
+that nothing is so terrible as temptation. I'm sure I see proof of that
+every day among my poor people. After all, doesn't the real surprise lie
+in the number that resist it?"
+
+"I beg your pardon," said the young German gently. "I shall not sneer. I
+shall not even be witty. I'm on your side,--that is to say, on Mrs.
+Fulham's side,--and I'll say anything you want me to say."
+
+"I beg you all," replied Kate, sweeping the table with an imploring
+glance, "to say as little as possible. Be matter-of-fact if any one
+questions you. And, whatever you do, shield Honora."
+
+They gave their affirmation solemnly, and the next day Honora appeared
+among them, pallid and courageous. They were simple folk for all of
+their learning. Sorrow was sorrow to them. Honora was widowed by an
+accident more terrible than death. No mockery, no affected solicitude
+detracted from the efficacy of their sympathy. If they saw torments of
+jealousy in this betrayed woman's eyes, they averted their gaze; if they
+saw shame, they gave it other interpretations. Moreover, Kate was
+constantly beside her, eagle-keen for slight or neglect. Her fierce
+fealty guarded the stricken woman on every side. She had the imposing
+piano which Mary had rented carted back to the warehouse to lie in
+deserved silence with Mary's seductive harmonies choked in its recording
+fibre; she stripped from their poles the curtains Mary had hung at the
+drawing-room windows and burned them in the furnace; the miniatures, the
+plaster casts, all the artistic rubbish which Mary's exuberance had
+impelled her to collect, were tossed out for the waste wagons to cart
+away. The coquetry of the room gave way to its old-time austerity; once
+more Honora's room possessed itself.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A wire came from Karl Wander addressed to Kate.
+
+"Fractured leg. Can't go to you. Honora and the children must come here
+at once. Have written."
+
+That seemed to give Honora a certain repose--it was at least a spar to
+which to cling. With Kate's help she got over to the laboratory and put
+the finishing touches on things there. The President detailed two of
+Fulham's most devoted disciples to make a record of their professor's
+experiments.
+
+"Fulham shall have full credit," the President assured Honora, calling
+on her and comforting her in the way in which he perceived she needed
+comfort. "He shall have credit for everything."
+
+"He should have the Norden prize," Honora cried, her hot eyes blazing
+above her hectic cheeks. "I want him to have the prize, and I want to be
+the means of getting it for him. I told Miss Barrington I meant to have
+my revenge, and that's it. How can he stand it to know he ruined my life
+and that I got the prize for him? A generous man would find that
+torture! You understand, I'm willing to torture him--in that way. He's
+subtle enough to feel the sting of it."
+
+The President looked at her compassionately.
+
+"It's a noble revenge--and a poignant one," he agreed.
+
+"It's not noble," repudiated Honora. "It's terrible. For he'll remember
+who did the work."
+
+But shame overtook her and she sobbed deeply and rendingly. And the
+President, who had thought of himself as a mild man, left the house
+regretting that duels were out of fashion.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Then the letter came from the West. Kate carried it up to Honora, who
+was in her room crouched before the window, peering out at the early
+summer cityscape with eyes which tried in vain to observe the passing
+motors, and the people hastening along the Plaisance, but which
+registered little.
+
+"Your cousin's letter, woman, dear," announced Kate.
+
+Honora looked up quickly, her vagueness momentarily dissipated. Kate
+always had noticed that Wander's name had power to claim Honora's
+interest. He could make folk listen, even though he spoke by letter. She
+felt, herself, that whatever he said, she would listen to.
+
+Honora tore open the envelope with untidy eagerness, and after she had
+read the letter she handed it silently to Kate. It ran thus:--
+
+     "COUSIN HONORA, MY DEAR AND PRIZED:--
+
+     "Rather a knock-out blow, eh? I shan't waste my time in
+     telling you how I feel about it. If you want me to follow
+     David and kill him, I will--as soon as this damned leg gets
+     well. Not that the job appeals to me. I'm sensitive about
+     family honor, but killing D. won't mend things. As I spell
+     the matter out, there was a blunder somewhere. _Perhaps you
+     know where it was_.
+
+     "Of course you feel as if you'd gone into bankruptcy. Women
+     invest in happiness as men do in property, and to 'go broke'
+     the way you have is disconcerting. It would overwhelm some
+     women; but it won't you--not if you're the same Honora I
+     played with when I was a boy. You had pluck for two of us
+     trousered animals--were the best of the lot. I want you to
+     come here and stake out a new claim. You may get to be a
+     millionaire yet--in good luck and happiness, I mean.
+
+     "I'm taking it for granted that you and the babies will soon
+     be on your way to me, and I'm putting everything in
+     readiness. The fire is laid, the cupboard stored, the
+     latchstring is hanging where you'll see it as you cross the
+     state line.
+
+     "You understand I'm being selfish in this. I not only want,
+     but I need, you. You always seemed more like a sister than a
+     cousin to me, and to have you come here and make a home out
+     of my house seems too good to be true.
+
+     "There are a lot of things to be learned out here, but I'll
+     not give them a name. All I can say is, living with these
+     mountains makes you different. They're like men and women, I
+     take it. (The mountains, I mean.) The more they are ravaged
+     by internal fires and scoured by snow-slides, the more
+     interesting they become.
+
+     "Then it's so still it gives you a chance to think, and by
+     the time you've had a good bout of it, you find out what is
+     really important and what isn't. You'll understand after
+     you've been here awhile.
+
+     "I mean what I say, Honora. I want you and the babies. Come
+     ahead. Don't think. Work--pack--and get out here where Time
+     can have a chance at your wounds.
+
+     "Am I making you understand how I feel for you? I guess you
+     know your old playmate and coz,
+
+     "KARL WANDER.
+
+     "P.S. My dried-up old bach heart jumps at the thought of
+     having the kiddies in the house. I'll bet they're wonders."
+
+There was an inclosure for Kate. It read:--
+
+     "MY DEAR MISS BARRINGTON:--
+
+     "I see that you're one of the folk who can be counted on. You
+     help Honora out of this and then tell me what I can do for
+     you. I'd get to her some way even with this miserable
+     plaster-of-Paris leg of mine if you weren't there. But I know
+     you'll play the cards right. Can't you come with her and stay
+     with her awhile till she's more used to the change? You'd be
+     as welcome as sunlight. But I don't even need to say that. I
+     saw you only a moment, yet I think you know that I'd count it
+     a rich day if I could see you again. You are one of those who
+     understand a thing without having it bellowed by megaphone.
+
+     "Don't mind my emphatic English. I'm upset. I feel like
+     murdering a man, and the sensation isn't pleasant. Using
+     language is too common out here to attract attention--even on
+     the part of the man who uses it. Oh, my poor Honora! Look
+     after her, Miss Barrington, and add all my pity and love to
+     your own. It will make quite a sum. Yours faithfully,
+
+     "KARL WANDER."
+
+"He wrote to you, too?" inquired Honora when Kate had perused her note.
+
+"Yes, begging me to hasten you on your way."
+
+"Shall I go?"
+
+"What else offers?"
+
+"Nothing," said Honora in her dead voice. "If I kept a diary, I would be
+like that sad king of France who recorded '_Rien_' each day."
+
+Kate made a practical answer.
+
+"We must pack," she said.
+
+"But the house--"
+
+"Let it stand empty if the owner can't find a tenant. Pay your rent till
+he does, if that's in the contract. What difference does all that make?
+Get out where you'll have a chance to recuperate."
+
+"Oh, Kate, do you think I ever shall? How does a person recuperate from
+shame?"
+
+"There isn't really any shame to you in what others do," Kate said.
+
+"But you--you'll have to go somewhere."
+
+"So I shall. Don't worry about me. I shall take good care of myself."
+
+Honora looked about her with the face of a spent runner.
+
+"I don't see how I'm going to go through with it all," she said,
+shuddering.
+
+So Kate found packers and movers and the breaking-up of the home was
+begun. It was an ordeal--even a greater ordeal than they had thought it
+would be. Every one who knew Honora had supposed that she cared more
+for the laboratory than for her home, but when the packers came and tore
+the pictures from the walls, it might have been her heart-strings that
+were severed.
+
+Just before the last things were taken out, Kate found her in an agony
+of weeping on David's bed, which stood with an appalling emptiness
+beside Honora's. Honora always had wakened first in the morning, Kate
+knew, and now she guessed at the memories that wrung that great,
+self-obliterating creature, writhing there under her torment. How often
+she must have raised herself on her arm and looked over at her man, so
+handsome, so strong, so completely, as she supposed, her own, and called
+to him, summoning him to another day's work at the great task they had
+undertaken for themselves. She had planned to be a wife upon an heroic
+model, and he had wanted mere blitheness, mere feminine allure. Then,
+after all, as it turned out, here at hand were all the little qualities,
+he had desired, like violets hidden beneath their foliage.
+
+Kate thought she never had seen anything more feminine than Honora,
+shivering over the breaking-tip of the linen-closet, where her
+housewifely stores were kept.
+
+"I don't suppose you can understand, dear," she moaned to Kate. "But
+it's a sort of symbol--a linen-closet is. See, I hemmed all these things
+with my own hands before I was married, and embroidered the initials!"
+
+How could any one have imagined that the masculine traits in her were
+getting the upper hand! She grew more feminine every hour. There was an
+increasing rhythm in her movements--a certain rich solemnity like that
+of Niobe or Hermione. Her red-brown hair tumbled about her face and
+festooned her statuesque shoulders. The severity of her usual attire
+gave place to a negligence which enhanced her picturesqueness, and the
+heaving of her troubled bosom, the lifting of her wistful eyes gave her
+a tenderer beauty than she ever had had before. She was passionate
+enough now to have suited even that avid man who had proved himself so
+delinquent.
+
+"If only David could have seen her like this!" mused Kate. "His
+'Blue-eyed One' would have seemed tepid in comparison. To think she
+submerged her splendor to so little purpose!"
+
+She wondered if Honora knew how right Karl Wander had been in saying
+that some one had blundered, and if she had gained so much enlightenment
+that she could see that it was herself who had done so. She had
+renounced the mistress qualities which the successful wife requires to
+supplement her wifely character, and she had learned too late that love
+must have other elements than the rigidly sensible ones.
+
+Honora was turning to the little girls now with a fierce sense of
+maternal possession. She performed personal services for them. She held
+them in her arms at twilight and breathed in their personality as if it
+were the one anaesthetic that could make her oblivious to her pain.
+
+Kate hardly could keep from crying out:--
+
+"Too late! Too late!"
+
+There was a bleak, attic-like room at the Caravansary, airy enough, and
+glimpsing the lake from its eastern window, which Kate took temporarily
+for her abiding-place. She had her things moved over there and camped
+amid the chaos till Honora should be gone.
+
+The day came when the two women, with the little girls, stood on the
+porch of the house which had proved so ineffective a home. Kate
+turned the key.
+
+"I hope never to come back to Chicago, Kate," Honora said, lifting her
+ravaged face toward the staring blankness of the windows. "I'm not
+brave enough."
+
+"Not foolish enough, you mean," corrected Kate. "Hold tight to the
+girlies, Honora, and you'll come out all right."
+
+Honora refrained from answering. Her woe was epic, and she let her
+sunken eyes and haggard countenance speak for her.
+
+Kate saw David Fulham's deserted family off on the train. Mrs. Hays, the
+children's nurse, accompanied them. Honora moved with a slow hauteur in
+her black gown, looking like a disenthroned queen, and as she walked
+down the train aisle Kate thought of Marie Antoinette. There were plenty
+of friends, as both women knew, who would have been glad to give any
+encouragement their presence could have contributed, but it was
+generally understood that the truth of the situation was not to be
+recognized.
+
+When Kate got back on the platform, Honora became just Honora again,
+thinking of and planning for others. She thrust her head from
+the window.
+
+"Oh, Kate," she said, "I do hope you'll get well settled somewhere and
+feel at home. Don't stay in that attic, dear. It would make me feel as
+if I had put you into it."
+
+"Trust me!" Kate reassured her. She waved her hand with specious gayety.
+"Give my love to Mr. Wander," she laughed.
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+Kate was alone at last. She had time to think. There were still three
+days left of the vacation for which she had begged when she perceived
+Honora's need of her, and these she spent in settling her room. It would
+not accommodate all of the furniture she had accumulated during those
+days of enthusiasm over Ray McCrea's return, so she sold the superfluous
+things. Truth to tell, however, she kept the more decorative ones.
+Honora's fate had taught her an indelible lesson. She saw clearly that
+happiness for women did not lie along the road of austerity.
+
+Was it humiliating to have to acknowledge that women were desired for
+their beauty, their charm, for the air of opulence which they gave to an
+otherwise barren world? Her mind cast back over the ages--over the
+innumerable forms of seduction and subserviency which the instinct of
+women had induced them to assume, and she reddened to flame sitting
+alone in the twilight. Yet, an hour later, still thinking of the
+subject, she realized that it was for men rather than for women that she
+had to blush. Woman was what man had made her, she concluded.
+
+Yet man was often better than woman--more generous, more just, more
+high-minded, possessed of a deeper faith.
+
+Well, well, it was at best a confusing world! She seemed to be like a
+ship without a chart or a port of destination. But at least she could
+accept things as they were--even the fact that she herself was not "in
+commission," and was, philosophically speaking, a derelict.
+
+"Other women seem to do things by instinct," she mused, "but I have,
+apparently, to do them from conviction. It must be the masculine traits
+in me. They say all women have masculine traits, that if they were
+purely feminine, they would be monstrous; and that all civilized men
+have much of the feminine in them or they would not be civilized. I
+suppose there's rather more of the masculine in me than in the majority
+of women."
+
+Now Mary Morrison, she concluded, was almost pure feminine--she was the
+triumphant exposition of the feminine principle.
+
+Some lines of Arthur Symons came to her notice--lines which she tried in
+vain not to memorize.
+
+     "'I am the torch,' she saith; 'and what to me
+       If the moth die of me? I am the flame
+     Of Beauty, and I burn that all may see
+       Beauty, and I have neither joy nor shame,
+     But live with that clear light of perfect fire
+     Which is to men the death of their desire.
+
+     '"I am Yseult and Helen, I have seen
+       Troy burn, and the most loving knight lies dead.
+     The world has been my mirror, time has been
+       My breath upon the glass; and men have said,
+     Age after age, in rapture and despair,
+     Love's few poor words before my mirror there.
+
+     "'I live and am immortal; in my eyes
+       The sorrow of the world, and on my lips
+     The joy of life, mingle to make me wise!'" ...
+
+Was it wisdom, then, that Mary Morrison possessed--the immemorial wisdom
+of women?
+
+Oh, the shame of it! The shame of being a woman!
+
+Kate denied herself to McCrea when he called. She plunged into the
+development of her scheme for an extension of motherhood. State
+motherhood it would be. Should the movement become national, as she
+hoped, perhaps it had best be called the Bureau of Children.
+
+It was midsummer by now and there was some surcease of activity even in
+"welfare" circles. Many of the social workers, having grubbed in
+unspeakable slums all winter, were now abroad among palaces and
+cathedrals, drinking their fill of beauty. Many were in the country near
+at hand. For the most part, neophytes were in charge at the settlement
+houses. Kate was again urged to domesticate herself with Jane Addams's
+corps of workers, but she had an aversion to being shut between walls.
+She had been trapped once,--back at the place she called home,--and she
+had not liked it. There was something free and adventurous in going from
+house to house, authoritatively rearranging the affairs of the
+disarranged. It suited her to be "a traveling bishop." Moreover, it left
+her time for the development of her great Idea. In a neighborhood house
+privacy and leisure were the two unattainable luxuries.
+
+She was still writing at odd times'; and now her articles were
+appearing. They were keen, simple, full of meat, and the public liked
+them. As Kate read them over, she smiled to find them so emphatic. She
+was far from _feeling_ emphatic, but she seemed to have a trick of
+expressing herself in that way. She was still in need of great economy.
+Her growing influence brought little to her in the way of monetary
+rewards, and it was hard for her to live within her income because she
+had a scattering hand. She liked to dispense good things and she liked
+to have them. A liberal programme suited her best--whatever gave free
+play to life. She was a wild creature in that she hated bars. Of all the
+prison houses of life, poverty seemed one of the most hectoring.
+
+But poverty, to be completely itself, must exclude opportunity. Kate had
+the key to opportunity, and she realized it. In the letters she received
+and wrote bringing her into association with men and women of force and
+aspiration, she had a privilege to which, for all of her youth, she
+could not be indifferent. She liked the way these purposeful persons put
+things, and felt a distinct pleasure in matching their ideas with her
+own. As the summer wore on, she was asked to country homes of charm and
+taste--homes where wealth, though great, was subordinated to more
+essential things. There she met those who could further her
+purposes--who could lend their influence to aid her Idea, now shaping
+itself excellently. At the suggestion of Miss Addams, she prepared an
+article in which her plan unfolded itself in all its benevolent length
+and breadth--an article which it was suggested might yet form a portion
+of a speech made before a congressional committee. There was even talk
+of having Kate deliver this address, but she had not yet reached the
+point where she could contemplate such an adventure with calmness.
+
+However, she was having training in her suffrage work, which was now
+assuming greater importance in her eyes. She addressed women audiences
+in various parts of the city, and had even gone on a few flying motor
+excursions with leading suffragists, speaking to the people in villages
+and at country schoolhouses.
+
+There was an ever-increasing conviction in this department of her work.
+She had learned to count the ballot as the best bulwark of liberty, and
+she could find no logic to inform her why, if it was a protection for
+man,--for the least and most insignificant of men,--it was not equally a
+weapon which women, searching now as never before for defined and
+enduring forms of liberty, should be permitted to use. She not only
+desired it for other women,--women who were supposed to "need it"
+more,--but she wished it for herself. She felt it to be merely
+consistent that she, in whom service to her community was becoming a
+necessity, should have this privilege. It never would be possible for
+her to exercise murderous powers of destruction in behalf of her
+country. She would not be allowed to shoot down innocent men whose
+opinions were opposed to her own, or to make widows and orphans. She
+would be forbidden to stand behind cannon or to sink submarine
+torpedoes. But it was within her reach to add to the sum total of peace
+and happiness. She would, if she could get her Bureau of Children
+established, exercise a constructive influence completely in accord with
+the spirit of the time. This being the case, she thought she ought to
+have the ballot. It would make her stand up straighter, spiritually
+speaking. It would give her the authority which would point her
+arguments; put a cap on the sheaf of her endeavors. She wanted it
+precisely as a writer wants a period to complete a sentence. It had a
+structural value, to use the term of an architect. Without it her
+sentence was foolish, her building insecure.
+
+"Why is it," she demanded of the women of Lake Geneva when, in company
+with a veteran suffragist, she addressed them there, "that you grow
+weary in working for your town? It is because you cannot demonstrate
+your meaning nor secure the continuation of your works by the ballot.
+Your efforts are like pieces of metal which you cannot weld into useful
+form. You toil for deserted children, indigent mothers, for hospitals
+and asylums, starting movements which, when perfected, are absorbed by
+the city. What happens then to these benevolent enterprises? They are
+placed in the hands of politicians and perfunctorily administered. Your
+disinterested services are lost sight of; the politicians smile at the
+manner in which you have toiled and they have reaped. You see sink into
+uselessness, institutions, which, in the compassionate hands of women,
+would be the promoters of good through the generations. The people you
+would benefit are treated with that insolent arrogance which only a
+cheap man in office can assume. Causes you have labored to establish,
+and which no one denies are benefits, are capriciously overthrown. And
+there is one remedy and one only: for you to cast your vote--for you to
+have your say as you sit in your city council, on your county board, or
+in your state legislature and national congress.
+
+"You may shrink from it; you may dread these new responsibilities; but
+strength and courage will come with your need. You dare not turn aside
+from the road which opens before you, for to tread it is now the test of
+integrity."
+
+"Ought you to have said that?" inquired the older suffragist, afterward
+looking at Kate with earnest and burning eyes from her white spiritual
+face. "I dare say I care much more about suffrage than you. I have been
+interested in it since I was a child, and I am now no longer a young
+woman. Yet I feel that integrity is not allied to this or that opinion.
+It is a question of sincerity--of steadfastness of purpose."
+
+"There, there," said Kate, "don't expect me to be too moderate. How can
+I care about anything just now if I have to be moderate? I love suffrage
+because it gives me something to care about and to work for. The last
+generation has destroyed pretty much all of the theology, hasn't it?
+Service of man is all there is left--particularly that branch of it
+known as the service of woman. Isn't that what all of the poets and
+playwrights and novelists are writing about? Isn't that the most
+interesting thing in the world at present? You've all urged me to go
+into it, haven't you? Very well, I have. But I can't stay in it if I'm
+to be tepid. You mustn't expect me to modify my utterance and cut down
+my climaxes. I've got to make a hot propaganda of the thing. I want the
+exhilaration of martyrdom--though I'm not keen for the discomforts of
+it. In other words, dear lady, because you are judicious, don't expect
+me to be. I don't want to be judicious--yet. I want to be fervid."
+
+"You are a dear girl," said the elder woman, "but you are an egotist, as
+of course you know."
+
+"If I had been a modest violet by a mossy stone," laughed Kate, "should
+I have taken up this work?"
+
+"I'm free to confess that you would not," said the other, checking a
+sigh as if she despaired of bringing this excited girl down to the
+earth. "Yet I am bound to say--" She hesitated and Kate took up
+the word.
+
+"I _do_ know--I really understand," she cried contritely. "You are not
+an egotist at all, dear lady. Though you have held many positions of
+honor, you have never thought of yourself. Your sacrifices have been
+_bona fide_. You who are so delicate and tender have done things which
+men might have shrunk from. I know what you mean by sincerity, and I am
+aware that you have it completely and steadily, whereas I have more
+enthusiasm than is good either for myself or the cause. But you wouldn't
+want me to form myself on you, would you now? Temperament is just as
+much a fact as physique. I've got to dramatize woman's disadvantages if
+I am to preach on the subject. Though I really think there are tragedies
+of womanhood which none could exaggerate."
+
+"Oh, there are, there are, Miss Barrington."
+
+"How shall I make you understand that I am to be trusted!" Kate cried.
+"I know I'm avid. I want both pain and joy. I want to suffer with the
+others and enjoy with the others. I want my cup of life full and running
+over with a brew of a thousand flavors, and I actually believe I want to
+taste of the cup each neighbor holds. I have to know how others feel and
+it's my nature to feel for them and with them. When I see this great
+wave of aspiration sweeping over women,--Chinese and Persian women as
+well as English and American,--I feel magnificent. I, too, am standing
+where the stream of influence blows over me. It thrills me
+magnificently, and I am meaning it when I say that I think the women who
+do not feel it are torpid or cowardly."
+
+The elder woman smiled patiently. After all, who was she that she should
+check her flaming disciple?
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+Whenever Kate had a free Sunday, she and Mrs. Dennison, the mistress of
+the Caravansary, would go together to the West Side to visit George and
+Marna Fitzgerald. It amused and enchanted Kate to think that in the
+midst of so much that was commonplace, with dull apartment buildings
+stretching around for miles, such an Arcadia should have located itself.
+It opened her eyes to the fact that there might be innumerable Arcadians
+concealed in those monotonous rows of three-and four-story flat
+buildings, if only one had the wisdom and wit to find them. Marna seemed
+to know of some. She had become acquainted with a number of these happy
+unknown little folk, to whom it never had occurred that celebrity was an
+essential of joy, and she liked them mightily. Marna, indeed, liked high
+and low--always providing she didn't dislike them. If they were Irish,
+her inclination toward them was accelerated. There were certain wonders
+of Marna's ardent soul which were for "Irish faces only"--Irish eyes
+were the eyes she liked best to have upon her. But she forgave Kate her
+Anglo-Saxon ancestry because of her talent for appreciating the Irish
+character.
+
+Time was passing beautifully with Marna, and her Bird of Hope was
+fluttering nearer. She told Kate that now she could see some sense in
+being a woman.
+
+"If you'd ask me," she said with childish audacity, "if such a foolish
+little thing as I could actually have a wonderful, dear little baby, I'd
+have said 'no' right at the start. I'm as flattered as I can be. And
+what pleases me so is that I don't have to be at all different from what
+I naturally am. I don't have to be learned or tremendously good; it
+isn't a question of deserts. It has just come to me--who never did
+deserve any such good!"
+
+Next door to Marna there was a young Irishwoman of whom the Fitzgeralds
+saw a good deal, the mother of five little children, with not more than
+sixteen months between the ages of any of them. Mary Finn had been
+beautiful--so much was evident at a glance. But she already wore a
+dragged expression; and work, far beyond her powers to accomplish, was
+making a sloven of her. She was petulant with the children, though she
+adored them--at least, sporadically. But her burden tired her patience
+out. Timothy Finn's income had not increased in proportion to his
+family. He was now in his young manhood, at the height of his earning
+capacity, and early middle-age might see him suffering a reduction.
+
+Mrs. Finn dropped in Sunday afternoon to share the cup of tea which
+Marna was offering her guests, and as she looked wistfully out of her
+tangle of dark hair,--in which lines of silver already were beginning to
+appear,--she impressed herself upon Kate's mind as one of the
+innumerable army of martyrs to the fetish of fecundity which had borne
+down men and women through the centuries.
+
+She had her youngest child with her.
+
+"It was a terrible time before I could get up from the last one," she
+said, "me that was around as smart as could be with the first. I'm in
+living terror all the time for fear of what's coming to me. A mother has
+no business to die, that's what I tell Tim. Who'd look to the ones I
+have, with me taken? I'm sharp with them at times, but God knows I'd die
+for 'em. Blessed be, they understand my scolding, the dears. It's a cuff
+and a kiss with me, and I declare I don't know which they like best.
+They may howl when I hurt them, but they know it's their own mother
+doing the cuffing, and in their hearts they don't care. It's that way
+with cubs, ye see. Mother bear knows how hard to box the ears of 'em.
+But it's truth I'm saying, Mrs. Fitzgerald; there's little peace for
+women. They don't seem to belong to themselves at all, once they're
+married. It's very happy you are, looking forward to your first, and you
+have my good wishes. More than that, I'll be proud to be of any service
+to you I can when your time comes--it's myself has had experience
+enough! But, I tell you, the joy runs out when you're slaving from
+morning to night, and then never getting the half done that you ought;
+and when you don't know what it is to have two hours straight sleep at
+night; and maybe your husband scolding at the noise the young ones make.
+Love 'em? Of course, you love 'em. But you can stand only so much.
+After that, you're done for. And the agony of passing and leaving the
+children motherless is something I don't like to think about."
+
+She bared her thin breast to her nursing babe, rocking slowly, her blue
+eyes straining into the future with its menace.
+
+"But," said Marna, blushing with embarrassment, "need there be
+such--such a burden? Don't you think it right to--to--"
+
+"Neither God nor man seems to have any mercy on me," cried the little
+woman passionately. "I say I'm in a trap--that's the truth of it. If I
+was a selfish, bad mother, I could get out of it; if I was a mean wife,
+I could, too, I suppose. I've tried to do what was right,--what other
+people told me was right,--and I pray it won't kill me--for I ought to
+live for the children's sake."
+
+The child was whining because of lack of nourishment, and Mrs. Finn put
+it to the other breast, but it fared little better there. Mrs. Dennison
+was looking on with her mild, benevolent aspect.
+
+"My dear," she said at last with an air of gentle authority, "I'm going
+out to get a bottle and good reliable infant food for that child. You
+haven't strength enough to more than keep yourself going, not to say
+anything about the baby."
+
+She took the child out of the woman's arms and gave it to Kate.
+
+"But I don't think I ought to wean it when it's so young," cried Mrs.
+Finn, breaking down and wringing her thin hands with an immemorial
+Hibernian gesture. "Tim wouldn't like it, and his mother would rage
+at me."
+
+"They'll like it when they see the baby getting some flesh on its
+bones," insisted Mrs. Dennison. "There's more than one kind of a fight a
+mother has to put up for her children. They used to think it fine for a
+woman to kill herself for her children, but I don't think it's so much
+the fashion now. As you say, a mother has no business to die; it's the
+part of intelligence to live. So you just have a set-to with your
+old-fashioned mother-in-law if it's necessary."
+
+"Yes," put in Kate, "the new generation always has to fight the old in
+the interests of progress."
+
+Marna broke into a rippling laugh.
+
+"That's her best platform manner," she cried. "Just think, Mrs. Finn, my
+friend talks on suffrage."
+
+"Oh!" gasped the little Irishwoman, involuntarily putting out her hands
+as if she would snatch her infant from such a contaminating hold.
+
+But Kate drew back smilingly.
+
+"Yes," she said significantly, "I believe in woman's rights."
+
+She held on to the baby, and Mrs. Dennison, putting on her hat and coat,
+went in search of a nursing-bottle.
+
+On the way home, Mrs. Dennison, who was of the last generation, and
+Kate, who was of the present one, talked the matter over.
+
+"She didn't seem to understand that she had been talking 'woman's
+rights,'" mused Kate, referring to Mrs. Finn. "The word frightened the
+poor dear. She didn't see that fatal last word of her 'love, honor, and
+obey' had her where she might even have to give her life in keeping
+her word."
+
+"Well, for my part," said Mrs. Dennison, in her mellow, flowing tones,
+"I always found it a pleasure to obey my husband. But, then, to be sure,
+I don't know that he ever asked anything inconsiderate of me."
+
+"You were a well-shielded woman, weren't you?" asked Kate.
+
+"I didn't need to lift my hand unless I wished," said Mrs. Dennison in
+reminiscence.
+
+"And you had no children--"
+
+"But that was a great sorrow."
+
+"Yes, but it wasn't a living vexation and drain. It didn't use up your
+vitality and suck up your brain power and make a slattern and a drudge
+of you as having five children in seven years has of little Mrs. Finn.
+It's all very well to talk of obeying when you aren't asked to obey--or,
+at least, when you aren't required to do anything difficult. But good
+Tim Finn, I'll warrant, tells his Mary when she may go and where, and
+he'd be in a fury if she went somewhere against his desire. Oh, she's
+playing the old medieval game, you can see that!"
+
+"Dear Kate," sighed Mrs. Dennison, "sometimes your expressions seem to
+me quite out of taste. I do hope you won't mind my saying so. You're so
+very emphatic."
+
+"I don't mind a bit, Mrs. Dennison. I dare say I am getting to be rather
+violent and careless in my way of talking. It's a reaction from the
+vagueness and prettiness of speech I used to hear down in Silvertree,
+where they begin their remarks with an 'I'm not sure, but I think,' et
+cetera. But, really, you must overlook my vehemence. If I could spend my
+time with sweet souls like you, I'd be a different sort of woman."
