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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13146 ***
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration: “I Beg Your Pardon. Is This a Private Raft?”]
+
+
+
+
+The Beauty and the Bolshevist
+
+By ALICE DUER MILLER
+
+
+_Author of_ “_The Charm School_” “_Ladies must Live_” “_Come out of the
+Kitchen_” _etc_.
+
+
+
+
+Illustrated
+
+
+Harper & Brothers Publishers
+New York and London
+
+
+Printed in the United States of America
+Published October, 1920
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+“I beg your pardon. Is this a private raft?”
+“Mr. Moreton, the Newport boat leaves at five-thirty”
+“I’ll be there in five minutes, in a little blue car”
+“Suppose you find you do hate being poor?”
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+ Chapter I
+ Chapter II
+ Chapter III
+
+
+
+
+Chapter I
+
+
+The editor of that much-abused New York daily, _Liberty_, pushed back
+his editorial typewriter and opened one letter in the pile which the
+office-boy—no respecter of persons—had just laid upon the desk while
+whistling a piercing tune between his teeth.
+
+The letter said:
+
+
+DEAR BEN,—I hate to think what your feelings will be on learning that I
+am engaged to be married to a daughter of the capitalistic class. Try
+to overcome your prejudices, however, and judge Eugenia as an
+individual and not as a member of a class. She has very liberal ideas,
+reads your paper, and is content to go with me to Monroe College and
+lead the life of an instructor’s wife. You will be glad to know that
+Mr. Cord disapproves as much as you do, and will not give his daughter
+a cent, so that our life will be as hard on the physical side as you in
+your most affectionate moments could desire. Mr. Cord is under the
+impression that lack of an income will cool my ardor. You see he could
+not think worse of me if he were my own brother.
+
+Yours,
+
+DAVID.
+
+
+The fine face of the editor darkened. It was the face of an
+idealist—the deep-set, slowly changing eyes, the high cheek bones, but
+the mouth closed firmly, almost obstinately, and contradicted the rest
+of the face with a touch of aggressiveness, just as in Lincoln’s face
+the dreamer was contradicted by the shrewd, practical mouth. He crossed
+his arms above the elbow so that one long hand dangled on one side of
+his knees and one on the other—a favorite pose of his—and sat thinking.
+
+The editor was often called a Bolshevist—as who is not in these days?
+For language is given us not only to conceal thought, but often to
+prevent it, and every now and then when the problems of the world
+become too complex and too vital, some one stops all thought on a
+subject by inventing a tag, like “witch” in the seventeenth century, or
+“Bolshevist” in the twentieth.
+
+Ben Moreton was not a Bolshevist; indeed, he had written several
+editorials to show that, in his opinion, their doctrines were not
+sound, but of course the people who denounced him never thought of
+reading his paper. He was a socialist, a believer in government
+ownership, and, however equably he attempted to examine any dispute
+between capital and labor, he always found for labor. He was much
+denounced by ultraconservatives, and perhaps their instinct was sound,
+for he was educated, determined, and possessed of a personality that
+attached people warmly, so that he was more dangerous than those whose
+doctrines were more militant. He was not wholly trusted by the extreme
+radicals. His views were not consistently agreeable to either group.
+For instance, he believed that the conscientious objectors were really
+conscientious, a creed for which many people thought he ought to be
+deported. On the other hand, he doubted that Wall Street had started
+the war for its own purposes, a skepticism which made some of his
+friends think him just fit for a bomb.
+
+The great problem of his life was how to hold together a body of
+liberals so that they could be effective. This problem was going to be
+immensely complicated by the marriage of his brother with the daughter
+of a conspicuous capitalist like William Cord.
+
+He pushed the buzzer on his desk and wrote out the following telegram:
+
+
+David Moreton, Care William Cord, Newport, R.I.
+
+Am taking boat Newport to-night. Meet me.
+
+Ben.
+
+
+No one answered his buzzer, but presently a boy came in collecting
+copy, and Moreton said to him:
+
+“Here, get this sent, and ask Klein to come here. He’s in the composing
+room.”
+
+And presently Mr. Klein entered, in the characteristic dress of the
+newspaper man—namely, shirt sleeves and a green shade over his eyes.
+
+“Look here, Ben!” he exclaimed in some excitement. “Here’s a
+thousand-dollar check just come in for the strike fund. How’s that for
+the second day?”
+
+“Good enough,” said Ben, who would ordinarily have put in a good hour
+rejoicing over such unexpected good fortune, but whose mind was now on
+other things. “I have to go out of town to-night. You’ll be here, won’t
+you, to lock the presses? And, see here, Leo, what is the matter with
+our book page?”
+
+“Pretty rotten page,” replied Klein.
+
+“I should say it was—all about taxes and strikes and economic crises. I
+told Green never to touch those things in the book reviews. Our readers
+get all they want of that from us in the news and the
+editorials—hotter, better stuff, too. I’ve told him not to touch ’em in
+the book page, and he runs nothing else. He ought to be beautiful—ought
+to talk about fairies, and poetry, and twelfth-century art. What’s the
+matter with him?”
+
+“He doesn’t know anything,” said Klein. “That’s his trouble. He’s
+clever, but he doesn’t know much. I guess he only began to read books a
+couple years ago. They excite him too much. He wouldn’t read a fairy
+story. He’d think he was wasting time.”
+
+“Get some one to help him out.”
+
+“Who’d I get?”
+
+“Look about. I’ve got to go home and pack a bag. Ask Miss Cox what time
+that Newport boat leaves.”
+
+“Newport! Great heavens, Ben! What is this? A little week-end?”
+
+“A little weak brother, Leo.”
+
+“David in trouble again?”
+
+Moreton nodded. “He thinks he’s going to marry William Cord’s
+daughter.”
+
+Klein, who was Ben’s friend as well as his assistant, blanched at the
+name.
+
+“Cord’s daughter!” he exclaimed, and if he had said Jack-the-ripper’s,
+he could not have expressed more horror. “Now isn’t it queer,” he went
+on, musingly, “that David, brought up as he has been, can see anything
+to attract him in a girl like that?”
+
+Ben was tidying his desk preparatory to departure—that is to say, he
+was pushing all the papers far enough back to enable him to close the
+roller top, and he answered, absently:
+
+“Oh, I suppose they’re all pretty much the same—girls.”
+
+“Why, what do you mean?” said Leo, reproachfully. “How can a girl who’s
+been brought up to be a parasite—to display the wealth of her father
+and husband, and has never done a useful thing since she was born—Why,
+a woman was telling me the other day—I got caught in a block in the
+subway and she was next me—awfully interesting, she was. She sewed in
+one of these fashionable dressmaking establishments—and the things she
+told me about what those women spend on their clothes—underclothes and
+furs and everything. Now there must be something wrong with a woman who
+can spend money on those things when she knows the agony of poverty
+right around her. You can’t compare that sort of woman with a
+self-respecting, self-supporting girl—”
+
+At this moment the door opened and Miss Cox entered. She wore a
+short-sleeved, low-neck, pink-satin blouse, a white-satin skirt,
+open-work stockings, and slippers so high in the heels that her ankles
+turned inward. Her hair was treated with henna and piled untidily on
+the top of her head. She was exactly what Klein had described—a
+self-respecting, self-supporting girl, but, on a superficial
+acquaintance, men of Cord’s group would have thought quite as badly of
+her as Klein did of fashionable women. They would have been mistaken.
+Miss Cox supported her mother, and, though only seventeen, denied
+herself all forms of enjoyment except dress and an occasional movie.
+She was conscientious, hard-working, accurate, and virtuous. She loved
+Ben, whom she regarded as wise, beautiful, and generous, but she would
+have died rather than have him or anyone know it.
+
+She undulated into the room, dropped one hip lower than the other,
+placed her hand upon it and said, with a good deal of enunciation:
+
+“Oh, Mr. Moreton, the Newport boat leaves at five-thirty.”
+
+“Thank you very much, Miss Cox,” said Ben, gravely, and she went out
+again.
+
+“It would be a terrible thing for Dave to make a marriage like that,”
+Klein went on as soon as she had gone, “getting mixed up with those
+fellows. And it would be bad for you, Ben—”
+
+“I don’t mean to get mixed up with them,” said Ben.
+
+“No, I mean having Dave do it. It would kill the paper; it would
+endanger your whole position; and as for leadership, you could never
+hope—”
+
+
+[Illustration: “Mr. Moreton, the Newport Boat Leaves at Five-thirty”]
+
+
+“Now, look here, Leo. You don’t think I can stop my brother’s marrying
+because it might be a poor connection for me? The point is that it
+wouldn’t be good for Dave—to be a poorly tolerated hanger-on. That’s
+why I’m going hot-foot to Newport. And while I’m away do try to do
+something about the book page. Get me a culture-hound—get one of these
+Pater specialists from Harvard. Or,” he added, with sudden inspiration
+when his hand was already on the door, “get a woman—she’d have a sense
+of beauty and would know how to jolly Green into agreeing with her.”
+And with this the editor was gone.
+
+It was the end of one of those burning weeks in August that New York
+often knows. The sun went down as red as blood every evening behind the
+Palisades, and before the streets and roofs had ceased to radiate heat
+the sun was up again above Long Island Sound, as hot and red as ever.
+As Ben went uptown in the Sixth Avenue Elevated he could see pale
+children hanging over the railings of fire escapes, and behind them
+catch glimpses of dark, crowded rooms which had all the disadvantages
+of caves without the coolness. But to-day he was too concentrated on
+his own problem to notice.
+
+Since Ben’s sixteenth year his brother David had been dependent on him.
+Their father had been professor of economics in a college in that part
+of the United States which Easterners describe as the “Middle West.” In
+the gay days when muck-raking was at its height Professor Moreton had
+lost his chair because he had denounced in his lecture room financial
+operations which to-day would be against the law. At that time they
+were well thought of, and even practiced by the eminent philanthropist
+who had endowed the very chair which Moreton occupied. The trustees
+felt that it was unkind and unnecessary to complicate their already
+difficult duties by such tactlessness, and their hearts began to turn
+against Moreton, as most of our hearts turn against those who make life
+too hard for us. Before long they asked him to resign on account of his
+age—he was just sixty and extremely vigorous; but immediately
+afterward, having been deeply surprised and hurt, he did what Goldsmith
+recommends to lovely woman under not dissimilar circumstances—he died.
+He left his two young sons—he had married late in life—absolutely
+unprovided for. Ben, the elder of the two, was sixteen, and just ready
+for college; but he could not give four precious years to an academic
+degree. He went to work. With the background of an educated environment
+and a very sound knowledge of economic questions, breathed in from his
+earliest days, he found a place at once on a new paper—or, rather, on
+an old paper just being converted into a new organ of
+liberalism—_Liberty_. It was independent in politics, and was supposed
+to be independent in economic questions, but by the time Ben worked up
+to the editorship it was well recognized to be an anticapitalist sheet.
+The salary of its editor, though not large, was sufficient to enable
+him to send his younger brother through college, with the result that
+David, a little weak, a little self-indulgent, a little—partly through
+physical causes—disinclined to effort, was now a poet, a classicist and
+an instructor in a fresh-water college. Ben made him an allowance to
+enable him to live—the college not thinking this necessary for its
+instructors. But during the war Ben had not been able to manage the
+allowance, because, to the surprise of many of his friends, Ben had
+volunteered early.
+
+Although the reasons for doing this seemed absurdly simple to him, the
+decision had been a difficult one. He was a pacifist—saw no virtue in
+war whatsoever. He wished to convert others to his opinion—unlike many
+reformers who prefer to discuss questions only with those who already
+agree with them. He argued that the speeches of a man who had been
+through war, or, better still, the posthumous writings of one who has
+been killed in war, would have more weight with the public than the
+best logic of one who had held aloof. But his radical friends felt that
+he was using this argument merely as an excuse for choosing the easy
+path of conformity, while the few ultraconservatives who mentioned the
+matter at all assumed that he had been drafted against his will.
+Afterward, when the war was over and his terrible book, _War_,
+appeared, no one was pleased, for the excellent reason that it was
+published at a moment when the whole world wanted to forget war
+entirely. The pay of a private, however, had not allowed him to
+continue David’s allowance, and so David, displaying unusual energy,
+had found a job for himself as tutor for the summer to William Cord’s
+son. Ben had not quite approved of a life that seemed to him slightly
+parasitical, but it was healthy and quiet and, above everything, David
+had found it for himself, and initiative was so rare in the younger man
+that Ben could not bear to crush it with disapproval.
+
+Increasingly, during the two years he was in France, Ben was displeased
+by David’s letters. The Cords were described as kindly, well-educated
+people, fond one of another, considerate of the tutor, with
+old-fashioned traditions of American liberties. Ben asked himself if he
+would have been better pleased if David’s employers had been cruel,
+vulgar, and blatant, and found the answer was in the affirmative. It
+would, he thought, have been a good deal safer for David’s integrity if
+he had not been so comfortable.
+
+For two summers Ben had made no protest, but the third summer, when the
+war was over and the allowance again possible, he urged David not to go
+back to Newport. David flatly refused to yield. He said he saw no
+reason why he should go on taking Ben’s money when this simple way of
+earning a full living was open to him. Wasn’t Ben’s whole theory that
+everyone should be self-supporting? Why not be consistent?
+
+Ignorant people might imagine that two affectionate brothers could not
+quarrel over an issue purely affectionate. But the Moretons did
+quarrel—more bitterly than ever before, and that is saying a great
+deal. With the extraordinary tenacity of memory that develops under
+strong emotion, they each contrived to recall and to mention everything
+which the other had done that was wrong, ridiculous, or humiliating
+since their earliest days. They parted with the impression on David’s
+part that Ben thought him a self-indulgent grafter, and on Ben’s side
+that David thought him a bully solely interested in imposing his will
+on those unfortunate enough to be dependent on him.