+
+"I can't help looking forward, Kate, to the time when you'll be in your
+own home. You think you're all bound up in this public work, but I can
+tell by the looks of you that you're just the one to make a good wife
+for some fine man. I hope you don't think it impertinent of me, but I
+can't make out why you haven't taken one or the other of the men who
+want you."
+
+"You think some one wants me?" asked Kate provokingly.
+
+"Oh, we all know that Dr. von Shierbrand would rather be taking you home
+to see his old German mother than to be made President of the University
+of Chicago; and that nice Mr. McCrea is nearly crazy over the way you
+treat him."
+
+"But it would seem so stale--life in a home with either of them! Should
+I just have to sit at the window and watch for them to come home?"
+
+"You know you wouldn't," said Mrs. Dennison, almost crossly. "Why do
+you tease me? What's good enough for other women ought to be good
+enough for you."
+
+"Oh, what a bad one I am!" cried Kate. "Of course what is good enough
+for better women than I ought to be good enough for me. But yet--shall I
+tell the truth about myself?"
+
+"Do," said Mrs. Dennison, placated. "I want you to confide in me, Kate."
+
+"Well, you see, dear lady, suppose that I marry one of the gentlemen of
+whom you have spoken. Suppose I make a pleasant home for my husband,
+have two or three nice children, and live a happy and--well, a good
+life. Then I die and there's the end."
+
+"Well, of course I don't think that's the end," broke in Mrs. Dennison.
+
+Kate evaded the point.
+
+"I mean, there's an end of my earthly existence. Now, on the other hand,
+suppose I get this Bureau for Children through. Suppose it becomes a
+fact. Let us play that I am asked to become the head of it, or, if not
+that, at least to assist in carrying on its work. Then, suppose that, as
+a result of my work, the unprotected children have protection; the
+education of all the children in the country is assured--even of the
+half-witted, and the blind and the deaf and the vicious. Suppose that
+the care and development of children becomes a great and generally
+comprehended science, like sanitation, so that the men and women of
+future generations are more fitted to live than those we now see about
+us. Don't you think that will be better worth while than my individual
+happiness? They think a woman heroic when she sacrifices herself for her
+children, but shouldn't I be much more heroic if I worked all my life
+for other people's children? For children yet to be born? I ask you that
+calmly. I don't wish you to answer me to-day. I'm in earnest now, dear
+Mrs. Dennison, and I'd like you to give me a true answer."
+
+There was a little pause. Mrs. Dennison was trifling nervously with the
+frogs on her black silk jacket. When she spoke, it was rather
+diffidently.
+
+"I could answer you so much better, my dear Kate," she said at length,
+"if I only knew how much or how little vanity you have."
+
+"Oh!" gasped Kate.
+
+"Or whether you are really an egotist--as some think."
+
+"Oh!" breathed Kate again.
+
+"As for me, I always say that a person can't get anywhere without
+egotism. The word never did scare me. Egotism is a kind of yeast that
+makes the human bread rise. I don't see how we could get along without
+it. As you say, I'd better wait before answering you. You've asked me an
+important question, and I'd like to give it thought. I can see that
+you'd be a good and useful woman whichever thing you did. But the
+question is, would you be a happy one in a home? You've got the idea of
+a public life in your head, and very likely that influences you without
+your realizing it."
+
+"I don't say I'm not ambitious," cried Kate, really stirred. "But that
+ought to be a credit to me! It's ridiculous using the word 'ambitious'
+as a credit to a man, and making it seem like a shame to a woman.
+Ambition is personal force. Why shouldn't I have force?"
+
+"There are things I can't put into words," said Mrs. Dennison, taking a
+folded handkerchief from her bead bag and delicately wiping her face,
+"and one of them is what I think about women. I'm a woman myself, and it
+doesn't seem becoming to me to say that I think they're sacred."
+
+"No more sacred than men!" interrupted Kate hotly. "Life is sacred--if
+it's good. I can't say I think it sacred when it's deleterious. It's
+that pale, twilight sort of a theory which has kept women from doing the
+things they were capable of doing. Men kept thinking of them as sacred,
+and then they were miserably disappointed when they found they weren't.
+They talk about women's dreams, but I think men dream just as much as
+women, or more, and that they moon around with ideas about angel wives,
+and then are horribly shocked when they find they've married limited,
+commonplace, selfish creatures like themselves. I say let us train them
+both, make them comrades, give them a chance to share the burdens and
+the rewards, and see if we can't reduce the number of broken hearts in
+the world."
+
+"There are some burdens," put in Mrs. Dennison, "which men and women
+cannot share. The burden of child-bearing, which is the most important
+one there is, has to be borne by women alone. You yourself were talking
+about that only a little while ago. It's such a strange sort of a
+thing,--so sweet and _so_ terrible,--and it so often takes a woman to
+the verge of the grave, or over it, that I suppose it is that which
+gives a sacredness to women. Then, too, they'll work all their lives
+long for some one they love with no thought of any return except love.
+That makes them sacred, too. Most of them believe in God, even when
+they're bad, and they believe in those they love even when they ought
+not. Maybe they're right in this and maybe they're not. Perhaps you'll
+say that shows their lack of sense. But I say it helps the world on,
+just the same. It may not be sensible--but it makes them sacred."
+
+Mrs. Dennison's face was shining. She had pulled the gloves from her
+warm hands, and Kate, looking down at them, saw how work-worn they now
+were, though they were softly rounded and delicate. She knew this woman
+might have married a second time; but she was toiling that she might
+keep faith with the man she had laid in his grave. She was expecting a
+reunion with him. Her hope warmed her and kept her redolent of youth.
+She was still a bride, though she was a widow. She was of those who
+understood the things of the spirit. The essence of womanhood was in
+her--the elusive poetry of womanhood. To such implications of mystic
+beauty there was no retort. Kate saw in that moment that when women got
+as far as emancipation they were going to lose something infinitely
+precious. The real question was, should not these beautiful, these
+evanishing joys be permitted to depart in the interests of progress?
+Would not new, more robust satisfactions come to take the place of them?
+
+They rode on in silence, and Kate's mind darted here and there--darted
+to Lena Vroom, that piteous little sister of Icarus, with her scorched
+wings; darted to Honora Fulham with her shattered faith; to Mary
+Morrison with her wanton's wisdom; to Mary Finn, whose womanhood was her
+undoing; to Marna, who had given fame for love and found the bargain
+good; to Mrs. Leger, who had turned to God; to her mother, the cringing
+wife, who could not keep faith with herself and her vows of obedience,
+and who had perished of the conflict; to Mrs. Dennison, happy in her
+mid-Victorian creed. Then from these, whom she knew, her mind swept on
+to the others--to all the restless, disturbed, questioning women the
+world over, who, clinging to beautiful old myths, yet reached out
+diffident hands to grasp new guidance. The violence and nurtured hatred
+of some of them offended her deeply; the egregious selfishness of others
+seemed to her as a flaming sin. Militant, unrestrained, avid of coarse
+and obvious things, they presented a shameful contrast to this little,
+gentle, dreaming keeper of a boarding-house who sat beside her, her
+dove's eyes filled with the mist of memories.
+
+And yet--and yet--
+
+
+
+XX
+
+The next day, as it happened, she was invited to Lake Forest to attend a
+"suffrage tea." A distinguished English suffragette was to be present,
+and the more fashionable group of Chicago suffragists were gathering to
+pay her honor.
+
+It was a torrid day with a promise of storm, and Kate would have
+preferred to go to the Settlement House to do her usual work, which
+chanced just now to be chiefly clerical. But she was urged to meet the
+Englishwoman and to discuss with her the matter of the Children's
+Bureau, in which the Settlement House people were now taking the keenest
+interest. Kate went, gowned in fresh linen, and well pleased, after all,
+to be with a holiday crowd riding through the summer woods. Tea was
+being served on the lawn. It overlooked the lake, and here were gathered
+both men and women. It was a company of rather notable persons, as Kate
+saw at a glance. Almost every one there was distinguished for some
+social achievement, or as the advocate of some reform or theory, or
+perhaps as an opulent and fashionable patron. It was at once interesting
+and amusing.
+
+Kate greeted her hostess, and looked about her for the guest of honor.
+It transpired that the affair was quite informal, after all. The
+Englishwoman was sitting in a tea-tent discoursing with a number of
+gentlemen who hung over her with polite attentions. They were well-known
+bachelors of advanced ideas--men with honorary titles and personal
+ambitions. The great suffragist was very much at home with them. Her
+deep, musical voice resounded like a bell as she uttered her dicta and
+her witticisms. She--like the men--was smoking a cigarette, a feat which
+she performed without coquetry or consciousness. She was smoking because
+she liked to smoke. It took no more than a glance to reveal the fact
+that she was further along in her pregnancy than Marna--Marna who
+started back from the door when a stranger appeared at it lest she
+should seem immodest. But the suffragette, having acquired an applauding
+and excellent husband, saw no reason why she should apologize to the
+world for the processes of nature. Quite as unconscious of her condition
+as of her unconventionality in smoking, she discoursed with these
+diverted men, her transparent frock revealing the full beauties of her
+neck and bust, her handsome arms well displayed--frankly and insistently
+feminine, yet possessing herself without hesitation of what may be
+termed the masculine attitude toward life.
+
+For some reason which Kate did not attempt to define, she refrained from
+discussing the Bureau of Children with the celebrated suffragette,
+although she did not doubt that the Englishwoman would have been capable
+of keen and valuable criticism. Instead, she returned to the city, sent
+a box of violets to Marna, and then went on to her attic room.
+
+A letter was awaiting her from the West. It read:
+
+     "MY DEAR MISS BARRINGTON:--
+
+     "Honora and the kiddies are here. I have given my cousin a
+     room where she can see the mountains on two sides, and I hope
+     it will help. I've known the hills to help, even with pretty
+     rough customers. It won't take a creature like Honora long to
+     get hold of the secret, will it? You know what I mean,
+     I guess.
+
+     "I wish you had come. I watched the turn in the drive to see
+     if you wouldn't be in the station wagon. There were two
+     women's heads. I recognized Honora's, and I tried to think
+     the second one was yours, but I really knew it wasn't. It was
+     a low head--one of that patient sort of heads--and a flat,
+     lid-like hat. The nurse's, of course! I suppose you wear
+     helmet-shaped hats with wings on them--something like
+     Mercury's or Diana's. Or don't they sell that kind of
+     millinery nowadays?
+
+     "Honora tells me you're trying to run the world and that you
+     make up to all kinds of people--hold-up men as well as
+     preachers. Do you know, I'm something like that myself? I
+     can't help it, but I do seem to enjoy folks. One of the
+     pleasantest nights I ever spent was with a lot of bandits in
+     a cave. I was their prisoner, too, which complicated matters.
+     But we had such a bully time that they asked me to join
+     them. I told them I'd like the life in some respects. I could
+     see it was a sort of game not unlike some I'd played when I
+     was a boy. But it would have made me nervous, so I had to
+     refuse them.
+
+     "Well, I'm talking nonsense. What if you should think I
+     counted it sense! That would be bad for me. I only thought
+     you'd be having so may pious and proper letters that I'd have
+     to give you a jog if I got you to answer this. And I do wish
+     you would answer it. I'm a lonely man, though a busy one. Of
+     course it's going to be a tremendous comfort having Honora
+     here when once she gets to be herself. She's wild with pain
+     now, and nothing she says means anything. We play chess a
+     good deal, after a fashion. Honora thinks she's amusing me,
+     but as I like 'the rigor of the game,' I can't say that I'm
+     amused at her plays. The first time she thinks before she
+     moves I'll know she's over the worst of her trouble. She
+     seems very weak, but I'm feeding her on cream and eggs. The
+     kiddies are dears--just as cute as young owls. They're not
+     afraid of me even when I pretend I'm a coyote and howl.
+
+     "Do write to me, Miss Barrington. I'm as crude as a cabbage,
+     but when I say I'd rather have you write me than have any
+     piece of good fortune befall me which your wildest
+     imagination could depict, I mean it. Perhaps that will scare
+     you off. Anyway, you can't say I didn't play fair.
+
+     "I'm worn out sitting around with this fractured leg of mine
+     in its miserable cast. (I know stronger words than
+     'miserable,' but I use it because I'm determined to behave
+     myself.) Honora says she thinks it would be all right for you
+     to correspond with me. I asked her.
+
+     "Yours faithfully,
+
+     "KARL WANDER."
+
+"What a ridiculous boy," said Kate to herself. She laughed aloud with a
+rippling merriment; and then, after a little silence, she laughed again.
+
+"The man certainly is naif," she said. "Can he really expect me to
+answer a letter like that?"
+
+She awoke several times that night, and each time she gave a fleeting
+thought to the letter. She seemed to see it before her eyes--a purple
+eidolon, a parallelogram in shape. It flickered up and down like an
+electric sign. When morning came she was quite surprised to find the
+letter was existent and stationary. She read it again, and she wished
+tremendously that she might answer it. It occurred to her that in a way
+she never had had any fun. She had been persistently earnest,
+passionately honest, absurdly grim. Now to answer that letter would come
+under the head of mere frolic! Yet would it? Was not this curious,
+outspoken man--this gigantic, good-hearted, absurd boy--giving her
+notice that he was ready to turn into her lover at the slightest gesture
+of acquiescence on her part? No, the frolic would soon end. It would be
+another of those appalling games-for-life, those woman-trap affairs.
+And she liked freedom better than anything.
+
+She went off to her work in a defiant frame of mind, carrying, however,
+the letter with her in her handbag.
+
+What she did write--after several days' delay--was this:--
+
+     "MY DEAR MR. WANDER:--
+
+     "I can see that Honora is in the best place in the world for
+     her. You must let me know when she has checkmated you. I
+     quite agree that that will show the beginning of her
+     recovery. She has had a terrible misfortune, and it was the
+     outcome of a disease from which all of us 'advanced' women
+     are suffering. Her convictions and her instincts were at war.
+     I can't imagine what is going to happen to us. We all feel
+     very unsettled, and Honora's tragedy is only one of several
+     sorts which may come to any of us. But an instinct deeper
+     than instinct, a conviction beyond conviction, tells me that
+     we are right--that we must go on, studying, working,
+     developing. We may have to pay a fearful price for our
+     advancement, but I do not suppose we could turn back now
+     if we would.
+
+     "You ask if I will correspond with you. Well, do you suppose
+     we really have anything to say? What, for example, have you
+     to tell me about? Honora says you own a mine, or two or
+     three; that you have a city of workmen; that you are a
+     father to them. Are they Italians? I think she said so.
+     They're grateful folk, the Italians. I hope they like you.
+     They are so sweet when they do, and so--sudden--when
+     they don't.
+
+     "I have had something to do with them, and they are very dear
+     to me. They ask me to their christenings and to other
+     festivals. I like their gayety because it contrasts with my
+     own disposition, which is gloomy.
+
+     "Upon reflection, I think we'd better not write to each
+     other. You were too explicit in your letter--too
+     precautionary. You'd make me have a conscience about it, and
+     I'd be watching myself. That's too much trouble. My business
+     is to watch others, not myself. But I do thank you for giving
+     such a welcome to Honora and the babies. I hope you will soon
+     be about again. I find it so much easier to imagine you
+     riding over a mountain pass than sitting in the house with a
+     leg in plaster.
+
+     "Yours sincerely,
+
+     "KATE BARRINGTON."
+
+He wrote back:--
+
+     "MY DEAR MISS BARRINGTON:--
+
+     "I admire your idea of gloom! Not the spirit of gloom but of
+     adventure moves you. I saw it in your eye. When I buy a
+     horse, I always look at his eye. It's not so much viciousness
+     that I'm afraid of as stupidity. I like a horse that is
+     always pressing forward to see what is around the next turn.
+     Now, we humans are a good deal like horses. Women are,
+     anyway. And I saw your eye. My own opinion is that you are
+     having the finest time of anybody I know. You're shaping your
+     own life, at least,--and that's the best fun there is,--the
+     best kind of good fortune. Of course you'll get tired of it
+     after a while. I don't say that because you are a woman, but
+     I've seen it happen over and over again both with men and
+     women. After a little while they get tired of roving and
+     come home.
+
+     "You may not believe it, but, after all, that's the great
+     moment in their lives--you just take it from me who have seen
+     more than you might think and who have had a good deal of
+     time to think things out. I do wish you had seen your way to
+     come out here. There are any number of matters I would like
+     to talk over with you.
+
+     "You mustn't think me impudent for writing in this familiar
+     way. I write frankly because I'm sure you'll understand, and
+     the conventionalities have been cast aside because in this
+     case they seem so immaterial. I can assure you that I'm not
+     impudent--not where women are concerned, at any rate. I'm a
+     born lover of women, though I have been no woman's lover. I
+     haven't seen much of them. Sometimes I've gone a year without
+     seeing one, not even a squaw. But I judge them by my mother,
+     who made every one happy who came near her, and by some
+     others I have known; I judge them by you, though I saw you
+     only a minute. I suppose you will think me crazy or insincere
+     in saying that. I'm both sane and honest--ask Honora.
+
+     "You speak of my Italians. They are making me trouble. We
+     have been good friends and they have been happy here. I gave
+     them lots to build on if they would put up homes; and I
+     advanced the capital for the cottages and let them pay me
+     four per cent--the lowest possible interest. I got a school
+     for their children and good teachers, and I interested the
+     church down in Denver to send a priest out here and establish
+     a mission. I thought we understood each other, and that they
+     comprehended that their prosperity and mine were bound up
+     together. But an agitator came here the other day,--sent by
+     the unions, of course,--and there's discontent. They have
+     lost the friendly look from their eyes, and the men turn out
+     of their way to avoid speaking to me. Since I've been laid up
+     here, things have been going badly. There have been meetings
+     and a good deal of hard talk. I suppose I'm in for a fight,
+     and I tell you it hurts. I feel like a man at war with his
+     children. As I feel just now, I'd throw up the whole thing
+     rather than row with them, but the money of other men is
+     invested in these mines and I'm the custodian of it. So I've
+     no choice in the matter. Perhaps, too, it's for their own
+     good that they should be made to see reason. What do you say?
+
+     "Faithfully,
+
+     "WANDER."
+
+Honora wrote the same day and to her quiet report of improved nights
+and endurable days she added:--
+
+     "I hope you will answer my cousin's letter. I can't tell you
+     what a good man he is, and so boyish, in spite of his being
+     strong and perfectly brave--oh, brave to the death! He's very
+     lonely. He always has been. You'll have to make allowances
+     for his being so Western and going right to the point in such
+     a reckless way. He hasn't told me what he's written you, but
+     I know if he wants to be friends with you he'll say so
+     without any preliminaries. He's very eager to have me talk of
+     you, so I do. I'm eager to talk, too. I always loved you,
+     Kate, but now I put you and Karl in a class by yourselves as
+     the completely dependable ones.
+
+     "The babies send kisses. Don't worry about me. I'm beginning
+     to see that it's not extraordinary for trouble to have come
+     to me. Why not to me as well as to another? I'm one of the
+     great company of sad ones now. But I'm not going to be
+     melancholy. I know how disappointed you'd be if I were. I'm
+     beginning to sleep better, and for all of this still, dark
+     cavern in my heart, so filled with voices of the past and
+     with the horrible chill of the present, I am able to laugh a
+     little at passing things. I find myself doing it
+     involuntarily. So at least I've got where I can hear what the
+     people about me are saying, and can make a fitting reply.
+     Yes, do write Karl. For my sake."
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+Meantime, Ray McCrea had neglected to take his summer vacation. He was
+staying in the city, and twice a week he called on Kate. Kate liked him
+neither more nor less than at the beginning. He was clever and he was
+kind, and it was his delight to make her happy. But it was with the
+surface of her understanding that she listened to him and the skimmings
+of her thoughts that she passed to him. He had that light, acrid accent
+of well-to-do American men. Reasonably contented himself, he failed to
+see why every one else should not be so, too. He was not religious for
+the same reason that he was not irreligious--because it seemed to him
+useless to think about such matters. Public affairs and politics failed
+to interest him because he believed that the country was in the hands of
+a mob and that the "grafters would run things anyway." He called
+eloquence spell-binding, and sentiment slush,--sentiment, that is, in
+books and on the stage,--and he was indulgently inclined to suspect that
+there was something "in it" for whoever appeared to be essaying a
+benevolent enterprise. Respectable, liberal-handed, habitually amused,
+slightly caustic, he looked out for the good of himself and those
+related to him and considered that he was justified in closing his
+corporate regards at that point. He had no cant and no hypocrisy, no
+pose and no fads. A sane, aggressive, self-centered, rational
+materialist of the American brand, it was not only his friends who
+thought him a fine fellow. He himself would have admitted so much and
+have been perfectly justified in so doing.
+
+Kate received flowers, books, and sweets from him, and now and then he
+asked her why he had lost ground with her. Sometimes he would say:--
+
+"I can see a conservative policy is the one for me, Kate, where you're
+concerned. I'm going to lie low so as not to give you a chance to send
+me whistling."
+
+Once, when he grew picturesquely melancholy, she refused to receive his
+offerings. She told him he was making a villainess out of her, and that
+she'd end their meetings. But at that he promised so ardently not to be
+ardent that she forgave him and continued to read the novels and to tend
+the flowers he brought her. They went for walks together; sometimes she
+lunched with him in the city, and on pleasant evenings they attended
+open-air concerts. He tried to be discreet, but in August, with the full
+moon, he had a relapse. Kate gave him warning; he persisted,--the moon
+really was quite wonderful that August,--and then, to his chagrin, he
+received a postcard from Silvertree. Kate had gone to see her father.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She would not have gone but for a chance word in one of Wander's
+letters.
+
+"I hear your father is still living," he wrote. "That is so good! I have
+no parents now, but I like to remember how happy I was when I had them.
+I was young when my mother died, but father lived to a good age, and as
+long as he was alive I had some one to do things for. He always liked to
+hear of my exploits. I was a hero to him, if I never was to any one
+else. It kept my heart warmed up, and when he went he left me very
+lonely, indeed."
+
+Kate reddened with shame when she read these words. Had Honora told him
+how she had deserted her father--how she had run from him and his
+tyranny to live her own life, and was he, Wander, meaning this for a
+rebuke? But she knew that could not be. Honora would have kept her
+counsel; she was not a tattler. Karl was merely congratulating her on a
+piece of good fortune, apparently. It threw a new light on the
+declaration of independence that had seemed to her to be so fine. Was
+old-time sentiment right, after all? The ancient law, "Honor thy father
+and thy mother," did not put in the proviso, "if they are according to
+thy notion of what they should be."
+
+So Kate was again at Silvertree and in the old, familiar and now
+lifeless house. It was not now a caressed and pampered home; there was
+no longer any one there to trick it out in foolish affectionate
+adornments. In the first half-hour, while Kate roamed from room to room,
+she could hardly endure the appalling blankness of the place. No
+stranger could have felt so unwelcomed as she did--so alien, so
+inconsolably homeless.
+
+She was waiting for her father when he came home, and she hoped to warm
+him a little by the surprise of her arrival. But it was his cue to be
+deeply offended with her.
+
+"Hullo, Kate," he said, nodding and holding out his hand with a
+deliberately indifferent gesture.
+
+"Oh, see here, dad, you know you've got to kiss me!" she cried.
+
+So he did, rather shamefacedly, and they sat together on the dusty
+veranda and talked. He had been well, he said, but he was far from
+looking so. His face was gray and drawn, his lips were pale, and his
+long skillful surgeon's hands looked inert and weary. When he walked, he
+had the effect of dragging his feet after him.
+
+"Aren't you going to take a vacation, dad?" Kate demanded. "If ever a
+man appeared to be in need of it, you do."
+
+"What would I do with a vacation? And where could I go? I'd look fine at
+a summer resort, wouldn't I, sitting around with idle fools? If I could
+only go somewhere to get rid of this damned neurasthenia that all the
+fool women think they've got, I'd go; but I don't suppose there's such a
+place this side of the Arctic Circle."
+
+Kate regarded him for a moment without answering. She saw he was almost
+at the end of his strength and a victim of the very malady against which
+he was railing. The constant wear and tear of country practice, year in
+and year out, had depleted him of a magnificent stock of energy and
+endurance. Perhaps, too, she had had her share of responsibility in his
+decline, for she had been severe with him; had defied him when she might
+have comforted him. She forgot his insolence, his meanness, his
+conscienceless hectoring, as she saw how his temples seemed fallen in
+and how his gray hair straggled over his brow. It was she who assumed
+the voice of authority now.
+
+"There's going to be a vacation," she announced, "and it will be quite a
+long one. Put your practice in the hands of some one else, let your
+housekeeper take a rest, and then you come away with me. I'll give you
+three days to get ready."
+
+He cast at her the old sharp, lance-like look of opposition, but she
+stood before him so strong, so kind, so daughterly (so motherly, too),
+that, for one of the few times in his life of senseless domination and
+obstinacy, he yielded. The tears came to his eyes.
+
+"All right, Kate," he said with an accent of capitulation. He really was
+a broken old man.
+
+She passed a happy evening with him looking over advertisements of
+forest inns and fishing resorts, and though no decision was reached,
+both of them went to bed in a state of pleasant anticipation. The
+following day she took his affairs in hand. The housekeeper was
+delighted at her release; a young physician was pleased to take charge
+of Dr. Barrington's patients.
+
+Kate made him buy new clothes,--he had been wearing winter ones,--and
+she set him out in picturesque gear suiting his lank length and
+old-time manner. Then she induced him to select a place far north in the
+Wisconsin woods, and the third day they were journeying there together.
+
+It seemed quite incredible that the dependent and affectionate man
+opposite her was the one who had filled her with fear and resentment
+such a short time ago. She found herself actually laughing aloud once at
+the absurdity of it all. Had her dread of him been fortuitous, his
+tyranny a mere sham? Had he really liked her all the time, and had she
+been a sensitive fool? She would have thought so, indeed, but for the
+memory of the perplexed and distracted face of her mother, the cringing
+and broken spirit of her who missed truth through an obsession of love.
+No, no, a tyrant he had been, one of a countless army of them!
+
+But now he leaned back on his seat very sad of eye, inert of gesture,
+without curiosity or much expectancy. He let her do everything for him.
+She felt her heart warming as she served him. She could hardly keep
+herself from stooping to kiss his great brow; the hollows of his eyes
+when he was sleeping moved her to a passion of pity. After all, he was
+her own; and now she had him again. The bitterness of years began to
+die, and with it much of that secret, instinctive aversion to men--that
+terror of being trapped and held to some uninspiring association or
+dragging task.
+
+For now, when her father awoke from one of his many naps, he would turn
+to her with: "Have I slept long, Kate?" or "We'll be going in to lunch
+soon, I suppose, daughter?" or "Will it be very long now before we reach
+our destination?"
+
+It was reached at dawn of an early autumn day, and they drove ten miles
+into the pine woods. The scented silence took them. They were at "God's
+green caravansarie," and the rancor that had poisoned their hearts was
+gone. They turned toward each other in common trust, father and
+daughter, forgiving, if not all forgetting, the hurt and angry years.
+
+"It really was your cousin who brought it about," Kate wrote Honora. "He
+reminded me that I was fortunate to have a father. You see, I hadn't
+realized it! Oh, Honora, what a queer girl I am--always having to think
+things out! Always making myself miserable in trying to be happy! Always
+going wrong in striving to be right! I should think the gods would make
+Olympus ring laughing at me! I once wrote your cousin that women of my
+sort were worn out with their struggle to reconcile their convictions
+and their instincts. And that's true. That's what is making them so
+restless and so strange and tumultuous. But of course I can't think it
+their fault--merely their destiny. Something is happening to them, but
+neither they nor any one else can quite tell what it is."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Dr. Barrington was broken, no question about that. Even the stimulation
+of the incomparable air of those Northern woods could not charge him
+with vitality. He lay wrapped in blankets, on the bed improvised for him
+beneath the trees, or before the leaping fire in the inn, with the odors
+of the burning pine about him, and he let time slip by as it would.
+
+The people at the inn thought they never had seen a more devoted
+daughter than his. She sat beside him while he slept; she read or talked
+to him softly when he awakened; she was at hand with some light but
+sustaining refreshment whenever he seemed depressed or too relaxed. But
+there were certain things which the inn people could not make out. The
+sick man had the air of having forgiven this fine girl for something. He
+received her service like one who had the right to expect it. He was
+tender and he was happy, but he was, after all, the dominator. Nor could
+they quite make out the girl, who smiled at his demands,--which were
+sometimes incessant,--and who obeyed with the perfect patience of the
+strong. They did not know that if he had once been an active tyrant, he
+was now a supine one. As he had been unable, for all of his
+intelligence, to perceive the meaning of justice from the old angle, so
+he was equally unable to get it from his present point of view. He had
+been harsh with his daughter in the old days; so much he would have
+admitted. That he would have frustrated her completely, absorbed and
+wasted her power, he could not perceive. He did not surmise that he was
+now doing in an amiable fashion what he hitherto had tried to do in a
+masterful and insolent one. He did not realize that the tyranny of the
+weak is a more destructive thing when levelled at the generous than the
+tyranny of the strong.
+
+Had he been interrupted in mid-career--in those days when his surgery
+was sure and bold--to care for a feeble and complaining wife, he would
+have thought himself egregiously abused. That Kate, whose mail each day
+exceeded by many times that which he had received in his most
+influential years, whose correspondence was with persons with whom he
+could not at any time have held communication, should be taken from her
+active duties appeared to him as nothing. He was a sick father. His
+daughter attended him in love and dutifulness. He was at peace--and he
+knew she was doing her duty. It really did not occur to him that she or
+any one else could have looked at the matter in a different light, or
+that any loving expression of regret was due her. Such sacrifices were
+expected of women. They were not expected of men, although men sometimes
+magnificently performed them.
+
+To tell the truth, no such idea occurred to Kate either. She was as
+happy as her father. At last, in circumstances sad enough, she had
+reached a degree of understanding with him. She had no thought for the
+inconvenience under which she worked. She was more than willing to sit
+till past the middle of the night answering her letters, postponing her
+engagements, sustaining her humbler and more unhappy friends--those who
+were under practical parole to her--with her encouragement, and always,
+day by day, extending the idea of the Bureau of Children. For daily it
+took shape; daily the system of organization became more apparent to
+her. She wrote to Ray McCrea about it; she wrote to Karl Wander on the
+same subject. It seemed to suffice or almost to suffice her. It kept her
+from anticipating the details of the melancholy drama which was now
+being enacted before her eyes.