+
+It was after half past four when, having walked up five flights of
+stairs, he let himself into his modest flat on the top floor of an
+old-fashioned brownstone house. As he opened the door, he called,
+
+“Nora!”
+
+No beautiful partner of a free-love affair appeared, but an elderly
+woman in spectacles who had once been Professor Moreton’s cook, and
+now, doing all the housework for Ben, contrived to make him so
+comfortable that the editor of a more radical paper than his own had
+described the flat as “a bourgeois interior.”
+
+“Nora,” said Ben, “put something in my bag for the night—I’m going to
+Newport in a few minutes.”
+
+He had expected a flood of questions, for Nora was no looker-on at
+life, and he was surprised by her merely observing that she was glad he
+was getting away from the heat. The truth was that she knew far more
+about David than he did. She had consistently coddled David since his
+infancy, and he told her a great deal. Besides, she took care of his
+things when he was at Ben’s. She had known of sachets, photographs, and
+an engraved locket that he wore on his watch-chain. She was no radical.
+She had seen disaster come upon the old professor and attributed it,
+not to the narrowness of the trustees, but to the folly of the
+professor. She disapproved of most of Ben’s friends, and would have
+despised his paper if she ever read it. The only good thing about it in
+her estimation was, he seemed to be able “to knock a living out of
+it”—a process which Nora regarded with a sort of gay casualness. She
+did not blame him for making so little money and thus keeping her
+housekeeping cramped, but she never in her own mind doubted that it
+would be far better if he had more. The idea that David was about to
+marry money seemed to her simply the reward of virtue—her own virtue in
+bringing David up so well. She knew that Mr. Cord opposed the marriage,
+but she supposed that Ben would arrange all that. She had great
+confidence in Ben. Still he was very young, very young, so she gave him
+a word of advice as she put his bag into his hand.
+
+“Don’t take any nonsense. Remember you’re every bit as good as they.
+Only don’t, for goodness’ sake, Mr. Ben, talk any of your ideas to
+them. A rich man like Mr. Cord wouldn’t like that.”
+
+Ben laughed. “How would you like me to bring you home a lovely heiress
+of my own?” he said.
+
+She took a thread off his coat. “Only don’t let her come interfering in
+my kitchen,” she said, and hurried him away. He had a good deal of
+courage, but he had not enough to tell Nora he was going to Newport to
+stop her darling’s marriage.
+
+The Newport boat gets to Newport about two o’clock in the morning, and
+experienced travelers, if any such choose this method of approach, go
+on to Fall River and take a train back to Newport, arriving in time for
+a comfortable nine-o’clock breakfast. But Ben was not experienced, and
+he supposed that when you took a boat for Newport and reached Newport
+the thing to do was to get off the boat.
+
+It had been a wonderful night on the Sound, and Ben had not been to
+bed, partly because, applying late on a Friday evening, he had not been
+able to get a room, but partly because the moon and the southerly
+breeze and the silver shores of Long Island and the red and white
+lighthouses had been too beautiful to leave. Besides, he had wanted to
+think out carefully what he was going to say to his brother.
+
+To separate a man from the woman he loves, however unwisely, has some
+of the same disadvantages as offering a bribe—one respects the other
+person less in proportion as one succeeds. What, Ben said to himself,
+could he urge against a girl he did not know? Yet, on the other hand,
+if he had known her, his objections would have seemed regrettably
+personal. Either way, it was difficult to know what to say. He wondered
+what Cord had said, and smiled to think that here was one object for
+which he and Cord were co-operating—only Cord would never believe it.
+That was one trouble with capitalists—they always thought themselves so
+damned desirable. And Ben did not stop to inquire how it was that
+capitalists had gained this impression.
+
+On the pier he looked about for David, but there was no David. Of
+course the boy had overslept, or hadn’t received his telegram—Ben said
+this to himself, but somehow the vision of David comfortably asleep in
+a luxurious bed in the Cords’s house irritated him.
+
+His meditations were broken in upon by a negro boy with an open hack,
+who volunteered to “take him up for fifty cents.” It sounded
+reasonable. Ben got in and they moved slowly down the narrow pier, the
+horses’ hoofs clumping lazily on the wooden pavement. Turning past the
+alley of Thames Street, still alight at three o’clock in the morning,
+Ben stopped at the suggestion of his driver and left his bag at a
+hotel, and then they went on up the hill, past the tower of the
+Skeleton in Armor, past old houses with tall, pillared porticoes,
+reminiscent of the days when the South patronized Newport, and turned
+into Bellevue Avenue—past shops with names familiar to Fifth Avenue,
+past a villa with bright-eyed owls on the gateposts, past many large,
+silent houses and walled gardens.
+
+The air was very cool, and now and then the scent of some flowering
+bush trailed like a visible cloud across their path. Then suddenly the
+whole avenue was full of little red lights, like the garden in “Faust”
+when Mephistopheles performs his magic on it. Here and there the huge
+headlights of a car shone on the roadway, magnifying every rut in the
+asphalt, and bringing out strange, vivid shades in the grass and the
+hydrangea bushes. They were passing a frowning palace set on a piece of
+velvet turf as small as a pocket handkerchief—so small that the lighted
+windows were plainly visible from the road.
+
+“Stop,” said Ben to his driver. He had suddenly realized how long it
+must be before he could rouse the Cord household.
+
+He paid his driver, got out, and made his way up the driveway toward
+the house. Groups of chauffeurs were standing about their
+cars—vigorous, smartly dressed men, young for the most part. Ben
+wondered if it were possible that they were content with the present
+arrangement, and whether their wives and children were not stifling in
+the city at that very moment. He caught a sentence here and there as he
+passed. “And, believe me,” one was saying, “as soon as he got into the
+box he did not do a thing to that fellar from Tiverton—” Ben’s
+footsteps lagged a little. He was a baseball fan. He almost forgave the
+chauffeurs for being content. They seemed to him human beings, after
+all.
+
+He approached the house, and, walking past a narrow, unroofed piazza,
+he found himself opposite a long window. He looked straight into the
+ballroom. The ball was a fancy ball—the best of the season. It was
+called a Balkan Ball, which gave all the guests the opportunity of
+dressing pretty much as they pleased. The wood of the long paneled room
+was golden, and softened the light from the crystal appliques along the
+wall, and set off the bright dresses of the dancers as a gold bowl sets
+off the colors of fruit.
+
+Every now and then people stepped out on the piazza, and as they did
+they became audible to Ben for a few seconds. First, two middle-aged
+men, solid, bronzed, laughing rather wickedly together. Ben drew back,
+afraid of what he might overhear, but it turned out to be no very
+guilty secret. “My dear fellow,” one was saying, “I gave him a stroke a
+hole, and he’s twenty years younger than I am—well, fifteen anyhow. The
+trouble with these young men is that they lack—”
+
+Ben never heard what it was that young men lacked.
+
+Next came a boy and a girl, talking eagerly, the girl’s hand
+gesticulating at her round, red lips. Ben had no scruples in
+overhearing them—theirs appeared to be the universal secret. But here
+again he was wrong. She was saying: “Round and round—not up and down.
+My dentist says that if you always brush them round and round—”
+
+Then two young men—boys, with cigarettes drooping from their lips; they
+were saying, “I haven’t pitched a game since before the war, but he
+said to go in and get that Tiverton fellow, and so—” Ben saw that he
+was in the presence of the hero of the late game. He forgave him, too.
+
+As a matter of fact, he had never given the fashionable world enough
+attention to hate it. He knew that Leo Klein derived a very revivifying
+antagonism from reading about it, and often bought himself an entrance
+to the opera partly because he loved music, but partly, Ben always
+thought, because he liked to look up at the boxes and hate the
+occupants for their jewels and inattention. But Ben watched the
+spectacle with as much detachment as he would have watched a spring
+dance among the Indians.
+
+And then suddenly his detachment melted away, for a lovely girl came
+through the window—lovely with that particular and specific kind of
+loveliness which Ben thought of when he used the word—_his_ kind. He
+used to wonder afterward how he had known it at that first glimpse,
+for, in the dim light of the piazza, he could not see some of her
+greatest beauties—the whiteness of her skin, white as milk where her
+close, fine, brown hair began, or the blue of the eyes set at an angle
+which might have seemed Oriental in eyes less enchanting turquoise in
+color. But he could see her slenderness and grace. She was dressed in
+clinging blues and greens and she wore a silver turban. She leaned her
+hands on the railings—she turned them out along the railings; they were
+slender and full of character—not soft. Ben looked at the one nearest
+him. With hardly more than a turn of his head he could have kissed it.
+The idea appealed to him strongly; he played with it, just as when he
+was a child in a college town he had played with the idea of getting up
+in church and walking about on the backs of the pews. This would be
+pleasanter, and the subsequent getaway even easier. He glanced at the
+dark lawn behind him; there appeared to be no obstacle to escape.
+
+Perhaps, under the spell of her attraction for him, and the knowledge
+that he would never see her again, he might actually have done it, but
+she broke the trance by speaking to a tall, stolid young man who was
+with her.
+
+“No, Eddie,” she said, as if answering something he had said some time
+ago, “I really was at home, at just the time I said, only this new
+butler does hate you so—”
+
+“You might speak to him about it—you might even get rid of him,”
+replied the young man, in the tone of one deeply imposed upon.
+
+“Good butlers are so rare nowadays.”
+
+“And are devoted friends so easy to find?”
+
+“No, but a good deal easier than butlers, Eddie dear.”
+
+The young man gave an exclamation of annoyance. “Let us find some place
+out of the way. I want to speak to you seriously—” he began, and they
+moved out of earshot—presumably to a secluded spot of Eddie’s choosing.
+
+When they had gone Ben felt distinctly lonely, and, what was more
+absurd, slighted, as if Eddie had deliberately taken the girl away from
+him—out of reach. How silly, he thought, for Eddie to want to talk to
+her, when it was so clear the fellow did not know how to talk to her.
+How silly to say, in the sulky tone, “Are devoted friends so easy to
+find?” Of course they were—for a girl like that—devoted friends,
+passionate lovers, and sentimental idiots undoubtedly blocked her path.
+
+It might have been some comfort to him to know that in the remote spot
+of his own choosing, a stone bench under a purple beech, Eddie was
+simply going from bad to worse.
+
+“Dear Crystal,” he began, with that irritating reasonableness of manner
+which implies that the speaker is going to be reasonable for two, “I’ve
+been thinking over the situation. I know that you don’t love me, but
+then I don’t believe you will ever be deeply in love with any one. I
+don’t think you are that kind of woman.”
+
+“Oh, Eddie, how dreadful!”
+
+“I don’t see that at all. Just as well, perhaps. You don’t want to get
+yourself into such a position as poor Eugenia.”
+
+“I do, I would. I’d give anything to be as much in love as Eugenia.”
+
+“What? With a fellow like that! A complete outsider.”
+
+“Outside of what? The human race?”
+
+“Well, no,” said Eddie, as if he were yielding a good deal, “but
+outside of your traditions and your set.”
+
+“My set! Good for him to be outside of it, I say. What have they ever
+done to make anyone want to be inside of it? Why, David is an educated
+gentleman. To hear him quote Horace—”
+
+“Horace who?”
+
+“Really, Eddie.”
+
+“Oh, I see. You mean the poet. That’s nothing to laugh at, Crystal. It
+was a natural mistake. I thought, of course, you meant some of those
+anarchists who want to upset the world.”
+
+Crystal looked at him more honestly and seriously than she had yet
+done.
+
+“Well, don’t you think there _is_ something wrong with the present
+arrangement of things, Eddie?”
+
+“No, I don’t, and I hate to hear you talk like a socialist.”
+
+“I am a socialist.”
+
+“You’re nothing of the kind.”
+
+“I suppose I know what I am.”
+
+“Not at all—not at all.”
+
+“I certainly think the rich are too rich, while the poor are so
+horridly poor.”
+
+“_You’d_ get on well without your maid and your car and your father’s
+charge accounts at all the shops, wouldn’t you?”
+
+Though agreeable to talk seriously if you agree, it is correspondingly
+dangerous if you disagree. Crystal stood up, trembling with an emotion
+which Eddie, although he was rather angry himself, considered utterly
+unaccountable.
+
+“Yes,” she said, almost proudly, “I _am_ luxurious, I _am_ dependent on
+those things. But whose fault is that? It’s the way I was brought
+up—it’s all wrong. But, even though I am dependent on them, I believe I
+could exist without them. I’d feel like killing myself if I didn’t
+think so. Sometimes I want to go away and find out if I couldn’t live
+and be myself without all this background of luxury. But at the
+worst—I’m just one girl—suppose I were weak and couldn’t get on without
+them? That wouldn’t prove that they are right. I’m not so blinded that
+I can’t see that a system by which I profit may still be absolutely
+wrong. But you always seem to think, Eddie, that it’s part of the
+Constitution of the United States that you should have everything
+you’ve always had.”
+
+Eddie rose, too, with the manner of a man who has allowed things to go
+far enough. “Look here, my dear girl,” he said, “I am a man and I’m
+older than you, and have seen more of the world. I know you don’t mean
+any harm, but I must tell you that this is very wicked, dangerous
+talk.”
+
+“Dangerous, perhaps, Eddie, but I can’t see how it can be wicked to
+want to give up your special privileges.”
+
+“Where in the world do you pick up ideas like this?”