+
+For her father was passing. His weakness increased, and his attitude
+toward life became one of gentle indifference. He was homesick for his
+wife, too. Though he had seemed to take so little satisfaction in her
+society, and had not scrupled when she was alive to show the contempt he
+felt for her opinions, now he liked to talk of her. He had made a great
+outcry against sentiment all of his life, but in his weakness he found
+his chief consolation in it. He had been a materialist, denying
+immortality for the soul, but now he reverted to the phrases of pious
+men of the past generation.
+
+"I shall be seeing your mother soon, Kate," he would say wistfully,
+holding his daughter's hand. Kate was involuntarily touched by such
+words, but she was ashamed for him, too. Where was all his hard-won,
+bravely flaunted infidelity? Where his scientific outlook?
+
+It was only slowly, and as the result of her daily and nightly
+association with him, that she began to see how his acquired convictions
+were slipping away from him, leaving the sentiments and predilections
+which had been his when he was a boy. Had he never been a strong man,
+really, and had his violence of opinion and his arrogance of demeanor
+been the defences erected by a man of spiritual timidity and restless,
+excitable brain? Had his assertiveness, like his compliance, been part
+and parcel of a mind not at peace, not grounded in a definite faith?
+Perhaps he had been afraid of the domination of his gentle wife with her
+soft insistence, and had girded at her throughout the years because of
+mere fanatic self-esteem. But now that she had so long been beyond the
+reach of his whimsical commands, he turned to the thought of her like a
+yearning child to its mother.
+
+"If you hadn't come when you did, Kate," he would say, weeping with
+self-pity, "I should have died alone. I wouldn't own to any one how sick
+I was. Why, one night I was so weak, after being out thirty-six hours
+with a sick woman, that I had to creep upstairs on my hands and knees."
+He sobbed for a moment piteously, his nerves too tattered to permit him
+to retain any semblance of self-control. Kate tried in vain to soothe
+him. "What would your mother have thought if you had let me die alone?"
+he demanded of her.
+
+It was useless for her to say that he had not told her he was ill. He
+was in no condition to face the truth. He was completely shattered--the
+victim of a country physician's practice and of an unrestrained
+irritability. Her commiseration had been all that was needed to have him
+yield himself unreservedly to her care.
+
+It had been her intention to stay in the woods with him for a fortnight,
+but the end of that time found his lassitude increasing and his need for
+her greater than ever. She was obliged to ask for indefinite leave of
+absence. A physician came from Milwaukee once a week to see him; and
+meantime quiet and comfort were his best medicines.
+
+The autumn began to deepen. The pines accentuated their solemnity, and
+out on the roadways the hazel bushes and the sumac changed to canary, to
+russet, and to crimson. For days together the sky would be cloudless,
+and even in the dead of night the vault seemed to retain its splendor.
+There are curious cloths woven on Persian and on Turkish looms which
+appear to the casual eye to be merely black, but which held in sunlight
+show green and blue, purple and bronze, like the shifting colors on a
+duck's back. Kate, pacing back and forth in the night after hours of
+concentrated labor,--labor which could be performed only when her father
+was resting,--noted such mysterious and evasive hues in her Northern
+sky. Never had she seen heavens so triumphant. True, the stars shone
+with a remote glory, but she was more inspired by their enduring, their
+impersonal magnificence, than she could have been by anything relative
+to herself.
+
+A year ago, had she been so isolated, she might have found herself
+lonely, but it was quite different now. She possessed links with the
+active world. There were many who wanted her--some for small and some
+for great things. She felt herself in the stream of life; it poured
+about her, an invisible thing, but strong and deep. Sympathy,
+understanding, encouragement, reached her even there in her solitude and
+heartened her. Weary as she often was physically, drained as she could
+not but be mentally, her heart was warm and full.
+
+October came and went bringing little change in Dr. Barrington's
+condition. It did not seem advisable to move him. Rest and care were the
+things required; and the constant ministrations of a physician would
+have been of little benefit. Kate prayed for a change; and it came, but
+not as she had hoped. One morning she went to her father to find him
+terribly altered. It was as if some blight had fallen upon him in the
+night. His face was gray in hue, his pulse barely fluttering, though his
+eyes were keener than they had been, as if a sudden danger had brought
+back his old force and comprehension. Even the tone in which he
+addressed her had more of its old-time quality. It was the accent of
+command, the voice he had used as a physician in the sick-room, though
+it was faint.
+
+"Send for Hudson," he said. "We'll be needing him, Kate. The fight's
+on. Don't feel badly if we fail. You've done your best."
+
+It was six hours before the physician arrived from Milwaukee.
+
+"I couldn't have looked for anything like this," he said to Kate. "I
+thought he was safe--that six months' rest would see him getting
+about again."
+
+They had a week's conflict with the last dread enemy of man, and they
+lost. Dr. Barrington was quite as much aware of the significance of his
+steady decline as any one. He had practical, quiet, encouraging talks
+with his daughter. He sent for an attorney and secured his property to
+her. Once more, as in his brighter days, he talked of important matters,
+though no longer with his old arrogance. He seemed to comprehend at
+last, fully and proudly, that she was the inheritor of the best part of
+him. Her excursive spirit, her inquisitive mind, were, after all, in
+spite of all differences, his gift to her. He gave her his good wishes
+and begged her to follow whatever forces had been leading her. It was as
+if, in his weakness, he had sunk for a period into something resembling
+childhood and had emerged from it into a newer, finer manhood.
+
+"I kept abreast of things in my profession," he said, "but in other
+matters I was obstinate. I liked the old way--a man at the helm, and the
+crew answering his commands. No matter how big a fool the man was, I
+still wanted him at the helm." He smiled at her brightly. There was,
+indeed, a sort of terrible brilliancy about him, the result, perhaps,
+of heroic artificial stimulation. But these false fires soon burned
+themselves out. One beautiful Sunday morning they found him sinking. He
+himself informed his physician that it was his day of transition.
+
+"I've only an hour or two more, Hudson," he whispered cheerfully. "Feel
+that pulse!"
+
+"Oh, we may manage to keep you with us some time yet, Dr. Barrington,"
+said the other with a professional attempt at optimism.
+
+But the older man shook his head.
+
+"Let's not bother with the stock phrases," he said. "Ask my daughter to
+come. I'd like to look at her till the last."
+
+So Kate sat where he could see her, and they coaxed the fluttering heart
+to yet a little further effort. Dr. Barrington supervised everything;
+counted his own pulse; noted its decline with his accustomed accuracy.
+
+The sunlight streamed into the room through the tall shafts of trees;
+outside the sighing of the pines was heard, rising now and then to a
+noble requiem. It lifted Kate's soul on its deep harmonies, and she was
+able to bear herself with fortitude.
+
+"It's been so sweet to be with you, dear," she murmured in the ears
+which were growing dull to earthly sounds. "Say that I've made up to you
+a little for my willfulness. I've always loved you--always."
+
+"I know," he whispered. "I understand--everything--now!"
+
+In fact, his glance answered hers with full comprehension.
+
+"The beat is getting very low now, Doctor," he murmured, the fingers of
+his right hand on his left wrist; "very infrequent--fifteen
+minutes more--"
+
+Dr. Hudson tried to restrain him from his grim task of noting his own
+sinking vitality, but the old physician waved him off.
+
+"It's very interesting," he said. It seemed so, indeed. Suddenly he said
+quite clearly and in a louder voice than he had used that day: "It has
+stopped. It is the end!"
+
+Kate sprang to her feet incredulously. There was a moment of waiting so
+tense that the very trees seemed to cease their moaning to listen. In
+all the room there was no sound. The struggling breath had ceased. The
+old physician had been correct--he had achieved the thing he had set
+himself to do. He had announced his own demise.
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+Kate had him buried beside the wife for whom he had so inconsistently
+longed. She sold the old house, selected a few keepsakes from it,
+disposed of all else, and came, late in November, back to the city.
+Marna's baby had been born--a little bright boy, named for his father.
+Mrs. Barsaloux, relenting, had sent a layette of French workmanship, and
+Marna was radiantly happy.
+
+"If only _tante_ will come over for Christmas," Marna lilted to Kate, "I
+shall be almost too happy to live. How good she was to me, and how
+ungrateful I seemed to her! Write her to come, Kate, mavourneen. Tell
+her the baby won't seem quite complete till she's kissed it."
+
+So Kate wrote Mrs. Barsaloux, adding her solicitation to Marna's. Human
+love and sympathy were coming to seem to her of more value than anything
+else in the world. To be loved--to be companioned--to have the vast
+loneliness of life mitigated by fealty and laughter and tenderness--what
+was there to take the place of it?
+
+Her heart swelled with a desire to lessen the pain of the world. All her
+egotism, her self-assertion, her formless ambitions had got up, or down,
+to that,--to comfort the comfortless, to keep evil away from little
+children, to let those who were in any sort of a prison go free. Yet
+she knew very well that all of this would lack its perfect meaning
+unless there was some one to say to her--to her and to none other: "I
+understand."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mrs. Barsaloux did not come to America at Christmas time. Karl Wander
+did not--as he had thought he might--visit Chicago. The holiday season
+seemed to bring little to Kate except a press of duties. She aspired to
+go to bed Christmas night with the conviction that not a child in her
+large territory had spent a neglected Christmas. This meant a skilled
+cooeperation with other societies, with the benevolently inclined
+newspapers, and with generous patrons. The correspondence involved was
+necessarily large, and the amount of detail to be attended to more than
+she should have undertaken, unaided, but she was spurred on by an almost
+consuming passion of pity and sisterliness. That sensible detachment
+which had marked her work at the outset had gradually and perhaps
+regrettably disappeared. So far from having outgrown emotional struggle,
+she seemed now, because of something that was taking place in her inner
+life, to be increasingly susceptible to it.
+
+Her father's death had taken from her the last vestige of a home. She
+had now no place which she could call her own, or to which she would
+instinctively turn at Christmas time. To be sure, there were many who
+bade her to their firesides, and some of these invitations she accepted
+with gratitude and joy. But she could, of course, only pause at the
+hearthstones of others. Her thoughts winged on to other things--to the
+little poor homes where her wistful children dwelt, to the great scheme
+for their care and oversight which daily came nearer to realization.
+
+A number of benevolent women--rich in purse and in a passion for public
+service--desired her to lecture. She was to explain the meaning of the
+Bureau of Children at the state federations of women's clubs, in lyceum
+courses, and wherever receptive audiences could be found. They advised,
+among other things, her attendance at the biennial meeting of the
+General Federation of Women's Clubs which was meeting that coming spring
+in Southern California.
+
+The time had been not so far distant when she would have had difficulty
+in seeing herself in the role of a public lecturer, but now that she had
+something imperative to say, she did not see herself in any "role" at
+all. She ceased to think about herself save as the carrier of a message.
+
+Her Christmas letter from Wander was at once a disappointment and a
+shock.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     "I've made a mess of things," he wrote, "and do not intend to
+     intrude on you until I have shown myself more worthy of
+     consideration. I try to tell myself that my present fiasco is
+     not my fault, but I've more than a suspicion that I'm
+     playing the coward's part when I think that. You can be
+     disappointed in me if you like. _I'm_ outrageously
+     disappointed. I thought I was made of better stuff.
+
+     "I don't know when I'll have time for writing again, for I
+     shall be very busy. I suppose I'll think about you more than
+     is good for me. But maybe not. Maybe the thoughts of you will
+     be crowded out. I'm rather curious to see. It would be better
+     for me if they would, for I've come to a bad turn in the
+     road, and when I get around it, maybe all of the old familiar
+     scenes--the window out of which your face looked, for
+     example--will be lost to me. I send my good wishes to you all
+     the same. I shall do that as long as I have a brain and
+     a heart.
+
+     "Faithfully,
+
+     "WANDER."
+
+"That means trouble," reflected Kate, and had a wild desire to rush to
+his aid.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That she did not was owing partly--only partly--to another letter which,
+bearing an English postmark, indicated that Ray McCrea, who had been
+abroad for a month on business, was turning his face toward home. What
+he had to say was this:--
+
+     "DEAREST KATE:--
+
+     "I'm sending you a warning. In a few days I'll be tossing on
+     that black sea of which I have, in the last few days, caught
+     some discouraging glimpses. It doesn't look as if it meant to
+     let me see the Statue of Liberty again, but as surely as I
+     do, I'm going to go into council with you.
+
+     "I imagine you know mighty well what I'm going to say. For
+     years you've kept me at your call--or, rather, for years I
+     have kept myself there. You've discouraged me often, in a
+     tolerant fashion, as if you thought me too young to be
+     dangerous, or yourself too high up to be called to account.
+     I've been patient, chiefly because I found your society, as a
+     mere recipient of my awkward attentions, too satisfactory to
+     be able to run the risk of foregoing it. But if I were to sit
+     in the outer court any longer I would be pusillanimous. I'm
+     coming home to force you to make up that strange mind of
+     yours, which seems to be forever occupying itself with the
+     thing far-off and to-be-hoped-for, rather than with what is
+     near at hand.
+
+     "You'll have time to think it over. You can't say I've been
+     precipitate.
+
+     "Yours--always,
+
+     "RAY."
+
+At that she flashed a letter to Colorado.
+
+"What is your cousin's trouble?" she asked Honora. "Is it at the mines?"
+
+"It's at the mines," Honora replied. "Karl's life has been and is in
+danger. Friends have warned me of that again and again. There's no
+holding these people--these several hundred Italians that poor Karl
+insisted upon regarding as his wards, his 'adopted children.' They're
+preparing to leave their half-paid-for homes and their steady work, and
+to go threshing off across the country in the wave of a hard-drinking,
+hysterical labor leader. He has them inflamed to the explosive point.
+When they've done their worst, Karl may be a poor man. Not that he
+worries about that; but he's likely to carry down with him friends and
+business associates. Of course this is not final. He may win out, but
+such a catastrophe threatens him.
+
+"But understand, all this is not what is tormenting him and turning him
+gaunt and haggard. No, as usual, the last twist of the knife is given by
+a woman. In this case it is an Italian girl, Elena Cimiotti, the
+daughter of one of the strikers and of the woman who does our washing
+for us. She's a beautiful, wild creature, something as you might suppose
+the daughter of Jorio to be. She has come for the washing and has
+brought it home again for months past, and Karl, who is thoughtful of
+everybody, has assisted her with her burden when she was lifting it from
+her burro's back or packing it on the little beast. Sometimes he would
+fetch her a glass of water, or give her a cup of tea, or put some fruit
+in her saddle-bags. You know what a way he has with all women! I suppose
+it would turn any foolish creature's head. And he has such an impressive
+way of saying things! What would be a casual speech on the tongue of
+another becomes significant, when he has given one of his original
+twists to it. I think, too, that in utter disregard of Italian etiquette
+he has sometimes walked on the street with this girl for a few steps. He
+is like a child in some ways,--as trusting and unconventional,--and he
+wants to be friends with everybody. I can't tell whether it is because
+he is such an aristocrat that it doesn't occur to him that any one can
+suspect him of losing caste, or because he is such a democrat that he
+doesn't know it exists.
+
+"However that may be, the girl is in love with him. These Italian girls
+are modest and well-behaved ordinarily, but when once their imagination
+is aroused they are like flaming meteors. They have no shame because
+they can't see why any one should be ashamed of love (and, to tell the
+truth, I can't either). But this girl believes Karl has encouraged her.
+I suppose she honestly believed that he was sweethearting. He is
+astounded and dismayed. At first both he and I thought she would get
+over it, but she has twice been barely prevented from killing herself.
+Of course her countrymen think her desperately ill-treated. She is the
+handsomest girl in the settlement, and she has a number of ardent
+admirers. To the hatred which they have come to bear Karl as members of
+a strike directed against him, they now add the element of
+personal jealousy.
+
+"So you see what kind of a Christmas we are having! I have had Mrs. Hays
+take the babies to Colorado Springs, and if anything happens to us
+here, I'll trust to you to see to them. You, who mean to look after
+little children, look after mine above all others, for their mother gave
+you, long since, her loving friendship. I would rather have you mother
+my babies, maiden though you are, than any woman I know, for I feel a
+great force in you, Kate, and believe you are going on until you get an
+answer to some of the questions which the rest of us have found
+unanswerable.
+
+"Karl wants me to leave, for there is danger that the ranch house may be
+blown up almost any time. These men play with dynamite as if it were
+wood, anyway, and they make fiery enemies. Every act of ours is spied
+upon. Our servants have left us, and Karl and I, obstinate as mules and
+as proud as sheiks, after the fashion of our family, hold the fort. He
+wants me to go, but I tell him I am more interested in life than I ever
+dared hope I would be again. I have been bayoneted into a fighting mood,
+and I find it magnificent to really feel alive again, after crawling in
+the dust so long, with the taste of it in my mouth. So don't pity me. As
+for Karl--he looks wild and strange, like the Flying Dutchman with his
+spectral hand on the helm. But I don't know that I want you to pity him
+either. He is a curious man, with a passionate soul, and if he flares
+out like a torch in the wind, it will be fitting enough. No, don't pity
+us. Congratulate us rather."
+
+"Now what," said Kate aloud, "may that mean?"
+
+"Congratulate us!"
+
+The letter had a note of reckless gayety. Had Honora and Karl, though
+cousins, been finding a shining compensation there in the midst of many
+troubles? It sounded so, indeed. Elena Cimiotti might swing down the
+mountain roads wearing mountain flowers in her hair if she pleased, and
+Kate would not have thought her dangerous to the peace of Karl Wander.
+If the wind were wild and the leaves driving, he might have kissed her
+in some mad mood. So much might be granted--and none, not even Elena, be
+the worse for it. But to live side by side with Honora Fulham, to face
+danger with her, to have the exhilaration of conflict, they two
+together, the mountains above them, the treacherous foe below, a fortune
+lost or gained in a day, all the elements of Colorado's gambling chances
+of life and fortune at hand, might mean--anything.
+
+Well, she would congratulate them! If Honora could forget a shattered
+heart so soon, if Wander could take it on such easy terms, they were
+entitled to congratulations of a sort. And if they were killed some
+frantic night,--were blown to pieces with their ruined home, and so
+reached together whatever lies beyond this life,--why, then, they were
+to be congratulated, indeed! Or if they evaded their enemies and swung
+their endangered craft into the smooth stream of life, still
+congratulations were to be theirs.
+
+She confessed to herself that she would rather be in that lonely
+beleaguered house facing death with Karl Wander than be the recipient of
+the greatest honor or the participant in the utmost gayety that life
+could offer.
+
+That the fact was fantastic made it none the less a fact.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Should she write to Honora: "I congratulate you?"
+
+Or should she wire Karl?
+
+She got out his letters, and his words were as a fresh wind blowing over
+her spirit. She realized afresh how this man, seen but once, known only
+through the medium of infrequent letters, had invigorated her. What had
+he not taught her of compassion, of "the glory of the commonplace," of
+duty eagerly fulfilled, of the abounding joy of life--even in life
+shadowed by care or sickness or poverty?
+
+No, she would write them nothing. They were her friends in fullness of
+sympathy. They, like herself, were of those to whom each day and night
+is a privilege, to whom sorrow is an enrichment, delight an unfoldment,
+opposition a spur. They were of the company of those who dared to speak
+the truth, who breathed deep, who partook of the banquet of life
+without fear.
+
+She had seen Honora in the worst hour of tribulation that can come to a
+good woman, and she knew she had arisen from her overthrow, stronger for
+the trial; now Karl was battling, and he had cried out to her in his
+pain--his shame of defeat. But it would not be his extinction. She was
+sure of that. They might, among them, slay his body, but she could not
+read his letters, so full of valiant contrasts, and doubt that his
+spirit must withstand all adversaries.
+
+No, sardonic with these two she could never be. Like that poor Elena,
+she might have mistaken Wander's meanings. He was a man of too elaborate
+gestures; something grandiose, inherently his, made him enact the drama
+of life with too much fervor. It was easy, Honora had insinuated, for a
+woman to mistake him!
+
+Kate gripped her two strong hands together and clasped them about her
+head in the first attitude of despair in which she ever had indulged in
+her life. She was ashamed! Honora had said there was nothing to be
+ashamed of in love. But Kate would not call this meeting of her spirit
+with Karl's by that name. She had no idea whether it was love or not. On
+the whole, she preferred to think that it was not. But when they faced
+each other, their glances had met. When they had parted, their thoughts
+had bridged the space. When she dreamed, she fancied that she was
+mounting great solitary peaks with him to look at sunsets that blazed
+like the end of the world; or that he and she were strong-winged birds
+seeking the crags of the Andes. What girl's folly! The time had come to
+put such vagrant dreams from her and to become a woman, indeed.
+
+Ray telephoned that he was home.
+
+"Come up this evening, then," commanded Kate.
+
+Then, not being as courageous as her word, she wept brokenly for her
+mother--the mother who could, at best, have given her but such
+indeterminate advice.
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+As she heard Ray coming up the stairs, she tossed some more wood on the
+fire and lighted the candles in her Russian candlesticks.
+
+"It's what any silly girl would do!" she admitted to herself
+disgustedly.
+
+Well, there was his rap on the foolish imitation Warwick knocker. Kate
+flung wide the door. He stood in the dim light of the hall, hesitating,
+it would seem, to enter upon the evening's drama. Tall, graceful as
+always, with a magnetic force behind his languor, he impressed Kate as a
+man whom few women would be able to resist; whom, indeed, it was a sort
+of folly, perhaps even an impiety, to cast out of one's life.
+
+"Kate!" he said, "Kate!" The whole challenge of love was in the accent.
+
+But she held him off with the first method of opposition she could
+devise.
+
+"My name!" she admitted gayly. "I used to think I didn't like it, but I
+do."
+
+He came in and swung to the door behind him, flinging his coat and hat
+upon a chair.
+
+"Do you mean you like to hear me say it?" he demanded. He stood by the
+fire which had begun to leap and crackle, drawing off his gloves with a
+decisive gesture.
+
+She saw that she was not going to be able to put him off. The hour had
+struck. So she faced him bravely.
+
+"Sit down, Ray," she said.
+
+He looked at her a moment as if measuring the value of this courtesy.
+
+"Thank you," he said, almost resentfully, as he sank into the chair she
+placed for him.
+
+So they sat together before the fire gravely, like old married people,
+as Kate could not help noticing. Yet they were combatants; not as a
+married couple might have been, furtively and miserably, but with a
+frank, almost an exhilarating, sense of equally matched strength, and of
+their chance to conduct their struggle in the open.
+
+"It's come to this, Kate," he said at length. "Either I must have your
+promise or I stay away entirely."
+
+"I don't believe you need to do either," she retorted with the
+exasperating manner of an elder sister. "It's an obsession with you,
+that's all."
+
+"What man thinks he needs, he does need," Ray responded sententiously.
+"It appears to me that without you I shall be a lost man. I mean
+precisely what I say. You wouldn't like me to give out that fact in an
+hysterical manner, and I don't see that I need to. I make the statement
+as I would make any other, and I expect to be believed, because I'm a
+truth-telling person. The fairest scene in the world or the most
+interesting circumstance becomes meaningless to me if you are not
+included in it. It isn't alone that you are my sweetheart--the lady of
+my dreams. It's much more than that. Sometimes when I'm with you I feel
+like a boy with his mother, safe from all the dreadful things that might
+happen to a child. Sometimes you seem like a sister, so really kind and
+so outwardly provoking. Often you are my comrade, and we are completely
+congenial, neuter entities. The thing is we have a satisfaction when we
+are together that we never could apart. There it is, Kate, the fact we
+can't get around. We're happier together than we are apart!"
+
+He seemed to hold the theory up in the air as if it were a shining
+jewel, and to expect her to look at it till it dazzled her. But her
+voice was dull as she said: "I know, Ray. I know--now--but shall we
+stay so?"
+
+"Why shouldn't we, woman? There's every reason to suppose that we'd grow
+happier. We want each other. More than that, we need each other. With
+me, it's such a deep need that it reaches to the very roots of my being.
+It's my groundwork, my foundation stone. I don't know how to put it to
+make you realize--"
+
+He caught a quizzical smile on her face, and after a moment of
+bewilderment he leaped from his chair and came toward her.
+
+"God!" he half breathed, "why do I waste time talking?"
+
+He had done what her look challenged him to do,--had substituted action
+for words,--yet now, as he stretched out his arms to her, she held him
+off, fearful that she would find herself weeping on his breast. It would
+be sweet to do it--like getting home after a long voyage. But dizzily,
+with a stark clinging to a rock of integrity in herself, she fought him
+off, more with her militant spirit than with her outspread,
+protesting hands.
+
+"No, no," she cried. "Don't hypnotize me, Ray! Leave me my judgment,
+leave me my reason. If it's a partnership we're to enter into, I ought
+to know the terms."
+
+"The terms, Kate? Why, I'll love you as long as I live; I'll treasure
+you as the most precious thing in all the world."
+
+"And the winds of heaven shall not be allowed to visit my cheek too
+roughly," she managed to say tantalizingly.
+
+He paused, perplexed.
+
+"I know I bewilder you, dear man," she said. "But this is the point: I
+don't want to be protected. I mean I don't want to be made dependent; I
+don't want my interpretations of life at second-hand. I object to having
+life filter through anybody else to me; I want it, you see, on my
+own account."
+
+"Why, Kate!" It wasn't precisely a protest. He seemed rather to reproach
+her for hindering the onward sweep of their happiness--for opposing him
+with her ideas when they might together have attained a beautiful
+emotional climax.
+
+"I couldn't stand it," she went on, lifting her eyes to his, "to be
+given permission to do this, that, or the other thing; or to be put on
+an allowance; or made to ask a favor--"
+
+He sank down in his chair and folded across his breast the arms whose
+embrace she had not claimed.
+
+"You seem to mean," he said, "that you don't want to be a wife. You
+prefer your independence to love."
+
+"I want both," Kate declared, rising and standing before him. "I want
+the most glorious and abounding love woman ever had. I want so much of
+it that it never could be computed or measured--so much it will lift me
+up above anything that I now am or that I know, and make me stronger and
+freer and braver."
+
+"Well, that's what your love would do for me," broke in McCrea. "That's
+what the love of a good woman is expected to do for a man."
+
+"Of course," cried Kate; "but is that what the love of a good man is
+expected to do for a woman? Or is it expected to reconcile her to
+obscurity, to the dimming of her personality, and to the endless petty
+sacrifices that ought to shame her--and don't--those immoral sacrifices
+about which she has contrived to throw so many deceiving, iridescent
+mists of religion? Oh, yes, we are hypnotized into our foolish state of
+dependence easily enough! I know that. The mating instinct drugs us. I
+suppose the unborn generations reach out their shadowy multitudinous
+hands and drag us to our destiny!"
+
+"What a woman you are! How you put things!" He tried but failed to keep
+the offended look from his face, and Kate knew perfectly well how hard
+he was striving not to think her indelicate. But she went on
+regardlessly.
+
+"You think that's the very thing I ought to want to be my destiny? Well,
+perhaps I do. I want children--of course, I want them."
+
+She stopped for a moment because she saw him flushing with
+embarrassment. Yet she couldn't apologize, and, anyway, an apology would
+avail nothing. If he thought her unwomanly because she talked about her
+woman's life,--the very life to which he was inviting her,--nothing she
+could say would change his mind. It wasn't a case for argument. She
+walked over to the fire and warmed her nervous hands at it.
+
+"I'm sorry, Ray," she said finally.
+
+"Sorry?"
+
+"Sorry that I'm not the tender, trusting, maiden-creature who could fall
+trembling in your arms and love you forever, no matter what you did, and
+lie to you and for you the way good wives do. But I'm not--and, oh, I
+wish I were--or else--"
+
+"Yes, Kate--what?"
+
+"Or else that you were the kind of a man I need, the mate I'm looking
+for!"
+
+"But, Kate, I protest that I am. I love you. Isn't that enough? I'm not
+worthy of you, maybe. Yet if trying to earn you by being loyal makes me
+worthy, then I am. Don't say no to me, Kate. It will shatter me--like an
+earthquake. And I believe you'll regret it, too. We can make each other
+happy. I feel it! I'd stake my life on it. Wait--"
+
+He arose and paced the floor back and forth.
+
+"Do you remember the lines from Tennyson's 'Princess' where the Prince
+pleads with Ida? I thought I could repeat them, but I'm afraid I'll mar
+them. I don't want to do that; they're too applicable to my case."
+
+He knew where she kept her Tennyson, and he found the volume and the
+page, and when he had handed the book to her, he snatched his coat
+and hat.
+
+"I'm coming for my answer a week from to-night," he said. "For God's
+sake, girl, don't make a mistake. Life's so short that it ought to be
+happy. At best I'll only be able to live with you a few decades, and I'd
+like it to be centuries."
+
+He had not meant to do it, she could see, but suddenly he came to her,
+and leaning above her burned his kisses upon her eyes. Then he flung
+himself out of the room, and by the light of her guttering candles
+she read:--
+
+     "Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height.
+     What pleasure lives in height (the shepherd sang).
+     In height and cold, the splendor of the hills?
+     But cease to move so near the Heavens, and cease
+     To glide a sunbeam by the blasted pine,
+     To sit a star upon the sparkling spire;
+     And come, for Love is of the valley, come thou down
+     And find him; by the happy threshold, he
+     Or hand in hand with Plenty in the maize,
+     Or red with spirted purple of the vats,
+     Or foxlike in the vine; nor cares to walk
+     With Death and Morning on the Silver Horns,
+     Nor wilt thou snare him in the white ravine,
+     Nor find him dropped upon the firths of ice,
+     That huddling slant in furrow-cloven falls
+     To roll the torrent out of dusky doors;
+     But follow; let the torrent dance thee down
+     To find him in the valley; let the wild
+     Lean-headed eagles yelp alone, and leave
+     The monstrous ledges there to slope, and spill
+     Their thousand wreaths of dangling water-smoke,
+     That like a broken purpose waste in air;
+     So waste not thou; but come; for all the vales
+     Await thee; azure pillars of the hearth
+     Arise to thee; the children call, and I
+     Thy shepherd pipe, and sweet is every sound,
+     Sweeter thy voice, but every sound is sweet;
+     Myriads of rivulets hurrying thro' the lawn,
+     The moan of doves in immemorial elms,
+     And murmuring of innumerable bees."
+
+She read it twice, soothed by its vague loveliness. She could hear,
+however, only the sound of the suburban trains crashing by in the
+distance, and the honking of the machines in the Plaisance. None of
+those spirit sounds of which Ray had dreamed penetrated through her
+vigorous materialism. But still, she knew that she was lonely; she knew
+Ray's going left a gray vacancy.
+
+"I can't think it out," she said at last. "I'll go to sleep. Perhaps
+there--"
+
+But neither voices nor visions came to her in sleep. She awoke the next
+morning as unillumined as when she went to her bed. And as she dressed
+and thought of the full day before her, she was indefinably glad that
+she was under no obligations to consult any one about her programme,
+either of work or play.
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+Kate had dreaded the expected solitude of the next night, and it was a
+relief to her when Marna Fitzgerald telephoned that she had been sent
+opera-tickets by one of her old friends in the opera company, and that
+she wanted Kate to go with her.
+
+"George offers to stay home with the baby," she said. "So come over,
+dear, and have dinner with us; that will give you a chance to see
+George. Then you and I will go to the opera by our two independent
+selves. I know you don't mind going home alone. 'Butterfly' is on, you
+know--Farrar sings."
+
+She said it without faltering, Kate noticed, as she gave her
+enthusiastic acceptance, and when she had put down the telephone, she
+actually clapped her hands at the fortitude of the little woman she had
+once thought such a hummingbird--and a hummingbird with that one last
+added glory, a voice. Marna had been able to put her dreams behind her;
+why should not her example be cheerfully followed?
+
+When Kate reached the little apartment looking on Garfield Park, she
+entered an atmosphere in which, as she had long since proved, there
+appeared to be no room for regret. Marna had, of course, prepared the
+dinner with her own hands.
+
+"I whipped up some mayonnaise," she said. "You remember how
+Schumann-Heink used to like my mayonnaise? And she knows good cooking
+when she tastes it, doesn't she? I've trifle for desert, too."
+
+"But it must have taken you all day, dear, to get up a dinner like
+that," protested Kate, kissing the flushed face of her friend.
+
+"It took up the intervals," smiled Marna. "You see, my days are made up
+of taking care of baby, _and_ of intervals. How fetching that black
+velvet bodice is, Kate. I didn't know you had a low one."
+
+"Low _and_ high," said Kate. "That's the way we fool 'em--make 'em think
+we have a wardrobe. Me--I'm glad I'm going to the opera. How good of you
+to think of me! So few do--at least in the way I want them to."
+
+Marna threw her a quick glance.
+
+"Ray?" she asked with a world of insinuation.
+
+To Kate's disgust, her eyes flushed with hot tears.
+
+"He's waiting to know," she answered. "But I--I don't think I'm going to
+be able--"
+
+"Oh, Kate!" cried Marna in despair. "How can you feel that way? Just
+think--just think--" she didn't finish her sentence.
+
+Instead, she seized little George and began undressing him, her hands
+lingering over the firm roundness of his body. He seemed to be anything
+but sleepy, and when his mother passed him over to her guest, Kate let
+him clutch her fingers with those tenacious little hands which looked
+like rose-leaves and clung like briers. Marna went out of the room to
+prepare his bedtime bottle, and Kate took advantage of being alone with
+him to experiment in those joys which his mother had with difficulty
+refrained from descanting upon. She kissed him in the back of the neck,
+and again where his golden curls met his brow--a brow the color of a
+rose crystal. A delicious, indescribable baby odor came up from him,
+composed of perfumed breath, of clean flannels, and of general
+adorability. Suddenly, not knowing she was going to do it, Kate snatched
+him to her breast, and held him strained to her while he nestled there,
+eager and completely happy, and over the woman who could not make up her
+mind about life and her part in it, there swept, in wave after wave,
+like the south wind blowing over the bleak hills, billows of warm
+emotion. Her very finger-tips tingled; soft, wistful, delightful tears
+flooded her eyes. Her bosom seemed to lift as the tide lifts to the
+moon. She found herself murmuring inarticulate, melodious nothings. It
+was a moment of realization. She was learning what joys could be hers
+if only--
+
+Marna came back into the room and took the baby from Kate's trembling
+hands.
+
+"Why, dear, you're not afraid of him, are you?" his mother asked
+reproachfully.
+
+Kate made no answer, but, dropping a farewell kiss in the crinkly palm
+of one dimpled hand, she went out to the kitchen, found an apron, and
+began drawing the water for dinner and dropping Marna's mayonnaise on
+the salad. She must, however, have been sitting for several minutes in
+the baby's high chair, staring unseeingly at the wall, when the buzzing
+of the indicator brought her to her feet.
+
+"It's George!" cried Marna; and tossing baby and bottle into the cradle,
+she ran to the door.
+
+Kate hit the kitchen table sharply with a clenched hand. What was there
+in the return of a perfectly ordinary man to his home that should cause
+such excitement in a creature of flame and dew like Marna?
+
+     "Marna with the trees' life
+       In her veins a-stir!
+     Marna of the aspen heart--"
+
+George came into the kitchen with both hands outstretched.
+
+"Well, it's good to see you here," he declared. "Why don't you come
+oftener? You make Marna so happy."
+
+That proved her worthy; she made Marna happy! Of what greater use could
+any person be in this world? George retired to prepare for dinner, and
+Marna to settle the baby for the night, and Kate went on with the
+preparations for the meal, while her thoughts revolved like a
+Catherine wheel.
+
+There were the chops yet to cook, for George liked them blazing from the
+broiler, and there was the black coffee to set over. This latter was to
+fortify George at his post, for it was agreed that he was not to sleep
+lest he should fail to awaken at the need and demand of the beloved
+potentate in the cradle; and Marna now needed a little stimulant if she
+was to keep comfortably awake during a long evening--she who used to
+light the little lamps in the windows of her mind sometime
+after midnight.
+
+They had one of those exclamatory dinners where every one talked about
+the incomparable quality of the cooking. The potatoes were after a new
+recipe,--something Spanish,--and they tasted deliciously and smelled as
+if assailing an Andalusian heaven. The salad was _piquante_; the trifle
+vivacious; Kate's bonbons were regarded as unique, and as for the
+coffee, it provoked Marna to quote the appreciative Talleyrand:--
+
+     "Noir comme le diable,
+     Chaud comme l'enfer,
+     Pur comme un ange,
+     Doux comme l'amour."
+
+Other folk might think that Marna had "dropped out," but Kate could see
+it written across the heavens in letters of fire that neither George nor
+Marna thought so. They regarded their table as witty, as blessed in such
+a guest as Kate, as abounding in desirable food, as being, indeed, all
+that a dinner-table should be. They had the effect of shutting out a
+world which clamored to participate in their pleasures, and looked on
+themselves as being not forgotten, but too selfish in keeping to
+themselves. It kept little streams of mirth purling through Kate's soul,
+and at each jest or supposed brilliancy she laughed twice--once with
+them and once at them. But they were unsuspicious--her friends. They
+were secretly sorry for her, that was all.
+
+After dinner there was Marna to dress.
+
+"Naturally I haven't thought much about evening clothes since I was
+married," she said to Kate. "I don't see what I'm to put on unless it's
+my immemorial gold-of-ophir satin." She looked rather dubious, and Kate
+couldn't help wondering why she hadn't made a decision before this.
+Marna caught the expression in her eyes.
+
+"Oh, yes, I know I ought to have seen to things, but you don't know what
+it is, mavourneen, to do all your own work and care for a baby. It makes
+everything you do so staccato! And, oh, Kate, I do get so tired! My feet
+ache as if they'd come off, and sometimes my back aches so I just lie on
+the floor and roll and groan. Of course, George doesn't know. He'd
+insist on our having a servant, and we can't begin to afford that. It
+isn't the wages alone; it's the waste and breakage and all."
+
+She said this solemnly, and Kate could not conceal a smile at her
+"daughter of the air" using these time-worn domestic plaints.
+
+"You ought to lie down and sleep every day, Marna. Wouldn't that help?"
+
+"That's what George is always saying. He thinks I ought to sleep while
+the baby is taking his nap. But, mercy me, I just look forward to that
+time to get my work done."
+
+She turned her eager, weary face toward Kate, and her friend marked the
+delicacy in it which comes with maternity. It was pallid and rather
+pinched; the lips hung a trifle too loosely; the veins at the temples
+showed blue and full. Kate couldn't beat down the vision that would rise
+before her eyes of the Marna she had known in the old days, who had
+arisen at noon, coming forth from her chamber like Deirdre, fresh with
+the freshness of pagan delight. She remembered the crowd that had
+followed in her train, the manner in which people had looked after her
+on the street, and the little furore she had invariably awakened when
+she entered a shop or tea-room. As Marna shook out the gold-of-ophir
+satin, dimmed now and definitely out of date, there surged up in her
+friend a rebellion against Marna's complete acquiescence in the present
+scheme of things. But Marna slipped cheerfully into her gown.
+
+"I shall keep my cloak on while we go down the aisle," she declared.
+"Nobody notices what one has on when one is safely seated.
+Particularly," she added, with one of her old-time flashes, "if one's
+neck is not half bad. Now I'm ready to be fastened, mavourneen. Dear me,
+it _is_ rather tight, isn't it? But never mind that. Get the hooks
+together somehow. I'll hold my breath. Now, see, with this scarf about
+me, I shan't look such a terrible dowd, shall I? Only my gloves are
+unmistakably shabby and not any too clean, either. George won't let me
+use gasoline, you know, and it takes both money and thought to get them
+to the cleaners. Do you remember the boxes of long white gloves I used
+to have in the days when _tante_ Barsaloux was my fairy godmother?
+Gloves were an immaterial incident then. 'Nevermore, nevermore,' as our
+friend the raven remarked. Come, we'll go. I won't wear my old opera
+cloak in the street-car; that would be too absurd, especially now that
+the bullion on it has tarnished. That long black coat of mine is just
+the thing--equally appropriate for market, mass, or levee. Oh, George,
+dear, good-bye! Good-bye, you sweetheart. I hate to leave you, truly I
+do. And I do hope and pray the baby won't wake. If he does--"
+
+"Come along, Marna," commanded Kate. "We mustn't miss that next car."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They barely were in their seats when the lights went up, and before them
+glittered the Auditorium, that vast and noble audience chamber
+identified with innumerable hours of artistic satisfaction. The receding
+arches of the ceiling glittered like incandescent nebulae; the pictured
+procession upon the proscenium arch spoke of the march of ideas--of the
+passionate onflow of man's dreams--of whatever he has held beautiful
+and good.
+
+Kate yielded herself over to the deep and happy sense of completion
+which this vast chamber always gave her, and while she and Marna sat
+there, silent, friendly, receptive, she felt her cares and frets
+slipping from her, and guessed that the drag of Mama's innumerable
+petty responsibilities was disappearing, too. For here was the pride of
+life--the power of man expressed in architecture, and in the high
+entrancement of music. The rich folds of the great curtain satisfied
+her, the innumerable lights enchanted her, and the loveliness of the
+women in their fairest gowns and their jewels added one more element to
+that indescribable thing, compacted of so many elements,--all
+artificial, all curiously and brightly related,--which the civilized
+world calls opera, and in which man rejoices with an inconsistent and
+more or less indefensible joy.
+
+The lights dimmed; the curtain parted; the heights above Nagasaki were
+revealed. Below lay the city in purple haze; beyond dreamed the harbor
+where the battleships, the merchantmen and the little fishing-boats
+rode. The impossible, absurd, exquisite music-play of "Madame Butterfly"
+had begun.
+
+Oh, the music that went whither it would, like wind or woman's hopes;
+that lifted like the song of a bird and sank like the whisper of waves.
+Vague as reverie, fitful as thought, yearning as frustrate love, it
+fluttered about them.
+
+"The new music," whispered Marna.
+
+"Like flame leaping and dying," responded Kate.
+
+They did not realize the passage of time. They passed from chamber to
+chamber in that gleaming house of song.
+
+"This was the best of all to me," breathed Marna, as Farrar's voice took
+up the first notes of that incomparable song of woven hopes and fears,
+"Some Day He'll Come." The wild cadences of the singer's voice,
+inarticulate, of universal appeal, like the cry of a lost child or the
+bleating of a lamb on a windy hill,--were they mere singing? Or were
+they singing at all? Yes, the new singing, where music and drama
+insistently meet.
+
+The tale, heart-breaking for beauty and for pathos, neared its close.
+Oh, the little heart of flame expiring at its loveliest! Oh, the loyal
+feet that waited--eager to run on love's errands--till dawn brought the
+sight of faded flowers, the suddenly bleak apartment, the unpressed
+couch! Then the brave, swift flight of the spirit's wings to other
+altitudes, above pain and shame! And like love and sorrow, refined to a
+poignant essence, still the music brooded and cried and aspired.
+
+What visions arose in Marna's brain, Kate wondered, quivering with
+vicarious anguish. Glancing down at her companion's small, close-clasped
+hands, she thought of their almost ceaseless toil in those commonplace
+rooms which she called home, and for the two in it--the ordinary man,
+the usual baby. And she might have had all this brightness, this
+celebrity, this splendid reward for high labor!
+
+The curtain closed on the last act,--on the little dead
+Cio-Cio-San,--and the people stood on their feet to call Farrar, giving
+her unstintedly of their _bravas_. Kate and Marna stood with the others,
+but they were silent. There were large, glistening tears on Marna's
+cheeks, and Kate refrained from adding to her silent singing-bird's
+distress by one word of appreciation of the evening's pleasure; but as
+they moved down the thronged aisle together, she caught Marna's hand in
+her own, and felt her fingers close about it tenaciously.
+
+Outside a bitter wind was blowing, and with such purpose that it had
+cleared the sky of the day's murk so that countless stars glittered with
+unwonted brilliancy from a purple-black heaven. Crowded before the
+entrance were the motors, pouring on in a steady stream, their lamps
+half dazzling the pedestrians as they struggled against the wind that
+roared between the high buildings.
+
+Though Marna was to take the Madison Street car, they could not resist
+the temptation to turn upon the boulevard where the scene was even more
+exhilarating. The high standing lights that guarded the great drive
+offered a long and dazzling vista, and between them, sweeping steadily
+on, were the motor-cars. Laughing, talking, shivering, the people
+hastened along--the men of fashion stimulated and alert, their women
+splendid in furs and cloaks of velvet while they waited for their
+conveyances; by them tripped the music students, who had been
+incomparably happy in the highest balcony, and who now cringed before
+the penetrating cold; among them marched sedately the phalanx of
+middle-class people who permitted themselves an opera or two a year, and
+who walked sedately, carrying their musical feast with a certain sense
+of indigestion;--all moved along together, thronging the wide pavement.
+The restaurants were awaiting those who had the courage for further
+dissipation; the suburban trains had arranged their schedules to
+convenience the crowd; and the lights burned low in the hallways of
+mansions, or apartments, or neat outlying houses, awaiting the return of
+these adventurers into another world--the world of music. All would talk
+of Farrar. Not alone that night, nor that week, but always, as long as
+they lived, at intervals, when they were happy, when their thoughts were
+uplifted, they would talk of her. And it might have been Marna Cartan
+instead of Geraldine Farrar of whom they spoke!
+
+"Marna of the far quest" might have made this "flight unhazarded"; might
+have been the core of all this fine excitement. But she had put herself
+out of it. She had sold herself for a price--the usual price. Kate would
+not go so far as to say that a birthright had been sold for a mess of
+pottage, but Ray McCrea's stock was far below par at that moment. Yet
+Ray, as she admitted, would not doom her to a life of monotony and heavy
+toil. With him she would have the free and useful, the amusing and
+excursive life of an American woman married to a man of wealth. No, her
+programme would not be a petty one--and yet--
+
+"Do take a cab, Marna," she urged. "My treat! Please."
+
+"No, no," said Marna in a strained voice. "I'll not do that. A
+five-cent ride in the car will take me almost to my door; and besides
+the cars are warm, which is an advantage."
+
+It was understood tacitly that Kate was the protector, and the one who
+wouldn't mind being on the street alone. They had but a moment to wait
+for Marna's car, but in that moment Kate was thinking how terrible it
+would be for Marna, in her worn evening gown, to be crowded into that
+common conveyance and tormented with those futile regrets which must be
+her so numerous companions.
+
+She was not surprised when Marna snatched her hand, crying:--
+
+"Oh, Kate!"
+
+"Yes, yes, I know," murmured Kate soothingly.
+
+"No, you don't," retorted Marna. "How can you? It's--it's the milk."
+
+There was a catch in her voice.
+
+"The milk!" echoed Kate blankly. "What milk? I thought--"
+
+"Oh, I know," Marna cried impatiently. "You thought I was worrying about
+that old opera, and that I wanted to be up there behind that screen
+stabbing myself. Well, of course, knowing the score so well, and having
+hoped once to do so much with it, the notes did rather try to jump out
+of my throat. But, goodness, what does all that matter? It's the baby's
+milk that I'm carrying on about. I don't believe I told George to warm
+it." Her voice ceased in a wail.
+
+The car swung around the corner, and Kate half lifted Marna up the huge
+step, and saw her go reeling down the aisle as the cumbersome vehicle
+lurched forward. Then she turned her own steps toward the stairs of the
+elevated station.
+
+"The milk!" she ejaculated with commingled tenderness and impatience.
+"Then that's why she didn't say anything about going behind the scenes.
+I thought it was because she couldn't endure the old surroundings and
+the pity of her associates of the opera-days. The milk! I wonder--"
+
+What she wondered she did not precisely say; but more than one person on
+the crowded elevated train noticed that the handsome woman in black
+velvet (it really was velveteen, purchased at a bargain) had something
+on her mind.
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+Kate slept lightly that night. She had gone to bed with a sense of
+gentle happiness, which arose from the furtive conviction that she was
+going to surrender to Ray and to his point of view. He could take all
+the responsibility if he liked and she would follow the old instincts of
+woman and let the Causes of Righteousness with which she had allied
+herself contrive to get along without her. It was nothing, she told
+herself, but sheer egotism for her to suppose that she was necessary to
+their prosperity.
+
+She half awoke many times, and each time she had a vague, sweet longing
+which refused to resolve itself into definite shape. But when the full
+morning came she knew it was Ray she wanted. She couldn't wait out the
+long week he had prescribed as a season of fasting and prayer before she
+gave her answer, and she was shamelessly glad when her superior, over
+there at the Settlement House, informed her that she would be required
+to go to a dance-hall at South Chicago that night--a terrible place,
+which might well have been called "The Girl Trap." This gave Kate a
+legitimate excuse to ask for Ray's company, because he had besought her
+not to go to such places at night without his escort.
+
+"But ought I to be seeing you?" he asked over the telephone in answer
+to her request. "Wouldn't it be better for my cause if I stayed away?"
+
+In spite of the fact that he laughed, she knew he was quite in earnest,
+and she wondered why he hadn't discerned her compliant mood from her
+intonations.
+
+"But I had to mind you, hadn't I?" she sent back. "You said I mustn't go
+to such places without you."
+
+From her tone she might have been the most betendriled feminine vine
+that ever wrapped a self-satisfied masculine oak.
+
+"Oh, I'll come," he answered. "Of course I'll come. You knew you had
+only to give me the chance."
+
+He was on time, impeccable, as always, in appearance. Kate was glad that
+he was as tall as she. She knew, down in her inner consciousness, that
+they made a fine appearance together, that they stepped off gallantly.
+It came to her that perhaps they were to be envied, and that they
+weren't--or at least that she wasn't--giving their good fortune its full
+valuation.
+
+She told him about her dinner with the Fitzgeralds and about the opera,
+but she held back her discovery, so to speak, of the baby, and the
+episode of Marna's wistful tears when she heard the music, and her
+amazing _volte-face_ at remembering the baby's feeding-time. She would
+have loved to spin out the story to him--she could have deepened the
+colors just enough to make it all very telling. But she wasn't willing
+to give away the reason for her changed mood. It was enough, after all,
+that he was aware of it, and that when he drew her hand within his arm
+he held it in a clasp that asserted his right to keep it.
+
+They were happy to be in each other's company again. Kate had to admit
+it. For the moment it seemed to both of them that it didn't matter much
+where they went so long as they could go together. They rode out to
+South Chicago on the ill-smelling South Deering cars, crowded with men
+and women with foreign faces. One of the men trod on Kate's foot with
+his hobnailed shoe and gave an inarticulate grunt by way of apology.
+
+"He's crushed it, hasn't he?" asked Ray anxiously, seeing the tears
+spring to her eyes. "What a brute!"
+
+"Oh, it was an accident," Kate protested. "Any one might have done it."
+
+"But anyone except that unspeakable Huniack would have done more than
+grunt!"
+
+"I dare say he doesn't know English," Kate insisted. "He'll probably
+remember the incident longer and be sorrier about it than some who would
+have been able to make graceful apologies."
+
+"Not he," declared Ray. "Don't you think it! Bless me, Kate, why you
+prefer these people to any others passes my comprehension. Can't you
+leave these people to work out their own salvation--which to my notion
+is the only way they ever can get it--and content yourself with your own
+kind and class?"
+
+"Not variety enough," retorted Kate, feeling her tenderness evaporate
+and her tantalizing mood--her usual one when she was with Ray--come
+back. "Don't I know just what you, for example, are going to think and
+say about any given circumstances? Don't I know your enthusiasms and
+reactions as if I'd invented 'em?"
+
+"Well, I know yours, too, but that's because I love you, not because
+you're like everybody else. I wish you were rather more like other
+women, Kate. I'd have an easier time."
+
+"If we were married," said Kate, with that cheerful directness which
+showed how her sentimentality had taken flight, "you'd never give up
+till you'd made me precisely like Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Smith, and Mrs.
+Johnson. Men fall in love with women because they're different from
+other women, and then put in the first years of their married life
+trying to make them like everybody else. I've noticed, however, that
+when they've finished the job, they're so bored with the result that
+they go and look up another 'different' woman. Oh, I know!"
+
+He couldn't say what he wished in reply because the car filled up just
+then with a party of young people bound for a dance in Russell Square.
+It always made Kate's heart glow to think of things like that--of what
+the city was trying to do for its people. These young people came from
+small, comfortable homes, quite capacious enough for happiness and
+self-respect, but not large enough for a dance. Very well; all that was
+needed was a simple request for the use of the field-house and they
+could have at their disposal a fine, airy hall, well-warmed and lighted,
+with an excellent floor, charming decorations, and a room where they
+might prepare their refreshments. All they had to pay for was the music.
+Proper chaperonage was required and the hall closed at midnight. Kate
+descanted on the beauties of the system till Ray yawned.
+
+"Think how different it is at the dance-hall where we are going," she
+went on, not heeding his disinclination for the subject. "They'll keep
+it up till dawn and drink between every dance. There's not a party of
+the kind the whole winter through that doesn't see the steps of some
+young girl set toward destruction. Oh, I can't see why it isn't stopped!
+If women had the management of things, it would be, I can tell you. It
+would take about one day to do it."
+
+"That's one of the reasons why the liquor men combine to kill suffrage,"
+said Ray. "They know it will be a sorry day for them when the women get
+in. Positively, the women seem to think that's all there is to
+politics--some moral question; and the whole truth is they'd do a lot of
+damage to business with their slap-dash methods, as they'd learn to
+their cost. When they found their pin-money being cut down, they'd sing
+another tune, for they're the most reckless spenders in the world,
+American women are."
+
+"They're the purchasing agents for the most extravagant nation in the
+world, if you like," Kate replied. "Men seem to think that shopping is a
+mere feminine diversion. They forget that it's what supports their
+business and supplies their homes. Not to speak of any place beyond our
+own town, think of the labor involved in buying food and clothing for
+the two million and a half human beings here in Chicago. It's no joke, I
+assure you."
+
+"Joke!" echoed Ray. "A good deal of the shopping I've seen at my
+father's store seems to me to come under the head of vice. The look I've
+seen on some of those faces! It was ravaging greed, nothing less. Why,
+we had a sale the other day of cheap jewelry, salesmen's samples, and
+the women swarmed and snatched and glared like savages. I declare, when
+I saw them like that, so indecently eager for their trumpery ornaments,
+I said to myself that you'd only to scratch the civilized woman to get
+at the squaw any day."
+
+Kate kept a leash on her tongue. She supposed it was inevitable that
+they should get back to the old quarrel. Deep down in Ray, she felt, was
+an unconquerable contempt for women. He made an exception of her because
+he loved her; because she drew him with the mysterious sex attraction.
+It was that, and not any sense of spiritual or intellectual approval of
+her, which made him set her apart as worthy of admiration and of his
+devoted service. If ever their lives were joined, she would be his
+treasure to be kept close in his personal casket,--with the key to the
+golden padlock in his pocket,--and he would all but say his prayers to
+her. But all that would not keep him from openly discountenancing her
+judgment before people. She could imagine him putting off a suggestion
+of hers with that patient married tone which husbands assume when they
+discover too much independent cerebration on the part of their wives.
+
+"I couldn't stand that," she inwardly declared, as she let him think
+that he was assisting her from the car. "If any man ever used that
+patient tone to me, I'd murder him!"
+
+She couldn't keep back her sardonic chuckle.
+
+"What are you laughing at?" he asked irritatedly.
+
+"At the mad world, master," she answered.
+
+"Where is this dance-hall?" he demanded, as if he suspected her of
+concealing it.
+
+The tone was precisely the "married" one she had been imagining, and she
+burst out with a laugh that made him stop and visibly wrap his dignity
+about him. Nothing was more evident than that he thought her silly. But
+as she paused, too, standing beneath the street-lamp, and he saw her
+with her nonchalant tilt of her head,--that handsome head poised on her
+strong, erect body,--her force and value were so impressed upon him that
+he had to retract. But she was provoking, no getting around that.
+
+At that moment another sound than laughter cut the air--a terrible
+sound--the shriek of a tortured child. It rang out three times in quick
+succession, and Kate's blood curdled.
+
+"Oh, oh," she gasped; "she's being beaten! Come, Ray."
+
+"Mix up in some family mess and get slugged for my pains? Not I! But
+I'll call a policeman if you say."
+
+"Oh, it might be too late! I'm a policeman, you know. Get the patrol
+wagon if you like. But I can't stand that--"
+
+Once more that agonized scream! Kate flashed from him into the mesh of
+mean homes, standing three deep in each yard, flanking each other with
+only a narrow passage between, and was lost to him. He couldn't see
+where she had gone, but he knew that he must follow. He fell down a
+short flight of steps that led from the street to the lower level of the
+yard, and groped forward. He could hear people running, and when a large
+woman, draping her wrapper about her, floundered out of a basement door
+near him, he followed her. She seemed to know where to go. The squalid
+drama with the same actors evidently had been played before.
+
+Mid-length of the building the woman turned up some stairs and came to a
+long hall which divided the front and rear stairs. At the end of it a
+light was burning, and Kate's voice was ringing out like that of an
+officer excoriating his delinquent troops.
+
+"I'm glad you can't speak English," he heard her say, "for if you could
+I'd say things I'd be sorry for. I'd shrivel you up, you great brute. If
+you've got the devil in you, can't you take it out on some one else
+beside a little child? You're her father, are you? She has no mother, I
+suppose. Well, you 're under arrest, do you understand? Tell him, some
+of you who can talk English. He's to sit in that chair and never move
+from it till the patrol wagon comes. I shall care for the child myself,
+and she'll be placed where he can't treat her like that again. Poor
+little thing! Thank you, that's a good woman. Just hold her awhile and
+comfort her. I can see you've children of your own."
+
+Ray found the courage at length to peer above the heads of the others in
+that miserable, crowded room. The dark faces of weary men and women,
+heavy with Old-World, inherited woe, showed in the gloom. The short,
+shaking man on the chair, dully contrite for his spasm of rage, was
+cringing before Kate, who stood there, amazingly tall among these
+low-statured beings. Never had she looked to Ray so like an eagle, so
+keen, so fierce, so fit for braving either sun or tenebrous cavern. She
+dominated them all; had them, who only partly understood what she said,
+at her command. She had thrown back her cloak, and the star of the
+Juvenile Court officer which she wore carried meaning to them. Though
+perhaps it had not needed that. Ray tried to think her theatrical, to
+be angry at her, but the chagrin of knowing that she had forgotten him,
+and was not caring about his opinion, scourged his criticisms back. She
+had lifted from the floor the stick with its leathern thong with which
+the man had castigated the tender body of his motherless child. She held
+it in her hand, looking at it with the angry aversion that she might
+have turned upon a venomous serpent. Then slowly, with unspeakable
+rebuke, she swung her gaze upon the wretch in the chair. For a moment
+she silently accused him. Then he dropped his head in his hands and
+sobbed. He seemed in his voiceless way to say that he, too, had been
+castigated by a million invisible thongs held in dead men's hands, and
+that his soul, like his child's body, was hideous with welts.
+
+Kate turned to Ray.
+
+"Is the patrol wagon on its way?" she inquired.
+
+"I--I--didn't call it," he stammered.
+
+"Please do," she said simply.
+
+He went out of the room, silently raging, and was grateful that one of
+the men followed to show him the patrol box. He waited outside for the
+wagon to come, and when the officers brought out the shaking prisoner,
+he saw Kate with them carrying the child in her arms.
+
+"I must go to the station," she said to Ray, in a matter-of-fact tone
+that put him far away from her. "So I'll say good-night. It wouldn't be
+pleasant for you to ride in the wagon, you know. I'll be quite all
+right. One of the officers will see me safe home. Anyway, I shall have
+to go to the dance-hall before the evening's over."
+
+"Kate!" he protested.
+
+"Oh, I know," she said to him apart softly while the others concerned
+themselves with assisting the blubbering Huniack into the wagon, "you
+think it isn't nice of me to be going around like this, saving babies
+from beatings and young girls from much worse. You think it isn't
+ladylike. But it's what the coming lady is either going to do or see
+done. It's a new idea, you understand, Ray. Quite different from the
+squaw idea, isn't it? Good-night!"
+
+An officer stood at the door of the wagon waiting for her. He touched
+his hat and smiled at her in a comradely fashion, and she responded with
+as courteous a bow as she ever had made to Ray.
+
+The wagon drove off.
+
+"I've been given my answer," said Ray aloud. He wondered if he were more
+relieved or disappointed at the outcome. But really he could neither
+feel nor think reasonably. He went home in a tumult, dismayed at his own
+sufferings, and in no condition to realize that the old ideas and the
+new were at death grips in his consciousness.
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+Karl Wander rode wearily up the hill on his black mare. Honora saw him
+coming and waved to him from the window. There was no one to put up his
+horse, and he drove her into the stables and fed her and spread her bed
+while Honora watched what he and she had laughingly termed "the
+outposts." For she believed she had need to be on guard, and she thanked
+heaven that all of the approaches to the house were in the open and that
+there was nothing nearer than the rather remote grove of pinon trees
+which could shelter any creeping enemy.
+
+Wander came on at last to the house, making his way deliberately and
+scorning, it would seem, all chance of attack. But Honora's ears fairly
+reverberated with the pistol shot which did not come; the explosion
+which was now so long delayed. She ran to open the door for him and to
+drag him into the friendly kitchen, where, in the absence of any
+domestic help, she had spread their evening meal.