+
+“I inherited them from an English ancestor of mine, who gave up all
+that he had when he enlisted in Washington’s army.”
+
+“You got that stuff,” said Eddie, brushing this aside, “from David
+Moreton, and that infernal seditious paper his brother edits—and that
+white-livered book which I haven’t read against war. I’d like to put
+them all in jail.”
+
+“It’s a pity,” said Crystal, “that your side can’t think of a better
+argument than putting everyone who disagrees with you in jail.”
+
+With this she turned and left him, and, entering the ballroom, flung
+herself into the arms of the first partner she met. It was a timid boy,
+who, startled by the eagerness with which she chose him, with her
+bright eyes and quickly drawn breath, was just coming to the conclusion
+that a lovely, rich, and admired lady, had fallen passionately in love
+with him, when with equal suddenness she stepped out of his arms and
+was presently driving her small, open car down the avenue.
+
+Under the purple beech Eddie, left alone, sank back on the stone bench
+and considered, somewhat as the persecutors of Socrates may have done,
+suitable punishments for those who put vile, revolutionary ideas into
+the heads of young and lovely women.
+
+In the meantime Ben, who had enjoyed the party more than most of the
+invited guests, and far more than the disconsolate Eddie, had left his
+vantage point at the window. He had suddenly become aware of a strange
+light stealing under the trees, and, looking up, he saw with surprise
+that the stars were growing small and the heavens turning
+steel-color—in fact, that it was dawn.
+
+Convinced that sunrise was a finer sight than the end of the grandest
+ball that ever was given, he made his way down a shabby back lane, and
+before long came out on the edge of the cliffs, with the whole panorama
+of sunrise over the Atlantic spread out before him.
+
+He stood there a moment, somebody’s close, well-kept lawn under his
+feet, and a pale-pink sea sucking in and out on the rocks a hundred
+feet below. The same hot, red sun was coming up; there wasn’t a steady
+breeze, but cool salt puffs came to him now and then with a breaking
+wave. It was going to be a hot day, and Ben liked swimming better than
+most things in life. He hesitated.
+
+If he had turned to the left, he would have come presently to a public
+beach and would have had his swim conventionally and in due time. But
+some impulse told him to turn to the right, and he began to wander
+westward along the edge of the cliffs—always on his left hand, space
+and the sea, and on his right, lawns or gardens or parapets crowned by
+cactus plants in urns, and behind these a great variety of
+houses—French chateaux and marble palaces and nice little white
+cottages, and, finally, a frowning Gothic castle. All alike seemed
+asleep, with empty piazzas and closed shutters, and the only sign of
+life he saw in any of them was one pale housemaid shaking a duster out
+of a window in an upper gable.
+
+At last he came to a break in the cliffs—a cove, with a beach in it, a
+group of buildings obviously bathing-houses. The sacredness of this
+pavilion did not occur to Ben; indeed, there was nothing to suggest it.
+He entered it light-heartedly and was discouraged to find the door of
+every cabin securely locked. The place was utterly deserted. But Ben
+was persistent, and presently he detected a bit of a garment hanging
+over a door, and, pulling it out, he found himself in possession of a
+man’s bathing suit. A little farther on he discovered a telephone room
+unlocked. Here he undressed and a minute later was swimming straight
+out to sea.
+
+The level rays of the sun were doing to the water just what the
+headlights of the motors had done to the road; they were enlarging
+every ripple and edging the deep purple-blue with yellow light. Except
+for a fishing dory chunking out to its day’s work, Ben had the sea and
+land to himself. He felt as if they were all his own, and, for a
+socialist, was guilty of the sin of pride of possession. He was
+enjoying himself so much that it was a long time before he turned to
+swim back.
+
+He was swimming with his head under water most of the time so that he
+did not at once notice that a raft he had passed on his way out was now
+occupied. As soon as he did see it his head came up. It was a female
+figure, and even from a distance he could see that she was unconscious
+of his presence and felt quite as sure of having the world to herself
+as he was. She was sitting on the edge of the raft, kicking a pair of
+the prettiest legs in the world in and out of the water. They were clad
+in the thinnest of blue-silk stockings, the same in which a few minutes
+before she had been dancing, but not being able to find any others in
+her bathhouse, she had just kept them on, recklessly ignoring the
+inevitable problem of what she should wear home. She was leaning back
+on her straightened arms, with her head back, looking up into the sky
+and softly whistling to herself. Ben saw in a second that she was the
+girl of the silver turban.
+
+He stole nearer and nearer, cutting silently through the water, and
+then, when he had looked his fill, he put his head down again, splashed
+a little, and did not look up until his hand was on the raft, when he
+allowed an expression of calm surprise to appear on his face.
+
+“I beg your pardon,” he said. “Is this a private raft?”
+
+The young lady, who had had plenty of time since the splash to arrange
+her countenance, looked at him with a blank coldness, and then suddenly
+smiled.
+
+“I thought it was a private world,” she replied.
+
+“It’s certainly a very agreeable one,” said Ben, climbing on the raft.
+“And what I like particularly about it is the fact that no one is alive
+but you and me. Newport appears to be a city of the dead.”
+
+“It always was,” she answered, contemptuously.
+
+“Oh, come. Not an hour ago you were dancing in blue and green and a
+silver turban at a party over there,” and he waved his hand in the
+direction from which he had come.
+
+“Did you think it was a good ball?”
+
+“I enjoyed it,” he answered, truthfully.
+
+Her face fell. “How very disappointing,” she said. “I didn’t see you
+there.”
+
+“Disappointing that you did not see me there?”
+
+“No,” she replied, and then, less positively; “No; I meant it was
+disappointing that you were the kind of man who went to parties—and
+enjoyed them.”
+
+“It would be silly to go if you didn’t enjoy them,” he returned,
+lightly.
+
+She turned to him very seriously. “You’re right,” she said; “it is
+silly—very silly, and it’s just what I do. I consider parties like that
+the lowest, emptiest form of human entertainment. They’re dull; they’re
+expensive; they keep you from doing intelligent things, like studying;
+they keep you from doing simple, healthy things, like sleeping and
+exercising; they make you artificial; they make you civil to people you
+despise—they make women, at least, for we must have partners—”
+
+“But why do you go, then?”
+
+She was silent, and they looked straight and long at each other. Then
+she said, gravely:
+
+“The answer’s very humiliating. I go because I haven’t anything else to
+do.”
+
+He did not reassure her. “Yes, that’s bad,” he said, after a second.
+“But of course you could not expect to have anything else to do when
+all your time is taken up like that. ‘When the half gods go,’ you know,
+‘the gods arrive.’”
+
+The quotation was not new to Crystal; in fact, she had quoted it to
+Eddie not very long before, apropos of another girl to whom he had
+shown a mild attention, but it seemed to her as if she took in for the
+first time its real meaning. Whether it was the dawn, exhaustion, a
+stimulating personality, love, or mere accident, the words now came to
+her with all the beauty and truth of a religious conviction. They
+seemed to shake her and make her over. She felt as if she could never
+be sufficiently grateful to the person who had thus made all life fresh
+and new to her.
+
+“Ah,” she said, very gently, “that’s it. I see. You won’t believe me,
+but I assure you from now on I mean to be entirely different.”
+
+“Please, not too different.”
+
+“Oh yes, yes, as different as possible. I’ve been so unhappy, and
+unhappy about nothing definite—that’s the worst kind, only that I have
+not liked the life I was leading.”
+
+She glanced at him appealingly. She had tried to tell this simple story
+to so many people, for she had many friends, and yet no one had ever
+really understood. Some had told her she was spoiled, more, that there
+was no use in trying to change her life because she would soon marry;
+most of them had advised her to marry and find out what real trouble
+was. Now, as she spoke she saw that this strange young man from the sea
+not only understood her discontent, but thought it natural, almost
+commonplace.
+
+She poured it all out. “Only the worst thing,” she ended, “is that I’m
+not really any good. There isn’t anything else that I know how to do.”
+
+“I doubt that,” he answered, and she began to doubt it, too. “I’m sure
+there are lots of things you could do if you put your mind on it. Did
+you ever try to write?”
+
+Now, indeed, she felt sure that he was gifted with powers more than
+mortal—to have guessed this secret which no one else had ever
+suspected. She colored deeply.
+
+“Why, yes,” she answered, “I think I can—a little, only I’ve so little
+education.”
+
+“So little education?”
+
+“Yes, I belong to the cultivated classes—three languages and nothing
+solid.”
+
+“Well, you know, three languages seem pretty solid to me,” said Ben,
+who had wrestled very unsuccessfully with the French tongue. “You speak
+three languages, and let me see, you know a good deal about painting
+and poetry and jade and Chinese porcelains?”
+
+She shrugged her shoulders contemptuously. “Oh, of course everyone
+knows about those things, but what good are they?”
+
+They were a good deal of good to Ben. He pressed on toward his final
+goal. “What is your attitude toward fairies?” he asked, and Miss Cox
+would have heard in his tone a faint memory of his voice when he
+engaged a new office-boy.
+
+Her attitude toward fairies was perfectly satisfactory, and he showed
+so much appreciation that she went on and told him her great secret in
+full. She had once had something published and been paid money for
+it—fifteen dollars—and probably never in her life had she spoken of any
+sum with so much respect. It had been, well, a sort of a review of a
+new illustrated edition of Hans Andersen’s Tales, treating them as if
+they were modern stories, commenting on them from the point of view of
+morals and probability—making fun of people who couldn’t give
+themselves up to the charm of a story unless it tallied with their own
+horrid little experiences of life. She told it, she said, very badly,
+but perhaps he could get the idea.
+
+He got it perfectly. “Good,” he said. “I’ll give you a job. I’m a
+newspaper editor.”
+
+“Oh,” she exclaimed, “you’re not Mr. Munsey, are you, or Mr. Reid, or
+Mr. Ochs?”
+
+Her knowledge of newspaper owners seemed to come to a sudden end.
+
+“No,” he answered, smiling, “nor even Mr. Hearst. I did not say I owned
+a newspaper. I edit it. I need some one just like you for my book page,
+only you’d have to come to New York and work hard, and there wouldn’t
+be very much salary. Can you work?”
+
+“Anyone can.”
+
+“Well, will you?”
+
+“Indeed I will.” (It was a vow.) “And now I must go. I have to drive
+myself home in an open car, and the tourists do stare at one so—in
+fancy dress.”
+
+“Yes, but when am I to see you again? I leave Newport to-night.”
+
+“Telephone me—2079—and we’ll arrange to do something this afternoon.”
+
+“And whom shall I ask for?”
+
+“Telephone at two-fifteen to the minute, and I’ll answer the telephone
+myself.”
+
+She evidently rather enjoyed the mystery of their not knowing each
+other’s names. But a black idea occurred to Ben. She had slid off the
+raft and swum a few strokes before he shouted to her:
+
+“Look here. Your name isn’t Eugenia, is it?”
+
+She waved her hand. “No, I’m Crystal,” she called back.
+
+“Good-by, Crystal.”
+
+This time she did not wave, but, swimming on her side with long, easy
+strokes, she gave him a sweet, reassuring look.
+
+After she had gone he lay down on the raft with his face buried in his
+arms. A few moments before he had thought he could never see enough of
+the sunrise and the sea, but now he wanted to shut it out in favor of a
+much finer spectacle within him. So this was love. Strange that no one
+had ever been able to prepare you for it. Strange that poets had never
+been able to give you a hint of its stupendous inevitability. He
+wondered if all miracles were like that—so simple—so—
+
+Suddenly he heard her voice near him. He lifted his head from his arms.
+She was there in the water below him, clinging to the raft with one
+hand.
+
+“I just came back to tell you something,” she said. “I thought you
+ought to know it before things went any farther.”
+
+He thought, “Good God! she’s in love with some one else!” and the
+horror of the idea made him look at her severely.
+
+“I’m not perhaps just as I seem—I mean my views are rather liberal. In
+fact”—she brought it out with an effort—“I’m almost a socialist.”
+
+The relief was so great that Ben couldn’t speak. He bent his head and
+kissed the hand that had tempted him a few hours before.
+
+She did not resent his action. Her special technique in such matters
+was to pretend that such little incidents hardly came into the realm of
+her consciousness. She said, “At two-fifteen, then,” and swam away for
+good.
+
+Later in the day a gentleman who owned both a bathing house and a
+bathing suit on Bailey’s beach was showing the latter possession to a
+group of friends.
+
+“No one can tell me that Newport isn’t damp,” he said. “I haven’t been
+in bathing for twenty-four hours, and yet I can actually wring the
+water out of my suit.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+That same morning, about ten o’clock, Mr. William Cord was shut up in
+the study of his house—shut up, that is, as far as entrance from the
+rest of the house was concerned, but very open as to windows looking
+out across the grass to the sea. It was a small room, and the leather
+chairs which made up most of its furnishings were worn, and the
+bookshelves were filled with volumes like railroad reports and _Poor’s
+Manual_, but somehow the total effect of the room was so agreeable that
+the family used it more than Mr. Cord liked.
+
+He was an impressive figure, tall, erect, and with that suggestion of
+unbroken health which had had something to do with his success in life.
+His hair must have been of a sandy brown, for it had turned, not gray
+nor white, but that queer no-color that sandy hair does turn, melting
+into all pale surroundings. His long face was not vividly colored,
+either, but was stamped with the immobility of expression that
+sensitive people in contact with violent life almost always acquire.
+The result was that there seemed to be something dead about his face
+until you saw his eyes, dark and fierce, as if all the fire and energy
+of the man were concentrated in them.