+
+There was a look in his face which she had not seen there before--a look
+of quietude, of finality.
+
+"Well?" she asked.
+
+He flung his hat on a settle and sat down to loosen his leggings.
+
+"They've gone," he said, "bag and baggage."
+
+"The miners?"
+
+"Yes, left this afternoon--confiscated some trains and made the crews
+haul them out of town. They shook their fists at the mines and the works
+as if they had been the haunt of the devil. I couldn't bring myself to
+skulk. I rode Nell right down to the station and sat there till the last
+carload pulled out with the men and women standing together on the
+platform to curse me."
+
+"Karl! How could you? It's a marvel you weren't shot."
+
+"Too easy a mark, I reckon."
+
+"And Elena?"
+
+"Lifted on board by two rival suitors. She didn't even look at me." He
+drew a long breath. "I was guiltless in that, Honora. You've stood by
+through everything, and you've made a cult of believing in me, and I
+want you to know that, so far as Elena was concerned, you were right to
+do it. I may have been a fool--but not consciously--not consciously."
+
+"I know it. I believe you."
+
+A silence fell between them while Honora set the hot supper on the table
+and put the tea to draw.
+
+"It's very still," he said finally. "But the stillness here is nothing
+to what it is down where my village stood. I've made a frightful mess of
+things, Honora."
+
+"No," she said, "you built up; another has torn down. You must get more
+workmen. There may be a year or two of depression, but you're going to
+win out, Karl."
+
+"I've fought a good many fights first and last, Honora,--fights you know
+nothing about. Some of them have been with men, some with ideas, some of
+the worst ones with myself. It would be a long story and a strange one
+if I were to tell it all."
+
+"I dare say it would."
+
+"I suppose I must seem very strange to a civilized woman like you,
+or--or your friend, Kate Barrington."
+
+"You seem very like a brave man, Karl, and an interesting one."
+
+"But I'm tired, Honora,--extraordinarily tired. I don't feel like
+fighting. Quiet and rest are what I'm longing for, and I'm to begin all
+over again, it appears. I've got to struggle up again almost from
+the bottom."
+
+"Come to supper, Karl. Never mind all that. We have food and we have
+shelter. No doubt we shall sleep. Things like that deserve our
+gratitude. Accept these blessings. There are many who lack them."
+
+Suddenly he threw up his arms with a despairing gesture.
+
+"Oh, it isn't myself, Honora, that I'm grieving for! It's those
+hot-headed, misguided, wayward fellows of mine! They've left the homes I
+tried to help them win, they've followed a self-seeking, half-mad,
+wholly vicious agitator, and their lives, that I meant to have flow on
+so smoothly, will be troubled and wasted. I know so well what will
+happen! And then, their hate! It hangs over me like a cloud! I'm not
+supposed to be sensitive. I'm looked on as a swaggering, reckless,
+devil-may-care fellow with a pretty good heart and a mighty sure aim;
+but I tell you, cousin, among them, they've taken the life out of me."
+
+"It's your dark hour, Karl. You're standing the worst of it right now.
+To-morrow things will look better."
+
+"I couldn't ask a woman to come out here and stand amid this ruin with
+me, Honora. You know I couldn't. The only person who would be willing to
+share my present life with me would be some poor, devil-driven creature
+like Elena--come to think of it, even she wouldn't! She's off and away
+with a lover at each elbow!"
+
+"Here!" said Honora imperatively. She held a plate toward him laden with
+steaming food.
+
+He arose, took it, seated himself, and tried a mouthful, but he had to
+wash it down with water.
+
+"I'm too tired," he said. "Really, Honora, you'll have to forgive me."
+
+She got up then and lighted the lamp in his bedroom.
+
+"Thank you," he said. "Rest is what I need. It was odd they didn't
+shoot, wasn't it? I thought every moment that they would."
+
+"You surely didn't wish that they would, Karl?"
+
+"No." He paused for a moment at the door. "No--only everything appeared
+to be so futile. My bad deeds never turned on me as my good ones have
+done. It makes everything seem incoherent. What--what would a woman like
+Miss Barrington make of all that--of harm coming from good?"
+
+"I don't know," said Honora, rather sharply. "She hasn't written. I told
+her all the trouble we were in,--the danger and the distress,--but she
+hasn't written a word."
+
+"Why should she?" demanded Wander. "It's none of her concern. I suppose
+she thinks a fool is best left with his folly. Good-night, cousin.
+You're a good woman if ever there was one. What should I have done
+without you?"
+
+Honora smiled wanly. He seemed to have forgotten that it was she who
+would have fared poorly without him.
+
+She closed up the house for the night, looking out in the bright
+moonlight to see that all was quiet. For many days and nights she had
+been continually on the outlook for lurking figures, but now she was
+inclined to believe that she had overestimated the animosity of the
+strikers. After all, try as they might, they could bring no accusations
+against the man who, hurt to the soul by their misunderstanding of him,
+was now laying his tired head upon his pillow.
+
+All was very still. The moonlight touched to silver the snow upon the
+mountains; the sound of the leaping river was like a distant flute; the
+wind was rising with long, wavelike sounds. Honora lingered in the
+doorway, looking and listening. Her heart was big with pity--pity for
+that disheartened man whose buoyancy and self-love had been so deeply
+wounded, pity for those wandering, angry, aimless men and women who
+might have rested secure in his guardianship; pity for all the hot,
+misguided hearts of men and women. Pity, too, for the man with the most
+impetuous heart of them all, who wandered in some foreign land with a
+woman whose beauty had been his lure and his undoing. Yes, she had been
+given grace in those days, when she seemed to stand face to face with
+death, to pity even David and Mary!
+
+She walked with a slow firm step up to her room, holding her head high.
+She had learned trust as well as compassion. She trusted Karl and the
+issue of his sorrow. She even trusted the issue of her own sorrow,
+which, a short time before, had seemed so shameful. She threw wide her
+great windows, and the wind and the moonlight filled her chamber.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Two days later Karl Wander and Honora Fulham rode together to the
+village, now dismantled and desolate.
+
+"I remember," said Karl, "what a boyish pride I took in the little town
+at first, Honora, to have built it, and had it called after me and all.
+Such silly fools as men are, trying to perpetuate themselves by such
+childish methods."
+
+"Perpetuation is an instinct with us," said Honora calmly, "Immortality
+is our greatest hope. I'm so thankful I have my children, Karl. They
+seem to carry one's personality on, you know, no matter how different
+they actually may be from one's self."
+
+"Oh, yes," said Karl, with a short sigh, "you're right there. You've a
+beautiful brace of babies, Honora. I believe I'll have to ask you to
+appoint me their guardian. I must have some share in them. It will give
+me a fresh reason for going on."
+
+"Are you a trifle short of reasons for going on, Karl?" Honora asked
+gently, averting her look so that she might not seem to be watching him.
+
+"Yes, I am," he admitted frankly. "Although, now that the worst of my
+chagrin is over at having failed so completely in the pet scheme of my
+life, I can feel my fighting blood getting up again. I'm going to make a
+success of the town of Wander yet, my cousin, and those three mines that
+lie there so silently are going to hum in the old way. You'll see a
+string of men pouring in and out of those gates yet, take my word for
+it. But as for me, I proceed henceforth on a humbler policy."
+
+"Humbler? Isn't it humble to be kind, Karl? That's what you were first
+and last--kind. You were forever thinking of the good of your people."
+
+"It was outrageously insolent of me to do it, my cousin. Who am I that I
+should try to run another man's affairs? How should I know what is best
+for him--isn't he the one to be the judge of that? patronage,
+patronage, that's what they can't stand--that's what natural overmen
+like myself with amiable dispositions try to impose on those we think
+inferior to ourselves. We can't seem to comprehend that the way to make
+them grow is to leave them alone."
+
+"Don't be bitter, Karl."
+
+"I'm not bitter, Honora. I'm rebuked. I'm literal. I'm instructed. I
+have brought you down here to talk the situation over with me. I can get
+men in plenty to advise me, but I want to know what you think about a
+number of things. Moreover, I want you to tell me what you imagine Miss
+Barrington would think about them."
+
+"Why don't you write and ask her?" asked Honora. She herself was hurt at
+not having heard from Kate.
+
+"I gave her notice that I wasn't going to write any more," said Karl
+sharply. "I couldn't have her counting on me when I wasn't sure that I
+was a man to be counted on."
+
+"Oh," cried Honora, enlightened. "That's the trouble, is it? But still,
+I should think she'd write to me. I told her of all you and I were going
+through together--" she broke off suddenly. Her words presented to her
+for the first time some hint of the idea she might have conveyed to
+Kate. She smiled upon her cousin beautifully, while he stared at her,
+puzzled at her unexpected radiance.
+
+"Kate loves him," she decided, looking at the man beside her with fresh
+appreciation of his power. She was the more conscious of it that she saw
+him now in his hour of defeat and perceived his hope and ingenuity, his
+courage and determination gathering together slowly but steadily for a
+fresh effort.
+
+"Dear old Kate," she mused. "Karl rebuffed her in his misery, and I
+misled her. If she hadn't cared she'd have written anyway. As it is--"
+
+But Karl was talking.
+
+"Now there's the matter of the company store," he was saying. "What
+would Miss Barrington think about the ethical objections to that?"
+
+Honora turned her attention to the matter in hand, and when, late that
+afternoon, the two rode their jaded horses home, a new campaign had been
+planned. Within a week Wander left for Denver. Honora heard nothing from
+him for a fortnight. Then a wire came. He was returning to Wander with
+five hundred men.
+
+"They're hoboes--pick-ups," he told Honora that night as the
+two sat together at supper. "Long-stake and short-stake
+men--down-and-outs--vagrants--drunkards, God knows what. I advertised
+for them. 'Previous character not called into question,' was what I
+said. 'Must open up my mines. Come and work as long as you feel like
+it.' I haven't promised them anything and they haven't promised me
+anything, except that I give them wages for work. A few of them have
+women with them, but not more than one in twenty. I don't know what kind
+of a mess the town of Wander will be now, but at any rate, it's
+sticking to its old programme of 'open shop.' Any one who wants to take
+these fellows away from me is quite welcome to do it. No affection shall
+exist between them and me. There are no obligations on either side. But
+they seem a hearty, good-natured lot, and they said they liked my grit."
+
+Something that was wild and reckless in all of the Wanders flashed in
+Honora's usually quiet eyes.
+
+"A band of brigands," she laughed. "Really, Karl, I think you'll make a
+good chief for them. There's one thing certain, they'll never let you
+patronize them."
+
+"I shan't try," declared Karl. "They needn't look to me for benefits of
+any sort. I want miners."
+
+Honora chuckled pleasantly and looked at her cousin from the corner of
+her eye. She had her own ideas about his ability to maintain such
+detachment.
+
+He amused her a little later by telling her how he had formed a town
+government and he described the men he had appointed to office.
+
+"They take it seriously, too," he declared. "We have a ragamuffin
+government and regulations that would commend themselves to the most
+judicious. 'Pon my soul, Honora, though it's only play, I swear some of
+these fellows begin to take on little affectations of self-respect.
+We're going to have a council meeting to-morrow. You ought to
+come down."
+
+That gave Honora a cue. She was wanting something more to do than to
+look after the house, now that servants had again been secured. It
+occurred to her that it might be a good idea to call on the women down
+at Wander. She was under no error as to their character. Broken-down
+followers of weak men's fortunes,--some with the wedding ring and some
+without,--they nevertheless were there, flesh and blood, and possibly
+heart and soul. Not the ideal but the actual commended itself to her
+these days. Kate had taught her that lesson. So, quite simply, she went
+among them.
+
+"Call on me when you want anything," she said to them. "I'm a woman who
+has seen trouble, and I'd like to be of use to any of you if trouble
+should come your way. Anyhow, trouble or no trouble, let us be friends."
+
+In her simple dress, with her quiet, sad face and her deep eyes, she
+convinced them of sincerity as few women could have done. They bade her
+enter their doors and sit in their sloven homes amid the broken things
+the Italians had left behind them.
+
+"Why not start a furniture shop?" asked Honora. "We could find some men
+here who could make plain furniture. I'll see Mr. Wander about it."
+
+That was a simple enough plan, and she had no trouble in carrying it
+out. She got the women to cooperate with her in other ways. Among them
+they cleaned up the town, set out some gardens, and began spending their
+men's money for necessaries.
+
+"Do watch out," warned Karl; "you'll get to be a Lady Bountiful--"
+
+"And you a benevolent magnate--"
+
+"Damned if I will! Well, play with your hobo brides if you like, Honora,
+but don't look for gratitude or rectitude or any beatitude."
+
+"Not I," declared Honora. "I'm only amusing myself."
+
+They kept insisting to each other that they had no higher intention.
+They were hilarious over their failures and they persisted in taking
+even their successes humorously. At first the "short-stake men" drifted
+away, but presently they began to drift back again. They liked it at
+Wander,--liked being mildly and tolerantly controlled by men of their
+own sort,--men with some vested authority, however, and a reawakened
+perception of responsibility. Wander was their town--the hoboes' own
+city. It was one of the few places where something was expected of the
+hobo. Well, a hobo was a man, wasn't he? The point was provable. A
+number of Karl Wander's vagrants chose to prove that they were not
+reprobates. Those who had been "down and out" by their own will, or lack
+of it, as well as those whom misfortune had dogged, began to see in this
+wild village, in the heart of these rich and terrific mountains, that
+wonderful thing, "another chance."
+
+"Would Miss Barrington approve of us now?" Karl would sometimes ask
+Honora.
+
+"Why should she?" Honora would retort. "We're not in earnest. We're
+only fighting bankruptcy and ennui."
+
+"That's it," declared Karl. "By the way, I must scrape up some more
+capital somewhere, Honora. I've borrowed everything I could lay my hands
+on in Denver. Now I've written to some Chicago capitalists about my
+affairs and they show a disposition to help me out. They'll meet in
+Denver next week. Perhaps I shall bring them here. I've told them
+frankly what my position was. You see, if I can swing things for six
+months more, the tide will turn. Do you think my interesting rabble will
+stick to me?"
+
+"Don't count on them," said Honora. "Don't count on anybody or anything.
+But if you like to take your chance, do it. It's no more of a gamble
+than anything else a Colorado man is likely to invest in."
+
+"You don't think much of us Colorado men, do you, my cousin?"
+
+"I don't think you are quite civilized," she said. Then a twinge of
+memory twisted her face. "But I don't care for civilized men. I like
+glorious barbarians like you, Karl."
+
+"Men who are shot at from behind bushes, eh? If I ever have to hide in a
+cave, Honora, will you go with me?"
+
+"Yes, and load the guns."
+
+He flashed her a curious look; one which she could not quite interpret.
+Was he thinking that he would like her to keep beside him? For a
+second, with a thrill of something like fear, this occurred to her. Then
+by some mysterious process she read his mind, and she read it aright. He
+was really thinking how stirring a thing life would seem if he could
+hear words like that from the lips of Kate Barrington.
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+It had been a busy day for Honora. She had been superintending the
+house-cleaning and taking rather an aggressive part in it herself. She
+rejoiced that her strength had come back to her, and she felt a keen
+satisfaction in putting it forth in service of the man who had taken her
+into community of interest with him when, as he had once put it, she was
+bankrupted of all that had made her think herself rich.
+
+Moreover, she loved the roomy, bare house, with its uncurtained windows
+facing the mountains, and revealing the spectacles of the day and night.
+Because of them she had learned to make the most of her sleepless hours.
+The slow, majestic procession in the heavens, the hours of tumult when
+the moon struggled through the troubled sky, the dawns with their swift,
+wide-spreading clarity, were the finest diversions she ever had known.
+
+She remembered how, in the old days, she and David had patronized the
+unspeakably puerile musical comedies under the impression that they
+"rested" them. Now, she was able to imagine nothing more fatiguing.
+
+They had an early supper, for Karl was leaving for a day or two in
+Denver and had to be driven ten miles to the station. He was unusually
+silent, and Honora was well pleased that he should be so, for, though
+she had kept herself so busily occupied all the day, she had not been
+able to rid herself of the feeling that a storm of memories was waiting
+to burst upon her. The feeling had grown as the hours of the day went
+on, and she at once dreaded and longed for the solitude she should have
+when Karl was gone. She was relieved to find that the little girls were
+weary and quite ready for their beds. She watched Karl drive away,
+standing at the door for a few moments till she heard his clear voice
+calling a last good-bye as the station wagon swept around the pinon
+grove; then she locked the house and went to her own room. A fire had
+been laid for her, and she touched a match to the kindling, lighted her
+lamp, and took up some sewing. But she found herself too weary to sew,
+and, moreover, this assailant of recollection was upon her again.
+
+She had once seen the Northern lights when the many-hued glory seemed to
+be poured from vast, invisible pitchers, till it spread over the floor
+of heaven and spilled earthward. Her memories had come upon her
+like that.
+
+Then she faced the fact she had been trying all day not to recognize.
+
+It was David's birthday!
+
+She admitted it now, and even had the courage to go back over the ways
+they had celebrated the day in former years; at first she held to the
+old idea that these recollections made her suffer, but presently she
+perceived that it was not so. Had her help come from the hills, as Karl
+had told her it would?
+
+She sat so still that she could hear the ashes falling in the
+fireplace--so still that the ticking of her watch on the dressing-table
+teased her ears. She seemed to be listening for something--for something
+beautiful and solemn. And by and by the thing she had been waiting
+for came.
+
+It swept into the house as if all the doors and windows had been thrown
+wide to receive it. It was as invisible as the wind, as scentless as a
+star, as complete as birth or death. It was peace--or forgiveness--or,
+in a white way, perhaps it was love.
+
+Suddenly she sprang to her feet.
+
+"David!" she cried. "David! Oh, I _believe I understand!_"
+
+She went to her desk, and, as if she were compelled, began to write.
+Afterward she found she had written this:--
+
+     "DEAR DAVID:--
+
+     "It is your birthday, and I, who am so used to sending you a
+     present, cannot be deterred now. Oh, David, my husband, you
+     who fathered my children, you, who, in spite of all, belong
+     to me, let me tell you how I have at last come, out of the
+     storm of angers and torments of the past year, into a
+     sheltered room where you seem to sit waiting to hear me say,
+     'I forgive you.'
+
+     "That is my present to you--my forgiveness. Take it from me
+     with lifted hands as if it were a sacrament; feed on it, for
+     it is holy bread. Now we shall both be at peace, shall we
+     not? You will forgive me, too, _for all I did not do_.
+
+     "We are willful children, all of us, and night over-takes us
+     before we have half learned our lessons.
+
+     "Oh, David--"
+
+She broke off suddenly. Something cold seemed to envelop her--cold as a
+crevasse and black as death. She gave a strangled cry, wrenched the
+collar from her throat, fighting in vain against the mounting waves that
+overwhelmed her.
+
+Long afterward, she shuddered up out of her unconsciousness. The fire
+had burned itself out; the lamp was sputtering for lack of oil.
+Somewhere in the distance a coyote called. She was dripping with cold
+sweat, and had hardly strength to find the thing that would warm her and
+to get off her clothes and creep into bed.
+
+At first she was afraid to put out the light. It seemed as if, should
+she do so, the very form and substance of Terror would come and grip
+her. But after a time, slowly, wave upon wave, the sea of Peace rolled
+over her--submerging her. She reached out then and extinguished the
+light and let herself sink down, down, through the obliterating waters
+of sleep--waters as deep, as cold, as protecting as the sea.
+
+"Into the Eternal Arms," she breathed, not knowing why.
+
+But when she awakened the next morning in response to the punctual gong,
+she remembered that she had said that.
+
+"Into the Eternal Arms."
+
+She came down to breakfast with the face of one who has eaten of the
+sacred bread of the spirit.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next two days passed vaguely. A gray veil appeared to hang between
+her and the realities, and she had the effect of merely going through
+the motions of life. The children caused her no trouble. They were,
+indeed, the most normal of children, and Mrs. Hays, their old-time
+nurse, had reduced their days to an agreeable system. Honora derived
+that peculiar delight from them which a mother may have when she is not
+obliged to be the bodily servitor and constant attendant of her
+children. She was able to feel the poetry of their childhood, seeing
+them as she did at fortunate and picturesque moments; and though their
+lives were literally braided into her own,--were the golden threads in
+her otherwise dun fabric of existence,--she was thankful that she did
+not have the task of caring for them. It would have been torture to have
+been tied to their small needs all day and every day. She liked far
+better the heavier work she did about the house, her long walks, her
+rides to town, and, when Karl was away, her supervision of the ranch.
+Above all, there was her work at the village. She could return from
+that to the children for refreshment and for spiritual illumination. In
+the purity of their eyes, in the liquid sweetness of their voices, in
+their adorable grace and caprice, there was a healing force beyond her
+power to compute.
+
+During these days, however, her pleasure in them was dim, though sweet.
+She had been through a mystic experience which left a profound influence
+upon her, and she was too much under the spell of it even to make an
+effort to shake it off. She slept lightly and woke often, to peer into
+the velvet blackness of the night and to listen to the deep silence. She
+was as one who stands apart, the viewer of some tremendous but
+uncomprehended event.
+
+The third day she sent the horses for Karl, and as twilight neared, he
+came driving home. She heard his approach and threw open the door for
+him. He saw her with a halo of light about her, curiously enlarged and
+glorified, and came slowly and heavily toward her, holding out both
+hands. At first she thought he was ill, but as his hands grasped hers,
+she saw that he was not bringing a personal sorrow to her but a
+brotherly compassion. And then she knew that something had happened to
+David. She read his mind so far, almost as if it had been a printed
+page, and she might have read further, perhaps, if she had waited, but
+she cried out:--
+
+"What is it? You've news of David?"
+
+"Yes," he said. "Come in."
+
+"You've seen the papers?" he asked when they were within the house. She
+shook her head.
+
+"I haven't sent over for the mail since you left, Karl. I seemed to like
+the silence."
+
+"There's silence enough in all patience!" he cried. "Sixteen hundred
+voices have ceased."
+
+"I don't understand."
+
+"The Cyclops has gone down--a new ship, the largest on the sea."
+
+"Why, that seems impossible."
+
+"Not when there are icebergs floating off the banks and when the bergs
+carry submerged knives of ice. One of them gored the ship. It
+was fatal."
+
+"How terrible!" For a second's space she had forgotten the possible
+application to her. Then the knowledge came rushing back upon her.
+
+She put her hands over her heart with the gesture of one wounded.
+
+"David?" she gasped.
+
+Karl nodded.
+
+"He was on it--with Mary. They were coming back to America. He had been
+given the Norden prize, as you know,--the prize you earned for him. I
+think he was to take a position in some Eastern university. He and Mary
+had gone to their room, the paper says, when the shock came. They ran
+out together, half-dressed, and Mary asked a steward if there was
+anything the matter. 'Yes, madam,' he said quietly, just like that, 'I
+believe we are sinking.' You'll read all about it there in those papers.
+Mary was interviewed. Well, they lowered the boats. There were enough
+for about a third of the passengers. They had made every provision for
+luxury, but not nearly enough for safety. The men helped the women into
+the boats and sent them away. Then they sat down together, folded their
+arms, and died like gentlemen, with the good musicians heartening them
+with their music to the last. The captain went down with his ship, of
+course. All of the officers did that. Almost all of the men did it, too.
+It was very gallant in its terrible way, and David was among the most
+gallant. The papers mention him particularly. He worked till the last
+helping the others off, and then he sat down and waited for the end."
+
+Honora turned on her cousin a face in which all the candles of her soul
+were lit.
+
+"Oh, Karl, how wonderful! How beautiful!"
+
+He said nothing for amazement.
+
+"In that half-hour," she went on, speaking with such swiftness that he
+could hardly follow her, "all his thoughts streamed off across the miles
+of sea and land to me! I felt the warmth of them all about me. It was
+myself he was thinking of. He came back to me, his wife! I was alone,
+waiting for something, I couldn't tell what. Then I remembered it was
+his birthday, and that I should be sending him a gift. So I sent him my
+forgiveness. I wrote a letter, but for some reason I have not sent it.
+It is here, the letter!" She drew it from her bosom. "See, the date and
+hour is upon it. Read it."
+
+Karl arose and held the letter in a shaking hand. He made a
+calculation.
+
+"The moments correspond," he said. "You are right; his spirit sought
+yours."
+
+"And then the--the drowning, Karl. I felt it all, but I could not
+understand. I died and was dead for a long time, but I came up again, to
+live. Only since then life has been very curious. I have felt like a
+ghost that missed its grave. I've been walking around, pretending to
+live, but really half hearing and half seeing, and waiting for you to
+come back and explain."
+
+"I have explained," said Karl with infinite gentleness. "Mary is saved.
+She was taken up with others by the Urbania, and friends are caring for
+her in New York. She gave a very lucid interview; a feeling one, too.
+She lives, but the man she ruined went down, for her sake."
+
+"No," said Honora, "he went down for my sake. He went down for the sake
+of his ideals, and his ideals were mine. Oh, how beautiful that I have
+forgiven him--and how wonderful that he knew it, and that I--" She spoke
+as one to whom a great happiness had come. Then she wavered, reached out
+groping hands, and fell forward in Karl's arms.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For days she lay in her bed. She had no desire to arise. She seemed to
+dread interruption to her passionate drama of emotion, in which sorrow
+and joy were combined in indeterminate parts. From her window she could
+see the snow-capped peaks of the Williston range, rising with immortal
+and changeful beauty into the purple heavens. As she watched them with
+incurious eyes, marking them in the first light of the day, when their
+iridescence made them seem as impalpable as a dream of heaven; eyeing
+them in the noon-height, when their sides were the hue of ruddy granite;
+watching them at sunset when they faded from swimming gold to rose, from
+rose to purple, they seemed less like mountains than like those fair and
+fatal bergs of the Northern Atlantic. She had read of them, though she
+had not seen them. She knew how they sloughed from the inexhaustible
+ice-cap of Greenland's bleak continent and marched, stately as an army,
+down the mighty plain of the ocean. Fair beyond word were they, with
+jeweled crevasses and mother-of-pearl changefulness, indomitable,
+treacherous, menacing. Honora, closing weary eyes, still saw them
+sailing, sailing, white as angels, radiant as dawn, changing, changing,
+lovely and cold as death.
+
+Mind and gaze were fixed upon their enchantment. She would not think of
+certain other things--of that incredible catastrophe, that rent ship,
+crashing to its doom, of that vast company tossed upon the sea, of those
+cries in the dark. No, she shut her eyes and her ears to those things!
+They seemed to be the servitors at the doors of madness, and she let
+them crook their fingers at her in vain. Now and then, when she was not
+on guard, they swarmed upon her, whispering stories of black struggle,
+of heart-breaking separation of mother and child, of husband and wife.
+Sometimes they told her how Mary--so luxurious, so smiling, so avid of
+warmth and food and kisses--had shivered in that bleak wind, as she sat
+coatless, torn from David's sheltering embrace. They had given her
+elfish reminders of how soft, how pink, how perfumed was that woman's
+tender flesh. Then as she looked the blue eyes glazed with agony, the
+supple body grew rigid with cold, and down, down, through miles of
+water, sank the man they both had loved.
+
+No, no, it was better to watch the bergs, those glistering, fair, white
+ships of death! Yes, there from the window she seemed to see them! How
+the sun glorified them! Was the sun setting, then? Had there been
+another day?
+
+"To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow--"
+
+Darkness was falling. But even in the darkness she saw the ice-ships
+slipping down from that great frozen waste, along the glacial rivers,
+past the bleak _lisiere_, into the bitter sea, and on down, down to meet
+that other ship--that ship bearing its mighty burden of living men--and
+to break it in unequal combat.
+
+Oh, could she never sleep! Would those white ships never reach port!
+
+Did she hear Karl say he had telegraphed for Kate Barrington? But what
+did it matter? Neither Kate nor Karl, strong and kind as they were,
+could stem the tide that bore those ships along the never-quiet seas.
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+So Kate was coming!
+
+He had cravenly rebuffed her, and she had borne the rebuff in silence.
+Yet now that he needed her, she was coming. Ah, that was what women
+meant to men. They were created for the comforting of them. He always
+had known it, but he had impiously doubted them--doubted Her. Because
+fortune had turned from him, he had turned from Her--from Kate
+Barrington. He had imagined that she wanted more than he could give;
+whereas, evidently, all she ever had wanted was to be needed. He had
+called. She had answered. It had been as swift as telegraphy could make
+it. And now he was driving to the station to meet her.
+
+Life, it appeared, was just as simple as that. A man, lost in the
+darkness, could cry for a star to guide him, and it would come. It would
+shine miraculously out of the heavens, and his path would be made plain.
+It seemed absurd that the horses should be jogging along at their usual
+pace over the familiar road. Why had they not grown shining wings? Why
+was the old station wagon not transformed, by the mere glory of its
+errand, into a crystal coach? But, no, the horses went no faster because
+they were going on this world-changing errand. The resuscitated village,
+with the American litter heaped on the Italian dirt, looked none the
+less slovenly because She was coming into it in a few minutes. The clock
+kept its round; the sun showed its usual inclination toward the west.
+But notwithstanding this torpidity, She was coming, and that day stood
+apart from all other days.
+
+That it was Honora's desperate need which she was answering, in no way
+lessened the value of her response to him. His need and Honora's were
+indissoluble now; it was he who had called, and it was not to Honora
+alone that she was coming with healing in her hands.
+
+He saw her as she leaped from the train,--tall, alert, green-clad,--and
+he ran forward, sweeping his Stetson from his head. Their hands
+met--clung.
+
+"You!" he said under his breath.
+
+She laughed into his eyes.
+
+"No, _you_!" she retorted.
+
+He took her bags and they walked side by side, looking at each other as
+if their eyes required the sight.
+
+"How is she?" asked Kate.
+
+"Very bad."
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"The doorway to madness."
+
+"You've had a specialist?"
+
+"Yes. He wanted to take her to a sanatorium. I begged him to wait--to
+let you try. How could I let her go out from my door to be cast in with
+the lost?"
+
+"I suppose it was David's death that caused it."
+
+"Oh, yes. What else could it be?"
+
+"Then she loved him--to the end."
+
+"And after it, I am sure."
+
+He led the way to the station wagon and helped her in; then brought her
+luggage on his own shoulder.
+
+"Oh," she cried in distress. "Do you have to be your own stevedore? I
+don't like to have you doing that for me."
+
+"Out here we wait on ourselves," he replied when he had tumbled the
+trunk into the wagon. He seated himself beside her as if he were doing
+an accustomed thing, and she, too, felt as if she had been there beside
+him many times before.
+
+As they entered the village, he said:--
+
+"You must note my rowdy town. Never was there such a place--such
+organized success built on so much individual failure. From boss to
+water-boy we were failures all; so we understood each other. We haven't
+sworn brotherhood, but we're pulling together. Some of us had known no
+law, and most of us had a prejudice against it, but now we're making our
+own laws and we rather enjoy the process. We've made the town and the
+mines our own cause, so what is the use of playing the traitor? Some of
+us are short-stake men habitually and constitutionally. Very well, say
+we, let us look at the facts. Since there are short-stake men in the
+world, why not make allowances for them? Use their limited powers of
+endurance and concentration, then let 'em off to rest up. If there are
+enough short-stake men around, some one will always be working. We find
+it works well."
+
+"Have you many women in your midst?"
+
+"At first we had very few. Just some bedraggled wives and a few less
+responsible ladies with magenta feathers in their hats. At least, two of
+them had, and the magenta feather came to be a badge. But they've
+disappeared--the feathers, not the ladies. Honora had a hand in it. I
+think she pulled off one marriage. She seemed to think there were
+arguments in favor of the wedding ceremony. But, mind you, she didn't
+want any of the poor women to go because they were bad. We are sinners
+all here. Stay and take a chance, that's our motto. It isn't often you
+can get a good woman like Honora to hang up a sign like that."
+
+"Honora couldn't have done it once," said Kate. "But think of all she's
+learned."
+
+"Learned? Yes. And I, too. I've been learning my lessons, too,--they
+were long and hard and I sulked at some of them, but I'm more
+tractable new."
+
+"I had my own hard conning," Kate said softly. "You never could have
+done what I did, Mr. Wander. You couldn't have been cruel to an
+old father."
+
+"Honora has made all that clear to me," said Karl with compassion.
+"When we are fighting for liberty we forget the sufferings of
+the enemy."
+
+There was a little pause. Then Karl spoke.
+
+"But I forgot to begin at the beginning in telling you about my
+made-over mining town. Yet you seemed to know about it."
+
+"Oh, I read about it in the papers. Your experiment is famous. All of
+the people I am associated with, the welfare workers and sociologists,
+are immensely interested in it. That's one of the problems now--how to
+use the hobo, how to get him back into an understanding of regulated
+communities."
+
+"Put him in charge," laughed Karl. "The answer's easy. Treat him like a
+fellow-man. Don't annoy him by an exhibition of your useless virtues."
+
+"I never thought of that," said Kate.
+
+They turned their backs on the straggling town and faced the peaks.
+Presently they skirted the Williston River which thundered among
+boulders and raged on toward the low-lying valley. From above, the roar
+of the pines came to them, reverberant and melancholy.
+
+"What sounds! What sounds!" cried Kate.
+
+"The mountains breathing," answered Wander.
+
+He drove well, and he knew the road. It was a dangerous road, which,
+ever ascending, skirted sharp declivities and rounded buttressed rocks.
+Kate, prairie-reared, could not "escape the inevitable thrill," but she
+showed, and perhaps felt, no fear. She let the matter rest with
+him--this man with great shoulders and firm hands, who knew the
+primitive art of "waiting on himself." Their brief speech sufficed them
+for a time, and now they sat silent, well content. The old, tormenting
+question as to his relations with Honora did not intrude itself. It was
+swept out of sight like flotsam in the plenteous stream of
+present content.
+
+They swung upon a purple mesa, and in the distance Kate saw a light
+which she felt was shining from the window of his home.
+
+"It's just as I thought it would be," she said.
+
+"Perhaps you are just the way it thought you would be," he replied.
+"Perhaps the soul of a place waits and watches for the right person,
+just as we human beings wander about searching for the right spot."
+
+"_I'm_ suited," affirmed Kate. "I hope the mesa is."
+
+"I know it well and I can answer for it."
+
+The road continued to mount; they entered the pinon grove and rode in
+aromatic dusk for a while, and when they emerged they were at
+the doorway.
+
+He lifted her down and held her with a gesture as if he had something to
+say.
+
+"It's about my letter," he ventured. "You knew very well it wasn't that
+I didn't want you to write. But my life was getting tangled--I wasn't
+willing to involve you in any way in the debris. I couldn't be sure that
+letters sent me would always reach my hands. Worst of all, I accused
+myself of unworthiness. I do so still."
+
+"I'm not one who worries much about worthiness or unworthiness," she
+said. "Each of us is worthy and unworthy. But I thought--"
+
+"What?"
+
+"I was confused. Honora said I was to congratulate you--and her. I
+didn't know--"
+
+He stared incredulously.
+
+"You didn't know--" He broke off, too, then laughed shortly. "I wish you
+had known," he added. "I would like to think that you never could
+misunderstand."
+
+She felt herself rebuked. He opened the door for her and she stepped for
+the first time across the threshold of his house.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Half an hour later, Wander, sitting in his study at the end of the upper
+hall, saw his guest hastening toward Honora's room. She wore a plain
+brown house dress and looked uniformed and ready for service. She did
+not speak to him, but hastened down the corridor and let herself into
+that solemn chamber where Honora Fulham lay with wide-staring eyes
+gazing mountain ward. That Honora was in some cold, still, and appalling
+place it took Kate but a moment to apprehend. She could hardly keep from
+springing to her as if to snatch her from impending doom, but she forced
+all panic from her manner.
+
+"Kate's come," she said, leaning down and kissing those chilly lips
+with a passion of pity and reassurance. "She's come to stay, sister
+Honora, and to drive everything bad away from you. Give her a kiss if
+you are glad."
+
+Did she feel an answering salute? She could not be sure. She moved aside
+and watched. Those fixed, vision-seeing eyes were upon the snow-capped
+peaks purpling in the decline of the day.
+
+"What is it you see, sister?" she asked. "Is there something out there
+that troubles you?"
+
+Honora lifted a tragic hand and pointed to those darkening snows.
+
+"See how the bergs keep floating!" she whispered. "They float slowly,
+but they are on their way. By and by they will meet the ship. Then
+everything will be crushed or frozen. I try to make them stay still, but
+they won't do it, and I'm so tired--oh, I'm so terribly tired, Kate."
+
+Kate's heart leaped. She had, at any rate, recognized her.
+
+"They really are still, Honora," she cried. "Truly they are. I am
+looking at them, and I can see that they are still. They are not bergs
+at all, but only your good mountains, and by and by all of that ice and
+snow will melt and flowers will be growing there."
+
+She pulled down the high-rolled shades at the windows with a decisive
+gesture.
+
+"But I must have them up," cried Honora, beginning to sob. "I have to
+keep watching them."
+
+"It's time to have in the lamps," declared Kate; and went to the door
+to ask for them.
+
+"And tea, too, please, Mrs. Hays," she called; "quite hot."
+
+"We've been keeping her very still," warned Wander, rejoicing in Kate's
+cheerful voice, yet dreading the effect of it on his cousin.
+
+"It's been too still where her soul has been dwelling," Kate replied in
+a whisper. "Can't you see she's on those bitter seas watching for the
+ice to crush David's ship? It's not yet madness, only a profound
+dream--a recurring hallucination. We must break it up--oh, we must!"
+
+She carried in the lamps when they came, placing them where their glow
+would not trouble those burning eyes; and when Mrs. Hays brought the tea
+and toast, whispering, "She'll take nothing," Kate lifted her friend in
+her determined arms, and, having made her comfortable, placed the tray
+before her.
+
+"For old sake's sake, Honora," she said. "Come, let us play we are girls
+again, back at Foster, drinking our tea!"
+
+Mechanically, Honora lifted the cup and sipped it. When Kate broke
+pieces of the toast and set them before her, she ate them.
+
+"You are telling me nothing about the babies," Kate reproached her
+finally. "Mayn't we have them in for a moment?"
+
+"I don't think they ought to come here," said Honora faintly. "It
+doesn't seem as if they ought to be brought to such a place as this."
+
+But Kate commanded their presence, and, having softly fondled them,
+dropped them on Honora's bed and let them crawl about there. They
+swarmed up to their mother and hung upon her, patting her cheeks, and
+investigating the use of eyelids and of ropes of hair. But when they
+could not provoke her to play, they began to whimper.
+
+"Honora," said Kate sharply, "you must laugh at them at once! They
+mustn't go away without a kiss."
+
+So Honora dragged herself from those green waters beyond the fatal
+Banks, half across the continent to the little children at her side, and
+held them for a moment--the two of them at once--in her embrace.
+
+"But I'm so tired, Kate," she said wearily.
+
+"Rest, then," said Kate. "Rest. But it wouldn't have been right to rest
+without saying good-night to the kiddies, would it? A mother has to
+think of that, hasn't she? They need you so dreadfully, you see."
+
+She slipped the extra pillows from beneath the heavy head, and stood a
+moment by the bedside in silence as if she would impress the fact of her
+protection upon that stricken heart and brain.
+
+"It is safe, here, Honora," she said softly. "Love and care are all
+about you. No harm shall come near you. Do you believe that?"
+
+Honora looked at her from beneath heavy lids, then slowly let her eyes
+close. Kate walked to the window and waited. At first Honora's body was
+convulsed with nervous spasms, but little by little they ceased. Honora
+slept. Kate threw wide the windows, extinguished the light, and crept
+from the room, not ill-satisfied with her first conflict with the
+dread enemy.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Karl was waiting for her in the corridor when she came from Honora's
+room, and he caught both of her hands in his.
+
+"You're cold with horror!" he said. "What a thing that is to see!"
+
+"But it isn't going to last," protested Kate with a quivering accent.
+"We can't have it last."
+
+"Come into the light," he urged. "Supper is waiting."
+
+He led her down the stairs and into the simple dining-room. The table
+was laid for two before a leaping blaze. There was no other light save
+that of two great candles in sticks of wrought bronze. The room was bare
+but beautiful--so seemly were its proportions, so fitted to its use its
+quiet furnishings.
+
+He placed her chair where she could feel the glow and see, through the
+wide window, a crescent moon mounting delicately into the clear sky.
+There was game and salad, custard and coffee--a charming feast. Mrs.
+Hays came and went quietly serving them. Karl said little. He was
+content with the essential richness of the moment. It was as if Destiny
+had distilled this hour for him, giving it to him to quaff. He was
+grave, but he did not resent her sorrowfulness. Sorrow, he observed,
+might have as sweet a flavor as joy. It did not matter by what name the
+present hour was called. It was there--he rested in it as in a state of
+being which had been appointed--a goal toward which he had been
+journeying.
+
+"What's to be done?" he asked.
+
+"I've been thinking," said Kate, "that we had better move her from that
+room. Is there none from which no mountains are visible? She ought not
+to have the continual reminder of those icebergs."
+
+"Why didn't I think of that?" he cried with vexation. "That shows how
+stupid a man can be. Certainly we have such a room as you wish. It looks
+over the barnyard. It's cheerful but noisy. You can hear the burros and
+the chickens and pigs and calves and babies all day long."
+
+"It's precisely what she needs. Her thoughts are the things to fear, and
+I know of no way to break those up except by crowding others in. Is the
+room pleasant--gay?"
+
+"No--hardly clean, I should say. But we can work on it like fiends."
+
+"Let's do it, then,--put in chintz, pictures, flowers, books, a jar of
+goldfish, a cage of finches,--anything that will make her forget that
+terrible white procession of bergs."
+
+"You think it isn't too late? You think we can save her?"
+
+"I won't admit anything else," declared Kate.
+
+The wind began to rise. It came rushing from far heights and moaned
+around the house. The silence yielded to this mournful sound, yet kept
+its essential quality.
+
+"It's a wild place," said Kate; "wilder than any place I have been in
+before. But it seems secure. I find it hard to believe that you have
+been in danger here."
+
+"I am in danger now," said Karl. "Much worse danger than I was in when
+the poor excited dagoes were threatening me."
+
+"What is your danger?" asked Kate.
+
+She was incapable of coquetry after that experience in Honora's room;
+nor did the noble solitude of the place permit the thought of an
+excursion into the realms of any sort of dalliance. Moreover, though
+Karl's words might have led her to think of him as ready to play with a
+sentimental situation, the essential loftiness of his gaze forbade her
+to entertain the thought.
+
+"I am in danger," he said gravely, "of experiencing a happiness so great
+that I shall never again be satisfied with life under less perfect
+conditions. Can you imagine how the fresh air seems to a man just
+released from prison? Well, life has a tang like that for me now. I tell
+you, I have been a discouraged man. It looked to me as if all of the
+things I had been fighting for throughout my manhood were going to
+ruin. I saw my theories shattered, my fortune disappearing, my
+reputation, as the successful manipulator of other men's money, being
+lost. I've been looked upon as a lucky man and a reliable one out here
+in Colorado. They swear by you or at you out in this part of the
+country, and I've been accustomed to having them count on me. I even had
+some political expectations, and was justified in them, I imagine. I had
+an idea I might go to the state legislature and then take a jump to
+Washington. Well, it was a soap-bubble dream, of course. I lost out.
+This tatterdemalion crew of mine is all there is left of my cohorts. I
+suppose I'm looked on now as a wild experimenter."
+
+"Would it seem that way to men?" asked Kate, surprised. "To take what
+lies at hand and make use of it--to win with a broken sword--that
+strikes me as magnificent."
+
+She forgot to put a guard on herself for a moment and let her
+admiration, her deep confidence in him, shine from her eyes. She saw him
+whiten, saw a look of almost terrible happiness in his eyes, and
+withdrew her gaze. She could hear him breathing deeply, but he said
+nothing. There fell upon them a profound and wonderful silence which
+held when they had arisen and were sitting before his hearth. They were
+alone with elemental things--night, silence, wind, and fire. They had
+the essentials, roof and food, clothing and companionship. Back and
+forth between them flashed the mystic currents of understanding. A
+happiness such as neither had known suffused them.
+
+When they said "good-night," each made the discovery that the simple
+word has occult and beautiful meanings.
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+At the end of a week Honora showed a decided change for the better. The
+horror had gone out of her face; she ate without persuasion; she slept
+briefly but often. The conclusion of a fortnight saw her still sad, but
+beyond immediate danger of melancholy. She began to assume some slight
+responsibility toward the children, and she loved to have them playing
+about her, although she soon wearied of them.
+
+Kate had decided not to go back to Chicago until her return from
+California. She was to speak to the Federation of Women's Clubs which
+met at Los Angeles, and she proposed taking Honora with her. Honora was
+not averse if Kate and Karl thought it best for her. The babies were to
+remain safe at home.
+
+"I wouldn't dare experiment with babies," said Kate. "At least, not with
+other people's."
+
+"You surely wouldn't experiment with your own, ma'am!" cried the
+privileged Mrs. Hays.
+
+"Oh, I might," Kate insisted. "If I had babies of my own, I'd like them
+to be hard, brown little savages--the sort you could put on donkey-back
+or camel-back and take anywhere."
+
+Mrs. Hays shook her head at the idea of camels. It hardly sounded
+Christian, and certainly it in no way met her notion of the need
+of infants.
+
+"Mrs. Browning writes about taking her baby to a mountain-top not far
+from the stars," Kate went on. "They rode donkey-back, I believe.
+Personally, however, I should prefer the camel. For one thing, you could
+get more babies on his back."
+
+Mrs. Hays threw a glance at her mistress as if to say: "Is it proper for
+a young woman to talk like this?"
+
+The young woman in question said many things which, according to the
+always discreet and sensible Mrs. Hays, were hardly to be commended.
+
+There was, for example, the evening she had stood in the westward end of
+the veranda and called:--
+
+"Archangels! Come quick and see them!"
+
+The summons was so stirring that they all ran,--even Honora, who was
+just beginning to move about the house,--but Wander reached Kate's
+side first.
+
+"She's right, Honora," he announced. "It is archangels--a whole party of
+them. Come, see!"
+
+But it had been nothing save a sunset rather brighter than usual, with
+wing-like radiations.
+
+"Pshaw!" said Mrs. Hays confidentially to the cook.
+
+"Shouldn't you think they'd burn up with all that flaming crimson on
+them?" Kate cried. "And, oh, their golden hair! Or does that belong to
+the Damosel? Probably she is leaning over the bar of heaven at
+this minute."
+
+In Mrs. Hays's estimation, the one good thing about all such talk was
+that Mrs. Fulham seemed to like it. Sometimes she smiled; and she hung
+upon the arm of her friend and looked at her as if wondering how one
+could be so young and strong and gay. Mr. Wander, too, seemed never
+tired of listening; and the way that letters trailed after this young
+woman showed her that a number--quite an astonishingly large number--of
+persons were pleased to whet their ideas on her. Clarinda Hays decided
+that she would like to try it herself; so one morning when she sat on
+the veranda watching the slumbers of the little girls in their hammocks,
+and Miss Barrington sat near at hand fashioning a blouse for Honora's
+journey, she ventured:--
+
+"You're a suffragette, ain't you, Miss?"
+
+"Why, yes," admitted Kate. "I suppose I am. I believe in suffrage for
+women, at any rate."
+
+"Well, what do you make of all them carryings-on over there in England,
+ma'am? You don't approve of acid-throwing and window-breaking and
+cutting men's faces with knives, do you?" She looked at Kate with an
+almost poignant anxiety, her face twitching a little with her
+excitement. "A decent woman couldn't put her stamp on that kind
+o' thing."
+
+"But the puzzling part of it all is, Mrs. Hays, that it appears to be
+decent women who are doing it. Moreover, it's not an impulse with them
+but a plan. That rather sets one thinking, doesn't it? You see, it's a
+sort of revolution. Revolutions have got us almost everything we have
+that is really worth while in the way of personal liberty; but I don't
+suppose any of them seemed very 'decent' to the non-combatants who were
+looking on. Then, too, you have to realize that women are very much
+handicapped in conducting a fight."
+
+"What have they got to fight against, I should like to know?" demanded
+Mrs. Hays, dropping her sewing and grasping the arms of her chair in her
+indignation.
+
+"Well," said Kate, "I fancy we American women haven't much idea of all
+that the Englishwomen are called upon to resent. I do know, though, that
+an English husband of whatever station thinks that he is the commander,
+and that he feels at liberty to address his wife as few American
+husbands would think of doing. It's quite allowed them to beat their
+wives if they are so minded. I hope that not many of them are minded to
+do anything of the kind, but I feel very sure that women are 'kept in
+their place' over there. So, as they've been hectored themselves,
+they've taken up hectoring tactics in retaliation. They demand a share
+in the government and the lawmaking. They want to have a say about the
+schools and the courts of justice. If men were fighting for some new
+form of liberty, we should think them heroic. Why should we think women
+silly for doing the same thing?"
+
+"It won't get them anywhere," affirmed Clarinda Hays. "It won't do for
+them what the old way of behaving did for them, Miss. Now, who, I
+should like to know, does a young fellow, dying off in foreign parts,
+turn his thoughts to in his last moments? Why, to his good mother or his
+nice sweetheart! You don't suppose that men are going to turn their
+dying thoughts to any such screaming, kicking harridans as them
+suffragettes over there in England, do you?"
+
+Kate heard a chuckle beyond the door--the disrespectful chuckle, as she
+took it, of the master of the house. It armed her for the fray.
+
+"I don't think the militant women are doing these things to induce men
+to feel tenderly toward them, Mrs. Hays. I don't believe they care just
+now whether the men feel tenderly toward them or not. Women have been
+low-voiced and sweet and docile for a good many centuries, but it hasn't
+gained them the right to claim their own children, or to stand up beside
+men and share their higher responsibilities and privileges. I don't like
+the manner of warfare, myself. While I could die at the stake if it
+would do any good, I couldn't break windows and throw acid. For one
+thing, it doesn't seem to me quite logical, as the damage is inflicted
+on the property of persons who have nothing to do with the case. But, of
+course, I can't be sure that, after the fight is won, future generations
+will not honor the women who forgot their personal preferences and who
+made the fight in the only way they could."
+
+"You're such a grand talker, Miss, that it's hard running opposite to
+you, but I was brought up to think that a woman ought to be as near an
+angel as she could be. I never answered my husband back, no matter what
+he said to me, and I moved here and there to suit him. I was always
+waiting for him at home, and when he got there I stood ready to do for
+him in any way I could. We was happy together, Miss, and when he was
+dying he said that I had been a good wife. Them words repaid me, Miss,
+as having my own way never could."
+
+Clarinda Hays had grown fervid. There were tears in her patient eyes,
+and her face was frankly broken with emotion.
+
+Kate permitted a little silence to fall. Then she said gently:--
+
+"I can see it is very sweet to you--that memory--very sweet and sacred.
+I don't wonder you treasure it."
+
+She let the subject lie there and arose presently and, in passing, laid
+her firm brown hand on Mrs. Hays's work-worn one.
+
+Wander was in the sitting-room and as she entered it he motioned her to
+get her hat and sweater. She did so silently and accepted from him the
+alpenstock he held out to her.
+
+"Is it right to leave Honora?" he asked when they were beyond hearing.
+"I had little or nothing to do down in town, and it occurred to me that
+we might slip away for once and go adventuring."
+
+"Oh, Honora's particularly well this morning. She's been reading a
+little, and after she has rested she is going to try to sew. Not that
+she can do much, but it means that she's taking an interest again."
+
+"Ah, that does me good! What a nightmare it's been! We seem to have had
+one nightmare after another, Honora and I."
+
+They turned their steps up the trail that mounted westward.
+
+"It follows this foothill for a way," said Wander, striding ahead, since
+they could not walk side by side. "Then it takes that level up there and
+strikes the mountain. It goes on over the pass."
+
+"And where does it end? Why was it made?"
+
+"I'm not quite sure where it ends. But it was made because men love to
+climb."
+
+She gave a throaty laugh, crying, "I might have known!" for answer, and
+he led on, stopping to assist her when the way was broken or unusually
+steep, and she, less accustomed but throbbing with the joy of
+it, followed.
+
+They reached an irregular "bench" of the mountain, and rested there on a
+great boulder. Below them lay the ranch amid its little hills,
+dust-of-gold in hue.
+
+"I have dreamed countless times of trailing this path with you," he
+said.
+
+"Then you have exhausted the best of the experience already. What equals
+a dream? Doesn't it exceed all possible fact?"
+
+"I think you know very well," he answered, "that this is more to me than
+any dream."
+
+An eagle lifted from a tree near at hand and sailed away with
+confidence, the master of the air.
+
+"I don't wonder men die trying to imitate him," breathed Kate, wrapt in
+the splendor of his flight. "They are the little brothers of Icarus."
+
+"I always hope," replied Wander, "when I hear of an aviator who has been
+killed, that he has had at least one perfect flight, when he soared as
+high as he wished and saw and felt all that a man in his circumstances
+could. Since he has had to pay so great a price, I want him to have had
+full value."
+
+"It's a fine thing to be willing to pay the price," mused Kate. "If you
+can face whatever-gods-there-be and say, 'I've had my adventure. What's
+due?' you're pretty well done with fears and flurries."
+
+"Wise one!" laughed Wander. "What do you know about paying?"
+
+"You think I don't know!" she cried. Then she flushed and drew back.
+"The last folly of the braggart is to boast of misfortune," she said.
+"But, really, I have paid, if missing some precious things that might
+have been mine is a payment for pride and wilfullness."
+
+"I hope you haven't missed very much, then,--not anything that you'll be
+regretting in the years to come."
+
+"Oh, regret is never going to be a specialty of mine," declared Kate.
+"To-morrow's the chance! I shall never be able to do much with
+yesterday, no matter how wise I become."
+
+"Right you are!" said Wander sharply. "The only thing is that you don't
+know quite the full bearing of your remark--and I do."
+
+She laughed sympathetically.
+
+"Truth is truth," she said.
+
+"Yes." He hung over the obvious aphorism boyishly. "Yes, truth is truth,
+no matter who utters it."
+
+"Thanks, kind sir."
+
+"Oh, I was thinking of the excellent Clarinda Hays. I listened to your
+conversation this morning and it seemed to me that she was giving you
+about all the truth you could find bins for. I couldn't help but take it
+in, it was so complacently offered. But Clarinda was getting her 'sacred
+feelings' mixed up with the truth. However, I suppose there is an
+essential truth about sacred feelings even when they're founded on an
+error. I surmised that you were holding back vastly more than you were
+saying. Now that we 're pretty well toward a mountain-top, with nobody
+listening, you might tell me what you _were_ thinking."
+
+Kate smiled slowly. She looked at the man beside her as if appraising
+him.
+
+"I'm terribly afraid," she said at length, "that you are soul-kin to
+Clarinda. You'll walk in a mist of sacred feelings, too, and truth will
+play hide and seek with you all over the place."
+
+"Nonsense!" he cried. "Why can't I hear what you have to say? You stand
+on platforms and tell it to hundreds. Why should you grudge it to me?"
+
+She swept her hand toward the landscape around them.
+
+"It has to do with change," she said. "And with evolution. Look at this
+scarred mountain-side, how confused and senseless the upheavals seem
+which have given it its grandeur! Nor is it static yet. It is
+continually wearing down. Erosion is diminishing it, that river is
+denuding it. Eternal change is the only law."
+
+"I understand," said Wander, his eyes glowing.
+
+"In the world of thought it is the same."
+
+"Verily."
+
+"But I speak for women--and I am afraid that you'll not understand."
+
+"I should like to be given a chance to try," he answered.
+
+"Clarinda," she said, after a moment's pause, "like the larger part of
+the world, is looking at a mirage. She sees these shining pictures on
+the hot sand of the world and she says: 'These are the real things. I
+will fix my gaze on them. What does the hot sand and the trackless waste
+matter so long as I have these beautiful mirages to look at?' When you
+say that mirages are insubstantial, evanishing, mere tricks of air and
+eye, the Clarindas retort, 'But if you take away our mirages, where are
+we to turn? What will you give us in the place of them?' She thinks, for
+example, if a dying soldier calls on his mother or his sweetheart that
+they must be good women. This is not the case. He calls on them because
+confronts the great loneliness of death. He is quite as likely to call
+on a wicked woman if she is the one whose name comes to his flickering
+sense. But even supposing that one had to be sacrificial, subservient,
+and to possess all the other Clarinda virtues in order to have a dying
+man call on one, still, would that burst of delirious wistfulness
+compensate one for years of servitude?"
+
+She let the statement hang in the air for a moment, while Wander's color
+deepened yet more. He was being wounded in the place of his dreams and
+the pang was sharp.
+
+"If some one, dying, called you 'Faithful slave,'" resumed Kate, "would
+that make you proud? Would it not rather be a humiliation? Now, 'good
+wife' might be synonymous with 'faithful slave.' That's what I'd have to
+ascertain before I could be complimented as Clarinda was complimented by
+those words. I'd have to have my own approval. No one else could comfort
+me with a 'well done' unless my own conscience echoed the words. 'Good
+wife,' indeed!"
+
+"What would reconcile you to such commendations?" asked Wander with a
+reproach that was almost personal.
+
+"The possession of those privileges and mediums by which liberty is
+sustained."
+
+"For example?"
+
+"My own independent powers of thought; my own religion, politics, taste,
+and direction of self-development--above all, my own money. By that I
+mean money for which I did not have to ask and which never was given to
+me as an indulgence. Then I should want definite work commensurate with
+my powers; and the right to a voice in all matters affecting my life or
+the life of my family."
+
+"That is what you would take. But what would you give?"
+
+"I would not 'take' these things any more than my husband would 'take'
+them. Nor could he bestow them upon me, for they are mine by
+inherent right."
+
+"Could he give you nothing, then?"
+
+"Love. Yet it may not be correct to say that he could give that. He
+would not love me because he chose to do so, but because he could not
+help doing so. At least, that is my idea of love. He would love me as I
+was, with all my faults and follies, and I should love him the same way.
+I should be as proud of his personality as I would be defensive of my
+own. I should not ask him to be like me; I should only ask him to be
+truly himself and to let me be truly myself. If our personalities
+diverged, perhaps they would go around the circle and meet on the
+other side."
+
+"Do you think, my dear woman, that you would be able to recognize each
+other after such a long journey?"
+
+"There would be distinguishing marks," laughed Kate; "birthmarks of the
+soul. But I neglected to say that it would not satisfy me merely to be
+given a portion of the earnings of the family--that portion which I
+would require to conduct the household and which I might claim as my
+share of the result of labor. I should also wish, when there was a
+surplus, to be given half of it that I might make my own experiments."
+
+"A full partnership!"
+
+"That's the idea, precisely: a full partnership. There is an assumption
+that marriages are that now, but it is not so, as all frank persons
+must concede."
+
+"_I_ concede it, at any rate."
+
+"Now, you must understand that we women are asking these things because
+we are acquiring new ideas of duty. A duty is like a command; it must be
+obeyed. It has been laid upon us to demand rights and privileges equal
+to those enjoyed by men, and we wish them to be extended to us not
+because we are young or beautiful or winning or chaste, but because we
+are members of a common humanity with men and are entitled to the same
+inheritance. We want our status established, so that when we make a
+marriage alliance we can do it for love and no other reason--not for a
+home, or support, or children or protection. Marriage should be a
+privilege and a reward--not a necessity. It should be so that if we
+spinsters want a home, we can earn one; if we desire children, we can
+take to ourselves some of the motherless ones; and we should be able to
+entrust society with our protection. By society I mean, of course, the
+structure which civilized people have fashioned for themselves, the
+portals of which are personal rights and the law."
+
+"But what will all the lovers do? If everything is adjusted to such a
+nicety, what will they be able to sacrifice for each other?"
+
+"Lovers," smiled Kate, "will always be able to make their own paradise,
+and a jewelled sacrifice will be the keystone of each window in their
+house of love. But there are only a few lovers in the world compared
+with those who have come down through the realm of little morning clouds
+and are bearing the heat and burden of the day."
+
+"How do you know all of these things, Wise Woman? Have you had so much
+experience?"
+
+"We each have all the accumulated experience of the centuries. We don't
+have to keep to the limits of our own little individual lives."
+
+"I often have dreamed of bringing you up on this trail," said Wander
+whimsically, "but never for the purpose of hearing you make your
+declaration of independence."
+
+"Why not?" demanded Kate. "In what better place could I make it?"
+
+Beside the clamorous waterfall was a huge boulder squared almost as if
+the hand of a mason had shaped it. Kate stepped on it, before Wander
+could prevent her, and stood laughing back at him, the wind blowing her
+garments about her and lifting strands of her loosened hair.
+
+"I declare my freedom!" she cried with grandiose mockery. "Freedom to
+think my own thoughts, preach my own creeds, do my own work, and make
+the sacrifices of my own choosing. I declare that I will have no master
+and no mistress, no slave and no neophyte, but that I will strive to
+preserve my own personality and to help all of my brothers and sisters,
+the world over, to preserve theirs. I declare that I will let no
+superstition or prejudice set limits to my good will, my influence, or
+my ambition!"