+
+He was dressed in gray golfing-clothes that smelled more of peat than
+peat does, and, though officially supposed to be wrestling with the
+more secret part of correspondence which even his own secretary was not
+allowed to see, he was actually wiggling a new golf-club over the rug,
+and toying with the romantic idea that it would enable him to drive
+farther than he had ever driven before.
+
+There was a knock at the door. Mr. Cord leaned the driver in a corner,
+clasped his hands behind his back, straddled his legs a trifle, so that
+they seemed to grow out of the rug as the eternal oak grows out of the
+sod, and said, “Come in,” in the tone of a man who, considering the
+importance of his occupation, bears interruption exceedingly well.
+
+Tomes, the butler, entered. “Mr. Verriman, sir, to see you.”
+
+“To see _me_?”
+
+“Yes, sir.”
+
+Cord just nodded at this, which evidently meant that the visitor was to
+be admitted, for Tomes never made a mistake and Verriman presently
+entered. Mr. Cord had seen Eddie Verriman the night before at the ball,
+and had thought him a very fine figure of a man, so now, putting two
+and two together, he said to himself, “Is he here to ask my blessing?”
+
+Aloud he said nothing, but just nodded; it was a belief that had
+translated itself into a habit—to let the other man explain first.
+
+“I know I’m interrupting you, Mr. Cord,” Verriman began. Mr. Cord made
+a lateral gesture with his hand, as if all he had were at the disposal
+of his friends, even his most precious asset—time.
+
+“It’s something very important,” Eddie went on. “I’m worried. I haven’t
+slept. Mr. Cord, have you checked up Crystal’s economic beliefs
+lately?”
+
+“Lately?” said Mr. Cord. “I don’t know that I ever have. Have a cigar?”
+
+Eddie waved the cigar aside as if his host had offered it to him in the
+midst of a funeral service.
+
+“Well, I have,” he said, as if some one had to do a parent’s duty, “and
+I’ve been very much distressed—shocked. I had a long talk with her
+about it at the dance last night.”
+
+“About economics?”
+
+“Yes, sir.”
+
+“Why, Eddie, don’t I seem to remember your telling me you were in love
+with Crystal?”
+
+“Yes, Mr. Cord, I am.”
+
+“Then what do you want to talk economics for? Or is it done like that
+nowadays?”
+
+“I don’t want to,” answered Eddie, almost in a wail. “_She_ does. She
+gets me going and then we quarrel because she has terrible opinions.
+She talks wildly. I have to point out to her that she’s wrong. And last
+night she told me”—Eddie glanced about to be sure he was not
+overheard—“she told me that she was a socialist.”
+
+Mr. Cord had just lit the very cigar which Eddie had waved away, and he
+took the first critical puffs at it before he answered:
+
+“Did you ask her what that was?”
+
+“No—no—I didn’t.”
+
+“Missed a trick there, Eddie.”
+
+It was impossible to accuse so masklike a magnate of frivolity, but
+Eddie was often dissatisfied with Mr. Cord’s reactions to the serious
+problems of life.
+
+“But don’t you think it’s terrible,” he went on, eagerly, “for Crystal
+to be a socialist? In this age of the world—civilization trembling on
+the brink—chaos”—Eddie made a gesture toward the perfectly ordered
+shelves containing _Poor’s Manual_—“staring us in the face? You say
+that the half-baked opinions of an immature girl make no difference?”
+
+“No, I shouldn’t say that—at least not to Crystal,” murmured her
+father.
+
+“But the mere fact that she picks up such ideas proves that they are in
+the air about us and that terrifies me—terrifies me,” ended Eddie, his
+voice rising as he saw that his host intended to remain perfectly calm.
+
+“Which terrifies you, Eddie—Crystal or the revolution?”
+
+“The general discontent—the fact that civilization is tr—”
+
+“Oh yes, that,” said Mr. Cord, hastily. “Well, I wouldn’t allow that to
+terrify me, Eddie. I should have more sympathy with ou if it had been
+Crystal. Crystal is a good deal of a proposition, I grant you. The
+revolution seems to me simpler. If a majority of our fellow countrymen
+really want it, they are going to get it in spite of you and me; and if
+they don’t want it, they won’t have it no matter how Crystal talks to
+you at parties. So cheer up, Eddie, and have a cigar.”
+
+“They can, they will,” said Eddie, not even troubling to wave away the
+cigar this time. “You don’t appreciate what an organized minority of
+foreign agitators can do in this country. Why, they can—”
+
+“Well, if a minority of foreigners can put over a revolution against
+the will of the American people, we ought to shut up shop, Eddie.”
+
+“You’re not afraid?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“You mean you wouldn’t fight it?”
+
+“You bet your life I’d fight it,” said Mr. Cord, gayly, “but I fight
+lots of things without being afraid of them. What’s the use of being
+afraid? Here I am sixty-five, conservative and trained to only one
+game, and yet I feel as if _I_ could manage to make my own way even
+under soviet rule. Anyway, I don’t want to die or emigrate just because
+my country changes its form of government. Only it would have to be the
+wish of the majority, and I don’t believe it ever will be. In the
+meantime there is just one thing I _am_ afraid of—and that’s the thing
+that you and most of my friends want to do first—suppressing free
+speech; if you suppress it, we won’t know who wants what. Then you
+really do get an explosion.”
+
+Eddie had got Mr. Cord to be serious now, with the unfortunate result
+that the older man was more shocking than ever.
+
+“Free speech doesn’t mean treason and sedition,” Eddie began.
+
+“It means the other man’s opinion.”
+
+There was a pause during which Eddie became more perturbed and Mr. Cord
+settled back to his habitual calm.
+
+“Wouldn’t you suppress _anything_?” Verriman asked at length, willing
+to know the worst. “Not even such a vile sheet as _Liberty_?”
+
+“Do you ever see it, Eddie?”
+
+“Read a rotten paper like that? Certainly not. Do you?”
+
+“I subscribe to it.” And, bending down, Mr. Cord unlocked a drawer in
+his desk and produced the issue of the preceding day.
+
+“I notice you keep it locked up,” said Eddie, and felt that he had
+scored.
+
+“I have to,” replied Mr. Cord, “or else Crystal gets hold of it and
+cuts it all up into extracts—she must have sent you some—before I get a
+chance to read it. Besides, it shocks Tomes. You ought to talk to
+Tomes, Eddie. He thinks about as you do—”
+
+At this moment the door opened and Tomes himself entered.
+
+“Mr. Moreton would like to see you, sir.”
+
+Even Cord’s calm was a little disturbed by this unexpected news.
+
+“Mr. Moreton!” he exclaimed. “Not—not—not—not?”
+
+“No, sir,” said Tomes, always in possession of accurate information.
+“His brother, I believe.”
+
+“Show him in here,” said Cord, and added to Eddie, as Tomes left the
+room: “Well, here he is—the editor himself, Eddie. You can say it all
+to him.”
+
+“I don’t want to see such fellows,” Verriman began.
+
+“Stay and protect me, Eddie. He may have a bomb in his pocket.”
+
+“You don’t really believe that he’s come to—”
+
+“No, Eddie, I don’t. I think he’s come like young Lochinvar—to dance a
+little late at the wedding. To try to persuade me to accept that lazy,
+good-looking brother of his as a son-in-law. He’ll have quite a job
+over that.” Then, as the door opened, Mr. Cord’s eyes concentrated on
+it and his manner became a shade sharper. “Ah, Mr. Moreton, good
+morning. Mr. Verriman—Mr. Moreton.”
+
+Ben was a good-looking young man, but it was his expression—at once
+illuminated and determined—that made him unusual. And the effect of his
+night and morning had been to intensify this, so that now, as he stood
+a moment in the doorway, he was a very attractive and compelling
+figure.
+
+“I came to see my brother, Mr. Cord,” he said, simply, “but I hear he’s
+not here any more. If I could speak to you alone for a few minutes—” He
+glanced at Eddie, whom he instantly recognized as the man who had not
+known how to talk to the woman in the world best worth talking to.
+
+“Oh, you may speak before Mr. Verriman,” said Cord. “He knows the
+situation—knows your brother—knows my children—knows about you. In
+fact, we were just speaking about your paper when you came in. However,
+I must tell you that Mr. Verriman doesn’t approve of _Liberty_. At
+least, I believe I understood you right, Eddie.” And Mr. Cord, having
+thus assured himself a few minutes to regain his poise, leaned back
+comfortably in his chair.
+
+“What’s wrong with the paper, Mr. Verriman?” said Ben, pleasantly.
+
+Eddie did not love the adventure of mental combat, but he was no
+coward. “It seems to me,” he said, “that it preaches such radical
+changes in our government that it is seditious. To be frank, Mr.
+Moreton, I think the government ought to suppress it.”
+
+“But we don’t break the law. The government can’t suppress us.”
+
+“Then the laws ought to be changed so that it can.”
+
+“That’s all we advocate, Mr. Verriman, the changing of the law. It
+isn’t any more seditious for me to say it than for you to, is it?”
+
+Of course in Eddie’s opinion it was—much, much more seditious. Only
+somehow it was a difficult point to make clear, if a person was so
+wrongheaded he couldn’t see it for himself. The point was that he,
+Eddie, was right in wanting the laws changed and Moreton was wrong.
+Anyone, it seemed to Eddie, would agree to that, unless he happened to
+agree with Moreton beforehand, and those were just the people who ought
+to be deported, imprisoned, or even perhaps in rare instances, as
+examples, strung up to lamp-posts. Only each time he tried to put these
+very natural opinions in words, they kept sounding wrong and tyrannical
+and narrow—qualities which Eddie knew he was entirely without. In order
+to counteract this effect, he tried at first to speak very temperately
+and calmly, but, unhappily, this only had the effect of making him
+sound patronizing to Ben’s ears.
+
+In short, it was hardly to be expected that the discussion would be
+amicable, and it was not. Each man began to be angry in his own way.
+Eddie shouted a little, and Ben expressed himself with turns of phrase
+quite needlessly insulting. Ben found Verriman’s assumption that the
+profits of capital were bound up with patriotism, family life, and the
+Christian religion almost as irritating as Verriman found Ben’s
+assumption that the government of labor as a class would be entirely
+without the faults that have always marked every form of class
+government.
+
+“And suppose you got socialism,” said Eddie, at last, “suppose you did
+divide everything up equally, don’t you suppose that in a few years the
+clever, strong, industrious men would have it all in their own hands?”
+
+“Very likely,” said Ben, “but that would be quite a change from the
+present arrangement, wouldn’t it?”
+
+Mr. Cord had a narrow escape from laughing out loud, which would have
+cost him the friendship of the man with whom on the whole he really
+agreed. He thought it was time to interfere.
+
+“This is very interesting, Mr. Moreton,” he said, “but I fancy it
+wasn’t about the general radical propaganda that you came to see me.”
+
+“No,” said Ben, turning slowly. He felt as a dog feels who is dragged
+out of the fight just as it begins to get exciting. “No, I came to see
+you about this unfortunate engagement of my brother’s.”
+
+“Unfortunate?” asked Mr. Cord, without criticism.
+
+“I should consider it so, and I understand you do, too.”
+
+Cord did not move an eyelash; this was an absolutely new form of
+attack. It had certainly never crossed his mind that any objection
+could come from the Moreton family.
+
+“You consider it unfortunate?” said Eddie, as if it would be mere
+insolence on Ben’s part to object to his brother’s marrying anyone.
+
+“Will you give me your reasons for objecting?” said Cord.
+
+Ben smiled. “You ought to understand them,” he said, “for I imagine
+they’re pretty much the same as your own. I mean they are both founded
+on class consciousness. I feel that it will be destructive to the
+things I value most in David to be dependent on, or associated with,
+the capitalistic group. Just as you feel it will be destructive to your
+daughter to be married to a tutor—a fellow with radical views and a
+seditious brother—”
+
+“One moment, one moment,” said Cord; “you’ve got this all wrong so far
+as I’m concerned. I do most emphatically disagree with the radical
+propaganda. I think the radical is usually just a man who hasn’t got
+something he wants.”
+
+“And the conservative is a man who wants to keep something he’s got,”
+said Ben, less hostilely than he had spoken to Eddie.
+
+“Exactly, exactly,” said Cord. “In ideality there isn’t much to choose
+between them, but, generally speaking, I have more respect for the man
+who has succeeded in getting something to preserve than for the man who
+hasn’t got anything to lose.”
+
+“If their opportunities were equal.”
+
+“I say in general. There is not much to choose between the two types;
+but there is in my opinion a shade in favor of the conservative on the
+score of efficiency, and I am old-fashioned perhaps, but I like
+efficiency. If it came to a fight, I should fight on the conservative
+side. But this is all beside the point. My objections to your brother,
+Mr. Moreton, are not objections to his group or class. They are
+personal to him. Damned personal.”
+
+“You don’t like David?”
+
+“Why, he’s an attractive young fellow, but, if you’ll forgive my saying
+so, Mr. Moreton, I don’t think he’s any good. He’s weak, he’s idle, he
+entirely lacks that aggressive will that—whether we have your
+revolution or not—is the only bulwark a woman has in this world. Why,
+Mr. Moreton, you are evidently a very much more advanced and dangerous
+radical than your brother, but I should not have half the objection to
+you that I have to him. There is only one thing that makes a difference
+in this world—character. Your brother hasn’t got it.”
+
+For an instant the perfect accuracy of Cord’s statements about David
+left Ben silent. Then he pulled himself together and said, with a
+firmness he did not wholly feel:
+
+“You hardly do David justice. He may not have great force, but he has
+talent, great sweetness, no vices—”
+
+“Oh, quite, quite, quite, quite,” said Cord, with a gesture of his long
+hand that should somehow have recalled to Ben the motion of a hand he
+had recently kissed.
+
+“However,” said Ben, “there is no use in arguing about our differences.
+The point is we are agreed that this marriage ought not to be. Let us
+co-operate on that. Where could I find David? I believe if I could see
+him I’d have some effect on him.”
+
+“You mean you could talk him out of marrying the girl he loves?”
+
+“I might make him see the folly of it.”
+
+“Well, I haven’t said anything as bad about your brother as that, Mr.
+Moreton. But you do him injustice. You couldn’t talk him out of it, and
+if you could, she’d talk him right back into it again. But there is one
+thing to consider. I understand you make him an allowance. How about
+stopping that?”
+
+“I wouldn’t consider that for a moment,” said Ben, with more temper
+than he had so far shown. “I don’t make him that allowance so that I
+can force him to do what I think best. I give it to him because he
+needs it. I don’t believe in force, Mr. Cord.”
+
+“Oh yes, you do, Mr. Moreton.”
+
+“What do you mean?”
+
+“You were proposing to use a much more pernicious kind of force when
+you proposed talking the boy out of his first love. However, to be
+candid with you, I must tell you that the issue is dead. They ran off
+yesterday and were married in Boston.”
+
+There was a short silence and then Ben moved toward the door.
+
+“Won’t you stay to lunch?” said Mr. Cord, politely.
+
+“Thank you, no,” said Ben. He wanted to be alone. Like all dominating
+people who don’t get their own way in an altruistic issue, his feelings
+were deeply wounded. He took his hat from the disapproving Tomes, and
+went out to the sea to think. He supposed he was going to think about
+David’s future and the terrible blow his paper had just received.
+
+As the door closed behind him, Eddie turned to Mr. Cord with a world of
+reproach in his eyes.
+
+“Well,” he said, “I must say, sir, I think you were unnecessarily
+gentle with that fellow.”
+
+“Seemed to me a fine young fellow,” said Mr. Cord.
+
+“Asking him to lunch,” said Eddie.
+
+“I did that for Crystal,” replied Cord, getting up and slapping his
+pockets—a gesture which in some subconscious way he hoped would make
+Eddie go home. “She’s always so keen to meet new people. If she heard
+that the editor of _Liberty_ had been here while she was asleep and
+that I had not tried to keep him for her to see—whew!—she would make a
+scene.”
+
+“But she oughtn’t to see people like that,” protested Eddie, as if he
+were trying to talk sense in a madhouse. “That was what I was just
+explaining to you, Mr. Cord, when—”
+
+“So you were, Eddie, so you were,” said Mr. Cord. “Stay to lunch and
+tell Crystal. Or, rather,” he added, hastily glancing at the clock,
+“come back to lunch in an hour. I have to go now and see—” Mr. Cord
+hesitated for the fraction of a second—“the gardener. If you don’t see
+gardeners now and then and let them scold you about the weather and the
+Lord’s arrangement of the seasons, they go mad and beat their wives.
+See you later, Eddie,” and Mr. Cord stepped out through the French
+window. It was only great crises like these that led him to offer
+himself up to the attacks of his employees.
+
+A severe elderly man with a long, flat upper lip and side whiskers
+immediately sprang apparently from the earth and approached him. He had
+exactly the manner of resolute gloom that a small boy has when
+something has gone wrong at school and he wants his mother to drag it
+out of him.
+
+“Good morning, sir,” he said.
+
+“Morning, McKellar,” said Cord, gayly. “Everything’s all right, I
+suppose.”
+
+McKellar shook his head. Everything was about as far from all right as
+it well could be. The cook was a violent maniac who required peas to be
+picked so young that they weren’t worth the picking. Tomes and his
+footman were a band of malicious pirates who took pleasure in cutting
+for the table the very buds which McKellar was cherishing for the
+horticultural show. And as for the season—McKellar could not remember
+such a devastatingly dry August since he was a lad at home.
+
+“Why, McKellar, we had rain two days ago.”
+
+“You wouldn’t call that little mist rain, sir.”
+
+“And last week a perfect downpour.”
+
+“Ah, that’s the kind doesn’t sink into the soil.” Looking up critically
+at the heavens, McKellar expressed his settled conviction that in two
+weeks’ time hardly a blade or a shrub would be alive in the island at
+Newport.
+
+“Well, that will save us all a lot of trouble, McKellar,” said Mr.
+Cord, and presently left his gloomy gardener. He had attained his
+object. When he went back into the house, Eddie had gone, and he could
+go back to his new driver in peace.
+
+He was not interrupted until ten minutes past one, when Crystal came
+into the room, her eyes shining with exactly the same color that,
+beyond the lawn, the sea was displaying. Unlike Eddie, she looked
+better than in her fancy dress. She had on flat tennis shoes, a cotton
+blouse and a duck skirt, and a russet-colored sweater. Miss Cox would
+have rejected every item of her costume except the row of pearls, which
+just showed at her throat.
+
+She kissed her father rapidly, and said:
+
+“Good morning, dear. Are you ready for breakfast—lunch I mean?”
+
+She was a little bit flustered for the reason that it seemed to her as
+if any one would be able to see that she was an entirely different
+Crystal from the one of the evening before, and she was not quite sure
+what she was going to answer when her father said, as she felt certain
+he must say at any moment, “My dear child, what has come over you?”
+
+He did not say this, however. He held out his golf-club and said, “Got
+a new driver.”
+
+“Yes, yes, dear, very nice,” said Crystal. “But I want to have lunch
+punctually, to-day.”
+
+Mr. Cord sighed. Crystal wasn’t always very sympathetic. “I’m ready,”
+he said, “only Eddie’s coming.”
+
+“_Eddie!_” exclaimed Crystal, drawing her shoulders up, as if at the
+sight of a cobra in her path. “Why is Eddie coming to lunch? I did not
+ask him.”
+
+“No, my dear, I took that liberty,” replied her father. “It seemed the
+only way of getting rid of him.”
+
+“Well, I sha’n’t wait for him,” said Crystal, ringing the bell. “I have
+an engagement at a quarter past two.”
+
+“At the golf club?” asked her father, his eye lighting a little. “You
+might drive me out, you know.”
+
+“No, dear; quite in the other direction—with a man who was at the party
+last night.”
+
+“You enjoyed the party?”
+
+“No, not a bit.”
+
+“But you stayed till morning.”
+
+“I stopped and took a swim.”
+
+“You enjoyed that, I suppose?”
+
+His daughter glanced at him and turned crimson; but she did not have to
+answer, for at that moment Tomes came, in response to her ring, and she
+said:
+
+“We won’t wait lunch for Mr. Verriman, Tomes.” Then, as he went away,
+she asked, “And what was Eddie doing here this morning, anyhow?”
+
+“He was scolding me,” replied Mr. Cord. “Have you noticed, Crystal,
+what a lot of scolding is going on in the world at present? I believe
+that that is why no one is getting any work done—everyone is so busy
+scolding everybody else. The politicians are scolding, and the
+newspapers are scolding, and most of the fellows I know are scolding. I
+believe I’ve got hold of a great truth—”
+
+“And may I ask what Eddie was scolding about?” asked Crystal, no more
+interested in great truths than most of us.
+
+“About you.”
+
+Crystal moved her head about as if things had now reached a point where
+it wasn’t even worth while to be angry. “About me?”
+
+“It seems you’re a socialist, my dear. Eddie asked me how long it was
+since I had taken an inventory of your economic beliefs. I could not
+remember that I ever had, but perhaps you will tell them to me now.
+That is,” Mr. Cord added, “if you can do it without scolding
+me—probably an impossible condition to impose nowadays.”
+
+“It’s a pity about Eddie,” said Crystal, fiercely. “If only stupid
+people would be content to be stupid, instead of trying to run the
+world—”
+
+“Ah, my dear, it’s only stupid people who are under the impression that
+they can. Good morning again, Eddie, we were just speaking of you.”
+
+Mr. Cord added the last sentence without the slightest change of tone
+or expression as his guest was ushered in by Tomes, who, catching
+Crystal’s eyes for a more important fact than Eddie’s arrival, murmured
+that luncheon was served.
+
+“Well, Eddie,” said Crystal, and there was a sort of gay vibration in
+her whole figure, and her tone was like a bright banner of war, “and so
+you came round to complain to my father, did you?”
+
+Mr. Cord laid his hand on her shoulder. “Do you think you could
+demolish Eddie just as well at table, my dear?” he said. “If so,
+there’s no use in letting the food get cold.”
+
+“Oh, she can do it anywhere,” replied Eddie, bitterly, and then,
+striking his habitual note of warning, he went on, “but, honestly,
+Crystal, if you had heard what your father and I heard this morning—”
+
+“I had a visit from David’s brother this morning,” put in Mr. Cord,
+“the editor of your favorite morning paper.”
+
+“Ben Moreton, here! Oh, _father_, why didn’t you call me? Yes, I know,”
+she added, as her father opened his mouth to say that she had left most
+particular instructions that she was to be allowed to sleep as late as
+she could, “I know, but you must have known I should have wanted to
+look David’s brother over. Has he long hair? Does he wear a soft tie?
+Did you hate him?”
+
+“Eddie didn’t take much of a fancy to him.”
+
+“I should say not. A damned, hollow-eyed fanatic.”
+
+“Is he as good-looking as David, father? What does he look like?”
+
+Mr. Cord hesitated. “Well, a little like my engraving of Thomas
+Jefferson as a young man.”
+
+“He looks as if he might have a bomb in his pocket.”
+
+“Oh, Eddie, do keep quiet, there’s a dear, and let father give me one
+of his long, wonderful accounts. Go ahead, father.”
+
+“Well,” said Mr. Cord, helping himself from a dish that Tomes was
+presenting to him, “as I told you, Eddie had dropped in very kindly to
+scold me about you, when Tomes announced Mr. Moreton. Tomes thought he
+ought to be put straight out of the house. Didn’t you, Tomes?”
+
+“No, sir,” said Tomes, who was getting used to his employer, although
+he did not encourage this sort of thing, particularly before the
+footmen.
+
+“Well, Moreton came in and said, very simply—”
+
+“Has he good manners, father?”
+
+“He has no manners at all,” roared Eddie.
+
+“Oh, how nice,” said Crystal, of whom it might be asserted without
+flattery that she now understood in perfection the art of irritating
+Eddie.
+
+“He is very direct and natural,” her father continued. “He has a lot
+more punch than your brother-in-law, my dear. In fact, I was rather
+impressed with the young fellow until he and Eddie fell to quarreling.
+Things did not go so well, then.”
+
+“You mean,” said Crystal, the gossip rather getting the best of the
+reformer in her, “that he lost his temper horribly?”
+
+“I should say he did,” said Eddie.
+
+“Well, Eddie, you know you were not perfectly calm,” answered Cord.
+“Let us say that they both lost their tempers, which is strange, for as
+far as I could see they were agreed on many essentials. They both
+believe that one class in the community ought to govern the other. They
+both believe the world is in a very bad way; only, according to Eddie,
+we are going to have chaos if capital loses its control of the
+situation; and according to Moreton we are going to have chaos if labor
+doesn’t get control. So, as one or the other seems bound to happen, we
+ought to be able to adjust ourselves to chaos. In fact, Crystal, I have
+been interviewing McKellar about having a chaos cellar built in the
+garden.”
+
+Eddie pushed back his plate; it was empty, but the gesture suggested
+that he could not go on choking down the food of a man who joked about
+such serious matters.
+
+“I must say, Mr. Cord,” he began, “I really must say—” He paused,
+surprised to find that he really hadn’t anything that he must say, and
+Crystal turned to her father:
+
+“But you haven’t told me why he came. To see Eugenia, I suppose?”
+
+“No; he hadn’t heard of the marriage. He came to talk to his brother.”
+
+“For you must know,” put in Eddie, hastily, “that Mr. Ben Moreton does
+not approve of the marriage—oh, dear, no. He would consider such a
+connection quite beneath his family. He disapproves of Eugenia as a
+sister-in-law.”
+
+“How could any one disapprove of her?” asked her sister, hotly.
+
+“Jevver hear such nerve?” said Eddie.
+
+“It’s not Eugenia; it’s capital Moreton disapproves of,” Mr. Cord went
+on, patiently explaining. “You see it never crossed our minds that the
+Moretons might object, but of course they do. They regard us as a very
+degrading connection. Doubtless it will hurt Ben Moreton with his
+readers to be connected with a financial pirate like myself, quite as
+much as it will hurt me in the eyes of most of my fellow board members
+when it becomes known that my son-in-law’s brother is the editor of
+_Liberty_.”
+
+“The Moretons disapprove,” repeated Crystal, to whom the idea was not
+at all agreeable.
+
+“Disapprove, nonsense!” said Eddie. “I believe he came to blackmail
+you. To see what he could get out of you if he offered to stop the
+marriage. Well, why not? If these fellows believe all the money ought
+to be taken away from the capitalists, why should they care how it’s
+done? I can’t see much difference between robbing a man, and
+legislating his fortune out of—”
+
+“Well, I must tell you, father dear,” said Crystal, exactly as if Eddie
+had not been speaking, “that I think it was horrid of you not to have
+me called when you must have known—”
+
+“Crystal, you’re scolding me,” wailed her father. “And most unjustly. I
+did ask him to lunch just for your sake, although I saw Eddie was
+shocked, and I was afraid Tomes would give warning. But I did ask him,
+only he wouldn’t stay.”
+
+Crystal rose from the table with her eye on the clock, and they began
+to make their way back to Mr. Cord’s study, as she asked:
+
+“Why wouldn’t he stay?”