+
+"You are standing on a precipice," he warned.
+
+"It's glorious!"
+
+"But it may be fatal."
+
+"But I have the head for it," she retorted. "I shall not fall!"
+
+"Others may who try to emulate you."
+
+"That's Fear--the most subtle of foes!"
+
+"Oh, come back," he pleaded seriously, "I can't bear to see you standing
+there!"
+
+"Very well," she said, giving him her hand with a gay gesture of
+capitulation. "But didn't you say that men liked to climb? Well,
+women do, too."
+
+They were conscious of being late for dinner and they turned their faces
+toward home.
+
+"How ridiculous," remarked Wander, "that we should think ourselves
+obliged to return for dinner!"
+
+"On the contrary," said Kate, "I think it bears witness to both our
+health and our sanity. I've got over being afraid that I shall be
+injured by the commonplace. When I open your door and smell the roast
+or the turnips or whatever food has been provided, I shall like it just
+as well as if it were flowers."
+
+Wander helped her down a jagged descent and laughed up in her face.
+
+"What a materialist!" he cried. "And I thought you were interested only
+in the ideal."
+
+"Things aren't ideal because they have been labeled so," declared Kate.
+"When people tell you they are clinging to old ideals, it's well to find
+out if they aren't napping in some musty old room beneath the cobwebs.
+I'm a materialist, very likely, but that's only incidental to my
+realism. I like to be allowed to realize the truth about things, and you
+know yourself that you men--who really are the sentimental sex--have
+tried as hard as you could not to let us."
+
+"You speak as if we had deliberately fooled you."
+
+"You haven't fooled us any more than we have fooled ourselves." They had
+reached the lower level now, and could walk side by side. "You've kept
+us supplemental, and we've thought we were noble when we played the
+supplemental part. But it doesn't look so to us any longer. We want to
+be ourselves and to justify ourselves. There's a good deal of complaint
+about women not having enough to do--about the factories and shops
+taking their work away from them and leaving them idle and inexpressive.
+Well, in a way, that's true, and I'm a strong advocate of new vocations,
+so that women can have their own purses and all that. But I know in my
+heart all this is incidental. What we really need is a definite set of
+principles; if we can acquire an inner stability, we shall do very well
+whether our hands are perpetually occupied or not. But just at present
+we poor women are sitting in the ruins of our collapsed faiths, and we
+haven't decided what sort of architecture to use in erecting the
+new one."
+
+"There doesn't seem to be much peace left in the world," mused Wander.
+"Do you women think you will have peace when you get this new faith?"
+
+"Oh, dear me," retorted Kate, "what would you have us do with peace? You
+can get that in any garlanded sepulcher. Peace is like perfection, it
+isn't desirable. We should perish of it. As long as there is life there
+is struggle and change. But when we have our inner faith, when we can
+see what the thing is for which we are to strive, then we shall cease to
+be so spasmodic in our efforts. We'll not be doing such grotesque
+things. We'll come into new dignity."
+
+"What you're trying to say," said Wander, "is that it is ourselves who
+are to be our best achievement. It's what we make of ourselves
+that matters."
+
+"Oh, that's it! That's it!" cried Kate, beating her gloved hands
+together like a child. "You're getting it! You're getting it! It's what
+we make of ourselves that matters, and we must all have the right to
+find ourselves--to keep exploring till we find our highest selves. There
+mustn't be such a waste of ability and power and hope as there has
+been. We must all have our share in the essentials--our own relation
+to reality."
+
+"I see," he said, pausing at the door, and looking into her face as if
+he would spell out her incommunicable self. "That's what you mean by
+universal liberty."
+
+"That's what I mean."
+
+"And the man you marry must let you pick your own way, make your own
+blunders, grow by your own experience."
+
+"Yes."
+
+Honora opened the door and looked at them. She was weak and she leaned
+against the casing for her support, but her face was tender and calm,
+and she was regnant over her own mind.
+
+"What is the matter with you two?" she asked. "Aren't you coming in to
+dinner? Haven't you any appetites?"
+
+Kate threw her arms about her.
+
+"Oh, Honora," she cried. "How lovely you look! Appetites? We're
+famished."
+
+
+
+XXX
+
+Another week went by, and though it went swiftly, still at the end of
+the time it seemed long, as very happy and significant times do. Honora
+was still weak, but as every comfort had been provided for her journey,
+it seemed more than probable that she would be benefited in the long run
+by the change, however exhausting it might be temporarily.
+
+"It's the morning of the last day," said Wander at breakfast. "Honora is
+to treat herself as if she were the finest and most highly decorated
+bohemian glass, and save herself up for her journey. All preparations, I
+am told, are completed. Very well, then. Do you and I ride to-day, Miss
+Barrington?"
+
+"'Here we ride,'" quoted Kate. Then she flushed, remembering the
+reference.
+
+Did Karl recognize it--or know it? She could not tell. He could, at
+will, show a superb inscrutability.
+
+Whether he knew Browning's poem or not, Kate found to her
+irritation that she did. Lines she thought she had forgotten,
+trooped--galloped--back into her brain. The thud of them fell like
+rhythmic hoofs upon the road.
+
+     "Then we began to ride. My soul
+     Smoothed itself out, a long-cramped scroll
+     Freshening and fluttering in the wind.
+     Past hopes already lay behind.
+     What need to strive with a life awry?
+     Had I said that, had I done this,
+     So might I gain, so might I miss."
+
+She wove her braids about her head to the measure; buckled her boots and
+buttoned her habit; and then, veiled and gauntleted she went down the
+stairs, still keeping time to the inaudible tune:--
+
+     "So might I gain, so might I miss."
+
+The mare Wander held for her was one which she had ridden several times
+before and with which she was already on terms of good feeling. That
+subtle, quick understanding which goes from horse to rider, when all is
+well in their relations, and when both are eager to face the wind,
+passed now from Lady Bel to Kate. She let the creature nose her for a
+moment, then accepted Wander's hand and mounted. The fine animal
+quivered delicately, shook herself, pawed the dust with a motion as
+graceful as any lady could have made, threw a pleasant, sociable look
+over her shoulder, and at Kate's vivacious lift of the rein was off.
+Wander was mounted magnificently on Nell, a mare of heavier build, a
+black animal, which made a good contrast to Lady Bel's shining
+roan coat.
+
+The animals were too fresh and impatient to permit much conversation
+between their riders. They were answering to the call of the road as
+much as were the humans who rode them. Kate tried to think of the
+scenes which were flashing by, or of the village,--Wander's "rowdy"
+village, teeming with its human stories; but, after all, it was
+Browning's lines which had their way with her. They trumpeted themselves
+in her ear, changing a word here and there, impishly, to suit her case.
+
+     "We rode; it seemed my spirit flew,
+     Saw other regions, cities new,
+     As the world rushed by on either side.
+     I thought, All labor, yet no less
+     Bear up beneath their unsuccess.
+     Look at the end of work, contrast
+     The petty Done, the Undone vast,
+     This present of theirs with the hopeful past!
+     I hoped he would love me. Here we ride."
+
+They were to the north of the village, heading for a canon. The road was
+good, the day not too warm, and the passionate mountain springtime was
+bursting into flower and leaf. Presently walls of rock began
+to rise about them. They were of innumerable, indefinable rock
+colors--grayish-yellows, dull olives, old rose, elusive purples, and
+browns as rich as prairie soil. Coiling like a cobra, the Little
+Williston raced singing through the midst of the chasm, sun-mottled and
+bright as the trout that hid in its cold shallows. Was all the world
+singing? Were the invisible stars of heaven rhyming with one another?
+Had a lost rhythm been recaptured, and did she hear the pulsations of a
+deep Earth-harmony--or was it, after all, only the insistent beat of the
+poet's line?
+
+     "What if we still ride on, we two,
+     With life forever old, yet new,
+     Changed not in kind but in degree,
+     The instant made eternity,--
+     And Heaven just prove that I and he
+     Ride, ride together, forever ride?"
+
+What Wander said, when he spoke, was, "Walk," and the remark was made to
+his horse. Lady Bel slackened, too. They were in the midst of great
+beauty--complex, almost chaotic, beauty, such as the Rocky Mountains
+often display.
+
+Wander drew his horse nearer to Kate's, and as a turning of the road
+shut them in a solitary paradise where alders and willows fringed the
+way with fresh-born green, he laid his hand on her saddle.
+
+"Kate," he said, "can you make up your mind to stay here with me?"
+
+Kate drew in her breath sharply. Then she laughed.
+
+"Am I to understand that you are introducing or continuing a topic?" she
+asked.
+
+He laughed, too. They were as willing to play with the subject as
+children are to play with flowers.
+
+"I am continuing it," he affirmed.
+
+"Really?"
+
+"And you know it."
+
+"Do I?"
+
+"From the first moment that I laid eyes on you, all the time that I was
+writing to Honora and really was trying to snare your interest, and
+after she came here,--even when I absurdly commanded you not to write
+to me,--and now, every moment since you set foot in my wild country,
+what have I done but say: 'Kate, will you stay with me?'"
+
+"And will I?" mused Kate. "What do you offer?"
+
+She once had asked the same question of McCrea.
+
+"A faulty man's unchanging love."
+
+"What makes you think it will not change--especially since you are a
+faulty man?"
+
+"I think it will not change because I am so faulty that I must have
+something perfect to which to cling."
+
+"Nonsense! A Clarinda dream! There's nothing perfect about me! The whole
+truth is that you don't know whether you'll change or not!"
+
+"Well, say that I change! Say that I pass from shimmering moonlight to
+common sunlight love! Say that we walk a heavy road and carry burdens
+and that our throats are so parched we forget to turn our eyes toward
+each other. Still we shall be side by side, and in the end the dust of
+us shall mingle in one earth. As for our spirits--if they have triumphed
+together, where is the logic in supposing that they will know
+separation?"
+
+"You will give me love," said Kate, "changing, faulty, human love! I ask
+no better--in the way of love. I can match you in faultiness and in
+changefulness and in hope. But now what else can you give me--what
+work--what chance to justify myself, what exercise for my powers? You
+have your work laid out for you. Where is mine?"
+
+Wander stared at her a moment with a bewildered expression. Then he
+leaped from his horse and caught Kate's bridle.
+
+"Where is your work, woman?" he thundered. "Are you teasing me still or
+are you in earnest? Your work is in your home! With all your wisdom,
+don't you know that yet? It is in your home, bearing and rearing your
+sons and your daughters, and adding to my sum of joy and your own. It is
+in learning secrets of happiness which only experience can teach. Listen
+to me: If my back ached and my face dripped sweat because I was toiling
+for you and your children, I would count it a privilege. It would be the
+crown of my life. Justify yourself? How can you justify yourself except
+by being of the Earth, learning of her; her obedient and happy child?
+Justify yourself? Kate Barrington, you'll have to justify yourself
+to me."
+
+"How dare you?" asked Kate under her breath. "Who has given you a right
+to take me to task?"
+
+"Our love," he said, and looked her unflinchingly in the eye. "My love
+for you and your love for me. I demand the truth of you,--the deepest
+truth of your deepest soul,--because we are mates and can never escape
+each other as long as we live, though half the earth divides us and all
+our years. Wherever we go, our thoughts will turn toward each other.
+When we meet, though we have striven to hate each other, yet our hands
+will long to clasp. We may be at war, but we will love it better than
+peace with others. I tell you, I march to the tune of your piping; you
+keep step to my drum-beats. What is the use of theorizing? I speak of
+a fact."
+
+"I am going to turn my horse," she said. "Will you please stand aside?"
+
+He dropped her bridle.
+
+"Is that all you have to say?"
+
+She looked at him haughtily for a moment and whirled her horse. Then she
+drew the mare up.
+
+"Karl!" she called.
+
+No answer.
+
+"I say--Karl!"
+
+He came to her.
+
+"I am not angry. I know quite well what you mean. You were speaking of
+the fundamentals."
+
+"I was."
+
+"But how about me? Am I to have no importance save in my relation to
+you?"
+
+"You cannot have your greatest importance save in your relation to me."
+
+She looked at him long. Her eyes underwent a dozen changes. They taunted
+him, tempted him, comforted him, bade him hope, bade him fear.
+
+"We must ride home," she said at length.
+
+"And my question? I asked you if you were willing to stay here with me?"
+
+"The question," she said with a dry little smile, "is laid very
+respectfully on the knees of the gods."
+
+He turned from her and swung into his saddle. They pounded home in
+silence. The lines of "The Last Ride" were besetting her still.
+
+     "Who knows what's fit for us? Had fate
+     Proposed bliss here should sublimate
+     My being; had I signed the bond--
+     Still one must lead some life beyond,--
+     Have a bliss to die with, dim-descried.
+     This foot once planted on the goal,
+     This glory-garland round my soul,
+     Could I descry such? Try and test?"
+
+She gave him no chance to help her dismount, but leaping to the ground,
+turned the good mare's head stableward, and ran to her room. He did not
+see her till dinner-time. Honora was at the table, and occupied their
+care and thought.
+
+Afterward there was the ten-mile ride to the station, but Kate sat
+beside Honora. There was a full moon--and the world ached for lovers.
+But if any touched lips, Karl Wander and Kate Barrington knew nothing of
+it. At the station they shook hands.
+
+"Are you coming back?" asked Wander. "Will you bring Honora back home?"
+
+In the moonlight Kate turned a sudden smile on him.
+
+"Of course I'm coming back," she said. "I always put a period to my
+sentences."
+
+"Good!" he said. "But that's a very different matter from writing a
+'Finis' to your book."
+
+"I shall conclude on an interrupted sentence," laughed Kate, "and I'll
+let some one else write 'Finis.'"
+
+The great train labored in, paused for no more than a moment, and was
+off again. It left Wander's world well denuded. The sense of aching
+loneliness was like an agony. She had evaded him. She belonged to him,
+and he had somehow let her go! What had he said, or failed to say? What
+had she desired that he had not given? He tried to assure himself that
+he had been guiltless, but as he passed his sleeping village and
+glimpsed the ever-increasing dumps before his mines, he knew in his
+heart that he had been asking her to play his game. Of course, on the
+other hand--
+
+But what was the use of running around in a squirrel cage! She was gone.
+He was alone.
+
+
+
+XXXI
+
+The Federation of Women's Clubs!
+
+Two thousand women gathered in the name of--what?
+
+Why, of culture, of literature, of sisterhood, of benevolence, of music,
+art, town beautification, the abolition of child-labor, the abolition of
+sweat-shops, the extension of peace and opportunity.
+
+And run how? By politics, sharp and keen, far-seeing and combative.
+
+The results? The cooeperation of forceful women, the encouragement of
+timid ones; the development of certain forms of talent, and the
+destruction of some old-time virtues.
+
+The balance? On the side of good, incontestably.
+
+"Yes, it's on the side of good," said Honora, who was, after all, like a
+nun (save that her laboratory had been her cell, and a man's fame her
+passion), and who therefore brought to this vast, highly energized,
+capable, various gathering a judgment unprejudiced, unworldly, and
+clear. As she saw these women of many types, from all of the States,
+united in great causes, united, too, in the cultivation of things not
+easy of definition, she felt that, in spite of drawbacks, it must be
+good. She listened to their papers, heard their earnest propaganda. A
+distinguished Jewess from New York told of the work among the
+immigrants and the methods by which they were created into intelligent
+citizens; a beautiful Kentuckian spoke of the work among the white
+mountaineers; a very venerable gentlewoman from Chicago, exquisitely
+frail, talked on behalf of the children in factories; a crisp, curt,
+efficient woman from Oregon advocated the dissemination of books among
+the "lumber-jacks." They were ingenious in their pursuit of
+benevolences, and their annual reports were the impersonal records of
+personal labors. They had started libraries, made little parks,
+inaugurated playgrounds, instituted exchanges for the sale of women's
+wares, secured women internes in hospitals, paid for truant officers,
+founded children's protective associations, installed branches of the
+Associated Charities, encouraged night schools, circulated art exhibits
+and traveling libraries; they had placed pictures in the public schools,
+founded kindergartens--the list seemed inexhaustible.
+
+"Oh, decidedly," Kate granted Honora, "the thing seems to be good."
+
+Moreover, there was good being done of a less assertive but equally
+commendable nature. The lines of section grew vague when the social
+Georgian sat side by side with the genial woman from Michigan. Mrs.
+Johnson of Minnesota and Mrs. Cabot of Massachusetts, Mrs. Hardin of
+Kentucky and Mrs. Garcia of California, found no essential differences
+in each other. Ladies, the world over, have a similarity of tastes. So,
+as they lunched, dined, and drove together they established
+relationships more intimate than their convention hall could have
+fostered. If they had dissensions, these were counterbalanced by the
+exchange of amenities. If their points of view diverged in lesser
+matters, they converged in great ones.
+
+And then the women of few opportunities--the farmers' wives representing
+their earnest clubs; the village women, wistful and rather shy; the
+emergent, onlooking company of few excursions, few indulgences--what of
+the Federation for them? At first, perhaps, they feared it; but
+cautiously, like unskilled swimmers, they took their experimental
+strokes. They found themselves secure; heard themselves applauded. They
+acquired boldness, and presently were exhilarated by the consciousness
+of their own power. If the great Federation could be cruel, it could be
+kind, too. One thing it had stood for from the first, and by that thing
+it still abided--the undeviating, disinterested determination
+to help women develop themselves. So the faltering voice was
+listened to, and the report of the eager, kind-eyed woman from the
+little-back-water-of-the-world was heard with interest. The Federation
+knew the value of this woman who said what she meant, and did what she
+promised. They sent her home to her town to be an inspiration. She was a
+little torch, carrying light.
+
+Day succeeded day. From early morning till late at night the great
+convention read its papers, ate its luncheons, held its committee
+meetings--talked, aspired, lobbied, schemed, prayed, sang, rejoiced!
+Culture was splendidly on its way--progress was the watchword! It was
+wonderful and amusing and superb.
+
+The Feminine mind, much in action, shooting back and forth like a
+shuttle, was weaving a curious and admirable fabric. There might be some
+trouble in discerning the design, but it was there, and if it was not
+arrestingly original, at least it was interesting. In places it was even
+beautiful. Now and then it gave suggestions of the grotesque. It was
+shot through with the silver of talent, the gold of genius. And with all
+of its defects it was splendid because the warp thereof was purpose and
+the woof enthusiasm.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Kate's day came. The great theater was packed--not a vacant seat
+remained. For it was mid-afternoon, the sun was shining, and the day was
+the last one of the convention.
+
+The president presided with easy authority. It became her--that seat.
+Her keen eyes expressed themselves as being satisfied; her handsome head
+was carried proudly. Her voice, of medium pitch, had an accent of
+gracious command. She presented to the eye a pleasing, nay, an artistic,
+picture, and the very gown she wore was a symbol of efficiency--sign to
+the initiate.
+
+Kate's heart was fluttering, her mouth dry. She greeted her chairwoman
+somewhat tremulously, and then faced her audience.
+
+For a moment she faltered. Then a face came before her--Karl's face.
+She did not so much wish to succeed for him as in despite of him. He had
+said she would reach her greatest importance through her relationship to
+him. At that moment she thrilled to the belief that, independently of
+him, she was still important.
+
+The great assemblage had ears for her. The idea of an extension of
+motherhood, an organized, scientific supervision of children, made an
+appeal such as nothing else could. For, after all, persistently--almost
+irritatingly, at times--this great federation, which was supposed to
+concern itself with many fine abstractions, swung back to that concrete
+and essentially womanly idea of the care of children. Women who had
+brought to it high messages of art and education had known what it was
+to be exasperated into speechlessness by what they were pleased to
+denominate the maternal obsession.
+
+Kate swung them back to it now, by means of impersonal rather than
+personal arguments. She did not idealize paternity. She was bitterly
+well aware by this time that parents were no better than other folk, and
+that only a small proportion of those to whom the blessing came were
+qualified or willing to bear its responsibilities. She touched on
+eugenics--its advantages and its limitations; she referred to the
+inadequacy of present laws and protective measures. Then she went on to
+describe what a Bureau of Children might be.
+
+"The business of this bureau," she said, "will be the removal of
+handicaps.
+
+"Is the child blind, deaf, lame, tubercular, or possessed of any sorry
+inheritance? The Bureau of Children will devise some method of easing
+its way; some plan to save it from further degeneration. Is the child
+talented, and in need of special training? Has it genius, and should it,
+for the glory of the commonwealth and the enrichment of life, be given
+the right of way? Then the Bureau of Children will see to it that such
+provision is made. It will not be the idea merely to aid the deficient
+and protect the vicious. Nor shall its highest aspiration be to serve
+the average child, born of average parents. It would delight to reward
+successful and devoted parents by giving especial opportunity to their
+carefully trained and highly developed children. As the Bureau of
+Agriculture labors to propagate the best species of trees, fruit, and
+flowers, so we would labor to propagate the best examples of
+humanity--the finest, most sturdily reared, best intelligenced boys
+and girls.
+
+"We would endeavor to prevent illness and loss of life among babies and
+children. Our circulars would be distributed in all languages among all
+of our citizens. We would employ specialists to direct the feeding,
+clothing, and general rearing of the children of all conditions. We
+would advocate the protection of children until they reached the age of
+sixteen; and would endeavor to assist in the supervision of these
+children until they were of legal age. My idea would be to have all
+young people under twenty-one remain in a sense the wards of schools. If
+they have had, at any early age, to leave school and take the burdens of
+bread-winning upon their young shoulders and their untried hearts, then
+I would advise an extension of school authority. The schools should be
+provided with assistant superintendents whose business it would be to
+help these young bread-winners find positions in keeping with their
+tastes and abilities, thus aiding them in the most practical and
+beneficent way, to hold their places in this struggling, modern world.
+
+"It is an economic measure of the loftiest type. It will provide against
+the waste of bodies and souls; it is a device for the conservation and
+the scientific development of human beings. It is part and parcel of the
+new, practical religion--a new prayer.
+
+"'Prayer,' says the old hymn, 'is the soul's sincere desire.'
+
+"Many of us have lost our belief in the old forms of prayer. We are
+beginning to realize that, to a great extent, the answer to prayer lies
+in our own hands. Our answers come when we use the powers that have been
+bestowed upon us. More and more each year, those who employ their
+intellects for constructive purposes are turning their energies toward
+the betterment of the world. They have a new conception of 'the world to
+come.' It means to them our good brown Mother Earth, warm and fecund and
+laden with fruits for the consumption of her children as it may be
+under happier conditions. They wish to increase the happiness of those
+children, to elevate them physically and mentally, and to give their
+spirits, too often imprisoned and degraded by hard circumstance, a
+chance to grow.
+
+"When you let the sunlight in to a stunted tree, with what exultant
+gratitude it lifts itself toward the sun! How its branches greet the
+wind and sing in them, how its little leaves come dancing out to make a
+shelter for man and the birds and the furred brothers of the forest! But
+this, wonderful and beautiful as it is, is but a small thing compared
+with the way in which the soul of a stunted child--stunted by evil or by
+sunless environment--leaps and grows and sings when the great spiritual
+elements of love and liberty are permitted to reach it.
+
+"You have talked of the conservation of forests; and you speak of a
+great need--an imperative cause. I talk of the conservation of
+children--which is a greater need and a holier right.
+
+"Mammalia are numerous in this world; real mothers are rare. Can we lift
+the mammalia up into the high estate of motherhood? I believe so. Can we
+grow superlative children, as we grow superlative fruits and animals?
+Oh, a thousand times, yes. I beg for your support of this new idea. Let
+the spirit of inspiration enter into your reflections concerning it. Let
+that concentration of purpose which you have learned in your clubs and
+federations be your aid here.
+
+"Most of you whom I see before me are no longer engaged actively in the
+tasks of motherhood. The children have gone out from your homes into
+homes of their own. You are left denuded and hungry for the old sweet
+vocation. Your hands are too idle; your abilities lie unutilized. But
+here is a task at hand. I do not say that you are to use this extension
+to your motherhood for children alone, or merely in connection with this
+proposed Bureau. I urge you, indeed, to employ it in all conceivable
+ways. Be the mothers of men and women as well as of little children--the
+mothers of communities--the mothers of the state. And as a focus to
+these energies and disinterested activities, let us pray Washington to
+give us the Bureau of Children."
+
+She turned from her responsive audience to the chairwoman, who handed
+her a yellow envelope.
+
+"A telegram, Miss Barrington. Should I have given it to you before? I
+disliked interrupting."
+
+Kate tore it open.
+
+It was from the President of the United States. It ran:--
+
+"I have the honor to inform you that the Bureau of Children will become
+a feature of our government within a year. It is the desire of those
+most interested, myself included, that you should accept the
+superintendence of it. I hope this will reach you on the day of your
+address before the Federation of Women's Clubs. Accept my
+congratulations."
+
+It was signed by the chief executive. Kate passed the message to the
+chairwoman.
+
+"May I read it?" the gratified president questioned. Kate nodded. The
+gavel fell, and the vibrant, tremulous voice of the president was heard
+reading the significant message. The women listened for a moment with
+something like incredulity--for they were more used to delays and
+frustrations than to cooeperation; then the house filled with the curious
+muffled sounds of gloved hands in applause. Presently a voice shrilled
+out in inarticulate acclaim. Kate could not catch its meaning, but two
+thousand women, robed like flowers, swayed to their feet. Their
+handkerchiefs fluttered. The lovely Californian blossoms were snatched
+from their belts and their bosoms and flung upon the platform with
+enthusiastic, uncertain aim.
+
+
+
+XXXII
+
+Afterward Kate took Honora down to the sea. They found a little house
+that fairly bathed its feet in the surf, and here they passed the days
+very quietly, at least to outward seeming. The Pacific thundered in upon
+them; they could hear the winds, calling and calling with an immemorial
+invitation; they knew of the little jewelled islands that lay out in the
+seas and of the lands of eld on the far, far shore; and they dreamed
+strange dreams.
+
+Sitting in the twilight, watching the light reluctantly leave the sea,
+they spoke of many things. They spoke most of all of women, and it
+sometimes seemed, as they sat there,--one at the doorway of the House of
+Life and one in a shaded inner chamber,--as if the rune of women came to
+them from their far sisters: from those in their harems, from others in
+the blare of commercial, Occidental life; from those in chambers of
+pain; from those freighted with the poignant burdens which women bear in
+their bodies and in their souls.
+
+As the darkness deepened, they grew unashamed and then reticences fell
+from them. The eternally flowing sea, the ever-recurrent night gave them
+courage, though they were women, to speak the truth.
+
+"When I found how deeply I loved David," said Honora, "and that I could
+serve him, too, by marrying him, I would no more have put the idea of
+marriage with him out of my mind than I would have cast away a hope of
+heaven if I had seen that shining before me. I would no more have turned
+from it than I would have turned from food, if I had been starving; or
+water after I had been thirsting in the desert. Why, Kate, to marry him
+was inevitable! The bird doesn't think when it sings or the bud when it
+flowers. It does what it was created to do. I married David the
+same way."
+
+"I understand," said Kate.
+
+They sat on their little low, sand-swept balcony, facing the sea. The
+rising tide filled the world with its soft and indescribable cadence.
+The stars came out into the sky according to their rank--the greatest
+first, and after them the less, and the less no more lacking in beauty
+than the great. All was as it should be--all was ordered--all was fit
+and wonderful.
+
+"So," went on Honora, after a silence which the sea filled in with its
+low harmonies, "if you loved Karl--"
+
+"Wait!" said Kate. So Honora waited. Another silence fell. Then Kate
+spoke brokenly.
+
+"If to feel when I am with him that I have reached my home; if to suffer
+a strangeness even with myself, and to feel less familiar with myself
+than with him, is to love, then I love him, Honora. If to want to work
+with him, and to feel there could be no exultation like overcoming
+difficulties with him, is love, then truly I love him. If just to see
+him, at a distance, enriches the world and makes the stream of time turn
+from lead to gold is anything in the nature of love, then I am his
+lover. If to long to house with him, to go by the same name that he
+does, to wear him, so to speak, carved on my brow, is to love, then
+I do."
+
+"Then I foresee that you will be one of the happiest women in the
+world."
+
+"No! No; you mustn't say that. Aren't there other things than love,
+Honora,--better things than selfish delight?"
+
+"My dear, you have no call to distress yourself about the occult
+meanings of that word 'selfish.' Unselfish people--or those who mean to
+be so--contrive, when they refuse to follow the instincts of their
+hearts, to cause more suffering even than the out-and-out selfish ones."
+
+"But I have an opportunity to serve thousands--maybe hundreds of
+thousands of human beings. I can set in motion a movement which may have
+a more lasting effect upon my country than any victory ever gained by it
+on a field of battle; and perhaps in time the example set by this land
+will be followed by others. Dare I face that mystic, inner ME and say:
+'I choose my man, I give him all my life, and I resign my birthright of
+labor. For this personal joy I refuse to be the Sister of the World; I
+let the dream perish; I hinder a great work'? Oh, Honora, I want him, I
+want him! But am I for that reason to be false to my destiny?"
+
+"You want celebrity!" said Honora with sudden bitterness. "You want to
+go to Washington, to have your name numbered among the leading ones of
+the nation; you are not willing to spend your days in the solitude of
+Williston Ranch as wife to its master."
+
+"I will not say that you are speaking falsely, but I think you know you
+are setting out only a little part of the truth. Admit it, Honora."
+
+Honora sighed heavily.
+
+"Oh, yes," she said at length, "I do admit it. You must forgive me,
+Kate. It seems so easy for you two to be happy that I can't help feeling
+it blasphemous for you to be anything else. If it were an ordinary
+marriage or an ordinary separation, I shouldn't feel so agonized over
+it. But you and Karl--such mates--the only free spirits I know! How you
+would love! It would be epic. And I should rejoice that you were living
+in that savage world instead of in a city. You two would need room--like
+great beautiful buildings. Who would wish to see you in the jumble of a
+city? With you to aid him, Karl may become a distinguished man. Your
+lives would go on together, widening, widening--"
+
+"Oh!" interrupted Kate with a sharp ejaculation; "we'll not talk of it
+any more, Honora. You must not think because I cannot marry him that he
+will always be unhappy. In time he will find another woman--"
+
+"Kate! Will you find another man?"
+
+"You know I shall not! After Wander? Any man would be an anticlimax to
+me after him."
+
+"Can you suspect him of a passion or a fealty less than your own? If you
+refuse to marry him, I believe you will frustrate a great purpose of
+Nature. Why, Kate, it will be a crime against Love. The thought as I
+feel it means more--oh, infinitely more--than I can make the words
+convey to you; but you must think them over, Kate,--I beg you to think
+them over!"
+
+In the darkness, Kate heard Honora stealing away to her room.