+
+“I gathered because he didn’t want to. Perhaps he was afraid he’d have
+to argue with Eddie about capital and labor all through lunch. And of
+course he did not know that I had another beautiful daughter sleeping
+off the effects of a late party, or very likely he would have
+accepted.”
+
+Very likely he would.
+
+Just as they entered the study, the telephone rang. Crystal sprang to
+the instrument, brushing away her father’s hand, which had moved toward
+it.
+
+“It’s for me, dear,” she said, and continued, speaking into the
+mouthpiece: “Yes, it’s I.” (A pause.) “Where are you?... Oh, yes, I
+know the place. I’ll be there in five minutes, in a little blue car.”
+She hung up the receiver, sprang up, and looked very much surprised to
+see Eddie and her father still there just as before. “Good-by, Eddie,”
+she said, “I’m sorry, but I have an engagement. Good-by, father.”
+
+“You don’t want to run me out to the golf club first?”
+
+“Not possible, dear. The chauffeur can take you in the big car.”
+
+“Yes, but he’ll scold me all the way about there not being room enough
+in the garage.”
+
+Crystal was firm. “I’m sorry, but I can’t, dear. This is important. I
+may take a job. I’ll tell you all about it this evening.” And she left
+the room, with a smile that kept getting entirely beyond her control.
+
+“What’s this? What’s this?” cried Eddie as the door shut. “A job. You
+wouldn’t let Crystal take a job, would you, Mr. Cord?”
+
+“I haven’t been consulted,” said Mr. Cord, taking out his new driver
+again.
+
+“But didn’t you notice how excited she was. I’m sure it’s decided.”
+
+“Yes, I noticed, Eddie; but it looked to me more like a man than a job.
+How do you think we’d come out if I gave you a stroke and a half a
+hole?”
+
+Eddie was too perturbed even to answer.
+
+In the meantime, Crystal was spinning along Bellevue Avenue, forgetting
+to bow to her friends, and wondering why the car was going so badly
+until, her eye falling on the speedometer, she noticed that she was
+doing a mild thirty-five miles an hour. Sooner, therefore, than the law
+allowed, she reached a small park that surrounds a statue of Perry, and
+there she picked up a passenger.
+
+Ben got in and shut the little door almost before she brought the car
+to a standstill.
+
+“When you were little,” he said, “did you ever imagine something
+wonderful that might happen—like the door’s opening and a delegation
+coming to elect you captain of the baseball team, or whatever is a
+little girl’s equivalent of that—and keep on imagining it and imagining
+it, until it seemed as if it really were going to happen? Well, I have
+been standing here saying to myself, Wouldn’t it be wonderful if
+Crystal should come in a little blue car and take me to drive? And, by
+Heaven! you’ll never believe me, but she actually did.”
+
+
+[Illustration: “I’ll Be There in Five Minutes, In a Little Blue Car”]
+
+
+“Tell me everything you’ve done since I saw you,” she answered.
+
+“I haven’t done anything but think about you. Oh yes, I have, too. I’ve
+reappraised the universe. You see, you’ve just made me a present of a
+brand-new world, and I’ve been pretty busy, I can tell you, untying the
+string and unwrapping the paper, and bless me, Crystal, it looks like a
+mighty fine present so far.”
+
+“Oh,” she said, “I think you talk charmingly.” She had started to say,
+“you make love charmingly,” but on second thoughts decided that the
+overt statement had better come from him. “Dear me,” she went on, “we
+have so much to talk about. There’s my job. Can’t we talk a little
+about that?”
+
+They could and did. Their talk consisted largely in his telling her how
+much richer a service she could render his paper through having been
+unconsciously steeped in beauty than if she had been merely
+intellectually instructed—than if, as she more simply put it, she had
+known something. And as he talked, her mind began to expand in the warm
+atmosphere of his praise and to give off its perfume like a flower.
+
+But the idea of her working with him day after day, helping the
+development of the paper which had grown as dear as a child to him, was
+so desirable that he did not dare to contemplate it unless it promised
+realization.
+
+“Oh,” he broke out, “you won’t really do it. Your family will object,
+or something. Probably when I go away to-night, I shall never see you
+again.”
+
+“You are still going away to-night?”
+
+“I must.”
+
+She looked at him and slowly shook her head, as a mother shakes her
+head at the foolish plans of a child.
+
+“I thought I was going,” he said, weakly.
+
+“Why?”
+
+He groaned, but did not answer.
+
+She thought, “Oh, dear, I wish when men want to be comforted they would
+not make a girl spend so much time and energy getting them to say that
+they do want it.” Aloud she said:
+
+“You must tell me what’s the matter.”
+
+“It’s a long story.”
+
+“We have all afternoon.”
+
+“That’s it—we haven’t all eternity.”
+
+“Oh, eternity,” said Crystal, dismissing it with the Cord wave of the
+hand. “Who wants eternity? ‘Since we must die how bright the starry
+track,’ you know.”
+
+“No; what is that?”
+
+“I don’t remember.”
+
+“Oh.”
+
+After this meeting of minds they drove for some time in silence. Ben
+was seeing a new aspect of Newport—bare, rugged country, sandy roads, a
+sudden high rock jutting out toward the sea, a rock on which tradition
+asserts that Bishop Berkeley once sat and considered the illusion of
+matter. They stopped at length at the edge of a sandy beach. Crystal
+parked her car neatly with a sharp turn of the wheel, and got out.
+
+“There’s a tea basket,” she called over her shoulder.
+
+Ben’s heart bounded at the news—not that he was hungry, but as the hour
+was now but little past half after two a tea basket indicated a
+prolonged interview. He found it tucked away in the back of the car,
+and followed her. They sat down at the edge of the foam. He lit a pipe,
+clasped his hands about his knees and stared out to sea; she curled her
+feet backward, grasped an ankle in her hand, and, looking at him, said:
+
+“Now what makes you groan so?”
+
+“I haven’t meant to be dishonest,” he said, “but I have been obtaining
+your friendship—trying to—under false pretenses.”
+
+“Trying to?” said Crystal. “Now isn’t it silly to put that in.”
+
+He turned and smiled at her. She was really incredibly sweet. “But, all
+the same,” he went on, “there is a barrier, a real, tangible barrier
+between us.”
+
+Crystal’s heart suffered a chill convulsion at these words. “Good
+gracious!” she thought. “He’s entangled with another woman—oh
+dear!—_marriage_”—But she did not interrupt him, and he continued:
+
+“I let you think that I was one of the men you might have known—that I
+was asked to your party last night, whereas, as a matter of fact, I
+only watched you—”
+
+Crystal’s mind, working with its normal rapidity, invented, faced, and
+passed over the fact that he must have been one of the musicians. She
+said aloud:
+
+“I think I ought to tell you that I’m not much of a believer in
+barriers—between sensible people who want friendship.”
+
+“Friendship!” exclaimed Ben, as if that were the last thing he had come
+out on a lovely summer afternoon to discuss.
+
+“There aren’t any real barriers any more,” Crystal continued.
+“Differences of position, and religion, and all those things don’t seem
+to matter now. Romeo and Juliet wouldn’t have paid any attention to the
+little family disagreement if they had lived to-day.”
+
+“In the case of Romeo and Juliet, if I remember correctly,” said Ben,
+“it was not exactly a question of friendship.”
+
+She colored deeply, but he refused to modify his statement, for, after
+all, it was correct. “But difference of opinion _is_ an obstacle,” he
+went on. “I have seen husbands and wives parted by differences of
+opinion in the late war. And as far as I’m concerned there’s a war on
+now—a different war, and I came here to try to prevent my brother
+marrying into an enemy influence—”
+
+“Good Heavens!” cried Crystal. “You are Ben Moreton! Why didn’t I see
+it sooner? I’m Crystal Cord,” and, lifting up her chin, she laughed.
+
+That she could laugh as the gulf opened between them seemed to him
+terrible. He turned his head away.
+
+She stopped laughing. “You don’t think it’s amusing?” (He shook his
+head.) “That we’re relations-in-law, when we thought it was all so
+unknown and romantic? No wonder I felt at home with you, when I’ve read
+so many of your letters to David—such nice letters, too—and I subscribe
+to your paper, and read every word of the editorials. And to think that
+you would not lunch with me to-day, when my father asked you.”
+
+“To think that it was you I was being asked to lunch with, and didn’t
+know it!”
+
+“Well, you dine with us to-morrow,” she answered, stating a simple
+fact.
+
+“Crystal,” he said, and put his hand on hers as if this would help him
+through his long explanation; but the continuity of his thought was
+destroyed and his spirit wounded by her immediately withdrawing it; and
+then—so exactly does the spring of love resemble the uncertain glory of
+an April day—he was rendered perfectly happy again by perceiving that
+her action was due to the publicity of their position and not to
+repugnance to the caress.
+
+Fortunately he was a man not without invention, and so when a few
+minutes later she suggested opening the tea basket, he insisted on
+moving to a more retired spot on the plea that the teakettle would burn
+better out of the wind; and Crystal, who must have known that Tomes
+never gave her a teakettle, but made the tea at home and put it in a
+thermos bottle, at once agreed to the suggestion.
+
+They moved back across the road, where irregular rocks sheltered small
+plots of grass and wild flowers, and here, instead of an Arcadian duet,
+they had, most unsuitably, their first quarrel.
+
+It began as quarrels are so apt to do, by a complete agreement. Of
+course he would stay over the next day, which was Sunday, and not very
+busy in the office of _Liberty_. In return he expected her undivided
+attention. She at once admitted that this was part of the plan—only
+there would have to be one little exception; she was dining out this
+evening. Oh, well, that could be broken, couldn’t it? She would like to
+break it, but it happened to be one of those engagements that had to be
+kept. Ben could not understand that.
+
+At first she tried to explain it to him: She had chosen her own evening
+several weeks ago with these people, who wanted her to meet a friend of
+theirs who was motoring down specially from Boston. She felt she must
+keep her word.
+
+“I assure you I don’t want to, but you understand, don’t you?”
+
+If she had looked at his face she would not have asked the last
+question. He did not understand; indeed, he had resolved not to.
+
+“No,” he said, “I must own, I don’t. If you told me that you _wanted_
+to go, that would be one thing. I shouldn’t have a word to say then.”
+
+“Oh yes, you would, Ben,” said Crystal, but he did not notice her.
+
+“I can’t understand your allowing yourself to be dragged there against
+your will. You say you despise this life, but you seem to take it
+pretty seriously if you can’t break any engagement that you may make.”
+
+“How absurd you are! Of course I often break engagements.”
+
+“I see. You do when the inducement is sufficient. Well, that makes it
+all perfectly clear.”
+
+She felt both angry and inclined to cry. She knew that to yield to
+either impulse would instantly solve the problem and bring a very
+unreasonable young man to reason. She ran over both scenes in her
+imagination. Registering anger, she would rise and say that, really,
+Mr. Moreton, if he would not listen to her explanation there was no use
+in prolonging the discussion. That would be the critical moment. He
+would take her in his arms then and there, or else he would let her go,
+and they would drive in silence, and part at the little park, where of
+course she might say, “Aren’t you silly to leave me like this?”—only
+her experience was that it was never very practical to make up with an
+angry man in public.
+
+To burst into tears was a safer method, but she had a natural
+repugnance to crying, and perhaps she was subconsciously aware that she
+might be left, after the quarrel was apparently made up by this method,
+with a slight resentment against the man who had forced her to adopt so
+illogical a line of conduct.
+
+A middle course appealed to her. She laid her hand on Ben’s. A few
+minutes before it would have seemed unbelievable to Ben that his own
+hand would have remained cold and lifeless under that touch, but such
+was now the case.
+
+“Ben,” she said, “if you go on being disagreeable a second longer you
+must make up your mind how you will behave when I burst into tears.”
+
+“How I should behave?”
+
+She nodded.
+
+His hands clasped hers. He told her how he should behave. He even
+offered to show her, without putting her to the trouble of tears.
+
+“You mean,” she said, “that you would forgive me? Well, forgive me,
+anyhow. I’m doing what I think is right about this old dinner. Perhaps
+I’m wrong about it; perhaps you’re mistaken and I’m not absolutely
+perfect, but if I were, think what a lot of fun you would miss in
+changing me. And you know I never meant to abandon you for the whole
+evening. I’ll get away at half past nine and we’ll take a little turn.”
+
+So that was settled.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+As they drove back she revealed another plan to him—she was taking him
+for a moment to see a friend of hers. He protested. He did not want to
+see anyone but herself, but Crystal was firm. He must see this woman;
+she was their celebrated parlor Bolshevist. Ben hated parlor
+Bolshevists. Did he know any? No. Well, then. Anyhow, Sophia would
+never forgive her if she did not bring him. Sophia adored celebrities.
+Sophia who? Sophia Dawson. The name seemed dimly familiar to Ben, and
+then he remembered. It was the name on the thousand-dollar check for
+the strike sufferers that had come in the day before.
+
+They drove up an avenue of little oaks to a formidable palace built of
+gray stone, so smoothly faced that there was not a crevice in the
+immense pale façade. Two men in knee-breeches opened the double doors
+and they went in between golden grilles and rows of tall white lilies.
+They were led through a soundless hall, and up stairs so thickly
+carpeted that the feet sank in as in new-fallen snow, and finally they
+were ushered through a small painted door into a small painted room,
+which had been brought all the way from Sienna, and there they found
+Mrs. Dawson—a beautiful, worn, world-weary Mrs. Dawson, with one streak
+of gray in the front of her dark hair, her tragic eyes, and her long
+violet and black draperies—a perfect Sibyl.
+
+Crystal did not treat her as a Sibyl, however. “Hullo, Sophie!” she
+said. “This is my brother-in-law’s brother, Ben Moreton. He’s crazy to
+meet you. You’ll like him. I can’t stay because I’m dining somewhere or
+other, but he’s not.”
+
+“Will he dine with me?” said Mrs. Dawson in a wonderful deep, slow
+voice—“just stay on and dine with me alone?”
+
+Ben began to say that he couldn’t, but Crystal said yes, that he would
+be delighted to, and that she would stop for him again about half past
+nine, and that it was a wonderful plan, and then she went away.
+
+Mrs. Dawson seemed to take it all as a matter of course. “Sit down, Mr.
+Moreton,” she said. “I have a quarrel with you.”
+
+Ben could not help feeling a little disturbed by the way he had been
+injected into Mrs. Dawson’s evening without her volition. He did not
+sit down.
+
+“You know,” he said, “there isn’t any reason why you should have me to
+dine just because Crystal says so. I do want to thank you for the check
+you sent in to us for the strike fund. It will do a lot of good.”
+
+“Oh, that,” replied Mrs. Dawson. “They are fighting all our battles for
+us.”
+
+“It cheered us up in the office. I wanted to tell you, and now I think
+I’ll go. I dare say you are dining out, anyhow—”
+
+Her eyes flashed at him. “Dining out!” she exclaimed, as if the
+suggestion insulted her. “You evidently don’t know me. I never dine
+out. I have nothing in common with these people. I lead a very lonely
+life. You do me a favor by staying. You and I could exchange ideas.
+There is no one in Newport whom I can talk to—reactionaries.”
+
+“Miss Cord is not exactly a reactionary,” said Ben, sitting down.
+
+Mrs. Dawson smiled. “Crystal is not a reactionary; Crystal is a child,”
+she replied. “But what can you expect of William Cord’s daughter? He is
+a dangerous and disintegrating force—cold—cynical—he feels not the
+slightest public responsibility for his possessions.” Mrs. Dawson laid
+her hand on her heart as if it were weighted with all her jewels and
+footmen and palaces. “Most Bourbons are cynical about human life, but
+he goes farther; he is cynical about his own wealth. And that brings me
+to my quarrel with you, Mr. Moreton. How could you let your brother
+spend his beautiful vigorous youth as a parasite to Cord’s vapid son?
+Was that consistent with your beliefs?”
+
+This attack on his consistency from a lady whose consistency seemed
+even more flagrant amused Ben, but as he listened he was obliged to
+admit that there was a great deal of good sense in what she had to say
+about David, whom she had met once or twice at the Cords’. Ben was too
+candid and eager not to ask her before long the question that was in
+his mind—how it was possible for a woman holding her views to be
+leading a life so opposed to them.
+
+She was not at all offended, and even less at a loss for an answer. “I
+am not a free agent, Mr. Moreton,” she said. “Unhappily, before I began
+to think at all, I had undertaken certain obligations. The law allows a
+woman to dispose of everything but her property while she is still a
+child. I married at eighteen.”
+
+It was a story not without interest and Mrs. Dawson told it well. There
+does not live a man who would not have been interested.
+
+They dined, not in the great dining room downstairs, nor even in the
+painted room from Sienna, but in a sort of loggia that opened from it,
+where, beyond the shaded lights, Ben could watch the moon rise out of
+the sea.
+
+It was a perfect little meal, short, delicious, and quickly served by
+three servants. He enjoyed it thoroughly, although he found his hostess
+a strangely confusing companion. He would make up his mind that she was
+a sincere soul captured by her environment, when a freshly discovered
+jewel on her long fingers would shake his faith. And he would just
+decide that she was a melodramatic fraud, when she would surprise him
+by her scholarly knowledge of social problems. She had read deeply,
+knew several languages, and had known many of the European leaders.
+Such phrases as “Jaurès wrote me ten days before he died—” were
+frequent, but not too frequent, on her lips.
+
+By the time Crystal stopped for him Ben had begun to feel like a child
+who has lost his mother in a museum, or as Dante might have felt if he
+had missed Virgil from his side. When he bade Mrs. Dawson good night,
+she asked him to come back.
+
+“Come and spend September here,” she said, as if it were a small thing.
+“You can work all day if you like. I sha’n’t disturb you, and you need
+never see a soul. It will do you good.”
+
+He was touched by the invitation, but of course he refused it. He tried
+to explain tactfully, but clearly, why it was that he couldn’t do that
+sort of thing—that the editor of _Liberty_ did not take his holiday at
+Newport.
+
+She understood, and sighed. “Ah, yes,” she said. “I’m like that man in
+mythology whom neither the sky nor the earth would receive. I’m very
+lonely, Mr. Moreton.”
+
+He found himself feeling sorry for her, as he followed a footman
+downstairs, his feet sinking into the carpets at each step. Crystal in
+the blue car was at the door. She was bareheaded and the wind had been
+blowing her hair about.
+
+“Well,” she said, as he got in, “did you have a good time? I’m sure you
+had a good dinner.”
+
+“Excellent, but confusing. I don’t quite get your friend.”
+
+“You don’t understand Sophia?” Crystal’s tone expressed surprise. “You
+mean her jewels and her footmen? Why, Ben, it’s just like the fathers
+of this country who talked about all men being equal and yet were
+themselves slaveholders. She sincerely believes those things in a way,
+and then it’s such a splendid role to play, and she enjoys that; and
+then it teases Freddie Dawson. Freddie is rather sweet if he’s
+thoroughly unhappy, and this keeps him unhappy almost all the time. Did
+she ask you to stay? I meant her to.”
+
+“Yes, she did; but of course I couldn’t.”
+
+“Oh, Ben, why not?”
+
+This brought them once more to the discussion of the barrier. This time
+Ben felt he could make her see. He said that she must look at it this
+way—that in a war you could not go and stay in enemy country, however
+friendly your personal relations might be. Well, as far as he was
+concerned this was a war, a class war.
+
+They were headed for the Ocean Drive, and Crystal rounded a sharp turn
+before she answered seriously:
+
+“But I thought you didn’t believe in war.”
+
+“I don’t,” he answered. “I hate it—I hate all violence. We—labor, I
+mean—didn’t initiate this, but when men won’t see, when they have power
+and won’t stop abusing it, there is only one way to make—”
+
+“Why, Ben,” said Crystal, “you’re just a pacifist in other people’s
+quarrels, but as militaristic as can be in your own. I’m not a
+pacifist, but I’m a better one than you, because I don’t believe in
+emphasizing any difference between human beings. That’s why I want a
+League of Nations. I hate gangs—all women really do. Little girls don’t
+form gangs like little boys. Every settlement worker knows that. I
+won’t have you say that I belong to the other group. I won’t be
+classified. I’m a human being—and I intend to behave as such.”
+
+Since she had left him she had been immersed again in her old life—her
+old friends—and the result had been to make her wonder if her
+experience with Ben had been as wonderful as it had seemed. When she
+stopped for him she had been almost prepared to find that the wild joy
+of their meetings had been something accidental and temporary, and that
+only a stimulating and pleasant friendship was left. But as soon as she
+saw that he really regarded their differences seriously, all her own
+prudence and doubt melted away. She knew she was ready to make any
+sacrifices for him, and in view of that all talk of obstacles was
+folly.
+
+She stopped the car on the point of the island, with the open sea on
+one hand, the harbor on the other. In front of them the lightship was
+moving with a slow, majestic roll, and to the right was the long
+festoon of Narragansett lights, and as they stopped the lighted bulk of
+the New York boat appeared, making its way toward Point Judith.
+
+His prolonged silence began to frighten her.
+
+“Ben,” she said, “do you seriously mean that you believe friendship
+between us is impossible?”
+
+“Friendship, nothing,” answered Moreton. “I love you.”
+
+He said it as if it had always been understood between them, as of
+course it had, but the instant he said it, he gave her a quick,
+appealing look to see how she would take so startling an assertion.
+
+If Crystal had poured out just what was in her mind at that second she
+would have answered: “Of course you do. I’ve known that longer than you
+have. And can’t you see that if I had had any doubt about its being
+true, I’d have taken steps to make it true? But, as I really did not
+doubt it, I’ve been able to be quite passive and leave it mostly to
+you, which I so much prefer.”
+
+But rigorous candor is rarely attained, and Crystal did not say this.
+In fact, for a few seconds she did not say anything, but merely allowed
+her eyes to shine upon him, with the inevitable result that at the end
+of precisely six seconds of their benevolent invitation he took her in
+his arms and kissed her. It was a very unprotected point, and several
+cars were standing not too far away, but Crystal, who had an excellent
+sense of proportion, made no objection whatever. She was being proved
+right in two important particulars—first, that she was a human being,
+and second, that there was no barrier between them. She was very
+generous about it. She did not say, “Where’s your barrier now?” or
+anything like that; she simply said nothing, and the barrier passed out
+of the conversation and was no more seen.
+
+Very soon, alleging that she must get home at the time at which she
+usually did get home from dinners, she took him back; but she soothed
+him with the promise of an uninterrupted day to follow.
+
+Time—the mere knowledge of unbroken hours ahead—is a boon which real
+love cannot do without. Minor feelings may flourish on snatched
+interviews and stolen meetings, but love demands—and usually
+gets—protected leisure. The next day these lovers had it. They spent
+the morning, when Mr. Cord was known to be playing golf, at the Cords’
+house, and then when Mr. Cord telephoned that he was staying to
+luncheon at the club, if Crystal did not object (and Crystal did not),
+she and Ben arranged a picnic—at least Tomes did, and they went off
+about one o’clock in the blue car. They went to a pool in the rocks
+that Crystal had always known about, with high walls around it, and
+here, with a curtain of foam between them and the sea, for the waves
+were rising, they ate lunch, as much alone as on a desert island.
+
+It was here that Ben asked her to marry him, or, to be accurate, it was
+here that they first began talking about their life together, and
+whether Nora would become reconciled to another woman about the flat.
+
+The nearest approach to a definite proposal was Ben’s saying:
+
+“You would not mind my saying something about all this to your father
+before I go this evening, would you?”
+
+And Crystal replied: “Poor father! It will be a blow, I’m afraid.”
+
+“Well,” said Ben, “he told me himself that he liked me better than
+David.”
+
+“That’s not saying much.”
+
+At this Ben laughed lightly.
+
+He might have had his wrong-headed notions about barriers, but he was
+not so un-American as to regard a father as an obstacle.
+
+“But, oh, Crystal,” he added, “suppose you find you do hate being poor.
+It is a bore in some ways.”
+
+Crystal, who had been tucking away the complicated dishes of her
+luncheon basket, looked at Ben and lightly sucked one finger to which
+some raspberry jam from Tomes’s supernal sandwiches had adhered.
+
+“I sha’n’t mind it a bit, Ben,” she said, “and for a good
+reason—because I’m terribly conceited.” He did not understand at all,
+and she went on: “I believe I shall be just as much of a person—perhaps
+more—without money. The women who really mind being poor are the
+humble-minded ones, who think that they are made by their clothes and
+their lovely houses and their maids and their sables. When they lose
+them they lose all their personality, and of course that terrifies
+them. I don’t think I shall lose mine. Does it shock you to know that I
+think such a lot of myself?”
+
+It appeared it did not shock him at all.
+
+
+[Illustration: “Suppose You Find You Do Hate Being Poor?”]
+
+
+When they reached the house she established him in the drawing-room and
+went off to find her father.
+
+She was a true woman, by which is meant now and always that she
+preferred to allow a man to digest his dinner before she tried to bring
+him to a rational opinion. But in this case her hands were tied. The
+Cords dined at eight—or sometimes a little later, and Ben’s boat left
+for New York at half past nine, so that it would be utterly impossible
+to postpone the discussion of her future until after dinner. It had to
+be done at once.
+
+Crystal ran up and knocked at his bedroom door. Loud splashings from
+the adjoining bathroom were all the answer she got. She sat down on the
+stairs and waited. Those are the moments that try men’s and even
+women’s souls. For the first time her enterprise seemed to her a little
+reckless. For an instant she had the surprising experience of
+recognizing the fact that Ben was a total stranger. She looked at the
+gray-stone stairway on which she was sitting and thought that her life
+had been as safe and sheltered as a cloister, and now, steered by this
+total stranger, she proposed to launch herself on an uncharted course
+of change. And to this program she was to bring her father’s
+consent—for she knew very well that if she couldn’t, Ben wouldn’t be
+able to—in the comparatively short time between now and dinner. Then,
+the splashing having ceased, the sound of bureau drawers succeeded, and
+Crystal sprang up and knocked again.
+
+“That you, Peters?” said an unencouraging voice. (Peters was Mr. Cord’s
+valet.)
+
+“No, dear, it’s I,” said Crystal.
+
+“Oh, come in,” said Mr. Cord. He was standing in the middle of the room
+in his shirt sleeves and gloomily contemplating the shirt he wore.
+“What’s this laundress, anyhow? A Bolshevist or a pastry-cook?” he
+said. “Did you ever see anything like this shirt?”
+
+Crystal approached and studied the shirt. It appeared to her to be
+perfectly done up, but she said: “Yes, dear, how terrible! I’ll pack
+her off to-morrow, but you always look all right whatever you wear;
+that’s some comfort.” She saw that even this hadn’t done much good,
+and, going to the heart of the problem, she asked, “How did your golf
+go?”
+
+Mr. Cord’s gloom gathered as he answered, with resignation, “Oh, all
+right.”
+
+His manner was exactly similar to Ben’s in his recent moment of
+depression, and not unlike McKellar’s when he had explained what he
+suffered under the good Lord’s weather.