+
+So she was alone, and the hour had come for her decision.
+
+"'Bitter, alas,'" she quoted to the rising trouble of the sea, '"the
+sorrow of lonely women.'" The distillation of that strange duplex soul,
+Fiona Macleod, was as a drop of poisoned truth upon her parched tongue.
+
+     "We who love are those who suffer;
+     We who suffer most are those who most do love."
+
+She went down upon the sands. The tongues of the sea came up and lapped
+her feet. The winds of the sea enfolded her in an embrace. For the first
+time in her life, freely, without restraint, bravely, as sometime she
+might face God, she confronted the idea of Love. And a secret, wonderful
+knowledge came to her--the knowledge of lovely spiritual ecstasies, the
+realization of rich human delights. Sorrow and cruel loss might be on
+their way, but Joy was hers now. She feigned that Karl was waiting for
+her a little way on in the warm darkness--on, around that
+scimitar-shaped bend of the beach. She chose to believe that he was
+running to meet her, his eyes aflame, his great arms outstretched; she
+thrilled to the rain of his kisses; she thought those stars might hear
+the voice with which he shouted, "Kate!"
+
+Then, calmer, yet as if she had run a race, panting, palpitant, she
+seated herself on the sands. She let her imagination roam through the
+years. She saw the road of life they would take together; how they would
+stand on peaks of lofty desire, in sunlight; how, unfaltering, they
+would pace tenebrous valleys. Always they would be together. Their
+laughter would chime and their tears would fall in unison. Where one
+failed, the other would redeem; where one doubted, the other would hope.
+They would bear their children to be the vehicle of their ideals--these
+fresh new creatures, born of their love, would be trained to achieve
+what they, their parents, had somehow missed.
+
+Then her bolder thought died. She, who had forced herself so
+relentlessly to face the world as a woman faces it, with the knowledge
+and the courage of maturity, felt her wisdom slip from her. She was a
+girl, very lonely, facing a task too large for her, needing the comfort
+of her lover's word. She stretched herself upon the sand, face downward,
+weeping, because she was afraid of life--because she was wishful for
+the joy of woman and dared not take it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Have you decided?" asked Honora in the morning.
+
+"I think so," answered Kate.
+
+Honora scrutinized the face of her friend.
+
+"Accept," she said, "my profound commiseration." Her tone seemed to
+imply that she included contempt.
+
+After this, there was a change in Honora's attitude toward her. Kate
+felt herself more alone than she ever had been in her life. It was as if
+she had been cast out into a desert--a sandy plain smitten with the
+relentless Sun of Life, and in it was no house of refuge, no comfortable
+tree, no waters of healing. No, nor any other soul. Alone she walked
+there, and the only figures she saw were those of the mirage. It gave
+her a sort of relief to turn her face eastward and to feel that she must
+traverse the actual desert, and come at the end to literal combat.
+
+
+
+XXXIII
+
+Two dragons, shedding fire, had paused midway of the desert. One was the
+Overland Express racing from Los Angeles to Kansas City; its fellow was
+headed for the west. Both had halted for fuel and water and the
+refreshment of the passengers. The dusk was gathering over the
+illimitable sandy plain, and the sun, setting behind wind-blown buttes,
+wore a sinister glow. By its fantastic light the men and women from the
+trains paced back and forth on the wide platform, or visited the
+luxurious eating-house, where palms and dripping waters, roses and
+inviting food bade them forget that they were on the desert.
+
+Kate and Honora had dined and were walking back and forth in the deep
+amber light.
+
+"Such a world to live in," cried Kate admiringly, pressing Honora's arm
+to her side. "Do you know, of all the places that I might have imagined
+as desirable for residence, I believe I like our old earth the best!"
+
+She was in an inconsequential mood, and Honora indulged her with smiling
+silence.
+
+"I couldn't have thought of a finer desert than this if I had tried,"
+she went on gayly. "And this wicked saffron glow is precisely the color
+to throw on it. What a mistake it would have been if some supernal
+electrician had dropped a green or a blue spot-light on the scene! Now,
+just hear that fountain dripping and that ground-wind whispering! Who
+wouldn't live in the arid lands? It's all as it should be. So are you,
+too, aren't you, Honora? You've forgiven me, too, I know you have; and
+you're getting stronger every day, and making ready for happiness,
+aren't you?"
+
+She leaned forward to look in her companion's face.
+
+"Oh, yes, Kate," said Honora. "It really is as it should be with me. I'm
+looking forward, now, to what is to come. To begin with, there are the
+children shining like little stars at the end of my journey; and there's
+the necessity of working for them. I'm glad of that--I'm glad I have to
+work for them. Perhaps I shall be offered a place at the University of
+Wisconsin. I think I should be if I gave any indication that I had such
+a desire. The president and I are old friends. Oh, yes, indeed, I'm very
+thankful that I'm able to look forward again with something like
+expectancy--"
+
+The words died on her lips. She was arrested as if an angry god had
+halted her. Kate, startled, looked up. Before them, marble-faced and
+hideously abashed,--yet beautiful with an insistent beauty,--stood Mary
+Morrison, like Honora, static with pain.
+
+It seemed as if it must be a part of that fantastic, dream-like scene.
+So many visions were born of the desert that this, not unreasonably,
+might be one. But, no, these two women who had played their parts in an
+appalling drama, were moving, involuntarily, as it seemed, nearer to
+each other. For a second Kate thought of dragging Honora away, till it
+came to her by some swift message of the spirit that Honora did not wish
+to avoid this encounter. Perhaps it seemed to her like a
+fulfillment--the last strain of a wild and dissonant symphony. It was
+the part of greater kindness to drop her arm and stand apart.
+
+"Shall we speak, Mary," said Honora at length. "Or shall we pass on in
+silence?"
+
+"It isn't for me to say," wavered the other. "Any way, it's too late for
+words to matter."
+
+"Yes," agreed Honora. "Quite too late."
+
+They continued to stare at each other--so like, yet so unlike. It was
+Honora's face which was ravaged, though Mary had sinned the sin. True,
+pallor and pain were visible in Mary's face, even in the disguising
+light of that strange hour and place, but back of it Kate perceived her
+indestructible frivolity. She surmised how rapidly the scenes of Mary's
+drama would succeed each other; how remorse would yield to regret,
+regret to diminishing grief, grief to hope, hope to fresh adventures
+with life. Here in all verity was "the eternal feminine," fugitive,
+provocative, unspiritualized, and shrinking the one quality, fecundity,
+which could have justified it.
+
+But Honora was speaking, and her low tones, charged with a mortal grief,
+were audible above the tramping of many feet, the throbbing of the
+engines, and the talking and the laughter.
+
+"If you had stayed to die with him," she was saying, "I could have
+forgiven you everything, because I should have known then that you loved
+him as he hungered to be loved."
+
+"He wouldn't let me," Mary wailed. "Honestly, Honora--"
+
+"Wouldn't let you!" The scorn whipped Mary's face scarlet.
+
+"Nobody wants to die, Honora!" pleaded the other. "You wouldn't
+yourself, when it came to it."
+
+A child might have spoken so. The puerility of the words caused Honora
+to check her speech. She looked with a merciless scrutiny at that face
+in which the dimples would come and go even at such a moment as this.
+The long lashes curled on the cheeks with unconscious coquetry; the
+eyes, that had looked on horrors, held an intrinsic brilliance. The
+Earth itself, with its perpetual renewals, was not more essentially
+expectant than this woman.
+
+Honora's amazement at her cousin's hedonism gave way to contempt for it.
+
+"Oh," she groaned, "to have had the power to destroy a great man and to
+have no knowledge of what you've done! To have lived through all that
+you have, and to have got no soul, after all!"
+
+She had stepped back as if to measure the luscious opulence of Mary's
+form with an eye of passionate depreciation.
+
+"Stop her, Miss Barrington," cried Mary, seizing Kate's arm. "There's
+no use in all this, and people will overhear. Can't you take her away?"
+
+She might have gazed at the Medusa's head as she gazed at Honora's.
+
+"Come," said Kate to Honora. "As Miss Morrison says, there's no use in
+all this."
+
+"If David and I did wrong, it was quite as much Honora's fault as mine,
+really it was," urged "Blue-eyed Mary," her childish voice choking.
+
+Kate shook her hand off and looked at her from a height.
+
+"Don't dare to discuss that," she warned. "Don't dare!"
+
+She threw her arm around Honora.
+
+"Do come," she pleaded. "All this will make you worse again."
+
+"I don't wish you ill," continued Honora, seeming not to hear and still
+addressing herself to Mary. "I know you will live on in luxury somehow
+or other, and that good men will fetch and carry for you. You exude an
+essence which they can no more resist than a bee can honey. I don't
+blame you. That's what you were born for. But don't think that makes a
+woman of you. You never can be a woman! Women have souls; they suffer;
+they love and work and forget themselves; they know how to go down to
+the gates of death. You don't know how to do any of those things,
+now, do you?"
+
+She had grown terrible, and her questions had the effect of being
+spoken by some daemonic thing within her--something that made of her
+mouth a medium as the priestesses did of the mouths of the
+ancient oracles.
+
+"Miss Barrington," shuddered Mary, "I'm trying to hold on to myself, but
+I don't think I can do it much longer. Something is hammering at my
+throat. I feel as if I were being strangled--" she was choking in the
+grasp of hysteria.
+
+Kate drew Honora away with a determined violence.
+
+"She'll be screaming horribly in a minute," she said. "You don't want to
+hear that, do you?"
+
+Honora gave one last look at the miserable girl.
+
+"Of course, you know," she said, throwing into her words an intensity
+which burned like acid, "that he did not die for you, Mary. He died to
+save his soul alive. He died to find himself--and me. Just that much I
+have to have you know."
+
+At that Kate forced her to go into the Pullman, and seated her by the
+window where the rising wind, bringing its tale of eternal solitude,
+eternal barrenness, could fan her cheek. A gentleman who had been pacing
+the platform alone approached Mary and seemed to offer her assistance
+with anxious solicitude. She drooped upon his arm, and as she passed
+beneath the window the odor of her perfumes stole to Honora's nostrils.
+
+"How dare she walk beneath my window?" Honora demanded of Kate. "Isn't
+she afraid I may kill her?"
+
+"No, I don't think she is, Honora. Why should she suspect anything
+ignoble of you?"
+
+Silence fell. A dull golden star blossomed in the West.
+
+"All aboard! All aboard!" called the conductors. The people began
+straggling toward their trains, laughing their farewells.
+
+"Hope I'll meet you again sometime!"
+
+"East or West, home's the best."
+
+"You're sure you're not going on my train?"
+
+"Me for God's country! You'll find nothing but fleas and flubdub on the
+Coast."
+
+"You'll be back again next year, just the same. Everybody comes back."
+
+"All aboard! All aboard!"
+
+"God willing," said Honora, "I shall never see her again."
+
+Suddenly she ceased to be primitive and became a civilized woman with a
+trained conscience and artificial solicitude.
+
+"How do you suppose she's going to live, Kate? She had no money. Will
+David have made any arrangement for her? Oughtn't I to see to that?"
+
+"You are neither to kill nor pension her," said Kate angrily. "Keep
+still, Honora."
+
+The fiery worms became active, and threshed their way across the
+fast-chilling and silent plain. On the eastbound one two women sat in
+heavy reverie. On the westbound one a group of solicitous ladies and
+gentlemen gathered about a golden-haired daughter of California offering
+her sal volatile, claret, brandy-and-water. She chose the claret and
+sipped it tremblingly. Its deep hue answered the glow in the great ruby
+in her ring. By a chance her eye caught it and she turned the jewel
+toward her palm.
+
+"A superb stone," commented one of the kindly group. "You purchased it
+abroad?" The inquiry was meant to distract her thoughts. It did not
+quite succeed. She put the wine from her and covered her face with her
+hands, for suddenly she was assailed by a memory of the burning kisses
+with which that gem had been placed upon her finger by lips now many
+fathoms beneath the surface of the sun-warmed world.
+
+
+
+XXXIV
+
+Kate and Honora left the train at the station of Wander, and the man for
+whom it was named was there to meet them. If it was summer with the
+world, it was summer with him, too. Some new plenitude had come to him
+since Kate had seen him last. His full manhood seemed to be realized. A
+fine seriousness invested him--a seriousness which included, the
+observer felt sure, all imaginable fit forms of joy. Clothed in gray,
+save for the inevitable sombrero, clean-shaven, bright-eyed, capable,
+renewed with hope, he took both women with a protecting gesture into his
+embrace. The three rejoiced together in that honest demonstration which
+seems permissible in the West, where social forms and fears have not
+much foothold.
+
+They talked as happily of little things as if great ones were not
+occupying their minds. To listen, one would have thought that only
+"little joys" and small vexations had come their way. It would be by
+looking into their faces that one could see the marks of passion--the
+passion of sorrow, of love, of sacrifice.
+
+As they came out of the pinon grove, Honora discovered her babies. They
+were in white, fresh as lilies, or, perhaps, as little angels, well
+beloved of heavenly mothers; and they came running from the house,
+their golden hair shining like aureoles about their eager faces. Their
+sandaled feet hardly touched the ground, and, indeed, could they have
+been weighed at that moment, it surely had been found that they had
+become almost imponderable because of the ethereal lightness of their
+spirits. Their arms were outstretched; their eyes burning like the eyes
+of seraphs.
+
+"Stop!" cried Honora to Karl in a choking voice. He drew up his
+restless, home-bound horses, and she leaped to the ground. As she ran
+toward her little ones on swift feet, the two who watched her were
+convinced that she had regained her old-time vigor, and had acquired an
+eloquence of personality which never before had been hers. She gathered
+her treasures in her arms and walked with them to the house.
+
+Kate had not many minutes to wait in the living-room before Wander
+joined her. It was a long room, with triplicate, lofty windows facing
+the mountains which wheeled in majestic semicircle from north to west.
+At this hour the purple shadows were gathering on them, and great peace
+and beauty lay over the world.
+
+There was but one door to this room and Wander closed it.
+
+"I may as well know my fate now," he said. "I've waited for this from
+the moment I saw you last. Are you going to be my wife, Kate?"
+
+He stood facing her, breathing rather heavily, his face commanded to a
+tense repose.
+
+"My answer is 'no,'" cried Kate, holding out her hands to him. "I love
+you as my life, and my answer is 'no.'"
+
+He took the hands she had extended.
+
+"Kiss me!" He gathered her into his arms, and upon her welcoming lips he
+laid his own in such a kiss as a man places upon but one woman's lips.
+
+"Now, what is your answer?" he breathed after a time. "Tell me your
+answer now, you much-loved woman--tell it, beloved."
+
+She kissed his brow and his eyes; he felt her tears upon his cheeks.
+
+"You know all that I have thought and felt," she said; "you know--for I
+have written--what my life may be. Do you ask me to let it go and to
+live here in this solitude with you?"
+
+"Yes, by heaven," he said, his eyes blazing, "I ask it."
+
+Some influence had gone out from them which seemed to create a palpitant
+atmosphere of delight in which they stood. It was as if the spiritual
+essence of them, mingling, had formed the perfect fluid of the soul, in
+which it was a privilege to live and breathe and dream.
+
+"I am so blessed in you," whispered Karl, "so completed by you, that I
+cannot let you go, even though you go on to great usefulness and great
+goodness. I tell you, your place is here in my home. It is safe here. I
+have seen you standing on a precipice, Kate, up there in the mountain. I
+warned you of its danger; you told me of its glory. But I repeat my
+warning now, for I see you venturing on to that precipice of loneliness
+and fame on which none but sad and lonely women stand."
+
+"Oh, I know what you say is true, Karl. I mean to do my work with all
+the power there is in me, and I shall be rejoicing in that and in
+Life--it's in me to be glad merely that I'm living. But deep within my
+heart I shall, as you say, be both lonely and sad. If there's any
+comfort in that for you--"
+
+"No, there's no comfort at all for me in that, Kate. Stay with me, stay
+with me! Be my wife. Why, it's your destiny."
+
+Kate crossed the room as if she would move beyond that aura which
+vibrated about him and in which she could not stand without a too
+dangerous delight. She was very pale, but she carried her head high
+still--almost defiantly.
+
+"I mean to be the mother to many, many children, Karl," she said in a
+voice which thrilled with sorrow and pride and a strange joy. "To
+thousands and thousands of children. But for the Idea I represent and
+the work I mean to do they would be trampled in the dust of the world.
+Can't you see that I am called to this as men are called to honorable
+services for their country? This is a woman's form of patriotism. It's a
+higher one than the soldier's, I think. It's come my way to be the
+banner-carrier, and I'm glad of it. I take my chance and my honor just
+as you would take your chance and your honor. But I could resign the
+glory, Karl, for your love, and count it worth while."
+
+"Kate--"
+
+"But the thing to which I am faithful is my opportunity for great
+service. Come with me, Karl, my dear. Think how we could work together
+in Washington--think what such a brain and heart as yours would mean to
+a new cause. We'd lose ourselves--and find ourselves--laboring for one
+of the kindest, lovingest ideas the hard old world has yet devised. Will
+you come and help me, Karl, man?"
+
+He moved toward her, his hands outspread with a protesting gesture.
+
+"You know that all my work is here, Kate. This is my home, these mines
+are mine, the town is mine. It is not only my own money which is
+invested, but the money of other men--friends who have trusted me and
+whose prosperity depends upon me."
+
+"Oh, but, Karl, aren't there ways of arranging such things? You say I am
+dear to you--transfer your interests and come with me--Karl!" Her voice
+was a pleader's, yet it kept its pride.
+
+"Kate! How can I? Do you want me to be a supplement to you--a hanger-on?
+Don't you see that you would make me ridiculous?"
+
+"Would I?" said Kate. "Does it seem that way to you? Then you haven't
+learned to respect me, after all."
+
+"I worship you," he cried.
+
+Kate smiled sadly.
+
+"I know," she said, "but worship passes--"
+
+"No--" he flung out, starting toward her.
+
+But she held him back with a gesture.
+
+"You have stolen my word," she said with an accent of finality. "'No'"
+is the word you force me to speak. I am going on to Washington in the
+morning, Karl.
+
+They heard the children running down the hall and pounding on the door
+with their soft fists. When Kate opened to them, they clambered up her
+skirts. She lifted them in her arms, and Karl saw their sunny heads
+nestling against her dark one. As she left the room, moving unseeingly,
+she heard the hard-wrung groan that came from his lips.
+
+A moment later, as she mounted the stairs, she saw him striding up the
+trail which they, together, had ascended once when the sun of their hope
+was still high.
+
+She did not meet him again that day. She and Honora ate their meals in
+silence, Honora dark with disapproval, Kate clinging to her spar of
+spiritual integrity.
+
+If that "no" thundered in Karl's ears the night through while he kept
+the company of his ancient comforters the mountains, no less did it beat
+shatteringly in the ears of the woman who had spoken it.
+
+"No," to the deep and mystic human joys; "no" to the most holy privilege
+of women; "no" to light laughter and a dancing heart; "no" to the
+lowly, satisfying labor of a home. For her the steep path, alone; for
+her the precipice. From it she might behold the sunrise and all the
+glory of the world, but no exalted sense of duty or of victory could
+blind her to its solitude and to its danger.
+
+Yet now, if ever, women must be true to the cause of liberty. They had
+been, through all the ages, willing martyrs to the general good. Now it
+was laid upon them to assume the responsibilities of a new crusade, to
+undertake a fresh martyrdom, and this time it was for themselves.
+Leagued against them was half--quite half--of their sex. Vanity and
+prettiness, dalliance and dependence were their characteristics. With a
+shrug of half-bared shoulders they dismissed all those who, painfully,
+nobly, gravely, were fighting to restore woman's connection with
+reality--to put her back, somehow, into the procession; to make, by new
+methods, the "coming lady" as essential to the commonwealth as was the
+old-time chatelaine before commercialism filched her vocations and left
+her the most cultivated and useless of parasites.
+
+Oh, it was no little thing for which she was fighting! Kate tried to
+console herself with that. If she passionately desired to create an
+organization which should exercise parental powers over orphaned or
+poorly guarded children, still more did she wish to set an example of
+efficiency for women, illustrating to them with how firm a step woman
+might tread the higher altitudes of public life, making an achievement,
+not a compromise, of labor.
+
+Moreover, no other woman in the country had at present had an
+opportunity that equaled her own. Look at it how she would, throb as she
+might with a woman's immemorial nostalgia for a true man's love, she
+could not escape the relentless logic of the situation. It was not the
+hour for her to choose her own pleasure. She must march to battle
+leaving love behind, as the heroic had done since love and combat were
+known to the world.
+
+
+
+XXXV
+
+Morning came. She was called early that she might take the train for the
+East, and arising from her sleepless bed she summoned her courage
+imperatively. She determined that, however much she might suffer from
+the reproaches of her inner self,--that mystic and hidden self which so
+often refuses to abide by the decisions of the brain and the
+conscience,--she would not betray her falterings. So she was able to go
+down to the breakfast-room with an alert step and a sufficiently gallant
+carriage of the head.
+
+Honora was there, as pale as Kate herself, and she did not scruple to
+turn upon her departing guest a glance both regretful and forbidding.
+Kate looked across the breakfast-table at her gloomy aspect.
+
+"Honora," she said with some exasperation, "you've walked _your_ path,
+and it wasn't the usual one, now, was it? But I stood fast for your
+right to be unusual, didn't I? Then, when the whole scheme of things
+went to pieces and you were suffering, I didn't lay your misfortune to
+the singularity of your life. I knew that thousands and thousands of
+women, who had done the usual thing and chosen the beaten way, had
+suffered just as much as you. I tried to give you a hand
+up--blunderingly, I suppose, but I did the best I could. Of course, I'm
+a beast for reminding you of it. But what I want to know is, why you
+should be looking at me with the eyes of a stony-hearted critic because
+I'm taking the hardest road for myself. You don't suppose I'd do it
+without sufficient reason, do you? Standing at the parting of the ways
+is a serious matter, however interesting it may be at the moment."
+
+Honora's face flushed and her eyes filled.
+
+"Oh," she cried, "I can't bear to see you putting happiness behind you.
+What's the use? Don't you realize that men and women are little more
+than motes in the sunshine, here for an hour and to-morrow--nothing! I'm
+pretty well through with those theories that people call principles and
+convictions. Why not be obedient to Nature? She's the great teacher.
+Doesn't she tell you to take love and joy when they come your way?"
+
+"We've threshed all that out, haven't we?" asked Kate impatiently. "Why
+go over the ground again? But I must say, if a woman of your
+intelligence--and my friend at that--can't see why I'm taking an uphill
+road, alone, instead of walking in a pleasant valley with the best of
+companions, then I can hardly expect any one else to sympathize with me.
+However, what does it matter? I said I was going alone so why should I
+complain?"
+
+Her glance fell on the fireplace before which she and Karl had sat the
+night when he first welcomed her beneath his roof. She remembered the
+wild silence of the hour, the sense she had had of the invisible
+presence of the mountains, and how Karl's love had streamed about her
+like shafts of light.
+
+"I've seen nothing of Karl," said Honora abruptly. "He went up the trail
+yesterday morning, and hasn't been back to the house since."
+
+"He didn't come home last night? He didn't sleep in his bed?"
+
+"No, I tell you. He's had the Door of Life slammed in his face, and I
+suppose he's pretty badly humiliated. Karl isn't cut out to be a beggar
+hanging about the gates, is he? Pence and crumbs wouldn't interest him.
+I wonder if you have any idea how a man like that can suffer? Do you
+imagine he is another Ray McCrea?"
+
+"Pour my coffee, please, Honora," said Kate.
+
+Honora took the hint and said no more, while Kate hastily ate her
+breakfast. When she had finished she said as she left the table:--
+
+"I'd be glad if you'll tell the stable-man that I'll not take the
+morning train. I'm sorry to change my mind, but it's unavoidable."
+
+The smart traveling-suit she had purchased in Los Angeles was her
+equipment that morning. To this she added her hat and traveling-veil.
+
+"If you're going up the mountain," said the maladroit Honora, "better
+not wear those things. They'll be ruined."
+
+"Oh, things!" cried Kate angrily. She stopped at the doorway. "That
+wasn't decent of you, Honora. I _am_ going up the mountain--but what
+right had you to suppose it?"
+
+The whole household knew it a moment later--the maids, the men at the
+stables and the corral. They knew it, but they thought more of her. She
+went so proudly, so openly. The judgment they might have passed upon
+lesser folk, they set aside where Wander and his resistant sweetheart
+were concerned. They did not know the theater, these Western men and
+women, but they recognized drama when they saw it. Their deep love of
+romance was satisfied by these lovers, so strong, so compelling, who
+moved like demigods in their unconcern for the opinions of others.
+
+Kate climbed the trail which she and Wander had taken together on the
+day when she had mockingly proclaimed her declaration of independence.
+She smiled bitterly now to think of the futility of it. Independence?
+For whom did such a thing exist? Karl Wander was drawing her to him as
+that mountain of lode in the Yellowstone drew the lightnings of heaven.
+
+In time she came to the bench beside the torrent where she and Wander
+had rested that other, unforgettable day. She paused there now for a
+long time, for the path was steep and the altitude great. The day had
+turned gray and a cold wind was arising--crying wind, that wailed among
+the tumbled boulders and drove before it clouds of somber hue.
+
+After a time she went on, and as she mounted, encountering ever a
+steeper and more difficult way, she tore the leather of her shoes, rent
+the skirt of her traveling-frock, and ruined her gloves with soil
+and rock.
+
+"If I have to go back as I came, alone," she reflected, "all in tatters
+like this, to find that he is at the mines or the village, attending to
+his work, I shall cut a fine figure, shan't I? The very gods will
+laugh at me."
+
+She flamed scarlet at the thought, but she did not turn back.
+
+Presently she came to a place where the path forked. A very narrow,
+appallingly deep gorge split the mountain at this point, each path
+skirting a side of this crevasse.
+
+"I choose the right path," said Kate aloud.
+
+Her heart and lungs were again rebelling at the altitude and the
+exertion, and she was forced to lie flat for a long time. She lay with
+her face to the sky watching the roll of the murky clouds. Above her
+towered the crest of the mountain, below her stretched the abyss. It was
+a place where one might draw apart from all the world and contemplate
+the little thing that men call Life. Neither ecstasy nor despair came to
+her, though some such excesses might have been expected of one whose
+troubled mind contemplated such magnificence, such terrific beauty.
+Instead, she seemed to face the great soul of Truth--to arrive at a
+conclusion of perfect sanity, of fine reasonableness.
+
+Conventions, pettiness, foolish pride, waywardness, secret egotism,
+fell away from her. The customs of society, with what was valuable in
+them and what was inadequate, assumed their true proportions. It was as
+if her House of Life had been swept of fallacy by the besom of the
+mountain wind. A feeling of strength, courage, and clarity took
+possession of her. There was an expectation, too,--nay, the
+conviction,--that an event was at hand fraught for her with vast
+significance.
+
+The trail, almost perpendicular now, led up a mighty rock. She pulled
+herself up, and emerging upon the crown of the mountain, beheld the
+proud peaks of the Rockies, bare or snow-capped, dripping with purple
+and gray mists, sweeping majestically into the distance. Such solemnity,
+such dark and passionate beauty, she never yet had seen, though she was
+by this time no stranger to the Rockies, and she had looked upon the
+wonders of the Sierras. She envisaged as much of this sublimity as eye
+and brain might hold; then, at a noise, glanced at that tortuous
+trail--yet more difficult than the one she had taken--which skirted the
+other side of the continuing crevasse.
+
+On it stood Karl Wander, not as she had seen him last, impatient, racked
+with mental pain, and torn with pride and eager love. He was haggard,
+but he had arrived at peace. He was master over himself and no longer
+the creature of futile torments. To such a man a woman might well
+capitulate if capitulation was her intent. With such a chieftain might
+one well treat if one had a mind to maintain the suzerainty of
+one's soul.
+
+The wind assailed Kate violently, and she caught at a spur of rock and
+clung, while her traveling-veil, escaped from bounds, flung out like a
+"home-going" pennant of a ship.
+
+"A flag of truce, Kate?" thundered Wander's voice.
+
+"Will you receive it?" cried Kate.
+
+Now that she had sought and found him, she would not surrender without
+one glad glory of the hour.
+
+"Name your conditions, beloved enemy."
+
+"How can we talk like this?"
+
+"We're not talking. We're shouting."
+
+"Is there no way across?"
+
+"Only for eagles."
+
+"What did you mean by staying up here? I was terrified. What if you had
+been dying alone--"
+
+"I came up to think things out."
+
+"Have you?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Kate, we must be married."
+
+"Yes," laughed Kate. "I know it."
+
+"But--"
+
+"Yes," called Kate, "that's it. But--"
+
+"But you shall do your work: I shall do mine."
+
+"I know," said Kate. "That's what I meant to¸ say to you. There's more
+than one way of being happy and good."
+
+"Go your way, Kate. Go to your great undertaking. Go as my wife. I stay
+with my task. It may carry me farther and bring me more honor than we
+yet know. I shall go to you when I can: you must come to me--when you
+will. What more exhilarating? A few years will bring changes. I hear
+they may send me to Washington, after all. But they'll not need to send
+me. Lead where you will, I will follow--on condition!"
+
+"The condition?"
+
+She stood laughing at him, shining at him, free and proud as the
+"victory" of a sculptor's dream.
+
+"That you follow my leadership in turn. We'll have a Republic of Souls,
+Kate, with equal opportunity--none less, none greater--with high
+expediency for the watchword."
+
+"Yes. Oh, Karl, I came to say all this!"
+
+"Then some day we'll settle down beneath one roof--we'll have a
+hearthstone."
+
+"Yes," cried Kate again, this time with an accent that drowned forever
+the memory of her "no."
+
+"Turn about, Kate; turn about and go down the trail. You'll have to do
+it alone, I'm afraid. I can't get over there to help."
+
+"I don't need help," retorted Kate. "It's fine doing it alone."
+
+"Follow your path, and I will follow mine. We can keep in sight almost
+all the way, I think, and,¸ as you know, a little below this height, the
+paths converge."
+
+Kate stood a moment longer, looking at him, measuring him.
+
+"How splendid to be a man," she called. "But I'm glad I'm a woman," she
+supplemented hastily.
+
+"Not half so glad as I, Kate, my mate,--not a thousandth part so glad as
+I."
+
+She held out her arms to him. He gave a great laugh and plunged down the
+path. Kate swept her glance once more over the dark beauty of the
+mountain-tops--her splendid world, wrought with illimitable joy in
+achievement by the Maker of Worlds,--and turning, ran down the great
+rock that led to the trail.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Precipice, by Elia Wilkinson Peattie
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