+
+“Is Eddie’s game any better?” asked Crystal, feeling her way.
+
+“No,” cried her father, contemptuously. “He’s rotten, but I’m worse.
+And golf-clubs, Crystal! No one can make a club any more. Have you
+noticed that? But the truth of the matter is, I’m getting too old to
+play golf.” And Mr. Cord sat down with a good but unconscious imitation
+of a broken old man.
+
+Of course Crystal swept this away. She scolded him a little, pointed
+out his recent prowess, and spoke slightingly of all younger athletes,
+but she really had not time to do the job thoroughly, for the thought
+of Ben, sitting so anxious in the drawing-room alone, hurried her on.
+
+“Anyhow, dear,” she said, “I’ve come to talk to you about something
+terribly important. What would you say, father, if I told you I was
+engaged?”
+
+Mr. Cord was so startled that he said, what was rare for him, the first
+thing that came into his head:
+
+“Not to Eddie?”
+
+The true diplomatist, we have been told, simply takes advantage of
+chance, and Crystal was diplomatic. “And suppose it is?” she replied.
+
+“I should refuse my consent,” replied her father.
+
+Crystal looked hurt. “Is there anything against Eddie,” she asked,
+“except his golf?”
+
+“Yes,” answered her father, “there are two of the most serious things
+in the world against him—first, that he doesn’t amount to anything; and
+second, that you don’t love him.”
+
+“No,” Crystal admitted, “I don’t, but then—love—father, isn’t love
+rather a serious undertaking nowadays? Is it a particularly helpful
+adjunct to marriage? Look at poor Eugenia. Isn’t it really more
+sensible to marry a nice man who can support one, and then if in time
+one does fall in love with another man—”
+
+“Never let me hear you talk like that again, Crystal,” said her father,
+with a severity and vigor he seldom showed outside of board meetings.
+“It’s only your ignorance of life that saves you from being actually
+revolting. I’m an old man and not sentimental, you’ll grant, but, take
+my word for it, love is the only hope of pulling off marriage
+successfully, and even then it’s not easy. As for Eugenia, I think
+she’s made a fool of herself and is going to be unhappy, but I’d rather
+do what she has done than what you’re contemplating. At least she cared
+for that fellow—”
+
+“I’m glad you feel like that, darling,” said Crystal, “because it isn’t
+Eddie I’m engaged to, but Ben Moreton. He’s waiting downstairs now.”
+
+Mr. Cord started up—his eyes shining like black flames.
+
+“By God! Crystal,” he said, “you sha’n’t marry that
+fellow—Eugenia—perhaps—but not you.”
+
+“But, father, you said yourself, you thought he was a fine—”
+
+“I don’t care what I said,” replied Mr. Cord, and, striding to the
+door, he flung it open and called in a voice that rolled about the
+stone hall: “Mr. Moreton, Mr. Moreton! Come up here, will you?”
+
+Ben came bounding up the stairs like a panther. Cord beckoned him in
+with a sharp gesture and shut the door.
+
+“This won’t do at all, Moreton,” he said. “You can’t have Crystal.”
+
+Ben did not answer; he looked very steadily at Cord, who went on:
+
+“You think I can’t stop it—that she’s of age and that you wouldn’t take
+a penny of my money, anyhow. That’s the idea, isn’t it?”
+
+“That’s it,” said Ben.
+
+Cord turned sharply to Crystal. “Does what I think make any difference
+to you?” he asked.
+
+“A lot, dear,” she answered, “but I don’t understand. You never seemed
+so much opposed to the radical doctrine.”
+
+“No, it’s the radical, not the doctrine, your father objects to,” said
+Ben.
+
+“Exactly,” answered Mr. Cord. “You’ve put it in a nutshell. Crystal,
+I’m going to tell you what these radicals really are—they’re
+failures—everyone of them. Sincere enough—they want the world changed
+because they haven’t been able to get along in it as it is—they want a
+new deal because they don’t know how to play their cards; and when they
+get a new hand, they’ll play it just as badly. It’s not their theories
+I object to, but them themselves. You think if you married Moreton
+you’d be going into a great new world of idealism. You wouldn’t. You’d
+be going into a world of failure—of the pettiest, most futile quarrels
+in the world. The chief characteristic of the man who fails is that he
+always believes it’s the other fellow’s fault; and they hate the man
+who differs with them by one per cent more than they hate the man who
+differs by one hundred. Has there ever been a revolution where they did
+not persecute their fellow revolutionists worse than they persecuted
+the old order, or where the new rule wasn’t more tyrannical than the
+old?”
+
+“No one would dispute that,” said Ben. “It is the only way to win
+through to—”
+
+“Ah,” said Cord, “I know what you’re going to say, but I tell you, you
+win through to liberal practices when, and only when, the conservatives
+become converted to your ideas, and put them through for you. That’s
+why I say I have no quarrel with radical doctrines—they are coming,
+always coming, but”—Cord paused to give his words full weight—“I hate
+the radical.”
+
+There was a little pause. Crystal, who had sunk into a low chair,
+raised her eyes to Ben, as if she expected a passionate contradiction
+from him, but it did not come.
+
+“Yes,” he said, after a moment, “that’s all true, Mr. Cord—with
+limitations; but, granting it, you’ve put my side, too. What are we to
+say of the conservative—the man who has no vision of his own—who has to
+go about stealing his beliefs from the other side? He’s very efficient
+at putting _them_ into effect—but efficient as a tool, as a servant.
+Look at the mess he makes of his own game when he tries to act on his
+own ideas. He crushes democracy with an iron efficiency, and he creates
+communism. He closes the door to trade-unionism and makes a revolution.
+That’s efficiency for you. We radicals are not so damned inefficient,
+while we let the conservatives do our work for us.”
+
+“Well, let it be revolution, then,” said Cord. “I believe you’re right.
+It’s coming, but do you want to drag a girl like Crystal into it? Think
+of her! Say you take her, as I suppose a young fellow like you can do.
+She’d have perhaps ten years of an exciting division of allegiance
+between your ideas and the way she had been brought up, and the rest of
+her life (for, believe me, as we get older we all return to our early
+traditions)—the rest of her life she’d spend regretting the ties and
+environment of her youth. On the other hand, if she gives you up she
+will have regrets, too, I know, but they won’t wreck her and embitter
+her the way the others will.”
+
+Ben’s face darkened. No man not a colossal egotist could hear such a
+prophesy with indifference. He did not at once answer, and then he
+turned to Crystal.
+
+“What do you think of that?” he asked.
+
+To the surprise of both men, Crystal replied with a laugh. “I was
+wondering,” she said, “when either of you would get round to asking
+what I thought of it all.”
+
+“Well, what do you think?” said Cord, almost harshly.
+
+Crystal rose, and, slipping her arm through his, leaned her head on the
+point of her father’s shoulder—he was of a good height. “I think,” she
+said, “you both talk beautifully. I was so proud of you both—saying
+such profound things so easily, and keeping your tempers so perfectly”
+(both brows smoothed out), “and it was all the more wonderful because,
+it seemed to me, you were both talking about things you knew nothing
+about.”
+
+“What do you mean?” burst from both men with simultaneous astonishment.
+
+“Ben, dear, father doesn’t know any radicals—except you, and he’s only
+seen you twice. Father dear, I don’t believe Ben ever talked five
+minutes with an able, successful conservative until he came here
+to-day.”
+
+“You’re going to throw me over, Crystal?” said Ben, seeing her pose
+more clearly than he heard her words.
+
+“No,” said Mr. Cord, bitterly, “she’s going to throw over an old man in
+favor of a young one.”
+
+“You silly creatures,” said Crystal, with a smile that made the words
+affectionate and not rude. “How can I ever throw either of you over?
+I’m going to be Ben’s wife, and I am my father’s daughter. I’m going to
+be those two things for all my life.”
+
+Ben took her hand. She puzzled him, but he adored her. “But some day,
+Crystal,” he said, “you will be obliged to choose between our
+views—mine or your father’s. You must see that.”
+
+“He’s right,” her father chimed in. “This is not a temporary difference
+of opinion, you know, Crystal. This cleavage is as old as mankind—the
+radical against the conservative. Time doesn’t reconcile them.”
+
+Again the idea came to her: “They do love to form gangs, the poor
+dears.” Aloud she said: “Yes, but the two types are rarely pure ones.
+Why, father, you think Ben is a radical, but he’s the most hidebound
+conservative about some things—much worse than you—about free verse,
+for instance. I read a long editorial about it not a month ago. He
+really thinks anyone who defends it ought to be deported to some poetic
+limbo. Ben, you think my father is conservative. But there’s a great
+scandal in his mental life. He’s a Baconian—”
+
+“He thinks Bacon wrote the plays!” exclaimed Ben, really shocked.
+
+“Certainly I do,” answered Mr. Cord. “Every man who uses his mind must
+think so. There is nothing in favor of the Shakespeare theory, except
+tradition—”
+
+He would have talked for several hours upon the subject, but Crystal
+interrupted him by turning to Ben and continuing what she had meant to
+say:
+
+“When you said I should have to choose between your ideas, you meant
+between your political ideas. Perhaps I shall, but I won’t make my
+choice, rest assured, until I have some reason for believing that each
+of you knows something—honestly knows something about the other one’s
+point of view.”
+
+“I don’t get it, exactly,” said Ben.
+
+She addressed Mr. Cord.
+
+“Father,” she went on, “Ben has a little flat in Charles Street, and an
+old servant, and that’s where I’m going to live.”
+
+Her father, though bitterly wounded, had regained his sardonic calm.
+“Perhaps,” he said, “you’ll bring him up to Seventy-ninth Street for
+Sunday dinner now and then.”
+
+Crystal shook her head. “No, dear,” she said. “That isn’t the way it’s
+going to be. As soon as I get settled and have time to look about me, I
+shall take another little flat for you. You will live with us, for a
+few months in the winter, and get to know Ben’s friends—his gang, as
+you would say—get to know them not as a philanthropist, or an employer,
+or an observer, but just as one of our friends—see if they really are
+the way you think they are. And then, in March you shall go off to Palm
+Beach or Virginia just as usual.”
+
+“That’s a fine idea,” said Mr. Cord, sarcastically. “Do you realize
+that I shall hardly survive your marriage with the editor of _Liberty_.
+I shall be kicked off—requested to resign from half a dozen boards for
+having such a son-in-law—”
+
+“There’s freedom for you,” said Ben.
+
+“And,” continued Mr. Cord, “if it were known that I consented to the
+marriage, and actually consorted with such fellows! You must realize,
+Crystal, that most of the most influential men in the country think the
+way Eddie does. Half my boards are composed of older Eddies.”
+
+“You’ll do better to resign from them, then,” said Crystal.
+
+Ben had been very much struck by Crystal’s suggestion.
+
+“Really, Mr. Cord,” he said, “I believe that is a great idea of
+Crystal’s. I really believe if capital had more idea of the real views
+of labor—as you said, you eventually adopt all our ideas, why wouldn’t
+an intimate knowledge of individuals hurry that process?”
+
+“Simply because I should lose all influence with my own people by
+merely investigating you in a friendly spirit.”
+
+“Glory!” exclaimed Ben, with open contempt for such people. “Think of
+penalizing the first honest attempt to understand!”
+
+“You see the point of my plan, don’t you, Ben?” said Crystal.
+
+“You bet I do.”
+
+“That’s wonderful,” she answered, “for you’ve only heard half of it. In
+July, August, and September, we will come here to Newport, and you will
+get to understand father’s—”
+
+“Hold on,” cried Ben, “just a moment. That is absolutely impossible,
+Crystal. You don’t understand. The paper couldn’t keep me a day if I
+did that.”
+
+“Ha!” cried Mr. Cord, coming suddenly to life. “There’s freedom for
+you!”
+
+“That would be very cruel of the owners, Ben, but if they did—”
+
+“It wouldn’t be cruel at all,” said Moreton. “They wouldn’t have any
+choice. I should have lost all influence with my readers, if it were
+known—”
+
+“Glory!” said Mr. Cord. “Think of penalizing the first honest attempt
+to understand the capitalistic class!”
+
+Ben stood silent, caught in the grip of an intellectual dilemma which
+he felt every instant would dissolve itself and which didn’t.
+
+Crystal for the first time moved away from her father. “Those are my
+terms,” she said. “I stay with the man who agrees to them, and if you
+both decline them—well, I’ll go off and try and open the oyster by
+myself.”
+
+There was a long momentous pause, and then Tomes’s discreet knock on
+the door.
+
+“Mr. Verriman on the telephone, madam.”
+
+“I can’t come,” said Crystal. “Ask him to send a message.”
+
+“Don’t you see, Crystal, what your plan would do?” said her father.
+“Either it would make Moreton a red revolutionist and me a persecuting
+Bourbon, or else it would just ruin us both for either of our
+objectives.”
+
+“It won’t ruin you for my objectives,” said Crystal, “and women are
+more human, you know, than men.”
+
+Another knock at the door. Tomes’s voice again:
+
+“Mr. Verriman wishes to know if he might dine here this evening?”
+
+“No,” said Cord, looking at Crystal.
+
+Crystal raised her voice. “Certainly, Tomes. Say we shall be delighted
+to have him—at eight.”
+
+Both men turned to her.
+
+“Why did you do that, Crystal? Verriman—here—to-night?”
+
+Crystal did not answer—the identity of their tones, their words, and
+their irritation with her should have told them the answer, but didn’t.
+
+She knew that only opposition to Eddie and Eddie’s many prototypes
+could weld her two men solidly together.
+
+THE END
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13146 ***